powerfully arrested their attention in early life. With such, their choice is not unfrequently a necessary part of their being, and to be relinquished only with life. A few, a very few, forgetting themselves and their own present wants, look rather to the good of others, and to the estimation in which they shall be held by the great and good of coming ages.

If all young men are bound by every consideration of duty and interest to make the choice of a profession a subject of careful and anxious inquiry, with the educated youth it assumes a two-fold importance. Gifted, it may be, with powers which fall not to the lot of ordinary men, and these powers nurtured, enlarged, and invigorated by a long course of patient application, his capacity, both for receiving and communicating, is greatly increased. How important, then, that that capacity receive such a direction that both himself and others may reap the full benefit of it.

I have been led to make these remarks as preliminary to the attempt to urge upon young men of talents and education who are about making their choice, the claims of that profession which we represent on the present occasion. The same attempt may also be viewed in the light of an apology, if apology be necessary in such a case, for choosing this field of labor in preference to those which are more usually sought. An apology or defence of this sort is the more appropriate, as it has appeared to me, in consequence of the estimation in which the calling has usually been held. That it has not been held in very high repute, I need not assert, much less attempt to prove. But why it

has not been held in higher estimation, is a question more easily asked than answered; for it is a profession which gives promise of competence, honor, gratitude, and the opportunities for self-improvement and benevolent effort, to an extent to which scarcely any other profession can lay claim. Let us inquire whether the teacher's profession be not, in all these respects, an eligible one.

In the first place, is it not an eligible one, so far as competence is concerned? And here, allow me to say, I begin with this, not because it possesses any superiority over the other inducements yet to be named; on the contrary, viewed as a motive power in the settlement of such a question as this, in the mind of an educated man, I would rank it as one of the very lowest. It deserves notice first only because the first question to be asked and answered by him who is about to choose a profession, is, whether it will yield a support for himself and for those who may be dependent on him in life. No one, certainly, could be expected to enter any profession, however inviting in other respects, directly in face of starvation and beggary. A competence, then, may be relied on by every teacher of fair abilities and deter. mined spirit, -a competence, I say, not a fortune, though even that might be hoped for, if a man could see nothing fair but gold, and were willing to become a mean, miserly wretch, to obtain it. But we protest against the idea of valuing a man's services to the public by gold. We cannot but look with utter loathing and abhorrence upon the attempt to make professional skill a matter of mere merchandise, to be bought and

sold, and held at its market price, and valued in dollars and cents. Nor can we forbear to express with what supreme contempt we look upon that man, be he in either of the learned professions, who seeks his only or his chief compensation in a pecuniary form. Those who cannot appreciate the luxury of benevolence, who have no conception of the priceless value of gratitude and love, unless followed by the means of luxurious ease and sensual indulgence, have no business in those pursuits and callings where love and gratitude are the great staple commodities. There are professions in which love of justice and benevolence should be the great ruling motive; but reverse the order, and make these motives subservient to a love of gain, and you rob them of half their power, and in their relations to humanity, of more than half their excellency and loveli

ness.

The time has been, perhaps, when talent could not command so high pay in teaching as in many other departments of labor, or, if you choose, in the other learned professions. I may even say it was not sufficiently rewarded to meet its actual necessities for efficient service. But in this respect, we all know very well, there has been a rapid improvement going on of late. In the cities and more populous villages of this State, the salaries of teachers have attained to a condition little below that of our most talented clergymen, to say nothing of the agents and secretaries of insurance and other moneyed corporations. Indeed, all over the State and country, the signs of the times are still auspicious. The absolute necessity of the right educa

tion of the young to the permanency of our government and free institutions, is every day gaining a firmer hold upon the convictions of the public mind. Whilst this is the case, there must ever be an increasing demand for talent in this department of labor,—a demand which can be supplied only by the offer of liberal compensation. We venture the assertion, therefore, that few callings offer so liberal and especially so sure inducements, in the way of compensation, as this. We respect it; there is no one of the learned professions in which a man of fair talents and determined spirit may more confidently expect a competence than in that of teaching. With the generous and noble-minded, this will suffice; whilst those who lack these qualities we care not to lead farther in their inquiries.

Again, this profession is an eligible one because it is an honorable one. And here let me express the hope that no one will smile at my simplicity, for I said an honorable, not an honored, one. I know, indeed, that the calling, as a calling, has not been held in the very highest esteem, even in this land of schools. There are not a few, even at this late day, who regard the teacher as a mere harmless drudge, destitute of the spirit of a man, and unworthy the respect due to humanity. Geniuses, it is true, have sometimes been compelled, from the necessity of their circumstances, to serve their turn in this intellectual purgatory; but they have afterward spared no pains to inform the world that their aspirations were awfully checked, their intellects cramped, and their magnanimous souls vexed, past endurance, by the petty foibles and nameless caprices of childhood.

We have even seen the biography of a man, by some esteemed a martyr to the cause of humanity, set off most sadly at the expense of this much-abused profession. Indeed, the simple, unvarnished state of public opinion on this subject seems to have been, that if a man were too stupid for any other business, then he might reasonably devote himself to school-keeping;-as a life-business, of course, I mean; for even a man of spirit and abilities might follow it occasionally, or for a short time, provided he did it only as a means to some more exalted and praiseworthy pursuit; provided, also, he manifested the utmost impatience to get out of the employment, and took every possible occasion to express the utter contempt in which he held the business. But this, after all, has been but a public opinion; and public opinion, aside from the merits of the question, is really worth nothing at all. No man of sense will graduate his views of the dignity of any calling by the rank assigned it by the multitude, or measure its claims upon his attention by the present applause to be gained thereby. It is notorious that, with the great mass of men, pomp and display are in vastly higher repute than the most substantial good; and more than five out of every ten will esteem you more for a laughable anecdote, than for the most inestimable moral precept or valuable information. It surely is not to be wondered at, then, that the office of the teacher should have been considered one of no special dignity, save the mock dignity of caricatured pedagogues.

But, fortunately, the day of such factitious distinctions is passing away; and the time is not far distant