in view of the governments themselves, the sudden appearance of the United States and of Prussia as great nations, is closely allied to their systems of universal education. England and France have showed of late that they have profited by the lesson, taking more interest than formerly in the diffusion of education. This is the clear influence exercised by American institutions in their most acceptable forms.
Mr. Laboulaye, the distinguished French professor who has done so much to make North American institutions known in Europe, not long ago presented to the workmen of Lyons the portraiture of Horace Mann as the only man comparable to Washington in the part which he took in the definitive and enduring organization of American democracy. But in the greater part of the world to-day, if the influence and efficacy of North American institutions of education are known by their results, very few if any have an idea of their mode of operation, or of their organization. In England, reports, data, and ideas are frequently sought from the United States, and I am acquainted with the fact that the ex-minister Ratazzi, desiring to organize a vast system of education in Italy, lamented that he had not within reach the precise documents which could explain the systems that have given such happy results in the United States, the only country which can serve as a guide in this respect. The speech of the Hon. Mr. Garfield in the House of Representatives in favor of the creation of the National Department of Education, has been reproduced in the presses of South America as a stimulus toward adopting the same measure, and another of Professor Wickersham, of Pennsylvania, has had the same currency in France and South America.
If the United States, then, owe an account to the human race of their own experience and progress in certain respects which are important to the well-being and improvement of mankind, just as they received from England and from human thought many of the principal benefits of government, a means of transmitting the knowledge would hereby have been established, and the National Department of Education would have fulfilled that useful function, beside the special object for which it was created. It would have come to be, as it were, the Department of International and Foreign Educational Relations, and its reports and data would, when collected, have been a fountain of information, not only for the Southern States, but other nations, for even if a Report of Massachusetts or New York Schools can be obtained in Europe, such documents, by their purely provincial character, are wanting in the authority which the seal of the United States would give to those of a National Department. The great inequality with which education is actually distributed in the United States, and which it was the confessed object of the said Department to regulate, would have given an opportunity to see the work of diffusion, and the application of means, as well as the desired results.
With some diffidence, I will venture to make one observation with re-
