with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted.
He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more. He
finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding fault
with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than his
father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had known
at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years later, at
his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the twen-
tieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole, the boy of 1854
stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year I. He
found himself unable to give a sure answer. The calculation was
clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century thought,
but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in essentials
like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the
concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American
boy of 1854 stood nearer the year I than to the year 1900. The
education he had received bore little relation to the education he
needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no edu-
cation at all. He knew not even where or how to begin.

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