on the other hand, it is the great and only reservoir supplying the state and the public with functionaries. The university, including the university-like schools of technology, is the sole gateway to a career of honor in the church and the state, in medicine and law. These conditions do not now and probably never will obtain among us. For years to come our universities will yield the palm in museum and similar facilities to the old centers of European scholarship. Even our state universities, in view of certain well-known peculiarities of our present political life, cannot congratulate themselves upon being the objects of the government's anxiety in the sense in which Berlin or Heidelberg may do so. They have good cause to be thankful that the attention paid them by the state legislature is not more intense; the suspicion is well grounded that they would look upon too frequent an inspection by a legislative committee as in more than one way a—visitation. The great and glorious work done by many of the state universities, one is safe to say, is not in consequence but in spite of the attention of the legislature. The folly of slavish imitations of transatlantic university methods and models is apparent if no other factor be weighed than our antipodal temporal situation.
Higher reasons, however, than these give point to the ambition to create in America the American university, which, while profiting by the larger wealth and longer experience of Europe's historic centers of learning will blaze paths peculiarly its own. The passion for American educational independence has even now won for the American professor equality with his European colleague, if not of opportunity and facilities, at least of expectation. The last four lustra have wrought a wonderful change in the appreciation in even wider circles, of the character, the ultimate aim of university instruction. Time was, when among us transmission of knowledge was deemed the sole function of the so-called university teacher. This misapprehension recalls as the definition of the instructor's task, Plato's description of the ceremonies incidental to the festivities in the Piraeus in honor of the Thracian Diana: λαμπάδια ἔχοντες διαδώσουσιν αλλήλοις. The
