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Show Hi THE PROVINCIAL PROFESSOR. U Professor Eliot, of Harvard, thinks the men of Rj the east superior, intellectually, to western men. H Professor Eliot is a very scholarly gentleman, who Hj in his youth possessed the needed attributes to H acquire the knowledge imparted by books, but the good God withheld from him a clear judgment in H the weighing of the world's forces. That is, from Hi the first he has lacked that prime requisite which Hi in homely phrase is called "horse sense." When H a turkey is stuffed for a week with chestnuts and H corn meal, the poultry vender loves to call at- Hh tention to the faultless condition of the bird. The Ht founders and supporters of Harvard kept poultry Hl in their younger days, and heredity has performed Hlf' its perfect work. When a man is stuffed with the Hpf knowledge that is imparted at Cambridge, they M love to exhibit him on the market and exclaim: m "Was there ever before so fine a showing?" It Is H good, too, because the equipment supplied by the H University enables a man to bring out all there is H in him. But if there was not much to the boy in KL the beginning a dozen Harvards can never make H him great. Sometimes, too, men are dwarfed by H the course, for they come out of school with an H idea that it is a shame for gentlemen with a Har- H vard diploma to mix in the hand to hand battle H with the common men of the world, and that re- H strains the best that is in them. Neither Charles H Sumner nor Charles Francis Adams could ever H forgive Abraham Lincoln's uncoufnness and Pro- H fessor Eliot is filled with that same prejudice. H' But suppose he had been born and reared amid Hf h flie squalor and privations in which Mr. Lincoln's H cradle was rocked and his early youth passed, H would he ever have been able to make a mark In H his generation? We fear not. H Now as to intellectual gifts, east and west, on H1 what is the learned professor's opinion founded? Hi Or did he mean intellectual gifts or scholastic H acquirements? There Is a vast difference. A H magpie can be taught to scream like an eagle, Hj but he can never be converted into an eagle. The H stock of men east and west was originally the same, ours is yet so young a nation that new races Ht can scarcely have been created; there has been a Hi much freer mingling of men from all sections In H the west than in the east; the occupations of the ' , masses west have been more ennobling than the B t regular pursuits of the east. Western men, as a I'' rule, have better food to eat and a purer air to breathe than have their eastern brothers, what i J has caused them to deteriorate? What has exalt- i. ed the eastern branch? In the east on an area M ' about as great as three of our western states, an ( area which in a general way Is called "The East," some seventy millions of people are gathered. l! Millions of those seventy millions are degraded by r ! poverty, by ignorance, by crime and a petty pro- 'I vincialism which it Is pitiable to see. But there I ' are also many thousands of superb men and wo- men and these no doubt Professor Eliot has in I t ; mind. But the proportion of these to the whole ' I number is very small. Smaller we thin t than In I 1 the west, for in the west are fewer children and old people. Then for a century past it has been the business busi-ness of the west to subdue a continent and to build temples to civilization, while all that time Boston has been an educational center. So while the westerners have been felling forests, opening mines, fighting savages and building roads, in the eastern educational centers they have been discussing dis-cussing the didactics of the intangible and transcendental trans-cendental and the occult metaphysics of the flap doodle. They have grown refined and superfined in this exalted employment and so rate scholarship scholar-ship as the sum of all things desirable to achieve. Hut scholarship never made an inferior man great. There must be native Intellect behind the acquirements, acquire-ments, and then a race is what its occupation and necessities compel it to be. Then we think there are eras of great births. England has had two or three of these, New England has had one. But there is no proof that the present generation of New Englanders was born in one of those eras. If New England has given any new light to the world in the last thirty years we have failed to see it, while in that time about half of the native-born there have moved away and their places have been mostly filled by Importations from Canada, Ireland and Italy. Is it this new blood that kindles kin-dles the learned professor's enthusiasm? It is well enough to talk about the scholarship of New' England, but scholarship and intellectual power are different things, and of this latter Professor Pro-fessor Eliot should fight shy, because the good God did not give him the attributes to wisely weigh the intellectual status of his fellow man. |