directed educational work to attain. It is that Germany possesses a national weapon of precision which must give her an enormous national advantage in any and every contest depending on disciplined and methodized intellect."

The Moseley Commission in a report of its recent visit of investigation to the United States said, "The American manufacturer is distinguished from his English competitor by an almost feverish eagerness to obtain the latest improvements in machinery. He does not hesitate to put in the latest machinery at whatever cost, and from time to time sacrifices large sums by scrapping the old whenever improvements are brought out. As the introduction of labor-saving machinery is not used to cut down wages, such a policy meets with hearty co-operation from the workman; every hand in the factory, man or boy, woman or child, is constantly striving to discover some improvement upon the existing régime, simply because it means profit to themselves. This is very different from the ordinary state of affairs in England."

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In the appendix to the report of the Moseley Commission there is an interesting paper dealing with the causes that have contributed to the enormous expansion of manufacturing industries in the United States.

"The operation of the tariff apart, these causes may be assigned as follows:

"1st, The enormous coal resources of the United States, coupled with the rich deposits of iron ore.

"2nd, The readiness of the manufacturer to adopt laborsaving devices.

"3rd, The largeness of scale, with its resultant economies, on which manufactures are carried out.

"4th, Similar economies (such as the use of heavier train loads) in internal transport.

5th, The attitude of the workmen to labor-saving devices and the general questions of standardization of wages and methods of remuneration."

The lesson taught by England's experience has not, let us hope, been lost upon the United States. She has profited and will in the future still more profit by Germany's example, which England failed to heed. The great sums already devoted to education in this country can have no other meaning, and all signs indicate that the expenditures for this purpose in this country have only begun. "Prosperity," Bacon has said, "discovers our vices, adversity our virtues."

Whether we as a nation shall be able to endure prosperity or whether we shall succumb under the burden of our wealth; whether we shall be able to assimilate in the future, as we have done in the past, the large and ever increasing increment to our population by immigration from foreign shores, and make of it an integral and valuable asset for our own intellectual and industrial progress; whether our own people possess the virility in mind and body which will tend to material and intellectual advance in the years to come,-these and many other questions are problems for the future. Much depends upon whether we shall be able to preserve the moral qualities which characterized our forefathers.

But it must not be supposed that the supremacy which has already been achieved has been achieved by any deliberate purpose of ours. We have come into our inheritance through causes over which we had little control, by the operation of great economic laws which are as inexorable as the laws of nature, if indeed they may not be classed as such.

The certainty that the United States would supersede Great Britain has long been foreseen by thoughtful British statesmen. Conspicuous among these was Mr. Gladstone, who as early as 1878 expressed both his conviction as to the inevitableness of the change and his view as to the way in which it should be regarded by Great Britain. "It is America," he said, "who will wrest from us that

commercial primacy. We have no title. I have no inclination to murmur at the prospect. If she acquires it she will make the acquisition upon the right of the strongest; but in this instance the strongest means the best. She will probably become what we are now,-the head servant in the great household of the world, the employer of all employed because her service will be the most and ablest. We have no more title against her than Vienna, Genoa or Holland had against us."

"Nations, like men," to quote again from Mr. Hobson, “are apt to measure themselves and others by different standards. The prosperity of others is commonly attributed to adroitness or good luck, and our own to fidelity and virtue. Nations are slow to learn for themselves the lessons of history, and to recognize that laws which have worked inexorably in other cases work so in their own."

"Great economic and social forces," says John Morley, in his Life of Cobden, "flow with a tidal sweep over communities which are only half conscious of that which is befalling them. Wise statesmen are those who foresee what time is thus bringing and endeavor to shape institutions and to mould men's thoughts and purposes in accordance with the change that is silently surrounding them."

ALGONQUIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE-REPORT BY THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLICATION.

It seems proper that at this meeting a short account should be given, however elementary, of the important steps forward in the study of the Algonquian language, a study to which this Society has so largely contributed since its formation.

The Committee of Publication were able to announce at the last meeting the completion of the printing of Trumbull's dictionary. We owe the publication of this important book to the cordial care of the United States Bureau of Ethnology. The late Major Powell, the accomplished head of that bureau, promised on its behalf to undertake the editing and printing of Trumbull's dictionary. He assigned the care of the work to our accomplished associate, Mr. Albert S. Gatschet. That gentleman fulfilled his duty with the most assiduous skill, and before Major Powell's lamented death, he had the pleasure of seeing most of the book in the proof-sheets. As the Committee has already reported, the printing was completed before our last meeting and its distribution among students has since been made. Mr. Trumbull's own manuscripts, carefully rebound, have been returned by the bureau to the Society Library.

This publication marks an era in the study of the Indian languages. The volume is the first, as may be hoped, in a series of bulletins contemplated by the act of the 27th of April, 1900. While we recognize the importance of the publications of the bureau in several years past, it will probably be fair to say that no work of equal importance to this has been printed since this Society published Mr. Gallatin's studies on the Indian languages nearly seventy years ago. At that time, men of the ability of Duponceau

and Pickering on this side the water, and the great German philologists of the last century, had discovered and recognized the importance of John Eliot's contributions to the study of language. There was a fashion perhaps, among ignorant people, of saying that his great translation of the Bible was a book of no use to mankind. But everybody who knew anything about it, was obliged to say that in his study of the tongue of our poor Natick Indians, he had unlocked the secrets of that extraordinary system of grammar which extends from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn. Of that grammar and of a sufficient number of the vocabularies of our tribes between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Mr. Gallatin had made a very comprehensive examination. Our Society had the honor of publishing his results. In his long career as Secretary of the Treasury, in days when secretaries had very little treasure, Mr. Gallatin availed himself of his official relations with the Indian tribes to collect a vast quantity of crude material. That material is arranged in the second volume of our transactions with comprehensive vocabularies, quite sufficient for scientific purposes.

It would seem that our publication of Mr. Gallatin's book first called attention to the great extent of the Algonquian Lenape language in Canada and the United States. It is possible that the insular position of the Iroquoisin New York-with a language which has not one word in common with the Algonquian spoken east, south and north of them had given the impression that our New England language had a limited range. But Gallatin at once recognized the similarity, not to say identity, of the languages of the northwest with those of Virginia, Pennsylvania and New England. The Algonquian language ranged so far to the southward that, as the Society will remember, our associate Judge Forbes reminded us that Manteo, one of Raleigh's Indians from Roanoke Island, could have talked with Capt. Smith's Powhatan and Edward Wins