“In this manner,” rejoined I, “you will never have eminent men in the higher departments of philosophy.”
“We have as yet no time to devote to abstract learning,” he observed; “we are too young for that. Our principal acquirement consists in common sense; all the rest we consider as moonshine. You must know,” he said, with a countenance in which superiority of knowledge was mingled with condescension of manners, “that a young man learns as much in six months in a counting-room as in four years at college. My friends do not entirely agree with me; but I often told them that our colleges only made poor gentlemen, and spoiled clever tradesmen.”
He then counted over the names of most of the rich men in Boston, who, he said, were all self-taught country boys, possessed of no other learning than the art of making dollars in a neat, handsome, clean manner. “This,” he added, “has given them a higher standing in society than they could have acquired by all the philosophy in the world, and enabled them to marry into the oldest and most aristocratic families of the place.
“Take, for instance, the case of our friend ***. What does he know except making money? What has he ever learned except negociating, or rather shaving notes? What college did he ever go to, except that of our brokers in State-street? And has he not married the daughter of one of our richest men? Has he not got one of the largest fortunes with her? And is he not now connected with some of our first people—with the real back-bone of our Boston aristocracy? And do you know the answer his father-in-law gave to one of his old friends, who remonstrated with him for giving his daughter away to a parvenu from the country? ‘I give my daughter to any man,’ said he, ‘who will come to Boston and have wit enough to make a hundred thousand dollars in six years.’ There’s common sense for you, I trust: that’s what we call practical philosophy.”
“It is certainly a melancholy fact,” sighed the gentleman next to me, who now for the first time opened his lips, “that a great number of our young men, who have gone to college, have afterwards been unsuccessful in business. I think our education is not sufficiently practical;—we are still attached to the European system.”
“Not only that,” replied our entertainer, “but most of our students contract habits of idleness, which will never answer in this country. They want to imitate your English gentleman, when their patrimony—I mean their share in their father’s fortune—is scarcely sufficient to keep them alive. Do you remember Mr. ***’s reply to a young gentleman who had asked him his advice as to what he ought to do in order to succeed in business? ‘Take off your kid gloves,’ said he, ‘and go to work.’ There’s philosophy for you, equal to your Kants and Leibnitz! Mr. ***, you know, is a plain-spoken man, who came to Boston without a cent in his pocket, and is now one of our most respectable citizens.”
“But if this be the prevailing taste of your townsmen,” said I, “why do you call Boston the Athens of the United States?”
“That appellation,” replied he, “refers to our women, not to our gentlemen. Our ladies read a great deal. And why should they not? What else have they to do? And we have, besides, a lot of literary twaddles, manufactured by the wholesale at Cambridge, who attempt to turn the heads of our young girls with the nonsense they call ‘poetry,’ which fills nearly all our papers, instead of clever editorials. If we have one poet among us, we have at least fifty, the joint earnings of whom would not be sufficient to keep a dog. But then poets don’t turn our heads, you see; we are too much occupied with business.”
“But how do your literary men manage to get on?” demanded I: “I know several of them quite in easy circumstances.”
“They marry rich women, who can afford paying for being entertained. They show their common sense in that. It’s quite the fashion for our rich girls to buy themselves a professor, previous to taking a trip to Europe.”