Having a knowledge of the facts just stated, you will agree with me when I say that a writer of a paper to be read in thirty or sixty minutes on a subject so broad in its scope and so important as the one assigned me, can’t do more than “rattle ’round” in its field, to quote Starr King’s figure. If he should try to do more, he would be tempting the Fates. Realizing, as you must, how unsatisfactory the isolated and unrelated fragments of our history are, do you not feel, as do I, that this Association should take early steps to find a thoroughly competent man to prepare for the fraternity of educational publishers a complete history of their business in America from the day when _The New England Primer_ was printed in Boston to the present time? The attention of people is frequently called to the great march of progress since colonial days in all that helps to make the world a better place in which to live. It is truthfully said that both medicine and surgery have been perfected to such a high degree that the length of human life greatly has been increased; that sanitary science is so well understood, and its principles so generally practiced, that disease germs born in filth no longer exist in such abundance as in the days when, because of the ignorance or indifference of the majority of the population, food, air, and water carried these breeders of disease to their unhappy victims. We are reminded of the electric light, the telegraph, the wireless, the ocean cable, and the telephone; of the leviathan of the ocean--the great and palatial steamship that crosses the Atlantic in five days; of the aeroplane that has demonstrated its ability to fly across seas, oceans, and wide expanses of land, carrying passengers and mail at a speed almost inconceivable; of the transcontinental lines of railroad that transport people in comfort from ocean to ocean in six or seven days; of the splendid specimens of art housed in our great museums; of the beautiful homes, the really elegant school and college buildings, the great business structures planned by architects as skilled as any the world has produced since the days of the Greeks and the Moors; of the sewing machine, the reaper, the steam plow, the powerful motor truck, and the automobile; of the mighty steel bridges that span our wide rivers; and, in view of all this, we are told by the historian and the philosopher that the last century has been the Golden Age of the world, that all this has brought man a little closer to God, and God a little closer to man.