Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

In America (says the Nation) scarcely any man who can afford it likes to refuse his son a college education if the boy wants it; but probably not one boy in one thousand can say, five years after graduating, that he has been helped by his college education in making his start in life. It may have been never so useful to him as a means of moral and intellectual culture, but it has not helped to adapt him to the environment in which he has to live and work; or, in other words, to a world in which not one man in a hundred thousand has either the manners or cultivation of a gentleman, or changes his shirt more than once a week, or eats with a fork.

Now upon this remarkable declaration many comments might be made, but I am going now to make one comment only. Is it credible, if there were established in almost every town of the great majority of the United States a type of “elegant and simple social order,” a “group of people of good taste, good manners, reading the best books, interpreting the best music, interested in themes world-wide, the peers of any people in the world,” is it credible, with the instinct of self-preservation which there is in humanity, and choice things being so naturally attractive as they undoubtedly are,--is it credible,