ooms above him and above all in sight, before he
speaks--before he is able to speak.

It is soon over. He lies passive and insensible at last,--as convenient
as though he were dead, and the Church and the School operate upon him.
They remove as many of his natural organs as they can, put in
Presbyterian ones perhaps, or School-Board ones instead. Those that
cannot be removed are numbed. When the time is fulfilled and the youth
is cured of enough life at last to like living with the dead, and when
it is thought he is enough like every one else to do, he is given his
degree and sewed up.

After the sewing up his history is better imagined than described. Not
being interesting to himself, he is not apt to be very interesting to
any one else, and because of his lack of interest in himself he is
called the average man.[1]

[1] A Typical Case: "The brain was cut away neatly and dressed.
A healthy yearling calf was tied down, her skull cut away,
and a lobe of brain removed and fitted into the cavity in
L's head. The wound was dressed and trephined, and the
results awaited. The calf's head was fixed up with half a
brain in it. Both the man and the calf have progressed
satisfactorily, and the man is nearly as well as before the
operation."--Daily Paper.

The main distinction of every greater or more extraordinary book is that
it has been written by an extraordinary man--a natural or wild man, a
man of genius, who has never been operated on. The main distinction of
the man of talent is that he has somehow managed to escape a complete
operation. It is a matter of common observation in reading biography
that in proportion as men have had lasting power in the world there has
been something irregular in their education. These irregularities,
whether they happen to be due to overwhelming circumstance or to
overwhelming temperament, seem to sum themselves up in one fundamental
and comprehensive irregularity that penetrates them all--namely, every
powerful mind, in proportion to its power, either in school or out of it
or in spite of it, has educated itself. The ability that many men have
used to avoid being educated is exactly the same ability they have used
afterward to move the world with. In proportion as they have moved the
world, they are found to have kept the lead in their education from
their earliest years, to have had a habit of initiative as well as
hospitality