They have all very much the same general
features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have
something odious about them,--from the wretched country-houses where
paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables at
colleges, and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite
should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people,
especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed the
living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if
possible, by those that love them like their own flesh and blood. Elsewhere
their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are almost as
bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of their
exacting necessities and demands.
Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred interests
of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The clergyman, the
physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them, if his duty be
performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver of disgust when.
money is counted out to him for administering the consolations of religion,
for saving some precious life, for sowing the seeds of Christian
civilization in young, ingenuous souls.
And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their
mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and
commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to all
who see the task they are performing in our new social order.
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