62 Alumni Reunion 



reached when he was handed his A. B. diploma; when the 

 lower ranks of the teaching staffs of our colleges were 

 habitually recruited from among those who had just com- 

 pleted their studies in the senior class; when in almost 

 every department of learning and science always except- 

 ing of course cases of genius or of phenomenal industry 

 and energy our country was content not only to have the 

 work of research and discovery done for us by other 

 nations, but to lag decades behind the times even in the 

 acquisition of the results; when, excellent as were many 

 of our colleges in producing fine types of the "gentleman 

 and scholar," the name university in the European 

 sense could be applied to any of our institutions of learn- 

 ing only by a great stretch of courtesy. Every year a 

 little stream of students found its way across the Atlantic, 

 and every year a little stream of them came back from the 

 inspiring and stimulating experiences of Germany, to 

 diffuse a certain amount of knowledge of higher stand- 

 ards, and a certain amount of aspiration for higher 

 achievement; but, though this process had been going on 

 ever since the time when Longfellow and Bancroft were 

 youths, the things that the German universities stood for 

 remained, for the great majority of ardent and aspiring 

 young American scholars, nothing more than a distant 

 dream; while even the men who, in a foreign land, had 

 drunk for a while at the living fountain, soon lost, under 

 the pressure of absorbing routine duty, the taste of those 

 refreshing waters, and were fain to be content with ful- 

 filling the exacting functions of the college instructor. All 

 men of light and leading in our college world felt that 

 such acquiescence in palpable inferiority, such failure to 

 strive for the upper heights of intellectual effort, was 

 deplorable and discreditable; but the trammels of pre- 

 cedent, the absence of any appreciation of the situation, 

 or interest in its betterment, on the part of even the 

 educated public, seemed to make any hope of a marked 

 advance extremely remote. 



