defined. This great movement of labor, for instance, does not know definitely what it wants, and those who are spectators do not know what their relations are to it. The first thing to be done is for them to try to understand each other. One class sees that the other has lighter or at least different labor, opportunities of travel, a more liberal supply of the luxuries of life, a higher enjoyment and a keener relish of the beautiful, the immaterial. Looking only at external conditions, it concludes that all it needs to come into this better place is wealth, and so it organizes war upon the rich, and it makes demands of freedom from toil and of compensation which it is in no man's power to give it, and which would not, if granted over and over again, lift it into that condition it desires. It is a tale in the Gulistan, that a king placed his son with a preceptor, and said, "This is your son; educate him in the same manner as your own." The preceptor took pains with him for a year, but without success, whilst his own sons were completed in learning and accomplishments. The king reproved the preceptor, and said, "You have broken your promise, and not acted faithfully."

He replied, "O king, the education was the same, but the capacities are different. Although silver and gold are produced from a stone, yet these metals are not to be found in every stone. The star Canopus shines all over the world, but the scented leather comes only from Yemen." "'Tis an absolute, and, as it were, a divine perfection," says Montaigne, "for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being. We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside."

But nevertheless it becomes a necessity for us to understand the wishes of those who demand a change of condition, and it is necessary that they should understand the compensations as well as the limitations of every condition. The dervish congratulated himself that although the only monument of his grave would be a brick, he should at the last day arrive at and enter the gate of Paradise before the king had got from under the heavy stones of his costly tomb. Nothing will bring us into this desirable mutual understanding except sympathy and personal contact. Laws will not do it; institutions of charity and relief will not do it.

We must believe, for one thing, that the graces of culture will not be thrown away if exercised among the humblest and the least cultured; it is found out that flowers are often more welcome in the squalid tenement-houses of Boston than loaves of bread. It is difficult to say exactly how culture can extend its influence into places uncongenial and to people indifferent to it, but I will try and illustrate what I mean by an example or two.

Criminals in this country, when the law took hold of them, used to be turned over to the care of men who often had more sympathy with the crime than with the criminal, or at least to those who were almost as coarse in feeling and as brutal in speech as their charges. There have been some changes of late years in the care of criminals, but does public opinion yet everywhere demand that jailers and prison-keepers and executioners of the penal law should be men of refinement, of high character, of any degree of culture? I do not know any class more needing the best direct personal influence of the best civilization than the criminal. The problem of its proper treatment and reformation is one of the most pressing, and it needs practically the aid of our best men and women. I should have great hope of any prison establishment at the head of which was a gentleman of fine education, the purest tastes, the most elevated morality and lively sympathy with men as such, provided he had also will and the power of command. I do not know what might not be done for the viciously inclined and the transgressors, if they could come under the influence of refined men and women. And yet you know that a boy or a girl may be arrested for crime, and pass from officer to keeper, and jailer to warden, and spend years in a career of vice and imprisonment, and never once see any man or woman, officially, who has tastes, or sympathies, or aspirations much above that vulgar level whence the criminals came. Anybody who is honest and vigilant is considered good enough to take charge of prison birds.

The age is merciful and abounds in charities-houses of refuge for poor women, societies for the conservation of the exposed and the reclamation of the lost. It is willing to pay liberally for their support, and to hire ministers and distributors of its benefactions. But it is beginning to see that it cannot hire the distribution of love, nor buy brotherly feeling. The most encouraging thing I have seen lately is an experiment in one of our cities. In the thick of the town the ladies of the city have furnished and opened a reading-room, sewing-room, conversation-room, or what not, where young girls, who work for a living and have no opportunity for any culture, at home or elsewhere, may spend their evenings. They meet there always some of the ladies I have spoken of, whose unostentatious duty and pleasure it is to pass the evening with them, in reading or music or the use of the needle, and the exchange of the courtesies of life in conversation. Whatever grace and kindness and refinement of manner they carry there, I do not suppose are wasted. These are some of the ways in which culture can serve men. And I take it that one of the chief evidences of our progress in this century is the recognition of the truth that there is no selfishness so supreme—not even that in the possession of wealth—as that which retires into itself with all the accomplishments of liberal learning and rare opportunities, and looks upon the intellectual poverty of the world without a wish to relieve it. "As often as I have been among men," says Seneca, "I have returned less a man." And Thomas a Kempis declared that "the greatest saints avoided the company of men as much as they could, and chose to live to God in secret." The Christian philosophy was no improvement upon the pagan in this respect, and was exactly at variance with the teaching and practice of Jesus of Nazareth.

The American scholar cannot afford to live for himself, nor merely for scholarship and the delights of learning. He must make himself more felt in the material life of this country. I am aware that it is said that the culture of the age is itself materialistic, and that its refinements are sensual; that there is little to choose between the coarse excesses of poverty and the polished and more decorous animality of the more fortunate. Without entering directly upon the consideration of this much-talked-of tendency, I should like to notice the influence upon our present and probable future of the bounty, fertility, and extraordinary opportunities of this still new land.

The American grows and develops himself with few restraints. Foreigners used to describe him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt, inquisitive, inventive, restless, and certain to shrivel into physical inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere. This apprehension is not well founded. It is quieted by his achievements the continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the most difficult explorations, his resistance of the influence of great cities towards effeminacy and loss of physical vigor. If ever man took large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own use, it is the American. We are gross eaters, we are great drinkers. We shall excel the English when we have as long practice as they. I am filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the prairies, marching straight down the throats of Eastern people. Thousands are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling, to slake the immortal thirst of the