The long nights and indoor days of the North are favorable to another and more desirable trait of modern social progress--education. The potency of such a meteorological cause in making popular a taste for knowledge the instances of Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia and North Germany, to say nothing of New England, leave us no room to doubt. It is, of course, not the only cause. Ability to read and write is as universal in China and Japan, as in the countries we have named. In the case of the Orientals it cannot be ascribed, either, wholly to that conviction of the importance, as a conservative guarantee, of elevating the popular mind and taste, which belongs to the enlightenment of the day. Instinctive recognition of this need manifests itself in a simultaneous move in the direction of universal education at government expense throughout the two continents. All the populations snatch up their satchels and hurry to school. Athens revives the Academe and reinstates the Olympic games under a literary avatar. Italy follows suit. Hornbooks open and shut with a suggestive snap under the pope's nose, and Young Rome calculates its future with slate and pencil. Gaul, fresh from one year's term in the severest of all schools, adversity, joins the procession, close by John Bull, who, _more suo_, pauses first to decide whether the youthful mind shall take its pap with the spoon of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, or neither. With him the question between Church schools and national schools is complicated by one which is common to other nations--whether attendance shall be compulsory or voluntary only. The tendency is toward the former, which has long been in practice in some of the States of the Union; and it seems not unlikely that Christendom will, before many years, revert, in this important matter, to the Spartan view that children are the property of the state.