ervalue it. Such an influence can
never convey much solid instruction, but it may convey some of its
results. It may produce a more thoughtful and reasonable condition of
mind, it may preserve the ignorant from some of those preposterous
theories and beliefs which so easily gain currency amongst them.
Indirectly, it may have rather an important political influence, by
disposing people to vote for the better sort of candidate. And the
influence of such intellectual charity on the material well being of the
humbler classes, on their health and wealth, may be quite as
considerable as that of the other and more common sort of charity which
passes silver from hand to hand.

Shortly after the termination of the great Franco-German conflict, M.
Taine suggested in the _Temps_ that subscribers to the better sort of
journals might do a good deal for the enlightenment of the humbler
classes by merely lending their newspapers in their neighborhood. This
was a good suggestion: the best newspapers are an important intellectual
propaganda; they awaken an interest in the most various subjects, and
supply not only information but a stimulus. The danger to persons of
higher culture that the newspaper may absorb time which would else be
devoted to more systematic study, does not exist in the classes for
whose benefit M. Taine made his recommendation. The newspaper is their
only secular reading, and without it they have no modern literature of
any kind. In addition to the praiseworthy habit of lending good
newspapers, an intellectual man who lives in the country might adopt the
practice of conversing with his neighbors about everything in which they
could be induced to take an interest, giving them some notion of what
goes on in the classes which are intellectually active, some idea of
such discoveries and projects as an untutored mind may partially
understand. For example, there is the great tunnel under the Mont Cenis,
and there is the projected tunnel beneath the Channel, and there is the
cutting of the Isthmus of Suez. A peasant can comprehend the greatness
of these remarkable conceptions when they are properly explained to
him, and he will often feel a lively gratitude for information of that
kind. We ought to remember what a slow and painful operation reading is
to the uneducated. Merely to read the native tongue is to them a labor
so irksome that they are apt to lose the sense of a paragraph in seeking
for that of a sentence or an e