le account in the improvement of his own
country.

The ancients said, "Know thyself"; the twentieth century says, "Help
thyself." Self-culture gives a second birth to the soul. A liberal
education is a true regeneration. When a man is once liberally
educated, he will generally remain a man, not shrink to a manikin, nor
dwindle to a brute. But if he is not properly educated, if he has
merely been crammed and stuffed through college, if he has merely a
broken-down memory from trying to hold crammed facts enough to pass the
examination, he will continue to shrink, shrivel, and dwindle, often
below his original proportions, for he will lose both his confidence
and self-respect, as his crammed facts, which never became a part of
himself, evaporate from his distended memory.

Every bit of education or culture is of great advantage in the struggle
for existence. The microscope does not create anything new, but it
reveals marvels. To educate the eye adds to its magnifying power until
it sees beauty where before it saw only ugliness. It reveals a world
we never suspected, and finds the greatest beauty even in the commonest
things. The eye of an Agassiz could see worlds of which the uneducated
eye never dreamed. The cultured hand can do a thousand things the
uneducated hand can not do. It becomes graceful, steady of nerve,
strong, skilful, indeed it almost seems to think, so animated is it
with intelligence. The cultured will can seize, grasp, and hold the
possessor, with irresistible power and nerve, to almost superhuman
effort. The educated touch can almost perform miracles. The educated
taste can achieve wonders almost past belief. What a contrast between
the cultured, logical, profound, masterly reason of a Gladstone and
that of the hod-carrier who has never developed or educated his reason
beyond what is necessary to enable him to mix mortar and carry brick!

Be careful to avoid that over-intellectual culture which is purchased
at the expense of moral vigor. An observant professor of one of our
colleges has remarked that "the mind may be so rounded and polished by
education, and so well balanced, as not to be energetic in any one
faculty. In other men not thus trained, the sense of deficiency and of
the sharp, jagged corners of their knowledge leads to efforts to fill
up the chasms, rendering them at last far better educated men than the
polished, easy-going graduate who has just knowledge enough to prevent