The Spirit of America shows its ingrained individualism nowhere more clearly than in education. First, by the breadth of the provision which it makes, up to a certain point, for everybody who wishes to be educated. Second, by the entire absence of anything like a centralized control of education. Third, by the remarkable evolution of different types of educational institutions and the liberty of choice which they offer to each student.

All this is in the nature of evidence to the existence of a fifth quality in the Spirit of America, closely connected with the sense of self-reliance and a strong will-power, intimately related to the love of fair play and common order,—a keen appreciation of the value of personal development.

Here again, as in the previous lectures, what we have to observe and follow is not a logical syllogism, nor a geometrical proposition neatly and accurately worked out. It is a natural process of self-realization. It is the history of the soul of a people learning how to think for itself. As in government, in social order, in organized industry, so in education, America has followed, not the line of least resistance, nor the line of abstract doctrine, but the line of vital impulse.

And whence did this particular impulse spring? From a sense of the real value of knowledge to man as man. From a conviction that there is no natural right more precious than the right of the mind to grow. From a deep instinct of prudence reminding a nation in which the people are the sovereign that it must attend to “the education of the prince.”

These are the feelings and convictions, very plain and primitive in their nature, which were shared by the real makers of America, and which have ever since controlled her real leaders. They are in striking contrast with the views expressed by some of the strangers who were sent out in early times to govern the colonies; as, for example, that Royal Governor Berkeley who, writing home to England from Virginia in the seventeenth century, thanked God that “no public schools nor printing-presses existed in the colony,” and 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.”

But this Governor Berkeley was of a different type from that Bishop Berkeley who came to the western world to establish a missionary training-school, and, failing in that, gave his real estate at Newport and his library of a thousand books to the infant Yale College at New Haven; of a different type from those Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam who founded the first American public school in 1621; of a different type from those Puritan colonists of Massachusetts Bay who established the Boston Latin School in 1635 and Harvard College in 1636; of a different type from Franklin, who founded the Philadelphia Circulating Library in 1731, the American Philosophical Society in 1744, and the Academy of Pennsylvania in 1749; of a different type from Washington, who urged the foundation of a national university and left property for its endowment by his last will and testament; of a different type from Jefferson, who desired to have it recorded upon his tombstone that he had rendered three services to his country—the framing of the Declaration of Independence, the establishment of religious liberty in Virginia, and the founding of the University of that State.

Among the men who were most responsible, from the beginning, for the rise and growth and continuance of the spirit of self-reliance and fair play, of active energy and common order in America, there was hardly one who did not frequently express his conviction that the spread of public intelligence was necessary to these ends. Among those who have been most influential in the guidance of the republic, nothing is more remarkable than their agreement in the opinion that education, popular and special, is friendly to republican institutions.

This agreement is not a mere formal adherence to an academic principle learned in the same school. For there has been the greatest possible difference in the schooling of these men. Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Hamilton, Webster, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, Roosevelt, had a college training; Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Jackson, Van Buren, Clay, Lincoln, Cleveland, McKinley, did not.

The sincere respect for education which is typical of the American spirit is not a result of education. It is a matter of intuitive belief, of mental character, of moral temperament. First of all, the sure conviction that every American child ought to have the chance to go to school, to learn to read, to write, to think; second, the general notion that it is both fair and wise to make an open way for every one who is talented and ambitious to climb as far as he can and will in the higher education; third, the vague feeling that it will be to the credit and benefit of democracy not only to raise the average level of intelligence, but also to produce men and institutions of commanding excellence in learning and science and philosophy,—these are the three elements which you will find present in varying degrees in the views of typical Americans in regard to education.

I say that you will find these elements in varying degrees, because there has been, and there still is, some divergence of opinion as to the comparative emphasis to be laid on these three points—the schoolhouse door open to everybody, the college career open to all the talents, and the university providing unlimited opportunities for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

Which is the most important? How far may the State go in promoting the higher education? Is it right to use the public funds, contributed by all the taxpayers, for the special advantage of those who have superior intellectual powers? Where is the line to be drawn between the education which fits a boy for citizenship, and that which merely gratifies his own tastes or promotes his own ambition?

These are questions which have been seriously, and, at times, bitterly debated in America. But, meantime, education has gone steadily and rapidly forward. The little public school of New Amsterdam has developed into an enormous common-school system covering the United States and all their Territories. The little Harvard College at Cambridge has become the mother of a vast brood of institutions, public and private, which give all kinds of instruction, philosophical, scientific, literary, and technical, and which call themselves colleges or universities according to their own fancy and will.

A foreigner visiting the country for the first time might well think it had a touch of academic mania. A lecturer invited to describe the schools and colleges of the United States in a single discourse might well feel as embarrassed as that famous diplomat to whom his companion at dinner said, between the soup and the fish, “I am so glad to meet you, for now you can tell me all about the Far Eastern Question and make me understand it.” Let me warn you against expecting anything of that kind in this lecture. I am at least well enough educated to know that it is impossible to tell all about American education in an hour. The most that I can hope to do is to touch on three points:—

First, the absence of centralized control and the process of practical unification in educational work in the United States.

Second, the growth and general character of the common schools as an expression of the Spirit of America.

Third, the relation of the colleges, universities, and technical institutes to the life of the republic.

I. First, it should be distinctly understood and remembered that there is absolutely no national system of education in America.

The government at Washington has neither power nor responsibility in regard to it. There is no Ministry of Public Instruction; there are no Federal Inspectors; there is no regulation from the centre. The whole thing is local and voluntary to a degree which must seem to a Frenchman incomprehensible if not reprehensible. In consequence it is both simple and complicated,—simple in its practical working, and extremely complicated in its general aspect.

The reasons for this lack of a national system and a centralized control are not far to seek. In the first place, at the time when the Union was formed, many different European influences were already at work fostering different educational ideals in various parts of the country. No doubt the English influence was predominant, especially in New England. Harvard College at Cambridge in Massachusetts may be regarded as the legitimate child of Emmanuel College at Cambridge in England. But the development of free common schools, especially in the Middle States, was more largely affected by the example of Holland, France, and Switzerland than by England. The Presbyterians of New Jersey, when they founded Princeton College in 1746, naturally turned to Scotland for a model.

In Virginia, through Thomas Jefferson, a strong French influence was felt. A Frenchman, Quesnay, who had fought in the American army of the Revolution, proposed to establish a National Academy of Arts and Sciences in Richmond, with branches at Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, to give advanced instruction in all branches of human learning. He had the approval of many of the best people in France and Virginia, and succeeded in raising 60,000 francs towards the endowment. The corner-stone of a building was laid, and one professor was chosen. But the scheme failed, because, in 1786, both America and France were busy and poor. Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia, which was framed on French lines, was put into successful operation in 1825.

It would have been impossible at any time in the early history of the United States—indeed, I think it would be impossible now—to get a general agreement among the friends of education in regard to the form and method of a national system.

Another obstacle to a national system was the fact that the colleges founded before the Revolution—William and Mary, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia—were practically supported and controlled by different churches—Congregational, Presbyterian, or Episcopalian. Churches are not easy to combine.

Still another obstacle, and a more important one, was the sentiment of local independence, the spirit of home rule which played such a prominent part in the mise en scÈne of the American drama. Each of the distinct States composing the Union was tenacious of its own individuality, and jealous of the local rights by which alone that individuality could be preserved. The most significant and potent of these rights was that of educating the children and youth of the community.

The States which entered the Union later brought with them the same feeling of local pride and responsibility. Ohio with its New England traditions, Kentucky with its Southern traditions, Michigan with its large infusion of French blood and thought, Wisconsin with its vigorous German and Scandinavian element,—each of these communities felt competent and in honour bound to attend to its own educational affairs. So far as the establishment and control of schools, colleges, and universities is concerned, every State of the Union is legally as independent of all the other States as if they were separate European countries like France and Germany and Switzerland. Therefore, we may say that the American system of education is not to have a system.

But if we stop here, we rest upon one of those half-truths which are so dear to the pessimist and the satirist. The bare statement that there is no national system of education in America by no means exhausts the subject. Taken by itself, it gives a false impression. Abstract theory and formal regulation are not the only means of unification. Nature and human nature have their own secrets for creating unity in diversity. This is the process which has been at work in American education.

First of all, there has been a general agreement among the States in regard to the vital necessity of education in a republic. The constitution of Massachusetts, adopted in 1780, reads thus: “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality, in their dealings, sincerity, good humour, and all social affections and generous sentiments among the people.” After such a sentence, one needs to take breath. It is a full programme of American idealism, written in the English of the eighteenth century, when people had plenty of time. The new constitution of North Carolina adopted in 1868 puts the same idea in terse modern style: “The people have the right to the privilege of education, and it is the duty of the State to guard and maintain that right.” You will find the same principle expressed in the constitutions of all the American commonwealths.

In the next place, the friendly competition and rivalry among the States produced a tendency to unity in education. No State wished to be left behind. The Southern States, which for a long time had neglected the matter of free common schools, were forced by the growth of illiteracy, after the Civil War, to provide for the schooling of all their children at public expense. The Western States, coming into the Union one by one, had a feeling of pride in offering to their citizens facilities for education which should be at least equal to those offered in “the effete East.” It is worthy of note that the most flourishing State Universities now are west of the Alleghanies. The only States which have more than 90 per cent of the children from five to eighteen years of age enrolled in the common schools are Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington,—all in the far West.

Furthermore, the free intercourse and exchange of population between the States have made for unity in the higher education. Methods which have proved successful in one community have been imitated and adopted in others. Experiments tried at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Columbia have been repeated in the West and South. Teachers trained in the older colleges have helped to organize and develop the new ones.

Nor has this process of assimilation been confined to American ideas and models. European methods have been carefully studied and adapted to the needs and conditions of the United States. I happen to know of a new Institute of Technology which has been recently founded in Texas by a gift of eight millions of dollars. The president-elect is a scientific man who has already studied in France and Germany and achieved distinction in his department. But before he touches the building and organization of his new Institute, he is sent to Europe for a year to see the oldest and the newest and the best that has been done there. In fact, the Republic of Learning to-day is the true Cosmopolis. It knows no barriers of nationality. It seeks truth and wisdom everywhere, and wherever it finds them, it claims them for its own.

The spirit of voluntary coÖperation for the promotion of the common order, of which I spoke in a previous lecture, has made itself felt in education by the formation of Teachers’ Associations in the various States, and groups of States, and by the foundation of the National Educational Association, a voluntary body incorporated in the District of Columbia, “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of education in the United States.”

Finally, while there is no national centre of authority for education in the United States, there is a strong central force of encouragement and enlightenment. The Federal Government shows its interest in education in several ways: First, in the enormous grants of public lands which it has made from the beginning for the endowment of common schools and higher institutions in the various States.

Second, in the control and support of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the Indian Schools, the National Museum, and the Congressional Library, and in the provision which it makes for agricultural and mechanical schools in different parts of the country. The annual budget for these purposes runs from twelve to twenty millions of dollars a year.

Third, in the establishment of a National Bureau of Education which collects statistics and information and distributes reports on all subjects connected with the educational interests of America. The Commissioner at the head of this bureau is a man of high standing and scholarship. He is chosen without reference to politics, and holds his office independent of party. He has no authority to make appointments or regulations. But he has a large influence, through the light which he throws upon the actual condition of education, in promoting the gradual and inevitable process of unification.

Let me try to sum up what I have been saying on this difficult subject of the lack of system and the growth of unity in American education. There is no organization from the centre. But there is a distinct organization from the periphery,—if I may use a scientific metaphor of such an unscientific character. The formative principle is the development of the individual.

What, then, does the average American boy find in this country to give him a series of successive opportunities to secure this personal development of mental and moral powers?

First, a public primary school and grammar school which will give him the rudiments of learning from his sixth to his fourteenth year. Then a public high school which will give him about what a French lycÉe gives from his fourteenth to his eighteenth year. He is now ready to enter the higher education. Up to this point, if he lives in a town of any considerable size, he has not been obliged to go away from home. Many of the smaller places of three or four thousand inhabitants have good high schools. If he lives in the country, he may have had to go to the nearest city or large town for his high school or academy.

Beyond this point, he finds either a college, as it is called in America, or the collegiate department in one of the universities, which will give him a four years’ course of general study. Before he can begin this, he must pass what is called an entrance examination, which is practically uniform in all the better institutions, and almost, but perhaps not quite, equivalent to the examination in France for the degree of bachelier. Thus a certain standard of preparation is set for all the secondary schools. It is at the end of his general course in literature, science, and philosophy that the American student gets his bachelor’s degree, which corresponds pretty nearly to the French degree of licenciÉ in letters and sciences.

Now the student, a young man of about twenty-one or twenty-two years, is supposed to be prepared, either to go into the world as a fairly well-educated citizen, or to continue his studies for a professional career. He finds the graduate schools of the universities ready to give him courses which lead to the degree of M.A. or Ph.D., and prepare him for the higher kind of teaching. The schools of law and medicine and engineering offer courses of from two to four years with a degree of LL.B. or M.D. or C.E. or M.E. at the end of them. The theological seminaries are ready to instruct him for the service of the church in a course of three or four years.

By this time he is twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Unless he has special ambitions which lead him to study abroad, or to take up original research at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, or some other specially equipped university, he is now ready for practical work. The American theory is that he should go to work and get the rest of his education in practice.

Of course there have been short cuts and irregular paths open to him all along the way,—a short cut from the high school to the technical school,—a short cut into law or medicine by the way of private preparation for the examination, which in some States is absurdly low. But these short cuts are being closed up very rapidly. It is growing more and more difficult to get into a first-class professional school without a collegiate or university degree. Already, if the American student wants system and regularity, he can get a closely articulated course, fitted to his individual needs, from the primary school up to the door of his profession.

But the real value of that course depends upon two things that are beyond the power of any system to insure—the personal energy that he brings to his work, and the personal power of the professors under whom he studies. I suppose the same thing is true in France as in America. Neither here nor there can you find equality of results. All you have a right to expect is equality of opportunity.

II. The great symbol and instrument of this idea of equal opportunity in the United States is the common school. In every State of the Union provision is made for the education of the children at public expense. The extent and quality of this education, the methods of control, the standards of equipment, even the matter of compulsory or voluntary attendance, vary in different States and communities. But, as a rule, you may say that it puts within the reach of every boy and girl free instruction from the a-b-c up to the final grade of a lycÉe.

The money expended by the States on these common schools in 1905-1906 was $307,765,000,—more than one-third of the annual expenditure of the national government for all purposes, more than twice as much as the State governments spent for all other purposes. This sum, you understand, was raised by direct, local taxation. Neither the import duties nor the internal revenue contributed anything to it. It came directly from the citizen’s pocket, at the rate of $3.66 a year per capita, or nearly $13 a year for every grown-up man.

How many children were benefited by it? Who can tell? 16,600,000 boys and girls were enrolled in the public schools (that is to say, more than 70 per cent of the whole number of children between five and eighteen years of age, and about 20 per cent of the total population). The teachers employed were 109,000 men, 356,000 women. The average daily expenditure for each pupil was 17 cents; the average annual expenditure, about $25.

In addition to this number there are at least 1,500,000 children in privately endowed and supported schools, secular or religious. The Catholic Church has a system of parochial schools which is said to provide for about a million children. Many of the larger Protestant Churches support high schools and academies of excellent quality. Some of the most famous secondary schools, like Phillips Exeter and Andover, St. Paul’s, the Hill School, Lawrenceville School, are private foundations well endowed.

These figures do not mean much to the imagination. Statistics are like grapes in their skins. You have to put a pressure upon them to extract any wine. Observe, then, that if you walked through an American town between eight and nine in the morning, and passed a thousand people indoors and out, more than two hundred of them would be children going to school. Perhaps twenty of these children would turn in at private schools, or church schools. But nine-tenths of the little crowd would be on their way to the public schools. The great majority of the children would be under fourteen years of age; for only about one child out of every twenty goes beyond that point in schooling. Among the younger children the boys would outnumber the girls a little. But in the small group of high-school children there would be three girls to two boys, because the boys have to go to work earlier to earn a living.

Suppose you followed one of these groups of children into the school, what would you find? That would depend entirely upon local circumstances. You might find a splendid building with modern fittings; you might find an old-fashioned building, overcrowded and ill-fitted. Each State, as I have said before, has its own common-school system. And not only so, but within the State there are smaller units of organization—the county, the township, the school district. Each of these may have its own school board, conservative or progressive, generous or stingy, and the quality and equipment of the schools will vary accordingly. They represent pretty accurately the general enlightenment and moral tone of the community.

Wealth has something to do with it, of course. People cannot spend money unless they have it. The public treasury is not a Fortunatus’ purse which fills itself. In the remote country districts, the little red schoolhouse, with its single room, its wooden benches, its iron stove, its unpainted flagstaff, stands on some hill-top without a tree to shadow it, in brave, unblushing poverty. In the richer cities there are common school palaces with an aspect of splendour which is almost disconcerting.

Yet it is not altogether a question of wealth. It is also a question of public spirit. Baltimore is nearly as large and half as rich as Boston, yet Boston spends about three times as much on her schools. Richmond has about the same amount of taxable property as Rochester, N.Y., yet Richmond spends only one-quarter as much on her schools. Houston, Texas; Wilmington, Delaware; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Des Moines, Iowa, are six cities with a population of from 80,000 to 100,000 each, and not far apart in wealth. But their public-school bills in 1906 varied as follows: Des Moines, $492,000; New Bedford, $472,000; Harrisburg, $304,000; Trenton, $300,000; Wilmington, $226,000; and Houston, the richest of the six, $163,000.

If you should judge from this that the public schools are most liberally supported in the North Atlantic, North Central, and Far Western States, you would be right. The amount that is contributed to the common schools per adult male inhabitant is largest in the following States in order: Utah, $22; North Dakota, $21; New York, $20; Colorado, $20; Massachusetts, $19; South Dakota, $19; Nebraska, $17; and Pennsylvania, $16. The comparative weakness of the common schools in the South Atlantic and South Central States has led to the giving of large sums of money by private benevolence, the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, the Southern Education Fund, which are administered by boards of trustees for the promotion of education in these backward regions. The Spirit of America strongly desires to spread, to improve, to equalize and coÖrdinate, the public schools of the whole country.

Is it succeeding? What lines is it following? Where are the changes most apparent?

First of all, there is a marked advance in the physical equipment of the common school. In the villages and in the rural districts the new buildings are larger and more commodious than the old ones. In many parts of the country the method of concentration is employed. Instead of half a dozen poor little schoolhouses scattered over the hills, one good house is built in a central location, and the children are gathered from the farmhouses by school omnibuses or by the electric trolley-cars. Massachusetts made a law in 1894 requiring every township which did not have a high school to pay the transportation expenses of all qualified pupils who wished to attend the high schools of neighbouring towns.

In many States text-books are provided at the public cost. In the cities the increased attention to the physical side of things is even more noticeable. No expense is spared to make the new buildings attractive and convenient. Libraries and laboratories, gymnasiums and toilet-rooms, are provided. In some cities a free lunch is given to the pupils.

The school furniture is of the latest and most approved pattern. The old idea of the adjustable child who could be fitted to any kind of a seat or desk, has given way to the new idea of the adjustable seat and desk which can be fitted to any kind of a child. School doctors are employed to make a physical examination of the children. In a few cities there are school nurses to attend to the pupils who are slightly ailing.

Physical culture, in the form of calisthenics, military drill, gymnastics, is introduced. Athletic organizations, foot-ball clubs, base-ball clubs, are encouraged among the boys. In every way the effort is apparent to make school life attractive, more comfortable, more healthful.

Some critics say that the effort is excessive, that it spoils and softens the children, that it has distracted their attention from the serious business of hard study. I do not know. It is difficult for a man to remember just how serious he was when he was a boy. Perhaps the modern common-school pupil is less Spartan and resolute than his father used to be. Perhaps not. Pictures on the wall and flowers in the window, gymnastics and music, may not really distract the attention more than uncomfortable seats and bad ventilation.

Another marked tendency in the American common school, at least in the large towns and cities, is the warm, one might almost say feverish, interest in new courses and methods of study. In the primary schools this shows itself chiefly in the introduction of new ways of learning to spell and to cipher. The alphabet and the multiplication table are no longer regarded as necessities. The phonetic pupil is almost in danger of supposing that reading, writing, and arithmetic are literally “the three r’s.” Hours are given to nature-study, object-lessons, hygiene. Children of tender years are instructed in the mysteries of the digestive system. The range of mental effort is immensely diversified.

In the high schools the increase of educational novelties is even more apparent. The courses are multiplied and divided. Elective studies are offered in large quantity. I take an example from the programme of a Western high school. The studies required of all pupils are: English, history, algebra, plane geometry, biology, physics, and Shakespeare. The studies offered for a choice are: psychology, ethics, commercial law, civics, economics, arithmetic, book-keeping, higher algebra, solid geometry, trigonometry, penmanship, phonography, drawing and the history of art, chemistry, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Greek. This is quite a rich intellectual bill of fare for boys and girls between fourteen and eighteen years old. It seems almost encyclopÆdic,—though I miss a few subjects like Sanskrit, Egyptology, photography, and comparative religions.

The fact is that in the American high schools, as in the French lycÉes the effort to enlarge and vary the curriculum by introducing studies which are said to be “urgently required by modern conditions” has led to considerable confusion of educational ideals. But with us, while the extremes are worse, owing to the lack of the central control, the disorder is less universal, because the conservative schools have been free to adhere to a simpler programme. It is a good thing, no doubt, that the rigidity of the old system, which made every pupil go through the same course of classics and mathematics, has been relaxed. But our danger now lies in the direction of using our schools to fit boys and girls to make a living, rather than to train them in a sound and vigorous intellectual life. For this latter purpose it is not true that all branches of study are of equal value. Some are immensely superior. We want not the widest range, but the best selection.

There are some points in which the public schools of America, so far as one can judge from the general reports, are inferior to those of France. One of these points, naturally, is in the smooth working that comes from uniformity and coÖrdination. Another point, strangely enough, is in the careful provision for moral instruction in the primary schools. At least in the programmes of the French schools, much more time and attention are given to this than in the American programmes.

Another point of inferiority in the United States is in the requirement of proper preparation and certification of all teachers; and still another is in the security of their tenure of office and the length of their service in the profession. The teaching force of the American schools is a noble army; but it would be more efficient if the regular element were larger in proportion to the volunteers. The personnel changes too often.

One reason for this, no doubt, is the fact that the women outnumber the men by three to one. Not that the women are poorer teachers. Often, especially in primary work, they are the best. But their average term of professional service is not over four years. They are interrupted by that great accident, matrimony, which invites a woman to stop teaching, and a man to continue.

The shortage of male teachers, which exists in so many countries, is felt in extreme form in the United States. Efforts are made to remedy it by the increase of normal schools and teachers’ colleges, and by a closer connection between the universities and the public-school system.

In the conduct and development of the common schools we see the same voluntary, experimental, pragmatic way of doing things that is so characteristic of the Spirit of America in every department of life. “Education,” say the Americans, “is desirable, profitable, and necessary. The best way for us to get it is to work it out for ourselves. It must be practically adapted to the local conditions of each community, and to the personal needs of the individual. The being of the child must be the centre of development. What we want to do is to make good citizens for American purposes. Liberty must be the foundation, unity the superstructure.”

This, upon the whole, is what the common schools are doing for the United States: Three-fourths of the children of the country (boys and girls studying together from their sixth to their eighteenth year) are in them. They are immensely democratic. They are stronger in awakening the mind than in training it. They do more to stimulate quick perception than to cultivate sound judgment and correct taste. Their principles are always good, their manners sometimes. Universal knowledge is their foible; activity is their temperament; energy and sincerity are their virtues; superficiality is their defect.

Candour compels me to add one more touch to this thumb-nail sketch of the American common school. The children of the rich, the socially prominent, the higher classes, if you choose to call them so, are not generally found in the public schools. At least in the East and the South, most of these children are educated in private schools and academies.

One cause of this is mere fashion. But there are two other causes which may possibly deserve to be called reasons, good or bad.

The first is the fear that coeducation, instead of making the boys refined and the girls hardy, as it is claimed, may effeminate the boys and roughen the girls.

The second is the wish to secure more thorough and personal teaching in smaller classes. This the private schools offer, usually at a high price. In the older universities and colleges, a considerable part, if not the larger number, of the student body, comes from private preparatory schools and academies. Yet it must be noted that of the men who take high honours in scholarship a steadily increasing number, already a majority, are graduates of the free public high schools.

This proves what? That the State can give the best if it wants to. That it is much more likely to want to do so if it is enlightened, stimulated, and guided by the voluntary effort of the more intelligent part of the community.

III. This brings me to the last division of the large subject around which I have been hastily circling: the institutions of higher education,—universities, colleges, and technological schools. Remember that in America these different names are used with bewildering freedom. They are not definitions, nor even descriptions; they are simply “tags.” A school of arts and trades, a school of modern languages, may call itself a university. An institution of liberal studies, with professional departments and graduate schools attached to it, may call itself a college. The size and splendour of the label does not determine the value of the wine in the bottle. The significance of an academic degree in America depends not on the name, but on the quality, of the institution that confers it.

But, generally speaking, you may understand that a college is an institution which gives a four years’ course in liberal arts and sciences, for which four years of academic preparation are required: a university adds to this, graduate courses, and one or more professional schools of law, medicine, engineering, divinity, or pedagogy; a technological school is one in which the higher branches of the applied arts and sciences are the chief subjects of study and in which only scientific degrees are conferred.

Of these three kinds of institutions, 622 reported to the United States Bureau of Education in 1906: 158 were for men only; 129 were for women only; 335 were coeducational. The number of professors and instructors was 24,000. The number of undergraduate and resident graduate students was 136,000. The income of these institutions for the year was $40,000,000, of which a little less than half came from tuition fees, and a little more than half from gifts and endowments. The value of the real estate and equipment was about $280,000,000, and the invested funds for endowment amounted to $236,000,000.

These are large figures. But they do not convey any very definite idea to the mind, until we begin to investigate them and ask what they mean. How did this enormous enterprise of higher education come into being? Who supports it? What is it doing?

There are three ways in which the colleges and universities of America have originated. They have been founded by the churches to “provide a learned and godly ministry, and to promote knowledge and sound intelligence in the community.” They have been endowed by private and personal gifts and benefactions. They have been established by States, and in a few cases by cities, to complete and crown the common-school system.

But note that in the course of time important changes have occurred. Most of the older and larger universities which were at first practically supported and controlled by churches, have now become independent and are maintained by non-sectarian support. The institutions which remain under control of churches are the smaller colleges, the majority of which were established between 1810 and 1870.

The universities established by a large gift or bequest from a single person, of which Johns Hopkins in Maryland, Leland Stanford in California, and Chicago University founded by the head of the Standard Oil Company, may be taken as examples, are of comparatively recent origin. Their immediate command of large wealth has enabled them to do immense things quickly. Chicago is called by a recent writer “a University by enchantment.”

In the foundation of State universities the South pointed the way with the Universities of Tennessee North Carolina, and Georgia, at the end of the eighteenth century. But since that time the West has distinctly taken the lead. Out of the twenty-nine colleges and universities which report an enrolment of over a thousand undergraduate and graduate students, sixteen are State institutions, and fourteen of these are west of the Alleghanies.

It is in these State universities, especially in the Middle West, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, that you will see the most remarkable illustration of that thirst for knowledge, that ambition for personal development, which is characteristic of the Spirit of Young America.

The thousands of sons and daughters of farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen, who flock to these institutions, are full of eagerness and hope. They are no respecters of persons, but they have a tremendous faith in the power of education. They all expect to succeed in getting it, and to succeed in life by means of it. They are alert, inquisitive, energetic; in their work strenuous, and in their play enthusiastic. They diffuse around them an atmosphere of joyous endeavour,—a nervous, electric, rude, and bracing air. They seem irreverent; but for the most part they are only intensely earnest and direct. They pursue their private aim with intensity. They “want to know.” They may not be quite sure what it is that they want to know. But they have no doubt that knowledge is an excellent thing, and they have come to the university to get it. This strong desire to learn, this attitude of concentrated attack upon the secrets of the universe, seems to me less noticeable among the students of the older colleges of the East than it is in these new big institutions of the Centre.

The State universities which have developed it, or grown up to meet it, are in many cases wonderfully well organized and equipped. Professors of high standing have been brought from the Eastern colleges and from Europe. The main stress, perhaps, is laid upon practical results, and the technique of industry. Studies which are supposed to be directly utilitarian take the precedence over those which are regarded as merely disciplinary. But in the best of these institutions the idea of general culture is maintained.

The University of Michigan, which is the oldest and the largest of these western State universities, still keeps its primacy with 4280 students drawn from 48 States and Territories. But the Universities of Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and Illinois, and California are not unworthy rivals.

A member of the British Commission which came to study education in the United States four years ago gave his judgment that the University of Wisconsin was the foremost in America. Why? “Because,” said he, “it is a wholesome product of a commonwealth of three millions of people; sane, industrial, and progressive. It knits together the professions and labours; it makes the fine arts and the anvil one.”

That is a characteristic modern opinion, coming, mark you, not from an American, but from an Englishman. It reminds me of the advice which an old judge gave to a young friend who had just been raised to the judicial bench. “Never give reasons,” said he, “for your decisions. The decision may often be right, but the reasons will probably be wrong.”

A thoughtful critic would say that the union of “the fine arts and the anvil” was not a sufficient ground for awarding the primacy to a university. Its standing must be measured in its own sphere,—the realm of knowledge and wisdom. It exists for the disinterested pursuit of truth, for the development of the intellectual life, and for the rounded development of character. Its primary aim is not to fit men for any specific industry, but to give them those things which are everywhere essential to intelligent living. Its attention must be fixed not on the work, but on the man. In him, as a person, it must seek to develop four powers—the power to see clearly, the power to imagine vividly, the power to think independently, and the power to will wisely and nobly. This is the university ideal which a conservative critic would maintain against the utilitarian theory. He might admire the University of Wisconsin greatly, but it would be for other reasons than those which the Englishman gave.

“After all,” this conservative would say, “the older American universities are still the most important factors in the higher education of the country. They have the traditions. They set the standard. You cannot understand education in England without going to Oxford and Cambridge, nor in America without going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.”

Perhaps the conservative would be right. At all events, I wish that I could help the friendly foreign observer to understand just what these older institutions of learning, and some others like them, have meant and still mean to Americans. They are the monuments of the devotion of our fathers to ideal aims. They are the landmarks of the intellectual life of the young republic. Time has changed them, but it has not removed them. They still define a region within which the making of a reasonable man is the main interest, and truth is sought and served for her own sake.

Originally, these older universities were almost identical in form. They were called colleges and based upon the idea of a uniform four years’ course consisting mainly of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, with an addition of history, philosophy, and natural science in the last two years, and leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. This was supposed to be the way to make a reasonable man.

But in the course of time the desire to seek truth in other regions, by other paths, led to a gradual enlargement and finally to an immense expansion of the curriculum. The department of letters was opened to receive English and other modern languages. The department of philosophy branched out into economics and civics and experimental psychology. History took notice of the fact that much has happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. Science threw wide its doors to receive the new methods and discoveries of the nineteenth century. The elective system of study came in like a flood from Germany. The old-fashioned curriculum was submerged and dissolved. The four senior colleges came out as universities and began to differentiate themselves.

Harvard, under the bold leadership of President Eliot, went first and farthest in the development of the elective system. One of its own graduates, Mr. John Corbin, has recently written of it as “a Germanized university.” It offers to its students free choice among a multitude of courses so great that it is said that one man could hardly take them all in two hundred years. There is only one course which every undergraduate is required to take,—English composition in the Freshman year: 551 distinct courses are presented by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the whole university there are 556 officers of instruction and 4000 students. There is no other institution in America which provides such a rich, varied, and free chance for the individual to develop his intellectual life.

Princeton, so far as the elective system is concerned, represents the other extreme. President McCosh introduced it with Scotch caution and reserve, in 1875. It hardly went beyond the liberalizing of the last two years of study. Other enlargements followed. But at heart Princeton remained conservative. It liked regularity, uniformity, system, more than it liked freedom and variety. In recent years it has rearranged the electives in groups, which compel a certain amount of unity in the main direction of a student’s effort. It has introduced a system of preceptors or tutors who take personal charge of each student in his reading and extra class-room work. The picked men of the classes, who have won prizes, or scholarships, or fellowships, go on with higher university work in the graduate school. The divinity school is academically independent, though closely allied. There are no other professional schools. Thus Princeton is distinctly “a collegiate university,” with a very definite idea of what a liberal education ought to include, and a fixed purpose of developing the individual by leading him through a regulated intellectual discipline.

Yale, the second in age of the American universities, occupies a middle ground, and fills it with immense vigour. Very slow in yielding to the elective system, Yale theoretically adopted it four years ago in its extreme form. But in practice the “Yale Spirit” preserves the unity of each class from entrance to graduation; the “average man” is much more of a controlling factor than he is at Harvard, and the solid body of students in the Department of Arts and Sciences gives tone to the whole university. Yale is typically American in its love of liberty and its faculty of self-organization. It draws its support from a wider range of country than either Harvard or Princeton. It has not been a leader in the production of advanced ideas or educational methods. Originality is not its mark. Efficiency is. No other American university has done more in giving men of light and leading to industrial, professional, and public life in the United States.

Columbia, by its location in the largest of the American cities, and by the direction which its last three presidents have given to its policy, has become much stronger in its professional schools and its advanced graduate work, than in its undergraduate college. Its schools of mines and law and medicine are famous. In its graduate courses it has as many students enrolled as Harvard, Yale, and Michigan put together. It has a library of 450,000 volumes, and endowment for various kinds of special study, including Chinese and journalism.

None of these four universities is coeducational in the department of arts and sciences. But Harvard and Columbia each have an annex for women,—Radcliffe College and Barnard College,—in which the university professors lecture and teach.

In Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and most of the older colleges, except those which are situated in the great cities, there is a common life of the students which is peculiar, I believe, to America, and highly characteristic and interesting. They reside together in large halls or dormitories grouped in an academic estate which is almost always beautiful with ancient trees and spacious lawns. There is nothing like the caste division among them which is permitted, if not fostered, at Oxford and Cambridge by the existence of distinct colleges in the same university. They belong to the same social body, a community of youth bound together for a happy interval of four years between the strict discipline of school and the separating pressure of life in the outer world. They have their own customs and traditions, often absurd, always picturesque and amusing. They have their own interests, chief among which is the cultivation of warm friendships among men of the same age. They organize their own clubs and societies, athletic, musical, literary, dramatic, or purely social, according to elective affinity. But the class spirit creates a ground of unity for all who enter and graduate together, and the college spirit makes a common tie for all.

It is a little world by itself,—this American college life,—incredibly free, yet on the whole self-controlled and morally sound,—physically active and joyful, yet at bottom full of serious purpose. See the students on the athletic field at some great foot-ball or base-ball match; hear their volleying cheers, their ringing songs of encouragement or victory; watch their waving colours, their eager faces, their movements of excitement as the fortune of the game shifts and changes; and you might think that these young men cared for nothing but out-of-door sport. But that noisy enthusiasm is the natural overflow of youthful spirits. The athletic game gives it the easiest outlet, the simplest opportunity to express college loyalty by an outward sign, a shout, a cheer, a song. Follow the same men from day to day, from week to week, and you will find that the majority of them, even among the athletes, know that the central object of their college life is to get an education. But they will tell you, also, that this education does not come only from the lecture-room, the class, the library. An indispensable and vital part of it comes from their daily contact with one another in play and work and comradeship,—from the chance which college gives them to know, and estimate, and choose, their friends among their fellows.

It is intensely democratic,—this American college life,—and therefore it has distinctions, as every real democracy must. But they are not artificial and conventional. They are based in the main upon what a man is and does, what contribution he makes to the honour and joy and fellowship of the community.

The entrance of the son of a millionnaire, of a high official, of a famous man, is noted, of course. But it is noted only as a curious fact of natural history which has no bearing upon the college world. The real question is, What kind of a fellow is the new man? Is he a good companion; has he the power of leadership; can he do anything particularly well; is he a vigorous and friendly person? Wealth and parental fame do not count, except perhaps as slight hindrances, because of the subconscious jealousy which they arouse in a community where the majority do not possess them. Poverty does not count at all, unless it makes the man himself proud and shy, or confines him so closely to the work of self-support that he has no time to mix with the crowd. Men who are working their own way through college are often the leaders in popularity and influence.

I do not say that there are no social distinctions in American college life. There, as in the great world, little groups of men are drawn together by expensive tastes and amusements; little coteries are formed which aim at exclusiveness. But these are of no real account in the student body. It lives in a brisk and wholesome air of free competition in study and sport, of free intercourse on a human basis.

It is this tone of humanity, of sincerity, of joyful contact with reality, in student life, that makes the American graduate love his college with a sentiment which must seem to foreigners almost like sentimentality. His memory holds her as the Alma Mater of his happiest years. He goes back to visit her halls, her playgrounds, her shady walks, year after year, as one returns to a shrine of the heart. He sings the college songs, he joins in the college cheers, with an enthusiasm which does not die as his voice loses the ring of youth. And when gray hairs come upon him, he still walks with his class among the old graduates at the head of the commencement procession. It is all a little strange, a little absurd, perhaps, to one who watches it critically, from the outside. But to the man himself it is simply a natural tribute to the good and wholesome memory of American college life.

But what are its results from the educational point of view? What do these colleges and universities do for the intellectual life of the country? Doubtless they are still far from perfect in method and achievement. Doubtless they let many students pass through them without acquiring mental thoroughness, philosophical balance, fine culture. Doubtless they need to advance in the standard of teaching, the strictness of examination, the encouragement of research. They have much to learn. They are learning.

Great central institutions like those which Mr. Carnegie has endowed for the Promotion of Research and for the Advancement of Teaching will help progress. Conservative experiments and liberal experiments will lead to better knowledge.

But whatever changes are made, whatever improvements arrive in the higher education in America, one thing I hope will never be given up,—the free, democratic, united student life of our colleges and universities. For without this factor we cannot develop the kind of intellectual person who will be at home in the republic. The world in which he has to live will not ask him what degrees he has taken. It will ask him simply what he is, and what he can do. If he is to be a leader in a country where the people are sovereign, he must add to the power to see clearly, to imagine vividly, to think independently, and to will wisely, the faculty of knowing other men as they are, and of working with them for what they ought to be. And one of the best places to get this faculty is in the student life of an American college.

VII
SELF-EXPRESSION AND LITERATURE