All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our Tolstois and Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive.  Yet you remember the Irishman who, when asked, “Is not one man as good as another?” replied, “Yes; and a great deal better, too!” Similarly (it seems to me) does Tolstoi overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated man as absolutely as he does.  Grant that at Chautauqua there was little moral effort, little sweat or muscular strain in view.  Still, deep down in the souls of the participants we may be sure that something of the sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting when required.  And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances of the virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the result?  Is the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain definite amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and drawing water, just to keep himself alive?  Tolstoi’s philosophy, deeply enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction.  It savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions to be a cunning fraud.

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A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never believe the phenomenal world to be.  It admits fully that the inner joys and virtues are the essential part of life’s business, but it is sure that some positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show.  If it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.  It is with us really under every disguise:  at Chautauqua; here in your college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar of Russia’s court.  But, instinctively, we make a combination of two things in judging the total significance of a human being.  We feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be calculated) of his inner virtue and his outer place,—­neither singly taken, but both conjoined.  If the outer differences had no meaning for life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist?  They must be significant elements of the world as well.

Just test Tolstoi’s deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts.  This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to belong:—­