ess"; our
educational conditions are adverse otherwise. Our political system is
unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed
in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will
not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained
intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and
a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer
and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and
pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?

I do not hold that the political and social system that creates an
aristocracy of leisure is the best possible kind of human organization;
I perceive its disadvantages clearly enough. But I do hold that a system
under which most important public trusts, political and professional,
civil and military ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated
men--that is, men of trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is
not an altogether faulty system.

It is a universal human weakness to disparage the knowledge that we do
not ourselves possess, but it is only my own beloved country that can
justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum of the impotents and
incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge whatsoever. It was an
American senator who declared that he had devoted a couple of weeks to
the study of finance, and found the accepted authorities all wrong. It
was another American senator who, confronted with certain hostile facts
in the history of another country, proposed "to brush away all facts,
and argue the question on consideration of plain common sense."

Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
the _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that
ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we
attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here
as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to
make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds
general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over
again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity
suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.

Every patriot believes his country better than any other country. Now,
they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the be