Lem

[Marta Sherwood-Pike]

This is rather off the thread of this list, so I appologize. My family
history includes several Anglican clergymen who served in the colonies
before the Revolutionary war; they were not perhaps intellectuals, but
they were much better educated than the average settler. I havn't been
able to get any statistics, but transportation and involuntary servitude
of people convicted of petty crimes was certainly widespread in the
colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries.  --MAS-

On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Kat Tancock wrote:

> I think the bottom line here is something we can all see, and that is that
> it was the character of those who came to North America to settle that
> shaped the character of today's North Americans. Intellectualism wouldn't
> have helped the earliest pioneers much (not that hitting a ball with a stick
> would have been much more useful :). They had other skills that were more
> useful.
>
> The same principle can be applied to the (general) differences between
> Americans and Canadians - those who declared independence from Britain were
> a different bunch from the Loyalists who came north to Canada.
>
> Not that this is my specialty, by any means, but in general terms it
> explains a lot.
>
> > Persons hitting a ball with a stick and persons throwing a ball into a
> > basket earn hundreds and even thousands times more than  persons who teach
> > at school or university (Nobel Prize winners including).
>
> Not that I don't agree with you, but one could also say that it is a strange
> phenomenon that sitting in an office studying "useless" things (such as
> Russian literature) and propagating these ideas to students makes more money
> than growing food, building homes or any other trades.
>
> Have a good weekend,
>
> Kat
>
> _________
>
> And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
> who never let each other sleep above it.
>
>             - Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, 1915
>
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