Anecdotes of public men; by John W. Forney.

THE NEW ENGLAND STATES. 345
high collegiate establishments, but in the primary elements of
general education, public lectures, town halls, large libraries,
and local historians. The opportunities for universal information are most general, and almost perfect. The fundamental
principle of republican government is typified in the frequent
popular meetings, wherein are discussed all municipal necessities, in spacious buildings, which can also be utilized for other
purposes, and which are, in every case, I think, connected with
libraries open to every class and condition. The result is an
insatiate appetite for learning. The whole social frame-work
is permeated by healthy competition. No ordinary or superficial lecturer or book satisfies the public. Accustomed to read
the best authors, they will tolerate none but the best of speakers. Agassiz, Emerson, and Dr. Holmes are preferred to feebly forcible wits and glittering declaimers. These are the influences which produce so fine and wholesome a literature in
New England-which open so many doors to Massachusetts
scholars-which place Longfellow, Whittier, Bancroft, Motley,
Hillard, Prescott, Dana, Lowell, Ticknor, and Sprague at the
head of the American schools of learning-which send forth to
States and Territories intelligent young men and women qualified to lead in art and in industry-whether these relate to the
labor of the hands or to the labor of the brain. When Mr.
Sumner returned from his last tour through Pennsylvania, after
having repeated in many of our prominent places his great lectures on "Caste," "Lafayette," and "The Franco-Prussian War,"
he spoke in raptures of the extraordinary variety and fertility
of our soil and our productions, especially of the wonderful mineral and agricultural developments in such counties as Lebanon, Schuylkill, and Wyoming, and along the region of the Alleghany Valley. " But," he remarked, " that which pained me,
in the midst of all this affluence, was the absence in your most
populous interior cities of libraries and town halls, such as we
have in New England; and I beg of you," he said to me, "to
P2