A UNIVERSITY PENSION SYSTEM 513 



That there is a measure of truth in this complaint no one who knows 

 the educational situation will deny. And yet I fancy that no man is 

 ready to advocate the abolition of universities in order to preserve the 

 rights of the secondary schools. The real lesson, on the other hand, is 

 that of a wise cooperation. No agency in civilized society^, not even a 

 university, can have absolute independence. What such an institution 

 can have is freedom, to he gained however by due observance of its right 

 relations to all other agencies in the social order. In a democracy the 

 power of public opinion, as fast as public opinion is educated, will bring 

 about such cooperation. The remedy for possible danger to the rights 

 of the individual or of the single institution does not- seem to lie in 

 reducing all agencies to ineffectiveness, but rather in the general educa- 

 tion of the whole people to an appreciation of the observance of the law. 

 In the last analysis an educated public opinion will regulate both the 

 relations of centralized educational agencies to the universities and the 

 relations of the universities to the secondary schools. Meantime, no 

 man in either form of organization will object to sincere and discrim- 

 inating criticism. It is such criticism which educates public opinion. 



Notwithstanding the incidental difficulties, therefore, which arise in 

 the administration of any system of pensions, I believe that the advan- 

 tages which have resulted from the conferring of pensions have far out- 

 weighed the disadvantages and that, furthermore, the advantages on the 

 whole seem likely to become stronger with time, while the disadvantages 

 seem likely to diminish. The value of a pension system depends not 

 only on the intelligence and conscience of those who administer it, but 

 on the spirit and morals of those who are to benefit by it, and the 

 dangers of a pension system lie mainly in those universal dangers which 

 come from human weakness and human selfishness. 



It is, to my thinking, a fair question whether the college pensions 

 ought not, like other pensions, to carry a contributory feature. No one 

 can be more sensible than I of the tremendous demands made upon the 

 meager salaries of the x\merican college teachers, and yet notwithstand- 

 ing this, it is impossible to remove the college teacher from those social 

 and moral obligations which affect all men. The experience of the 

 world seems to point strongly to the conclusion that on the whole a 

 contributory form of pension is likely to be most just and least harmful. 



VOL. LXXIX. — 35. 



