758 great a compliment, at least until the However this may be, the question before you is whether or not there is anything to prevent your setting before yourself, as an aim, that systematic mastery of some portion of the vast field of knowledge which is supposed to be, but so rarely is, the result of a I do not believe there college education. is; but what you need is something more For a starting-point and center take your- For example, the main part of your work will be writing. Well, the way to learn to write is-to write at first, perhaps, very badly. If you would learn to swim, you don't sit on the bank and study a treatise on swimming; you pitch in and strike out. The way to learn to write well is to learn to think well, and the best of all ways to learn to think well is first to practice thinking, and next to familiarize yourself with the manner of thinking of good thinkers. I do not say that the Rhetorics and Logics are altogether useless, but I think their rules will carry you a very little way in comparison with practice in these two directions. In the same way you want, for example, to understand Political Economy. What is to hinder, provided you have sufficient perseverance? Political Economy is not Abracadabra. It is, or ought to be, common-sense applied to the discovery of the laws which govern certain social phenomena. There are two sources of information open to you, in my judgment equally valuable and necessary, namely, systematic treatises and current discussions. In the treatise you get results thinker, say Mill, never indeed without some After diligent reading in such books, and The case is the same with the study Place yourself in the stream Politics. current thought, even though, for lack off damental principles, you may at first of find yourself at a loss in forming judgmens To remedy this, begin a leisurely cou of reading, to extend say over the next years, among the recognized masters of torical and political science, carefully ave ing second-hand twaddlers, and always remembering that the true object of study is to see how much thought you can get out of the smallest amount of reading, not how much reading you can do with the smallest amount of thought. Such study will be profitable in two directions. While the historian gives you the record of the past, the political philosopher will help you to a key to its meaning, and both will guide you through the maze of contemporary events, which are history in the making. And with such a clew a great deal of contemporary writing may be very summarily dismissed-need give it only a glance. You will know beforehand exactly what Mr. Blank Blank will say on Protection, and about what sort of dust the Hon. Dash Dash will endeavor to throw in the eyes of his constituents; and the fact that nine-tenths of current political writings consist of such material renders the task of keeping up with the political current not altogether hopeless. The set of that current is determined at last-or perhaps I ought rather to say represented at last-by a very few leading minds, possessed of clearness and strength enough to see the way, and integrity enough to follow it. If it were not so, good government would be impossible, for events would be not temporarily but constantly under the control of pig-headed doctrinaires and knavish demagogues. It should be your ambition as a journalist to become, so far as your ability allows, one of those representative minds. It is ideas and principles that you are in search of, and gradually every earnest and independent man who is living to any purpose finds that around even the smallest nucleus of original power he has gathered a body of such principles and ideas, which, whether near to or far from the truth, at any rate constitute his actual intellectual and moral working capital. You cannot load on these ideas as you would load a cart, by merely transferring them from books, though this is a very common notion of education. Nothing is really yours that you have not incorporated into the very substance of your mind. You must let your mind grow. You can no more, by willing it, add a cubit to your mental than you can to your corporeal stature. Education, especially self-education, is even more a moral than it is an intellectual process. Ideas enough are lying about loose everywhere; it is the will to use them and the tact to discriminate between them and the power to organize them that we need, and success here depends upon the aim we have in view. We have more ideas than we ever use, but the man who is in earnest keeps up a constant process of selection, guided by his will, and moves in a definite direction upward towards a higher and higher ideal of character and efficiency, or downwards to the devil. If we allow ourselves to drift, we get ideas indeed, but we gradually lose what little individuality we began with; while, on the other hand, this constant effort at selection and organization gradually brings us to a certain individual philosophy; in other words, our knowledge forms itself into a logical and symmetrical whole, larger or smaller according to our native ability, but which is a whole, and constitutes our real self, and gives us our position and influence. It A first-rate journalist should be a man of speculative ability, and your speculative ability, or capacity for mastering principles, will constantly grow stronger if your studies and practice are rightly directed. The evidence will be that your thought will extend itself in wider circles, embracing details in higher and higher generalities, until these details not only arrange themselves under the principles of those provisional divisions, which we call the sciences, but the sciences themselves are co-ordinated into one great general science, which is philosophy. is the foolish delusion of a certain class of ignoramuses who are fond of calling themselves "practical" men, that philosophy is the spinning of brain-cobwebs by a class of incapables who are not quite up to what they call "real" work. Every really able man, in whatever calling, who is a leader and originator and not a mere subordinate, is so by virtue of a certain philosophy, that is a grasp of principles, whether he knows it or not. Often he does not know it, and can give no account to himself of his own philosophy, but nevertheless he has it lying unconsciously at the bottom of his practical sagacity. It is the advantage which the trained mind-whether self-trained or otherwise has over the untrained, however powerful, that training enables the man to give an account to himself of his philosophy, to think about his thinking. This power comes by practice and by the study of the works of the able thinkers. Whether you fully master them or not, you imbibe their spirit and method. In the matter of reading, the important question is not so much what to read as what not to read. The necessity for reading at all being a calamity and a consequence of our finite imperfections, we may liberate our 760 selves from a good deal of it by a little vigorous and well-directed thinking, without which no reading is of any value. Discount from your calculation say nine-tenths of current books. They have their use or they would not exist, but they are not meant for thinkers. They are a sort of expanded gossip, out of which one may pick facts but very seldom derive ideas, except by way of suggestion. Many of them are the work of men who set themselves professionally to write on subjects about which they have really nothing to say, and to mumble their topic as a toothless dog mumbles a bone. The journalist must have regard to form as well as matter, and so should study art and literature; but here too I cannot undertake to prescribe to you, because I have no idea what writers would soonest wake you up to a sense of beauty. You must find out that for yourself. The most I could do would be to tell you of books which have educated me; but, unless you are a precise duplicate of me, and in precisely the same circumstances, they would not have the same effect upon you. Neither can I hold up my own education as a model. One thing is certain, that you must begin with some original germ of sensibility in your own mind, and with that and a little self-reliance you can help yourself better than any one else can help you. If you want to know whether or not a book suits you, try it-don't run to a reviewer. If Mr. And if it suits you, stick to it, though all the reviewers should be against you. Tupper or any other pretentious twaddler stirs at first-pardon the supposition--what you suppose to be the innermost depths of your being, swear by him till you learn enough to outgrow him. I hope you will not begin quite so low down, but if you love Tupper and don't love Shakespeare, hug your Tupper to your bosom till growth in wisdom You can't understand shall release you. Shakespeare till you have fairly had it out with Tupper. Some books will not suit you either because they are above you or because they are below you. In regard to the former, there is a certain reading by faith out of Rather find, if possi- The safeguards against this latter calamity I am aware that I have failed to do the "course of reading." I do not think it a thing you asked of me, namely, give you a profitable thing to attempt, but if you think otherwise, there are several Guides to Inquiring Young Men by gentlemen whose learning is much greater than mine. I was younger and knew much more than I do wrote one myself once, but it was when I now; and it was a very little one. There are histories of literature, there is some good criticism, and there are the booksellers' catawithout the advice. It is the easiest thing logues, and in the latter you have the titles What subject are held in general esteem. in the world to learn what books on any need is not to make up an unmanage you able list of them, or to read other men's com ments on them, but to sit down and thor oughly digest some one of them, and wher to pick your way among the rest quite as you have fairly done that you will know how One book will easily lead on to well as the average writer of "courses" can direct you. another-the main point is to master the firs one, which need not of necessity be the ver best one. One soon gets the freedom any intellectual domain if he only puts h heart into it, but a little independent thin too much subservient reading. ing will carry one a great deal further the II. THE PILGRIM'S REVERY. THE waning moon shines pale and still; The vanished days! now dim and far, Quivers, deep-visioned, in the lake. They glimmer down the moon's long beam, I feel the hush of brooding wings, Of blessings that were once my own. But O most sweet, and O most sad, But life can never more fulfill. And yet 'tis strange, but these are more That draw my sails across the tide. Fade, golden evenings, fade and sink! Burn, crimson leaves, burn out and fall! For life is greater than we think, And death the surest life of all. The New York Woman. TOPICS OF THE TIME. WHAT kind of a being is the typical New York Woman? Our neighbors across the water evidently regard her as something very different from the typical Englishwoman; and they form their judgments not so much by what they know of the New York Woman at home, as by what they see of her abroad. They find her extravagant in her tastes, something more than self-assured in her bearing, "loud" in her dress, and superficial in her education and accomplishments-if she has any. Now we do not admit that a woman who can be thus characterized is the type of New York womanhood. The world does not hold better women, or better educated women, or better mannered women, than are to be found in great numbers in this much defamed city; but the Englishman does not see them, for they jealously guard their society when he comes here, and when they travel they are unobtrusive and do not attract his attention. The average traveling Englishman in New York knows just as little of the best society of New York as the average traveling American does of the best society of London. Yet the Englishman has an apology in what he sees, and, perhaps, in all that he sees, for the severity of his judgment. There is a type of womanhood in New York-and it has, alas! far too many representatives of which every American, everywhere, has reason to be ashamed. The same type can be found in all the large cities of the country, but it exists in |