AMERICA has more colleges, so called, than all the other civilized nations combined.

These institutions of learning are not results of accident, or accretions of church reverences and purposes, like the great universities of older lands. Most of them were founded and have been maintained by the people at large, and these, until recent times, were very poor. They are testimonials to the level-head and tenacity of purpose of the American people. Says President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins University:

“That tenacity of purpose with which a few settlers in the wilderness held on to the idea of a liberal education, in spite of their scanty crops and scantier libraries, their wide separation from the old-world seats of learning, and their lack of professional teachers, is one of the noblest of many noble traits possessed by our forefathers, who were never so weary or so poor that they could not keep alive the altar-fires in the temples of religion and of learning. Their primitive foundations did not depend on royal bounty or on feudal{567} liens; they were supported by free-will offerings from men and women in moderate circumstances, by the minister’s savings and the widow’s portion. It is only within the present generation that large donations have reached their coffers. The good and the bad we inherit in our collegiate systems were alike developed in the straitened school of necessity.

“The founders of the original colleges were not only high-minded and self-sacrificing, but they were devoted to an ideal. They believed in the doctrine that intellectual power is worth more than intellectual acquisitions; that an education of all the mental faculties is better for the happiness of individual scholars and for the advancement of the community than a narrow training for a special pursuit. Accordingly, their educational system did not begin with professional seminaries, for the special training of any one class, but with schools of general culture, colleges of the liberal arts, as good as could be made with their resources and in that age. Instead of an academic staff made up of those who professed to teach some special branch of knowledge, these colleges had a master and fellows (or tutors), men who were fit to teach others those rudiments of higher learning in which they had themselves been taught. Moreover, as years rolled on, instead of concentrating personal and pecuniary support upon a few of the oldest and most{568} promising foundations, far-sighted men built up in every portion of the land colleges corresponding in their principal features with the original foundations, and depending for maintenance on the beneficence of individuals.

“The history of the colonial foundations abounds in examples of the wisdom and self-sacrifice with which they were conducted under circumstances which called for devotion to a lofty ideal. No one can study the biography of their graduates without discovering that they were the men who moulded the institutions of this country. It is easy to point out deficiencies in these academic organizations, as it is to criticise the defects of the emigrants’ cabins and the foresters’ paths; it is easy to lament that a deeper impression was not made upon the scholarship of the world; easy to mention influential men who never passed a day within college walls; easy to provoke a smile, a sneer, or a censure by the record of some narrow-minded custom or proceeding. But, nevertheless, the fact cannot be shaken that the old American colleges have been admirable places for the training of men. Let the roll of graduates of any leading institution be scrutinized, or even the record of a single class selected at random, and it will be seen that the number of life failures is very small, and the number of useful, intelligent, high-minded and upright careers very large. It may, therefore,{569} be said that the traditional college, though commonly hampered by ancient conditions and by the lack of funds with which to attain its own ideal, has remained the firm and valiant supporter of liberal culture, and that any revolutionary or rabid changes in its organization or methods should be carefully watched. Nevertheless, as we proceed, it will be evident that changes are inevitable and that most desirable improvements are in progress. The child is becoming a man.”

But we need more concentration of effort, money and good men, both as instructors and students, in colleges where the highest education may be obtained. The great number of our colleges is a source of weakness—not of strength. A great number of these institutions are mere academies, and seem to have been founded principally to keep students within the denominational fences of their parents; the college is charged with what should be the special work of parent and pastor. Says President Gilman:

“Every important Christian denomination has come to have its distinctive college, and many an argument has been framed to prove that sectarian colleges are better than those which seek to promote the union of several religious bodies. It has not been thought sufficient that a college should be pervaded by an enlightened Christianity, nor even that it should be the stronghold of{570} a simple evangelical life and doctrine, nor that it should be orthodox as to the fundamental teachings of the Church; but sectarian influences must everywhere predominate, among the trustees or in the faculty, or in both the governing bodies. Hence we see all over the land feeble, ill-endowed and poorly manned institutions, caring a little for sound learning, but a great deal more for the defence of denominational tenets.”

President Eliot, of Harvard, thus indicates the results of this spirit, added to another which is still less pardonable:

“In the absence of an established church, or of a dominant sect in the United States, denominational zeal has inevitably tended to scatter even those scanty resources which in two centuries have become available for the higher education; and this lamentable dissipation has been increased by the local pride of States, cities and neighborhoods, and the desire of many persons, who had money to apply to public uses, to found new institutions rather than to contribute to those already established—a desire not unnatural in a new country, where love of the old and venerable in institutions has but just sprung up. In short, the different social, political and religious conditions of this country have, thus far, quite prevented the development of commanding universities like those of the mother-country.”

As the greater colleges increase in financial{571} and intellectual strength, the weaker ones must either drop out of existence, or be satisfied to impart merely the high-school course of instruction, and prepare their more aspiring pupils to enter colleges worthy of the name. Ex-President White, of Cornell University, foreshadows their future as follows:

“Our country has already not far short of four hundred colleges and universities more or less worthy of those names, besides a vast number of high-schools and academies quite as worthy to be called colleges or universities as many which bear those titles. But the system embracing all these has by no means reached its final form. Probably in its more complete development the stronger institutions, to the number of twenty or thirty, will, within a generation or two, become universities in the true sense of the word, restricting themselves to university work; beginning, perhaps, at the studies now usually undertaken in the junior year of our colleges, and carrying them on through the senior year, with two or three years of special or professional study afterward. The best of the others will probably accept their mission as colleges in the true sense of the word, beginning the course two years earlier than at present, and continuing it to what is now the junior year. Thus they will do a work intermediate between the general school system of the country and the{572} universities, a work which can be properly called collegiate, a work the need of which is now sorely felt, and which is most useful and honorable. Such an organization will give us as good a system as the world has ever seen, probably the best system.”

There is no lack of money for institutions of learning which show special aptitude in any direction. A belief in thorough education is common to almost all progressive men, whether they themselves are college graduates or “self-made” men. President White, after naming many men who have given largely to different colleges, says:

“Such a tide of generosity bursting forth from the hearts and minds of strong and shrewd men who differ so widely from each other in residence and ideas, yet flowing in one direction, means something. What is it? At the source of it lies, doubtless, a perception of duty to the country and a feeling of pride in the country’s glory. United with this is, naturally, more or less of an honorable personal ambition; but this is not all; strong common sense has done much to create the current and still more to shape its course. For, as to the origin of this stream, the wealthy American knows perfectly that the laws of his country favor the dispersion of inherited wealth rather than its retention; that in two or three generations at most his descendants, no matter{573} how large their inheritance, must come to the level determined by their character and ability; that their character and ability are most likely to be injured, and therefore the level to which they subside lowered, by an inheritance so large as to engender self-indulgence; that while, in Great Britain, the laws and customs of primogeniture and entail enable men of vast wealth to tie up their property, and so to found families, this, in America, is impossible; and that though the tendency toward the equalization of fortunes may sometimes be retarded, it cannot be prevented.

“So, too, as to the direction of the stream; this same common sense has given its main channel. These great donors have recognized the fact that the necessity for universal primary education will always be seen, and can be adequately provided for, only by the people as a whole; but that the necessity for that advanced education which can alone vivify and energize the whole school system, drawing a rich life up through it, sending a richer life down through it, will rarely be provided for, save by the few men wise enough to understand a great national system of education, and strong enough efficiently to aid it.

“It is, then, plain, good sense which has led mainly to the development of a munificence such as no other land has seen; therefore it is that the long list of men who have thus distinguished{574} themselves and their country is steadily growing longer.”

But in opposition to the spirit which founded and has supported our many institutions of learning there has arisen a pestilent theory, born of the sudden increase of wealth and love of luxury, that no education is worth anything which does not enable a man to make more money and make it easier than his neighbor who has had no liberal schooling. Because technical schools—of which the more we have the better off we will be—teach men to use their wits about many practical things, there seems to be prevalent a stupid notion that material things are all there are of life, and that sentiments, principles and aspirations are not worth cultivating. Such stuff might do if we were a nation of shopkeepers, but we are not that kind of people. For each man who is thinking and caring only for money and what it will bring him are half a dozen earnest, clear-headed people who know that all human needs are not satisfied when the stomach is full and the senses satiated.

In a recent and admirable address to a college society Bishop Potter fairly stated and answered the current sneer at the higher education, as follows:

“We are met by a spirit which it is time, I think, that we recognize, as there is a need that it should be challenged. We Americans are, of{575} all peoples under the sun, supremely a practical people. No mechanism is invented, no book is written, no theory is propounded, but that straightway there is heard a voice demanding: ‘Well, this is all very interesting, very novel, very eloquent; but what, after all, is the good of it? To what contrivance, to what enterprise can you hitch this discovery, this vision of yours, and make it work? How will it push, pull, pump, lift, drive, bore, so that, employed thus, it may be a veritable producer? Yes, we want learning for our young men, our young women; but how can it be converted by the shortest road and in the most effectual way into a marketable product?’ ‘The man of the North,’ says De Tocqueville, writing of our North, ‘has not only experience, but knowledge. He, however, does not care for science as a pleasure, and only embraces it with avidity when it leads to useful applications.’ And the worst of such an indictment is the fact that it is still so often true.

“The conditions of this generation demand that we should be reminded that, beyond bodies to be clothed, and tastes to be cultivated, and wealth to be accumulated, there is in each one of us an intellect to be developed and, by means of it, truth to be discerned, which, beside all other undertakings to which the mind of man can bend itself, should forever be foremost and supreme. The gratification of our physical{576} wants, and next to that the gratification of our personal vanity or ambition, may seem to many people at once the chief end of existence and the secret of the truest happiness. But there have been men who have neither sought nor cared for these things, who have found in learning for its own sake at once their sweetest rewards and their highest dignity.

“The vocation of the scholar of our time becomes most plain. He is to take his stand and to make his protest. With a dignity and a resolution born of the greatness of his calling and his opportunity, he is to spurn that low estimate of his work and its result which measures them by what they have earned in money or can produce in dividends. Here, in his counting-room or his warehouse, sits the plutocrat who has amassed his millions, and who can forecast the fluctuations of the market with the unerring accuracy of an aneroid barometer. To such a one comes the professor from some modest seat of learning among the hills, minded to see his old classmate of other days, to grasp his hand again, and to learn, if it may be, how he fares. And the rich man looks down with a bland condescension upon the school-fellow who chose the company of his books rather than the companionship of the market-place, and as he notes, perhaps, his lean and Cassius-like outline, his seedy if not shabby garb, and his shy and rustic{577} manner, smooths his own portly and well-clad person with complacency, and thanks his stars that he early took to trade. Poor fool! He does not perceive that his friend the professor has most accurately taken his measure, and that the clear and kindly eyes that look at him through those steel-bowed spectacles have seen with something of sadness, and something more of compassion, how the finer aspirations of earlier days have all been smothered and quenched! In an age which is impatient of any voice that will not cry, ‘Great is the god of railroads and syndicates, and greater yet are the apostles of ‘puts’ and ‘calls,’ of ‘corners’ and pools!’ we want a race of men who by their very existence shall be a standing protest against the reign of a coarse materialism and a deluge of greed and self-seeking.

“But to have such a race of men we must have among us those whose vision has been purged and unsealed to see the dignity of the scholar’s calling. One may not forget that among those who will soon go forth from college halls to begin their work in life there must needs be many to whom the nature of that work, and in some sense the aims of it, are foreordained by the conditions under which they are compelled to do it. One may not forget, in other words, that, with many of us, the stern question of earning our bread is that which most urgently{578} challenges us, and which we cannot hope to evade. But there is no one of us who may not wisely remember that, in the domain of the intellect as in the domain of the spiritual and moral nature, ‘the life is more than meat and the body than raiment,’ and that the hope of our time, or of any time, is not in men who are concerned in what they can get, but in what they can see. Frederick Maurice has well reminded us how inadequate is that phrase which describes the function of the scholar to be the acquisition of knowledge. Here is a man whose days and nights are spent in laborious plodding, and whose brain, before he is done with life, becomes a store-house from which you can draw out a fact as you would take down a book from the shelves of a library. We must not speak of such a scholar disrespectfully; and in a generation which is impatient of plodding industry, and content, as never before, with smart and superficial learning, we may well honor those whose rare acquisitions are the fruit of painful and untiring labor. But, surely, his is a nobler understanding of his calling as a scholar who has come to see that, in whatsoever department of inquiry, it is not so much a question of how much learning he is possessed of, as, rather, how truly anything that he has learned has possessed him. There are men whose acquirements in mere bulk and extent are, it may be, neither{579} large nor profound. But when they have taken their powers of inquiry and investigation and gone with them to the shut doors of the kingdom of knowledge, they have tarried there in stillness and on their knees, waiting and watching for the light. And to these has come, in all ages, that which is the best reward of the scholar—not a fact to be hung up on a peg and duly numbered and catalogued, but the vision of a truth to be the inspiration of all their lives.”

Among the departments of higher education at which the self-styled “practical” man turns up his nose are the mental, moral and political sciences. They are sneered at as a mass of mere theories; good enough, perhaps, to help intellectual natures otherwise unoccupied to pass away the time, but of no practical good in the world. Yet President Gilman, whose mind runs largely upon applied science, says of these studies:

“They have twofold value—their service to the individual and their service to the state. It is by the study of the history of opinion, by the scrutiny of mental phenomena, and by the discussion of ethical principles, that religious and moral character is to be developed. The hours of reflection are redeemed from barrenness and made fruitful, like sand-plains irrigated by mountain-streams, when they are pervaded by{580} the perennial currents which flow from the lofty heights of philosophy and religion. Above all other educational subjects in importance stands philosophy, the exercise of reason upon those manifold and perplexing problems of existence which are as old as humanity and as new as the nineteenth century. For its place in a liberal education no substitute need apply. What is true of the moral sciences in reference to individual character may be said of the historical and political sciences in relation to the state. That nation is in danger of losing its liberties, and of entering upon a period of corruption and decay, which does not keep its eye steadily fixed on the experience of other nations, and does not apply to its own institutions and laws the lessons of the past. The evils we complain of, the burdens we carry, the dangers we fear, are to be met by the accumulated experience of other generations and of other climes.”

Yet this distinguished teacher would not, like some men of equal note but less breadth of character, have the college student restrict himself to these departments of study. He shows himself abreast of the times when he says:

“A liberal education requires an acquaintance with scientific methods, with the modes of inquiry, of observation, of comparison, of eliminating error and of ascertaining truth, which are observed by modern investigators. Such an{581} acquaintance may be better secured by prolonged and thorough attention to one great department of science, like chemistry, physics, biology, or geology, than by acquiring a smattering of twenty branches. If every college student would daily for one or two years devote a third of his study time to either of the great subjects we have ............