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The table manners of the less-educated American classes are hardly of the best, but where but in America will you find eleven hundred charity-school boys sit down daily to dinner, each with his own table napkin, as they do at Girard College, Philadelphia?
They both display considerable talent, the one in historical portraiture of reconstruction times, and the other in genial caricature of the more childish side of the less-educated negro. The negroes whom Mr. Means has invented have still to be born in the flesh, but there is an infectious humor in his nightmare world which he may plead as a justification for the misuse of his very real ability.
It's their dependence that's wrong with them. They're nearly all of them absolutely dependent on an employer, and that's bad, fatal, for anybody. It's the root of the whole trouble with the less-educated classes, if people would only see it. What they want is pride in themselves.
He freely admitted that he was prejudiced against hard work, and, when in need of a few dollars to purchase actual necessities that he could not borrow, he would drive away with his wagon and peddle German oleographs and patent medicines to the less-educated settlers, returning after several weeks' absence to settle down again to a period of loafing.
He was also a great admirer of Burns, whose writings so inflamed his mind that at the age of twenty-two, when barely out of his apprenticeship, we find the young mason actually breaking out in verse.* By diligently reading all the books that he could borrow from friends and neighbours, Telford made considerable progress in his learning; and, what with his scribbling of "poetry" and various attempts at composition, he had become so good and legible a writer that he was often called upon by his less-educated acquaintances to pen letters for them to their distant friends.
With what different eyes must innumerable "trippers" from the less-educated masses of our people look into tide pools or crab holes, during their brief holiday at the seaside, if they have previously been "trippers" to the Crystal Palace, and visited the Great Aquarium.
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