attempt to carry on too many of the departments of approved and unapproved educational work.

And here is the great weakness in the university development in America. On the foundation of the college and the land grant school of agriculture and mechanics we have erected splendid groups of buildings, and have peopled them with capable professors and eager students; but each in turn has followed a policy of rivalry instead of co-operation, of repetition instead of supplement. Clark university stands out as a lonely attempt to do a few things supremely well. Why is it not possible to avoid the endless repetition of costly equipment, and secure a cordial co-operation? Some work admirably done in one university may well be supplemented in another. A system of migration, such as is common in Germany, would enable a graduate student at Princeton to spend part of his time at Columbia or Johns Hopkins with due credit. An eminent foreigner, who is now a professor in one of our universities, made this experiment not long ago. The trustees deemed his act a blow at their claim to absolute and final possession of all knowledge, and made it the subject of a formal rebuke.

The growth of the past half century is remarkable from every point of view. It is to be hoped that the next half century will place a higher value on the university spirit in all forms of work, will more clearly recognize the limitations of the university as an institution, and of individual universities as effective forces, and develop a spirit of co-operation which will place learning above local reputation, and productive scholarship above the number of students.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IDEALS.

BY EMIL G. HIRSCH.

Emil G. Hirsch, professor of rabbinical literature and philosophy in the University of Chicago and minister of the Sinai congregation of Chicago; born May 22, 1852, in Luxemburg, Germany; graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1872 and continued his studies in Berlin and Leipzig 1872-76, becoming rabbi in 1877; he was minister for the Sinai congregation of Baltimore in 1877 and of the Ardath-Israel congregation of Louisville, Ky., the following year, coming to the Sinai congregation of Chicago in 1880; the same year he became editor of the Zeitgeist, Milwaukee, continuing until 1887; in 1886, he became editor of the Reformer, New York, and is now editor of The Reform Advocate, Chicago; from 1888-97, he was president and member of the public library board of Chicago; he has written a number of monographs on religious and biblical matters and edited the biblical department of the Jewish Encyclopedia; he is well known as an orator. The following is from the American Journal of Sociology.]

The signs are multiplying that the ideal of the American university is beginning to take shape. While the creative week which is destined to mould it into perfect realization has by no means run its appointed length and is perhaps even not very far spent, yet the first day's formative "Let there be light!" has sounded. Primordial chaotic indefiniteness has yielded to incipient order and fruit bearing concentration. Whatever the American university may and should share with the historic institutions of other lands, enough of its destiny and function is even now indicated to bring out in clear relief the lines along which its own peculiar possessions and possibilities must and will develop. It stands to reason that the American university cannot be a slavish replica of however perfect a European model. According to an old legend, even God's revealing voice shaking Sinai's cloud crowned peaks to the very foundations and waking the whole universe to responsive and awe struck attention, clothed its one fundamental truth in as many dialects as found sound on human lips. Science, indeed, knows no geographical and no national boundaries. Its curiosity and message are for all climates and times. Yet, no two nations approach its altar by the same paths. Historical conditions which even the master of giant genius may not undo, for they have become a part of himself and of his people, introduce also into its world

dominion a personal and national equation. This, if one chooses so to regard it, limitation to national distinctiveness in dialect and expression, science shares with every member of the hierarchy appointed to lead man to the sanctuary of the heights vouchsafing the outlook and the uplook into the ideal meanings and relations of things. Art is certainly one of this priesthood. Yet, though she witnesses to a perfection which may beam upon man everywhere, she casts her testimony into certain moulds which differ not merely with the centuries, but also with the countries. Poetry is intensely human, and yet her melodies are always set to diverse keys chosen not merely under the pressure of individual temperament, but clearly responsive to national predispositions. Shakespeare prophesies of the eternally human, because he is so fundamentally British, Isaiah and the "son of man" have appeal for all generations and races, and yet they crystallize their stirring and uplifting thought along axes arising from the very soil of one land and the hopes of one people at definite periods of its career. Religion, the most universal of all human potencies, throws her white light into a many colored spectrum, its lines varying with the zones and epochs revealing the medium through which the one common ray had to pass to token the bow of promise arching across the sky.

These historical conditions cannot be ignored. They are roots of power. The last decade of the last century augurs so well for our nation because it proclaims the independence of the American university, as confidently as did the fourth quarter of the eighteenth compel recognition of the political autonomy of the republic by the nations of the earth. Independence, of course, can never be more than relative. Humanity, whatever the complex manifestations of its teeming energies, is organic. It holds its separate parts to interdependence. That the declaration of independence which for all mankind has made the Fourth of July sacramental was in its fundamental contentions not an original document, is not a secret. It is the precipitate of the political and philosophical doctrines of the age which lent tongue to Rousseau and pen to Montesquieu. Nevertheless, in its emphasis and its conclusions as applied to a concrete circumstance it was

a new creation. As philosophers those who drew its phraseology had predecessors; as American statesmen, they had none. The undimmed glory of a new initiative is thus theirs. He who would be for American education the Jefferson to herald the liberating word and intone the birth song of a new freedom, will, consciously or unconsciously, pursue paths analogous to those which the framers and signers of the declaration of our political independence chose for their confession of faith. In his theories, the spirit of the age will find a powerful echo. His, as incontestably as any European thinker's, is the past of the race. The failures and the victories with which the records of distant centuries or near decades are vocal are weighty monitions or winged messages to him. The American educator is no Chinese mandarin who in the anxiety to preserve his independence forgets the interdependence of all ages and countries. For such mandarins America has no call. But in the application of his wisdom, gleaned in all the fields and quarried in all the mines of accessible earth, the American has no more urgent circumstance to weigh and to remember than that he is neither in Germany nor in England-but in America.

In their temporal appointments even, for many circling years to come, if not forever, our universities will be confronted with difficulties pressing down to the same degree none of their European continental sisters. In Germany and France, and the other transatlantic states, education in its widest scope, from the primary school to the academy, counting among its members the greatest masters, is the solicitude of the government. Museums, libraries, and laboratories; funds for publications and grants for scientific expeditions, are endowed or maintained from the same source from which the police or administrative machinery of organized society draws its support. Moreover, the university stands, on the one hand, in an organic relation to the secondary schools, which are regulated with a sole eye to make them the well equipped drill and recruiting grounds for the higher schools; on the other hand, it is the great and only reservoir supplying the state and the public with functionaries. The university, including the university like schools of technology, is the sole

gateway to a career of honor in the church and the state, in medicine and law. These conditions do not now and probably never will obtain among us. For years to come our universities will yield the palm in museum and similar facilities to the old centers of European scholarship. Even our state universities, in view of certain well known peculiarities of our present political life, cannot congratulate themselves upon being the objects of the government's anxiety in the sense in which Berlin or Heidelberg may do so. They have good cause to be thankful that the attention paid them by the state legislature is not more intense; the suspicion is well grounded that they would look over too frequent an inspection by a legislative committee as in more than one way a— visitation. The great and glorious work done by many of the state universities, one is safe to say, is not in consequence but in spite of the attention of the legislature. The folly of slavish imitations of transatlantic university methods and models is apparent if no other factor be weighed than our antipodal temporal situation.

Higher reasons, however, than these give point to the ambition to create in America the American university, which, while profiting by the larger wealth and longer experience of Europe's historic centers of learning will blaze paths peculiarly its own. The passion for American educational independence has even now won for the American professor equality with his European colleague, if not of opportunity and facilities, at least of expectation. The last four lustra have wrought a wonderful change in the appreciation in even wider circles, of the character, the ultimate aim of university instruction. Time was, when among us transmission of knowledge was deemed the sole function of the so-called university teacher.

The emancipation of the American university from slavery to this prejudice was the final triumph over scholasticism, which defeated elsewhere had found its last refuge in our American school methods. The schoolman has implicit faith in books and authority. Knowledge for him is the acquisition of information established before. This view is involved in the very fundamental proposition of all scholasticism.