uded
by others, may be of infinite value to ourselves, and also that beyond
this gain to the individual, his culture is a gain to the nation,
whether the nation formally recognizes it or not. For the intellectual
life of a nation is the sum of the lives of all intellectual people
belonging to it, and in this sense your culture is a gain to England,
whether England counts you amongst her eminent sons, or leaves you
forever obscure. Is it not a noble spectacle, a spectacle well worthy of
a highly civilized country, when a private citizen, with an admirable
combination of patriotism and self-respect, says to himself as he
labors, "I know that in a country so great as England, where there are
so many able men, all that I do can count for very little in public
estimation, yet I will endeavor to store my mind with knowledge and make
my judgment sure, in order that the national mind of England, of which
my mind is a minute fraction, may be enlightened by so much, be it never
so little"? I think the same noble feeling might animate a citizen with
reference to his native town; I think a good townsman might say to
himself, "Our folks are not much given to the cultivation of their
minds, and they need a few to set them an example. I will be one of
those few. I will work and think, in order that our town may not get
into a state of perfect intellectual stagnation." But if the nation or
the city were too vast to call forth any noble feeling of this kind,
surely the family is little enough and near enough. Might not a man say,
"I will go through a good deal of intellectual drudgery in order that my
wife and children may unconsciously get the benefit of it; I will learn
facts for them that they may be accurate, and get ideas for them that
they may share with me a more elevated mental state; I will do something
towards raising the tone of the whole household"?

The practical difficulty in all projects of this kind is that the
household does not care to be intellectually elevated, and opposes the
resistance of gravitation. The household has its natural intellectual
level, and finds it as inevitably as water that is free. Cultivated men
are surrounded in their homes by a group of persons, wife, children,
servants, who, in their intercourse with one another, create the
household tone. What is a single individual with his books against these
combined and active influences? Is he to go and preach the gospel of the
intellect in the kitchen?