At the banquet in New York, Tuesday, in celebration of Washington's inauguration, President Eliot answered to "Our schools and colleges" as follows:

"That brief phrase, 'The schools and college of the United States,' is a formal and familiar one; but what imagination can grasp the infinitude of human affections, powers and wills which it really comprises? Not the liveliest and most far-reaching.

"But let us try. Let us forget the outward things called schools and colleges and summon up human beings.

"Imagine the 8,000,000 of children actually in attendance at the elementary schools of the country brought before your view. Each unit of that mass speaks of a glad birth, a brightened home, a mother's pondering heart, a father's careful joy. In all that multitude every little heart bounds and every eye shines at the name of Washington.

The 250,000 girls and boys in the secondary schools are getting a fuller view of this incomparable character than the younger children can reach. They learn of his great part in that immortal federal convention of 1787, of his inestimable services in organizing and conducting through two presidential terms the new government-services of which he alone was capable, and of his firm resistance to misguided popular clamor. They seehim ultimately vietorious in war and successful in peace but only through much adversity and over many obstacles.

"Next picture to yourselves the 60,000 students in colleges and universities-selected youth of keen intelligence, wide reading and high ambition. They are able to compare Washington with the greatest men of other times and countries, and to appreciate the uniquequality of his renown.

"This local commemoration of one great event in the life of Washington and of the United States is well, but it is nothing compared with the incessant memorial of him which the schools and colleges of the country maintain from generation to generation.

"What a reward is Washington's! What an influence is his and will be! One mind and will transfused by sympathetic instruction into milions; one character a standard for millions; one life a pattern for all public men teaching what greatness is and what the pathway to undying fame."