Out of this stir and agitation came the aggressive, conquering spirit that carried civilization straight across the continent, that built up cities and States, that developed wealth, and by invention, ingenuity, and energy performed miracles in the way of the subjugation of nature and the assimilation of societies.  Out of this free agitation sprang a literary product, great in quantity and to some degree distinguished in quality, groups of historians, poets, novelists, essayists, biographers, scientific writers.  A conspicuous agency of the period was the lecture platform, which did something in the spread and popularization of information, but much more in the stimulation of independent thought and the awakening of the mind to use its own powers.

Along with this and out of this went on the movement of popular education and of the high and specialized education.  More remarkable than the achievements of the common schools has been the development of the colleges, both in the departments of the humanities and of science.  If I were writing of education generally, I might have something to say of the measurable disappointment of the results of the common schools as at present conducted, both as to the diffusion of information and as to the discipline of the mind and the inculcation of ethical principles; which simply means that they need improvement.  But the higher education has been transformed, and mainly by the application of scientific methods, and of the philosophic spirit, to the study of history, economics, and the classics.  When we are called to defend the pursuit of metaphysics or the study of the classics, either as indispensable to the discipline or to the enlargement of the mind, we are not called on to defend the methods of a generation ago.  The study of Greek is no longer an exercise in the study of linguistics or the inspection of specimens of an obsolete literature, but the acquaintance with historic thought, habits, and polity, with a portion of the continuous history of the human mind, which has a vital relation to our own life.

However much or little there may be of permanent value in the vast production of northern literature, judged by continental or even English standards, the time has came when American scholarship in science, in language, in occidental or oriental letters, in philosophic and historical methods, can court comparison with any other.  In some branches of research the peers of our scholars must be sought not in England but in Germany.  So that in one of the best fruits of a period of intellectual agitation, scholarship, the restless movement has thoroughly vindicated itself.