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"In all the arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six." "They're wrong," Thorpe declared, and then consented to laugh in a grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial confession of puzzlement. "What I mean is what's the good of piling up money, while you can't pile up the enjoyments it will buy?
The early settlers of Cincinnati were generally well educated men and they had a keen sense of the value of learning. The public schools of Cincinnati were then more highly developed than those of any other city in the West. Woodward High School had been endowed and Dr. Joseph Ray, the author of the well known arithmetics, was the professor of mathematics there.
I would often go to cities where my opponent's readers or arithmetics had been adopted the night before, point out the defects of rival publications, give an unabridged dictionary to each official, offer a ten per cent. commission to the "king pin," take the board in a hack to their headquarters, secure a reconsideration, telegraph for my books, and the next day with express wagons and helpers, put our readers into every school in the town.
Those from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Kansas all seemed cut off the same piece. To all intents and purposes they might have come from the same County. They spoke the same dialect, read the same newspapers, had studied McGuffey's Readers, Mitchell's Geography, and Ray's Arithmetics at school, admired the same great men, and held generally the same opinions on any given subject.
To the uninitiated it may seem strange to behold a Harvard graduate stuck down day after day poring over a pile of dog-eared school-books third arithmetics, primary grammars, beginners' histories of Tennessee, of the United States, of England; physiology, hygiene. It may seem queer.
In the older arithmetics they contented themselves with doing "a certain piece of work." This statement of the case however, was found too sly and mysterious, or possibly lacking in romantic charm. It became the fashion to define the job more clearly and to set them at walking matches, ditch-digging, regattas, and piling cord wood.
Every time I speak to the students of a college, high school, or primary grade I cannot help thinking that within the room there may be a boy or girl who will catch a vision of great achievement and, consecrating a life of service, do a work so valuable that all the arithmetics will not compute its worth.
We read them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or in that, treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs about them form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in each and all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is flagrantly man-made.
It was the firm's first schoolbook. In revised and enlarged form it later became the first book in the successful series of "Ray's Arithmetics." But even in those early days, books would not sell themselves unless their qualities were made known to the public. Agents had to be employed and at first Mr. Smith was his own best agent.
"I'm afraid it will be a long time before I get money enough to run a hotel," laughed our hero. "Would you like to run one?" "I don't know. I'd like to educate myself first." "Don't you study some now? I have seen you with some arithmetics and histories." "Yes, sir, I study a little every day. You see, I never had much schooling, and I don't want to grow up ignorant, if I can help it."
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