Edward Everett Hale in his Phi Beta Kappa oration at Brown Tuesday, on "What's the American People," strove to make every scholar realize more fully the difference between the sovereign of America-the people-and the aristocratic and oligarchic sovereigns of the older nations. He said that the old simile by which nations have been described-the pyramid-was not applicable to the United States, that this nation was not one of vast lower classes and small numbers of well to do rulers and leaders, but that the truer simile for our social order was a vase "not large at the bottom, rising in a graceful curve till the area of its circle is four times as large as it was where it began, and then growing smaller again to a second circle at the top. It is no longer a pyramid, with its broad foundation in the mud and its solitary apex in the sky."

The speaker rebuked Wendell Phillips for his arraignment "of the scholars of the country because they did not help in its government." Mr. Phillips "implied that the country is badly governed because they let its affairs alone.

Such a theory implies that Francis Wayland would have done better service in the United States Senate than he did in thirty years of service here; that William Ellery Channing was thrown away when he was imprisoned in the pulpit; that Dr. Wolsey was wasted in the charge of Yale College, and that Mr. Bancroft did better service as Secretary of the Navy than as historian of America. It supposes that Thiers is the best administrator, because Thiers writes the best history. Now the writers on the other side of the water may determine this as they choose. We should remember here, that in our affairs, where government is divided into a thousand bureaux, and never centralized, the people-and no one class of the people-have shown in a thousand exigencies that they know what they are about, and how their business will be best done. As Mr. Garfield puts it, all the people is wiser than is any single man."

Comparing the relations of the scholar and the laborer, Mr. Hale concluded by saying: "Their life is our life. Our life is theirs. They know it, and we know it. Man of work or man of letters, our duty is the same-to lift up what has fallen down, to build higher the courses of the national life, to see to-morrow better, happier, stronger than to-day."