will speedily be degraded and unfruitful; and it is just as true that if we pursue knowledge only for the sake of gain, and not for its own sake, knowledge will lose the power it has of satisfying the higher needs of the human soul.  If we are seen to put only a money value on the higher education, why should not the workingman, who regards it only as a distinction of class or privilege, estimate it by what he can see of its practical results in making men richer, or bringing him more pleasure of the senses?

The world is ruled by ideas, by abstract thought.  Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them.  We recognize this clearly in studying any past period.  We see, for instance, how all the currents of human life changed upon the adoption of the inductive method; no science, no literature, no art, practical or fine, no person, inquiring scholar, day laborer, trader, sailor, fine lady or humblest housekeeper, escaped the influence.  Even though the prevailing ethics may teach that every man’s highest duty is to himself, we cannot escape community of sympathy and destiny in this cold-blooded philosophy.

No social or political movement stands by itself.  If we inquire, we shall find one preponderating cause underlying every movement of the age.  If the utilitarian spirit is abroad, it accounts for the devotion to the production of wealth, and to the consequent separation of classes and the discontent, and it accounts also for the demand that all education shall be immediately useful.  I was talking the other day with a lady who was doubting what sort of an education to give her daughter, a young girl of exceedingly fine mental capacity.  If she pursued a classical course, she would, at the age of twenty-one, know very little of the sciences.  And I said, why not make her an intellectual woman?  At twenty-one, with a trained mind, all knowledges are at one’s feet.

If anything can correct the evils of devotion to money, it seems to me that it is the production of intellectual men and women, who will find other satisfactions in life than those of the senses.  And when labor sees what it is that is really most to be valued, its discontent will be of a nobler kind.

THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO

By Charles Dudley Warner

At the close of the war for the Union about five millions of negroes were added to the citizenship of the United States.  By the census of 1890 this number had become over seven and a half millions.  I use the word negro because the descriptive term black or colored is not determinative.  There are many varieties of negroes among the African tribes, but all of them agree in certain physiological if not psychological characteristics, which separate them from all other races of mankind; whereas there are many races, black or colored, like the Abyssinian, which have no other negro traits.