administered under its auspices, are--to borrow the expression of one of its graduates--"killing" the private schools. We may rest assured that whatever the people of a State or of the United States is earnestly bent upon having, will come. Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has done--whether we are indeed ripe for thorough change--whether a change is to be effected by direct State action or indirectly by the mere pressure of public sentiment--whether we have real need of a body of professors and a set of universities such as Germany possesses--whether we are to make our higher as well as our primary education non-sectarian,--are all questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to come. It is also possible that one or the other of them may, in legal phraseology, be sprung upon us at any time. Not to be taken unawares, we have to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse ourselves of one misconception. The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old country and we are a young country. The circumstances are not so very different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is in our favor. We are a union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany of the eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection. Will it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have acquired these blessings only within our own day? We are a nation of forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources. The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry brutally ignorant and servile, the national character--to all appearance--ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the teachings of history--overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was only where she had been in 1618. That we should take Germany for our standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor. Although we are connected with England by common descent, institutions and language, although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted