Part 3

The Jesuits adopted a more liberal spirit and method. They established and controlled a large number of universities and schools, and made them the great channels of the movement of the counter-Reformation. Their educational activity gained for them a great reputation for teaching and a large patronage. In 1710, they had 612 colleges, 157 normal schools, 24 universities and 200 missions. They were inspired not so much by the value they placed on culture for its own sake, as to promote the authority of the old religion and prevent heresy.

The powerful initial impulse given to the cause of education by means of the humanists and the reformers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began to flag in the seventeenth century, when the Protestant Church, like the Catholic, became cold and petrified. The universities were regarded as appendages of the church, and classical training largely lost its hold in Europe.

The condition of contemporary institutions for superior instruction in the old world is full of promise. The importance of building up great universities is conceded by nearly all nations. In the judgment of Mr. L. D. Wishard, the Foreign Secretary of the College Y. M. C. A., there are 500,000 young men in Asia in the high-class institutions.

The government of Japan, that has lately joined the Western nations in the onward march of civilization, gives enlightened direction to higher education. There are, besides the Imperial College of Tokio, five great secondary schools located in different centers throughout the empire, which serve as feeders to the university. There are 5,000 youth in Christian colleges and schools in the kingdom. In the Christian university at Kioto there are 600 youth pursuing a college education under Christian teaching.

China has always encouraged colleges for the education of her magistrates. "The literary class consisting of the graduates, and those who attend the examinations for degrees, numbering some two and a half millions, are the rulers of China."

There is a growing tendency to universal education in India. "It is computed," says Bishop Hurst, "that in the small area of Calcutta and suburbs there are 28,000 alumni who have completed the curriculum in the five Christian colleges. There are about 2,000 who are alumni or students of the Calcutta University, and there are 1,000 youths besides who are studying up to the matriculation examinations of the university." The English language is the medium of instruction in all these institutions. It may not be wide of the mark to suppose that in all India there are not less than 40,000 natives who have graduated at some school of high grade, and that ten per cent. of the number have passed the university degrees. The number is now more probably 50,000. These men enjoy the highest respect and are the recognized leaders of native thought. Already many are, and many more are to be judges, lawyers, magistrates, professors, teachers, orators, physicians, engineers, merchants, authors and journalists of the country.

The University of Fez, in Morocco, established in the eighth century, is one of the oldest universities outside of Asia. The Mohammedan University at Cairo, in Egypt, has more than 200 instructors and 10,000 students assembled from Europe, Asia and Africa to be instructed in the Moslem faith.

If we turn to Europe, we find that the planting and enlarging of the institutions for superior instruction has the most hopeful outlook. In Great Britain and Ireland there are 11 universities with 834 professors and 18,400 students. Besides, there are the old established and excellent schools at Eaton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby.

A new era for the classical schools of Germany began in 1783, when Baron Sedlitz, encouraged by Frederic the Great, was able to revive "the dormant sparks planted in them by the Renaissance and they awoke to a new life, which since the beginning of this century has drawn the eyes of all students of intellectual progress upon them." Germany had in 1890, 250 gymnasia and 22 universities. The latter are manned by 2,431 instructors and have 31,803 students, or one student to every 151 of the population.

France has 19,152 students in her professional and technical schools. There are fifteen institutions of higher learning in the University of France, with 180 professors and 12,695 students. These are under the control and patronage of the State. The government appropriated in 1889-90, 12,000,000 francs for university purposes. Besides, there were expended in the same year 99,000,000 francs for new buildings for the advancement of higher education. In 1890, there were 598 professional chairs in the several universities, in which were taught 17,630 students, or one student to every 217 of the population.

The Austria-Hungary Empire had in 1891 eleven universities, eight of which were in Austria, with 1,112 professors and 14,272 students. The remaining three were in Hungary and had 322 professors and 4,098 students. There were for the same year in Switzerland nine universities, with 434 professors and 2,619 students.

The Catholic Church in Italy continued for years to exert an unprogressive and anti-intellectual influence. The present government of Italy, however, is fully awake to the importance of a university education for the people, and now maintains several universities at a large annual outlay.

This brief outline reveals the facts that all civilized nations are encouraging and maintaining schools for the higher education of the people, and suggests that a comparative study of them is both helpful and fruitful.

Many of the universities in the Old World lack the stimulus of the strong Protestant denominational influence and the marked religious character of the American colleges. They consequently fail to attain the highest results for the general good, but they are inaugurating an intellectual movement which will eventuate in a more glorious future.

II.

THE PLANTING OF COLLEGES IN THE NEW WORLD.

Our national existence came into full bloom under the light of a Christian civilization. The political, social and religious institutions were sufficiently well organized in the Old World to be advantageously introduced, with some modifications, into a young nation in the New World.

The early colonists first founded a church, then a school, and then a college. They felt that the colonial organization was incomplete without a college to inculcate such piety, virtue and intelligence as would preserve and perfect the highest social order and secure the blessings of liberty. These colleges, modelled at first after the universities of Europe, soon mapped out a pathway for themselves, and have now come to occupy a unique place in our national life.

The Pilgrim Fathers sought to establish in the New World three great principles: civil and religious liberty, and to make education their corner-stone. The scholarly impulses were so dominant at this early day that when the entire population of New England did not exceed four thousand, the people determined to establish a college, which Cotton Mather says "was the best thing they ever thought of." It is estimated that this meager population contained as many as one hundred men who had received the training of Oxford and Cambridge. Sixty of them were from the University of Cambridge; twenty were from Oxford, and others, apparently, from the Scotch universities. The colleges they founded show traces of all these institutions. These intelligent and refined men, with breadth of culture and political foresight and public spirit, constituted the chief source of greatness in the early days of New England.

The three leading colonial colleges, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary, were planted and permeated with the spirit of republican liberty and primitive Christianity. They began in a very modest way.

Harvard, the oldest of American colleges, was founded in the beginning of the colonial days, only eighteen years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, and when Boston was a village of twenty-five or thirty houses, and when only twenty-five towns had begun to be settled in the colony. In 1636, six years after the settlement of Boston, the colonial legislature voted the sum of four hundred pounds (equivalent to a tax of fifty cents to every person in the colony) towards the founding of Harvard College, with the avowed purpose of training young men for the ministry. This sum was increased in 1637 by the munificence of John Harvard, who was a graduate of Cambridge, and a finished scholar and clergyman from England. He gave eight hundred pounds and his library, consisting of three hundred volumes, towards the endowment, whereupon the college took his name. "The colony caught his spirit," says Boone. "Among the magistrates themselves, two hundred pounds was subscribed, a part in books. All did something, even the indigent; one subscribed a number of sheep; another, nine shillings' worth of cloth; one, a ten-shilling pewter flagon; others, a fruit dish, a sugar spoon, a silver-tipped jug, one great salt, one small trencher salt, etc. From such small beginnings did the institution take its start. No rank, no class of men, is unrepresented. The school was of the people." There is nothing in history to parallel the heroic spirit and boldness of these early settlers in attempting to found a college, surrounded as the people were with poverty, scanty subsistence, and savage enemies. They did not realize the wisdom of their liberality and sacrifice and its influence upon the future civilization of the Western World. Harvard College was located at Cambridge, with a single building, on less than three acres of land. It was supported by government appropriations and private philanthropy. For years the college was financially embarrassed. The salaries were small, and for nearly one hundred years were paid out of the colonial treasury. The President received a salary of $600. The total grants made to the college by the colony during the first century amounted to about $8,000. The total annual income from all sources at the close of the first century of its history was but £750. Down to 1780 the total amount contributed out of the public treasury was $68,675 and 3,793 acres of land. Individuals in England and America had likewise given $90,412.

No one at this period would have dared to predict that Harvard College would have in 1892 an endowment of $12,000,000 and an annual revenue of more than $1,000,000, with seventeen departments of instruction, three hundred teachers, and three thousand students. But such has been the phenomenal growth of some of our American institutions.

Among the colonial colleges, that of William and Mary is one of the most important. As early as 1617, an attempt was made in England to raise money to found a college among the Virginia settlers. In 1619, fifteen hundred pounds were in the hands of the treasurer, and ten thousand acres of land were granted by the Virginia Company. A preparatory school was founded two years later, but owing to the Indian massacre of 340 settlers which followed, the enterprise was suspended. The effort to found a college was subsequently revived in 1660. The Virginia Assembly enacted that "for the advancement of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken for a college and free school." Nothing came of this until 1688, when a subscription was taken from wealthy planters for twenty-five hundred pounds for the college. Five years later (1692) the first royal educational charter in America was granted. The college was established at Williamsburg, Virginia, and was given £2,000 and 20,000 acres of land, a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland, and the duty on furs, skins, and liquors imported, besides other fees and privileges of the Surveyor General's office. "In its royal foundation, its generous endowment, and liberal patronage," says R. C. Boone, "it stands in sharp contrast to the early years of Harvard. This was established by the Puritans, and stood for the severest of ultra-orthodox though dissenting Protestantism; that was founded to be and was an exponent of the most formal ceremonialism of the Church of England. The one was nursed by democracy; the other befriended by cavalier and courtier. Endowment for the one came from the purses of an infant and needy settlement; the other was drawn from the royal treasury. The one was environed and shaken for a hundred years by the schisms of a controversial people; the roots of the other were deep in the great English ecclesiastical system." This college has been called a school of statesmen. It was here that Jefferson, Randolph, Tyler, Monroe, Blair, Marshall, and other prominent statesmen received their training.

The history of Yale College is full of interest. The original design of the founders of the New Haven Colony was to establish a college. A lot was set apart for this purpose as early as 1647. A plan was proposed in 1698 to found a college, and to be placed under the general care of the churches. In 1700, sixty-three years after the founding of Harvard College, a society consisting of eleven ministers met to take the initial step. At a second meeting, in the same year, each of the trustees, numbering ten of the principal clergymen of the colony, were without money, but they brought forty volumes of books, and, placing them on a table, presented them to the body, saying in substance: "I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony." This was the humble beginning of Yale College. The colony had a population at this time of fifteen thousand people, fifty of whom were college-trained men. The outlook for this college was not very encouraging, in view of their limited means and scattered population. The work, at first, lacked system and unity. In 1718, the college was permanently located at New Haven, Connecticut, and named in honor of Elihu Yale, who was born in Boston in 1648. He received his education in England, and was afterward made Governor of Madras, and, later, Governor of the East India Company. His donation to Yale College was largely in books, and amounted to five hundred pounds. This gift was followed by that of Rev. George Berkely, who gave ninety-six acres of land in Rhode Island and one thousand volumes to the library. The college received for its support, in a century and a half, $100,000 from the commonwealth of Connecticut. It has been supported chiefly by private means. In 1890, there were 143 instructors and 1,500 students. There is no college in America that has a more enviable reputation for giving a thorough Christian education to the thousands of youth who have gone forth from her halls of learning.

It is a matter of record that our ancestors showed much self-denial, courage, and genius, to turn aside from the work of organizing a new social order, and the readjustment of themselves to their surroundings in a new country to provide for the higher education of the people. The founders and supporters of these colleges, as a rule, were men of high intellectual and religious character, and worked intensely and earnestly for the highest good of society. It would prove an inestimable blessing to our nation if every American citizen were inspired with the zeal of the early colonists in behalf of the cause of higher education. They, out of their poverty, poured their gifts into the treasury of the colleges in order to leave future generations a great and glorious heritage. Gratitude should prompt us to excel them in our love for the education of the present and future generations by cheerfully giving of our abundance for the same high and holy ends.

Other colleges were founded within the century. Aside from the three colonial colleges, six more were founded prior to the Revolution, and four during the war of independence. Following the Revolution was a period of expansion, and by the close of the century there were twenty-four colleges established. These colleges, scattered throughout the Union, appeared as a galaxy of stars in the literary firmament of the nation. They were founded and located as follows:

Institution. State. Date.

1. Harvard, Massachusetts, 1637 2. William and Mary, Virginia, 1693 3. Yale, Connecticut, 1701 4. Princeton, New Jersey, 1746 5. University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, 1749 6. Columbia, New York, 1754 7. Brown, Rhode Island, 1764 8. Dartmouth, New Hampshire, 1769 9. Queen's Rutgers, New Jersey, 1766 10. Hamden-Sidney, Virginia, 1776 11. Washington and Lee, Virginia, 1782 12. Washington University, Maryland, 1782 13. Dickinson, Pennsylvania, 1783 14. St. Johns, Maryland, 1784 15. Nashville, Tennessee, 1785 16. Georgetown, Dist. of Columbia, 1789 17. University of N. Carolina, North Carolina, 1789 18. University of Vermont, Vermont, 1791 19. University of E. Tennessee, Tennessee, 1792 20. Williams, Massachusetts, 1793 21. Bowdoin, Maine, 1794 22. Union, New York, 1795 23. Middlebury, Vermont, 1795 24. Frederick College, Maryland, 1796