spoken of not only in the government and the corporate character of the institution, but in the personal character of most of its officers. Many, very many exceptions must be made to such a statement; but, in the end it must be acknowledged that that stamp of action known as officialism leaves its mark upon the official; and that the individual as well as corporate influence of institutions thus artificially maintained, and animated by a different spirit and principle from that elsewhere prevailing in the body social, is hostile to the free movement, and an obstacle to a continuous healthful readjustment of ideas in our country.
Any general objection to the existing order of things inevitably meets the query, "What will you put in its place?" It is frequently assumed, so strong is the conservative instinct in mankind, that the objector, if he discovers or points out a disease, should also cure it. This hardly seems just. Nature puts forward one set of agencies for right criticism and another for right construction. Critics are seldom artists, and artists are seldom critics. Still, it is not difficult, in the present case, to give a more satisfactory answer. In the first place, it may be said that the objections brought against the foregoing are generally based on an overestimation of the function of academic education, both in individual and national life. The learned Huber remarks that the revival of learning in the fifteenth century, like the speculative movement of the twelfth century," was sustained by the co-operation, not of institutions, but of individuals"; and this is also true, he says, "without a doubt, of every intellectual impulse which is animated by an independent principle of life."[1] This fact is evident enough both historically and from the rationale of all progress. I can not think of a single forward movement of society which has not been obliged to overcome the opposition of great educational centers; and hardly an eminent name occurs to me as having been assisted in its high destiny by academic education.[2] Whether in business, politics, or letters, the world's leaders have not been sent forth panoplied to conquer by their alma maters. It is with intellectual as with other progress. New developments arise, not from fixed types and structures, but by fresh movements from beneath; and the surface crust has always to be broken through before the new experience can displace the old in consciousness, and the new force has to break or bend the old structure in society before it can assume its rightful place. This is so obviously and so universally and necessarily true, that one may be surprised at the wide prevalence of the opposite
- ↑ Huber's "History of English Universities," vol. i, p. 216.
- ↑ A few Englishmen in several classes may be instanced as either having no connection with universities, or as deriving no profit from them. Burke, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Davy, Faraday, Watt, the Stephensons, Lardner, Turner, Grote, Buckle, George Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens. Gladstone has been fifty years in getting Oxford out of him, and Grant Allen says that Darwin "escaped with comparatively little injury."
