to avoid examining them, been taught to reverence them; and now, as a natural result, to reverence them is second nature.  In order to shock them it is sufficient to inject a thought of the opposite kind into their dull minds.  For ages, any expression of so-called irreverence from their lips has been sin and crime.  The sham and swindle of all this is apparent the moment one reflects that he is himself the only legitimately qualified judge of what is entitled to reverence and what is not.  Come, I hadn’t thought of that before, but it is true, absolutely true.  What right has Goethe, what right has Arnold, what right has any dictionary, to define the word Irreverence for me?  What their ideals are is nothing to me.  So long as I reverence my own ideals my whole duty is done, and I commit no profanation if I laugh at theirs.  I may scoff at other people’s ideals as much as I want to.  It is my right and my privilege.  No man has any right to deny it.”

Tracy was expecting to hear the essay debated, but this did not happen.  The chairman said, by way of explanation: 

“I would say, for the information of the strangers present here, that in accordance with our custom the subject of this meeting will be debated at the next meeting of the club.  This is in order to enable our members to prepare what they may wish to say upon the subject with pen and paper, for we are mainly mechanics and unaccustomed to speaking.  We are obliged to write down what we desire to say.”

Many brief papers were now read, and several offhand speeches made in discussion of the essay read at the last meeting of the club, which had been a laudation, by some visiting professor, of college culture, and the grand results flowing from it to the nation.  One of the papers was read by a man approaching middle age, who said he hadn’t had a college education, that he had got his education in a printing office, and had graduated from there into the patent office, where he had been a clerk now for a great many years.  Then he continued to this effect: 

The essayist contrasted the America of to-day with the America of bygone times, and certainly the result is the exhibition of a mighty progress.  But I think he a little overrated the college-culture share in the production of that result.  It can no doubt be easily shown that the colleges have contributed the intellectual part of this progress, and that that part is vast; but that the material progress has been immeasurably vaster, I think you will concede.  Now I have been looking over a list of inventors—­the creators of this amazing material development—­and I find that they were not college-bred men.  Of course there are exceptions—­like Professor Henry of Princeton, the inventor of Mr. Morse’s system of telegraphy—­but these exceptions are few.  It is not overstatement to say that the imagination-stunning material development of this century, the only century worth living in since time