important position was a great boon to the nation. This Library

has already completely altered our conception of the city of Washington. It is not only a place to visit for its public buildings, its parks, and its streets, for its political importance as the seat of the national Government and its social prestige, for the place where offices are to be distributed and all sorts of measures to be abetted or opposed; but in less than a decade it has become a most serious place for research and investigation and study and writing and work. Such a change can a great Library alone bring at once upon a city or an institution, imparting a new character to it. For similar revolutions, one may take the new developments at Columbia, Yale, and Princeton, the central commanding position of the Library on the campus of prevailingly scientific institutions like Cornell and Pennsylvania, and the case of a State University like Wisconsin. The Boston Public and Harvard Libraries have long given the community surrounding them a definite character.

One very natural result is that the Library at Washington is becoming the training spot for librarians over the country. Two who have lately been sent out and are revolutionizing the library idea in their respective States are the librarians of the Virginia State Library at Richmond and of the University of Texas. Many notable accessions have been made to the Library at Washington among the 150,000 volumes, pamphlets, and manuscripts that have been added within the past year: the Hattala collection in Slavic Philology, the Weber collection on Sanskrit, many additions to the files of the government publications, etc. Among important manuscripts are the papers of Martin Van Buren, Elihu B. Washburne, Chancellor James Kent, William Thornton, designer of the Capitol, John M. Clayton, and others. Those of special importance to students of the history of the Southern States are the papers of James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, ninety letters of Duff Green of Georgia, and papers of Governors Pickens and Bonham of South Carolina relating to the Confederacy.

THE

SEWANEE REVIEW

VOL. XIII.]

JULY, 1905.

[No. 3.

CAN THE IDEAL COLLEGE LIVE IN A GREAT CITY?

I

COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY

These two words are in constant and familiar use; yet neither is easy to define. As a rule the university is a college,—and much besides.

The great American university usually includes, also, a group of advanced "schools," devoted to avowed and direct professional training. From them issue every year full-fledged doctors, dentists, preachers, advocates, engineers, and teachers. And yet, no mere preparation for a special employment as a livelihood, no Butter-brod study as such, is the essential part of a true liberal education. Mr. Lowell, in his oration at Harvard's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, defended in memorable words the description of a university as a place where "nothing useful is taught:" that is, where nothing is taught, or learned, simply for its money-earning value.

The university, as the largest and highest type of educational centre, is better distinguished by its graduate school or schools, in which the most eminent specialists undertake to conduct the advanced students to the frontier line of human knowledge, across the wide fields of purely scientific research. When the acolyte has also made his own first considerable contribution to the sum total of that knowledge, the second degree, of Ph.D., is in sight. This distinction is supposed to mark the close of student life and to assert the full maturity of the young scholar.

But there is, of course, no limit set to the growth of the individual, nor to the scope of such an institution.

One of the most striking examples, thus far attained, of advanced non-professional specialism is the school of political science at Columbia. To its faculty, when in need of instruction, confidential advice, or expert assistance, the national government itself has repeatedly turned: yet the school does not profess to graduate diplomatists, statesmen, nor even lawyers.

It evident that the material needs of a true university are enormous. Its libraries and laboratories, even its teaching staff, must always remain inadequate to its prospective needs. Not over four or five American universities can be called today wellendowed, and these, too, are clamorous for larger resources. Such centres of specialized erudition are already too numerous rather than too few. Far from any intelligent wish to increase the number, competent critics generally fear that, e. g. Princeton, Columbia and Yale, and, in the next wider circle, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Worcester, Harvard and the rest, are already planted too closely together for the interests of the highest and largest intellectual life.

But this fear, whenever expressed, is felt chiefly as to the advanced or graduate work in pure science. All knowledge is interrelated. The most learned specialist, who seems the loneliest outpost in his chosen direction, may at any instant need the aid of the freshest research in a field hardly known to him save by name. All the records of the past, all the thought of the present, may be drawn upon, before the task of the day can be done aright. Hence the true scholar is rather the most gregarious than the most solitary of mankind. Already our universities are organizing for freer national and even international exchange of men and ideas. Tennyson's "Parliament of Man" is yet a faraway dream: the universal republic of letters is by no means so remote. Eventually there will be one university.

For admission to this graduate or advanced study,-in more and more cases, even for entrance to a professional school,— a college diploma, or evidence of the A.B. degree, is regularly required. What, then, is a college? With possibly one or two exceptions, each real university supports one or more colleges,

and a far larger number exist independently. In the elder university centres, the college is usually oldest of all, and is still the object of peculiar pride and love among the alumni.

Generally speaking, the college provides four years of liberal study, not narrowly specialized, from about the eighteenth to the twenty-second year, for graduates of high schools and other secondary or preparatory institutions. This liberal collegiate course is in especial danger at present from the invasion of the "pedagogical option," which offers direct preparation for teaching. But liberal study, it must be repeated, means a better equipment for life, for large civic and social usefulness, not mere training for professional work. Psychology, child-study, history of education, may all be permissible elective studies; but drill in pedagogical method, with practice-teaching, should at best be tolerated as an extra course, preferably given in the professional school itself rather than in the college. But the whole attempt to win two diplomas, or reach two goals, simultaneously, is itself poor pedagogy and poor ethics.

The college curriculum, then, is to be regarded as a general preparation, either for the more rigid specialism common to professional and graduate schools, or for the active life into which a large proportion of the graduates will pass. The "plant" required is not enormous, nor difficult to obtain. It is a desirable addition to the equipment of any community. A college should be created wherever a sufficient number of willing students can be provided with competent instructors. A normal school will prove a helpful neighbor. For all professional schools the college course is an ideal preparation. But even if, for administrative purposes, united with such institutions, the moderately well equipped college should not attempt to give the "second degree in liberal arts," Ph. D.—and will be wiser to decline to bear the more pretentious name of University.

II

COLLEGE AND CHURCH

A college is not, and never can be, a corporation for investment and financial gain. All business enterprises undertake

eventually to "make" money: i. e. to pay out more than is put in. To accomplish this end is, for them, success: to fall short of it is failure, more or less complete. A business man may have ethical aims as well, but business as such, finance, has no end save profit measurable in money.

A church, however, as all men feel, is radically different. The wealthy Manhattan corporation bearing the mystic name of Trinity might hold all the property on Broadway and the Bowery as well, might draw larger rentals than all the descendants of ferryman and furtrader-and yet, as a Christian church, might be not merely a pitiful failure but actually dead: nonexistent. Nearly every church has in fact an edifice, salaried employes, an incorporated body of trustees. It should set a good example in business honor and solvency as in all else. Yet the real church fails, or succeeds, exactly so far as it forgets, or keeps alive, the spiritual influence of him who had not where to lay his head.

If a côterie of thrifty investors should ever build a steeplehouse, hire a popular preacher, let pews and sittings, and divide net annual profits pro rata on the stock, it would be time for history to repeat itself:

'And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that bought and sold in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers." (Matthew xxi, 12.)

A private hospital, a private school, may be legitimate sources of private revenue; but surely no American college was ever founded in any such mercenary or mercantile spirit. None has actually returned, with or without interest, the money spent on it since its foundation. Financially, then, every such experiment may be regarded as a failure.

But even the attempt at such thrift would be morally fraudulent, because, by unbroken usage, the historic name of College carries with it a promise of public service, a claim on public. gratitude and support. Like the church, it has always been created by men who eagerly made sacrifice of their investments and moneys, in the faith that other and better returns were assured them from the diffusion of truth, from human progress toward better ideals.