Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[167] faculty, in a small way, from the very beginning. Nothing is more interesting, in a university town, than to see the variety of antecedents, usually involving some knowledge of men, with which the older students have come together. In a nation where small mechanics and country shopkeepers become millionnaires and presidents, it is not strange that the student whose early life was perhaps not very different from theirs should also have his practical side.

It must be remembered that the supposed prejudice against educated men in practical affairs is not confined to our own country, but exists in England, in France, in Germany; and in each case with the additional condition which I have pointed out, that it is found more among other educated men than in the general public mind. We think of England as a place where they put authors forward in public life; and we instance Beaconsfield, Gladstone, Morley, and Bryce, by way of illustration. But the acute Sir Frederick Elliot wrote to the poet Sir Henry Taylor, in 1876: ‘I think that literati, when they have not been exercised in ’