iSS4.]
��Gifts to Colleges an el Universities.
��245
��return more than five per cent, interest. Ten years ago in the East it was as easy to secure seven, as it is now to secure five, per cent. In one year one college saw its income decrease many thousand dollars by reason of this decrease in the rate of interest. Bowdoin College is distinguished for the success with which its funds are administered. At the present these funds are said to pay about six per cent, interest, but it is a rate higher than many colleges are able to gain. By this decrease the salaries of professors, the income of scholarships, and the entire revenue, suffer.
Many reasons might be urged in behalf of benevolence to institutions of learning. Funds thus given are as a rule administered with extraordinary financial skill. Their permanence is greater than the permanence of funds in trust companies and savings banks. Harvard, the oldest college, Yale, the next to the oldest (with the exception of William and Mary), have funds still unimpaired, still applied to the designs of those who gave them in the first years of their incorporation.
Gifts to a college are, moreover, an application of the right principle of benevolence of helping those who help themselves. The trustees, the profes- sors, are, in proportion to their income, the most generous. Not seldom do they pledge a year's salary for the bene- fit of the institutions which they offi- cially serve. The first nineteen donors to Tabor College, Iowa, several of whom were its officers, gave no less than sixty per cent, of the assessed value of their property. The efficient presi- dent of Colorado College has been en- gaged in making money for his college
��in legitimate business, in preference to making his own fortune. The students, as well as the officers, of colleges en- deavor to help themselves to an educa- tion in all fitting ways. The keeping of school, the doing of chores, the run- ing of errands, the tutoring of fellow- students, suggest the various ways in which they endeavor to work their way through college.
Those who thus donate their money, in amounts either large or small, foster the highest interests of the nation. From institutions of learning flow the best forces of the national life. Litera- ture, the fine arts, patriotism, philan- throphy, and religion, thus receive their strongest motives. The higher educa- tion in the United States is most inti- mately related to the master-minds of American literature. Longfellow, Haw- thorne, Lowell, Holmes, were in part created by Bowdoin and Harvard. Among the most efficient officers of the late war were the graduates of the col- leges. Without the college the minis- try would become a " sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal " indeed, and without a learned ministry the church would languish. In the early years of the century, Mr. John Norris, of Salem, proposed to give a large sum of money to the cause of foreign missions. He was persuaded, however, to transfer the gift to the foundation of the Andover Theological Seminary, assured that thus he was really giving it to the mis- sionary cause. So the event proved. For the first American missionaries were trained at Andover. Thus, he who gives his money to the college, gives it to the fostering of the highest and best forces in American thought and character.
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