When a country has risen to the position of making adequate public provision against the blighting and destructive influences of ignorance, it has undertaken the discharge of one of those contingent and great obligations which, perhaps, will always await any people who are pressing forward to the attainment of the possibilities of Christian civilization. With all its imperfections our system of public education in an eminent degree commands the affectionate regard of our people and the admiration of strangers. While Ontario was not the first of our Canadian provinces to organize a free system of public schools, and while she has not maintained intact the principle which lies at the basis of the common schools, the grandeur of the outline of our system and the general completeness of its details are, I believe, unsurpassed by those of any other system on this continent or throughout the empire. This is especially true of the completeness of the provision made for passing from the elementary schools into the work of the higher education. Ontario occupies this advanced position to-day, with all its immeasurable advantages, largely because of Egerton Ryerson. He was possessed of a profound conviction that mind is the great creative power by which all resources of nature are to be turned to account. He had no idea that material good is a good at all only as it is a means for the development of the moral and social possibilities of the individual and of the nation. He did not argue, as many others in the country did, that since the area of the Province is vast, its population widely scattered, its forests waiting to be felled, its lands to be cleared and drained, therefore the organization of an efficient school system was a thing of the far future. On the contrary, having before him such examples as Prussia, Scotland, Ireland, the New England, Middle and Western States, and believing that our civic institutions should afford social conditions inferior to those of no country in the world, he poured all the energy of his great heart and mind into the effort to make available even to the remotest hamlets of the Province the blessings of knowledge. Intelligence, industry and morality were felt to be inseparably bound up with the progress of education. A system good enough for the rich and poor alike, and supported at the public expense, was his aim and his final achievement. The Christian communism underlying our systems of public education on this continent is proving one of the great safeguards of society against the forms of a false communism; and there is yet room, in my judgment, for a still wider application of kindred principles in our social system.