Excerpt from Education Abroad and Other Papers For our youth, American schools are better than European. To send our boys or girls away to foreign boarding schools is a great mistake, or rather, one of the fashionable follies which is just now having its day. With fashion one cannot reason. I do not object that this fashion is costly in money, for that is one of its attractions, but costly in what is worth vastly more than gold, namely, character and practical culture. This fash ion of to-day, experience and a wiser self-respect will surely rectify when the comparative results of the two systems come to be better understood. The fond hopes so often wrecked in foreign lands will at least serve as beacons in the future. It is not in France alone that a moral malaria pervades the atmos phere. The example of other cities besides Paris and Naples refutes the plausible but pernicious aphorism of Burke, that vice loses half its evil by parting with all its grossness. In these luxurious centres a voluptuous refinement veils the gross est immorality under simulations of delicacy, if not under the sanctions of law, and licenses vice herself, if only robed in the semblance of propriety. A thin veneering covers the foulest corruption. To offend against taste is worse than to break the ten commandments, and vice has less to fear than vulgarity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.