ractor who makes this
a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives
actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be
are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights
successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than
this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even
to lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted
leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to
man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself
of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says
one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their
hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean
something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they
should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports
them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to
end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the
experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much
as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and
sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which
is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where
anything is professed and practised but the art of life;--to survey the
world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural
eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or
mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to
Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he
is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all
around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which
would have advanced the most at the end of a month--the boy who had made
his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading
as much as would be necessary for this--or the boy who had attended
the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had
received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely
to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving
college that I had studied navigation!--why, if I had taken one turn
down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student
studies and is taught only political economy, while