In this matter of education the state governments, particularly in the North, have shown abundant and encouraging good will; but it is characteristic of their general inefficiency that a good will has found its expression in a comparatively bad way.
It would serve no good purpose to push any farther the list of excellent objects to which the state governments might devote their liberated and liberalized energies.

We need only add that they would then be capable, not merely of more efficient separate action, but also of far more profitable cooeperation.

In case the states were emancipated from their existing powerless subjection to individual, special, and parochial interests, the advantages of a system of federated states would be immediately raised to the limit.

The various questions of social and educational reform can only be advanced towards a better understanding and perhaps a partial solution by a continual process of experimentation--undertaken with the full appreciation that they were tentative and would be pushed further or withdrawn according to the nature of their results.

Obviously a state government is a much better political agency for the making of such experiments than is a government whose errors would affect the population of the whole country.