ndidates for the consular service in the
commercial and industrial affairs of Germany.

At several of the
universities evening extension lectures are given, an innovation first
tried at Leipsic, where more than seven thousand persons paid small
fees to attend the lectures in a recent year.

If one considers the
range of instruction from the Volkschulen and Fortbildungsschulen up
through the skeleton list I have mentioned to the universities, and
then on beyond that to the thousands still engaged as students in the
commerce and industry of Germany, as, for example, the technically
employed men in the Krupp Works at Essen, or the Color Works at
Elberfeld, to mention two of hundreds, it is seen that Germany is gone
over with a veritable fine-tooth comb of education. There is not only
nothing like it, there is nothing comparable to it in the world. If
training the minds of a population were the solution of the problems
of civilization, they are on the way to such solution in Germany.
Unfortunately there is no such easy way out of our troubles for
Germany or for any other nation. Some of us will live to see this
fetich of regimental instruction of everybody disappear as astrology
has disappeared. There is a Japanese proverb which runs, "The bottom
of lighthouses is very dark."

As early as 1717 Frederick William I in
an edict commanded parents to send their children to school, daily in
summer, twice a week in winter. Frederick the Great at the close of
the Seven Years' War, 1764, insisted again upon compulsory school
attendance, and prescribed books, studies, and discipline. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century began a great change in the
primary schools due to the influence of Pestalozzi, and in the
secondary schools owing to the efforts of Herder, Frederic August
Wolf, William Humboldt, and Suenern. Humboldt was the Prussian minister
of education for sixteen months. In 1809 he sent a memorial to the
King, urging the establishment and endowment of a university in
Berlin. He used his authority and his great influence to further
higher and secondary education, and fixed the main lines of action
which were followed for a century. He hoped that a liberal education
of his countrymen would make for both an intellectual and moral
regeneration, and emancipate the people from their sluggish obedience
to conventionality. The schools then were part of the ecclesiastical
organization and have never ceased to be so wholly, an