The hardiest skeptic, who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education.  “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all wild beasts”; and, in the same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, “A boy is better unborn than untaught.”  The city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different style; the sea another; the army a fourth.  We know that an army which can be confided in may be formed by discipline,—­that by systematic discipline all men may be made heroes.  Marshal Lannes said to a French officer, “Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he never was afraid.”  A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.  And, in all human action, those faculties will be strong which are used.  Robert Owen said, “Give me a tiger, and I will educate him.”  ’Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education, since to meliorate is the law of Nature; and men are valued precisely as they exert onward or meliorating force.  On the other hand, poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper.  There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your words, or any humor,—­but remain literalists, after hearing the music and poetry and rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years.  They are past the help of surgeon or clergy.  But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of “Fire!”—­and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive.  Politics is an after-work, a poor patching.  We are always a little late.  The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting.  We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education.  What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms.  We must begin higher up,—­namely, in Education.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same advantage over the novice as if you extended his life ten, fifty, or a hundred years.  And I think it the part of good sense to provide every fine soul with such culture, that it shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say, “This which I might do is made hopeless through my want of weapons.”

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect,—­that all success is hazardous and rare,—­that a large part of our cost and pains is thrown away.  Nature takes the matter into her own hands, and, though we must not omit any jot of our system, we can seldom be sure that it has availed much, or that as much good would not have accrued from a different system.