COLLEGE-BRED MEN.

The following extracts from an article in the Weekly Magazine on an old subject may be of interest to our readers :

"It is almost bewildering when one looks about him for the facts on which their opinions are based, to read so frequently from able and high-minded newspapers of the very general incapacity of college-bred men for the practical affairs of life. Generally this estimate of the value and efficiency of college-bred men finds expression in connection with lamentations over the condition of labor and the laborers of the community. If only the collegebred men had trades instead of "education," then things would have been, if not still exactly right, pretty nearly right.

But the facts in the case-what are they ? What proportion of college-bred men seem to have proved, or are now proving, so incapable and worthless ? And this in comparison with the tradesmen who are incapable and worthless, who have had the "practical" education so desirable ? Are, or have there been, many of them tramps, or paupers, or loafers in comparison with mechanics, artisans, and c., who have been blessed with "practical training" for life ? Farmers, builders, merchants, navigators, lawyers, judges, preachers, capitalists, high and low officials, editors, and even mechanics and handicraftsmen who are college bred men are all about us, extremely "practical" men as life seems to go. But the colleges, so far as is discoverable to many who open their eyes and look with all their might to see, have not been to any considerable extent producers of paupers, loafers, tramps, or other kinds of incapable. the fact seems rather to be that college-bred men estimate more justly than men otherwise bred the value of college breeding. They know what it is-what it is worth, and what it is not worth ; both of which many, from absence of knowledge, misunderstand and misconceive.

The real truth is that the college has always been, and now permanently is, a gymnasium where the young have to learn the necessities of actual life in its comprehensive scope, and realize their capacities and limitations under conditions the best calculated to suppress undue conceit and awaken or abolish dullness.

It may be observed that very seldom, if ever, are men who have had a college training found claiming that it has proved worthless or estimating its value in any way but the reverse of this. And if a list of facts is called for from those who hold that college breeding is worthless, or worse, out of which their uncomfortable belief has grown, it will be found that the facts are only such as have their foggy existence in want of knowledge and misconception. A small list, in proportion, of tramps, loafers, paupers, will be gathered from college alumni. Nor will it be found that mechanical pursuits and the handicrafts are calling in vain for skill men. But on the contrary it will be found that they are over supplied, as the times are, and willing mechanics every now and then have to wait for employment. It is also a fact that colleges and college-bred men have done their share in performing the only really effective work that is being done at all-as it seems to some-to improve the condition of mechanics and handicraftsmen, and in placing them in their right relation to the social body, and establishing this relation on solid foundations. And how ? By inculcating broad and full views of life ; by connecting intelligence with mechanical pursuits and thereby both dignifying them and informing them with a genuine interest.

The distance between the college scientist's lecture room and laboratory, and the shop of the machinist, the joiner, the furniture maker, the stonecutter, is no longer remote. One of the highest college-bred men of the present time is Prof. Huxley, and one of the strongest advocates of college and university training for all whose opportunities and means will permit them to enjoy it. He counts himself, and actually is, pre-eminently a handicraftsman whose life is mainly spent in his workshop, and his writings and addresses are what he learns from his own work. As civilization generally has advanced, so that society has been willing to accord a true value to mechanical pursuits, and invest them with the humane Interests which they rightfully claim, and so that men follow them as intelligent men and not as the inferior drudges of society, they have been coming up into the broad light of the university and assuming the character and interest which rightly belong to them."