How shall the scholar pay for his education? He is to give a service for the service received. Thus the miller and the farmer pay one another, each paying with service in his own kind. The scholar cannot pay back bread for bread, and cloth for cloth. He must pay in the scholar's kind, not the woodman's or the weaver's. He is to represent the higher modes of human consciousness; his culture and opportunities of position fit him for that. So he is not merely to go through the routine of his profession, as minister, doctor, lawyer, merchant, schoolmaster, politician, or maker of almanacs, and for his own advantage; he is also to represent truth, justice, beauty, philanthropy, and religion--the highest facts of human experience; he must be common, but not vulgar, and, as a star, must dwell apart from the vulgarity of the selfish and the low. He may win money without doing this, get fame and power, and thereby seem to pay mankind for their advance to him, while he rides upon their neck; but as he has not paid back the scholar's cost and in the scholar's way, he is a debtor still, and owes for his past culture and present position. * * * * * Such is the position of the scholar everywhere, and such his consequent obligation. But in America there are some circumstances which make the position and the duty still more important. Beside the natural aristocracy of genius, talent, and educated skill, in most countries there is also a conventional and permanent nobility based on royal or patrician descent and immovable aristocracy. Its members monopolize the high places of society, and if not strong by nature are so by position. Those men check the natural power of the class of scholars. The descendant of some famous chief of old time, takes rank before the Bacons, the Shakspeares, and the Miltons of new families, born yesterday, to-day gladdened and gladdening with the joy of their genius, usurps their place, and for a time "shoves away the worthy bidden guest" from the honors of the public board. Here there is no such class: a man born at all is well born; with a great nature, nobly born; the career opens to all that can run, to all men that wish to try; our aristocracy is movable, and the scholar has scope and verge enough.