Chapter Fifteen: The Schools and Popular Education…

Chapter Fifteen: The Schools and Popular Education

The Dutch population of New Amsterdam started a school system in the year 1621. The first public Latin school was founded in Boston in the year 1635. The other colonies soon followed. Clearly the English governor of Virginia, Berkeley, had not quite grasped the spirit of the New World, when at about that time he wrote home, that, thank God, no public schools and no printing-press existed here, and when he added his hope that they would not be introduced for a hundred years, since learning brings irreligion and disobedience into the world, and the printing-press disseminates them and fights against the best intentions of the government. For that matter it was precisely Virginia which was the first colony, even before Boston and New York, to consider the question of education. As early as 1619 the treasurer of the Virginia Company had proposed, in the English Parliament, that 15,000 acres of land should be set aside in the interests of a school for higher education. The English churches became interested in the plan, and an abundant supply of money was got together. Ground and buildings had been procured for lower and higher instruction and all was in working order, when in 1622 the fearful Indian war upset everything. The buildings were destroyed, and all thought of public education was for a long time given up. This is how that condition came about which so well pleased Governor Berkeley. But this mishap to the Virginia colony shows at once how the American system of education has not been able to progress in any systematic way, but has suffered frequent reverses through war or political disturbance. And it has developed in the different parts of the country at a very different pace, sometimes even in quite different directions. It was not until after the Civil War—that is, within the last thirty years—that these differences have to a large extent been wiped out. It is only to-day that one can speak of a general American system. The outsider will, therefore, come to a better understanding of the American educational system if he begins his study with conditions as they are to-day, for they are more unified and therefore easier to understand, than if he were to try to understand how the present has historically come from the complicated and rather uninteresting past.

So we shall not ask how the educational system has developed, but rather what it is to-day and what it aims to be. Even the present-day conditions may easily lead a German into some confusion, because he is naturally inclined to compare them with the conditions at home, and such a comparison is not always easy. Therefore, we must picture to ourselves first of all the fundamental points in the system, and describe its principal variations from the conditions in Germany. A few broad strokes will suffice for a first inspection.

The unit of the system in its completest form is a four years’ course of instruction. For the easier survey we may think of a boundary drawn at what in Germany would be between the Obersekunda and Prima of a Gymnasium or Realschule. Now, three such units of the system lie before and two after this line of demarcation. The son of a well-to-do family, who is to study medicine in Harvard University, will probably reach this line of demarcation in his eighteenth year. If he is advanced according to the normal scheme he will have entered a primary school at six years of age, the grammar school at ten, and the high school at fourteen. Thus he will complete a twelve years’ course in the public schools. Now he crosses our line of demarcation in his eighteenth year and enters college. And as soon as he has finished his four years’ course in college he begins his medical studies in the university, and he is twenty-six years old when he has finished. If we count in two years of early preparation in the kindergarten, we shall see that the whole scheme of education involves twenty-two years of study. Now, it is indeed possible that our young medical student will have progressed somewhat more rapidly; perhaps he will have reached the high school after six instead of eight years of study; perhaps he will finish his college course in three years, and it may be that he will never have gone to kindergarten. But we have at first to concern ourselves with the complete plan of education, not with the various changes and abbreviations of it, which are very properly allowed and even favoured.

The line which we call the great boundary is the time when the lad enters college. Now, what is the great significance of this moment? The German, who thinks in terms of Gymnasium and Universität, is almost sure to fall into a misapprehension; for college is neither the one nor the other. So far as the studies themselves go, it coincides rather well with the Prima of the Gymnasium and the first two or three semesters in the philosophical faculty of the German university. And yet even this by no means tells one what a college really is. Above all, it does not explain why the American makes the chief division at the time of entering college, while the German makes it when he enters the medical or law school. This needs to be explained most clearly, because very important factors are here involved, which bear on the future of American civilization. And so we must give especial attention to college and the professional schools. But that discussion is to be reserved for the chapter on the universities. For the present, we have only to deal with the system of instruction in those schools which prepare for college.

And so, leaving the kindergarten out of the question, we shall deal with those three institutions which we have called primary, grammar, and high schools. Usually, the first two of these are classed together as one eight years’ course of training. The European will be struck at once that in this system there is only one normal plan of public education. The future merchant, who goes to the high school and ends his studies in the eighteenth year, has to follow the same course of study in the primary and grammar schools as the peasant and labourer who studies only until his fourteenth year, and then leaves school to work in the field or the factory. And this young merchant, although he goes into business when he is eighteen years old, pursues exactly the same studies as the student who is later to go to college and the university. Now in fact, in just this connection the actual conditions are admirably adapted to the most diverse requirements; the public schools find an admirable complement in private schools; and, more than that, certain very complicated differentiations have been brought about within the single school, in order to overcome the most serious defects of this uniformity. Nevertheless, the principle remains; the system is uniform, and the American himself finds therein its chief merit.

The motive for this is clear. Every one, even the most humble, should find his way open; every one must be able to press on as far as his own intelligence permits; in other words—words which the American pedagogue is very fond of uttering—the public school is to make the spirit of caste impossible. It is to wipe out the boundaries between the different classes of society, and it is to see to it, that if the farmer’s lad of some remote village feels within himself some higher aspiration, and wants to go beyond the grammar school to the high school and even to college, he shall find no obstacle in his way. His advance must not be impeded by his suddenly finding that his entrance into the high school would need some different sort of previous training.

This general intermingling of the classes of society is thought to be the panacea of democracy. The younger generations are to be removed from all those influences which keep their parents apart, and out of all the classes of society the sturdiest youth are to be free of all prejudice and free to rise to the highest positions. Only in this wise can new sound blood flow through the social organism; only so can the great evils incident to the formation of castes which have hindered old Europe in its mighty progress be from the very outset avoided. The classic myth relates of the hero who gained his strength because he kissed the earth. In this way the American people believe that they will become strong only by returning with every fresh generation to the soil, and if the German Gymnasia were a hundred times better than they are, and if they were able to prepare a boy from early childhood for the highest intellectual accomplishment, America would still find them unsuited to her needs, because from the outset they are designed for only a small portion of the people, and for this reason they make it almost impossible for the great mass of boys to proceed to the universities from the ordinary public schools.

All of this is the traditional confession of belief of the pedagogue of the New World. But now since America, in the most recent times, has nevertheless begun to grow in its social structure considerably more like antiquated Europe, and sees itself less and less able to overcome the tendencies to a spirit of caste, so a sort of mild compromise has been made between the democratic creed and aristocratic tendencies, especially in the large cities of the East. Nevertheless, any one who keeps his eyes open will admit that, so far as the public school goes, intellectual self-perfection is in every way favoured, so that every single child of the people may rise as high as he will. Grammar school leads to the high school, and the high school leads to college.

There is another factor which is closely related to the foregoing. Education is free and obligatory. In olden times there was more the tendency for the parents of the children, rather than for the general taxpayer, to pay for the maintenance of the schools. Indeed, there were times in which the remission of the special school tax was considered almost an act of charity, which only the poorest of the parents would accept. But now it is quite different. The school system knows no difference between rich and poor, and it is a fundamental principle that the support of the schools is a matter for the whole community. The only question is in regard to the high school, since after all only a small percentage of school children comes as far as the high school; and it is unjust, some say, to burden the general taxpayer with the expenses of such school.

Nevertheless, on this point the opinions of those have won who conceive that it is the duty of the community to nurture any effort toward self-culture, even in the poorest child. The chief motive in olden times, wherefore the expenses of the schools were paid by all, was that the school was leading toward religion; to-day the official motive for the application of taxes to the maintenance of schools is the conviction that only an educated and cultivated people can rule itself. The right to vote, it is said, presupposes the right to an education by means of which every citizen becomes able to read the papers of the day and to form his own independent opinion on public matters. But since every public school is open also to the daughters of the citizens who possibly want the right to vote, but do not so far have it, it becomes clear that the above-mentioned political motive is not the whole of the matter. It is enough for technical discussions of taxation, but what the community is really working for is the greatest possible number of the most highly educated individuals. Free instruction is further supplemented in various states—as, for instance, in Massachusetts—by supplying text-books gratis. Some other states go so far as to supply the needy children with clothing. The obligatory character of education goes with the fact that it is free. In this respect, too, the laws of different states are widely divergent. Some require seven, others eight, still others even nine years, of school training. And the school year itself is fixed differently in different states.

These differences between the states point at once to a further fact which has been characteristic of the American school system from the very beginning. Responsibility for the schools rests at the periphery; and in extremely happy fashion the authority is so divided that all variations, wherever they occur, are adaptations to local conditions; and nevertheless unity is preserved. A labile equilibrium of the various administrative factors is brought about by harmonious distribution of the authority, and this is, in all departments of public life, the peculiar faculty of the Americans.

The federal government, as such, has no direct influence on education. The tirelessly active Bureau of Education at Washington, which is under the direction of the admirable pedagogue, Mr. Harris, is essentially a bureau for advice and information and for the taking of statistics. The legal ordinances pertaining to school systems is a matter for the individual state, and the state again leaves it to the individual community, within certain limits of course and under state supervision, to build schools and to organize them, to choose their teachers, their plans of education, and their school-books. And at every point here, exactly as in the striking example of the federal Constitution, the responsibility is divided between the legislative and the executive bodies. The state inspector of schools is co-ordinate with the state legislature, and the school inspector of a city or a country district, who is elected now by the mayor, now by the council, now perhaps directly by the community, is a sort of technical specialist with considerable discretionary power; he is co-ordinated to the school committee, which is elected by the community, and which directs the expenditures and confirms all appointments.

The responsibility for the moral and intellectual standards, for the practical conditions, and for the financial liabilities incurred by every school, rests therefore immediately with the community, which has to pay for their support, and whose children are to derive advantage. And nevertheless, the general oversight of the state sees to it that neither whimsicality nor carelessness abuses this right, nor departs too widely from approved traditions. These authorities are further supplemented in that the state legislature is more or less able to make up for differences between rich and poor districts and between the city and the country, besides directly carrying on certain normal schools in which the teachers for the elementary and grammar schools are trained.

Very great and very diverse advantages are the immediate outcome of this administrative system. Firstly, an interest in the well-being of the schools is developed in every state, city, and town, and the spirit of self-perfection is united with the spirit of self-determination. Secondly, there is a good deal of free play for local differences—differences between states and differences within the state. Nothing would have been more unsuitable than in this whole tremendous territory to institute a rigidly fixed school system, as say by some federal laws or some interstate agreements. If there were the same educational provisions for the negro states of the South and for the Yankee states of New England, for the thickly settled regions of the East and the prairies of the West, these provisions would be either empty words or else they would tend to drag down the more highly educated parts of the country to the level of the lowest districts. The German who objects to this on the ground of uniformity, does so because he is too apt to think of the great similarity which exists between the different sections of Germany. The only proper basis for a comparison, however, would be his taking Europe as a whole into consideration.

If now the outward unity of this system which we have described is nevertheless to be maintained, it is absolutely necessary that this form shall be filled with very different contents. And this introduction of diversity is intrusted to the state legislatures and local authorities, who are familiar with the special conditions. In this way the so-called school year in the school ordinances of a rich state may be about twice as long as in another state whose poorer population is perhaps not able entirely to do without the economies of child labour. But the differences between the schools take particularly such a form that the attainments of the different schools, corresponding to the culture and prosperity of the state in which they are, and of the community, are consciously designed to be quite different. The remoter rural schools which, on account of the poverty of their patronage perhaps, have to get on with one badly trained teacher and have to carry on four grades of instruction in one school-room, and other schools which employ only university graduates, which bring their scholars together in sumptuous buildings, afford them laboratories and libraries, and have all the wealth of a great city to back them—these schools cannot seriously enter into competition with each other. Two years of study in one place will mean more than four in another; and there is no special danger in this, since this very inequality has brought it about that the completion of one grade in a school by no means carries with it the right to enter the next higher grade of any other school. It is not the case that a scholar who has passed through any grammar school whatsoever will be welcome in every high school. This is regulated by an entrance examination for the higher school, which will not accept merely the certificate of graduation from a lower.

There are still other forms of this differentiation. In the first place, the schools have shown a growing tendency to establish various parallel courses, between which the scholars are allowed to choose. In the simplest case there is, perhaps, on the one hand a very practical plan of education, and a second course which is rather more liberal; or, again, there may be a course for those who are not meaning to study further, and another course for those who are preparing for the entrance examinations to some higher school. The fiction of uniformity is preserved in this way. The child does not, as in Germany, choose between different schools; but he chooses between plans of education in the same school, and every day the tendency deepens to make this elective system more and more labile.

But the most modern pedagogues are not content even with this, and insist, especially in the grade of the high school, that the make-up of the course of study must be more and more, as they say, adapted to the individuality of the scholars; or, as others think, to the whimsies of the parents and the scholars. Since, in accordance with this, the entrance examinations for the colleges leave considerable free play for the choice of specialties, this movement will probably go on developing for some time. It appeals very cleverly to the instincts of both the Puritans and the utilitarians. The Puritan demands the development of all individual gifts, and the utilitarian wants the preparation for an individual career. Nevertheless, there are some indications of an opposite tendency. Even the utilitarian begins to understand that he is best fitted for the fight who bases his profession on the broadest foundation—who begins, therefore, with his specialization as late as possible. And the Puritan, too, cannot wholly forget that nothing is more important for his personal development than the training of the will in the performance of duty, in the overcoming of personal inhibitions, and that therefore for the scholar those studies may well be the most valuable which at the first he seems least inclined to pursue. Further differentiation results from the almost universal opportunity to pass through the schools in a somewhat shorter time. It is also possible for a student to progress more rapidly in one branch of study, and so in different branches to advance at different rates.

We have over and above all these things, and more particularly in the large cities, a factor of differentiation which has so far been quite left out of account. This is the private school. The goal for the student who wants to advance is not the diploma of graduation, but preparation for the entrance examinations which are next higher. This preparation can perhaps be obtained more thoroughly, more quickly, and under more fortunate social conditions, in a private school, which charges a high tuition, but in this way is able to engage the very best teachers, and able perhaps to have smaller classes than the public schools. And such a private school will be able to extend its influence over all education. Large and admirably conducted institutions have grown up, often in some rural vicinity, where several hundred young persons lead a harmonious life together and are educated from their earliest youth, coming home only during vacation. In such ways the private school has taken on the most various forms, corresponding to obvious needs. They find justly the encouragement of the state.

This diversity which we have sketched of public and private educational institutions brings us at once to another principle, which has been and always will be of great significance in American material and intellectual history—the principle that everywhere sharp demarcations between the institutions of different grades are avoided, and that instead, sliding gradations and easy transitions are brought about, by means of which any institution can advance without any hindrance. This is in every case the secret of American success—free play for the creations of private initiative. The slightest aspiration must be allowed to work itself out, and the most modest effort must be helped along. Where anything which is capable of life has sprung up, it should be allowed to grow. Sharp demarcation with official uniformity would make that impossible; for only where such unnoticeably small steps form the transitions, is any continuous inner growth to be expected. We have emphasized the local differences. The grammar school in New York is probably more efficient than the high school in Oklahoma, and the high school in Boston will carry its students probably as far as some little college in Utah.

The thousands of institutions which exist afford a continuous transition between such extremes, and every single institution can set its own goal as high as it wishes to. A school does not, by any act of law, pass into a higher class; but it perfects itself by the fact that the community introduces improvements, makes new changes, appoints better and better teachers, augments the curriculum, and adds to its physical equipment. In such ways, the school year by year imperceptibly raises its standard. And the same is true of the private school. Everything is a matter of growth, and in spite of the outward uniformity of the system every school has its individual standard. If one were to require that only such institutions should exist as had distinctly limited and similar aims, then the American would look on this as he would on an attempt to force all cities to be either of ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or a million inhabitants. Of course, all this would have to be changed, if as in Germany, certain school grades carried with them certain privileges. In America no school diploma carries officially any privilege at all. It is the entrance examination, and not the tests for graduation, which is decisive; and if there is any question of filling a position, the particular schools which the candidates have gone through are the things which are chiefly taken into account.

We must mention one more trait which differentiates the American from the German school system. The American public school is co-educational. Co-education means theoretically that boys and girls are entitled to common education, but practically it means that boys are also tolerated. The idea that the school should not recognize differences of sex is most firmly rooted in the Middle-Western States, where the population is somewhat coldly matter of fact; but it has spread through the entire country. It is said that family life lends the authority for such an intermingling of boys and girls; that, through a constant and mutual influence, the boys are refined and the girls are made hardy; and that, during the years of development, sexual tension is diminished. It is one of the chief attractions that the private school offers to smaller circles that it gives up this hardening of the girls and refining of the boys, and is always either a boys’ or a girls’ school.

Even more striking than the presence of girls in the boys’ schools is, perhaps, the great number of women who figure as teachers. The employment of women teachers began in the Northern States after the Civil War, because as a direct result of the decimation of the population there were not men teachers enough. Since that time this practice has increased throughout the country; and although high schools generally try to get men teachers, the more elementary schools are really wholly in the hands of women. Men do not compete for the lower schools, since the competition of the women has brought down the wages, and more remunerative, not to say more attractive, situations are to be found in plenty. Women, on the other hand, flock in in great numbers, since their whole education has made them look forward to some professional activity, and no other calling seems so peculiarly adapted to the feminine nature. The merits and drawbacks of co-education and of the predominance of women teachers cannot be separated from the general question of woman’s rights; and so the due treatment of these conditions must be put off until we come to consider the American woman from all sides.

It is not difficult to criticise rather sharply the school system, and any one living in the midst of American life will feel it a duty to deliver his criticism without parsimony. A system which expects the best it is to have, from the initiative of the periphery, must also expect the ceaseless critical co-operation of the whole nation.

In this way, then, crying and undeniable evils are often pointed out. We hear of political interference in the government of the schools, and of the deficient technical knowledge of local authorities, of the insufficient preparation of the women teachers, the poorness of the methods of instruction, of waste of time, of arbitrary pedagogical experiments, and of much else. In every reproach there is a kernel of truth. The connection of the schools with politics is in a certain sense unavoidable, since all city government is a party government. And the attempts to separate elections for the school committee entirely from politics will probably, for a long time yet, meet with only slight success. Since, however, every party is able to put its hand on discrete and competent men, the only great danger is lest the majority of those concerned misuse their influence for party ends, and perhaps deal out school positions and advancements as a reward for political services.

Such things certainly happen; but they never escape the notice of the opposite party, and are faithfully exploited in the next year’s election. In this way any great abuses are quickly checked. The secret doings, which have nothing to do with politics, are a great deal more dangerous. It is certain that the enormous school budgets of the large cities offer the possibility for a deplorable plundering of the public treasury, when it is a question of buying new land for school-houses, of closing building contracts, or of introducing certain text-books. A committee-man who in these ways is willing to abuse his influence is able to derive a considerable profit; and so it may well happen that men come to be on the school boards through political influence or through a professed interest in school matters, who have really no other aim than to get something out of it. It is very hard in such matters to arrive at a really fair judgment, since the rival claimants who are unsuccessful are very apt to frame the opinion that they have been so because the successful man had “connections.”

This sharply suspicious tendency and spirit of over-watchfulness on the part of the public are certainly very useful in preserving the complete integrity of the schools, but they occasion such a considerable tumult of rumour that it easily misleads one’s judgment as to the real condition of the institutions. In general, the school committees appointed in the local elections perform their work in all conscientiousness. It is, of course, the fact that they are rather frequently ignorant of things which they need to know; but the tendency to leave all technical questions in the hands of pedagogical specialists, and to undertake any innovations only at the advice of the school superintendent and directors, is so general that on the whole things do not go quite so badly as one might expect.

The preparation of the teachers leaves very much to be wished. Those teachers who have been educated in higher seminaries are by no means numerous enough to fill all the public school positions; and even less does the number of college graduates suffice for the needs of the high schools. The fact that the teaching profession is remarkably versed in pedagogics only apparently relieves this defect; for even the very best methods of teaching are of course no substitute for a firm grasp of the subject which is being taught. In the elementary schools the lack of theoretical training in a teacher is, of course, less felt. The instinct of the teacher, her interest in the child, her tact and sympathy, in short the personal element, are what is here most important. And since all this, even in the superficially educated woman, springs purely from her feminity, and since the energetic women are extraordinarily eager and self-sacrificing, so it happens that almost everywhere the elementary schools are better conducted by their women teachers than are the high schools.

So far as method goes, a great deal too much stress is laid on the text-book; too much is taught mechanically out of the book, and too little is directly imparted by the teacher. The teacher submits passively to the text-book; and the American himself is inclined to defend this, since his democratic belief in the power of black and white is unlimited. Before all, he regards it as the chief aim of the public school to prepare the citizen for the independent reading of newspapers and books. Therefore, the scholars are expected to become as much acquainted as possible with the use of books. There is no doubt that the American school children read more newspapers in later life than do the European, and it must also be borne in mind that for the most part the text-books are notably good. Perhaps, in regard to attractiveness, they even go rather too far. In this way not only the books of natural history, but also of history and literature, are crowded with illustrations. The geographies are generally lavishly gotten-up volumes with all sorts of entertaining pictures. The appeals to the eye, both by means of the text-books and even more by the aid of demonstrations and experiments, are carried really to excess. Even the blackboards, which run along all four walls of the school rooms, encourage the teacher to appeal rather more to the eye than to the ear.

Also the much-discussed experimentation with new pedagogical ideas is an unfortunate fact which cannot be denied. A central authority, which was held fully responsible for a large district, would of course be conservative; but where the details of teaching are left entirely to every local school inspector, then of course many shallow reforms and many unnecessary experiments with doubtful methods will be undertaken. The school inspector will feel himself moved to display his modern spirit and to show his pedagogical efficiency in just these ways. And many a private school, in order to make itself attractive to the public, is obliged to introduce the latest pedagogical foibles and to make all sorts of concessions, perhaps against its will. To-day the method of writing will be oblique, to-morrow vertical, and the day after to-morrow “reformed vertical.” The pupils to-day are taught to spell, to-morrow to pronounce syllables, the next day to take the whole word as the least unit in language; and a day later they may be taught the meaning of the words by means of appropriate movements.

It is not quite easy for a professional psychologist, who lectures every year to hundreds of students in that subject, to say openly that this irregular and often dilettante craze for reform is encouraged by nothing more than by the interest in psychology which rages throughout the country. The public has been dissatisfied with teachers, and conceived the idea that everything would be better if the pedagogues concerned themselves more with the psychical life of their pupils. And since for this purpose every mother and every teacher has the materials at hand, there has sprung up a pseudo-psychological study of unexampled dimensions. It is only a small step from such a study to very radical reforms. Yet everything here comes back in the end to the independent interests and initiative of the teacher; and although many of these reforms are amateurish and immature, they are nevertheless better than the opposite extreme would be—that is, than a body of indifferent and thoughtless teachers without any initiative at all.

It is also not to be denied that the American school wastes a good deal of time, and accomplishes the same intellectual result with a much greater outlay of time than the German school. There are plenty of reasons for this. Firstly, it is conspicuous throughout the country that Saturday is a day of vacation. This is incidental to the Puritan Sunday. The school day begins at nine o’clock in the morning, and the long summer vacations are everywhere regarded as times for idleness, and are almost never broken in on by any sort of work. Again, the home duties required of the school children are fewer than are required of the German child, and all the instruction is less exacting. The American girls would hardly be able to stand so great a burden if the schools demanded the same as the German boys’ schools. Herewith, however, one must not forget that this time which is taken from work is dedicated very specially to the development of the body, to sport and other active exercises, and in this way the perfection of the whole man is by no means neglected. Moreover, America has been able, at least so far, to afford the luxury of this loss of time; the national wealth permits its young men to take up the earning of their daily bread later than European conditions would allow.

When the worst has been said and duly weighed, it remains that the system as a whole is one of which the American may well be proud—a system so thoroughly elastic as to be suited to all parts of the country and to all classes of society. It is a system which indubitably, with its broad foundation in the popular school, embodies all the requirements for the sound development of youth, and one, finally, which is adapted to a nation accustomed to individualism, and which meets the national requirement of perfection of the individual.

And now finally we may give a few figures by way of orientation. In the year 1902 out of the population of over 75,000,000, 17,460,000 pupils attended institutions of learning. This number would be increased by more than half a million if private kindergartens, manual training schools, evening schools, schools for Indians, and so forth were taken into account. The primary and intermediate schools have 16,479,177 scholars, and private schools about 1,240,000. This ratio is changed in favour of the private institutions when we come to the next step above, for the public high schools have 560,000 and the private ones 150,000 students. The remainder is in higher institutions of learning. To consider for the moment only the public schools; instruction is imparted by 127,529 male and 293,759 female teachers. The average salary of a male teacher is more than $46 a month, and of the female teacher $39. The expenditures were something over $213,000,000; and of this about 69 per cent. came from the local taxes, 16 per cent. from the state taxes, and the remainder from fixed endowments. Again, if we consider only the cities of more than 8,000 inhabitants, we find the following figures: in 1902 America had 580 such cities, with 25,000,000 inhabitants, 4,174,812 scholars and 90,744 teachers in the municipal public schools, and 877,210 students in private schools. These municipal systems have 5,025 superintendents, inspectors, etc. The whole outlay for school purposes amounted to about $110,000,000.

The high schools are especially characteristic. The increase of attendance in these schools has been much faster than that of the population. In 1890 there were only 59 pupils for every 10,000 inhabitants; in 1895 there were 79; and in 1900 there were 95. It is noticeable that this increase is entirely in the public schools. Of those 59 scholars in 1890, 36 were in public high schools and 23 in private. By 1900 there were 25 in private, but 70 in the public schools. Of the students in the public high schools 50 per cent. studied Latin, 9 per cent. French, 15 per cent. German. The principal courses of study are English grammar, English literature, history, geography, mathematics, and physics. In the private schools 23 per cent. took French, 18 per cent. German, 10 per cent. Greek. Only 11 per cent. of students in the public high schools go to college, but 32 per cent. of those in private schools. Out of the 1,978 private high schools in the year 1900, 945 were for students of special religious sects; 361 were Roman Catholic, 98 were Episcopalian, 96 Baptist, 93 Presbyterian, 65 Methodist, 55 Quaker, 32 Lutheran, etc. There were more than 1,000 private high schools not under the influence of any church. One real factor of their influence is found in the statistical fact that, in the public high schools, there are 26 scholars for every teacher, while in the private schools only 11.

The following figures will suffice to give an idea of the great differences which exist between the different states: The number of scholars in high schools in the state of Massachusetts is 15 to every 1,000 citizens; in the state of New York, 11; in Illinois, 9; in Texas, 7; in the Carolinas, 5; and in Oklahoma, 3. In the private high schools of the whole country the boys were slightly in the majority; 50.3 per cent. against 49.7 per cent. of girls. In order to give at least a glimpse of this abyss, we may say that in the public high school the boys were only 41.6 per cent., while the girls were 58.4 per cent.

So much for the schools proper. We shall later consider the higher institutions—colleges, universities, and so forth—while the actual expanse of the school system in America, as we have said before, is broader still. In the first place, the kindergarten, a contribution which Germany has made, deserves notice. Very few creations of German thought have won such complete acceptance in the New World as Froebel’s system of education; and seldom, indeed, is the German origin of an institution so frankly and freely recognized. Froebel is everywhere praised, and the German word “Kindergarten” has been universally adopted in the English language.

Miss Peabody, of Boston, took the part of pioneer, back in the fifties. Very soon the movement spread to St. Louis and to New York, so that in 1875 there were already about one hundred kindergartens with 3,000 children. To-day there must be about 5,000 kindergartens distributed over the country, with about a quarter of a million children. During this development various tendencies have been noticeable. At first considerable stress was laid on giving some rational sort of occupation to the children of the rich who were not quite old enough for school. Later, however, philanthropic interest in the children of the very poorest part of the population became the leading motive—the children, that is, who, without such careful nurture, would be exposed to dangerous influences. Both of these needs could be satisfied by private initiative. Slowly, however, these two extremes came to meet; not only the richest and poorest, but also the children of the great middle classes from the fourth to the sixth year, were gradually brought under this sort of school training. As soon as the system was recognized to be a need of the entire community, it was naturally adopted into the popular system of instruction. To-day two hundred and fifty cities have kindergartens as a part of their school systems.

Meanwhile there has sprung up still another tendency, which took its origin in Chicago. Chicago probably has the best institution with a four years’ course for the preparation of teachers for the kindergarten. In this school not only the professional teachers, but the mothers, are welcomed. And through the means of this institution in Chicago, the endeavour is slowly spreading to educate mothers everywhere how to bring up their children who are still in the nursery so as to be bodily, intellectually, and morally sound. The actual goal of this very reasonable movement may well be the disappearance of the official kindergarten. The child will then find appropriate direction and inspiration in the natural surroundings of its home, and the kindergarten will, as at first, limit itself chiefly to those rich families who wish to purchase their freedom from parental cares, and to such poor families as have to work so hard that they have no time left to look after their children. A slow reaction, moreover, is going on among the public school teachers. The child who comes out of the Froebel school into the primary school is said to be somewhat desultory in his activities, and so perhaps this great popularity of the kindergarten will gradually decrease. Nevertheless, for the moment the kindergarten must be recognized as a passing fashion of very great importance, and, so far as it devotes itself philanthropically to children in the poor districts, its value can hardly be overestimated.

Now, all this instruction of the child before he goes to school is much less significant and less widely disseminated than those thousandfold modes of instruction which are carried on for the development of men and women after they have passed their school days. Any one who knows this country will at once call to mind the innumerable courses of lectures, clubs of study, Chautauqua institutions, university extension courses, women’s clubs, summer and correspondence schools, free scientific lectures, and many other such institutions which have developed here more plentifully than in any other country. After having dwelt on the kindergarten, one is somewhat tempted to think also of these as men and women gardens. There is really some resemblance to a sort of intellectual garden, where no painful effort or hard work is laid out for the young men and women who wander there carelessly to pluck the flowers. But it is, perhaps, rather too easy for the trained person to be unjust to such informal means of culture. It is really hard to view the latter in quite the right perspective. Whosoever has once freed himself from all prejudices, and looked carefully into the psychic life of the intellectual middle classes, will feel at once the incomparable value of these peculiar forms of intellectual stimulation, and their great significance for the self-perfection of the great masses.

While the kindergarten was imported from Germany, the university extension movement came from England. This movement, which was very popular about a decade ago, is decidedly now on the wane. Those forms of popular education which are distinctly American have shown themselves to possess the most vigour. There is one name which, above all others, is characteristic of these native institutions. It is Chautauqua. This is the old Indian name for a lake which lies very pleasantly situated in the State of New York, about two hours by train from Buffalo. The name of the lake has gone over to the village on its banks, the name of the village has been carried over to that system of instruction which was first begun there, and now every institution is called Chautauquan which is modelled after that system. Even to-day the school at Chautauqua is the fountain-head of the whole movement. Every summer, and particularly through July and August, when the school-teachers have their vacation, some ten thousand men and women gather together to participate in a few weeks of recreation and intellectual stimulation. The life there is quiet and simple; concerts and lectures are given in the open air in an amphitheatre which seats several thousand, and there are smaller classes of systematic instruction in all departments of learning. The teachers in special courses are mostly professors. The lecturers in the general gatherings are well-known politicians, officials, scholars, ministers, or otherwise distinguished personalities. For the sake of recreation, there are excursions, dramatic performances, and concerts. A few hours of systematic work every day serve as a stimulus for thought and culture, while the mutual influence of the men and women who are so brought together and the whole atmosphere of the place generate a real moral enthusiasm.

The special courses which range from Greek, the study of the Bible, and mathematics to political economy, philosophy, and pedagogics, are supplemented on the one hand by examinations from which the participators get a certificate in black and white which is highly prized among teachers; and on the other side, by suggestions for the further carrying on by private reading of the studies which they have elected. The enthusiastic banner-bearer of Chautauqua is still to-day one of its founders, Bishop Vincent. He has done more than any one else toward bringing harmony into the monotonous and intellectually hungry lives of hundreds of thousands throughout the country, and especially of public school teachers. And in this work the instruction, the religious strengthening, the instillation of personal contentment, patriotic enthusiasm, æsthetic joy in life, and moral inspiration, are not to be separated.

When Theodore Roosevelt, who was then governor of New York, spoke in the Chautauqua amphitheatre to more than ten thousand persons, he turned enthusiastically to Bishop Vincent and said, “I know of nothing in the whole country which is so filled with blessing for the nation.” And when he had finished, the whole audience gave him the Chautauqua salute; ten thousand handkerchiefs were waved in the air—an extraordinary sight, which in Chautauqua signifies the greatest appreciation. This custom began years ago, when a deaf scholar had given a lecture, and while the thundering applause was sounding which the speaker himself could not hear, Bishop Vincent brought out this visible token of gratification; and this form of applause not only became a tradition there, but also spread to all other Chautauqua institutions throughout the country. To-day there are more than three hundred of these, many of them in beautifully situated summer resorts, and some equipped with splendid libraries, banquet halls, casinos, and clubs. Some of these concentrate their energies in particular lines of learning, and of course they are very different in scope and merit. And nevertheless the fundamental trait of idealism shows through all these popular academies.

Among other varieties of popular instruction there are the attempts at university extension, which are very familiar. The chief aim is here to utilize the teaching forces and other means of instruction of the higher educational institutions for the benefit of the great masses. Often the thing has been treated as if it were a matter of course, in a political democracy, that colleges and universities ought not to confine themselves to the narrow circles of their actual students, but should go out and down to the artisans and labourers. But it was always asserted that this education should not consist merely in entertaining lectures, but should involve a form of teaching that presupposed a certain participation and serious application on the part of the attendants. And the chief emphasis has been laid on having every subject treated in a series of from six to twelve meetings, on distributing to the hearers a concise outline of the lectures with references to literature, on allowing the audience after the lecture to ask as many questions as it desired, and on holding a written examination at the end of the course. Any one who has passed a certain number of these examinations receives a certificate. In one year, for example, there were 43 places in which the University of Philadelphia gave such courses of lectures. The University of Chicago has arranged as many as 141 courses of six lectures each, in 92 different places. Other higher institutions have done likewise; and if indeed the leading universities of the East have entirely declined to take part, nevertheless the country, and particularly the West, is everywhere scattered with such lecture courses.

These lectures can be divided into two groups; those which are instructive and educate their hearers, and those which are inspiring and awaken enthusiasm. The first are generally illustrated with stereopticon pictures, the last are illustrated with poetical quotations. Here, as everywhere in the world, the educational lectures are often merely tiresome, and the inspiring ones merely bombastic. But the reason for the rapid decline in this whole movement is probably not the bad quality of the lectures, but the great inconvenience which the lecturers feel in going so far from their accustomed haunts. It is not to be doubted that very much good has come after all from this form of instruction. The summer schools have a similar relation to the higher institutions, but a much more thorough-going character; and while the university extension movement is waning, the summer school instruction is on the increase. First of all, even the leading universities take part in it, although it is mostly the second violins who render the music; that is to say, younger instructors rather than the venerable professors are the ones who teach. High school teachers and ministers often return in this way to their alma mater, and the necessity of devoting one’s self for six weeks to a single subject gives to the whole enterprise a very much more scholarly character. That interesting summer school which was held a few years ago in Cambridge is still remembered, when Harvard invited at its own expense 1,400 of the most earnest Cuban school teachers, and instilled in them through six long weeks something of American culture.

Again, and this quite independent of the higher institutions and of any formal courses, there are the institutions for free lectures. Indeed, there are so many that one might almost call them lecture factories. The receptive attitude of the American public of all classes toward lectures surpasses the comprehension of the European. In many circles, indeed, this is positively a passion; and the extraordinary plentifulness of opportunity, of course, disciplines and strengthens the demand, which took its origin in the same strong spirit of self-perfection.

A favourable fact is undoubtedly the high perfection to which the lecture has been cultivated in America. As compared with European countries, a larger proportion of lectures may fairly be called works of art as regards both their content and their form. The American is first of all an artist in any sort of enthusiastic and persuasive exposition. For this very reason his lectures are so much more effective than whatever he prints, and for this reason, too, the public flocks to hear him. This state of things has also been favoured by the general custom of going to political meetings and listening to political speeches. In Boston and its suburbs, for example, although it is not larger than Hamburg, no less than five public lectures per day on the average are delivered between September and June. In contrast to German views, it is considered entirely appropriate for lecturers on all public occasions to receive financial compensation; just as any German scholar would accept from a publisher some emolument for his literary productions. This is, of course, not true of lectures at congresses, clubs, or popular gatherings. In a state like Massachusetts, every little town has its woman’s club, with regular evenings for lectures by outside speakers; and the condition of the treasury practically decides whether one or two hundred dollars shall be paid for some drawing speaker who will give a distinguished look to the programme; or whether the club will be satisfied with some teacher from the next town who will deliver his last year’s lecture on Pericles, or the tubercle bacillus, for twenty dollars. And so it is through the entire country; the quantity decreases as one goes South, and the quality as one goes West.

All this is no new phenomenon in American life. In the year 1639 lectures on religious subjects were so much a matter of course in New England, and Bostonians were so confirmed in the habit of going to lectures, that a law was passed concerning the giving of such lectures. It said that the poor people were tempted by the lecturer to neglect their affairs and to harm their health, as the lectures lasted well into the night. Scientific lectures, however, came into popular appreciation not earlier than the nineteenth century. In the first decade of that century, the famous chemist, Silliman, of Yale University, attained a great success in popular scientific lectures. After the thirties “lyceums” flourished throughout the land, which were educational societies formed for the purpose of establishing public lecture courses.

To be sure, these were generally disconnected lectures, in which political and social topics predominated. Those were the classic days of oratory, when men like Webster, Channing, Everett, Emerson, Parker, Mann, Sumner, Phillips, Beecher, Curtis, and others enthused the nation with their splendid rhetoric, and presented to the masses with pathos that we no longer know those great arguments which led to the Civil War. The activities of later decades emphasized the intellectual side. Splendid institutions have now been organized for popular lectures and lecture courses in all the leading cities. Thus the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, the Pratt Institute in New York, the Armour Institute in Chicago, and the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia have come into existence. The catalogue of the lectures and courses which, for instance, the Pratt Institute announces every winter fills a whole volume; and nevertheless, every one who pays his annual fee of five dollars is entitled to take part in all of them. Every day from morning to night he may listen to lectures by men who are more or less well known throughout the country, and who come specially to New York in order to give their short courses of some six lectures.

The highest undertaking of this sort is the Lowell Institute in Boston. In 1838, after a tour through Egypt, John A. Lowell added a codicil to his will, whereby he gave half of his large income for the free, popular, scientific instruction of his native town. The plan that has been followed for sixty years is of inviting every winter eight or ten of the most distinguished thinkers and investigators in America and England to give cycles of six or twelve connected lectures. The plentiful means of this foundation have made it possible to bring in the really most important men; and on the other hand, for just this reason an invitation to deliver the Lowell Lectures has come to be esteemed a high honour in the English-speaking world. Men like Lyell and Tyndall and many others have come across the ocean; even Agassiz, the well-known geologist, came to the New World first as a Lowell lecturer, and then later settled at Harvard University. Up to this time some five thousand lectures have been held before large audiences by this institute. The great advantage which this has been to the population of Boston can in no wise be estimated, nor can it ever be known how much this influence has done for the spirit of self-perfection in New England.

In a certain sense, however, we have already overstepped the field of popular education. The high standard of the Lowell Institute and the position of its speakers have brought it about that almost every course has been an original exposition of new scientific lines of thought. While the other popular courses have got their material second-hand, or have been at least for the speaker a repetition of his habitual discourses to students, in the Lowell Institute the results of new investigations have been the main thing. And so we have come already to the domain of productive science, of which we shall have later to treat.

One who looks somewhat more deeply will realize that, outside the Lowell Institute, there is no thought in by far the larger part of these lectures and readings, of original scientific endeavour. And the question inevitably comes up, whether the intellectual life of the country does not lose too much of its strength because the members of the community who should be especially devoted to intellectual production are enticed in so many different ways into the paths of mere reproduction. To be sure, it is never a professional duty with these men, but the temptation is so great as to overcome the latent resistance of even the best of them. There are a few, it is true, who see their highest goal in these popular and artistic expositions of their department of science; and a few who feel that their highest call, their most serious life-work, is to bear science philanthropically out to the masses. But it is different with most of them. Many like the rewards; it is such an easy way for the ready speaker, perhaps, of doubling his salary from the university: and especially the younger men whose income is small, find it hard to resist the temptation, although just they are the ones who ought to give all their free energy to becoming proficient in special lines of investigation. Yet even this is not the chief motive. In countless cases where any financial return to the speaker is out of the question, the love of rhetoric exerts a similar temptation. The chief motive, doubtless, is that the American popular opinion is so extraordinarily influenced by the spoken word, and at the same time popular eloquence is spread abroad so widely by the press, that not only a mere passing reputation, but also a strong and lasting influence on the thought of the people, can most readily be gotten in this way.

And so everything works together to bring a large amount of intellectual energy into the service of the people. The individual is hardly able to resist the temptation; and certainly very many thus harm seriously their best energies. Their popularization of knowledge diminishes their own scholarship. They grow adapted to half-educated audiences; their pleasure and capacity for the highest sort of scientific work are weakened by the seductive applause which follows on every pretty turn of thought, and by the deep effect of superficial arguments which avoid and conceal all the real difficulties. This is most especially true of that merely mechanical repetition which is encouraged by the possession of a lecture manuscript. If it is true that Wendell Phillips repeated his speech on the Lost Arts two thousand times, it was doubtless a unique case, and is hardly possible to-day. Nevertheless, to-day we find most regrettably frequent repetitions; and a few competent intellects have entirely abandoned their activities on regular academic lines to travel through the country on lecture tours. For instance, a brilliant historian like John Fiske, would undoubtedly have accomplished much more of permanent importance if he had not written every one of his books, in the first instance, as a set of lectures which he delivered before some dozen mixed audiences.

On the other hand, we must not suppose that these lectures before educational institutions are all hastily and mechanically produced. If the lectures were so trivial their preparation would demand little energy, and their delivery would much less satisfy the ambition of those who write them; and so, on both accounts, they would be much less dangerous for the highest productiveness of their authors. The level is really extremely high. Even the audience of the smallest town is rather pampered; it demands the most finished personal address and a certain tinge of individuality in the exposition. And so even this form of production redounds somewhat to the intellectual life of the nation. The often repeated attempt to depict some phase of reality, uniquely and completely in a one-hour lecture, or to elucidate a problem in such a short time, leads necessarily to a mastery in the art of the essay. Success in this line is made easier by the marked feeling for form which the American possesses. In a surprisingly large number of American books, the chapters read like well-rounded and complete addresses. The book is really a succession of essays, and if one looks more carefully, one will often discover that each one was obviously first thought out as a lecture. Thus the entire system of popular education by means of lectures has worked, beyond doubt, harmfully on creative production, but favourably on the development of artistic form in scientific exposition, on the art of essay, and on the popular dissemination of natural and social sciences and of history and economics most of all.

If one wished to push the inquiry further, and to ask whether these advantages outweigh the disadvantages, the American would decline to discuss the problem within these limits; since the prime factor, which is the effect on the masses who are seeking cultivation, would be left out of account. The work of the scholar is not to be estimated solely with reference to science or to its practical effects, but always with reference to the people’s need for self-perfection. And even if pure science in its higher soarings were to suffer thereby, the American would say that in science, as everywhere else, it is not a question of brilliant achievements, but of moral values. For the totality of the nation, he would say, it is morally better to bring serious intellectual awakenings into every quiet corner of the land, than to inscribe a few great achievements on the tablets of fame. Such is the sacrifice which democracy demands. And yet to-day the pendulum begins very slowly to swing back. A certain division of labour is creeping in whereby productive and reproductive activities are more clearly distinguished, and the best intellectual energies are reserved for the highest sort of work, and saved from being wasted on merely trivial tasks.

But even the effect on the masses has not been wholly favourable. We have seen how superficiality has been greatly encouraged. It is, indeed, an artificial feeding-ground for that immodesty which we see to spring up so readily in a political democracy, and which gives out its opinion on all questions without being really informed. To be sure, there is no lack of admiration for what is great; on the contrary, such admiration becomes often hysterical. But since it is not based on any sufficient knowledge, it remains after all undiscriminating; the man who admires without understanding, forms a judgment where he should decline to take any attitude at all. It may be, indeed, that the village population under the influence of the last lecture course is talking about Cromwell and Elizabeth instead of about the last village scandal; but if the way in which it talks has not been modified, one cannot say that a change of topic signifies any elevation of standard. And if, indeed, the village is still to gossip, it will seem to many more modest and more amiable if it gossips about some indifferent neighbour, and not about Cromwell.

On the other hand, we must not fail to recognize that, especially in the large institutions, as the Chautauquas, and in the university extension courses and the summer schools, everything possible is done to escape this constant danger. In the first place, the single lectures are very much discouraged, and a course of six to twenty lectures rather is given on a single topic; then the written examinations, with their certificates, and finally, the constant guidance in private reading have their due effect. Indeed, the smallest women’s club is particular to put before its members the very best books which relate to the subjects of their lectures; and smaller groups are generally formed to study carefully through together some rather large treatise.

The total amount of actual instruction and intellectual inspiration coming to the people outside of the schools, is, in these ways, immeasurable. And the disadvantages of superficiality are somewhat outweighed by a great increase and enrichment of personality. Of course, one could ask whether this traditional way is really the shortest to its goal. Some may think that the same expenditure of time and energy would give a better result if it were made on a book rather than on a course of lectures. Yet the one does not exclude the other. Hearing the lecture incites to the reading of the book; and nowhere is more reading done than in the United States. There is one other different and quite important factor in the situation. The man who reads is isolated, and any personal influence is suppressed. At a lecture, on the other hand, the peculiarly personal element is brought to the front, both in the speaker and in the hearer—the spoken word touches so much more immediately and vitally than the printed word, and gives to thought an individual colouring. Most of all, the listener is much more personally appealed to than the reader; his very presence in the hall is a public announcement of his participation. He feels himself called, with the other hearers, to a common task. And in this way a moral motive is added to the intellectual. They both work together to fill the life of every man with the desire for culture. Perchance the impersonal book may better satisfy the personal desire for self-perfection, and yet the lecture will be more apt to keep it alive and strengthen it as a force in character and in life.

It is indifferent whether this system of popular education, these lectures before the public, has really brought with it the greatest possible culture and enlightenment. It is at least clear that they have spread everywhere the most profound desire for culture and enlightenment, and for this reason they have been the necessary system for a people so informed with the spirit of individual self-perfection.

Chapter Sixteen: The Universities

When American industry began, a short time ago, to disturb European circles, people very much exaggerated the danger, because the event was so entirely unexpected. The “American peril” was at the door before any one knew about it, or even supposed that America really possessed an industry which amounted to anything. It will not be long before Europe will experience a like surprise in the intellectual sphere. A great work will certainly appear, as if accomplished in a moment, before any one supposes that America so much as dreams of science and investigation. At the time, people tardily said to themselves that such industry could only have been built on firm rock, and never would have been able to spring up if American economic life had really been founded, as was then supposed, on avarice and corruption. And similarly, in the intellectual sphere, people will have to trace things back, and say in retrospect that such achievements could not be brought forth suddenly, and that serious and competent scientific work throughout the country must really have gone before. It is not here, in this world of intellectual labour, as in the economic world; there is no question of threatening rivalry, there is no scientific competition; there is nothing but co-operation. And yet even here no people can, without danger to its own achievements, afford to ignore what another nation has done. The sooner that Europe, and in particular Germany, acquaints itself with the intellectual life of America, so much more organically and profitably the future labour in common will develop. For any one who knows the real situation can already realize, without the gift of prophecy, that in science more than in other spheres the future will belong to these two countries.

On the part of Germany to-day there prevails an almost discouraging ignorance of everything which pertains to American universities; and we may say, at once, that if we speak of science we shall refer to nothing but the universities. As in Germany, so it is in the United States, in sharp and notable contrast to France and England, that the academic teacher is the real priest of science. In England and France, it is not customary for the great investigator to be at the same time the daily teacher of youth. In America and Germany he is exactly this. America has, to be sure, historians and national economists like Rhodes, Lodge, Roosevelt, Schouler, and others who are outside of academic circles; and very many lawyers, doctors and preachers, who are scientifically productive; and her most conspicuous physicists, so far as reputation goes, like Edison, Bell, Tesla, and so many others, are advancing science indirectly through their discoveries and inventions. Strictly speaking, the officials of the scientific institutions at Washington are likewise outside of the universities, and the greatest intellectual efficiency has always been found among these men. Nevertheless, it remains true that on the whole, the scientific life of the nation goes on in the universities, and that the academic instruction conveyed there is the most powerful source of strength to the entire American people.

The German still has no confidence in American science, is fond of dwelling on the amusing newspaper reports of Western “universities” which are often equivalent to a German Sekunda, or on those extraordinary conditions which prevailed “a short time ago” in the study of medicine. This “short time ago” means, however, in the intellectual life of Germany an entirely different length of time from that which it means in the New World. One is almost tempted to compare the intellectual development of Germany and America by epochs in order to get a proper means of comparing intervals of time in these respective countries. The primitive times of the Germans, from the days of Tacitus down to their conversion to Christianity under Charlemagne in about the year 800, would correspond, then, to the one hundred and fifty years from the discovery of America up to the beginning of the Puritan era in 1630. The next period would embrace in Germany seven hundred years more—up to the time when Germany freed itself from Rome. In America this would be again a century and a half, up to 1776, when the nation freed itself from England. Then follow after the Reformation during a period of three hundred years, the Thirty Years’ War, the Renaissance of the eighteenth century, the downfall of the Napoleonic influence, and, finally, the war for freedom. And once again the corresponding intervals on this side of the ocean have been of very much shorter duration; firstly years of war, then the æsthetic rise in the middle of the century, then the sufferings of the Civil War, the period of reconstruction, and, finally, peace. After 1813 a new period commences, which ends in 1870 with the German amalgamation into a nation. Historically incomparable with Germany’s great war against the French, America had in 1898 an insignificant war with Spain; but for the national consciousness of the Americans it played, perhaps, no less important a rôle. In fact, there began at that time probably a certain culmination in American intellectual development which in its six years is comparable in effect with what the Germans went through during several decades after the Franco-Prussian War. Indeed, all that happened in America a hundred years ago is felt to lie as far back as the events which took place in Germany three hundred years ago; and, in matters of higher education and scientific research, conditions have probably changed more in the last ten years than they have changed during fifty years in Germany.

The many false ideas, however, depend for credence, so far as they have any foundation, not alone on the reports of the previous condition of things, but also on misleading accounts of the conditions to-day. For even the best-intentioned narrator is very apt to be misled, because he finds it so hard to free himself from ordinary German conceptions. The position of the German schools of higher education is so easily grasped, while that in America is so complicated, that the German is always tempted to bring clearness and order into what he sees as confusion, by forcing it into the simple scheme to which he is accustomed, and thus to misunderstand it.

The German traveller is certain to start from the distinction so familiar to him between the Gymnasium and the university with four faculties, and he always contents himself with making but one inquiry: “Is this institution a university with four faculties?” And when he is told that it is not, he is convinced to his entire satisfaction that it is therefore only a Gymnasium. Indeed, very many of the educated Germans who have lived in America for some decades would still know no better; and, nevertheless, the conditions are really not complicated until one tries to make them fit into this abstract German scheme. The principle of gradations which is manifest in all American institutions is in itself fully as simple as the German principle of sharp demarcations. Most foreigners do not even go so far as to ask whether a given institution is a university. They are quite content to find out whether the word university is a part of its name. If they then ascertain from the catalogue that the studies are about the same as those which are drilled into the pupils of a Sekunda, they can attest the shameful fact: “There are no universities in America to be in any wise compared with the German universities.”

In the first place, it should be said that the word “university” is not used in America in the same sense as in Germany, but is almost completely interchangeable with the word “college,” as a rather colorless addition to the proper name of any institution whatsoever, so long only as its curriculum goes beyond that of the high school, and so long also as it is not exclusively designed to train ministers of the gospel, doctors, or lawyers. A higher school for medical instruction is called a “medical school,” and there are similarly “law schools” and “divinity schools,” whereas, in the college or university, as the term is generally used, these three subjects are not taught. College is the older word, and since the institutions in the East are in general the older ones, the name college has been and still is in that region the more common. But in the West, where in general the institutions are on a considerably lower level, the newer name of university is the more usual. No confusion necessarily arises from this, since the institutions which are styled now college and now university represent countless gradations, and the general term is without special significance. No one would think of saying that when he was young he went to a university, any more than he would say that on a journey he visited a city. In order to make the statement entirely clear, he would add the explicit name of the institution. Every specialist knows that a man who has spent four years in Taylor University in Indiana or at Blackburn University in Illinois, or at Leland University in Louisiana, or at other similar “universities,” will not be nearly so well educated as a man who has been to Yale College or Princeton College or Columbia College. The proper name is the only significant designation, and the addition of “college” or “university” tells nothing.

Out of this circumstance there has independently developed, in recent years in pedagogical circles, a second sense for the word “university.” By “university” there is coming to be understood an institution which is not only a college or a university in the old sense, but which furthermore has various professional schools. Even in this sense of the word, it is not exactly the same as the German conception, since such an institution includes the college, whereas there is nothing in Germany which would correspond to this collegiate department. Moreover, here belongs also a part of what the Germans have only in the technological institute. Finally, there is one more usage which arises in a way from a confusion of the two that we have mentioned. Some persons are inclined to mean by “university” a first-class college, and by “college” an institution of an inferior standard; and so, finally, the proper name of the institution is the only thing to go by, and the entire higher system of education in the country can be understood only in this way.

Therefore, we shall abstract from the designations of these institutions, and consider only what they really are. We have before us the fact that hundreds of higher institutions of learning exist without any sharp demarcation between them; that is, they form a closely graded scale, commencing with secondary schools and leading up to universities, of which some are in many respects comparable with the best institutions of Germany. In the second place, the groupings of the studies in these institutions are entirely different from those which prevail in Germany, especially owing to the fact that emphasis is laid on the college, which Germany does not have. It could not be different; and this condition is, in fact, the patent of American success. If we try to understand the conditions of to-day from those of yesterday, the real unity of this system comes out sharply. What was, then, we have to ask, the national need for higher instruction at the time when these states organized themselves into one nation?

In the first place, the people had to have preachers, while it was clear, nevertheless, that the state, and therefore the entire political community, was independent of any church, and must never show any favour to one sect over another. And so it became the duty of each separate sect to prepare its own preachers for their religious careers as well or as badly as it was able. The people, again, had to have lawyers and judges. Now the judges, in accordance with the democratic spirit, were elected from the people, and every man had the right to plead his own case in court:—so that if any man proposed to educate and prepare himself to plead other men’s cases for them, it was his own business to give himself the proper education and not the business of the community. He had to become an apprentice under experienced attorneys, and the community had not to concern itself in the matter, nor even to see to it that such technical preparation was grounded on real learning. School-teachers were necessary, but in order to satisfy the demands of the times it was hardly necessary for the teacher to go in his own studies very much beyond the members of his classes. A few more years of training than could be had in the public schools was desirable, but there was no thought of scholarship or science. On the lowest level of all, a hundred years ago, stood the science of medicine. It was a purely practical occupation, of which anybody might learn the technique without any special training. He might be an apprentice with some older physician, or he might pick it up in a number of other ways.

As soon as we have understood the early conditions in this way, we can see at once how they would have further to develop. It is obvious that in their own interests the sects would have to found schools for preachers. The administrators of justice would of course consult together and found schools of law, in which every man who paid his tuition might be prepared for the legal career. Doctors would have to come together and found medical schools which, once more, every one with a public school training would be free to attend. Finally, the larger communities would feel the necessity of having schools for training their teachers. In all this the principle of social selection would have to enter in at once. Since there were no formal provisions which might prescribe and fix standards of excellence, so everything would be regulated by the laws of supply and demand. The schools which could furnish successful lawyers, doctors, teachers, and clergymen would become prosperous, while the others would lead a modest existence or perhaps disappear. It would not be, however, merely a question of the good or bad schools, but of schools having entirely different standards, and these adapted to purely local conditions. The older states would, of course, demand better things than the new pioneer states; thickly settled localities would fix higher requirements than rural districts; rich districts higher than poor. In this way some schools would have a longer course of study than others, and some schools demand more previous training as a condition of entrance than others. So it would soon come to mean nothing to say simply that one had taken the legal, or medical, or theological course, as the one school might offer a four years’ course and the other a course of two years, and the one, moreover, might demand college training as preparation, and the other merely a grammar-school education. Every school has its own name, and this name is the only thing which characterizes its standard of excellence. In this way there is no harm at all if there are three or four medical schools in one city, and if their several diplomas of graduation are of entirely different value.

What is the result of this? It is a threefold one. In the first place, popular initiative is stimulated to the utmost, and every person and every institution is encouraged to do its best. There are no formal regulations to hamper enterprising impulses, to keep back certain more advanced regions, or to approve mediocrity with an artificial seal of authority. In the second place, technical education is able to adapt itself thoroughly to all the untold local factors, and to give to every region such schools of higher training as it needs, without pulling down any more advanced sections of the country to an artificially mediocre level more adapted to the whole country. In the third place, the free competition between the different institutions insures their ceaseless progress. There are no hard and fixed boundary lines, and whatsoever does not advance surely recedes; that which leads to-day is surpassed to-morrow if it does not adapt itself to the latest requirements. This is true both as regards the quality of the teachers and their means of instruction, as regards the length of the course, and more especially the conditions of entrance. These last have steadily grown throughout the country. Fifty years ago the very best institutions in the most advanced portions of the country demanded no more for entrance than the professional schools of third class situated in more rural regions demand to-day. And this tendency goes steadily onward day by day. If there were any great departures made, the institutions would be disintegrated; the schools which prepare pupils would not be able suddenly to come up to new requirements, and therefore few scholars would be able to prepare for greatly modified entrance examinations. In this way, between the conservative holding to historic traditions and the striving to progress and to exceed other institutions by the highest possible efficiency, a compromise is brought about which results in a gradual but not over-hasty improvement.

We have so far entirely left out of account the state. We can speak here only of the individual state. The country as a whole has as little to do with higher education as with lower. But the single state has, in fact, a significant task—indeed, a double one. Since it aims at no monopoly, but rather gives the freest play to individual initiative, we have recognized the fundamental principle that restrictions are placed nowhere. On the other hand, it becomes the duty of the state to lend a helping hand wherever private activities have been found insufficient. This can happen in two ways: either the state may help to support private institutions which already exist, or it may establish new ones of its own, which in that case offer free tuition to the sons and daughters of all taxpayers. These so-called state universities are, in a way, the crowning feature of the free public school system. Wherever they exist, the sons of farmers have the advantage of free instruction from the kindergarten to the degree of doctor of philosophy.

Now private initiative is weakest where the population is poor or stands on a low level of culture, so that few can be found to contribute sufficient funds to support good institutions, and at the same time the rich citizens of these less advanced states prefer to send their children to the universities of the most advanced states. The result is, and this is what is hardest for the foreigner to understand, that the higher institutions of learning which are subsidized by the state stand for a grade of culture inferior to that of the private institutions, and that not only the leading universities, like Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Chicago, Cornell, and Stanford, carry on their work without the help of the state, but also that the leading Eastern States pay out much less for higher instruction than do the Western. The State of Massachusetts, which stands at the head in matters of education, does not give a cent to its universities, while Ohio entirely supports the Ohio State University and gives aid to six other institutions.

The second task of the states in educational matters is shared alike by all of them; the state supervises all instruction, and, more than that, the state legislature confers on the individual institution the right to award grades, diplomas, and degrees to its students. No institution may change its organization without a civil permit. As culture has advanced the state has found it necessary to make the requirements in the various professional schools rather high. In practice, once more, a continual compromise has been necessary between the need to advance and the desire to stay, by traditions which have been proved and tried and found practical. Here, once again, any universal scheme of organization would have destroyed everything. If a high standard had been fixed it would have hindered private initiative, and given a set-back to Southern and Western states and robbed them of the impulses to development. A lower universal standard, on the other hand, would have impeded the advance of the more progressive portions of the country. Therefore the various state governments have taken a happy middle position in these matters, and their responsibility for the separate institutions has been made even less complete in that the degrees of these institutions carry in themselves no actual rights. Every state has its own laws for the admission of a lawyer to its bar, or to the public practice of medicine, and it is only to a small degree that the diplomas of professional schools are recognized as equivalent to a state examination.

The history of the professional schools for lawyers, ministers, teachers, and physicians in America is by no means the history of the universities. We have so far left out of account the college, which is the nucleus of American education. Let us now go back to it. We saw in the beginning of the development of these states a social community in which preparation for the professions of teaching, preaching, law or medicine implied a technical and specialized training, which every one could obtain for himself without any considerable preparation. There was no thought of a broad, liberal education. Now, to be sure, the level of scholarship required for entrance into the professional schools has steadily risen, the duration and character of the instruction has been steadily improved; but even to-day the impression has not faded from the public consciousness, and is indeed favoured by the great differences in merit between the special schools, that such a practical introduction to the treatment of disease, to court procedure, the mastery of technical problems, or to the art of teaching, does not in itself develop educated men. All this is specialized professional training, which no more broadens the mind than would the professional preparation for the calling of the merchant or manufacturer or captain. Whether a man who is prepared for his special career is also an educated man, depends on the sort of general culture that he has become familiar with. It is thought important for a man to have had a liberal education before entering the commercial house or the medical school, but it is felt to be indifferent whether he has learned his profession at the stock exchange or at the clinic.

The European will find it hard to follow this trend of thought. In Europe the highest institutions of learning are so closely allied to the learned professions, and these themselves have historically developed so completely from the learned studies, that professional erudition and general culture are well-nigh identical. And the general system of distinctions and merits favours in every way the learned professions. How much of this, however, springs out of special conditions may be seen, for instance, from the fact that in Germany an equal social position is given to the officer of the army and to the scholar. Even the American is, in his way, not quite consistent, in so far as he has at all times honoured the profession of the ministry with a degree of esteem that is independent of the previous preparation which the minister had before entering his theological school. This fact has come from the leading position which the clergymen held in the American colonial days, and the close relation which exists between the study of theology and general philosophy.

The fact that by chance one had taken the profession of law, or teaching, or medicine, did not exalt one in the eyes of one’s contemporaries above the great mass of average citizens who went about their honest business. The separation of those who were called to social leadership was seen to require, therefore, some principle which should be different from any professional training. At this point we come on yet another historical factor. The nation grew step for step with its commercial activities and undertakings. So long as it was a question of gaining and developing new territory, the highest talent, the best strength and proudest personalities entered the service of this nationally significant work. It was a matter of course that no secondary position in society should be ascribed to these captains of commerce and of industry. The highest degree of culture which they were able to attain necessarily fixed the standard of culture for the whole community; and, therefore, the traditional concept of the gentleman as the man of liberal culture and refinement came to have that great social significance which was reserved in Germany for the learned professions.

In its outer form, the education of such a gentleman was borrowed from England. It was a four years’ course coming after the high school, and laying special stress on the classical languages, philosophy, and mathematics—a course which, up to the early twenties, kept a young man in contact with the fine arts and the sciences, with no thought for the practical earning of a livelihood; which, therefore, kept him four years longer from the tumult of the world, and in an ideal community of men who were doing as he was doing; which developed him in work, in sport, in morals and social address. Such was the tradition; the institution was called a college after the English precedent. Any man who went to college belonged to the educated class, and it was indifferent what profession he took up; no studies of the professional school were able to replace a college education. Now, it necessarily happened that the endeavour to have students enter the professional schools with as thorough preparation as possible led eventually to demand of every one who undertook a professional course the complete college education. In fact, this last state of development is already reached in the best institutions of America. For instance, in Harvard and in Johns Hopkins, the diploma of a four years’ college course is demanded for entrance into the legal, medical, or theological faculty. But in popular opinion the dividing line between common and superior education is still the line between school and college, and not, as in Germany, between liberal and technical institutions of learning. One who has successfully passed through college becomes a graduate, a gentleman of distinction; he has the degree of bachelor of arts, and those who have this degree are understood to have had a higher education.

This whole complex of relations is reflected within the college itself. It is supposed to be a four years’ course which comes after the high school, and we have seen that the high school itself has no fixed standard of instruction. The small prairie college may be no better than the Tertia or Sekunda of a German Realschule, while the large and influential colleges are certainly not at all to be compared simply with German schools, but rather with the German Prima of a Gymnasium, together with the first two or three semesters in the philosophical faculty of a university. Between these extremes there is a long, sliding scale, represented by over six hundred colleges. We must now bear in mind that the college was meant to be the higher school for the general cultivation of gentlemen. Of course, from the outset this idealistic demand was not free from utilitarian considerations; the same instruction could well be utilized as the most appropriate practical training of the school-teacher, and if so, the college becomes secondarily a sort of technical school for pedagogues. But, then, in the same way as the entrance into legal and medical faculties was gradually made more difficult, until now the best of these schools demand collegiate preparation, so also did the training school for teachers necessarily become of more and more professional character, until it gradually quite outgrew the college. The culmination is a philosophical faculty which, from its side, presupposes the college, and which, therefore, takes the student about where a German student enters his fourth semester—a technical school for specialized critical science laying main stress on seminaries, laboratories, and lectures for advanced students. Such a continuation of the college study beyond the time of college—that is, for those who have been graduated from college—is called a graduate school, and its goal is the degree of doctor of philosophy. The graduate school is in this way parallel with the law, medical, or divinity school, which likewise presuppose that their students have been graduated from college.

The utilitarian element inevitably affects the college from another side. A college of the higher type will not be a school with a rigid curriculum, but will adapt itself more or less to the individuality of its students. If it is really to give the most it can, it must, at least during the last years of the college course, be somewhat like a philosophical faculty, and allow some selection among the various studies:—so that every man can best perfect his peculiar talent and can satisfy his inclinations for one or other sort of learning. So soon, now, as such academic freedom has been instituted, it is very liable to be used for utilitarian purposes. The future doctor and the future lawyer in their election of college studies will have the professional school already in mind, and will be preparing themselves for their professional studies. The lawyer will probably study more history, the doctor will study biology, the theologian languages, the future manufacturer may study physics, the banker political economy, and the politician will take up government. And so the ideal training school for gentlemen will not be merely a place for liberal education, but at the same time will provide its own sort of untechnical professional training.

Inasmuch as everything really technical is still excluded, and the majority of college students even to-day come for nothing more than a liberal education, it remains true that the college is first of all a place for the development and refinement of personal character; a place in which the young American spends the richest and happiest years of his life, where he forms his friendships and intellectual preferences which are to last throughout his life, and where the narrow confines of school life are outgrown and the confines of professional education not yet begun; where, in short, everything is broad and free and sunny. For the American the attraction of academic life is wholly centred in the college; the college student is the only one who lives the true student life. Those who study in the four professional faculties are comparable rather to the German medical students of the last clinical semesters—sedate, semi-professional men. The college is the soul of the university. The college is to-day, more than ever, the soul of the whole nation.

We have to mention one more factor, and we shall have brought together all which are of prime importance. We have seen that the professional and the collegiate schools had at the outset different points of view, and were, in fact, entirely independent. It was inevitable that as they developed they should come into closer and closer relations. The name of the college remained during this development the general designation. Special faculties have grouped themselves about the college, while a common administration keeps them together. There are certain local difficulties in this. According to the original idea, a college ought to be in a small, rural, and attractively situated spot. The young man should be removed from ordinary conditions; and as he goes to Jena, Marburg, and Göttingen, so he should go to Princeton or New Haven, or Palo Alto, in order to be away from large cities in a little academic world which is inspired only by the glory of famous teachers and by the youthful happiness of many student generations. A medical or law school, on the other hand, belongs, according to American tradition, in some large city, where there is a plenty of clinical material at hand, and where great attorneys are in contact with the courts. It so happened that the college, as it grew up into a complete university, was especially favoured if it happened to be in the vicinity of a large city, like Harvard College in Cambridge, which had all the attractions of rural quiet and nevertheless was separated from the large city of Boston only by the Charles River bridge. In later times, to be sure, since the idyllic side of college life is everywhere on the wane, and the outward equipment, especially of laboratories, libraries, etc., has everywhere to grow, it is a noticeable advantage for even collegiate prosperity to have the resources of a large city at hand. And, therefore, the institutions in these cities, like New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco, develop more rapidly than many colleges which were once famous but which lie in more isolated places.

At the head of the administration there is always a president, a man whose functions are something between those of a Rektor and a Kultus-Minister, most nearly, perhaps, comparable with a Kurator, and yet much more independent, much more dictatorial. The direction of the university is actually concentrated in his person, and the rise or fall of the institution is in large measure dependent on his official leadership. In olden times the president was almost always a theologian, and at the same time was apt to be professor in moral philosophy. This is true to-day of none but small country colleges, and even there the Puritan tradition disappears as financial and administrative problems come to be important. The large universities have lately come almost always to place a professor of the philosophical faculty at their head. Almost invariably these are men of liberal endowments. Mostly they are men of wide outlook, and only such men are fit for these positions, which belong to the most influential and important in the country. The opinions of men like Eliot of Harvard, Hadley of Yale, Butler of Columbia, Shurman of Cornell, Remsen of Johns Hopkins, Wheeler of California, Harper of Chicago, Jordan of Leland Stanford, Wilson of Princeton, and of many others, are respected and sought on all questions of public life, even in matters extending far beyond education.

The university president is elected for a life term by the administrative council—a deliberative body of men who, without emoluments, serve the destinies of the university, and in a certain sense are the congress of the university as compared with the president. They confirm appointments, regulate expenditures, and theoretically conduct all external business for the university, although practically they follow in large part the recommendations of the faculties. The teaching body is composed everywhere of professors, assistant professors, and instructors. All these receive a fixed stipend. There are no such things as private tuition fees, and unsalaried teachers, like the German Privatdocenten, are virtually unknown. The instruction consists, in general, of courses lasting through a year and not a semester. The academic year begins, in most cases, at the end of September and closes at the end of June.

During his four years’ college course the student prefers to remain true to some one college. If this is a small institution, he is very apt, on being graduated, to attend some higher institution. Even the students in professional schools generally come back year after year to the same school till they finish their studies. It is only in the graduate school—that is, the German philosophical faculty—that migration after the German manner has come in fashion; here, in fact, the student frequently studies one year here and one year there, in order to hear the best specialists in his science. Except in the state institutions of the West, the student pays a round sum for the year; in the larger institutions from one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars. In the smaller colleges the four years’ course of study is almost wholly prescribed, and only in the final year is there a certain freedom of choice. The higher the college stands in the matter of scholarship, so much the more its lecture programme approaches that of a university; and in the foremost colleges the student is from the very beginning almost entirely free in his selection of studies.

A freedom in electing between study and laziness is less known. The student may elect his own lectures; he must, however, attend at least a certain number of these, and must generally show in a semi-annual examination that he has spent his time to some purpose. The examinations at the end of the special courses are in the college substituted for a final examination. Any man receives a degree who has passed the written examinations in a certain number of courses. The examinations concern not only what has actually been said in the lectures, but at the same time try to bring out how much the student has learned outside in the way of reading text-books and searching into literature. Originally the students roomed in college buildings, but with the growth of these institutions this factor of college life has declined. In the larger universities the student is, in matters of his daily life, as free as the German; but dwelling in college dormitories still remains the most popular mode of living, since it lends a social attraction to academic life.

To go over from this general plan to a more concrete presentation, we may perhaps sketch briefly a picture of Harvard College, the oldest and largest academy in the country. The colony of Massachusetts established in 1636 a little college in the vicinity of the newly founded city of Boston. The place was called Cambridge in commemoration of the English college in which some of the colonists had received their education. When in 1638 a young English minister, John Harvard, left this little academy half his fortune, it was decided to name the college for its first benefactor. The state had given £400, John Harvard about £800. The school building was one little structure, the number of students was very small, and there were a few clergymen for teachers. On the same spot to-day stands Harvard University, like a little city within a city, with fifty ample buildings, with 550 members of the teaching staff, over five thousand students, with a regular annual budget of a million and a half dollars, and in the enjoyment of bequests which add year by year millions to its regular endowments.

This growth has been constant, outwardly and inwardly; and it has grown in power and in freedom in a way that well befits the spirit of American institutions. Since the colonial régime of the seventeenth century gave to the new institution a deliberative body of seven men—the so-called Corporation—this body has perpetuated itself without interruption down to the present time by its own vote, and without changing any principle of its constitution has developed the home of Puritanism into the theatre of the freest investigation, and the school into a great university of the world.

Now, as then, there stands at the head this body of seven members, each of whom is elected for life. To belong to this is esteemed a high honour. Beside these, there is the board of overseers of thirty members, elected by the graduates from among their own number. Five men are elected every June to hold office for six years in this advisory council. Every Harvard man, five years after he has received his degree of bachelor, has the right to vote. Every appointment and all policies of the university must be confirmed by this board of overseers. Only the best sons of the alma mater are elected to this body. Thus the university administration has an upper and lower house, and it is clear that with such closely knit internal organization the destiny of the university is better guarded than it would be if appointments and expenditures were dependent on the caprice and political intrigues of the party politicians in the state legislature. Just on this account Harvard has declined, for almost a hundred years, all aid from the state; although this was once customary. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to suppose that, say in contrast with Germany, this self-government of the university implies any greater administrative rights for the professors. The German professors have much more administrative influence than their colleagues in America. If, indeed, the advice of the professors in matters of new appointments or promotions is important, nevertheless the administrative bodies are in no wise officially bound to follow the recommendations of the faculty.

The president of the university is Charles W. Eliot, the most distinguished and influential personality in the whole intellectual life of America. Eliot comes from an old Puritan family of New England. He was a professor of chemistry in his thirty-fifth year; and his essays on methods of instruction, together with his talents for organization, had awakened considerable attention, when the overseers, in spite of lively protestations from various sides, were prompted by keen insight in the year 1869 to call him to this high office. It would be an exaggeration to say that the tremendous growth of Harvard in the last three decades is wholly the work of Eliot; for this development is, first of all, the result of that remarkable progress which the intellectual life of the whole land has undergone. But the fact that Harvard during all this time has kept in the very front rank among all academic institutions is certainly due to the efforts of President Eliot; and once again, if the progress at Harvard has resulted in part from the scientific awakening of the whole country, this national movement was itself in no small measure the work of the same man. His influence has extended out beyond the boundaries of New England and far beyond all university circles, and has made itself felt in the whole educational life of the country. He was never a man after the taste of the masses; his quiet and distinguished reserve are too cool and deliberate. And if to-day, on great occasions, he is generally the most important speaker, this is really a triumph for clear and solid thought over the mere tricks of blatancy and rhetoric. Throughout the country he is known as the incomparable master of short and pregnant English.

His life work has contained nothing of the spasmodic; nor have his reforms been in any case sudden ones. To whatever has been necessary he has consecrated his patient energy, going fearlessly toward the goal which he recognized as right, and moving slowly and surely forward. Year by year he has exerted an influence on the immediate circles of his community, and so indirectly on the whole land, to bring up the conditions for entrance into college and professional schools until at the present time all the special faculties of Harvard demand as an entrance requirement a complete college course. He has made Harvard College over into a modern academy, in which every student is entirely free to select the course of studies which he desires, and has introduced through the entire university and for all time, the spirit of impartial investigation. Even the theological faculty has grown under his influence from a sectarian institution of the Unitarian Church into a non-sectarian Christian institution in which future preachers of every sect are able to obtain their preliminary training. And this indefatigable innovator is to-day, as he now has completed his seventieth year, pressing forward with youthful energies to new goals. Just as he has introduced into the college the opportunity of perfectly free specialization, so now he clearly sees that if a college education is necessary for every future student in the special departments of the university, that the college course must be shortened from four to three years, or in other words, must be compressed. There is much opposition to this idea. All traditions and very many apparently weighty arguments seem to speak against it. Nevertheless, any student of average intelligence and energy can now get the Harvard A. B. in three years; before long this will be the rule, and in a short time the entire country will have followed in the steps of this reform.

It is true that Eliot’s distinguished position has contributed very much to his outward success—that position which he has filled for thirty-five years, and which in itself guarantees a peculiar influence on academic life. But the decisive thing has been his personality. He is enthusiastic and yet conservative, bold and yet patient, always glad to consider the objections of the youngest teacher; he is religious, and nevertheless a confident exponent of modern science. First of all, he is through and through an aristocrat: his interest is in the single, gifted, and solid personality rather than in the masses; and his conception of the inequality of man is the prime motive of his whole endeavour. But at the same time he is the best of democrats, for he lays the greatest stress on making it possible for the earnest spirit to press on and emerge from the lowest classes of the people. Harvard has set its roots as never before through the whole country, and thereby has drawn on the intellectual and moral energies of the entire nation.

Under the president come the faculties, of which each one is presided over by a dean. The largest faculty is the faculty of arts and sciences, whose members lecture both for the college and for the Graduate School. There is really no sharp distinction, and the announcement of lectures says merely that certain elementary courses are designed for younger students in the college, and that certain others are only for advanced students. Moreover, the seminaries and laboratory courses for scientific research are open only to students of the Graduate School. The rest is common ground.

As always happens, the faculty includes very unlike material, a number of the most distinguished investigators, along with others who are first of all teachers. In general, the older generation of men belongs to that time in which the ability to teach was thought more important than pure scholarship. On the other hand, the middle generation is much devoted to productive investigations. The youngest generation of instructors is somewhat divided. A part holds the ideal of creative research, another part is in a sort of reactionary mood against the modern high estimation of specialized work; and has rather a tendency once more to emphasize the idealistic side of academic activity—the beauty of form and the cultivating value of belles-lettres as opposed to the dry details of scholarship. This last is generally accounted the peculiar work of German influence, and in opposition to this there is a demand for Gallic polish and that scientific connoisseurship of the English gentleman. Since, however, these men are thinking not of the main fact, but rather of certain insignificant excrescences of German work, and since after all nothing but the real work of investigation can lead to new achievements which justify in a real university any advancement to higher academic positions, there is no ground for fearing that this reactionary mood will exert any particularly harmful influence on more serious circles of workers. Such a movement may be even welcomed as a warning against a possible ossification of science. Particularly the college would be untrue to its ideals, if it were to forget the humanities in favour of scientific matters of fact.

The lectures naturally follow the principle of thorough-going specialization, and one who reads the Annual Report will probably be surprised to discover how many students take up Assyrian or Icelandic, Old Bulgarian, or Middle Irish. The same specialization is carried into the seminaries for the advanced students; thus, for instance, in the department of philosophy, there are special seminaries for ethics, psychology, metaphysics, logic, sociology, pedagogy, Greek, and modern philosophy. The theological faculty is the smallest. In spite of an admirable teaching staff there remains something still to do before the spirit of science is brought into perfect harmony with the strongly sectarian character of the American churches. On the other hand, the faculty of law is recognized as the most distinguished in the English-speaking world. The difference between the Anglo-American law and the Romano-German has brought it about that the entire arrangement and method of study here are thoroughly different from the German. From the very beginning law is taught by the study of actual decisions; the introduction of this “case system,” in opposition to the usual text-book system, was the most decisive advance of all and fixed the reputation of the law faculty. And this system has been gradually introduced into other leading schools of law. The legal course lasts three years, and each year has its prescribed courses of lectures. In the first year, for instance, students take up contracts, the penal code, property rights, and civil processes. Perhaps the departure from the German method of teaching law is most characteristically shown by the fact that the law students are from the very first day the most industrious students of all. These young men have passed through their rather easy college days, and when now they leave those early years of study in the elm-shaded college yard and withdraw to Austin Hall, the law building of the university, they feel that at last they are beginning their serious life-work. In the upper story of Austin Hall there is a large reading-room for the students, with a legal reference library of over sixty thousand volumes. This hall is filled with students, even late at night, who are quite as busy as if they were young barristers industriously working away on their beginning practice.

The German method is much more followed in the four-year medical course of studies, and still there are here striking differences. The medical faculty of Harvard, which is located in Boston on account of the larger hospitals to be found in the city, is at this moment in the midst of moving. Already work has been commenced on a new medical quadrangle with the most modern and sumptuous edifices. In somewhat the same way, the course of studies is rather under process of reformation. It is in the stage of experimentation, and of course it is true throughout the world that the astonishing advance of medicine has created new problems for the universities. It seems impossible now for a student to master the whole province, since his study time is of course limited. The latest attempt at reform is along the line of the greatest possible concentration. The student is expected for several months morning and night to study only anatomy, to hear anatomical lectures, to dissect and to use the microscope; and then again for several months he devotes himself entirely to physiology, and so on. Much is hoped, secondly, from the intuitive method of instruction. While in Germany the teaching of physiology is chiefly by means of lectures and demonstrations, every Harvard student has in addition during the period of physiological study to work one hundred and eighty hours on prescribed experiments, so that two hours of experimentation follow every one-hour lecture. In certain lines of practical instruction, especially in pathological anatomy, the American is at a disadvantage compared with the German, since the supply of material for autopsy is limited. Popular democratic sentiment is very strong against the idea that a man who dies in a public poor-house must fall a prey to the dissecting knife. The clinical demonstrations are not given in special university clinics, but rather in the large municipal hospitals, where all the chief physicians are pledged to give practical instruction in the form of demonstrations. In the third place, there is an increasing tendency to give to the study of medicine a certain mobility; in other words, to allow a rather early specialization. As to the substance itself which is taught, Harvard’s medical school is very much like a German university, and becomes daily more similar. In the American as in the German university, the microscope and the retort have taken precedence over the medicine chest.

Harvard has about five thousand students. Any boy who wishes to enter must pass, at the beginning of the summer, a six-day written examination; and these examinations are conducted in about forty different places of the country under the supervision of officers of the university. Any one coming from other universities is carefully graded according to the standard of scholarship of his particular institution. The amount of study required is not easily determined. Unlike the German plan, every course of lectures is concluded at the end of the year with a three-hour examination, and only the man who passes the examination has the course in question put to his credit. Whoever during the four, or perhaps three, college years has taken eighteen three-hour lecture courses extending through the year receives the bachelor’s degree. In practice, indeed, the matter becomes enormously complicated, yet extensive administrative machinery regulates every case with due justice. In the legal and medical faculties, everything is dependent on the final examinations of the year. In the philosophical two, or more often three, years of study after the bachelor’s degree lead to the doctorate of philosophy.

The graduate student always works industriously through the year, but the college student may be one of various types. Part of these men work no less industriously than the advanced students; while another part, and by no means the worst, would not for anything be guilty of such misbehaviour. These men are not in Harvard to learn facts, but they have come to college for a certain atmosphere—in order to assimilate by reflection, as they say. Of course, the lectures of enthusiastic professors and a good book or two belong to this atmosphere; and yet, who can say that the hours spent at the club, on the foot-ball field, at the theatre, in the Boston hotel, on the river or on horseback do not contribute quite as much—not to mention the informal discussions about God and the world, especially the literary and athletic worlds, as they sit together at their window seats on the crimson cushions and smoke their cigarettes? Harvard has the reputation through the country of being the rich man’s university, and it is true that many live here in a degree of luxury of which few German students would ever think. And yet there are as many who go through college on the most modest means, who perhaps earn their own livelihood or receive financial aid from the college. A systematic evasion of lectures or excessive drinking or card-playing plays no role at all. The distinctly youthful exuberance of the students is discharged most especially in the field of sport, which gets an incomparable influence on the students’ minds by means of the friendly rivalry between different colleges. The foot-ball game between Harvard and Yale in November, or the base-ball game in June, or the New London races, are national events, for which special trains transport thousands of visitors. Next to the historical traditions it is indeed sport, which holds the body of Harvard students most firmly together, and those who belong to the same class most firmly of all—that is, those who are to receive their A. B. in the same year. Year after year the Harvard graduates come back to Boston in order to see their old class-mates again. They know that to be a Harvard man means for their whole life to be the body-guard of the nation. They will stand for Harvard, their sons will go to Harvard, and to Harvard they will contribute with generous hands out of their material prosperity.

Harvard reflects all the interests of the nation, and all its social contrasts. It has its political, religious, literary and musical clubs, its scientific and social organizations, its daily paper for the discussion of Harvard’s interests, edited by students, and three monthly magazines; it has its public and serious parliamentary debates, and most popular of all, operatic performances in the burlesque vein given by students. Thousands of most diverse personalities work out their life problems in this little city of lecture halls, laboratories, museums, libraries, banquet halls, and club buildings, which are scattered about the ancient elm-shaded yard. Each student has come, in the ardour and ambition of youth, to these halls where so many intellectual leaders have taught and so many great men of the outside world have spent their student years; and each one goes away once more into the world a better and stronger man.

One thing that a European visitor particularly expects to find in the lecture room of an American university is not found in Harvard. There are no women students in the school. Women graduates who are well advanced are admitted to the seminaries and to scientific research in the laboratories, but they are excluded from the college; and the same is true of Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins. Of course, Harvard has no prejudice against the higher education of women; but Harvard is itself an institution for men. In an indirect way, the teaching staff of Harvard University is utilized for the benefit of women, since only a stone’s throw from the Harvard College gate is Radcliffe College, which is for women, and in which only Harvard instructors give lectures.

This picture of the largest university will stand as typical for the others, although of course each one of the great academies has its own peculiarities. While Harvard seeks to unite humanitarian and specialized work, Johns Hopkins aims to give only the latter, while Yale and Princeton aim more particularly at the former. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore is a workshop of productive investigation, and in the province of natural sciences and medicine Johns Hopkins has been a brilliant example to the whole country. Yale University, in New Haven, stands first of all for culture and personal development, although many a shining name in scholarship is graven on the tablets of Yale. Columbia University, in New York, gets its peculiar character from that great city which is its background; and this to a much greater extent than the University of Chicago, which has created its own environment and atmosphere on the farthest outskirts of that great city. Chicago, and Cornell University at Ithaca, the University of Pennsylvania, Ann Arbor in Michigan, Berkeley and Stanford in California are the principal institutions which admit women, and therein are outwardly distinguished from the large institutions of the East.

The male students from the West have somewhat less polish, but are certainly not less industrious. The Western students come generally out of more modest conditions, and are therefore less indifferent with regard to their own future. The student from Ann Arbor, Minnesota, or Nebraska would compare with the student at Yale or Princeton about as a student at Königsberg or Breslau would compare with one at Heidelberg or Bonn. Along with that he comes from a lower level of public school education. The Western institutions are forced to content themselves with less exacting conditions for entrance, and the South has at the present time no academies at all which are to be compared seriously with the great universities of the country.

Next to Harvard the oldest university is Yale, which a short time ago celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary. After Yale comes Princeton, whose foundation took place in the middle of the eighteenth century. Yale was founded as a protest against the liberal tendencies of Harvard. Puritan orthodoxy had been rather overridden at Harvard, and so created for itself a more secure fortress in the colony of Connecticut. In this the mass of the population was strictly in sympathy with the church; the free spirit of Harvard was too advanced for the people, and remained so in a certain way for nearly two centuries. Therein has lain the strength of Yale. Until a short time ago Yale had the more popular place in the nation; it was the democratic rallying-ground in contrast with Harvard, which was too haughtily aristocratic. Yale was the religious and the conservative stronghold as contrasted with the free thought and progress of Harvard. For some time it seemed as if the opposition of Yale against the modern spirit would really prejudice its higher interests, and it slowly fell somewhat from its great historic position. But recently, under its young, widely known president, Hadley, the political economist, it has been making energetic and very successful endeavours to recover its lost position.

The history of Columbia University, in New York, began as early as 1754. At that time it was King’s College, which after the War for Independence was rechristened Columbia College. But the real greatness of Columbia began only in the last few decades, with a development which is unparalleled. Under its president, Seth Low, the famous medical, legal, and political economical faculties were brought into closer relations with the college, the Graduate School was organized, Teachers’ College was developed, the general entrance conditions were brought up, and on Morningside Heights a magnificent new university quadrangle was erected. When Seth Low left the university, after ten years of irreproachable and masterly administration, in order to become Mayor of New York in the service of the Reform party, he was succeeded in the presidency by Butler, a young man who since his earliest years had shown extraordinary talents for administration, and who for many years as editor of the best pedagogical magazine had become thoroughly familiar with the needs of academic instruction. Columbia is favoured by every circumstance. If signs are not deceptive, Columbia will soon stand nearest to Harvard at the head of American universities. While Harvard and Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania, and Columbia are the most successful creations of the Colonial days, Johns Hopkins and Chicago, Cornell and Leland Stanford are the chief representatives of those institutions which have recently been founded by private munificence. The state universities of Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and California may be mentioned, finally, as the most notable state universities.

Johns Hopkins was an able railroad president, who died after a long life, in 1873, and bequeathed seven million dollars for a university and academy to be founded in his native city of Baltimore. The administrative council elected Gilman as its president, and it is Gilman’s memorable service to have accomplished that of which America was most in need in that moment of transition—an academy which should concentrate its entire strength on the furtherance of serious scientific investigation quite without concessions to the English college idea, without any attempt to reach a great circle of students, or without any effort to annex a legal or theological faculty. Its sole aim was to attract really eminent specialists as teachers in its philosophical faculties, to equip laboratories and seminaries in the most approved manner, to fill these with advanced students, and to inspire these students with a zeal for scientific productiveness. This experiment has succeeded remarkably. It is clear to-day that the further development of the American university will not consist in developing the special professional school, but will rather combine the ideals of the college with the ideals of original research. But at that time when the new spirit which had been imported from Germany began to ferment, it was of the first importance that some such institution should avowedly, without being hampered by any traditions, take up the cause of that method which seeks to initiate the future school-teacher into the secrets of the laboratory. Since Gilman retired, a short time ago, the famous chemist, Ira Remsen, has taken his place. A brilliant professor of Johns Hopkins, Stanley Hall, has undertaken a similar experiment on a much more modest scale, in the city of Worcester, with the millions which were given by the philanthropist Clark. His Clark University has remained something of a torso, but has likewise succeeded in advancing the impulse for productive science in many directions, especially in psychology and education.

In the year 1868, Cornell University was founded in the town of Ithaca, from the gifts of Ezra Cornell; and this university had almost exactly opposite aims. It has aimed to create a university for the people, where every man could find what he needed for his own education; it has become a stronghold for the utilitarian spirit. The truly American spirit of restless initiative has perhaps nowhere in the academic world found more characteristic expression than in this energetic dwelling-place of science. The first president was the eminent historian, Andrew D. White, who was appointed later to his happy mission as Ambassador to Berlin. At the present day the philosopher Shurman stands at the helm, whose efforts in colonial politics are widely known. Senator Stanford, of California, aimed to accomplish for the extreme West the same thing that Cornell had done for the East, when in memory of his deceased son he applied his entire property to the foundation of an academy in the vicinity of San Francisco. Leland Stanford is, so far as its financial endowment goes, probably the richest university in the country. As far as its internal efficiency has gone, the thirty million dollars have not meant so much, since the West has to depend on its own students and it has to take them as it finds them. In spite of this, the university accomplishes an excellent work in many directions under the leadership of the zoölogist Jordan, its possibly too energetic president. While its rival, the State University of California, near the Golden Gate of San Francisco, is perhaps the most superbly situated university in the world, Leland Stanford can lay claim to being the more picturesque. It is a dream in stone conjured up under the Californian palms. Finally, quite different, more strenuous than all others, some say more Chicagoan, is the University of Chicago, to which the petroleum prince, Rockefeller, has deflected some twelve million dollars. The University of Chicago has everything and offers everything. It pays the highest salaries, it is open the whole year through, it has accommodations for women, and welcomes summer guests who come to stay only a couple of months. It has the richest programme of collateral lectures, of university publications and of its own periodicals, has an organic alliance with no end of smaller colleges in the country, has observatories on the hill-tops and laboratories by the sea; and, whatever it lacks to-day, it is bound to have to-morrow. It is almost uncanny how busily and energetically this university has developed itself in a few years under the distinguished and brilliant presidential policy of Harper. One must admire the great work. It is possible that this place is still not equal to the older Eastern universities as the home of quiet maturity and reflection; but for hard, scholarly work it has few rivals in the world.

Johns Hopkins and Cornell, Stanford and Chicago, have been carefully designed and built according to one consistent plan, while the state universities have developed slowly out of small colleges more like the old institutions of Colonial days. Their history is for the most part uneventful; it is a steady and toilsome working to the top, which has been limited not so much by the finances of the states, but rather by the conditions of the schools in the regions about them. The largest state university is that of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, not far from Detroit. In number of students it is next to Harvard. One of its specialties is a homœopathic medical faculty in addition to the allopathic.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that, with the blossoming out of the large and middle-sized universities, all of which have colleges as one of their departments, the small colleges have ceased to play their part. Quite on the contrary; in a certain sense the small college situated in rural seclusion has found a new task to work out in contrast to the great universities. It is only in the small college that the young student is able to come into personal contact with the professor, and only there can his special individuality be taken into account by his alma mater. One scheme does not fit all the students, and not only in those regions where the homely college represents the highest attainable instruction of its kind, but also in many districts of the maturest culture, the college is for many youths the most favourable place for development. Thus the New England States would feel a great loss to the cause of culture if such old colleges as Williams, Brown, Amherst, and Dartmouth should simply deliver over its students to Harvard.

These smaller colleges fulfil a special mission, therefore, and they do their best when they do not try to seem more than they really are. There was the danger that the colleges would think themselves improved by introducing some fragments of research work into their curriculum, and so spoiling a good humanitarian college by offering a bad imitation of a university. Of course, there can be no talk of a sharp separation between college and university, for the reasons which we have emphasized many times before. It is necessary, as we have seen, that there should be a long continuous scale from the smallest college up to the largest university. It is true that many of the small institutions are entirely superfluous, and not capable of any great development, and so from year to year some are bound to disappear or to be absorbed by others. Many are really business enterprises, and many more are sectarian institutions. But in general there exists among these institutions a healthy struggle for existence which prospers the strongest of them and makes them do their best. The right of existence of many of the small and isolated professional schools is much more questionable. Almost all the best medical, legal, and theological schools of this order have already been assimilated to this or that college, and the growing together of the academies which started separately and from small beginnings into organic universities is in conformity with the centralizing tendency everywhere in progress in our time.

Many of the smaller colleges are, like all the state institutions, open to both sexes. Besides these, however, there thrive certain colleges which are exclusively for women. The best known of these are Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, and Barnard. Barnard College, in New York, stands in the same relation to Columbia University as Radcliffe College does to Harvard. Every one of these leading women’s colleges has its own physiognomy, and appeals rather to its special type of young woman. Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr lie in quiet, retired little towns or villages: and the four years of college life spent together by something like a thousand blooming, happy young women between the years of eighteen and twenty-two, in college halls which are surrounded by attractive parks, are four years of extraordinary charm. Only Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe lay any special stress on the advanced critical work of the graduates. In Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley it is mostly a matter of assimilation, and the standard of scholarship is not much higher than that of the German Arbiturientenexamen, together with possibly one or two semesters of the philosophical faculty. In Wellesley, women are almost the only teachers; while in Bryn Mawr almost all are men, and in Smith the teachers are both men and women.

In statistical language, the following conditions are found to hold. If for the moment we put college and graduate schools together as the “philosophical faculty,” there studied in the year 1900 in the philosophical faculties, 1,308 students for every million inhabitants; in the legal faculties 166, in the medical 333, and in the theological faculties 106. Ten years previously the corresponding figures were 877, 72, 266, 112, respectively, and twenty-five years ago they were 744, 61, 196, and 120, respectively. Thus the increase in the last ten years has been a remarkable one; theology alone shows some diminution in its numbers. If we consider now the philosophical faculties more closely, we discover the surprising fact that in the last decade the male students have increased 61 per cent., while the female have increased 149 per cent. The degrees conferred in the year 1900 were as follows: college degrees of bachelor of arts—to men 5,129, to women 2,140. The degree of bachelor of science, which is somewhat lower in its standard, and requires no classical preparation, was given to 2,473 men and 591 women. The degree of doctor of philosophy to 322 men and 20 women. The private endowment of all colleges together amounts to 360 million dollars, of which 160 million consist in income-bearing securities. The annual income amounted to 28 millions, not counting donations of that year, of which 11 millions came from the fees of students, about 7 millions were the interest on endowments, and 7.5 millions were contributed by the government. Thus the student pays about 39 per cent. of what his tuition costs. The larger donations for the year amounted to about 12 millions more. The number of colleges for men or for both sexes was 480, for women alone 141. This figure says very little; since, in the case of many women’s institutions, the name college is more monstrously abused than in any other, and in the West and South is assumed by every upstart girls’ school. There are only 13 women’s colleges which come up to a high standard, and it may at once be added that the number of polytechnic and agricultural schools whose conditions for entrance correspond on the average to those of the colleges amounts to 43. Also these stand on many different levels, and at the head of them all is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Boston, which is now under the brilliant leadership of President Pritchett. Almost all the technical schools are state institutions.

There were, in the year 1900, 151 medical faculties having 25,213 students: all except three provide a four years’ course of study. Besides these, there were 7,928 dental students studying in 54 dental schools, and 4,042 students of pharmacy in 53 separate institutions. There were 12,516 law students, and 8,009 theological students. Out of the law students 151, and of the theological 181, were women.

Chapter Seventeen: Science

One who surveys, without prejudice, the academic life of the country in reference to scientific work will receive a deep impression of the energy and carefulness with which this enormous national machinery of education furthers the higher intellectual life. And the continuous gradation of institutions by which the higher academy is able to adapt itself to every local need, so that no least remnant of free initiative can be lost and unlimited development is made possible at every point, must be recognized by every one as the best conceivable system for the country.

It is not to be denied that it brings with it certain difficulties and disadvantages. The administrative difficulties which proceed from the apparent incomparability of the institutions are really not serious, although the foreigner who is accustomed to uniformity in his universities, Gymnasia, certificates and doctorial diplomas, is inclined to overemphasize these difficulties in America. The real disadvantages of the system of continuous gradations is found, not in the outer administration, but in its inner methods. The German undergraduate takes the attitude of one who learns; his teacher must be thoroughly well informed, but no one expects a school-teacher himself to advance science. The graduate student, on the other hand, is supposed to take a critical attitude, and therefore his teacher has to be a teacher of methods—that is, he must be a productive investigator. Wherever, as in Germany, there lies a sharp distinction between these two provinces, it is easy to keep the spirit of investigation pure; but where, as in America, one merges into the other, the principles at stake are far too likely to be confused. Men who fundamentally are nothing but able school-teachers are then able to work up and stand beside the best investigators in the university faculties, because the principle of promotion on the ground of scientific production solely cannot be so clearly separated from the methods of selection which are adapted to the lower grades of instruction. To be sure, this has its advantages in other directions; because, in so far as there is no sharp demarcation, the spirit of investigation can also grow from above down, and therefore in many a smaller college there will be more productive scientists teaching than would be found, perhaps, in a German school; but yet the influences of the lower on the higher departments of instruction are the predominant ones. Investigation thrives best when the young scholar knows that his advancement depends ultimately on strictly scientific achievements, and not on work of a popular sort, nor on success in the teaching of second-hand knowledge. This fact has often been brought home to the public mind in recent years, and the leading universities have already more and more recognized the principle of considering scientific achievements to be the main ground for preferment.

But productive scholarship is interfered with in still other ways. Professors are often too much busied with administrative concerns; and although this sort of administrative influence may be attractive for many professors, its exercise requires much sacrifice of time. More particularly, the professors of most institutions, although there are many exceptions among the leading universities, are overloaded with lectures, and herein the graded transition from low to high works unfavourably. Especially in Western institutions, the administrative bodies do not see why the university professor should not lecture as many hours in the week as a school teacher; and most dangerous of all, as we have already mentioned in speaking of popular education, is the fact that the scholar is tempted, by high social and financial rewards, to give scientifically unproductive popular lectures and to write popular essays.

And the list of factors which have worked against scientific productiveness can be still further increased. To be sure, it would be false here to repeat the old tale that the American professor is threatened in his freedom by the whimsical demands of rich patrons, who have founded or handsomely endowed many of the universities. That is merely newspaper gossip; and the three or four cases which have busied public opinion in the last ten years and have been ridiculously overestimated, are found, on closer inspection, to have been cases which could have come up as well in any non-partisan institution in the world. There may have been mistakes on both sides; perhaps the university councils have acted with unnecessary rigour or lack of tact, but it has yet to be proved that there has been actual injustice anywhere. Even in small colleges purely scientific activity never interferes with the welfare of a professor. A blatant disrespect for religion would hurt his further prospects there, to be sure, just as in the Western state institutions the committees appointed by the legislature would dislike a hostile political attitude. Yet not even in the smallest college has any professor ever suffered the least prejudice by reason of his scientific labours. Science in America is not hampered by any lack of academic freedom.

On the other hand, the American university lacks one of the most important forces of German universities—the Privatdocent, who lives only for science, and without compensation places his teaching abilities in the service of his own scientific development. The young American scholar is welcome only where a paid position is vacant; but if he finds no empty instructorship in a large university, he is obliged to be content with a position in a small college, where the entire intellectual atmosphere, as regards the studies, apparatus, and amount of work exacted, all work against his desire to be scientifically productive, and finally perhaps kill it entirely. The large universities are just beginning to institute the system of voluntary docents—which, to be sure, encounters administrative difficulties. There is also a dangerous tendency toward academic in-breeding. The former students of an institution are always noticeably preferred for any vacant position, and the claims of capable scholars are often disregarded for the sake of quite insignificant men. Scientific productiveness meets further with the material obstacle of the high cost of printing in America, which makes it often more difficult for the young student here than in Germany to find a publisher for his works.

Against all this there are some external advantages: first, the lavishness of the accessories of investigation. The equipment of laboratories, libraries, museums, observatories, special institutes, and the fitting out of expeditions yield their due benefits. Then there are various sorts of free assistance—fellowships, travelling scholarships, and other foundations—which make every year many young scholars free for scientific work. There is also the admirable “sabbatical year.” The large universities give every professor leave of absence every seventh year, with the express purpose of allowing him time for his own scholarly labours. Another favourable circumstance is the excellent habit of work which every American acquires during his student years; and here it is not to be doubted that the American is on the average, and in consequence of his system has to be, more industrious than the German average student. From the beginning of his course, he is credited with only such lecture courses as he has passed examinations on, and these are so arranged as to necessitate not only presence at the lectures, but also the study of prescribed treatises; the student is obliged to apply himself with considerable diligence. A student who should give himself entirely to idling, as may happen in Germany, would not finish his first college year. If the local foot-ball gossip is no more sensible than the talk at duelling clubs, at least the practice of drinking beer in the morning and playing skat have no evil counterpart of comparable importance in America. The American student recreates himself on the athletic field rather than in the ale-house. Germany is exceedingly sparing of time and strength during school years, but lets both be wasted in the universities to the great advantage of a strong personality here and there, but to the injury of the average man. America wastes a good deal of time during school years, but is more sparing during the college and university courses, and there accustoms each student to good, hard work.

And most of all, the intellectual make-up of the American is especially adapted to scientific achievements. This temperament, owing to the historical development of the nation, has so far addressed itself to political, industrial, and judicial problems, but a return to theoretical science has set in; and there, most of all, the happy combination of inventiveness, enthusiasm, and persistence in pursuit of a goal, of intellectual freedom and elasticity, of feeling for form and of idealistic instinct for self-perfection will yield, perhaps soon, remarkable triumphs.

We have hitherto spoken only of the furtherance of science by the higher institutions of learning, but we must look at least hastily on what is being done outside of academic circles. We see, then, first of all, the magnificent government institutions at Washington which, without doing any teaching, are in the sole service of science. The cultivation of the sciences by twenty-eight special institutions and an army of 6,000 persons, conducted at an annual expense of more than $8,000,000, is certainly a unique feature of American government. There is no other government in the world which is organized for such a many-sided scientific work; and nevertheless, everything which is done there is closely related to the true interests of government—that is, not to the interests of the dominant political party, but to those of the great self-governing nation. All the institutes, as different as they are in their special work, have this in common—that they work on problems which relate to the country, population, products, and the general conditions of America, so that they meet first of all the national needs of an economical, social, intellectual, political, and hygienic sort, and only in a secondary way contribute to abstract science.

The work of these government institutes is peculiar, moreover, in that the results are published in many handsomely gotten-up volumes, and sent free of cost to hundreds of thousands of applicants. The institutions are devoted partly to science and partly to political economy. Among the scientific institutes are the admirable Bureau of Geological Survey, which has six hundred officials, and undertakes not only geological but also palæontological and hydrographic investigations, and carries on mineralogical and lithological laboratories; then the Geodetic Survey, which studies the coasts, rivers, lakes, and mountains of the country; the Marine Observatory, for taking astronomical observations; the Weather Bureau, which conducts more than one hundred and fifty meteorological stations; the Bureau of Biology, which makes a special study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals; the Bureau of Botany, which studies especially all problems connected with seeds; the Bureau of Forestry, which scientifically works on questions of the national timber supply; the important Bureau of Entomology, which has studied with great success the relations of insects to agriculture; the Bureau of Agriculture, which statistically works out experiments on planting, and which directs government experiment stations situated throughout the country; the Department of Fisheries, which conducts stations for marine biology; and many others. Among the political economic institutes in the broad sense of the word are the Bureau of Labour, which undertakes purely sociological investigations into labour conditions; the Corporation Bureau, which studies the conditions of organized business; the Bureau of General Statistics; the Census Bureau, which every ten years takes a census more complete than that of any other country. The Census of 1890 consisted of 39 large folio volumes, and the collecting of information alone cost $10,000,000. The Census of 1900 is still in course of publication. The Bureau of Education also belongs here, which studies purely theoretically the statistics of education. Then there are the Bureau of Immigration and several others. All these bureaus are really designed to impart instruction and advice; they have no authority to enforce any measures. But the extraordinary publicity which is given to their printed reports gives them a very considerable influence; and the thoroughness with which the investigations are carried on, thanks to the liberal appropriations of Congress, makes of these bureaus scientific and economic institutions of the highest order.

We have still to speak of the most famous of the government bureaus, the Smithsonian Institution. In 1836 the government came into the possession, by bequest, of the whole property of the Englishman Smithson, as a principal with which an institution should be founded bearing his name, and serving the advance and dissemination of science. It was never known just why this Oxonian and mineralogist left his large property to the city of Washington, which then numbered only 5,000 inhabitants. Although he had never visited America, he wrote to a friend: “The best blood of England flows in my veins; my father’s family is from Northumberland, my mother’s is related to kings. But I desire to have my name remembered when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percys shall have been forgotten.” His instinct guided him aright, and the Smithsonian Institution is to-day an intellectual centre in Washington—that city which is the political centre of the New World. It should be mentioned, in passing, that Congress accepted the bequest only after lively opposition; it was objected that to receive the gift of a foreigner was beneath the dignity of the government. As a fact, however, the success of the institution is not due so much to this foreign endowment as to the able labours of its three presidents: the physicist Henry, who served from 1846 to 1878, the zoölogist Baird from 1878 to 1887, and the physicist Langley, who has been at the head since 1887. All three have been successful in finding ways by which the institute could serve the growth and dissemination of science.

It was agreed from the outset not to found a university which would compete with others already existing, but an institute to complement all existing institutions, and to be a sort of centre among them. The great institution was divided into the following divisions: first, the National Museum, in which the visible results of all the national expeditions and excavations are gathered and arranged. The American idea is that a scientific museum should not be a series of articles with their labels, but rather a series of instructive labels, illustrated by typical specimens. Only in this way, it is thought, does a museum really help to educate the masses. The collection, which is visited every year by more than 300,000 persons, includes 750,000 ethnological and anthropological objects; almost 2,000,000 zoölogical, 400,000 botanical, and almost 300,000 palæontological specimens. Then there is the National Zoölogical Park, which contains animal species that are dying out; the Astrophysical Observatory, in which Langley carries on his famous experiments on the invisible portion of the solar spectrum; the Ethnological Bureau, which specially studies the Indian; and much else. The department of exchanges of this institute is a unique affair; it negotiates exchanges between scientists, libraries, and other American institutions, and also between these and European institutions. As external as this service may seem, it has become indispensable to the work of American science. Moreover, the library of the institution is among the most important in the country; and its zoölogical, ethnological, physical, and geological publications, which are distributed free to 4,000 libraries, already fill hundreds of volumes.

Any one examining the many-sided and happily circumstanced scientific work of these twenty-eight institutes at Washington will come to feel that the equipment could be used to better advantage if actual teaching were to be undertaken, and that the organization of the institutes into a national university attracting students from all parts of the country would tend to stimulate their achievements. In fact, the thought of a national university as the crowning point of the educational system of the country has always been entertained in Washington; and those who favour this idea are able to point to George Washington as the one who first conceived such a plan. In spite of vigorous agitation, this plan is still not realized, chiefly because the traditions of the country make education the concern of the separate states, and reserve it for such institutions as are independent of politics.

It is a different question, whether the time will not come when the nation will desire an institution of a higher sort—one which will not rival the other large universities of the country, but will stand above them all and assume new duties. A purely scientific institution might exist, admitting students only after they have passed their doctorial examination, and of which the professors should be elected by the vote of their colleagues through the country. There is much need of such a university; but the time may not be ripe for it now, and it may be a matter of the far future. And yet at the present rate at which science is developing in the country, the far future means only ten or fifteen years hence. When the time is ripe, the needed hundreds of millions of dollars will be forthcoming.

For the present, a sort of half-way station to a national university at Washington has been reached. This is the Carnegie Institute, whose efficiency can so far not be wholly estimated. With a provisional capital of $10,000,000 given by Andrew Carnegie, it is proposed to aid scientific investigations throughout the country, and on the recommendation of competent men to advance to young scientists the necessary means for productive investigations. There is, unfortunately, a danger here that in this way the other universities and foundations of the country may feel relieved of their responsibility, and so relax their efforts. It may be that people will look to the centre for that which formerly came from the periphery, and that in this way the general industry will become less intense. Most of all, the Carnegie Institute has, up to this point, lacked broad fruitful ideas and a real programme of what it proposes to do. If the institute cannot do better than it has so far done, it is to be feared that its arbitrary and unsystematic aid will do, in the long run, more harm than good to the scientific life of the country.

The same general conditions, on a smaller scale and with many variations, are found outside of Washington in a hundred different scientific museums and collections—biological, hygienic, medical, historical, economic, and experimental institutions; zoölogical and botanical gardens; astronomical observatories; biological stations, which are found sometimes under state or city administration, sometimes under private or corporate management. Thus the Marine Laboratory at Woods Hole is a meeting-place every summer for the best biologists. Sometimes important collections can be found in the most unlikely places—as, for instance, in the historic museum of the city of Salem, which, although it has gone to sleep to-day, is still proud of its history. The large cities, however, like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and Baltimore, have established admirable institutions, on which scientific work everywhere depends. Then there are the political capitals, such as Albany, with their institutions. That German who is most thoroughly acquainted with conditions of scientific collections, Professor Meyer, the director of the scientific museums at Dresden, has given his opinion in his admirable work on the museums of the Eastern United States as follows: “I have received a profound impression of American capabilities in this direction, and can even say that the museums of natural history of that country are generally on a higher plane than those of Europe. We have, so far as buildings and administrative machinery go, very few good and many moderate or downright poor museums, while the Americans have many more good and many fewer bad ones; and those which are poor are improving at the rapid American pace, while with us improvement is hopelessly slow.”

There is still another important factor in the scientific societies, whose membership, to be sure, is chiefly composed of the personnel of the higher educational institutions, but which nevertheless exert an independent influence on scientific life. The National Academy of Science is officially at the head. It was founded in 1863, having a hundred members and electing five new members each year. While its annual meetings in Washington observe only the ordinary scientific programme, the society has as a special function the advising of Congress and the government on scientific matters. Thus, this academy drew up the plans for organizing the Geological Survey and for replanting the national forests. The political atmosphere of Washington, however, has not been too favourable to the success of the Academy, and it has never attained the national significance of the Paris and London academies.

The American Historical Association has a similar character; and its transactions are published at the expense of the government. The popular associations, of course, reach much larger circles; thus, for instance, the American Society for the Advancement of Science, which has existed for fifty years, has about the same functions as the German Naturforscherversammlung. It brings together at its annual meetings, which are always held in different places, a thousand or so scientists, and holds in different sections a great many lectures. Still more popular are the meetings of the similarly organized National Educational Association, which brings together more than ten thousand members at its summer meetings, which are often held in pleasant and retired spots. In these and similar sessions, scientific work is popularized, while in the specialized societies it is stimulated toward greater profundity. In fact, there is no medical, natural-historical, legal, theological, historical, economic, philological, or philosophical specialty which has not its special national societies with annual congresses. It is increasingly the custom to hold these popular sessions during the summer holidays, but the strictly scientific congresses during the first week in January. The physicians, by exception, meet at Easter. In order that the business-like separation of subjects may not exclude a certain contact of scientific neighbours, it is increasingly the plan to organize groups of congresses; thus, the seven societies of anatomy, physiology, morphology, plant physiology, psychology, anthropology, and folk-lore always meet at the same time in the same city.

Besides these wandering meetings, finally, there are the local societies. Of these, the veteran is the Academy in Philadelphia. It was founded by Franklin in 1743, and so far as its membership goes, may claim to have a national character. In a similar way the American Academy, founded in 1780, has its home in Boston. Then there are the New York Academy, the Washington Academy, which has recently enlarged so as to include members from the whole country, and which ultimately will probably merge into the National Academy; the academies of Baltimore, Chicago, New Haven, and a hundred smaller associations, which for the most part are not merely interested in spreading scientific information, but in helping on the results of science.

We cannot hope to call the complete roll here of scientific production. Our purpose was merely to relate some of the favourable and unfavourable influences under which the American has to make his contribution to the science of the day. Merely for a first orientation, we may give some more detailed accounts in a few departments. At first sight, one might be tempted to give a sketch of present-day production by directly depicting the production with reference to the special higher institutions. Much more than in Germany, the results of scientific research are brought before the public eye with the official seal of some university. Every large educational institution publishes its own contributions to many different sciences; thus, the University of Chicago, which perhaps goes furthest in this respect, publishes journals of sociology, pedagogy, biblical studies, geology, astronomy, botany, etc.; and, besides these, regular series of studies in science, government, classical philology, Germanic and Romance languages, English philology, anthropology, and physiology. Johns Hopkins University publishes mathematical, chemical, and biological magazines; a journal for experimental medicine, one for psychiatry, for modern philology, for history, and Assyriology. Among the periodical publications of Harvard University, the astronomical, zoölogical, cryptogamic, ethnological, Oriental, classical philological, modern philological, historical, and economic journals are the best known. Columbia, Pennsylvania, and several other universities publish equally many journals. There are also a great many books published under the auspices of institutions of learning, which relate to expeditions or other special matters. Thus, for instance, Yale University, on the occasion of its two-hundredth anniversary in 1901, published commemorative scientific papers by its professors in twenty-five large volumes; the papers themselves ranging from such subjects as the Hindu epic and Greek metre to thermo-dynamics and physiological chemistry.

The various universities have always been known to have their scientific specialties. That of Johns Hopkins is natural science; of Columbia, the science of government; of Harvard, literature and philosophy. But the universities are, of course, not confined to their specialties; for instance, Johns Hopkins has done very much in philology, Columbia in biology, and while Harvard has been famous for its literary men, like Longfellow, Holmes, Norton and Child, it has also had such distinguished men on its faculty as the zoölogist Agassiz, the botanist Gray, and the astronomer Pickering.

It may be more natural to classify scientific production according to the separate sciences. The list is too long to be given entire. The venerable subject of philosophy is generally placed first in the university catalogues of lectures. This subject shows at once how much and how little is being done. A German, to be sure, is apt to have false standards in this matter; for if he thinks of German philosophy, he recalls the names of Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Hegel; and he asks what America has produced to compare with these. But we have seen that the work of productive science was commenced in the New World only a few decades ago, and for this reason we must compare the present day in America with the present day in Germany; and to be just, we should compare the American scholar only with the younger and middle-aged Germans who have developed under the scientific conditions of the last thirty years—that is, with men not over sixty years old. Young geniuses are not plentiful, even in Germany to-day; and not only are men like Kant and Hegel lacking in philosophy, but also in other departments of science; men like Ranke and Helmholtz seem not to belong to our day of specialization. A new wave of idealistic and broadly generalizing thought is advancing. The time of great thinkers will come again; but a young country is not to be blamed for the spirit of the times, nor ought its present accomplishment to be measured after the standards of happier days. If we make a perfectly fair comparison, we shall find that American philosophy is at present up to that of any other country.

Externally, in the first place, America makes a massive showing, even if we leave out of account philosophical literature of the more popular sort. While, for example, England has only two really important philosophical magazines, America has at least five which are as good as the English; and if philosophy is taken in the customary wider sense, sociological and pedagogical journals must be included, which are nowhere surpassed. The emphasis is laid differently in America and Germany; and this difference, which may be seen in almost all sciences, generally, though not always, has deeper grounds than merely personal ones, and is in every case apt to distort the judgment of a foreigner. America, for instance, is astonishingly unproductive in the history of philosophy. Every need seems to be satisfied by translations from the German or by very perfunctory text-book compilations. On the other hand, the theory of knowledge, ethics, and above all psychology, are very prosperous. Disputes in epistemology have always been carried on in America, and the Calvinistic theology, more especially, arrived at important conclusions. At the beginning of the eighteenth century lived Jonathan Edwards, who was perhaps the greatest metaphysical mind in the history of America. The transcendental way of thought, which is profoundly planted in the American soul, was nurtured by German idealism, and found expression through the genius of Emerson. Then, in more systematic and academic ways, there have been philosophers like Porter and McCosh, who stood under Scotch influence and fought against positivism; others, like Harris and Everett, who have represented German tendencies; while Draper, Fiske, Cope, Leconte, and others have preached the philosophy of science. In the front ranks to-day of philosophers are Ladd, Dewey, Fullerton, Bowne, Ormond, Howison, Santayana, Palmer, Strong, Hibben, Creighton, Lloyd, and most influential of all, Royce, whose latest work, “The World and the Individual,” is perhaps the most significant epistemological system of our day.

Psychology is the most favoured of all the philosophical disciplines in America at the present time. This is shown outwardly in the growth of laboratories for experimental psychology, which in size and equipment far exceed those of Europe. America has more than forty laboratories. Foremost in this psychological movement is William James, who is, next to Wundt, the most distinguished psychologist living, and whose remarkable analysis of conscious phenomena has been set down with a freshness and liveliness, an energy and discrimination, which are highly characteristic of American intellect. Then there are other well-known investigators like Stanley Hall, Cattell, Baldwin, Ladd, Sanford, Titchener, Angell, Miss Calkins, Scripture, and many others. In pedagogy, which is now disporting itself in a great display of paper and ink, the names of Harris, Eliot, Butler, Hall, Da Garmo, and Hanus are the most respected.

Just as theological and metaphysical speculations, ever since the early Colonial days, have preceded present-day scientific philosophy, so in the science of history systematic investigators were preceded in early days by the Colonial historians, beginning with Bradford and Winthrop. A people which are so restless to make history, so proud of their doings, so grateful to their heroes, and which more than any other people base their law and public policy avowedly on precedent, will necessarily have enjoyed the recounting of their own past. America has had a systematic history, however, only since the thirties, and two periods of work are generally distinguished; an earlier one, in which historians undertook to cover the whole subject of American history, or at least very large portions of it, and a later period embracing the last decade, in which historical interest has been devoted to minuter studies. Bancroft and Parkman stand for the first movement. George Bancroft began to write his history in 1830, and worked patiently thereon for half a century. By 1883 the development of the country, from its discovery up to the adoption of the American Constitution, had been completed in a thorough-going fashion. Parkman was the greater genius, and one who opened an entirely new perspective in American history by his investigations and fascinating descriptions of the wars between the English and the French colonists. The great works of Hildreth and Tucker should also be mentioned here.

The period of specialized work, of course, covers less ground. The large monographs of Henry Adams, John Fiske, Rhodes, Schouler, McMaster, Eggleston, Roosevelt, and of Von Holst, if an adoptive son of America may be included, are accounted the best pieces of work. They have described American history partly by geographical regions and partly by periods; and they show great diversity of style, as may be seen by comparing the martial tone of Holst and the majestic calmness of Rhodes. To these must be added the biographies, of which the best known form the series of “American Statesmen.” Americans are particularly fond of studying a portion of national history from the life of some especially active personality. Then too, for twenty years, there has been a considerable and indispensable fabrication of historical research. Large general works and reference books, like those of Winsor, Hart, and others; the biographies, archive studies, correspondences, local histories, often published by learned societies; series of monographs, journals, the chief of which is the American Historical Review—in short, everything necessary to the modern cultivation of historical science are to be found abundantly. The Revolution, the beginnings of the Federation, the Civil War, and Congress are specially favoured topics. It is almost a matter of course that the independent investigation into European history is very little attempted; although very good things have been done, such as Prescott’s work on Spanish history, Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic; and in recent times, for instance, Taylor has made important studies in English history, Perkins in French, Henderson in German, Thayer in Italian, Lea and Emerton in ecclesiastical history, Mahan in the history of naval warfare, and similarly others.

This lively interest in philosophy and history is itself enough to disprove the old fable that American science is directed only toward material ends. Perhaps, to be sure, some one might say that philosophy is practiced to better mankind and history to teach politicians some practical lessons, while both statements are in point of fact false. No such charge, however, can be made against classical philology; and yet no one can read the transactions, which constitute many volumes, of the five hundred members of the Philological Association, or read the numbers of the American journal of Philology, or the classical studies published by Harvard, Cornell, and Chicago, without feeling distinctly that here is scientific work of the strictest sort, and that the methods of investigations are steadily improving. The movement is younger in this department than in the others. To be sure, the classical authors have been well known in America for two centuries; but in no province has the dilettanteism of the English gentleman so thoroughly prevailed. It was not until the young philologians commenced to visit German universities, and especially Göttingen, that a thorough-going philology was introduced. And such a work as the forty-four students of the great classicist, Gildersleeve, published on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, would have been impossible twenty years ago. The greatest interest is devoted to syntactical investigation, in which the best-known works are those of Goodwin, Gildersleeve, and Hale; while there are some works on lexicography and comparative languages, and fewer still on textual criticism. Every classical philologian knows the names of Hadley, Beck, Allen, Lane, Warren, Smyth, White, Wheeler, Shorey, Dressier, and many others.

There is an unusual interest in Oriental philology, which is slightly influenced indeed by practical motives. For instance, the great religious interest taken in the Bible—not by scientists, but by the general public—has sent out special expeditions and done much to advance the study of cuneiform inscriptions. The Assyrian collections of the University of Pennsylvania are accounted, in many respects, the most complete in existence. Its curator, Hilprecht, is well known, and Lyon, Haupt, and others almost as well. Whitney, of Yale, was undoubtedly the leader in Sanskrit. Lanman, of Harvard, is his most famous successor, and besides him are Jackson, Buck, Bloomfield, and others. Toy is the great authority on Semitic languages.

It would lead us too far away if we were to follow philological science into modern languages. As a matter of course, the English language and literature are the most studied; in fact, English philology has had its real home in the New World since the days of Child. Francis James Child, one of the most winning personalities in the history of American scholarship, has contributed much on Chaucer and ancient English dramas; and as his great work, has gathered together English and Scottish ballads into a collection of ten volumes. This work has often been esteemed as America’s greatest contribution to philology. Kittredge, who has succeeded Child at Harvard, works on much the same lines. Lounsbury is known especially for his brilliant works on Chaucer; Manley has also studied Chaucer and the pre-Shakesperian drama; Gummere the early ballads, while Wendell and Furness are the great Shakesperian scholars. The Arthurian legends have been especially studied by Schofield, Mead, Bruce, and others; the Anglo-Saxon language by Bright, Cook, Brown, and Callaway. Lowell was the first great critic of literature, and he has been followed by Gates and many others. The belles-lettres themselves have given rise to a large historical and critical literature, such as the admirable general works of Steadman, Richardson, and Tyler, and the monographs by Woodberry, Cabot, Norton, Warner, and Higginson. The very best work, however, on American literature, in spite of all aspersions cast on the extreme aristocrat, is Barrett Wendell’s “Literary History of America.” We might mention a long list of works on Romance and Germanic languages and literature. At least emphasis must be laid on one, Kuno Francke’s extraordinary book on “Social Influences in German Literature,” the work of the most gifted herald of German culture in America. We may also mention the works of Thomas and Hempl in Germanic, and Todd, Elliot, and Cohn in romance languages.

Political economy is the favourite study of the American, since the history of this country has been determined by economic factors more directly than that of any other nation, and since all the different economic periods have been lived through in the still surveyable past. In a sense, the country looks like a tremendous experimental laboratory of political economy. The country is so unevenly developed that the most diverse economic stages are to be found in regions which are geographically near each other, and everything goes on, as it were, under the scientific magnifying glass of the statistical student. Remarkably enough, the actual history of economics has been rather neglected in American studies, in spite of many beginnings made in Germany on the history of American economics. The chief attention of the nation has been given rather to the systematic analysis and deductive investigation of special conditions. In political economy there are, of course, first the well-known agitators like Henry Carey, the great protectionist of the first half of the century; Henry George, the single-tax theorist, whose book, “Progress and Poverty,” found in 1879 extraordinary circulation; and Bellamy, whose “Utopia” was in much the same style: and the political tracts on economic subjects are far too numerous to think of mentioning. The really scientific works form another group. At first we find the pioneer efforts of the seventies and eighties—Wells’s work on tariff and commerce, Charles Francis Adams’s work on railways, Sumner’s on the history of American finance, Atkinson’s on production and distribution, Wright’s on wages, Knox’s on banking, and the general treatises of Walker, who conducted the censuses of 1870 and 1880. In recent times the chief works are those of Hadley on railroads, of Clark on capital, of James on political finance and municipal administration, of Ely on taxation, of Taussig on tariff, silver and wages, of Jenks on trusts, of Brooks on labour movements, of Seligman on the politics of taxation, of H. C. Adams on scientific finance, of Gross on the history of English economics, of Patten on economic theory, and of Lowell on the science of government. Moreover, the political economists and students of government have an unusually large number of journals at their disposal. In sociology there are Giddings, Small, and Ward, known everywhere, and after them Willcox, Ripley, and others.

We have spent too much time over the historical disciplines. Let us look at the opposite pole of the scientific globe from the mental sciences to the natural sciences, and at first to mathematics. Mathematicians were especially late in waking up to really scientific achievements; and this was scarcely ten years ago, so that all the productive mathematicians are the younger professors. Of the older period, there are but three mathematicians of great importance—Benjamin Peirce, perhaps the most brilliant of American mathematicians, and his pupils, Hill and Newcomb. Their chief interest has been mathematical astronomy. Of their generation are also Willard Gibbs in mathematical physics, McClintock in algebra, and Charles Peirce in mathematical logic. In the last ten years, it is no longer a question of a few great names. The younger generation has taken its inspiration from Germany and France, and is busily at work in pure mathematics; there are Moore and Dixon, of Chicago; Storey and Taber, of Clark; Böcher and Osgood, of Harvard; White at Evanston; Van Vleck at Wesleyan, and many others.

We find again, in the natural sciences, that the American by no means favours only practical studies. There is no less practical a science than astronomy, and yet we find a series of great successes. This is externally noticeable in a general interest in astronomy; no other country in the world has so many well-equipped observatories as the United States, and no other country manufactures such perfect astronomical lenses. America has perfected the technique of astronomy. Roland, for instance, has improved the astronomical spectroscope, and Pickering has made brilliant contributions to photometry. The catalogue of stars by Gould and Langley is an indispensable work, and America has contributed its full share to the observation of asteroids and comets. Newcomb, however, who is the leader since forty years, has done the most brilliant work, in his thorough computations of stellar paths and masses. We should also not forget Chandler’s determination of magnitudes, Young’s work on the sun, Newton’s on meteorites, and Barnard’s on comets.

Surprisingly enough, the development of scientific physics has been less brilliant so far. Only in optics has really anything of high importance been done; but in this field there have been such accomplishments as Michelson’s measurements of lightwaves, Rowland’s studies of concave gratings, Newcomb’s measurements on the speed of light, and Langley’s studies of the ultra-red rays. In all other fields the work is somewhat disconnected; although, to be sure, in the branches of electricity, acoustics, and heat, important discoveries have been made by Trowbridge, Woodward, Barus, Wood, Cross, Nichols, Hall, B. O. Pierce, Sabine, and many others. In purely technical subjects, especially those related to electricity, much has been done of serious scientific importance; and these triumphs in technical branches are, of course, famous throughout the world. From the hand tool of the workman to locomotives and bridges, American mechanics have been victorious. Applied physics has yielded the modern bicycle, the sewing-machine, the printing-press, tool-making machinery, and a thousand other substitutes for muscular labour; has also perfected the telegraph, the incandescent lamp, the telephone and the phonograph, and every day brings some new laurel to the American inventor. But it is not to be supposed that Edison, Tesla, and Bell are the sole representatives of American physics. Quiet scientific work of the highest order is carried on in a dozen laboratories. Meteorology ought to be mentioned as a branch of physics; it has been favoured by the large field of observation which America offers and has developed brilliantly under Ferrel, Hazen, Greely, Harrington, Mendenhall, Rotch, and others.

It is still more true of chemistry than of physics that advance has been independent of the industrial application of science. The leading chemists have all worked in the interests of pure science; and this work started at the beginning of the last century, when Benjamin Silliman, of Yale, the editor of the first magazine for natural science, laid the foundations for his scientific school. He was followed in succeeding generations by Hare, Smith, Hunt, and most notably Cooke, whose studies on the periodic law and the atomic weight of oxygen are specially valuable. Of later men there are Willard Gibbs, the Nestor of chemical thermo-dynamics, who became famous by his theory of the phase rule, and Wolcott Gibbs through his studies on complex acids. Crafts is known for his researches into organic compounds, and Mallet by classical investigations into the atomic weight of aluminum. Other valuable contributions have been Hillebrand’s analysis of minerals, Stieglitz’s organic syntheses, Noyes’s studies on ions, the work of Clark and Richards on atomic weights, Gooch’s technical discoveries, Hill’s synthetic production of benzol compounds, Warren’s work with mineral oils, Baskerville’s study of thorium, not to mention the highly prized text-books of Ira Remsen, the discoverer of saccharin. Among the physiological and agricultural chemists, the best known are Chittenden, Pfaff, Atwater, and Hilgard. The pioneer of physical chemistry is Richards, of Harvard, probably the only American professor so far who has been called to the position of a full professor at a German university. He remained in America, although invited to Göttingen. Bancroft and Noyes are at work on the same branch of chemistry.

The work in chemistry is allied in many ways to mineralogy, petrography, and geology. Oddly enough, mineralogy has centred distinctly at one place—Yale University. The elder Dana used to work there, whose “System of Mineralogy” first appeared in 1837, and while frequently revised has remained for half a century the standard book in any language; Dana’s chemical classification of minerals has also found general acceptance. His son, the crystallographer, worked here, as also Brush and Penfield, who has investigated more kinds of stone than any other living man. Beside these well-known leaders, there are such men as Lawrence Smith, Cooke, Gerth, Shepard, and Wolff. The advances in geology have been still more brilliant, since nature made America an incomparable field of study. Hall had already made an early beginning here, and Dana and Whitney, Hayden and King, Powell and Gilbert, Davis, Shaler, and Branner have continued the work. Remains of the Glacial Epoch and mountain formation have been the favourite topics. And the investigation which has frequently been connected with practical mining interests is among the most important, and in Europe the most highly regarded of American scientific achievements.

Closely related to the geological are the geographical studies. The Government Bureau of Survey figures prominently here, by reason of its magnificent equipment. Most famous are the coast surveys of Pache and Mendenhall, and the land surveys of Rogers, Whitney, and Gannet. The hydrographic investigations of Maury have perhaps had more influence on geography, and his physical geography of the ocean has opened up new lines of inquiry; Guyot has done most to spread the interests of geography. Americans have always been greatly interested in expeditions to dangerous lands, wherefore many Americans have been pioneers, missionaries, and scientific travellers. In this spirit Lewis and Clark explored the Northwest, Wilkes crossed the Pacific Ocean, Perry went to Japan, and Stanley to Africa; others have travelled to South America, and many expeditions have been started for the North Pole since the first expedition of Kane in 1853. Palæontology has been well represented in America, and has contributed a good deal to the advance in geology. Hall commenced the work with studies on invertebrate fossils; then came Hyatt, who studied fossil cephalopods, Scudder fossil insects, Beecher brachiopods; and then Leidy, Cope, Osborne, and above all, the great scientist, Marsh—all of whom have studied fossil vertebrates.

Almost every one of these men was at the same time a systematic zoölogist. Especially in former days, many young men devoted themselves to systematic zoölogy under the leadership of Audubon, whose pioneer work on “The Birds of America” appeared in 1827; then later of Say, the first investigator of butterflies and mussels; and still later of Louis Agassiz, the great student of jelly-fish, hydroids and polyps, whose son, Alexander Agassiz, has carried on the famous studies of coral islands. Besides these men have laboured LeConte, Gill, Packard, and Verrill in the province of invertebrates; Baird, Ridgeway, Huntington, Allen, Meriam, and Jordan in the field of vertebrates. At the present time interest in America as well as in Europe is turning toward histology and embryology. Here, too, the two Agassizes have taken the lead, the senior Agassiz with his studies on turtles, the younger Agassiz in studies on starfishes. Next to theirs come the admirable works of Wyman, Whitman, Brooks, Minot, Mark, and Wilson, and the investigations of Davenport on the subject of variation. The phenomenon of life has been studied now by zoölogists and again by biologists and physiologists. Here belong the researches into the conscious life of lower animals carried on by Lee and Parker, and the excellent investigations of the German-American Jacques Loeb, of California, who has placed the tropisms of animals and the processes of fertilization in a wholly new light. Of his colleagues in physiology, the best known are Bowditch, Howell, Porter, and Meltzer.

The highest organism which the natural scientist can study is man, taken not historically, but anthropologically. The American has been forced to turn to anthropology and to ethnology, since circumstances have put at his hand some hundred types of Indians, with the most diverse languages and customs, and since, moreover, peoples have streamed from every part of the world to this country; millions of African negroes are here, the ground is covered with the remains of former Indian life, and the strange civilizations of Central America have left their remains near by. The Ethnological Bureau at Washington and the Peabody Museum at Harvard have instituted many expeditions and investigations. In recent times the works of Morgan, Hale, Brinton, Powell, Dall, Putnam, McGee, and Boas have opened new perspectives, especially on the subject of the American Indian.

The American flora has contributed no less new material to science than the American fauna. European botanists had commenced the work with tours of observation, when in the middle of the last century Asa Gray began his admirable life-work. He was in the closest sympathy with European botanists, and published in all more than four hundred papers on the classification and systematic study of the profuse material. Gray died in 1888, undoubtedly the greatest botanist that America has produced. His labours have been supplemented by his teacher, Torrey; by Chapman, who worked up the southeastern part of the country; by scientific travellers, such as Wright and Watson; by Engelmann, who studied cacti; Bebb, who studied the fields; by Coulter, the expert on the plants of the Rocky Mountains; by Bailey and many others. This great work is more or less pervaded by the ideas of Gray; but in the last twenty years it has branched off in several directions under a number of leaders. Farlow has reached out into cryptogamic botany, Goodale into plant physiology, and Sargent into dendrology. There has been, moreover, considerable specialization and subdivision of labour in the botanical gardens of New York, Boston, and St. Louis, and the herbaria and botanical institutes of various universities and of the agricultural experiment stations. These institutions put forth publications under the editorship of such able botanists as Robinson, Trelease, Fernald, Smith, and True; and these works are not excelled by those of any other country.

We have had, perhaps, too much of mere names; and yet these have been only examples, calculated to show the strength and the weakness of the scientific development of America. We have sought specially to keep within the limits of the “philosophical faculties.” It would be interesting to go into the subjects of theology, law and medicine, and of technology in a similar way; but it would lead too far. Yet whether the unprejudiced observer considers such disciplines as we have described, or whether he looks out into neighbouring academic fields, he will find the same flourishing condition of things—a bold, healthy, and intelligent progress, with a complete understanding of the true aim of science, with tireless industry, able organization, and optimistic energy.

Of course, the actual achievements are very uneven; they are, in some directions, superior to those of England and France—in a few directions even to those of Germany, but in others far inferior to German attainments. We have seen that the conditions a short time ago were unfortunate for science, and that only recently have they given way to more favourable factors. Most people see such favourable factors first of all in the financial support offered to the investigator; but the chief aid for such work does not lie in the providing of appliances. Endowments can do no more than supply books, apparatus, laboratories, and collections for those who wish to study, but all that never makes a great scientist; the average level of study may be improved by material support, but it will never be brought above a certain level of mediocrity. For, after all, science depends chiefly on the personal factor; and good men can do everything, even on narrow means.

The more important factor in the opulence which science now enjoys is an indirect one; it improves the social status of scientific workers, so that better human material is now attracted to the scientific career. As long as scientific life meant poverty and dependence, the only people attracted to it were men of the schoolteaching stamp; the better men have craved something fuller and greater, and have wished to expend their strength in the more thoroughly living province of industrial and commercial life, where alone the great social premiums were to be found. But now the case is different. Science has been recognized by the nation; scientific and university life has become rich in significance, the professor is no longer a school-teacher, and the right kind of young scholar is stepping into the arena. Another factor is working in the same direction. Substantial families are coming to the third generation, when they go over from trade to art and science. The sons of the best people with great vitality and great personality prefer now to work in the laboratory rather than in the bank. Each one brings Yankee intelligence and Yankee energy with him. This social reappraisement of science, and its effect on the quality of men who become productive scholars, are the best indication of the coming greatness of American science.