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a code, create an industry, reform a wrong. Despotic governments have
stunted men--made them thin-blooded and low-browed, all backhead and
no forehead. Each child has been likened to a cask whose staves
represent trees growing on hills distant and widely separated; some
staves are sound and solid, standing for right-living ancestors; some
are worm eaten, standing for ancestors whose integrity was consumed by
vices. At birth all the staves are brought together in the infant
cask--empty, but to be filled by parents and teachers and friends. As
the waste-barrel in the alley is filled with refuse and filth, so the
orphan waifs in our streets are made receptacles of all vicious
thoughts and deeds. These children are not so much born as damned into
life. But how different is the childhood of some others. On the Easter
day, in foreign cathedrals, a beauteous vase is placed beside the
altar, and as the multitudes crowd forward and the solemn procession
moves up the aisles, men and women cast into the vase their gifts of
gold and silver and pearls and lace and rich textures. The well-born
child seems to be such a vase, unspeakably beautiful, filled with
knowledges and integrities more precious than gold and pearls. "Let
him who would be great select the right parents," was the keen dictum
of President Dwight.

By the influence of the racial element, the laborer in northern
Europe, viewed as a producing machine, doubles the industrial output
of his southern brother. The child of the tropics is out of the race.
For centuries he has dozed under the banana tree, awakening only to
shake the tree and bring down ripe fruit for his hunger, eating to
sleep again. His muscles are flabby, his blood is thin, his brain
unequal to the strain of two ideas in one day. When Sir John Lubbock
had fed the chief in the South Sea Islands he began to ask him
questions, but within ten minutes the savage was sound asleep. When
awakened the old chief said: "Ideas make me so sleepy." Similarly, the
warm Venetian blood has given few great men to civilization; but the
hills of Scotland and New England produce scholars, statesmen, poets,
financiers, with the alacrity with which Texas produces cotton or
Missouri corn. History traces certain influential nations back to a
single progenitor of unique strength of body and character. Thus
Abraham, Theseus, and Cadmus seem like springs feeding great and
increasing rivers. One wise and original thinker founds