Certain things will help to show whether we have gained or lost by this change in our educational policy. Let us take, for instance, the matter of patriotism. The Spanish-American War of 1898 came on before the old order ended. Every youth wanted to go because the country was aflame with zeal for the American cause. The recent world war came after a new generation of school boys had grown up. The necessities incident to that conflict disclosed the fact that American loyalty was partly asleep. It took very serious efforts to wholly awaken it. Take the question of thrift. The successful business man of today, that loyal public servant who carries the economic responsibilities of the country so capably, is a product of the times when some new lesson in thrift and industry came in each day of the public school course. Many a man who has succeeded would testify now that his first impulse to try came from the reading of the sayings of Poor Richard or some similar material. Since such things have been largely dropped, we have on our hands a growing race of spendthrifts. All this is not merely comparing the present unfavorably with the past. Everyone knows that we cannot properly do so. Taken as a whole, the public school is now far in advance of what it was in the days of the little red school house. The present purpose is to point out to the educator the really incomparable power and opportunity that are his. Whatever the future contains, the school teacher holds the key to it. The possession of great power is at once an opportunity and a peril, but the teacher certainly possesses that power. It is a wonderful thing to mould the world’s life into right patterns. It is a fearful thing to mould it wrongly, or to fail to mould it when one might. The teacher can do any one of these. Bismarck once said: “Whatever you would put into the state you must first put into the schools.” The truth of his statement was well proven in the subsequent history of the empire of which he was then chancellor. A whole people was led astray by being fed upon the false philosophy of Nietzsche and others. The Teuton mind and heart could not have been so completely shackled by any other means than the processes of popular education. When the Ottoman Empire was first founded, its fiercest military organization, the Janizaries, was recruited wholly from the children of Christian parents, taken from their homes in battle or exacted from their towns as tribute. They made the fiercest of soldiers, the most loyal of Turks, and the most fanatical of Mohammedans. This is but an example of what education will do.