ed into
stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those considered
most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that
the poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the
latter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness,
seem little better off than the former. The cultured man in your age
was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a
smelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question
of universal high education. No single thing is so important to every
man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There
is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will
enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it
fails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by
half, and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive
sources of pain.

"To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly
uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that
between different natural species, which have no means of
communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a
partial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoyment
leaves, indeed, the differences between men as to natural endowments
as marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is
vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of the
humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an
admiration for the still higher culture they have fallen short of.
They have become capable of receiving and imparting, in various
degrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a
refined social life. The cultured society of the nineteenth
century,--what did it consist of but here and there a few microscopic
oases in a vast, unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individuals
capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass
of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any
broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of
the world to-day represents a greater volume of intellectual life than
any five centuries ever did before.

"There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds
on which nothing less than the universality of the best education
could now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, the
interest of the coming gen