and the power of the individual. Gathering the wisdom of ages as into a sheaf of sunbeams, it shows that progress springs from the minority, and that if it will but stand fast, time will give it victory.

It is the educated voice of the country which teaches patience in politics and strengthens the conscience of the individual citizen by showing that servility to a majority is as degrading as servility to a Sultan or a Grand Lama. Emerson said that of all his friends he honored none more than a quiet old Quaker lady who, if she said yea and the whole world said nay, still said yea. One of the pleasantest stories of Garfield is that of his speech to his constituents in which he quaintly vindicated. his own independence. "I would do anything to win your regard," he said, "but there is one man whose good opinion I must have above all, and without whose approval I can do nothing. That is the man with whom I get up every morning and go to bed every night, whose thoughts are my thoughts, whose prayers are my prayers; I cannot buy your con fidence at the cost of his respect." Never was the scholarly Garfield so truly a man, so patriotically an American, and his constituents were. prouder than ever of their representative who complimented them by asserting his own manhood.

It is the same voice which exposes the sophists who mislead the mob and pitilessly scourges the demagogues who flatter it. "All men know more than any man," haughtily shout the larger and lesser Talleyrands. That is a French epigram, replies the scholar, but not a general truth. A crowd is not wiser than the wisest man in it. For the purposes of the voyage the crew does not know more than the master of the ship. The Boston town meeting was not more sagacious than Sam Adams. "Vox populi vox Dei," screams the foaming rhetoric of the stump; the voice of the people is the voice of God. The voice of the people in London, says history, declared against street lamps and denounced inoculation as wanton wickedness. The voice of the people in Paris demanded the head of Charlotte Corday. The voice of the people in Jerusalem cried, "Away with Him! crucify Him! crucify Him!" "God is on the side of the strongest battalions," sneers the party swindler who buys a majority with money or place. On the contrary, answers the cool critic, reading history and interpreting its lessons, God was with Leonidas, and not with Xerxes. He was with the exile John Robinson at Leyden, not with Laud and the hierarchy at Westminster.

Despite Napoleon even battles are not sums in arithmetic. Strange that a general, half of whose success was due to a sentiment, the glory of France, which welded his army into a thunderbolt, and still burns for us in the fervid song of Béranger, should have supposed that it is numbers and not conviction and enthusiasm which win the final victory.

The career of no man in our time illustrates this truth more signally than Garibaldi's. He was the symbol of the sentiment which the wise. Cavour molded into a nation, and he will be always canonized more universally than any other Italian patriot, because no other represents so purely and simply to the national imagination the Italian ideal of patriotic devotion. His enthusiasm of conviction made no calculation of defeat, because while he could be baffled, he could not be beaten. It was a stream flowing from a mountain height, which might be delayed or diverted, but knew instinctively that it must reach the sea. "Italia fará da se." Garibaldi was that faith incarnate, and the prophecy is fulfilled. Italy, more proud than stricken, bears his bust to the capitol, and there the eloquent marble will say, while Rome endures, that one man with God, with country, with duty and conscience, is at last the majority.

But, still further, it is educated citizenship which, while defining the rightful limitation of the power of the majority, is most loyal to its legitimate authority, and foremost always in rescuing it from the treachery of political peddlers and parasites. The rural statesmen who founded the Republic saw in vision a homogeneous and intelligent community, the peace and prosperity and intelligence of the State reflected in the virtue and wisdom of the government. But is this our actual America or a glimpse of Arcadia? Is this the United States or Plato's Republic or Harrington's Oceana or Sir Thomas More's Utopia? What are the political maxims of the hour? In Rome, do as the Romans do? Fight fire with fire. Beat the devil with his own weapons. Take men as they are, and don't affect superior goodness. Beware of the politics of the moon and of Sunday-school statesmanship. This is our current political wisdom and the results are familiar. "This is a nasty State,” cries the eager partizan, "and I hope we have done nasty work enough to carry it." "The conduct of the opposition," says another, "was infamous. They resorted to every kind of base and contemptible means, and, thank God, we have beaten them at their own game." The majority is overthrown by the political machinery intended to secure its will. The machinery is oiled by corruption and grinds the honest majority to powder. And it is educated citizenship, the wisdom and energy of men who are classed as prigs, pedants, and impracticables, which is first and most efficient in breaking the machinery and releasing the majority. It was this which rescued New York from Tweed, and which everywhere challenges and demolishes a Tweed tyranny by whatever name it may be known.7

Every year at the college commencement the American scholar is exhorted to do his duty. But every newspaper proves that he is doing. it. For he is the most practical politician who shows his fellow citizens,

as the wise old sailor told his shipmates, that "God has somehow so fixed the world that a man can afford to do about right." Take from the country at this moment the educated power, which is contemned as romantic and sentimental, and you would take from the army its general, from the ship its compass, from national action its moral mainspring. It is not the demagogue and the shouting rabble; it is the people heeding the word of the thinker and the lesson of experience, which secures the welfare of the American republic and enlarges human liberty. If American scholarship is not in place, it is in power. If it does not carry the election to-day, it determines the policy of to-morrow. Calm, patient, confident, heroic, in our busy and material life it perpetually vindicates the truth that the things which are unseen are eternal. So in the cloudless midsummer sky serenely shines the moon, while the tumultuous ocean rolls and murmurs beneath, the type of illimitable and unbridled power; but, resistlessly marshaled by celestial laws, all the wild waters, heaving from pole to pole, rise and recede, obedient to the mild queen of heaven.

Brethren of Brown, we have come hither as our fathers came, as our children will come, to renew our observation of that celestial law; and here, upon the old altar of fervid faith and boundless anticipation, let us pledge ourselves once more that, as the courage and energy of educated men fired the morning gun and led the contest of the Revolution, founded and framed the Union and, purifying it as with fire, have maintained the national life to this hour, so, day by day, we will do our part to lift America above the slough of mercenary politics and the cunning snares of trade, steadily forward toward the shining heights. which the hopes of its nativity foretold.

§ 94

BIG BLUNDERS

By Thomas Dewitt Talmage

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-The man who never made a blunder has not yet been born. If he had been he would have died right away. The first blunder was born in Paradise, and it has had a large family of chil

(Lecture by T. DeWitt Talmage, clergyman, editor, pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., for thirty years (born in Bound Brook, N. J., January 7, 1832; died in Washington, April 13, 1902), delivered in many lyceum courses during Dr. Talmage's long career as a lecturer. This was the most popular of his various platform discourses.)

dren. Agricultural blunders, commercial blunders, literary blunders, mechanical blunders, artistic blunders, ecclesiastical blunders, moral blunders, and blunders of all sorts; but an ordinary blunder will not attract my attention. It must be large at the girth and great in stature. In other words, it must be a big blunder.

Blunder the first: Multiplicity of occupations. I have a friend who is a very good painter, and a very good poet, and a very good speaker, and he can do a half dozen things well, but he is the exception. The general rule is that a man can do only one thing well. Perhaps there are two things to do. First, find your sphere; secondly, keep it. The general rule is, masons, stick to your trowel; carpenters, stick to your plane; lawyers, stick to your brief; ministers, stick to your pulpit, and don't go off lecturing. [Laughter.] Fireman, if you please, one locomotive at a time; navigator, one ship; professor, one department. The mighty men of all professions were men of one occupation. Thorwaldsen at sculpture, Irving at literature, Rothschild at banking, Forrest at acting, Brunel at engineering, Ross at navigation, "Punch" at joking.

Sometimes a man is prepared by Providence through a variety of occupations for some great mission. Hugh Miller must climb up to his high work through the quarries of Cromarty. And sometimes a man gets prepared for his work through sheer trouble. He goes from misfortune to misfortune, and from disaster to disaster, and from persecution to persecution, until he is ready to graduate from the University of Hard Knocks. I know the old poets used to say that a man got inspiration by sleeping on Mount Parnassus. That is absurd. That is not the way men get inspiration. It is not the man on the mountain, but the mountain on the man, and the effort to throw it off that brings men to the position for which God intended them. But the general rule is that by the time thirty years of age is reached the occupation is thoroughly decided, and there will be success in that direction if it be thoroughly followed. It does not make much difference what you do, so far as the mere item of success is concerned, if you only do it. Brandreth can make a fortune at pills, Adams by expressage, Cooper by manufacturing glue, Genin by selling hats, contractors by manufacturing shoddy, merchants by putting sand in sugar, beet juice in vinegar, chicory in coffee, and lard in butter. One of the costliest dwellings in Philadelphia was built out of eggs.. Palaces have been built out of spools, out of toothache drops, out of hides, out of pigs' feet, out of pickles, out of tooth-brushes, out of hose,-h-o-s-e and h-o-e-s,-out of fine-tooth combs, out of water, out of birds, out of bones, out of shells, out of steam, out of thunder and lightning.

The difference between conditions in life is not so much a difference in the fruitfulness of occupations as it is a difference in the endowment

of men with that great and magnificent attribute of stick-to-itiveness. Mr. Plod-on was doing a flourishing business at selling banties, but he wanted to do all kinds of huckstering, and his nice little property took wing of ducks and turkeys and shanghais and flew away. Mr. Loomdriver had an excellent factory on the Merrimac, and made beautiful carpets, but he concluded to put up another kind of factory for the making of shawls, and one day there was a nice little quarrel between the two factories, and the carpets ate up the shawls, and the shawls ate up the carpets, and having succeeded so well in swallowing each other, they turned around and gulped down Mr. Loomdriver.

Blackstone Large-Practice was the best lawyer in town. He could make the most plausible argument and had the largest retainers, and some of the young men of the profession were proud to wear their hair as he did, and to have just as big a shirt-collar. But he concluded to go into politics. He entered that paradise which men call a caucus. He was voted up and he was voted down. He got on the Chicago platform, but a plank broke and he slipped through. He got on the St. Louis platform, but it rocked like an earthquake, and a plank broke and he slipped through. Then, as a circus rider with one foot on each horse whirls round the ring, he puts one foot on the Chicago platform and another foot on the St. Louis platform, and he slipped between, and landing in a ditch of political obliquy, he concluded he had enough of politics. And he came back to his law office, and as he entered covered with the mire, all the briefs from the pigeon-hole rustled with gladness, and Kent's Commentaries and Livingstone's Law Register broke forth in the exclamation: "Welcome home, Honorable Blackstone Large-Practice; Jack-of-all-trades is master of none." [Applause.]

Dr. Bone-Setter was a master in the healing profession. No man was more welcome in anybody's house than this same Dr. Bone-Setter, and the people loved to see him pass and thought there was in his old gig a kind of religious rattle. When he entered the drug store all the medicines knew him, and the pills would toss about like a rattle box, and the quinine would shake as though it had the chills, and the great strengthening plasters unroll, and the soda fountain fizz, as much as to say: "Will you take vanilla or strawberry?" Riding along in his gig one day he fell into a thoughtful mood, and concluded to enter the ministry. He mounted the pulpit and the pulpit mounted him, and it was a long while before it was known who was of the most importance. The young people said the preaching was dry, and the merchant could not keep from making financial calculations in the back part of the psalm-book, and the church thinned out and everything went wrong. Well, one Monday morning Messrs. Plod-on, Loomdriver, Blackstone Large-Practice, and Dr. Bone