[385] more. If there is no interest in the spectacle of such a nation, laboring with all its might to build up an advanced civilization, then there is nothing interesting on earth. The time will come when all men will wonder, not that Americans attached so much importance to their national development at this period, but that they appreciated it so little. Canon Zincke has computed that in 1980 the English-speaking population of the globe will number, at the present rate of progress, one thousand millions, and that of this number eight hundred millions will dwell in the United States. No plans can be too far-seeing, no toils and sacrifices too great, in establishing this vast future civilization. It is in this light, for instance, that we must view the immense endowments of Mr. Carnegie, which more than fulfill the generalization of the acute author of a late Scotch novel, “The house with Green Shutters,” who says that while a Scotchman has all the great essentials for commercial success, “his combinations are rarely Napoleonic until he becomes an American.”
When one looks at the apparently uncertain, but really tentative steps taken by the trustees of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, one sees how much must yet lie before us in our provisions for intellectual progress. The numerical increase of our common schools and universities
