It (Chautauqua) is the common people's College, and its courses of instruction are so admirably arranged that it somehow induces the toiling millions to voluntarily grapple with all subjects and with all knowledge. My Chautauqua courses have taught me that what we need most is only so much knowledge as we can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; for if more be given it may become injurious. Chautauqua is doing more to nourish the intellects of the masses than any other system of education extant; except the public schools of the common country. Here is the testimony of ex-Governor Adolph O. Eberhardt of Minnesota: If I had the choice of being the founder of any great movement the world has ever known, I would choose the Chautauqua movement. The Hon. William Jennings Bryan, from the point of view of a speaker upon many Chautauqua platforms, wrote: The privilege and opportunity of addressing from one to seven or eight thousand of his fellow Americans in the Chautauqua frame of mind, in the mood which almost as clearly asserts itself under the tent or amphitheater as does reverence under the "dim, religious light"--this privilege and this opportunity is one of the greatest that any patriotic American could ask. It makes of him, if he knows it and can rise to its requirements, a potent human factor in molding the mind of the nation. Viscount James Bryce, Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States, and author of _The American Commonwealth_, the most illuminating work ever written on the American system of government, said, while visiting Chautauqua: I do not think any country in the world but America could produce such gatherings as Chautauqua's. Six presidents of the United States have thought it worth while to visit Chautauqua, either before, or during, or after their term of office. These were Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. Theodore Roosevelt was at Chautauqua four times. He said on his last visit, in 1905, "Chautauqua is the most American thing in America"; and also: This Chautauqua has made the name Chautauqua a name of a multitude of gatherings all over the Union, and there is probably no other educational influence in the country quite so fraught with hope for the future of the nation as this and the movement of which it is the archtype. Let us see what some journalists and writers have said about Chautauqua. Here is the opinion of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of _The Outlook_, and a leader of thought in our time: