gh treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a
destructive tax in my conformity.

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the
reform of Education. The popular education has been taxed with a want of
truth and nature. It was complained that an education to things was
not given. We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and
colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out
at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do
not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the
stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and
skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of
a spider. The Roman rule was to teach a boy nothing that he could not
learn standing. The old English rule was, 'All summer in the field,
and all winter in the study.' And it seems as if a man should learn to
plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence
at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow-men. The
lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of the planet
through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of
the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste
of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better
than volumes of chemistry.

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed on our
scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The ancient languages, with
great beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, which
draw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men,--Greek men, and
Roman men,--in all countries, to their study; but by a wonderful
drowsiness of usage they had exacted the study of all men. Once (say two
centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the science
and culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics had a momentary
importance at some era of activity in physical science. These things
became stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the Good
Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were
now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left these
shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other
matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and
colleges this warfare against c