sh, and yet not exactly English. The style was easy and smooth
and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it--A something
tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. It turned out to be
the work of a Hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a
railway office. He had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of
India. Upon inquiry I was told that the country was full of young
fellows of his like. They had been educated away up to the snow-summits
of learning--and the market for all this elaborate cultivation was
minutely out of proportion to the vastness of the product. This market
consisted of some thousands of small clerical posts under the government
--the supply of material for it was multitudinous. If this youth with the
flowing style and the blossoming English was occupying a small railway
clerkship, it meant that there were hundreds and hundreds as capable as
he, or he would be in a high place; and it certainly meant that there
were thousands whose education and capacity had fallen a little short,
and that they would have to go without places. Apparently, then, the
colleges of India were doing what our high schools have long been doing
--richly over-supplying the market for highly-educated service; and thereby
doing a damage to the scholar, and through him to the country.

At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high
school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been
willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had
the good luck to stop with the common school. But I made no converts.
Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above
following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for
their book-knowledge. The same rail that brought me the letter from the
Punjab, brought also a little book published by Messrs. Thacker, Spink &
Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its
contents treated of this matter of over-education. In the preface occurs
this paragraph from the Calcutta Review. For "Government office" read
"drygoods clerkship" and it will fit more than one region of America:

"The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in
their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On
the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in
life, and less willing to work with t