We Americans boast, and boast rightfully, of the high position in the scale of intelligence we occupy as a people; but pride in that fact should not blind our eyes to our existing imperfections. We are proud of the attainments of our men of letters; we rejoice in the achievements of our scientists and inventors; we glory in our rapid advance among the nations to wealth and power; and we fail to give serious heed to the hundreds of thousands of our people who are growing up every year in clouded ignorance, without even the rudiments of education. If we examine with care our census returns and the reports of our Bureau of Education, we will be startled by some of the facts they reveal. To follow many of these revelations in detail might lead to an accusation of making invidious distinctions, but there are enough to which the attention of the country may be called without the shadow of justification for such a charge. Let us look at these. Take the Bulletin of “Illiteracy in the United States,” as returned at the tenth census, and its first line reveals the deplorable fact that of the 36,761,607 persons of ten years of age and upward, 4,923,451 (over one-seventh) are unable to read, and 6,239,958 (nearly one-sixth) are unable to write. It appears, moreover, from other census tabulations presented[D] to the United States Senate that, of the 50,155,783 persons constituting our population in 1880, there were equally proportioned between the white and colored races, 4,204,363 of both sexes over twenty-one years of age unable to write, or about 2,000,000 “illiterates” out of the 10,000,000 persons at that time entitled to vote; or, in other words, one of every five voters in the United States unable to write his name. From other statistics of that census it appears also that 1,640,000 voters were unable to read. Thus we have the astounding assurance that while one in every five voters can not write the ballot that he wishes to deposit, one in every six voters can not even read the ballot that he places in the box! It is this one illiterate voter in every five (or six) voters who holds the balance of power at our elections. While a very large proportion of our population, and also of that portion of it which exercises the elective franchise, can both read and write, yet a great number of these are very little the more intelligent because their limited ability to do either or both is so imperfect and so rarely availed of. Alluding to these, a committee of the United States Senate (Report 101, Pt. 2, first session, Forty-eighth Congress), said: “Of those who can write, multitudes do not place a sentence on paper twice in a lifetime. Thousands never get an idea from the printed page.” Yet these are the men who may at any time subject the country to their control—men who hold the weighty balance of political power.