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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN
a notary, and any notary may be admitted to the bar, it is folly to profess to maintain the old and honorable identification of culture with these professions.
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Since success is that which everyone most desires, the relative probabilities of success that wait on different courses usually determine the young man’s or young woman’s choice among them. The lowest measure of success to which-one’s life can be subjected is the character of the shelter and the quality and the quantity of the food and raiment which he has been able to provide himself. Measured by this lowest unit, I believe the cultured as a class are more successful than the practical as a class. Let success be first gauged by bread and butter if you will; you will find the whitest loaves cut in the thinnest slices, most thickly spread with butter are on the table and in the larder of the cultured man. The second measure of success is in the number, the variety and magnitude of material luxuries in excess of the three primal necessities, shelter, clothing and food, enjoyed by the man himself, and in the number and magnitude of material benefits bestowed by him upon the community. In the personal application of this second measure, the average man of culture has the undoubted advantage of the average man destitute of culture. Measured by the material benefactions which they bestow upon the public, it is granted that the non-cultured man enjoys a relatively superior degree of success. Great inventors, great discoverers, great business magnates, who generally belong to the practical as distinguished from the cultured class, have been conspicuously successful in promoting the material interests of the world. To them society owes the railroads, the steamships, the telegraphs, the telephones, the artificial lights,the banks, the insurance companies, and an innumerable et c<ztera of devices fo rdeveloping material resources and for increasing, distributing and preserving*material benefits. But all of these intruments of material advancement are immediately made the instruments of culture, and are noble in just the degree to which they can be used to promote the ends of culture.
The third measure of relative success may be taken in the public honors enjoyed by the two classes. The impartial application of this measure nearly establishes an equilibrium between the two classes; and as the young man fevered by ambition applies it, he may feel the balance tip in favor of the practical class, especially as he sees representatives of this class in increasing numbers pushed into high public offices and into the social prominence incident to exalted official station. But even in the world of politics, of all worlds that most easily conquered by the practical man, that world which offers an exceptional field for the exercise of practical qualities, that world whose atmosphere lends a peculiar glamor both to practical talent and to its rewards, even in this world, the highest department of service is almost exclusively reserved for men of culture. In the diplomatic department the diplomatic man stands aside for the man of culture; in the records of diplomacy one reads f«w names of merchants, mechanics or inventors, but here with Franklin, the one conspicuous representative of the practical, and who is equally a representative of culture, in diplomacy are registered the names of Ticknor, Taylor, Prescott, Bancroft, Adams, Motley and Lowell, of men equally at home in the world of letters and in the world of affairs; of men whose culture was the instrument of their success in the practical world, and was the occasion of their official elevation and whose elevation in turn advanced their culture.
A fourth measure of success may be found in the degree to which a man has contributed to the amelioration of human hardships, to the eradication of human wrongs, to the promotion of intelligence and virtue, and maintenance of institutions and societies for the spread of learning, for the practice of benevolence, and for the promotion of religion. By this measure the success of the cultured as a class is relatively transcendent. The churches, the colleges, the universities, even the public schools, which are the sharpeners of the practical wits of the practical class—all of these institutions which hold, perpetuate, increase and measure the civilization of our period are, with some notable exceptions, the products and the movements of men of culture.