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 generation in having educated parents. To put the matter in
a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational
system rests: first, the right of every man to the completest education
the nation can