some newer name takes their
place, it maybe,--but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood
of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old
historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female
descendant.

There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern
States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general
distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very
probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come
direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--and he may, perhaps,
even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the
English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude
of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual
classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training
are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as
well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or
less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that
sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and
sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual
aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual
acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain
of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large
uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary
class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism;
thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical. The race of the
hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor
for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of
animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an
unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always
overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality.
A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add
muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his
thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes,
your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too
hard on his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main
fact: our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, jus