Our progress in the industries has been aided and inspired by an equal progress in educational facilities, and the intellectual development of our people has kept pace with their material advance. The United States spends more money for the education of its youth than any other country in the world, and among her institutions the school-house and the college stand most prominent. While the lower education has been abundantly attended to, the higher education has been by no means neglected, and amply endowed colleges and universities are found in every State and in almost every city of the land. In addition to the school-house, libraries are multiplying with rapidity, art galleries and museums of science are rising everywhere, temples to music and the drama are found in all our cities, the press is turning out books and newspapers with almost abnormal energy, and in everything calculated to enhance the intelligence of the people the United States has no superior, if any equal, among the nations of the earth. It may seem unnecessary to tell the people of the United States the story of their growth. The greatness to which this nation has attained is too evident to need to be put in words. It has, in fact, been made evident in two great and a multitude of smaller exhibitions in which the marvels of American progress have been shown, either by themselves or in contrast with those of foreign lands. The first of these, the Centennial Exposition of 1876, had a double effect: it opened our eyes at once to our triumphs and our deficiencies, to the particulars in which we excelled and those in which we were inferior to foreign peoples. In the next great exhibition, that at Chicago in 1893, we had the satisfaction to perceive, not only that we had made great progress in our points of superiority, but had worked nobly and heartily to overcome our defects, and were able to show ourselves the equal of Europe in almost every field of human thought and skill. In architecture a vision of beauty was shown such as the world had never before seen, and in the general domain of art the United States no longer had need to be ashamed of what it had to show.