sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among
them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the
highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins
always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and
spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one
may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at
present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an
index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal directions.
The outward organization of education which we have in our United States
is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any
country. The State school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an
opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere else to
be found on such an important scale. The independence of so many of the
colleges and universities; the give and take of students and instructors
between them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to
the lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from
the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand
the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which
considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the
sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English
tutorial system would seem too often to entail),--all these things (to
say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many
of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy
features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine
auguries may be drawn.

Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it
with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more
abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two
America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look