marked, "no amount of education can cure natural
dullness or make up for original mental deficiencies. Unless the
average natural mental capacity of men is much above its level in my
day, a high education must be pretty nearly thrown away on a large
element of the population. We used to hold that a certain amount of
susceptibility to educational influences is required to make a mind
worth cultivating, just as a certain natural fertility in soil is
required if it is to repay tilling."

"Ah," said Dr. Leete, "I am glad you used that illustration, for it is
just the one I would have chosen to set forth the modern view of
education. You say that land so poor that the product will not repay
the labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nevertheless, much land that
does not begin to repay tilling by its product was cultivated in your
day and is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks, lawns, and, in general,
to pieces of land so situated that, were they left to grow up to weeds
and briers, they would be eyesores and inconveniencies to all about.
They are therefore tilled, and though their product is little, there is
yet no land that, in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. So it is
with the men and women with whom we mingle in the relations of society,
whose voices are always in our ears, whose behavior in innumerable ways
affects our enjoyment--who are, in fact, as much conditions of our
lives as the air we breathe, or any of the physical elements on which
we depend. If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, we
should choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the
brightest, to receive what education we could give. The naturally
refined and intellectual can better dispense with aids to culture than
those less fortunate in natural endowments.

"To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not
consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population
of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, as was
the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied, merely
because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?
Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial
apartment, if the windows on all four sides opened 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