These conditions, and others as gravely distinctive, do not exist in America. From the first the American college has been organized by the people and for the people. It has been about as much resorted to by the poor as by the rich. Through a widely developed system of free public schools it has kept itself closely in touch with popular ideals. Its graduates go into commercial life as often as into medicine, the ministry, or the law. It has shown itself capable of expansion too in adjusting itself to the modern enlargement of knowledge. The rigid curriculum, which suited well enough the needs of our fathers, has been discarded, and every college, in proportion to the resources at its command, now offers elective studies and seeks to meet the needs of differing men. To all who can afford four years (soon it may be three), and who are masters of about half as much capital as would support them during the same time elsewhere, the four hundred colleges of our country offer an education far too good to be superseded, duplicated, or weakened. In these colleges excellent provision has been made, and has been made once for all, for everybody who has a little time and a little money to devote to systematic education of the higher sort. But our educational scheme has one serious limitation, and during the last fifty years there have been many earnest efforts to surmount it. Not every man is free to seek a systematic training. Multitudes are tied to daily toil and only in the evening can they consider their own enlargement. Many grow old before the craving for knowledge arises. Many also, with more or less profit, have attended a college, but are glad subsequently to supply those defects of education which the experiences of life relentlessly bring to view. To all these classes, caught in the whirl of affairs, the college does not minister. It is true that much that such people want they get from the public library, especially as our librarians of the modern type energetically accept their duties as facilitators of the public reading. Much is also obtainable from the cheap issues of the press and from such endowed courses of higher instruction as those of the Lowell, Cooper, Brooklyn, Peabody, and Drexel institutes. But, after all, these supplementary aids, though valuable, are deficient in guiding power. Most persons, especially if novices, work best under inspection. To learners teachers are generally important. There seems to be still a place in our well-supplied country for an organization which shall arouse a more general desire for knowledge; which shall stand ready to satisfy this desire more cheaply, with less interruption to daily occupation, and consequently in ways more fragmentary than the colleges can; and yet one which shall not leave its pupils alone with books, but shall supply them with the impulse of the living word and through writing, discussion and directed reading, shall economize and render effective the costly hours of learning.