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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVI. No. 664 



massive energies toward the opening of the 

 gigantic land, toward the building up of 

 its democratic commonwealth, and which 

 had thus for a long while little leisure for 

 science and art, for scholarship and litera- 

 ture? How could it be that the business 

 men and the men of affairs would be ranked 

 there behind the professional specialist ? 



In Germany the opposite development 

 has led historically to the opposite valua- 

 tion. The professional men, who alone 

 through centuries had the privilege 'of 

 widening their minds in the atmosphere of 

 the university, had to stand, therefore, in 

 public opinion high above the men of prac- 

 tical interests who had nothing but a school 

 diploma. To go into business or industry 

 and practical affairs thus meant a second- 

 class occupation, with which those had to 

 be satisfied whose brain or whose pocket- 

 book did not allow those years of university 

 study. Every social premium and every 

 social ambition became attached to these 

 learned professions, in common only with 

 the position of the nobleman and the army 

 officer, who, for historic reasons of another 

 sphere, seemed equally exalted beyond the 

 masses of those pitied money-makers. And 

 this traditional prejudice was in good har- 

 mony with the Germany of the day before 

 yesterday, when the population was poor 

 and their leaders were poets and thinkers. 



But the times have changed. Just as 

 America has added to its material culture 

 a rapidly growing ambition to rival the 

 Old World in the production of science and 

 art, so Germany has added commercial and 

 industrial ambition to its spiritual aims. 

 Germany has grown prosperous, a mighty 

 rival in the markets of the world. There 

 may be not a few who complain of this 

 rapid Americanization of the world, but 

 they can not change the fact that the Ger- 

 many of William II. is no longer the Ger- 

 many of Schiller and Kant. With political 



unity, with the inheritance of Bismarck's 

 constructive work, with the triumphs of 

 Germany's technique and industry, a thor- 

 ough change in the social estimate has set 

 in. The practical walks of life are more 

 honored day by day; the sons of the best 

 families press on more and more into the 

 economic life, and thus it becomes daily 

 more incongruous that the inspiring influ- 

 ence of academic life should be withheld 

 from all those who do not seek a profes- 

 sional career. To attend the present uni- 

 versities and technical schools with their 

 specializing professional work would be, 

 indeed, inappropriate for them. That 

 which is needed for the Germany of to-day, 

 and still more for the Germany of to- 

 morrow, is an academic institute of a new 

 type— a university where the full freedom 

 of academic life can be joined to studies 

 of purely cultural character, where young 

 men may enter two years before they have 

 reached the present goal of the professional 

 university, and where a three or four years' 

 course would prepare them for the duties 

 of life without any thought of their later 

 occupation ; in short, what is needed to-day 

 is, in its essentials, an American college. 



Of course, there would be hardly any 

 chance for new experiments in the famous 

 old universities. They are certainly re- 

 juvenating themselves steadily by adding 

 new departments and introducing new 

 methods, by admitting women as regular 

 students, and so forth ; but the development 

 must remain an internal one without an 

 external change of the classical form and 

 of the framework of the four professional 

 faculties. The whole state organization is 

 too closely bound up with the system of the 

 uniyersity and the gratitude of the nation 

 too much attached to its time-honored fea- 

 tures to allow any tampering in the interest 

 of the unprofessional disciplines. A new 

 foundation would thus be the better oppor- 



