ality of the primary schools, now render it possible for every
individual to become intelligent and enlightened.

But these conditions are comparatively recent, so that millions of
individuals to-day, even in the midst of great educational systems,
remain entirely unlettered. Nevertheless, the persistent effort on the
part of people everywhere to have good schools, with the best methods
of instruction, certainly must have its effect in bringing the masses
of unlearned into the realm of letters. The practical tendency of
modern education, by which discipline and culture may be given while at
the same time preparing the student for the active duties of life,
makes education more necessary for all persons and classes. The great
changes that have taken place in methods of instruction and in the
materials of scientific investigation, and the tendency to develop the
man as well as to furnish him with information, evince the masterly
progress of educational systems, and demonstrate their great worth.

_The Importance of State Education_.--So necessary has education become
to the perpetuation of free government that the states of the world
have deemed it advisable to provide on their own account a sufficient
means of education. Perpetuation of liberty can be secured only on the
basis of intellectual progress. From the time of the foundation of the
universities of Europe, kings and princes and state authorities have
{483} encouraged and developed education, but it remained for America
to begin a complete and universal free-school system. In the United
States educators persistently urge upon the people the necessity of
popular education and intelligence as the only means of securing to the
people the benefits of a free government, and other statesmen from time
to time have insisted upon the same principle. The private
institutions of America did a vast work for the education of the youth,
but proved entirely inadequate to meet the immediate demands of
universal education, and the public-school system sprang up as a
necessary means of preparation for citizenship. It found its earliest,
largest, and best scope in the North and West, and has more recently
been established in the South, and now is universal.

The grant by the United States government at the time of the formation
of the Ohio territory of lands for the support of universities led to
the provision in the act of formation of each state and territory in
the Unio