not from any want of proper aims in our scholars, but simply from the circumstance that our people do not sufficiently appreciate the value of the higher forms of literary and scientific work to bear the burden which the production necessarily entails. Scholars must live, as well as other men, and in a style which is in harmony with their surroundings and cultivated tastes, and their best efforts cannot be devoted to the extension of knowledge unless they are relieved from anxiety in regard to their daily bread.
In our colleges the professors are paid for teaching and for teaching only, while in a foreign university the teaching is wholly secondary, and the professor is expected to announce in his lectures the results of his own study, and not the thoughts of other men. Until the whole status of the professors in our chief universities can be changed, very little original thought or investigation can be expected, and these institutions cannot become what they should be, the soul of the higher life of the nation. It is in your power, however, to bring about this change, but the reform can be effected in only one way. You must give to your universities the means of supporting fully and generously those men of genius who have shown themselves capable of extending the boundaries of human knowledge, and demand of them, only, that they devote their lives to study and research, and let me assure you that no money can be spent which will yield a larger or more valuable return.
If you do not look beyond your material interests, the higher life of the nation, which you will thus serve to cherish and foster, will guard your honor, and protect your home; and, on the other hand, what can you expect in a nation whose highest ideal is the dollar, or what the dollar will buy, but venality, corruption, and ultimate ruin?
But, rising at once to the noblest considerations, and regarding only the welfare of your country and the education of your race, what higher service can you render than by sustaining and cherishing the grandest thought, the purest ideals, and the loftiest aspirations, which humanity has reached, and making your universities the altars where the holy fire shall be kept ever burning bright and warm?
Do you think me an enthusiast? Look back through history, and see for yourselves what has made the nations great and glorious. Why is it that, after twenty centuries, the memory of ancient Greece is still enshrined among the most cherished traditions of our race? Is it not because Homer sang, Phidias wrought, and Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Thucydides, with a host of others, thought and wrote? Or, if for you the military exploits of that classic age have the greater charm, do not forget that, were it not for Grecian literature, Thermopylæ, Marathon, and Salamis, would have been long since forgotten, and that the bravery, self-devotion, and patriotism, which these names embalm, were the direct fruits of that higher life which those great thinkers illustrated and sustained. And, coming down to
