within my knowledge, because his small comrades disapproved his political sentiments. For higher intellectual pursuits there are not only no such penalties among us, but there are no such opportunities. Yet in Athens — with its twenty thousand statues, with the tragedies of Æschylus enacted for civic prizes, and the histories of Herodotus read at the public games — a boy could no more grow up ignorant of art than he could here remain untrained in politics.
When we are once convinced that this result is desirable, we shall begin to feel the worth of our accumulated wealth. That is true of wealth which Talleyrand said of wisdom, —everybody is richer than anybody. The richest man in the world cannot afford the parks, the edifices, the galleries, the libraries, which this community can have for itself, whenever it chooses to create them. The Central Park in New York, the Public Library at Boston, the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Cambridge, — these are steps towards a more than Athenian culture. These institutions open their vast privileges, free from that sting of selfishness which the private monopolizer feels. Public enthusiasm is roused to sustain them, gifts flow in upon them, and they ennoble the common life around. It was claimed for Athens, that wealth could buy few facilities for culture which poverty did not also share. I take it, we aim at least to secure for the poorest American opportunities such as no wealth could buy in Europe. It may take centuries to accomplish it, but it can be done.
And it will not take so long as one might imagine. Although the great intellectual institutions of Europe are often nominally ancient, yet their effective life has been chiefly in the last few centuries. A hundred years ago, the British Museum and the Bodleian Library had each but about ten thousand volumes. The Imperial Library at Paris had then but fifty thousand, and the present century has added the most valuable half of its seven hundred thousand books. At the time of our Revolution, there were but three public galleries of art in Europe ; and the Louvre, “the chief attraction of the most attractive city of the world,” is of later origin. One half of the leading German universities are younger than Harvard College. With the immense wealth accumulating in America, and the impulse inherent in democracies to identify one’s own name and successes with the common weal, such institutions will rise among us like Aladdin’s palace, when public spirit is once thoroughly turned that way. For we must carefully distinguish between a want of cultivated sympathy with the higher intellectual pursuits, and a want of popular respect for them. It is this distinction which relieves the American people from the imputation of materialism. I solemnly believe that no race of practical laborers since the world began was ever so ready to feel respect for those higher pursuits to which it could as yet give no time. The test of a people is not in its occupations, but in its heroes. Whose photographs are for sale in the shop-windows? I remember to have observed with delight, in a trade-list of photographic likenesses which reached me while in camp, that even in the very height of the war the civilians outnumbered the soldiers. Who are these civilians? There is not a millionnaire among them; scarcely a man eminent in mere business pursuits ; scarcely a man whose fame is based on his income. They are statesmen, preachers, lecturers, poets, — men who stand low on the income-lists, and high only on the scale of intangible services, — heroes whose popularity is often exaggerated in quantity, no doubt, but in its quality always honorable. The community seeks wealth, but it knows how to respect its public men who are poor through honesty, or its scholars who are poor for the sake of knowledge. Agassiz never said anything which more endeared him to the mass of his adopted fellow-countrymen, than when he declined a profitable lecturing en
