Education is a part of the scheme to make all Americans equal. A more splendid _system_ it is impossible to conceive. Every possible facility is afforded the poorest family to educate their children. Public schools loom up everywhere, and are increased as rapidly as the children, so there is no excuse for ignorance. The schools are graded, and there is no expense or fee. The parents pay a tax, a small sum, those who have no children being taxed as well as those who have many. There are schools to train boys to any trade; normal free schools to make teachers; night schools for working boys; commercial schools to educate clerks; ship schools to train sailors and engineers. Then come the great universities, in part free, with all the splendid paraphernalia, some being State institutions and others memorials of dead millionaires. Then there are the great technical schools, as well as universities (where one can study Chinese, if desired). There are schools of art, law, medicine, nature, forestry, sculpture; schools to teach one how to write, how to dress, how to eat, and how to keep well; schools to teach one how to write advertisements, to cultivate the memory, to grow strong; schools for shooting, boxing, fencing; schools for nurses and cooks; summer schools; winter schools. And yet the American is not profoundly educated. He has too much within his reach. I have been distinctly surprised at crude specimens I have met who were graduates of great universities. The well-educated Englishman, German, and American are different things. The American is far behind in the best sense, which I am inclined to think is due to the teachers. Any one can get through a normal school and become a teacher who can pass the examination, and I have seen some singular instances. If all the teachers were obliged to pass examinations in culture, refinement, and the art of _conveying_ knowledge, there would be a falling of pedagogic heads. The free and over education of the poor places them at once above their parents. They are free, and the daughter of a ditch laborer, whose wife is a floor scrubber, upon being educated is ashamed of her parents, learns to play the piano, apes the rich, and is at least unhappy.