t is good sense, trained intelligence, cultivated
minds. Some rather difficult piece of work has to be done; and one runs
over in one's mind who could be found to do it. One after another is
given up. One lacks the ability--another the steadiness--another the
training--another the mind awakened to see the need: and so the work is
not done. "The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few." A
really liberal education, and the influence at school of cultivated and
vigorous minds, is the cure for this.

Again, you will do little good in the world unless you have wide and
strong sympathies: wide--so as to embrace many different types of
character; strong--so as to outlast minor rebuffs and failures. Now
understanding is the first step to sympathy, and therefore education
widens and strengthens our sympathies: it delivers us from ignorant
prepossessions, and in this way alone it doubles our powers, and fits us
for far greater varieties of life, and for the unknown demands that the
future may make upon us.

I spoke of the narrowness and immovability of ignorance. There is
another narrowness which is not due to ignorance so much as to
persistent exclusiveness in the range of ideas admitted. Fight against
this with all your might. The tendency of all uneducated people is to
view each thing as it is by itself, each part without reference to the
whole; and then increased knowledge of that part does little more than
intensify the narrowness. Education--liberal education--and the
association with many and active types of mind, among people of your own
age, as well as your teachers, is the only cure for this. Try to
understand other people's point of view. Don't think that you and a
select few have a monopoly of all truth and wisdom. "It takes all sorts
to make a world," and you must understand "all sorts" if you would
understand the world and help it.

You are living in a great age, when changes of many kinds are in
progress in our political and social and religious ideas. There never
was a greater need of trained intelligence, clear heads, and earnest
hearts. And the part that women play is not a subordinate one. They act
directly, and still more indirectly. The best men that have ever lived
have traced their high ideals to the influence of noble women as mothers
or sisters or wives. No man who is engaged in the serious work of the
world, in the effort to purify public opinion and direct it aright, but
is helped or hi