November 17, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



621 



or indirect coercion to drive everybody 

 desiring higher education into the state 

 university. Northwestern University, and 

 Chicago University, and the Armour In- 

 stitute of Technology, and Milliken Univer- 

 sity and the many small colleges in the 

 state are taking care of students of college 

 and university age, in the aggregate far in 

 excess of the number provided for in the 

 state university. And in my opinion they 

 always will, and, further, they always 

 should. 



In other words, while I am a firm believer 

 in the principle of a state system of educa- 

 tion from the lowest grade to the highest, 

 I believe also thoroughly in utilizing, as 

 far as possible, the assistance of all other 

 agencies in the same department of educa- 

 tion. And this cooperation will, in this 

 country, for aught that we can see, for an 

 indefinite period be not only desirable, but 

 necessary to meet our educational needs. 



It is the non-state institution then in 

 England and in this country which has 

 been in a certain sense the ' ark of the cove- 

 nant, ' which has carried on from genera- 

 tion to generation the precious deposit of 

 learning and has been the intermediary by 

 which the spiritual possessions of the past 

 have been carried over and made the pos- 

 sessions of the present. 



Endowed institutions, whether under pri- 

 vate or church control, have thus done a 

 vast service. But, on the other hand, they 

 have the defects of their virtues. Educa- 

 tional institutions, whether private or state, 

 are by nature conservative. They resist 

 changes and improvements. They fight 

 progress almost as by a law of their being, 

 and the greater their endowments, the more 

 completely they are removed from the ne- 

 cessity of appeal to the life of their own 

 generation for support, the more set do 

 they become in their conservatism, the more 

 bulwarked in their opposition to all prog- 



ress. They may by their wealth defy the 

 currents of progress. They may oppose 

 themselves to all forward movements. Not 

 only may they do so, but in nearly every 

 instance in history they have done so. The 

 history of every European country demon- 

 strates that these bodies, the universities 

 and colleges, have had to be reformed by 

 law. Left to themselves they have suffered 

 of dry rot in an extreme form. Oxford 

 and Cambridge fought bitterly all attempts 

 to force them into line with modern prog- 

 ress. It was the forcible subjection of the 

 German university to the directing powder 

 of the government which broke up the 

 crust of conservatism and paved the way 

 for that wonderful career of progress 

 which put Germany at the head of scientific 

 progress. Even in our own country our 

 colleges and universities have the same 

 opposition to education and progress to 

 record. If the people in this country had 

 handed over to college and university facul- 

 ties the decision of the important educa- 

 tional questions which they have had to 

 settle in the last fifty years, we should have 

 to-day practically no high school system, 

 or one of comparatively little value. We 

 should have no system of state universities. 

 We should have, to a large extent, no pro- 

 fessional schools of high quality at all. It 

 is, indeed, a question whether we should 

 have even an efficient free common school 

 system. 



Fortunately for us, however, our institu- 

 tions as a whole have been so poverty- 

 stricken that they have been compelled to 

 appeal to the community continually for 

 funds, and in doing so they have been 

 forced into lines of progress which have 

 become more and more evident in the past 

 few years. I am a great admirer of Har- 

 vard University, easily the greatest of our 

 universities; I am a great admirer of 

 Harvard professors, and especially of that 



