familiar facts in our own experience as a people. Here great for tunes and exalted positions are prizes held out to all, and are often reached by the unschooled and the obscure. Men learn to do things by doing them, and business capacity is secured by business experience. That part of education which supplements the curriculum of the schools will be acquired by many who have drawn but little from the wells of learning, in a country where vast and unexhausted resources make success certain to persistent enterprise. The elements of scholarship are chiefly utilized in most of the employments of society. These, thoroughly mastered and applied by one made strong and skilful by use, will bring affluence and power. Such men often become distinguished for ability in the executive work of public life. He who has learned to observe and think will acquire discipline and faculty outside of the schools; but discipline comes earliest in the schools, and knowledge enhances the power of faculty. Men who are great without culture would be greater with it. Discipline and acquisitions, whether obtained in the schools or out, are essential in the highest spheres of labor. They who stand upon the boundary between the actual and the possible are the agents of a perpetual creation. They move with the dawn as it dissipates the darkness before an advancing civilization, and must supply the thought, the institutions, and the activities of the new age as it rises from the grave of the past. To men who are called to such work, a knowledge of the past is indispensable. They who would perpetuate their own time in history, poetry, or eloquence must be inspired by the imperishable literature of other ages. The wine which quickens the brain has been mellowed and enriched by age. The domain of science can only be enlarged by men familiar with its present attainments. The principles of law and government have their source and correction in the past. Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and their great associates, who framed our organic law and put into form and action our political institutions, drew their statecraft and practical skill from the history of ancient and mediæval states. Their wisdom and patriotism had been informed and purified by profound study of the institutions and laws of the perished republics. But that learning may be useful, its results must be applied judiciously to the problems and events of our own time, by men who comprehend and appreciate both the past and the present.

Great scholars who despise or neglect the practical interests of

the day may be profound thinkers, and useful in the realms of philosophy, like Plato and Socrates; but they belong to a different order of men from our stricken executive, whose absence to-day we so much deplore, and whose every breath is watched by a prayerful nation with universal solicitude. His has been a broad and varied culture, such as Providence gives to its ordained leaders. He has been educated not only in the schools but on the farm, on the towpath of the canal, and in the carpenter's shop. He has had the training and experience of many vocations, and excelled in all. A teacher, a preacher, a soldier, and a statesman, he has stepped from the summit of each profession to the next, and at last has reached the seat of Washington and Lincoln, the pride and hope of the people to whose welfare his life has been devoted.

Trained to ways of peace, his advice was sought in councils of war, and his heroism became an inspiration in the hour of battle; called by the people from the camp to the halls of Congress, he was found as ready and able in the arena of debate as in the peril of arms; untouched in the storm and carnage of battle, he has fallen a victim to the lust of office. The nation in all its parties stands paralyzed with grief and horror; but his fall is a logical sequence of the more deadly attacks which with credulous indifference we suffer to be made upon the life and character of public men. The pains of the heart are more terrible to bear than the wounds of the flesh. Tortured by charges which the assassins of character levelled at his good name, the sensitive statesman found life more bitter than death; but now, when struck from the height of his fame by the hand of violence, he awaits with Christian fortitude the issue of his destiny, and men who would have destroyed in him all that makes life worth living turn their wrath upon the poor wretch who was maddened by their abuse of his victim. Is there no Providence that can reach beyond the law and strike the sources of crime? We suffer men to poison the moral atmosphere, and applaud their eulogies of their dead.

But the same brave, beautiful spirit which sustained the boy James A. Garfield, as he struggled up through poverty to the heights of aspiration, will support the President through all pains and perils to the close of his splendid career; for that is invincible and immortal.

Let us now turn from the stricken chief to the great theme of which he would gladly have discoursed to us from this platform.

We have met to consider the triumphs and the failures, the func tions and prospects, of popular education; and to me this great assembly is an evidence of an increasing public interest, and a cheering prophecy of better days to come.

Our institutions sprang from popular intelligence, and must rise or fall with it. The schools of the nation are the foundation of its power, and it will rise or decline with their growth or decay. The fathers builded wiser than they knew, for they could not anticipate the grandeur and strength of the Republic in the centuries to come. In a hundred years, we have increased from three to fifty millions of people. At the period of the Revolution, we did. not export a bale of cotton; now we grow more than five millions of bales, three fifths of which is exported to foreign markets: our foreign commerce has reached the magnificent proportion of fifteen hundred millions of dollars, and our domestic trade has far outstripped the foreign. The States of the Union have advanced from thirteen to thirty-eight, most of which are of imperial proportions and power.

All this increase of business, wealth, and prosperity has its springs in the intelligence of the people. With peace, in 1900 our population will number ninety five millions, and in 1950 they will reach more than two hundred and sixty millions.

Do we realize the possibilities involved in these statistics? Two hundred and sixty millions of people scattered over the broad and productive acreage of our country-intelligent, ingenious, self-reliant, and productive in all the paths of industry - will exert an incalculable influence upon the destinies of mankind. You cannot measure such influence by the force of nations ruled by arbitrary power. Each inventive brain adds to the resources of society. Six sevenths of all our patents have been issued to States that have enjoyed the quickening, elevating advantages of systems of common schools; and these inventions represent a productive power of many times fifty millions of people. By the peaceful victories of labor and enterprise, we may enter the markets of the world and compete for primacy in the profits of trade. But the promise of the future within our own borders is far more inspiring than any allurements of commerce. We cannot place limits to the civil power, the social privileges, and the domestic happiness that are in store for our children, if their intelligence and moral character shall keep pace with their numbers. To secure this is the paramount duty of

each succeeding generation. How this shall be accomplished is the greatest, if not the most difficult problem we have to solve. How the multitude of illiterates of our native populations, and the halfmillion of foreigners who are annually swarming into our territory, shall be educated and assimilated, outweighs all the ordinary questions of politics.

It is imperative that educational facilities should be multiplied in many of the States, and improved in all.

By the old methods of locomotion, the products of the interior could not be taken to the seaboard for exportation and pay the cost of production; and hence the old seats of wealth and civilization were for the most part upon the coast line and navigable rivers. The vast inlands were largely inhabited by rude pastoral peoples, less fixed in their habitations. But the introduction of cheaper, more rapid and comprehensive methods of transportation has opened up to profitable industry and trade the vast central regions of the continents, and so multiplied the supplies and the populations of the world, and essentially modified its history and its civilization. Nowhere has this inward drift of population been more marked than with us. Freedom and enterprise have intensi fied the movement. States have been created in rapid succession, and filled with men of varied tongues, conditions, and character. The civil war, too, in sixteen States of the Union whose former social and industrial systems excluded public schools, has opened to ignorant millions all the rights and duties of citizenship. The multiplication of schools has not kept pace with these rapid changes. in the national condition. Some of the older States even give but a reluctant and feeble support to the institutions of learning which have been the source and conservation of all they hold most dear.. Especially are they slow to accept the improved methods and pro, vide for the professional training which the age demands of those who are to keep step with its progress.

To create a better spirit, and inaugurate a revival in the cause of popular education by inspiring in the public mind a sense of its necessity, is a prime object of such gatherings as this. We admit that the demands of the friends of education are advanced, but they are not visionary and transcendental. The perpetuity of the Republic, the increase of its prosperity, the multiplication of its arts, and the assurance of continued progress would be impossible but. for the schools.

We desire that our education shall beget such habits of thinking, such accuracy and extent of knowledge, and such intellectual discipline as shall make the American people equal to the demands of the age and to the great responsibilities and destinies which seem to be opening before them.

The character of a nation may be studied as successfully in its machinery and industries as in its literature and institutions, for they are alike the products of thought. The inventions and discoveries, the arts and the literature, the avocations and customs of a nation measure its intellectual discipline, for they are the embodied conceptions of its brain. The loom of Bigelow and the telegraph of Morse are as truly the offspring of genius as the statuary of Phidias or the paintings of Angelo, and may be deemed as marvellous and studied with as profound an interest by distant generations. The philosophy of Plato crystallized into forms and things of beauty, that of Bacon into forms and things of utility. The education of the Republic should beget the power to advance upon this line of progress in successful competition with foreign states, which have at last awakened to an apprehension of the fact that the secret of national success is to be found in the kindling, sustaining power of popular intelligence.

The force and skill of an educated people cannot be circumvented or baffled by the craft of political or military leaders, however gifted. The rule of castes, aristocracies, and rings must follow the divine rights of kings into the shade of things that were. The genius of empire and business in our day resides in the schools. It is the child that has been taught to observe and think that becomes the man of resources and expedients. Others may be tricked into places of trust, but no other is fit for leadership or can retain it. Flippant men may talk in patchwork of things they do not understand, but it is only the disciplined thinker who can solve the problems of life, and apply the principles of a sound philosophy to the varying phases and conditions of our social and public experience.

The establishment of systems of free schools in all the States, sufficiently comprehensive to include every child of whatever race or condition, is an object of paramount national interest; but the maintenance and improvement of the schools is a local obligation, from which we can none of us escape. our duty when we have paid our taxes.

We have not discharged The teacher has his func