structor, but no art can infuse life into the subject. It was perfectly easy to see that the class was deriving no mental pabulum from Lysias, and that their minds were chiefly occupied with their chances of escaping a "flunk." There may be considerable literary merit in Lysias, but the class did not see it or care to look for it. They were exclusively occupied with the difficulty of translation and grammatical construction, and the whole process, as compared with real education, struck me as very like gum-chewing as compared with eating. The empty form is gone through with, but there is no nutrition. And even in the most popular courses, like the "seminary" in English literature, the same fact stands out in bold relief. The class study More's "Utopia," Spenser's "Faerie Queen," and the like, Tennyson's "Princess" being the only masterpiece in the course, except "Silas Marner," which has been written in any recent time. When I visited the class, it was striving, with very little success, to seem interested in Wordsworth's "Excursion." There may have been one member of the class who really had a spontaneous appreciation of the poem, but I do not believe there were more. After visiting even the best institutions artificially supported on the European plan, we are forced to think of the profound remark of Bagehot, that "academies are asylums of the ideas and tastes of the last age."
If the harm done by endowments consisted simply in a support of old-fashioned methods and subjects in education, it would be bad enough. But the trouble does not end there. There is a morbid, or what President Cleveland would call a pernicious, activity about them. What energy they have they use in actively obstructing the march of ideas and of political freedom. Oxford's history in this respect is too notorious to admit of further mention. Harvard, too, can tell her story. She has her Memorial Hall now for her sons who fell in the war of the rebellion; but time was when Senator Sumner was conspicuously slighted by her, and when Wendell Phillips was tabooed. Narrow sympathies, extending only to the prevailing power, have characterized "fair Harvard," as well as Oxford and the established Church in England. This is not due to the individual characteristics of the men who are for the time being in these institutions, but to a general law obtaining among privileged castes and corporations. And at this day, among the most prominent professors, we may find illustrations of this truth. It is not Oxford bishops alone who, from a class instinct, are the perpetual barriers of progress and the ardent champions of all that we have nearly outgrown, whether in education, political economy, barbaric criminal codes, and indefensible wars; in all of which the records of Parliament throw a singularly unfavorable light upon the English successors of the apostles, as may be seen in their adherence to the old education, in their resistance to the reform of the savage criminal code of England in the early part of this century, in their well-nigh unanimous support of the corn laws, and in
