Whitney had not yet gone up to college. Howe and Morse, M'Cormick and Fairbanks, Goodyear and Colt, 8 Dr. Morton and Dr. Bell, were yet to be born. By the treaty which secured the independence of the colonies the boundaries of the region given up by the mother country were clearly defined. The territory ceded. stretched from the Atlantic Ocean westward to the banks of the Mississippi, and from a line running along the great lakes on the north it spread southward to the thirtyfirst parallel and the southern border of Georgia. This vast tract was parceled out among the thirteen original States. Of the thirteen, seven had well-defined boundaries; of the remaining six, some laid claim to lands since given to other States, while a few would content themselves with no limits short of the waters of the Missis9sippi River. But, though the Fourth-of-July orators then boasted that their country extended over fifteen hundred miles in length, and spread westward across plains of marvelous fertility into regions yet unexplored by man, they had but to look about them to see that the States were indeed but little better than a great wilderness. A narrow line of towns and hamlets extended, with many breaks, along the coast from the province of Maine to Georgia. Maine was still owned by Massachusetts, and did not contain one hundred thousand souls. Portland existed, then Falmouth, and along the shore were a few fishers' cots, built of rough-hewn logs and 10 thatched with sea-weed. But an almost unbroken solitude lay between Portsmouth and the St. Lawrence. In New Hampshire a few hardy adventurers had marked out the sites of villages in the White Mountains. In New York, Albany was settled, and Schenectady; but the rich valleys through which the Mohawk and the Genesee flow down to join the Hudson and the lake were the hunting

grounds of the Oneidas, the Mohawks, and the Cayugas. In Pennsylvania, dense forests and impassable morasses covered that region where rich deposits of iron and of coal have since produced the Birmingham of America. In Virginia a straggling village or two was to be found 11 about the head-waters of the Potomac and the James. Beyond the Blue Ridge, Daniel Boone was fighting the Cherokees in the canebrakes of Kentucky. Some villages of log huts, surrounded by stockades, were rising on the fertile plains of western Tennessee. A handful of pioneers had settled at Natchez. Pittsburg was a military post. St. Louis was begun, but the very name of the village was unknown to nine tenths of the Americans. So late as 1795 Cincinnati consisted of ninety-five log cabins and five hundred souls. In truth, that splen-12 did section of our country drained by the Ohio and the Tennessee was one vast solitude. Buffaloes wandered in herds over the rich plains now the granaries of Europe. Forests of oak and sycamore grew thick on the site of many great and opulent cities whose population now exceeds that of Virginia during the Revolution, and whose names are spoken in the remotest corner of the civilized world. No white man had yet beheld the source of the Mississippi River. Of the country beyond the Mississippi little more was known than of the heart of Africa. Now and then some weather-beaten trapper came from it 13 to the frontiers of the States with stories of great plains as level as the floor, where the grass grew higher than the waist, where the flowers were more beautiful than in the best-kept garden, where trees were never seen, and where the Indians still looked upon the white man as a god. But this country lay far to the west of the frontier, and the frontier was wilder then than Wyoming is now. There the white man lived in an unending war with the red man.

1

The student should read the whole of Grote's famous chapter on Socrates "History of Greece," vol. viii—and then carefully study Spedding's edition of "Sir Francis Bacon," or the analysis of his philosophy contained in Morley's "First Sketch of English Literature," or Arnold's "English Literature." Ueberweg's "History of Philosophy" will be found especially valuable. This extract is inserted with the hope of inducing a thorough examination of the life and character of Socrates, his mode of teaching, his influence upon ethical philosophy, of which he may be called the founder-a subject abounding in interest as well as instruction.

THUS perished the "Father of Philosophy," the first of ethical philosophers; a man who opened to science both new matter, alike copious and valuable, and a new method, memorable not less for its originality and effi cacy than for the profound philosophical basis on which it rests. Though Greece produced great poets, orators, speculative philosophers, historians, etc., yet other countries, having the benefit of Grecian literature to begin with, have nearly equaled her in all these lines, and surpassed her in some. But where are we to look for a parallel to Socrates, either in or out of the Grecian 2 world? The cross-examining Elenchus, which he not only first struck out, but wielded with such matchless effect and to such noble purpose, has been mute ever since his last conversation in the prison; for even his great successor, Plato, was a writer and lecturer, not a colloquial dialectician. No man has ever been found strong enough to bend his bow, of much less sure enough to use it as he did. His life remains as the only evidence, but a very satisfactory evidence, of how much can be done by this sort of intelligent interrogation, how powerful is the

interest which it can be made to inspire, how energetic the stimulus which it can apply in awakening dormant reason and generating new mental power.

It has often been customary to exhibit Socrates as a 3 moral preacher, in which character probably he has acquired to himself the general reverence attached to his name. This is indeed a true attribute, but not the characteristic or salient attribute, nor that by which he permanently worked on mankind. On the other hand, Arkesilaus and the New Academy, a century and more afterward, thought that they were following the example of Socrates (and Cicero seems to have thought so too) when they reasoned against everything, and when they laid it down as a system that against every affirmative position an equal force of negative argument might be brought up as counterpoise. Now, this view of Socrates 4 is, in my judgment, not merely partial, but incorrect. He entertained no such systematic distrust of the powers of the mind to attain certainty. He laid down a clear, though erroneous, line of distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. About physics he was more than a skeptic; he thought that man could know nothing; the gods did not intend that man should acquire any such information, and therefore managed matters in such a way as to be beyond his ken for all except the simplest phenomena of daily wants; moreover, not only man could not acquire such information, but ought not to labor after it. But, respecting the topics which concern man 5 and society, the views of Socrates were completely the reverse. This was the field which the gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to human study and acquisition of knowledge-a field wherein, with that view, they managed phenomena on principles of constant and observable sequence, so that

every man who took the requisite pains might know them. Nay, Socrates went a step farther, and this forward step is the fundamental conviction upon which all 6 his missionary impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these things, but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well unless he did know them; and that it was his imperious duty to learn them as he would learn a profession; otherwise, he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. Socrates felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just, temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent unless he taught himself to know correctly what justice, temperance, courage, piety, and patriotism really were. He was possessed with the truly Baconian idea that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational com7 prehension of moral ends and means. But, when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied to acquire it; yet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here, then, Socrates found that the first outwork for him to surmount was that universal "conceit of knowledge without the reality," against which he declares such emphatic war, and against which, also, though under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon declares war not less emphatically two thousand years afterward. Socrates went to work in the Baconian manner and spirit, bringing his cross-examining process to bear, as the first condition to all further improvement, upon those rude, selfbegotten, incoherent generalizations which passed in men's 8 minds for competent and directing knowledge. But he, not less than Bacon, performs this analysis, not with a