54 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shown frequently in the " livings " of the English Church mere sine- 

 cures, involving little labor, much reward, and great security for dull- 

 ness and incapacity.* Relieved from the necessity of rendering serv- 

 ice which will be spontaneously recognized, the irresistible tendency 

 of weak human nature is to desist from the hard toil which such serv- 

 ice demands, and to take refuge, gradually and unconsciously, in doing 

 what will satisfy the powers that be ; in high pretense instead of actual 

 performance, and in pedantry instead of sound learning. 



Aad testimony is not wanting to show that the vast success of 

 Oxford and the aristocratic schools of England in producing ignorant 

 dunces is paralleled, fortunately on a milder scale, in this country. In 

 a recent paper in " The Forum," President Robinson speaks of various 

 disadvantages suffered by himself when in college : 



" To add to my misfortune, the most intimate of my friends, though 

 pure in their lives, and morally wholesome as associates, were low in 

 their aims as scholars, satisfied with very little and very superficial 

 work. They had been sent to college to prepare for the ministry, and 

 were fair specimens of the average of a class of men not yet wholly 

 extinct. Selected and aided by beneficiary funds as ' candidates for 

 the ministry,' they seemed to regard themselves as absolved from the 

 duty of high aims as scholars, and dropped into the wretched cant of 

 Maying aside ambition as unworthy the servants of the Lord.'" "The 

 Nation " comments on this by saying that the same thing " is true 

 of a larger part of the men who go to many of our colleges to-day 

 under similar conditions" that is, on a charitable basis. And it 

 further observes that, " if he had followed these men out into life, he 

 would have had little difficulty in showing that their effect upon the 

 moral and political influence of the pulpit had also been a misfortune." 

 There is nothing strange in this. Mendicancy is equally bad in its 

 effects on the beneficiary and on the public. 



A glance through the catalogues of the leading American institu- 

 tions will justify the opinion expressed as to the total irrelation bred 

 by endowments between public demand and educational supply. In 

 Harvard, the leading university of the country, we find courses of 

 study on the following languages among others : Hebrew, Aramaic, 

 Assyrian, Arabic, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Old Iranian, Pali. This in a 

 university which offers little instruction on the greatest problems con- 

 fronting the people of the present age. And in the University of 

 Michigan, at which I took a degree, the same general facts appear, not- 

 withstanding a closer responsibility to public opinion than Harvard is 

 subjected to. A short time ago I visited the university, going to hear 

 a classmate of mine instruct a class in Lysias. He is an excellent in- 



* So it is with endowed libraries. The Lenox and Astor Libraries of New York are 

 good illustrations both of the high expectations with which such institutions are founded, 

 and of subsequent disappointment. They are closed for long vacations, and are open for 

 few hours during their season (and those are inconvenient). 



