The process of national education means, not only a discipline of the popular will, but training in ability to draw inferences from the national experience, so that the national consciousness will gradually acquire an edifying state of mind towards its present and its future problems.

Those problems are always closely allied to the problems which have been more or less completely solved during the national history; and the body of practical lessons which can be inferred from that history is the best possible preparation for present and future emergencies.

Such history requires close and exact reading.

The national experience is always strangely mixed.

Even the successes of our own past, such as the Federal organization, contain much dubious matter, demanding the most scrupulous disentanglement.