It takes a long course of academic training to
educate a man up to the standard which he must reach before he can
entertain such questions seriously, and by a merciful dispensation
of Providence, university training is almost as costly as it is
unprofitable. The majority will thus be always unable to afford it,
and will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion
rather than on demonstration.
So I turned my steps homewards; I saw a good many more things on my
way home, but I was told that I was not to see more this time than I
could get into twelve pages of the Universal Review; I must
therefore reserve any remark which I think might perhaps entertain
the reader for another occasion.
THE AUNT, THE NIECES, AND THE DOG {3}
When a thing is old, broken, and useless we throw it on the dust-
heap, but when it is sufficiently old, sufficiently broken, and
sufficiently useless we give money for it, put it into a museum, and
read papers over it which people come long distances to hear. By-
and-by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge,
the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after
long ages it is re-discovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-
rubbish age--containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-
rubbish civilisation. So when people are old, indigent, and in all
respects incapable, we hold them in greater and greater contempt as
their poverty and impotence increase, till they reach the pitch when
they are actually at the point to die, whereon they become sublime.
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