highest prize. He then lapsed into deeper morbid despondency, made his will, and shot himself through the head with a pistol.
We have here merely another instance, of which there have been thousands before, of the vicious working of that competitive system in our higher educational institutions, which should receive the inexorable reprobation of the community. Prof. Johannot writes to the Tribune, in relation to Schwerdtfeger's case, saying that Cornell University neither forces, crams, nor uses class-markings, which is all very well; but how about competitive prizes? Does it forbid these to its students? and, if not, is there no "forcing" here? Schwerdtfeger began and ended at Cornell by gaining prizes. If Schwerdtfeger "came to the institution an exceptional student, with a thirst for knowledge which was an absorbing passion, and had morbid fancies and an inherited tendency toward insanity and suicide;" if he was "fascinated with the life and fate of Chatterton," then the institution that took charge of him is to be all the more condemned for exposing him to the fatal stimulus of competitive prizes.
It is forgotten that we live in an age of excitement—a speculating, gambling, horse-racing age, feverish with political, religious, commercial, and sporting rivalries. All grades of society are infected by it, and the universal interest in it is such that the newspapers are crammed day by day with the details of competitive conflicts in numberless forms, from foot-races up to political campaigns. Against all this our higher education ought to make a stand. But, instead of doing so, the colleges, in various degrees, yield to the general tendency, and, in fact, avail themselves of the competitive spirit in carrying on their work. The pernicious effects of artificial excitements and provocatives are undeniable and notorious. Many have been sacrificed to this forcing system, through constitutional enfeeblement, prostration by disease, and premature death. For the natures upon which it takes effect are just those that are most liable to become its victims. Fatal results may not be produced, but shattered nerves and broken constitutions do follow everywhere upon the competitive prize system, because it is the readily impressible, the impulsive, and the unregulated, that are taken by its lures.
It is a physiological fact of the greatest importance in education that, under the stimulus of intense feeling and factitious excitement, the brain is capable of making rapid and extensive acquisitions, which are, of course, correspondingly transient. The cramming policy rests upon this capability of the brain, and it is this to which the competitive prize system appeals. It bids for immediate, striking, and showy results in acquisition, to be gained by exhaustion of the plastic power of this organ, and that, too, during the period of its growth, when the forces are required for enlargement and advancing organization. It violates this fundamental principle of education: that intellectual acquirement, to be permanent and valuable, must be slow; and that, for healthful mental development, knowledge, like food, must be taken as required by normal appetite, and become assimilated into faculty by the quiet, unforced processes of organic transformation. The protests in recent years against this policy have been many and emphatic, and much has been done to check it; but it will undoubtedly continue so long as partial parents continue to be imposed upon by the shallow parade of examinations, exhibitions, and prize shows.
The Intercollegiate Literary Association now appears as a new force well calculated to thwart this beneficent tendency. It works by prizes and honors in their most mischievous forms, by blazoning the victories of students through all the newspapers in the land; so that
