ern States than from the Eastern. There are more and more young men of fortune whose parents will not stint them in education, at least; more and more poor young men, who will live on bread and water, if need be, to gain knowledge. What we need is the opportunity of high culture somewhere,— that there should be some place in America where a young man may go and study anything that kindles his enthusiasm, and find there instrumentalities to help the flame. As it is now, the maximum range of study in most of our colleges leaves a young man simply with a good preparation for Germany, while the minimum leaves him very ill prepared for America. What we need is a university. Whether this is to be a new creation, or something reared on the foundations now laid at Cambridge, or New Haven, or Ann Arbor, is unimportant. Until we have it somewhere, our means of culture are still provincial. Grant this one assumption, that we need a university, and then almost all the recent discussions on the subject seem to be merely questions of detail. There is small difficulty about discipline or selection of studies, when an institution undertakes to deal with men, not children, and assumes that they have come to learn, and not to be feruled. Give young men the opportunity to study anything which anybody in the land knows, and then the various departments will rest upon their own merits, and students will direct their course as parents direct, example influences, or genius guides. But compel them to give their time to something which neither they nor their parents desire, and the result will be ignorance, broken windows, and the torturing of Freshmen.
A more difficult point of detail, perhaps, will be to determine how much account should be made, in organizing such a university, of our present undergraduate system. My own impression is, that the true basis of the future university must be the professional schools, and that what is now called distinctively the College must shrink into a preparatory department, instead of being accepted, as now, for the full sum of a liberal education. Even the professional schools are not yet liberal enough, and their very name indicates that they are founded with a view to certain avocations, and not with a view to culture. It was a misfortune, in this respect, when the Scientific School at Cambridge abandoned its projected departments of Latin and Greek; for these might have led the way (as at New Haven) to Philology, History, and Metaphysics, and would have helped to save science from being confounded with mere technological training. On the other hand, the recent organization of an Academical Senate at Cambridge for the general government of all departments, and the introduction of University Lectures, are a great step towards giving us the larger system which the nation needs.
The error committed in our colleges of making Latin and Greek compulsory, and therefore unattractive, should not make us forget that this is, after all, an error in the direction of high culture, and one more pardonable in America than anywhere else. These languages are a perpetual protest against the strong tendency to make all American education hasty and superficial. They stand for a learning which makes no money, but helps to make men. Astronomy, metaphysics, the higher mathematics, and the critical or literarystudy of the modern languages, have the same advantage; but the Latin and Greek tongues represent this culture best. For they remain still synonymous with accurate linguistic training, and with the study of form in literature. Compared with these, all modern languages are undeniably loose in structure, deficient in models, and destitute of the apparatus of critical study. It is certainly unfortunate that it is so, but there is the fact. To suppose the modern languages used in education as we now use the ancient, would imply the complete transformation of the former, — their structure, their literary models,
