one, especially in a man familiar with the
reasoning capacities of the public; though those capacities themselves
owe half their shortcomings to being so unworthily treated. But, on the
whole, and looking broadly at the way the speakers and teachers of the
nation set about their business, there is an almost fathomless failure
in the results, owing to the general admission of special pleading as an
_art to be taught_ to youth. The main thing which we ought to teach our
youth is to _see_ something,--all that the eyes which God has given them
are capable of seeing. The sum of what we _do_ teach them is to _say_
something. As far as I have experience of instruction, no man ever
dreams of teaching a boy to get to the root of a matter; to think it
out; to get quit of passion and desire in the process of thinking; or to
fear no face of man in plainly asserting the ascertained result. But to
_say_ anything in a glib and graceful manner,--to give an epigrammatic
turn to nothing,--to quench the dim perceptions of a feeble adversary,
and parry cunningly the home thrusts of a strong one,--to invent
blanknesses in speech for breathing time, and slipperinesses in speech
for hiding time,--to polish malice to the deadliest edge, shape
profession to the seemliest shadow, and mask self-interest under the
fairest pretext,--all these skills we teach definitely, as the main arts
of business and life. There is a strange significance in the admission
of Aristotle's Rhetoric at our universities as a class-book. Cheating at
cards is a base profession enough, but truly it would be wiser to print
a code of gambler's legerdemain, and give _that_ for a class-book, than
to make the legerdemain of human speech, and the clever shuffling of the
black spots in the human heart, the first study of our politic youth.
Again, the Ethics of Aristotle, though containing some shrewd talk,
interesting for an _old_ reader, are yet so absurdly illogical and
sophistical, that if a young man has once read them with any faith, it
must take years before he recovers from the induced confusions of
thought and false habits of argument. If there were the slightest
dexterity or ingenuity in maintaining the false theory, there might be
some excuse for retaining the Ethics as a school-book, provided only the
tutor were careful to point out, on first opening it, that the Christian
virtues,--namely, to love with all the heart, soul, and strength; to
fight, not as one that beatet