of this fatal outbreak was not the unhealthfulness of the place, but bad sewage arrangements in the college buildings, where the unfortunate students resided.
There was, of course, nothing new or unusual in such an occurrence. There have been thousands of cases like it before. Indeed, as we go back in the centuries we read of great fever-plagues carrying off millions of people, and which were caused by air-poison and water-poison engendered in the filth of human habitations, when the methods and the virtues of sewage and drainage were unknown.
And yet there was something unexpected and startling about this affair at Princeton. The sickness and death that occurred there were not from want of knowledge. The calamity was entirely preventable. It could not be charged to the mysterious providence of God, as is often so plausibly done when the causes of disease and death are not understood. It took, place in a great seat of learning, where young men gather to be educated. The business of the place was to think. But if there was knowledge sufficient to prevent this disaster, and the young men were learning how to use their minds, why did the catastrophe occur? The answer is, these young men were sacrificed to an educational theory.
The theory to which the Princeton students were offered up is that college knowledge is not to be of the useful kind that is necessary to save life. Utilitarian knowledge—that which instructs people how to preserve life and maintain health, and deal intelligently with practical affairs—is decried in these institutions as vulgar and unfitted for educational purposes. Knowledge for its vital life-uses is flatly repudiated, and the courses of study are made up with reference to quite other objects. The study of dead languages, which, for general students, is most perfectly freed from all utilitarian taint, is the earliest, the most prolonged, and the most prized of all college studies. The whole pressure goes in this direction. Whatever else is neglected, the Greek and Latin are always insisted upon. The students are told that this will make men and scholars of them, while an acquaintance with modern knowledge, science, and the laws of their own nature is hardly to be ranked as education at all. A knowledge of sewage is not included in the Princeton ideal of scholarship, nor is it exacted by the Princeton curriculum. There was information enough to prevent the calamity that happened there, but nobody had any interest in making use of it. It was dead knowledge in the College of New Jersey. The intellectual interest fostered by the institution impels to other acquisitions. The whole battery of examinations, honors, prizes, is adapted to favor dignified, traditional, and disciplinary studies. The Princeton student is not, first of all, thoroughly instructed in regard to the laws of breathing and the circulation, nor of the brain and its conditions of action and limits of endurance, nor of the nervous system and its perils of exhaustion, nor of the stomach with its dyspeptic dangers, nor of the vital forces of the living system and the laws of their economical exercise, nor of the complex influence of environing conditions over human health, efficiency, and enjoyment. He is not taught these prime essentials of welfare as the most imperative of intellectual requirements, because they are slurred as mere "utilities"; and so he is left to die or sicken from poisonous air, or to undermine his energies and break down his health in any of the numberless ways to which carelessness, ignorance, and unregulated ambition may lead. If he does not die of collegiate sewage, he is turned adrift with his "miserable scrapings of Greek and Latin," to find out by bitter experience that it would have been better if he had devoted more of the precious time of his college years to the study of useful things.
We have spoken of the college at
