Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

The supposed prejudice against the incapacity of men of scholarly pursuits does not, therefore, come from the poorer class, whether Catholic or Protestant, nor does it come from the great intermediate and powerful class of the Silas Laphams; on the contrary, the college-bred man is more often touched by a certain covert and needless humility on the part of this class. The organizers of labor, the heads of great enterprises, are often mute and timid before those very much their inferiors in real training, simply from their consciousness that they are weak in things which are really of secondary importance. Just as an Englishman who has once discovered that he misplaces his H's will sometimes hold his tongue when he has things to say more important than all the separate letters of the alphabet put together; so is it often with the uneducated American who seems to exult in all the glory of material success. In the Massachusetts Legislature I