EDUCATIONAL ENDOWMENTS. 543 



structor, but no art can infuse life into the subject. It was perfectly- 

 easy to see that the class was deriving no mental pabulum from Lysias, 

 and that their minds were chiefly occupied with their chances of es- 

 caping a "flunk." There may be considerable literary merit in Lysias, 

 but the class did not see it or care to look for it. They were exclusively 

 occupied with the difficulty of translation and grammatical construc- 

 tion, and the whole process, as compared with real education, struck me 

 as very like gum-chewing as compared with eating. The empty form 

 is gone through witb, but there is no nutrition. And even in the most 

 popular courses, like the "seminary" in English literature, the same 

 fact stands out in bold relief. The class study More's " Utopia," Spen- 

 ser's " Faerie Queen," and the like, Tennyson's " Princess " being the 

 only masterpiece in the course, except " Silas Marner," which has been 

 written in any recent time. When I visited the class, it was striving, 

 with very little success, to seem interested in Wordsworth's " Excur- 

 sion." There may have been one member of the class who really had 

 a spontaneous appreciation of the poem, but I do not believe there 

 were more. After visiting even the best institutions artificially sup- 

 ported on the European plan, we are forced to think of the profound 

 remark of Bagehot, that "academies are asylums of the ideas and 

 tastes of the last age." 



If the harm done by endowments consisted simply in a support of 

 old-fashioned methods and subjects in education, it would be bad 

 enough. But the trouble does not end there. There is a morbid, or 

 what President Cleveland would call a pernicious, activity about them. 

 What energy they have they use in actively obstructing the march of 

 ideas and of political freedom. Oxford's history in this respect is too 

 notorious to admit of further mention. Harvard, too, can tell her 

 story. She has her Memorial Hall now for her sons who fell in the 

 war of the rebellion ; but time was when Senator Sumner was con- 

 spicuously slighted by her, and when Wendell Phillips was tabooed. 

 Narrow sympathies, extending only to the prevailing power, have 

 characterized " fair Harvard," as well as Oxford and the established 

 Church in England. This is not due to the individual characteristics 

 of the men who are for the time being in these institutions, but to a 

 general law obtaining among privileged castes and corporations. And 

 at this day, among the most prominent professors, we may find illus- 

 trations of this truth. It is not Oxford bishops alone who, from a class 

 instinct, are the perpetual barriers of progress and the ardent cham- 

 pions of all that we have nearly outgrown, whether in education, po- 

 litical economy, barbaric criminal codes, and indefensible wars ; in all 

 of which the records of Parliament throw a singularly unfavorable 

 light upon the English successors of the apostles, as may be seen in 

 their adherence to the old education, in their resistance to the reform 

 of the savage criminal code of England in the early part of this cent- 

 ury, in their well-nigh unanimous support of the corn laws, and in 



