"A boy," says Plato, "is the
most vicious of all wild beasts"; and, in the same spirit, the old
English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught." The
city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different
style; the sea another; the army a fourth. We know that an army which
can be confided in may be formed by discipline,--that by systematic
discipline all men may be made heroes. Marshal Lannes said to a French
officer, "Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he
never was afraid." A great part of courage is the courage of having done
the thing before. And, in all human action, those faculties will be
strong which are used. Robert Owen said, "Give me a tiger, and I will
educate him." 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education,
since to meliorate is the law of Nature; and men are valued precisely as
they exert onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery
is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.
Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people
who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given
to your words, or any humor,--but remain literalists, after hearing the
music and poetry and rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years. They
are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand
pitchforks and the cry of "Fire!"--and I have noticed in some of this
class a marked dislike of earthquakes.
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