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 rind 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 neighbours 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 neighbours. 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