The second is the wish to secure more thorough and personal teaching in smaller classes. This the private schools offer, usually at a high price. In the older universities and colleges, a considerable part, if not the larger number, of the student body, comes from private preparatory schools and academies. Yet it must be noted that of the men who take high honours in scholarship a steadily increasing number, already a majority, are graduates of the free public high schools. This proves what? That the State can give the best if it wants to. That it is much more likely to want to do so if it is enlightened, stimulated, and guided by the voluntary effort of the more intelligent part of the community. III. This brings me to the last division of the large subject around which I have been hastily circling: the institutions of higher education,--universities, colleges, and technological schools. Remember that in America these different names are used with bewildering freedom. They are not definitions, nor even descriptions; they are simply "tags." A school of arts and trades, a school of modern languages, may call itself a university. An institution of liberal studies, with professional departments and graduate schools attached to it, may call itself a college. The size and splendour of the label does not determine the value of the wine in the bottle. The significance of an academic degree in America depends not on the name, but on the quality, of the institution that confers it. But, generally speaking, you may understand that a college is an institution which gives a four years' course in liberal arts and sciences, for which four years of academic preparation are required: a university adds to this, graduate courses, and one or more professional schools of law, medicine, engineering, divinity, or pedagogy; a technological school is one in which the higher branches of the applied arts and sciences are the chief subjects of study and in which only scientific degrees are conferred. Of these three kinds of institutions, 622 reported to the United States Bureau of Education in 1906: 158 were for men only; 129 were for women only; 335 were coeducational. The number of professors and instructors was 24,000. The number of undergraduate and resident graduate students was 136,000. The income of these institutions for the year was $40,000,000, of which a little less than half came from tuition fees, and a little more than half from gifts and endowments. The value of the real estate and equipment was about $280,000,000, and the invested funds for endowment amounted to $236,000,000. These are large figures. But they do not convey any very definite idea to the mind, until we begin to investigate them and ask what they mean. How did this enormous enterprise of higher education come into being? Who supports it? What is it doing?