The Success of the Public Schools 87 



The success of the common schools, then, is seen in 

 proportion as our people, now for half a century so 

 largely trained in these public institutions, rise to the 

 discharge of public and private duty in accordance with 

 Milton's law, as we may now call it, doing their civic 

 work with justice, skill, and greatness of spirit, unselfish 

 generosity and love. I believe that it can be shown that 

 Milton's law is not only ideal, but that in all our com- 

 munities, wherever the common schools have a fair 

 chance, its terms are realized to a remarkable degree in 

 the universal public weal. Do not misunderstand me. 

 No system of education, public or private, can usher in 

 the millenium on this unhappy world. The natural an- 

 tipathy, for one thing, between the differentiated races, 

 will be a source of trouble, as it seems to me, for long, 

 even though we should begin to-morrow to cease inter- 

 ference with each other. If it is true that "of one blood 

 God hath made all nations of men for to dwell on all the 

 face of the earth " ; it is just as true, as the scripture quot- 

 ed goes on to say, that He hath "determined the bounds 

 of their habitation." When we shift the races and peo- 

 ples about and commingle them, we interfere with the 

 laws which have been long established and so render the 

 problem of self-government everywhere more difficult. 



Our civil war, which, in sporadic lynching outbreaks, 

 still continues, is in this sense a racial conflict; and so 

 also in a different way our Spanish and Mexican troubles. 

 But in all this, even at this moment, a sense of justice 

 and magnanimity, softly luminous but still brightening, 

 may easily be traced in nearly all the slowly crystalliz- 

 ing policy of this Republic. Whatsoever of uniform phil- 



