July 12, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



37 



With them, with the complete recognition 

 of the principle that it is within the func- 

 tions of a democratic state to do— or to 

 delegate the legal power to do— whatsoever 

 the people want to do for learning, and 

 with general education boards with mil- 

 lions at their disposal every year for the 

 higher institutions, it is not difficult to see 

 that the colleges and universities in Amer- 

 ica which will endure will minister to all 

 the people, without reference to their 

 means, and will promote every phase of 

 honorable endeavor without regard to class 

 or station. 



Let it not be inferred that the typical 

 American university is, or is to be, the poor 

 man 's university. It is not to be burdened 

 with any qualifying adjectives. It is to be 

 the rich man's and the poor man's alike. 

 Its strength is, and is to be, in the fact that 

 it is representative of the common life. It 

 is to be no more exclusive than the consti- 

 tution of the country is exclusive, save 

 upon the one point of ability to do its work. 

 It brings rich and poor, men and women, 

 together upon the basis of advanced schol- 

 arship, and it gives intellect an opportunity 

 which is distinctly higher and nobler than 

 any that can follow the mere accidents of 

 birth or the mere incidents of life. 



No university can be a real or an effect- 

 ive American university and follow the 

 exclusive educational ideals of other coun- 

 tries and other times. A new nation has 

 been compounded in this country out of 

 people from all social, industrial, political 

 and moral conditions in the world. That 

 nation is working out its own salvation. 

 It is doing it upon lines that are peculiar 

 to itself. I think it is doing it safely and 

 effectually. The net result will be the 

 freest and the finest uplift to the intel- 

 lectual and moral state of men and women 

 that the world has ever seen. This thing 

 is not only going throiigh this nation, but. 



largely through the instrumentality of this 

 nation, it is going through the world. It 

 must, of necessity, create instrumentalities 

 which are peculiarly its own. Above all, 

 its educational institutions of the first rank, 

 which must regulate the ebb and flow of 

 the nation's best and truest thought, can 

 not be limited by ideals which had reached 

 their zenith before our nation was born and 

 before our political science had begun to 

 make its revolutionary impressions upon 

 the thinking and the destiny of mankind. 

 Nor, indeed, can we be limited by condi- 

 tions which prevail at this time in other 

 nations and their institutions. Without, 

 by any means, descending to the low level 

 of declaring that things in this country are 

 better than things in other countries only 

 because they are in this country, and cheer- 

 fully recognizing the vastness of the knowl- 

 edge we are yet to gain from other lands, 

 I dare make the declaration, in words that 

 will leave little to be misunderstood, that 

 we can not follow the British university, 

 with its narrow, purely classical and pure- 

 ly English scholarship, which is studiously 

 prevented from being broadened by that 

 fatuous policy of the ruling classes which 

 stubbornly refuses the organization of all 

 secondary schools through which the only 

 people who can broaden it may come to the 

 universities at all. We can not accept the 

 scheme of the French universities, over- 

 balanced as they are with the mechanical 

 and the imaginative, and dominated by the 

 martial feeling and the military organiza- 

 tion of a people who need the opportunity 

 of thinking freely above all other things. 

 Nor can we copy the German university, 

 which puts the scientifie method first, re- 

 gards sound morals but little, and con- 

 veniently absolves itself from all responsi- 

 bility about the character of its students, 

 so long as they can use a microscope to 

 magnify the strength of the empire. And 



