A NATIONAL UNIVERSITY. 689 



the bettering of conduct can be effected, not by insisting on maxims 

 of good conduct, still less by mere intellectual culture, but only by 

 that daily exercise of the higher sentiments and repression of the 

 lower, which results from keeping men subordinate to the requirements 

 of orderly social life letting them suffer the inevitable penalties of 

 breaking these requirements, and reap the benefits of conforming to 

 them. This alone is national education. 



A NATIONAL UNIVERSITY. 1 



By CHAKLES W. ELIOT, 



PRESIDENT OF HARVARD COLLEGE. 



I TURN next to my third topic, the true policy of our government 

 as regards university instruction. In almost all the writings about 

 a nation's university, and of course in the two Senate bills now under 

 discussion, there will be found the implication, if not the express as- 

 sertion, that it is somehow the duty of our government to maintain a 

 magnificent university. This assumption is the foundation upon which 

 rest the ambitious projects before us, and many similar schemes. Let 

 me try to demonstrate that the foundation is itself unsound. 



The general notion that a beneficent government should provide 

 and control an elaborate organization for teaching, just as it maintains 

 an army, a navy, or a post-office, is of European origin, being a legiti- 

 mate corollary to the theory of government by divine right. It is 

 said that the state is a person having a conscience and a moral respon- 

 sibility ; that the government is the visible representative of a peo- 

 ple's civilization, and the guardian of its honor and its morals, and 

 should be the embodiment of all that is high and good in the people's 

 character and aspirations. This moral person, this corporate repre- 

 sentative of a Christian nation, has high duties and functions com- 

 mensurate with its great powers, and none more imperative than that 

 of diffusing knowledge and advancing science. 



I desire to state this argument for the conduct of high educational 

 institutions by government, as a matter of abstract duty, with all the 

 force which belongs to it ; for, under an endless variety of thin dis- 

 guises, and with all sorts of amplifications and dilutions, it is a staple 

 commodity with writers upon the relation of government to educa- 

 tion. The conception of government upon which this argument is 



1 Closing argument of a report by President Eliot to the National Educational Asso- 

 ciation at its recent session in Elmira. The first part of the report gives an account of 

 what had been done by the Association about the project of a national university since 

 1869 ; and the second part examines the two bills on the subject which were brought 

 before Congress in 1872. 



vol. in. 44 



