shown frequently in the "livings" of the English Church—mere sinecures, involving little labor, much reward, and great security for dullness and incapacity.[1] Relieved from the necessity of rendering service which will be spontaneously recognized, the irresistible tendency of weak human nature is to desist from the hard toil which such service demands, and to take refuge, gradually and unconsciously, in doing what will satisfy the powers that be; in high pretense instead of actual performance, and in pedantry instead of sound learning.
And testimony is not wanting to show that the vast success of Oxford and the aristocratic schools of England in producing ignorant dunces is paralleled, fortunately on a milder scale, in this country. In a recent paper in "The Forum," President Robinson speaks of various disadvantages suffered by himself when in college:
"To add to my misfortune, the most intimate of my friends, though pure in their lives, and morally wholesome as associates, were low in their aims as scholars, satisfied with very little and very superficial work. They had been sent to college to prepare for the ministry, and were fair specimens of the average of a class of men not yet wholly extinct. Selected and aided by beneficiary funds as 'candidates for the ministry,' they seemed to regard themselves as absolved from the duty of high aims as scholars, and dropped into the wretched cant of 'laying aside ambition as unworthy the servants of the Lord.'" "The Nation" comments on this by saying that the same thing "is true of a larger part of the men who go to many of our colleges to-day under similar conditions"—that is, on a charitable basis. And it further observes that, "if he had followed these men out into life, he would have had little difficulty in showing that their effect upon the moral and political influence of the pulpit had also been a misfortune." There is nothing strange in this. Mendicancy is equally bad in its effects on the beneficiary and on the public.
A glance through the catalogues of the leading American institutions will justify the opinion expressed as to the total irrelation bred by endowments between public demand and educational supply. In Harvard, the leading university of the country, we find courses of study on the following languages among others: Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian, Arabic, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Old Iranian, Pali. This in a university which offers little instruction on the greatest problems confronting the people of the present age. And in the University of Michigan, at which I took a degree, the same general facts appear, notwithstanding a closer responsibility to public opinion than Harvard is subjected to. A short time ago I visited the university, going to hear a classmate of mine instruct a class in Lysias. He is an excellent in-
- ↑ So it is with endowed libraries. The Lenox and Astor Libraries of New York are good illustrations both of the high expectations with which such institutions are founded, and of subsequent disappointment. They are closed for long vacations, and are open for few hours during their season (and those are inconvenient).
