And yet, to see the airs and graces of many educated and superior persons, one might suppose that they invented and discovered and developed all the knowledge and wisdom, all the virtues and the graces by which they benefit, of their own act and thought. One would suppose, to behold the scorn of these superior persons for their more rude and ignorant and unfortunate brothers and sisters, that _they_ had designed and tailored all the moral and intellectual finery in which they are arrayed. Whereas all their plumes are borrowed plumes; all they know they have been taught by other men; all they have has been made by other men; and they have become that which they are through the generosity and the tenderness of other men and women. The rich young scholar fresh from Harvard or Cambridge is blessedly endowed with health, and strength and grammar, and mathematics, a sprinkle of dead languages, and more or less graceful manners. He despises the lout at the plough or the coster at the barrow because of their lack of the benefits given to him as a dole. He forgets that the University was there centuries before he was born, that Euclid, Lindley Murray, Dr. Johnson, Cicero, Plato, and a million other abler men than himself, forged every link of the chain of culture with which his proud young neck is adorned. He forgets that it is to others, and not to himself, that he owes all that makes him the man of whom he is so vain. He forgets that the coster at the barrow and the hind at the plough differ from him chiefly by the accident of birth, and that had they been nursed and taught and trained like himself they would have been as handsome, as active, as clever, as cultured, and very probably as conceited and unjust as he. For all the mighty dead, and the noble works they have bequeathed us, and all the faithful living, and all the tender services they render us and the shielding love they bear us, are parts of our environment. And for the blessings these good men and gentle women, with their golden heritage, have wrought in us, we are no more responsible and no more praiseworthy than we are for the flowers of the field, or the constellations in the sky, or the warmth of the beneficent sun that shines alike upon the sinner and the saint. And since we are but debtors to the dead, but starvelings decked out by charity in the braveries made by other hands, and since we are deserving of no praise for our grandeur and our virtues, how shall we lift up our vainglorious and foolish faces to despise and contemn our less fortunate brothers and sisters, who have been made evil, even as we have been made good, who have been left uncouth and ignorant, even as we have been polished and instructed?