eople who cannot in the nature of things serve
society effectively in their own way without being quite outside of the
industrial life. There is a real incompatibility between some pursuits
and others. I suspect that you would have been a good general, for you
are a born leader and commander of men; but it would have been difficult
to unite a regular military career with strict personal attention to
your factories. We often find the same difficulty in our intellectual
pursuits. We are not always quite so unpractical as you think we are;
but the difficulty is how to find the time, and how to arrange it so as
not to miss two or three distinct classes of opportunities. We are not
all of us exactly imbeciles in money matters, though the pecuniary
results of our labors seem no doubt pitiful enough. There is a tradition
that a Greek philosopher, who was suspected by the practical men of his
day of incapacity for affairs, devoted a year to prove the contrary, and
traded so judiciously that he amassed thereby great riches. It may be
doubtful whether he could do it in one year, but many a fine
intellectual capacity has overshadowed a fine practical capacity in the
same head by the withdrawal of time and effort.

It is because the energies of one man are so limited, and there is so
little time in a single human life, that the intellectual and industrial
functions must, _in their highest development_, be separated. No one man
could unite in his own person your life and Humboldt's, though it is
possible that he might have the natural capacity for both. Grant us,
then, the liberty _not_ to earn very much money, and this being once
granted, try to look upon our intellectual superiority as a simple
natural fact, just as we look upon your pecuniary superiority.

In saying in this plain way that we are intellectually superior to you
and your class, I am guilty of no more pride and vanity than you when
you affirm or display your wealth. The fact is there, in its simplicity.
We have culture because we have paid the twenty or thirty years of labor
which are the price of culture, just as you have great factories and
estates which are the reward of your life's patient and intelligent
endeavor.

Why should there be any narrow jealousy between us; why any contempt on
the one side or the other? Each has done his appointed work, each has
caused to fructify the talent which the Master gave.

Yet a certain jealousy _does_ exist, if not between