is truly its soul. It would be impossible—how shall I say it?—not to conceal, and still less to dissimulate, but to envelop under a more seductive affability of manners, more of character, or to place an ingenuity of resources at the source of ideas more precise, more settled, or more ample. I wish I could reproduce entirely his Opening Address, delivered nearly four years ago, in 1893, at the inauguration of the Congress of Superior Instruction at Chicago. "The first function of a university," said he, "is the conservation of knowledge;" and could the fact that the very condition of scientific progress is respect for tradition be condensed into a better phrase? "The second function of a university," Mr. Gilman went on to say, "is to extend the bounds of human knowledge;" and it is the fixity of this ambition which has characterized the Johns Hopkins among all the other American universities. "And the third function of a university," he added, "is to disseminate knowledge." And truly it is not for ourselves, but in order to transmit them, that we have inherited the treasures of tradition or the acquisitions of experience—which is exactly what they are seeking to do here. By publications, by lectures, by review and magazine articles, by letters to the daily press, Mr. Gilman has desired the Johns Hopkins University always to keep in touch with public opinion. In France we form a more mystical, and at the same time a more practical, notion of science; more "practical" because many of our young men see little in it but a matter of examinations or an occasion of diplomas; and more "mystical" because we too often affect to be afraid lest we should vulgarize it by dissemination. . . .
THE COMING ARISTOCRACY IN AMERICA.
. . . And if, moreover, I have thought I ought to dwell at some length on this question of the American universities, it is because I have no better way of thanking them for their welcome than to do my best to make them better known; and also because, from all that I see and hear and read, there gradually emerges a lesson for ourselves. Permit me, in order to express myself clearly, to use a barbarism, and to say that, by means of these great universities, much of America is in the way of aristocratizing itself. While in France—what with our "modern education," the "specialization of our sciences," "the spirit of regionalism" with which we are trying to inocculate our universities—we are diminishing the part of general instruction, in America, on the contrary, they are seeking to extend, to increase, and to consolidate it. While we are insensibly detaching ourselves from our traditions, the Americans—who are inconsolable for not having an ancient history—are precisely essaying to attach themselves to the traditions we are forsaking. Of all that we affect to consider too useless or superannuated of the history of Greek institutions, or the examination of the books of the Old Testament, they are composing for themselves, as one might say, an intellectual past. And if, perhaps, the catalogues of their universities do not keep all their promises, which is often the case with our own, that is unimportant. The function always ends by creating its organ, and it is tendencies which must be regarded. The universitarian tendencies in America are on the way to constitute an aristocracy of intelligence in that great democracy; and, which is almost ironical, of that form of intelligence which we are so wrong-headed and stupid as to dread as the most hostile to the progress of democracy.
AMERICAN COSMOPOLITANISM.
April 4th.—. . . Before entering on my great week, and, pending eight days, of functioning for two days, one at Baltimore and the next at Bryn Mawr, I would like to summarize certain reflections. What renders this difficult is that with what there is original and local here, and of which I catch a glimpse now and again in glance or gesture, there is always blended, as in New York, a substratum of cosmopolitanism. If, having taken him for an American, or at least an Englishman, I wish to make a little portrait of Professor A———, I am informed that he is a German; it was not Germany that I came to look for in America. In the manner, the language, the countenance of Mrs. B———, something decided, precise, and energetic has struck me, but it appears that she is of French extraction. I cannot make a note of what seems to me indigenous in the manners of Mr. C——— if he spends rather more than half the year in Europe, at Paris or in Switzerland. Another person asks me what I think of Baltimore; I tell him; we become confidential; we chat; I question him; he answers me; it was a Russian! There are Italians also; there are English; there are Israelites, among whom, in truth, I am puzzled to meet an American, born
