pure and temperate air by a more unfriendly climate, form an increasingly intimate alliance with strong drink, until in the so-called gardens of Germany Calliope and Gambrinus are inseparable friends.  Farther still toward the Pole the voice of the Muse gradually dies away upon the sodden atmosphere; and she, having outlasted her successive Southern associates, wine and beer, in turn gives place to brandy pure and simple—­a beverage itself frost-proof and only suited to frost-proof men.

The long nights and indoor days of the North are favorable to another and more desirable trait of modern social progress—­education.  The potency of such a meteorological cause in making popular a taste for knowledge the instances of Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia and North Germany, to say nothing of New England, leave us no room to doubt.  It is, of course, not the only cause.  Ability to read and write is as universal in China and Japan, as in the countries we have named.  In the case of the Orientals it cannot be ascribed, either, wholly to that conviction of the importance, as a conservative guarantee, of elevating the popular mind and taste, which belongs to the enlightenment of the day.  Instinctive recognition of this need manifests itself in a simultaneous move in the direction of universal education at government expense throughout the two continents.  All the populations snatch up their satchels and hurry to school.  Athens revives the Academe and reinstates the Olympic games under a literary avatar.  Italy follows suit.  Hornbooks open and shut with a suggestive snap under the pope’s nose, and Young Rome calculates its future with slate and pencil.  Gaul, fresh from one year’s term in the severest of all schools, adversity, joins the procession, close by John Bull, who, more suo, pauses first to decide whether the youthful mind shall take its pap with the spoon of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, or neither.  With him the question between Church schools and national schools is complicated by one which is common to other nations—­whether attendance shall be compulsory or voluntary only.  The tendency is toward the former, which has long been in practice in some of the States of the Union; and it seems not unlikely that Christendom will, before many years, revert, in this important matter, to the Spartan view that children are the property of the state.

Lavish beyond precedent are the provisions made by governments and individuals everywhere for the promotion of this great object.  Private endowment of schools and colleges was never before so frequent and liberal, and nothing so quickly disarms the caution of the average taxpayer as an appeal for common schools.  From California eastward to Japan it is honored along the whole line, the unanimous “Yea” being the most eloquent and hopeful word the modern world emits.  Of the slumbering power that till recently lay hidden in coal and water, and which has so incalculably multiplied the material strength of man, much has