the conduct of other peoples? If we were to ask this
question of an older country, we could more easily obtain an answer, for
in the older countries the national ideals have, in many cases, reached
an advanced point of self-consciousness. The educational machinery of
the German empire, for example, turns upon this problem of impressing
the national ideals. It is one aim of the official courses of study, for
instance, that history shall be so taught that the pupils will gain an
overweening reverence for the reigning house of Hohenzollern. Nor is
that newer ideal of national unity which had its seed sown in the
Franco-Prussian War in any danger of neglect by the watchful eye of the
government. Not only must the teacher impress it upon every occasion,
but every attempt is also made to bring it daily fresh to the minds of
the people through great monuments and memorials. Scarcely a hamlet is
so small that it does not possess its Bismarck _Denkmal_, often situated
upon some commanding hill, telling to each generation, in the sublime
poetry of form, the greatness of the man who made German unity a reality
instead of a dream.

But in our country, we do not thus consciously formulate and express our
national ideals. We recognize them rather with averted face as the
adolescent boy recognizes any virtue that he may possess, as if
half-ashamed of his weakness. We have monuments to our heroes, it is
true, but they are often inaccessible, and as often they fail to convey
in any adequate manner, the greatness of the lessons which the lives of
these heroes represent. Where Germany has a hundred or more impressive
memorials to the genius of Bismarck, we have but one adequate memorial
to the genius of Washington, while for Lincoln, who represents the
typical American standards of life and conduct more faithfully than any
other one character in our history, we have no memorial that is at all
adequate,--and we should have a thousand. Some day our people will awake
to the possibilities that inhere in these palpable expressions of the
impalpable things for which our country stands. We shall come to
recognize the vast educative importance of perpetuating, in every
possible way, the deep truths that have been established at the cost of
so much blood and treasure.

To embody our national ideals in the personages of the great figures of
history who did so much to establish them is the most elementary method
of insuring their conservation and