meerschaums for the purpose of starting the process of "coloring." Happily, the high price of labor has hitherto prevented the introduction of this industry into America.

An inhabitant of the United States who smokes a pipe only, and good tobacco in that pipe, can now get his smoking for twenty-five dollars a year. One who smokes good cigars freely (say ten a day at twenty cents each) must expend between seven and eight hundred dollars a year. Almost every one whose eye may chance to fall upon these lines will be able to mention at least one man whose smoking costs him several hundred dollars per annum,—from three hundred to twelve hundred. On the other hand, our friend the hod-carrier can smoke a whole week upon ten cents' worth of tobacco, and buy a pipe for two cents which he can smoke till it is black with years.

All this inconceivable expenditure—this five hundred millions per annum—comes out of the world's surplus, that precious fund which must pay all the cost, both of improving and extending civilization. Knowledge, art, literature, have to be supported out of what is left after food, clothes, fire, shelter, and defence have all been paid for. If the surest test of civilization, whether of an individual or of a community, is the use made of surplus revenue, what can we say of the civilization of a race that expends five hundred millions of dollars every year for an indulgence which is nearly an unmitigated injury? The surplus revenue, too, of every community is very small; for nearly the whole force of human nature is expended necessarily in the unending struggle for life. The most prosperous, industrious, economical, and civilized community that now exists in the world, or that ever existed, is, perhaps, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Yes, take it for all in all, Massachusetts, imperfect as it is, is about the best thing man has yet done in the way of a commonwealth. And yet the surplus revenue of Massachusetts is set down at only three cents a day for each inhabitant; and out of this the community has to pay for its knowledge, decoration, and luxury. Man, it must be confessed, after having been in business for so many thousands of years, is still in very narrow circumstances, and most assuredly cannot afford to spend five hundred millions a year in an injurious physical indulgence.

It is melancholy to observe what a small, mean, precarious, grudging support we give to the best things, if they are of the kind which must be sustained out of our surplus. At Cambridge the other day, while looking about among the ancient barracks in which the students live, I had the curiosity to ask concerning the salaries of the professors in Harvard College,—supposing, of course, that such learned and eminent persons received a compensation proportioned to the dignity of their offices, the importance of their labors, and the celebrity of their names. Alas! it is not so. A good reporter on the New York press gets just about as much money as the President of the College, and the professors receive such salaries as fifteen and eighteen hundred dollars a year. The very gifts of inconsiderate benefactors have impoverished the college, few of whom, it seems, have been able to give money to the institution; most of them have merely bought distinction from it. Thus professorships in plenty have been endowed and named; but the college is hampered, and its resources have become insufficient, by being divided among a multitude of objects. I beg the reader, the next time he gives Harvard University a hundred thousand dollars, or leaves it a million in his will, to make the sum a gift,—a gift to the trustees,—to be expended as they deem best for the general and permanent good of the institution, and not to neutralize the benefit of the donation by conditions dictated by vanity. Yale, I have since learned, is no better off. At all our colleges, it seems, the professors either starve upon twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, or eke out a subsistence by taking pupils, or by some other arduous extra labor. But what wonder that learning pines, when we every year waste millions upon millions of the fund out of which alone learning can be supported!

It is so with all high and spiritual things. How the theatre languishes! There are but four cities in the United States where a good and complete theatre could be sustained. In the great and wealthy city of New York there has never been more than one at a time, nor always one. How small, too, the sale of good books, even those of a popular cast! One of the most interesting works ever published in the United States is the "Life of Josiah Quincy," by his son Edmund Quincy. It is not an abstruse production. The narrative is easy and flowing, interspersed with well-told anecdotes of celebrated men,—Washington, Lafayette, John Adams, John Randolph, Hancock, Jefferson, and many others. Above all, the book exhibits and interprets, in the most agreeable manner, a triumphant human life; showing how it came to pass that Josiah Quincy, in this perplexing and perilous world, was able to live happily, healthily, honorably, and usefully for ninety-three years! Splendid triumph of civilization! Ninety-three years of joyous, dignified, and beneficial existence! One would have thought that many thousands of people in the United States would have hurried to their several bookstores to bear away, rejoicing, a volume recounting such a marvel, the explanation of which so nearly concerns us all. The book has now been published three months or more, and has not yet sold more than three thousand copies! Young men cannot waste their hard-earned money upon a three-dollar book. It is the price of a bundle of cigars!

Mr. Henry Ward Beecher has recently told us, in one of his "Ledger" articles, how he earned his first ten dollars, and what he did with it. While he was a student in Amherst he was invited to deliver a Fourth-of-July temperance address in Brattleboro', forty miles distant. His travelling expenses were to be paid; but the brilliant scheme occurred to him to walk the eighty miles, and earn the stage fare by saving it. He did so, and received by mail after his return a ten-dollar bill,—the first ten dollars he had ever possessed, and the first money he had ever earned. He instantly gave a proof that the test of a person's civilization is the use he makes of his surplus money. He spent the whole of it upon an edition of the works of Edmund Burke, and carried the volumes to his room, a happy youth. It was not the best choice, in literature, perhaps; but it was one that marked the civilized being, and indicated the future instructor of his species. Suppose he had invested the sum (and we all know students who would make just that use of an unexpected ten-dollar bill) in a new meerschaum and a bag of Lone-Jack tobacco! At the end of his college course he would have had, probably, a finely colored pipe,—perhaps the prettiest pipe of his year; but he would not have had that little "library of fifty volumes," the solace of his coming years of poverty and fever and ague, always doing their part toward expanding him from a sectarian into a man of the world, and lifting him from the slavery of a mean country parish toward the mastership of a metropolitan congregation. His was the very nature to have been quenched by tobacco. If he had bought a pipe that day, instead of books, he might be at this moment a petty D.D., preaching safe inanity or silly eccentricity in some obscure corner of the world, and going to Europe every five years for his health.

We all perceive that smoking has made bold and rapid encroachments of late years. It is said that the absurdly situated young man who passes in the world by the undescriptive name of the Prince of Wales smokes in drawing-rooms in the presence of ladies. This tale is probably false; scandalous tales respecting conspicuous persons are so generally false, that it is always safest and fairest to reject them as a matter of course, unless they rest upon testimony that ought to convince a jury. Nevertheless, it is true that smoke is creeping