Some years ago, when walking across the island of Porto Rico in the West Indies, just after its occupation and annexation by the United States, I met in the interior mountains one morning a man carrying upon his shoulders a basket filled with flowers, as it seemed to me at a distance. As he approached, however, I saw that he was bearing the dead body of his child, with flowers about it, to burial in consecrated ground miles away. The first task of the new government there, as in the western States, was to make fields consecrated for the living child, to set apart sites for schoolhouses--the place for the common school. That the common school has not in itself brought millennial conditions to the valley we are aware, even as universal man suffrage has not brought the full fruits of democracy. French philosophers and American patriots alike have expected too much perhaps of an imperfect human nature. But they have made their high demand of the only institution that can give in full measure what is sought in a democracy. First, it teaches the child the way and the means by which the race has come out of barbarism and something of the rigor of the disciplines by which civilization has been learned. Second, it gives this teaching to the whole nation of to-morrow. There are over ten million children in the public schools of that valley alone in America, and, as I stated above, less than eight per cent in the private schools; in the State of Indiana, where Lincoln had his slight schooling, less than three per cent are in private schools-that is, practically the entire people of the coming generation will have had some tuition of the common school, some equality of fitting. Third, as is to be inferred from the second fact, children of rich and poor, of banker and mechanic, doctor and tradesman, come together, and in a perfectly natural companionship, though in the great cities, where there is less homogeneity, this mingling is somewhat disturbed by social stratification and the great masses of immigrants. So is the motto of the French Republic written the length and breadth of that valley, though it may never actually be seen upon a lintel or door- post: the "liberty" of access to the knowledges which are to assist in making men as free as they can be; an elevating "equality" such as a State can give to men of unequal endowments, capacities, and ambitions; and a "fraternity" which is unconscious of else than real differences.