Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[165] have had men come and beg me to make their speeches for them in regard to a certain measure, they putting all the facts and material into my hands, although they knew ten times as much about it as I, and could, consequently, make a far more effective speech; and this simply because they knew that their verbs did not always agree with their nominative cases, and they attached an exaggerated importance to this minor matter. Whatever may be the defects of the much-discussed American temperament, obtuseness is certainly not one of them. The unschooled American recognizes and laments his ignorance, and, indeed, commonly exaggerates it; that is, he does not reflect that he perhaps knows things which are vastly more important than the things which he does not know, and which his college-bred neighbor knows. That is why he sends his son to college. A friend of mine, a merchant by training and a most acute observer, had a theory that the college graduates did not care so very much to send their sons where they had been, as knowing that it had not done very much for themselves; but that the nonuates