NA TURE 



THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 1903. 



THE UNIVERSITY IN THE MODERN STATE} 



II. 



WHAT Germany thinks of the place of the uni- 

 versity in a modern State can be readily gathered 

 from the large and ever-increasing State endowments of 

 the numerous universities in Prussia and the other con- 

 stituent countries. 



The university activity of Prussia itself dates from the 

 time after Jena, 1806, when the nation was, as Sir 

 Rowland Blennerhassett has told us, a bleeding and 

 lacerated mass, so impoverished and shattered that 

 there seemed to be little future before it. King Frederick 

 William III. and his councillors, among them Wilhelm 

 von Humboldt, founded the University of Berlin, "to 

 supply the loss of territory by intellectual effort." Among 

 the universal poverty, money was also found for the Uni- 

 versities of Koenigsberg and Breslau, and Bonn was 

 founded in 1818. Observatories and other scientific in- 

 stitutions were not forgotten. As a result of this policy, 

 carried on persistently and continuously by successive 

 Ministers, aided by wise councillors, many of them the 

 products of this policy, such a state of things was 

 brought about that Palmerston, a typical English states- 

 man, is stated by Matthew Arnold to have defined the 

 Germany of his day as a country of " damned professors," 

 and so well have the damned professors done their 

 work since that not long ago M. Ferdinand Lot, one of the 

 most distinguished educationists of France, accorded to 

 Germany "a supremacy in science comparable to the 

 supremacy of England at sea." 



The whole history of Prussia since then constitutes 

 indeed a magnificent object lesson on the influence of 

 brain-power on history. There can be no question that 

 the Prussia of to-day, the leader of a united Germany, 



with its armed strength both for peace and war and 

 craving for a wider world dominion, is the direct out- 

 come of the policy of " intellectual effort " inaugurated 

 in 1806. 



The most remarkable thing about the German uni- 

 versities in later years is the constant addition of new 

 departments, added to enable them to meet and even to 

 anticipate the demands made for laboratories in which 

 each scientific subject, as it has been developed, can be 

 taught on Liebig's plan, that is by experiment, observ- 

 ation and research. 



It is in such State-aided institutions as these that the 

 members of the German Ministry and Parliament, and 

 the leading industrials are trained, while in our case, in 

 consequence of the lack of funds for new buildings at 

 Oxford and Cambridge, and, until not many years ago, 

 the lack of other high-teaching centres, our leaders have 

 had to be content with curricula extant before Galileo 

 was born, the teaching being, perhaps, not so good and 

 the desire to learn generally much less. 



No one will deny that the brain-power of a nation 

 must, in the last resort, depend upon the higher mental 

 training obtainable in that nation. It is well, therefore, 

 to see how we stand in this matter. 



The following tables will show what the German 

 Government is doing to provide brain-power in Germany. 

 Those who know most about our British conditions will 

 see how we are likely to fare in any competition with 

 Germany in which brain-power comes in, if indeed there 

 can be any important sphere of activity undertaken by 

 either King, Lords or Commons in which brain-power 

 does not come in. 



We owe the first table giving the facts relating to the 

 ordinary State endowments of the twenty-two German 

 universities to the kindness of Mr. Alexander Siemens, 

 who was good enough to obtain through official sources 

 an extract from the " Preussische Statistik " containing an 

 article by Dr. Petersilie. This deals with 1891-2, the 

 last year dealt with by the statistical bureau. 



Table I.— Ordinary State Endowment, Year 1891-2. 



NO. 1 74 1, vol. 67] 



1 Continued from p. iq6. 



