“When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans.  You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power.  Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.”

“Do we use them?  Oh, no!  We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel.  We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.

“There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces.  Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it can not be destroyed.

“Now, I am not sure but that my new storage-battery is the thing.  I’d tell you about that, but I don’t want to bore you.  Of course, I know that nothing is more interesting to the public than a good lie.  You see, I have been a newspaperman myself—­used to run a newspaper—­in fact, Veritas and Old Subscriber once took exception to one of my editorials and threw me into the Detroit River—­that is where I got my little deafness—­what’s that?  No, I did not say my deftness—­I got that in another way.  But about lies, you have heard that one about my smoking big, black cigars!  Well, the story is that the boys in the office used to steal my cigars, and so I got a cigarmaker to make me up a box that looked just like my favorite brand, only I had ’em filled with hemp, horsehair and a touch of asafetida.  Then I just left the box where the boys would be sure to dip into it; but it seems the cigarman put them on, and so they just put that box into my own private stock and I smoked the fumigators and never knew the difference.

“That whole story is a pernicious malrepresentation invented by the enemy of mankind in order to throw obloquy over a virtuous old telegraph-operator—­brand it!”

Witness, therefore, that I have branded it, forevermore!

* * * * *

Once upon a day I wrote an article on Alexander Humboldt.  And in that article among other things I said, “This world of ours, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the Poles, has produced but five educated men.”

And ironical ladies and gents from all parts of the United States wrote me on postal cards, begging that I should name the other four.  Let us leave the cynics to their little pleasantries, and make our appeal to people who think.

Education means evolution, development, growth.  Education is comparative, for there is no fixed standard—­all men know more than some men, and some men know more than some other men.  “Every man I meet is my master in some particular,” said Emerson.  But there are five men in history who had minds so developed, and evolved beyond the rest of mankind so far, that they form a class by themselves, and deserve to be called Educated Men.

The men I have in mind were the following:  Pericles, Builder of Athens.