So well is this understood by those who are the guides and teachers of certain foreign nationalities among us, and who would, if they could, keep them forever intact from the influence of American life, that they spare no pains to shield them from it, and withdraw their children and youth from the teaching of the public school, putting them into schools of their own where their foreign ideas and their foreign tongues may be perpetuated in the next generation. This is the meaning of Protestant parochial schools, no matter what other explanation of them is offered. The Scandinavians do not fall under censure in this matter. They have not as a rule set up their own schools in competition with the public school, but they have schools of a higher grade. Most of these were first established to furnish ministers for their own churches. Gradually, however, they have come to feel the pressure of their larger environment, so that their curriculum is now usually arranged with a view to giving all the inhabitants of the entire community the benefit of their instruction. Thus in the Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., representatives of seven different nationalities were in attendance last year; while the Swedish college in Rock Island, Ill., had fifty-one Americans, fifteen Germans, two Persians and two Hebrews among their five hundred students. The Luther College in Decorah, Ia, claims to send more young men to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for postgraduate study than any other western college. Several of these Scandinavian schools have come to see that they must adapt themselves more and more to the demands upon them from the entire community, and open the doors to all applicants for an education without regard to nationality. The principal of one of these schools writes: "Our school is not a Scandinavian, but an American institution of learning in the fullest sense of that word." Perhaps in no other sphere is the development of the Scandinavians into Americans better illustrated than in this evolution of their higher schools, for this tendency is not sporadic, but general; and when we remember that there are fifty-one such institutions in the Northwest, with five thousand young men and women studying in them, we begin to realize their importance, with their tendency towards a universal and liberal education, as factors in the development of the Scandinavians in this country.