But at length has come a time when parents, in blind worship of a system, have farmed their children out to intellectual wet-nurses. Many children who possess talent of the first order in the realm of poetry or literature are compelled during the most precious period of life to spend years upon subjects that yield them no culture effect. Meanwhile their enthusiasm is wasted, and their strongest faculties starved. Only when it is too late do they discover the cruel injustice that has been wrought upon them, and recognize that they must remain unfulfilled prophecies. Our common schools have wrought most effectively for our civilization. They are the hope of society. But not until our parents become enthusiastic teachers, and our homes assist the school rooms, will men cease complaining that the nation's great men have no successors, and that genius has departed from our people. The time has fully come for the nation also to begin to love itself. All perceive that the individual has no right to be so generous to-day as to have nothing to bestow to-morrow. Wisdom guards to-day's expenditures lest to-morrow's capital be impaired. He is a poor husbandman who so overtaxes his fields or vineyards as to exhaust the soil or destroy the vine. Yet many events seem to prove that our nation has sorely injured itself by over-kindness. It has forgotten that only God can love everybody. In trying to help the many it has threatened its power to help any. It has been like a man who on a January day opens his windows and tries to warm all out of doors, only to find that he has frozen his family within the house, and warmed no one without. If we journey into the factory towns in New England, where the youthful Whittier and Longfellow were trained, we find the school-houses with windows boarded over. The little churches also are deserted and the doors nailed up. Listening to the "reformers" in our parks on a Sunday afternoon, we are amazed by the virulent attacks upon our institutions. Conversing with the foreman of a large group of men laying water-pipes, we are astonished at his statement that he has not a single man who can write well enough to keep the time and hours of these toilers. Standing in Castle Garden, where the emigrant ship unloads its multitudes, we hear the physician exclaim: "It will take this nation a hundred years to expel this vice and scrofula from its blood."