"But if our young men had more time to read, their estates will not enable them to purchase the books requisite to make a learned man. And this inconvenience, resulting from our government and the state of society, I know not how to remedy. As this, however, is the government to which you are attached, you will certainly do us a great service if you can devise a plan for avoiding its disadvantages. And I can further inform you that any application to legislatures for money will be unsuccessful. The utmost we can do is to squeeze a little money occasionally from the public treasuries to furnish buildings and a professor or two. But as to libraries, public or private, men who do not understand their value will be the last to furnish the means of procuring them. Besides, our rage for gain absorbs all other considerations; science is a secondary object, and a man who has grown suddenly from a dunghill, by a fortunate throw of the die, avoids a man of learning as you would a tiger. There are exceptions to this remark, and some men of taste, here and there scattered over our country, adorn the sciences and the moral virtues....
"If the Americans are yet in their leading-strings as to some parts of literature, there is the more room for improvement; and I am confident that the genius of my fellow-citizens will not be slack in the important work. You will please to recollect, sir, that during one hundred and sixty years of our childhood we were in our nonage; respecting our parent and looking up to her for books, science, and improvements. From her we borrowed much learning and some prejudices, which time alone can remove. And be assured, Dr. Priestley, that the parent is yet to derive some scientific improvements from the child. Some false theories, some errors in science, which the British nation has imbibed from illustrious men, and nourished from an implicit reliance on their authority, are to be prostrated by the penetrating genius of America."
It is plain that Webster, aware of the deficiencies of his country in learning, was not rendered entirely submissive by his knowledge, and was not at all disposed to accept the relation of pupilage as a permanent one. He worked with such material as he had, and as a part of the intellectual movement of the day brought for his contribution both industry and an elastic hope.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Belknap Papers, v., Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc. iii.
[6] Life of Timothy Pickering, i. 479, 480.
[7] Nothing in these periodical ventures seems so certain as their uncertainty.
[8] It was now in its last number for the year.
[9] The Massachusetts Magazine, shortly after commenced by Isaiah Thomas.