essays and by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the class to which they are presumably designed to bring comfort and aid.
So far as I am concerned, however, the offence has been committed, and I am willing, if it is possible, to turn my discomfiture to some public profit. "By suffering we learn," says the Greek dramatist; and out of our suffering, one may add, we teach. I happen to be interested in public instruction, being associated with one of those State universities which, as many of us believe, are in a fair way to fufill to the people the promises which Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln saw in American life. Let the general reader fancy, then, my embarrassment when I found Mrs. Gerould declaring with emphasis that in the matter of education "we cannot count on the West to help us, for the West is cursed with State universities." Mrs. Gerould cannot, of course, have intended any incivility here. She is a writer of the most correct taste and complete decorum. The fault was, in a sense, my own, for I had—inadvertently, to be sure—intruded upon, or, as we sometimes say in our brutal Western fashion, "butted into," a kind of boudoir chat of the author with her confidential friends. And yet I cannot help feeling—it is a
