pile of money and can load dice or mark cards. Humble as the pot-house politician may be he is a great favorite in large cities. and, being an enlarged thief he is clothed at the ballot-box with an opportunity as large as his desire.

I.

Cicero, perhaps the broadest scholar of the Pagan age, says in his essay on the Republic, "That at no point of thought and feeling does man's virtue resemble more the divine nature than when the statesman is founding and caring for a commonwealth." De Rep. Chap. 1. 7. This luminous sentence is verified when the modern student reads the history of the modern great nations and finds them made and guided by the most profound men of the whole world. Hamilton, Burke, Pitt, Jefferson, Washington, Cavour, Castelar and Gladstone are only specimens of the names that underlie the modern State.

In common speech a scholar is not a person who is an expert among languages and among the forms of grammar and rhetoric. The term is equivalent to the

word "philosopher" or "wiseman."

The

history of his race lies outspread before him. He knows at least in great outline the careers pursued by the great races of our planet and by what paths they came to their ruin or success. He is familiar with the laws and duties that spring from the relations of man to man. He can see in the forest of life the paths that lead to the most happiness for the greatest number. He is not a critic of style and speech only, but he is somewhat familiar with the needs and capabilities of the human family.

All this wide survey of the human wants and condition must be expressed by the mind which at the same time possesses this rich wisdom and lives in a Republic. Be the individual a lawyer or physician or clergyman or writer or merchant, he must bring his scholarship to bear upon the national government because the Nation depends upon the culture and sense of the majority. There can be no division of labor by which one scholar can preach or teach or write books, and leave to some other

scholar the task of caring for the commonwealth. There is no security that the ignorance and vice of a continent will not ask some one distinguished for ignorance and vice to represent them at the local and national elections. If ig

norance and fraud move in bulk so must all the contemporary education and morality move in its totality. When an educated man avows himself to be neutral in politics he confesses that his education is very defective in the department of principles. He may be able to compose a sonnet or to speak his native tongue with propriety, but it would be an insult to Milton and John Stuart Mill and all the greatest men of all times to call him a student or a wise man. A man's vision would be thought defective if he could not see the sky or the ocean; defective is the American scholarship that cannot see that oceanic object loved and died for as the Nation.

Scholars the highest and the most sincere will differ as to the best path to the best end, but out of the long and earnest

exchange of opinion greater truth will come than can be hoped for from an age of ignorance and inaction. The differences of scholars are a matter of regret and are a delay of progress, but in vice and ignorance there is no hope whatever. An age of intellectual activity is always evolving great principles. When our nation began, slavery was not seen in its true light. The scholars differed as to the moral quality of the bondage of black to white, but out of educated reflection came at last a general acceptance of the equality of all human rights. The truth may come slowly from scholarship, but that is the only source from which it has been known to come.

Each nation, with its many millions of people, presents all the vicissitudes possible to human life. All scholars must stand near to the people that they may utter the eloquence and write the essays and poems of the people's sorrows and joys. All the old Hebrew writers were students and scholars for the commonwealth. The best education of that period went to the heads of the republic and afterward to the throne.

The classic states also were presided over by their scholars.

All the American scholars, from the poets like Whittier up to the college presidents like Woolsey and Hopkins, should keep so near to the daily needs of the republic that the congress at Washington would see them taking seats in the House or the Senate to help make wisdom and integrity assume a high place in the laws and deeds of the country. If there be any meaning in learning or wisdom, our nation should be seen sending to its central legislature and supreme bench and presidential chair only its best men in all the senses of that significant phrase; but by scholar we must not mean a graduate of some university, but the man who by some means has reached a wealth of information, a symmetry of intellect, a habit of reflection and a purity of heart.