The matter may be subjected to certain rough ways of measuring results as well. Leaving out such intellectual world centers as Paris, I may mention such a smaller town as Amsterdam, generally considered a mere minor trading and industrial center. In wandering about the streets of this northern Venice, one not only finds bookshops everywhere, but displayed in them the latest books, in four languages, on science, philosophy, and the arts. This fact speaks eloquently for the results attained by Dutch education of whatever sort it may be. There are plenty of cities in the United States of the same population—under seven hundred thousand—in which it would be difficult to get in even one language a tenth of the books offered at Amsterdam in four. Again, in the twenty-eight years that the Nobel Prize in literature has been offered, it has never yet been won by an American, though winners have come from practically every country in Europe and even from the Orient. Again, if we leave genius out of account and consider only the cultured public, we find that the number of books published in various countries in proportion to units of ten thousand inhabitants gives the following table: [Pg 156] Denmark 11.4 Latvia 9.5 Holland 9.0 Germany 5.2 Norway 4.7 France 3.8 Great Britain 3.0 United States .85 Even such “backward” nations, according to our ideas, as Spain, Russia, and Poland produce more books in the above ratio than do we—the most abundantly supplied with money for education of all the nations in the world! III Our errors are fairly evident. For one thing, our democracy has harmed our education in two directions. On the one hand we have to a great extent turned over our public educational system to the people, although the weakest point in American life is perhaps its lack of public responsibility. Our city, and not seldom our state, politics are a byword and a hissing, a sink of corruption and ignorance; yet it is usually to them that we leave the selection of the membership in our Boards of Education. The cry is also raised that public money should be spent only in giving the public what it wants—and, in its uneducated and uncultured soul, what it wants is anything but a “liberal education.” It all too often wants but two things: the ability to earn a better living; and the label of having been educated—a diploma or degree certifying that the recipient is as good as[Pg 157] any of the genuinely educated classes. As Lessing wrote a century and a half ago: The iron pot longs to be lifted up By tongs of silver from the kitchen fire That it may think itself a silver urn.