America has been made what she is largely by means of the public school. If she is democratic, it is largely because the public school has so faithfully sown the seeds of democracy in the thinking of her boys and girls in their plastic periods. In so far as she is clean and righteous, the fact is largely due to the teaching the children have received in the public schools. Their work in character-building, their inculcation of the principles of scientific temperance, and now their efforts to teach Americanism to all classes and ages have all been good seed sown in fertile and productive soil. Today every schoolhouse is a symbol of freedom, of democracy, and of productive efficiency. To neglect the schools would be to neglect the source of much that is entirely necessary in the nation’s life. What America did for herself by means of the school in the days when her interests did not reach beyond her own borders, she has since done by the same means in the territories for which she has assumed responsibility. Since Spain ceded the Philippines to us, the life of their people has been entirely regenerated. The old insanitary cities with their shacks and their squalor have changed into orderly and well-improved municipalities. The unkempt and ignorant people are now bright, industrious, and efficient. A practically savage land has become a civilized one in slightly more than two decades. Alaska has been transformed from a fruitless wilderness into a territory of awakened and forward-looking people. They have developed such industries as their land would support. They have achieved a large degree of economic independence. They acquitted themselves with as great credit as did almost any of the states in the various responsibilities incident to the war. They have cleaned up their towns and developed their social institutions. Through their town meetings, they are becoming more and more a self-governing people. Hawaii is rapidly learning to make the most of herself. Porto Rico is doing the same. The new Virgin Islands will follow along in the same course the others have travelled. Cuba has developed in the last twenty years largely because of the start American leadership, organization, and education gave her. Panama has been revolutionized by American influence. There are, of course, a number of answers to the question as to why all this has happened. One of the chiefest of them, however, is the work of the public school system inaugurated wherever the hand of America holds sway for any length of time. Even the leadership, the scientific attainment, the medical skill, the genius for organization, and the commercial power that have entered into the moulding of these new civilizations all owe themselves, in greater or less degree, to the public school and to the work of the teacher.