But there has come a change. Reformers have been endeavoring to go out and find the common man, and, in connection with him, to develop those subjects which before, according to university tradition, were looked at somewhat askance. English literature, political economy, modern history, have been put in the foreground of this popularized education. Far and wide throughout England an enthusiastic band of young teachers, under the guidance of officers of the universities, have been giving instruction in these subjects to companies in which social grades are for the time forgotten. And since public libraries are rare in England, and among the poorer classes the reading habit is but slightly formed, an ambitious few among the hearers have prized their opportunities sufficiently to undertake a certain amount of study and to hand in papers for the lecturer to inspect and to mark. In exceptional cases as many as one third of the audience have thus written exercises and passed examinations. The great majority of those in attendance during the three months' term of course do nothing more than listen to the weekly lecture. This is the very successful English movement which for some years has been exciting admiration the world over, and which it is proposed to introduce into the United States. Rightly to estimate its worth those aspects of it to which attention has just been directed should carefully be borne in mind. They are these: the movement is as much social as scholarly and accompanies a general democratic upheaval of an aristocratic nation; it springs up in the neighborhood of universities to which the common people do not resort, and in which those subjects which most concern the minds of modern men are little taught; in its country other facilities for enabling the average man to capture knowledge--public libraries, reading clubs, illustrated magazines, free high schools--are not yet general; it flourishes in a small and compact land, where a multitude of populous towns are in such immediate neighborhood and so connected by a network of railroads that he who is busied in one place to-day can, with the slightest fatigue and expense, appear in five other towns during the remaining days of the week.