Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[166] were very anxious to send theirs, because they attributed their own shortcomings to the want of that early advantage. Thus, he reasoned, every alternate generation goes to the university.

In the same way, I think that the college-bred man, or at any rate the man of literary pursuits, is apt to be more humble for himself than he is wished by others to be. It is like that curious self-humiliation, at the beginning of our Civil War, of those who had not been trained in the militia, in presence of those who had received such training. A book of tactics looked, when one opened it, harder than Euclid's Geometry; and it took a little time to discover that it was, for a man with tolerably clear head, as simple as the spelling-book. So the student is apt to think that the elementary principles of business, or the rules of parliamentary law, are things requiring long and difficult training; whereas they do not, in acquiring, prove very hard. Then it must be remembered that, in this country at least, the scholar has very commonly made his own way in the world and has had to develop the practical