It is of interest to inquire in what measure the American people have been requited by the success of their common-school system for the vast sums which they expend on its maintenance. At first sight the statistics of the subject seem to return a discouraging reply to such an inquiry. When the census of 1870 was taken it disclosed a high percentage of illiteracy. Seventeen adult males and twenty-three adult females in every hundred were wholly uneducated--numbers almost as high as those of England at the same period. But the special circumstances of the country explain these figures in a manner which relieves the common school of all blame. The larger portion of this illiteracy had its home in the Southern States and among the coloured population, whose ignorance had been carefully preserved by wicked laws and a corrupted public feeling. Again, America had received during the ten years which preceded the census an immigration of four and a half million persons. The educational condition of those strangers was low, and their presence therefore bore injuriously upon the averages which were reported. The common school must be judged in the Northern States and among the native white population, for there only has it had full opportunity to act. And there it has achieved magnificent success. In the New England States there is not more than one uneducated native of ten years and upwards in every hundred. In the other Northern States the average is scarcely so favourable. The uneducated number from two up to four in every hundred. It thus appears that the common school has banished illiteracy from the North. The native American of the Northern States is almost invariably a person who has received, at the lowest, a sound primary education. The efforts by which this result has been reached began with the foundation of each State, and have been continued uninterruptedly throughout its whole history. In the rising industrial competition of the time, it must count for much that American artisans are not only educated men and women, but are the descendants of educated parents. A nation which expends upon education a sum larger than all the nations of Europe unitedly expend; which contents itself with an army of twenty-five thousand soldiers; whose citizens are exempt from the curse of idle years laid by the governments of Continental Europe upon their young men,--such a nation cannot fail to secure a victorious position in the great industrial struggle which all civilized States are now compelled to wage for existence. CHAPTER V. EUROPE AND AMERICA.