Yet organized popular education is only one of the quickening influences that have been producing the general enlightenment which is everywhere becoming the promise of general liberty. Rather, it is only part of a great whole, vastly larger than itself. Schools are but separated seed-beds, in which the staple thoughts of the steady and stay-at-home people are prepared and nursed. Not much of the world, moreover, goes to school in the school house. But through the mighty influences of commerce and the press the world itself has become a school. The air is alive with the multitudinous voices of information. Steady trade winds of intercommunication have sprung up which carry the seeds of education and enlightenment, wheresoever planted, to every quarter of the globe. No scrap of new thought can escape being borne away from its place of birth by these all-absorbing currents. No idea can be kept exclusively at home, but is taken up by the trader, the reporter, the traveller, the missionary, the explorer, and is given to all the world, in the newspaper, the novel, the memoir, the poem, the treatise, till every community may know, not only itself, but all the world as well, for the small price of learning to read and keeping its ears open. All the world, so far as its news and its most insistent thoughts are concerned, is fast being made every man’s neighbor. Carlyle unquestionably touched one of the obvious truths concerning modern democracy when he declared it to be the result of printing. In the newspaper press a whole population is made critic of all human affairs; democracy is “virtually extant,” and “democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.” Looked at in the large, the newspaper press is a type of democracy, bringing all men without distinction under comment made by any man without distinction; every topic is reduced to a common standard of news; everything is noted and argued about by everybody. Nothing could give surer promise of popular power than the activity and alertness of thought which are made through such agencies to accompany the training of the public schools. The activity may often be misdirected or unwholesome, may sometimes be only feverish and mischievous, a grievous product of narrow information and hasty conclusion; but it is none the less a stirring and potent activity. It at least marks the initial stages of effective thought. It makes men conscious of the existence and interest of affairs lying outside the dull round of their own daily lives. It gives them nations, instead of neighborhoods, to look upon and think about. They catch glimpses of the international connections of their trades, of the universal application of law, of the endless variety of life, of diversities of race, of a world teeming with men like themselves, and yet full of strange customs, puzzled by dim omens, stained by crime, ringing with voices familiar and unfamiliar.