And these gentlemen have peeked and poked and peered in the friendliest, most flattering way imaginable. They have examined palace and tenement and cottage, and their tenants. They have eaten and drunk of all the products of the land, and have listened to speeches numerous and have read newspapers numberless. They have watched wheels go round in factories--and in heads as well. They have heard those who say “the captains of industry did it,” those who say “it was done in spite of the captains of industry and the high financiers.” And after tasting and seeing and smelling and touching and hearing, from Maine to the Golden Gate, these envoys have gone back, and with one accord have replied: “They do it by education.” From the end of the Civil War--an interruption of our progress to rid ourselves of a drag upon it--we have been educating as we never did before, as no other people ever did or now does. Immigrants have poured in; our great “infant industry” which protectionist and free trader alike believe in protecting and fostering, has been exceedingly expansive. And we have put home and foreign product into the great educational plant--from half to two-thirds of all between five years old and twenty going through school and academy and college. The average annual number who now receive formal education is one-fifth of our total population. And more than a million of our young men and women--one in every ten of both sexes of the higher education age, one in every six young men of that age--are annually in the universities, colleges, academies, business and professional schools. Not enough, not nearly enough; but in hopeful proportion to what used to be. “I think, therefore I am,” runs the Descartes formula. We teach our youth to think in order that they may really _be_--be individual, be proud and self-respecting and self-reliant, be free with the freedom no government or law can give or secure, or take away. In the educational institutions this impulse gets form and direction that it may develop efficient manhood. And against the thinking toiler all the forces of ignorance and passion and wasteful luxury, of base and foolish political, social, industrial ideas, cannot prevail. The first free school opened on these shores was in New York City on Manhattan Island. Of all the settlers who came to America the Dutch alone understood and believed in the free public school, offering free education not as alms but as a right. They had had it at home. They established it here, and set the example which was followed by the other colonists, first of all by those New Englanders who had lived in the Holland that fought Alva and Philip, and had there absorbed some democratic ideas. Holland was the godmother of modern Democracy, was the nursery of the modern public school. These words are from the pen of John of Nassau, the oldest brother of that friend of civil and religious liberty, William the Silent: