What then is to be the final outcome of all this? Is it not that the
average American is going to use, and is using, his thinker more than he
ever did before? Will not that thinker then, like the muscle of the
blacksmith's arm, or the mule's hind foot, grow to a wondrous size as a
result? Most assuredly.
The day certainly is not far distant, when the American can not only
out-fight, out-row, out-bat, out-run, out-lie, and out-sail all other
nationalities; but he will also be able to out-think them. We already
point with pride to some of the wonderful thoughts that our leading
thinkists, with their thinkers, have thunk. There are native born
Americans now living, who have thought of things that would make the head
of the amateur thinker ache for a week.
All this is largely due to the free use of the newspaper as a home
educator. The newspaper is growing more and more ubiquitous, if I may be
allowed the expression. Many poor people, who, a few years ago, could not
afford the newspaper, now have it scolloped and put it on their pantry
shelves every year.
But I did not start out to enlarge upon the newspaper. I would like to say
a word or two more, however, on that general subject. Very often we hear
some wise man with the responsibility of the universe on his shoulders, the
man who thinks he is the censor of the human race now, and that he will be
foreman of the grand jury on the Judgment Day--we hear this kind of man
say every little while:
“We've got too many papers. We are loaded down with reading matter. Can't
read all my paper every day. Lots of days I throw my paper aside before I
get it all read through, and never have a chance to finish it. All that is
dead loss.”
It is, of course, a dead loss to that kind of a man. He is the kind of man
that expects his family to begin at one side of the cellar and eat right
straight across, it--cabbages, potatoes, turnips, pickles, apples,
pumpkins, etc., etc.,--without stopping to discriminate. There are none
too many papers, so far as the subscriber is concerned. Looking at it from
the publisher's standpoint sometimes, there are too many.
To the man who has inherited too large, wide, sinewy hands, and a brain
that under the microscope looks like a hepatized lung, it seems some days
as though the field had been over-crowded when he entered it. To the young
man who was designed to maul rails or sock the fence-post into the bosom
of the earth, and who has evaded that sphere of action and disregarded the
mandate to maul rails, or to take a coal-pick and toy with the bowels of
the earth, hoping to win an easier livelihood by feeding sour paste to
village cockroaches, and still poorer pabulum to his subscribers, the
newspaper field seems to be indeed jam full.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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