From the time that Washington boasted of a system that proposes to furnish the means of education to “every child of the republic,” the educational spirit has been a prominent characteristic of our people. Amid all our national vicissitudes and struggles, defending the flag from foes without and within, cutting down the forests to make farms for cultivation, and clearing up the waste places to make them habitable, we have never lost our educational enterprise. In the far West, as well as in Maine and Massachusetts, you meet it. Not to be wondered at, either, is this in a people who had the courage and faith to launch such a governmental scheme as is ours. Indeed, it required little discernment to see that popular institutions could be served by no other handmaid than popular education. It is gratifying to note that our zeal for education did not prove a transient impulse, but that of an abiding conviction. Never have the reports from all parts of the Union, taken as a whole, been so encouraging as now. Stupidity and demagogism are still to be found in many places, and, of course, as ever, doing their best to hinder progress. But in spite of all such influences, educators throughout the nation feel that the cause, with the modifications of better methods, is understood and appreciated by the better and larger part of the public. An examination of reports and statistics of all the States and Territories for ten years past, shows advancement in almost every instance. Financial depression or shifting population will explain the exceptions. In the State of Ohio in the single year of 1879-80, three-fourths of a million dollars was expended in new school-houses. The young State of West Virginia reports seventeen hundred more teachers employed at the close of the decade than at the beginning. The State of Missouri reports a like number, and an increased enrollment of nearly sixty thousand, exclusive of those who had come of school age, thus showing a deep inroad into the ranks of illiteracy. These citations illustrate the advance movement all along the line. And while our common schools are thus moving onward, it is no less a sign of national devotion to education that schools of higher grades are springing up everywhere. Special and charitable schools for the deaf and dumb, for the weak-minded, industrial training schools, etc., all of them upheld by the same national spirit. Nor to be forgotten are the schools for all classes at home, where by correspondence and concert of work, results which none can measure are attained. Let us rejoice and give thanks!