Connecticut western news., 1901-11-28

their table that once even kings could not afford, having the advantage of thorough education of accomplishment and art, we are all ready at this sea son to unite with them In praise to God for his goodness.
 You shall yet see American labor ris- ing up with a stronger arm and a stout CT heart and d swarthier frame. New cities will be built. Commerce on the lakes will take new wings. Where now stand unbroken forests great capitals of business and aftiuence will rise, and streams that have idled away 6,0Oo years will be harnessed to ponderouS machinery and compelled to toll and sweat like the Chattahoochee and the Merrimac. At one of our great dry docks we shall yet build the model ocean steamship. It will come together under the chorus of a thousand Ameri- can hammers. She shall start amid great national hurrah and move far out at sea as though an island had been unanchored with It's forests of masts or as if some one had said in Scripture phrase unto mountain, Be thou cast into the sea-" The volcano In her heart will sprinkle on the sea baptism of fire, and as she goes up the channel of St. George among the ship yards of the old world and among the wheels of Liverpool and Manchester shall be announced the skill and the glory of the American hammer.
 Conquests of the Pen.
 Now come to speak of the conquests of the pen. This Is the symbol of all intellectually. The painters pencil and the sculptor's chisel and the philoso- pher's laboratory are all brothers to the pen, and therefore this may be used as a symbol of intellectual advance ment There are those disposed to de cry everything American. Having seen Melrose and Glastonbury by moonlight, they never behold among us an impress sive structure, or, having strolled through the picture galleries of the Louvre and the Luxembourg, they are disgusted with our academies of art. It makes me sick to hear these people who have been to Europe come home talking with foreign accent and ap- ing foreign customs and talking of moonlight on castles by the sea. think the biggest fool in the country Is the travelled fool.
 But, considering the youth of our na- tion and the fact that comparatively few persons devote themselves entirely to literature, I think we have great reason to thank God fer the progress of our American literature. AS historians have we not had In the past such men as Bancroft and Prescott, as essayists Irving and Emerson, as jurists Story and Marshall and Kent, as theologians Edwards and Hodge, as poets Pierre pont and Sprague and Longfellow and Bryant, as sculptors Powers and Craw- ford and Palmer, as painters such men as West and Cole and Inman and Ken sett? And among the living Americans what galaxies of intellectual splendor and power! Edward Eggleston and Will Carleton and Mark Twain and John Kendrick Bangs and Marion Har- land and Margaret Sangster and Stock ton and Churchill and Hopkinson Smith and Irving Bacheller and Julia Ward Howe and Amelia Barr and Brander Matthews and Thomas Nelson Page and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Will liam Dean Howells and a score of oth- CTS, some of them fixed stars and some meteors.
 As the pen has advanced our colleges and universities and observatories hays followed the waving of its plume. Our literature. Is of two kinds-that on foot and that on the wing By the former I mean the firm and substantial works which will go down through the cen turies. When, on the other hand, I speak of literature on the wing, I mean the newspapers of the land. They fly swiftly and vanish, but leave per manent results upon the public mind. They fall noiselessly as a snowflake, but with the strength of an Alpine glacier. This unparalleled multiplica- ton of intelligence will either make or break us. Every morning and evening our telegraph offices, with huge wire rakes, gather up the news of the nation and of the whole world, and men write to some purpose when they make pen out of thunderbolt
 Progress of Education.
 1t needs great energy and decision and perseverance for a man to be igno- rant in this country today. It seems to me that 1t requires more effort for him to keep out knowledge than to let 1t in. The mailbags at the smallest postof- fees disgorge large packages of intelli- gence for the people. Academies with
 maps, globes and philosophic appara- tus have been taking the places of those institutions where thirty or forty years ago you were put to the torture. Men selected for their qualifications are intrusted with the education of our youth instead of those teachers who formerly with a drover's shout and goad compelled the young generations up the hill of science. Happy child hood! What with broken tops and torn kites and the trial of losing the best marble and stumping your foot against a stone and somebody sticking a pin into you to see whether you will jump and examination day, with four or five wise men looking over their spectacles to see If you can parse the first page in Young's Might Thoughts" until verbs and conjunctions and participles and propositions get Into a grand riot worthy of the Fourth ward on election day.
 How things have marvelously chang ed! We used to cry because we had to go to school. Now children cry If they cannot go. Many of them can intelll- gently discuss political topics long be- fore they have seen a ballot box or, leased by some poetic muse, can con- pose articles for the newspapers. Phi losophy and astronomy and chemistry
 have been so improved that he must be a genius at dullness who knows noth- ing about them. On one shelf of poor
 mans library Is more practical knowl- edge than in the 100000 volumes of
 ancient Alexandria, and education Is possible for the most indigent, and no lppiSIa turQ or com for ho lo ct ftu