Page:Americans (1922).djvu/313

 were calculated to put him in the governing class. He went to Harvard—a course which may still be imitated, but which in 1755, when the total population of the colonies only equalled that of one of our great cities, set a man far more distinctly in a class by himself than it does today, and marked him for a professional career. Second, after an insignificant interval of school teaching, he studied law in the office of Rufus Putnam, and thus entered a still smaller class, carefully restricted by limitation of the number of apprentices who could be taken in any office.

At the same time he began keeping a diary, a habit which it is now the custom to ridicule. What strikes one about John's diary in his years of adolescence is that he uses it as an instrument for marking his intellectual progress and getting himself in hand, neither of which is a morbid activity. He notes that he is of an amorous temperament and that his thoughts are liable to be "called off from law by a girl, a pipe, a poem, a love-letter, a Spectator, a play, etc., etc." But studia in mores abeunt; and year after year he is digging away tenaciously and purposefully at studies which communicate a masculine vigor to the mind; and he is reading, with instant application to his own future, authors that are still capable of putting a flame of ambition in a young man's vitals.

The breadth and humanity of the old-fashioned