The student should then take a medical and surgical course, so that he
may be able to attend to contusions, fractures and so forth, which may
occur to himself or to the party who may come to his office for a
retraction and by mistake get his spinal column double-leaded.
Ten years should then be given to the study of law. No thorough,
metropolitan editor wants to enter upon the duties of his profession
without knowing the difference between a writ of _mandamus_ and other
styles of profanity. He should thoroughly understand the entire system of
American jurisprudence, so that in case a _certiorari_ should break out in
his neighborhood he would know just what to do for it.
The student will, by this time, begin to see what is required of him and
enter with great zeal upon the further study of his profession.
He will now enter upon a theological course of ten years and fit himself
thoroughly to speak intelligently of the various creeds and religions of
the world. Ignorance or the part of an editor is almost a crime, and when
he closes a powerful editorial with the familiar quotation, “It is the
early bird that catches the worm,” and attributes it to St. Paul instead
of Deuteronomy, it makes me blush for the profession.
The last ten years may be profitably devoted to the acquisition of a
practical knowledge of cutting cordwood, baking beans, making shirts,
lecturing, turning double handsprings, being shot out of a catapult at a
circus, learning how to make a good adhesive paste that will not sour in
hot weather, grinding scissors, punctuating, capitalization, condemnation,
syntax, plain sewing, music and dancing, sculpting, etiquette, prosody, how
to win the affections of the opposite sex and evade a malignant case of
breach of promise, the ten commandments, every man his own tooter on the
flute, croquet, rules of the prize ring, rhetoric, parlor magic,
calisthenics, penmanship, how to run a jack from the bottom of the pack
without getting shot, civil engineering, decorative art, kalsomining,
bicycling, base ball, hydraulics, botany, poker, international law,
high-low-jack, drawing and painting, faro, vocal music, driving, breaking
team, fifteen ball pool, how to remove grease spots from last year's
pantaloons, horsemanship, coupling freight cars, riding on a rail, riding
on a pass, feeding threshing machines, how to wean a calf from the parent
stem, teaching school, bull-whacking, plastering, waltzing, vaccination,
autopsy, how to win the affections of your wife's mother, every man his
own washerwoman, or how to wash underclothes so they will not shrink,
etc., etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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