Third, in the establishment of a National Bureau of Education which collects statistics and information and distributes reports on all subjects connected with the educational interests of America. The Commissioner at the head of this bureau is a man of high standing and scholarship. He is chosen without reference to politics, and holds his office independent of party. He has no authority to make appointments or regulations. But he has a large influence, through the light which he throws upon the actual condition of education, in promoting the gradual and inevitable process of unification. Let me try to sum up what I have been saying on this difficult subject of the lack of system and the growth of unity in American education. There is no organization from the centre. But there is a distinct organization from the periphery,--if I may use a scientific metaphor of such an unscientific character. The formative principle is the development of the individual. What, then, does the average American boy find in this country to give him a series of successive opportunities to secure this personal development of mental and moral powers? First, a public primary school and grammar school which will give him the rudiments of learning from his sixth to his fourteenth year. Then a public high school which will give him about what a French _lycée_ gives from his fourteenth to his eighteenth year. He is now ready to enter the higher education. Up to this point, if he lives in a town of any considerable size, he has not been obliged to go away from home. Many of the smaller places of three or four thousand inhabitants have good high schools. If he lives in the country, he may have had to go to the nearest city or large town for his high school or academy. Beyond this point, he finds either a college, as it is called in America, or the collegiate department in one of the universities, which will give him a four years' course of general study. Before he can begin this, he must pass what is called an entrance examination, which is practically uniform in all the better institutions, and almost, but perhaps not quite, equivalent to the examination in France for the degree of _bachelier_. Thus a certain standard of preparation is set for all the secondary schools. It is at the end of his general course in literature, science, and philosophy that the American student gets his bachelor's degree, which corresponds pretty nearly to the French degree of _licencié_ in letters and sciences.