A really competent and successful dry-goods jobber, in the year of grace, one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one, is a new creation.  He is begotten of the times.  Of him, as truly as of the poet, and with yet more emphasis, it must be said, He is born, not made.  He is a poet, a philosopher, an artist, an engineer, a military commander, an advocate, an attorney, a financier, a steam-engine, a telegraph-operator, a servant-of-all-work, a Job, a Hercules, and a Bonaparte, rolled into one.

“Exaggeration!” do you say?  Not at all.—­You asked for information?  You shall have it, to your heart’s content.

To a youth, for a time interrupted in his preparation for college, I said,—­

Never mind; this falls in exactly with my well-considered plan.  You shall go into a dry-goods store till your eyes recover strength; it will be the best year’s schooling of your life.

“How so?” was the dubious answer; “what can I learn there?”

Learn?  Everything,—­common sense included, which is generally excluded from the University curriculum:  for example, time, place, quantity, and the worth of each.  You shall learn length, breadth, and thickness; hard and soft; pieces and yards; dozens and the fractions thereof; order and confusion, cleanliness and dirt,—­to love the one and hate the other; materials, colors, and shades of color; patience, manners, decency in general; system and method, and the relation these sustain to independence; in short, that there is a vast deal more out of books than in books; and, finally, that the man who knows only what is in books is generally a lump of conceit, and of about as much weight in the scales of actual life as the ashes of the Alexandrian library, or the worms in any parchments that may have survived that conflagration.

“Whew!” was his ejaculation; “I didn’t know there was so much.”

I dare say not.  Most of your limited days have passed under the training of men who are in the like predicament,—­whose notion of the chief end of man is, to convert lively boys into thick dictionaries,—­and who honestly believe that the chief want of the age is your walking dictionary.  Any other type of humanity, they tell us, “won’t pay.”  Much they know of what will and what won’t pay!  This comes of partial education,—­of one-sided, of warped, and biased education.  It puts one out of patience, this arrogance of the University, this presuming upon the ignorance of the million, this assertion of an indispensable necessity to make the boy of the nineteenth century a mere expert in some subdivision of one of the sciences.  The obstinacy of an hereditary absolutism, which the world has outgrown, still lingers in our schools of learning.  Let us admit the divine right of Science, admit the fitness of a limited number of our youth to become high-priests in her temple, but no divine right of fossil interpreters of Science to compel the entire generation to disembowel