civilization. They are the hope of society. But
not until our parents become enthusiastic teachers, and our homes
assist the school rooms, will men cease complaining that the nation's
great men have no successors, and that genius has departed from our
people.

The time has fully come for the nation also to begin to love itself.
All perceive that the individual has no right to be so generous
to-day as to have nothing to bestow to-morrow. Wisdom guards to-day's
expenditures lest to-morrow's capital be impaired. He is a poor
husbandman who so overtaxes his fields or vineyards as to exhaust the
soil or destroy the vine. Yet many events seem to prove that our
nation has sorely injured itself by over-kindness. It has forgotten
that only God can love everybody. In trying to help the many it has
threatened its power to help any. It has been like a man who on a
January day opens his windows and tries to warm all out of doors, only
to find that he has frozen his family within the house, and warmed no
one without. If we journey into the factory towns in New England,
where the youthful Whittier and Longfellow were trained, we find the
school-houses with windows boarded over. The little churches also are
deserted and the doors nailed up. Listening to the "reformers" in our
parks on a Sunday afternoon, we are amazed by the virulent attacks
upon our institutions. Conversing with the foreman of a large group of
men laying water-pipes, we are astonished at his statement that he has
not a single man who can write well enough to keep the time and hours
of these toilers. Standing in Castle Garden, where the emigrant ship
unloads its multitudes, we hear the physician exclaim: "It will take
this nation a hundred years to expel this vice and scrofula from its
blood."

As some railways water their stock, and for each dollar issue bonds
for five, in the hope that only one of the five will ever know enough
to ask for their dollar, so the intelligence of the nation has been
watered and diluted. Sometimes a whole ballot-box full of voters'
tickets does not contain the common sense of a single vote of the days
of Hamilton. Our nation often seems like a householder who has given
his night-key to an enemy who has threatened his home with firebrands.
Our nation has loved--not wisely, but too well. The time has come when
it must choose between loving itself and becoming bankrupt in
intelligence and morality. For purposes of educating the nations of