The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

Speaking of the modern college curriculum, he said:

“The prevailing system was established at a time when the learning of the world was in Latin and Greek; when, if a man would learn arithmetic, he must first learn Latin; and if he would learn the history and geography of his own country, he could acquire that knowledge only through the Latin language. Of course, in those days it was necessary to lay the foundation of learning in a knowledge of the learned languages. The universities of Europe, from which our colleges were copied, were founded before the modern languages were born. The leading languages of Europe are scarcely six hundred years old. The reasons for a course of study then are not good now. The old necessities have passed away. We now have strong and noble living languages, rich in literature, replete with high and earnest thought,—the language of science, religion, and liberty,—and yet we bid our children feed their spirits on the life of dead ages, instead of the inspiring life and vigor of our own times.

“The present Chancellor of the British Exchequer, the Right Honorable Robert Lowe, one of the brightest minds in that kingdom, said, in a recent address before the venerable University of Edinburgh: ‘I was a few months ago in Paris, and two graduates of Oxford went with me to get our dinner at a restaurant, and if the white-aproned waiter had not been better educated than all three of us, we might have starved to death. We could not ask for our dinner in his language, but fortunately he could ask us in our own language what we wanted.’ There was one test of the insufficiency of modern education....

“Let me beg you, in the outset of your career, to dismiss from your minds all idea of succeeding by luck. There is no more common thought among young people than that foolish one that by-and-by something will turn up by which they will suddenly achieve fame or fortune. No, young gentlemen; things don’t turn up in this world unless somebody turns them up. Inertia is one of the indispensable laws of matter, and things lie flat where they are until by some intelligent spirit (for nothing but spirit makes motion in this world) they are endowed with activity and life. Luck is an ignis fatuus. You may follow it to ruin, but not to success. The great Napoleon, who believed in his destiny, followed it until he saw his star go down in blackest night, when the Old Guard perished round him, and Waterloo was lost. A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck....

“Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard, and compelled to sink or swim for himself. In all my acquaintance I have never known one to be drowned who was worth saving. This would not be wholly true in any country but one of political equality like ours. The editor of one of the leading magazines of England told me, not many months ago, a fact startling enough in itself, but of great significance to a poor man. He told me that he had never yet known, in all his experience, a single boy of the class of farm-laborers (not those who own farms, but mere farm-laborers) who had ever risen above his class. Boys from the manufacturing and commercial classes had risen frequently, but from the farm-labor class he had never known one.

“The reason is this: in the aristocracies of the Old World, wealth and society are built up like the strata of rock which compose the crust of the earth. If a boy be born in the lowest stratum of life, it is almost impossible for him to rise through this hard crust into the higher ranks; but in this country it is not so. The strata of our society resembles rather the ocean, where every drop, even the lowest, is free to mingle with all others, and may shine at last on the crest of the highest wave.”

His correspondence is full of glimpses of literary life. At one time he breaks into glee over a new book. At another he solemnly urges the necessity of his friend Hinsdale and himself mastering French and German. Again he sighs for more time to read, and, with the reader’s inconsistency, gives an elaborate criticism of some book he had just finished. Once he says:

“I can’t see that John Stuart Mill ever came to comprehend human life as a reality from the actual course of human affairs beginning with Greek life down to our own. Men and women were always, with him, more or less of the nature of abstractions; while, with his enormous mass of books, he learned a wonderful power of analysis, for which he was by nature surprisingly fitted. But his education was narrow just where his own mind was originally deficient. He was educated solely through books; for his father was never a companion. His brothers and sisters bored him. He had no playfellows, and of his mother not a word is said in his autobiography.”

The last fact mentioned must have seemed remarkable to Garfield. In another letter, he says:

“Permit me to transcribe a metrical version which I made the other day of the third ode of Horace’s first book. It is still in the rough.”