e neighbor. This is so evident,
when once seen, that it is not necessary for us to offer any argument in
its support. Law-makers have, for a thousand years, been elaborating
laws through which capital in lands, tenements, and other forms of fixed
values shall be made pay its share of the public burthen. They are no
nearer the desired end than when they began. It is a vain attempt to
reverse the pyramid and make the base stand on the apex.

The other error is not so patent. It comes of confounding intelligence
with the popular process of education. If the mass of men could, through
any process, be made more intelligent, we are prepared to admit that
there would be a moral gain. The gain, however, would not be so positive
or so great as many believe. Intelligence is not necessarily moral, nor
is morality necessarily intelligent. The rules that govern moral conduct
are few and simple, and, after all, it is more a matter of training and
habit, more the result of kindly feeling and religious belief, than any
intellectual process based on an accumulation of facts.

This grows plainer as we look more carefully into this thing called
popular education and realize its constituent parts. The true definition
of education is, that exercise and development of the intellectual
faculties which teaches and trains the mind to think. This presupposes
intellectual faculties. They are not general. The inequality, in this
respect, of the human family is well marked and universally recognized.
Through all the avocations of life, we find here and there at long
intervals men so blessed in this respect that the masses look up to
them, select them to be teachers and leaders. It is the foundation of
our hero-worship, and formulates the habits on which we live socially
and politically.

The popular idea of the common school is not this. It is based on a
proposition that the masses can be educated; that is, taught to think.
This conclusion is got at through a most ludicrous process. The mind is
reduced to a memory. Facts are crowded into the pupil, and as the facts
accumulate the education is supposed to proceed, and in possession of
these facts the graduate comes forth the superior of Plato, Bacon, or
Herbert Spencer.

This is simply an idiotic exercise of the memory, and as the memory
grows perfect the intellectual faculties weaken and disappear. It is now
recognized by the more thoughtful that an abnormal memory is evidence of
idiocy. The ne