CHAPTER XXIV.AMERICAN HUMOR.

THE burden of foreign criticism of the people of the United States may be expressed in the language of the vulgar by saying that we are “too fresh.” Well, if we are, we have the salt that will save us, and that salt is American Humor.

Whatever may be the failing of any American, whether native or adopted, he may generally be depended upon for a sense of humor. If there is no other point of contact between him and the stranger who encounters him, it is quite safe to fall back upon humor as a common meeting ground.

This is the only country in the world in which everybody indulges in joking. Other countries have their wits and humorists who are a special class among themselves. But here any and every man must have a sense of humor and know how to use it if he wants to get along with his fellow-citizens.

Some of our most humorous men are solemn judges. Others are physicians. Editors arehumorists as a matter of course, and even the clergyman with a level head leans to the belief that his education is incomplete until he can turn a joke as well as he can preach a sermon.

We joke about everything. This does not mean that we make fun of everything, but that, as everything has its possible humorous side, we are competent to see it and call attention to it.

There is no department of American history, political, military, social or religious, in which traces of the humorist may not be found. There was considerable sense of fun among the grim old fellows who came over in the Mayflower, as any one may find out for himself if he will take the trouble to look to the original records, and in the many volumes of correspondence which have appeared in genealogical history of the first families of New England. There is quite as much sense of humor manifested as in similar records of the first families of Virginia. It is the custom in history to draw a sharp dividing line between these two classes of American pioneers, but the line disappears as soon as one gets beneath the surface. Solemnity and seriousness, whether counterfeit or genuine, can be maintained for only a certain length of time by any one. So Puritan and Cavalier speedily went back to a distinguishing trait of their common ancestors in the old country, and improved upon it.

In the United States no subject is too sacred to joke about; or, at least, too sacred to be examined in the light of humor. Americans as a class are a reverent people. They would not for the world make fun of the Deity, but many of them talk of the most sacred sentiments and personages with a familiarity and play of humor which terribly shock some of the formalists from the other side of the water. When Mr. Lowell wrote his earlier series of the “Bigelow Papers” his verses were read with much curiosity and some delight in Europe, but suddenly the entire English press was horrified by his lines:

“You’ve got to get up airlyEf you want to take in God.”

“You’ve got to get up airlyEf you want to take in God.”

“You’ve got to get up airlyEf you want to take in God.”

This was pronounced by one high English literary authority the most irreverent and blasphemous expression that ever had appeared in print; but Mr. Lowell replied by saying that familiarity was not irreverence; that the early American was intimately acquainted with his God—he had to be. There was no other friend upon whom he could rely, and conscientiously he talked about Him in a half playful but always affectionate manner, which was the custom regarding the earthly parents of the period.

It is impossible to go anywhere in American society, no matter how high nor how serious the subject under consideration may be, without encountering, generally to the hearer’s benefit, theAmerican spirit of humor. Congress may be in session and the country almost convulsed by some grave discussion which is going on, nevertheless on the floor of the House and far more in the committee-rooms and in the lobby one is sure to hear the strongest arguments advanced in humorous form. They are called jokes, but some new word should be coined to give them the dignity which their usefulness has enabled them to attain.

The most serious man in appearance in the United States, excepting none of the early Puritan divines, was probably the late President Lincoln. His visage was not only earnest and solemn but positively mournful whenever it was in repose. He was a debater of high order, he was a logician whom men who had held him in contempt for his homely ways and awkward manner learned to respect as soon as they crossed verbal swords with him, but Lincoln’s strongest argument was always a joke. He said and wrote many things which were grand in their day, but which seemed to have been entombed in printed pages and diplomatic papers, for one seldom hears them quoted now-a-days; yet his jokes still live. They are perennial, not merely those which were attributed to him, but those which he really made. “To clinch a point,” which was one of his own favorite expressions, he tried the patience of his Cabinet severely at times by persistingin joking upon serious subjects—matters of great moment at the time; and it is said upon good authority that once he opened the Cabinet meeting called specially with the hope of averting great disaster to the Union cause by reading the last printed letter of “Petroleum V. Nasby on the Democratic doings at Confederit X Roads, State ov Kentucky.” Before the meeting was over, however, Mr. Lincoln read his Emancipation Proclamation. While Mr. Seward, as able and adroit a man as ever held the portfolio of Secretary of State, would be wondering how to reply to an annoying committee or deputation which had come from some one of the Northern States to instruct the Government how to carry on the war, Mr. Lincoln was quietly constructing a little joke or recalling one from his past experiences which would be appropriate to the occasion, and after the joke was inflicted upon the committee Mr. Seward was sure to find that his own carefully prepared speech was entirely unnecessary.

But it is not only in political circles that humor has been made to serve the cause of good government, good morals and the highest degree of righteousness in the United States. The members of the Supreme Court of the United States are all practical jokers; that is, they all are fond of avoiding a long-winded argument by telling a story illustrative of the question atissue. Ministers do the same. A meeting of clergymen of any denomination is likely to result in some very sharp discussion which closely approaches to ill temper, but in such cases some one may always be depended upon to get up and tell a humorous story which gives point to the proceedings, and also gives them a new direction and acts like oil upon the troubled waters. Humor is tolerated even in the pulpit. The late Henry Ward Beecher frequently made his congregation laugh on Sunday, and some of the newspapers criticised him severely for it, but he seldom lost a parishioner on that account, and thousands of people—who never otherwise would have heard him—were brought under his spiritual influence by appreciation of a faculty that drew them into closer sympathy with him as a man. A preacher of a very different stamp, the Rev. Sam Jones, of Georgia, never hesitates to tell funny stories, always illustrative of his subject, while delivering his talks, and Sam addresses larger congregations than any other American preacher of the present time.

Humor makes its way everywhere in the United States. Newspapers are full of it, and the most high-toned and serious of them find it necessary to supply their readers with jokes. A New Yorker recently held a neighbor to account for reading habitually a very serious and almost bilious daily newspaper. “I don’t read it much,”said he, “but I buy it because its funny column contains a better assortment of jokes than any other paper in the city.” The principal editorial writer of a large New York daily paper, a paper of wide circulation and great influence, once complained to the managing editor that all the point of a leading article to which he had devoted two days of thought had been expressed in the paragraph column by a joke one line long.

The public meeting is the truest, the fairest expression of American opinion in any given locality, but in the public meeting it is always the humorist who sways the audience and carries the day. He may be one of the stated speakers, a man of great wisdom and force, for wisdom and wit are closely allied in the American nature, however the celebrated couplet of the late Alexander Pope about “great wit and madness” may seem to indicate the contrary. In the great political discussions, now historic, which once were conducted by Abraham Lincoln and Senator Douglas, when both were comparatively young men, and the Democratic champion got his adversary into a corner, as occasionally he did, Lincoln always got out of his predicament with a joke—never with an argument—and the audience never failed to see the point. This shows the universality of the American sense of humor. In any other country of the world the peasantry, who are the nearest possible parallel to thefarmers of America, are stupid and dull of comprehension, but an American crowd, no matter how far away from the centres of civilization, nor how solemn, and serious, and weary, and dull of comprehension their faces may seem, can always be depended upon to take the point of a joke. They are equally quick to resent an attempt at humor which is not correctly and sharply pointed. They are all humorists themselves. Get a seat on the wagon of a farmer driving along a country road and engage the man in conversation, and you will hear more sharp, pithy, humorous sayings than you are apt to get from any professed wit in polite society. Let the man meet a brother farmer coming from the opposite direction, and, although the conversation will naturally turn on the crops, and the taxes, and local government, and family or individual misfortunes, the conversation is sure to be spiced with humor. In other countries it seems to require a jolly fellow, a man of high spirits, to say funny things; but here, if you chance not to expect the man of solemn visage, the man bowed down with care, to break out humorously, you are sure to be agreeably disappointed.

Even in stated religious meetings this quality of the American nature frequently displays itself unexpectedly, but always with effect. As solemn and religious gathering as can be seen in the United States is the camp-meeting in the farWest, where people come from many miles around to listen to the only form of religious service which they have the privilege of attending. The sermons and prayers are intensely earnest. The speakers have an immense sense of responsibility of the duties incumbent upon them, but in sermon, and even sometimes in prayer, expressions break forth which show that in no circumstances can the native American be free from the domination of his sense of humor. The most powerful individual influence that ever existed in the Western camp-meetings, according to historians sacred and profane, was a man named Peter Cartright, a Methodist preacher. He would move audiences to tears and sometimes to groans by the eloquence and earnestness of his preaching, yet suddenly, at the most unexpected times, he would say things that would put his entire congregation into paroxysms of laughter. The purpose of the meeting never was disturbed by these discursive efforts. They were as much to the point as the most earnest statements and exhortations which he had previously made, and were entirely in keeping with the general intentions of the service.

Passing from conversation to printed utterances, it may be safely said that the humorous writings of Americans have been more read than any other literature which has appeared from our press. We have many able editors in the UnitedStates, but those most read are those who say the funniest things. There never was a more influential editor in the United States than the late George D. Prentice, who for a long time managed the newspaper which now is the LouisvilleCourier-Journal. Prentice was a Whig, but probably half of his readers were Democrats. They didn’t like his politics, but they couldn’t get along without his fun. His paper was published in a Southern State, a slave State, but more than half of its circulation was in the free States of the North. While Prentice lived there was scarcely a post-office in the Mississippi or Ohio Valley which did not receive copies of it by mail. Its influence extended as far North as Chicago and the North-western States, and the local paper which didn’t repeat his humorous bits was likely to be informed by its readers that there must be a reform in that direction. For many years the most popular portion of the very good editorial page of one of the most prominent daily papers of New York was its humorous editorial. The topics of the writer were seldom those of the great interests of the day, yet people read it, turned to it the first thing, talked about it to their friends, compelled them to read it, and felt lost when the writer of those articles was transferred to a different field of labor.

We have some popular poets in the United States, but it is doubtful whether the works ofany of them have been as much read as Mr. Lowell’s “Bigelow Papers.” Mr. Lowell is no mean poet himself; there are critics who insist that he has not an equal among American versifiers, but the humorous verses just alluded to have made him better known than all of his more serious efforts, and it is believed by intelligent men of all parties that it had immense effect in bringing about the political changes which immediately preceded the late civil war.

During the civil war there were many editors who used to say, with some evidence of annoyance, that they wished they could be read as much as Nasby. Nasby was an Ohio editor who invented a scene and some characters in the South, and wrote about them so persistently and with such a realistic air that his effusions were copied regularly in almost all of the Republican papers of the land. Another man who was more read than any editor of the day was Artemas Ward. He did not go into politics to any great extent, but what he did say was so accurately satirical that nearly everybody read it and was the wiser for it. The mistakes of our generals, the blunders of our government and the crimes of many of our contractors were the subject of a great deal of vigorous editorial writing, but no one succeeded in bringing them so forcibly to the attention of the public as a wit who wrote under thenom de plumeof Orpheus C. Kerr. During thesame period there were facts in the local history of New York extremely uncomplimentary to one great political party, and the opposing party lost no opportunity to disclose them and criticise them in editorial columns and news columns, but one man was more read than all others combined. It was the man who wrote the satire entitled “The New Gospel of Peace,” in which the doings of the alleged Peace Party were set forth in humorous style.

At the present time the men whose writings are most read are not the historians, editors, essayists, or even novelists. They are the humorists. Bill Nye is more read than any novelist in the United States. So is James Whitcomb Riley. In Chicago there are a number of able journalists, but the one most quoted by name not only in his own city but throughout the Union is Eugene Field, whose humor finds no subject too great or too small to dwell upon. A little while ago anedition de luxeof his humorous prose and verse was published at a very high price, and some of the later would-be subscribers found to their disgust that the list was full and no more books could be supplied. Is there any poet or novelist in the United States who has had a commercial experience like this?

Mr. John Hay, once a Secretary of President Lincoln, and afterward a hard-working journalist, is also a poet, and has perpetrated some gracefulverses, but when any one offers to quote a bit from John Hay, the hearers always understand that it will be something humorous. His dialect poems do not exceed half-a-dozen, yet they seem as popular now as when first written twenty years ago. They were not carefully elaborated; the author is said to have dashed them off in a hurry as a relief from hard editorial work, but they struck the popular heart at once, probably because, like most other American humor, there was a basis of seriousness and sense to them. The finale of his poem, “Little Breeches,”—a poetic story of a lost child who was saved, as his father supposed, by angels, will long be the most popular and effective protest against formal religious ideas. He says of the angels:

“I think that savin’ a little childAnd bringin’ him back to his ownIs a durn sight better biznessThan loafin’ round the throne.”

“I think that savin’ a little childAnd bringin’ him back to his ownIs a durn sight better biznessThan loafin’ round the throne.”

“I think that savin’ a little childAnd bringin’ him back to his ownIs a durn sight better biznessThan loafin’ round the throne.”

Was there ever a greater commercial success in literature than that achieved by Mark Twain? The combined books of the most successful American novelist have not sold as many copies as one of Mark Twain’s books. Why? Because Mark Twain is funny—because he knows how to say something in a way in which nobody else has said it. Scores of other men have written about the Holy Land and our own West, but it was not until “Innocents Abroad” and “RoughingIt” appeared that people in general began to manifest a lively interest in these portions of the world. Innumerable sketches have been written about life on the Mississippi River in the old days before railroads and emancipation, but all of them combined did not “catch” the public as successfully as “Huckleberry Finn.” The latter was humorous, the others were not; there was no other point of difference.

It does not matter, to the American people, from where humor comes, so it really is humorous and has a point to it. We will take it in any shape or dialect. One of the great successes of humorous literature during the civil war was that achieved by Col. Charles G. Halpine, who made a mythical Irish soldier, “Private Miles O’Reilly,” his mouthpiece for a lot of humorous criticisms of the Government, the army and navy. During the same period there arose a Southerner, signing himself “Bill Arp,” who made some hard hits, in humorous style, at the North; somehow they found their way through the lines and were freely reprinted at the North. In later years another Southerner—the creator of “Uncle Remus,” put a lot of delightful stories into negro dialect, and a host of people at once began to quote them. In New York Mr. Julian Ralph wrote a lot of humorous sketches under the general head of “The German Barber,” and the newspaper press began to quote them.Across the ocean Max O’Rell began to satirize the English people and customs, and straightway his books sold better here than abroad.

On the stage and platform, as everywhere else, humor is the most popular and attractive feature. A few years ago, before the theatrical companies could easily reach any city or large town, the lecture was a favorite means of entertainment, and more than three hundred Americans and foreigners were busy every winter in hurrying from town to town to deliver lectures. The three hundred have been reduced almost to three, but there is room there still for any one who has anything humorous to say. “Bob” Burdette, more popularly known as “The BurlingtonHawk-eye Man,” works himself almost to death every winter in going all over the United States to give his humorous recitations. He is a very religious man, and a working Baptist, but people never ask him for a religious address: they always want to hear his fun. Another of the few successful men remaining on the platform is A. P. Burbank, a man who for ten years has determined every year to go upon the stage in legitimate comedy, but so humorous are his recitations and so effective his manner in delivering them that those who have heard him before insist upon hearing him more, and he goes again and again to towns where he has been a dozen times before, each time to find his audiencelarger and more appreciative, and each time to receive the assurance that they will want him again the following winter. Little Marshal Wilder, who never took a lesson in elocution in his life, and has been cruelly handicapped by nature, attempts merely to make people laugh; he succeeds, so he seldom is allowed to have an evening to himself, and when the “platform” season is ended here goes over to England and has three or four engagements a night.

Everybody knows that on the stage humor takes better than anything else. There may be a great tragedy well presented on the boards of a city theatre, or a brilliant spectacle, or a so-called emotional drama which appeals to everything improper in human nature, but the theatre which is presenting a good comedy can always depend upon holding its own. No dead-head seats are to be had at such theatres. The manager can always depend upon getting money for all the room at his disposal. The fun may be very rough, sometimes it is decidedly vulgar, but people ask as few questions and make as few protests against fun, no matter what its kind, as drunkards do against the quality of their whiskey.

American appreciation of humor may be found also in the number and wide circulation of periodicals devoted entirely to fun. There used to be a theory that there was no room for ahumorous paper in the United States because the ordinary dailies and weeklies indulged in so much fun themselves. But after the enormous success ofPuck,Judge,Life, and some other periodicals, it is useless to argue any longer on the subject. After a political or social question has been apparently worn threadbare in editorials and essays, out comes one of these papers with a pithy saying or a good cartoon that carries more influence than all the serious talk combined. It matters little upon which side of the question, even in politics, these professional humorists are found. Their hits when well made are cheerfully acknowledged even by their own enemies. During the palmy days of the New York ring, Mr. Nast, the cartoonist ofHarper’s Weekly, was offered an annual allowance several times larger than his salary if he would give up work entirely and go abroad. Humor and high character are often allied; one of the strongest illustrations of the fact is that Mr. Nast without any hesitation refused this valuable offer. Some of the abuses of local government in New York have been more effectually fought by Mr. Keppler and his associate artists inPuckthan by all the work of editors, lawyers and judges.Puck’sinfluence in politics became so great that before the last Presidential campaign began it became absolutely necessary for the party which it was fighting to start a humorous pictorial journal of their own, and itwas quite safe to suppose that it was influential in the political results that followed.

A delightful thing about humorous writings is that no one seems jealous of their influence or afraid to give them greater prominence. The only complaint which the publishers of the humorous weeklies have to make against their brethren of the daily press is, that their own circulation might be better were not so many of their good things promptly reprinted everywhere. No sooner does one of these papers come from the press than its best sayings are scissored and reprinted in a thousand or more papers. Almost any daily paper of large circulation seems to think it necessary to have a humorist of its own. They pay more for humorous contributions than for any other class of matter, and all of them are more keenly on the look-out for a new humorist than for a possible Presidential candidate. The readers of the daily press quote for one another the funny sayings of their favorite paper long before they think of mentioning the other contents; indeed, most of them are so absorbed by the fun that they don’t seem to have remembered anything else.

We cannot possibly overestimate the value of our national faculty of seeing the humorous side of things. It keeps us from making ourselves ridiculous; it prevents us, both as individuals and a people, from being laughed at for anythingwe may do in sober earnest. It is very hard, in this day and land, for any man, society, party or church to be a fool without hearing about it in a good-natured way that robs the rebuke of its sting. It is not so in other countries.

But our sense of humor does still more for us. It smooths numberless rough places in the pathway of a people whose road is not easy to travel. It averts many a quarrel, closes dangerous breaches, and is balm to wounds that otherwise would smart. It is almost always harmless. There are men and women whose fun always lingers upon incidents that are vulgar, but this is a fault of perverted minds—not of the humorous spirit. It is a better introduction, between strangers, than any letter or form of words, and it expresses much in little, doing it more effectively than any of the wise saws and proverbs of more serious races. It seems irrepressible and omnipresent; a man or woman may be too tired or sick to reason or to think, but whoever saw an American too weary to see the point of a joke or to offer another in return? We need to preserve our humor almost as carefully as if it were our character, for should we ever lose it our character will be the worse for the change.

AMERICA has more colleges, so called, than all the other civilized nations combined.

These institutions of learning are not results of accident, or accretions of church reverences and purposes, like the great universities of older lands. Most of them were founded and have been maintained by the people at large, and these, until recent times, were very poor. They are testimonials to the level-head and tenacity of purpose of the American people. Says President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins University:

“That tenacity of purpose with which a few settlers in the wilderness held on to the idea of a liberal education, in spite of their scanty crops and scantier libraries, their wide separation from the old-world seats of learning, and their lack of professional teachers, is one of the noblest of many noble traits possessed by our forefathers, who were never so weary or so poor that they could not keep alive the altar-fires in the temples of religion and of learning. Their primitive foundations did not depend on royal bounty or on feudalliens; they were supported by free-will offerings from men and women in moderate circumstances, by the minister’s savings and the widow’s portion. It is only within the present generation that large donations have reached their coffers. The good and the bad we inherit in our collegiate systems were alike developed in the straitened school of necessity.

“The founders of the original colleges were not only high-minded and self-sacrificing, but they were devoted to an ideal. They believed in the doctrine that intellectual power is worth more than intellectual acquisitions; that an education of all the mental faculties is better for the happiness of individual scholars and for the advancement of the community than a narrow training for a special pursuit. Accordingly, their educational system did not begin with professional seminaries, for the special training of any one class, but with schools of general culture, colleges of the liberal arts, as good as could be made with their resources and in that age. Instead of an academic staff made up of those who professed to teach some special branch of knowledge, these colleges had a master and fellows (or tutors), men who were fit to teach others those rudiments of higher learning in which they had themselves been taught. Moreover, as years rolled on, instead of concentrating personal and pecuniary support upon a few of the oldest and mostpromising foundations, far-sighted men built up in every portion of the land colleges corresponding in their principal features with the original foundations, and depending for maintenance on the beneficence of individuals.

“The history of the colonial foundations abounds in examples of the wisdom and self-sacrifice with which they were conducted under circumstances which called for devotion to a lofty ideal. No one can study the biography of their graduates without discovering that they were the men who moulded the institutions of this country. It is easy to point out deficiencies in these academic organizations, as it is to criticise the defects of the emigrants’ cabins and the foresters’ paths; it is easy to lament that a deeper impression was not made upon the scholarship of the world; easy to mention influential men who never passed a day within college walls; easy to provoke a smile, a sneer, or a censure by the record of some narrow-minded custom or proceeding. But, nevertheless, the fact cannot be shaken that the old American colleges have been admirable places for the training of men. Let the roll of graduates of any leading institution be scrutinized, or even the record of a single class selected at random, and it will be seen that the number of life failures is very small, and the number of useful, intelligent, high-minded and upright careers very large. It may, therefore,be said that the traditional college, though commonly hampered by ancient conditions and by the lack of funds with which to attain its own ideal, has remained the firm and valiant supporter of liberal culture, and that any revolutionary or rabid changes in its organization or methods should be carefully watched. Nevertheless, as we proceed, it will be evident that changes are inevitable and that most desirable improvements are in progress. The child is becoming a man.”

But we need more concentration of effort, money and good men, both as instructors and students, in colleges where the highest education may be obtained. The great number of our colleges is a source of weakness—not of strength. A great number of these institutions are mere academies, and seem to have been founded principally to keep students within the denominational fences of their parents; the college is charged with what should be the special work of parent and pastor. Says President Gilman:

“Every important Christian denomination has come to have its distinctive college, and many an argument has been framed to prove that sectarian colleges are better than those which seek to promote the union of several religious bodies. It has not been thought sufficient that a college should be pervaded by an enlightened Christianity, nor even that it should be the stronghold ofa simple evangelical life and doctrine, nor that it should be orthodox as to the fundamental teachings of the Church; but sectarian influences must everywhere predominate, among the trustees or in the faculty, or in both the governing bodies. Hence we see all over the land feeble, ill-endowed and poorly manned institutions, caring a little for sound learning, but a great deal more for the defence of denominational tenets.”

President Eliot, of Harvard, thus indicates the results of this spirit, added to another which is still less pardonable:

“In the absence of an established church, or of a dominant sect in the United States, denominational zeal has inevitably tended to scatter even those scanty resources which in two centuries have become available for the higher education; and this lamentable dissipation has been increased by the local pride of States, cities and neighborhoods, and the desire of many persons, who had money to apply to public uses, to found new institutions rather than to contribute to those already established—a desire not unnatural in a new country, where love of the old and venerable in institutions has but just sprung up. In short, the different social, political and religious conditions of this country have, thus far, quite prevented the development of commanding universities like those of the mother-country.”

As the greater colleges increase in financialand intellectual strength, the weaker ones must either drop out of existence, or be satisfied to impart merely the high-school course of instruction, and prepare their more aspiring pupils to enter colleges worthy of the name. Ex-President White, of Cornell University, foreshadows their future as follows:

“Our country has already not far short of four hundred colleges and universities more or less worthy of those names, besides a vast number of high-schools and academies quite as worthy to be called colleges or universities as many which bear those titles. But the system embracing all these has by no means reached its final form. Probably in its more complete development the stronger institutions, to the number of twenty or thirty, will, within a generation or two, become universities in the true sense of the word, restricting themselves to university work; beginning, perhaps, at the studies now usually undertaken in the junior year of our colleges, and carrying them on through the senior year, with two or three years of special or professional study afterward. The best of the others will probably accept their mission as colleges in the true sense of the word, beginning the course two years earlier than at present, and continuing it to what is now the junior year. Thus they will do a work intermediate between the general school system of the country and theuniversities, a work which can be properly called collegiate, a work the need of which is now sorely felt, and which is most useful and honorable. Such an organization will give us as good a system as the world has ever seen, probably the best system.”

There is no lack of money for institutions of learning which show special aptitude in any direction. A belief in thorough education is common to almost all progressive men, whether they themselves are college graduates or “self-made” men. President White, after naming many men who have given largely to different colleges, says:

“Such a tide of generosity bursting forth from the hearts and minds of strong and shrewd men who differ so widely from each other in residence and ideas, yet flowing in one direction, means something. What is it? At the source of it lies, doubtless, a perception of duty to the country and a feeling of pride in the country’s glory. United with this is, naturally, more or less of an honorable personal ambition; but this is not all; strong common sense has done much to create the current and still more to shape its course. For, as to the origin of this stream, the wealthy American knows perfectly that the laws of his country favor the dispersion of inherited wealth rather than its retention; that in two or three generations at most his descendants, no matterhow large their inheritance, must come to the level determined by their character and ability; that their character and ability are most likely to be injured, and therefore the level to which they subside lowered, by an inheritance so large as to engender self-indulgence; that while, in Great Britain, the laws and customs of primogeniture and entail enable men of vast wealth to tie up their property, and so to found families, this, in America, is impossible; and that though the tendency toward the equalization of fortunes may sometimes be retarded, it cannot be prevented.

“So, too, as to the direction of the stream; this same common sense has given its main channel. These great donors have recognized the fact that the necessity for universal primary education will always be seen, and can be adequately provided for, only by the people as a whole; but that the necessity for that advanced education which can alone vivify and energize the whole school system, drawing a rich life up through it, sending a richer life down through it, will rarely be provided for, save by the few men wise enough to understand a great national system of education, and strong enough efficiently to aid it.

“It is, then, plain, good sense which has led mainly to the development of a munificence such as no other land has seen; therefore it is that the long list of men who have thus distinguishedthemselves and their country is steadily growing longer.”

But in opposition to the spirit which founded and has supported our many institutions of learning there has arisen a pestilent theory, born of the sudden increase of wealth and love of luxury, that no education is worth anything which does not enable a man to make more money and make it easier than his neighbor who has had no liberal schooling. Because technical schools—of which the more we have the better off we will be—teach men to use their wits about many practical things, there seems to be prevalent a stupid notion that material things are all there are of life, and that sentiments, principles and aspirations are not worth cultivating. Such stuff might do if we were a nation of shopkeepers, but we are not that kind of people. For each man who is thinking and caring only for money and what it will bring him are half a dozen earnest, clear-headed people who know that all human needs are not satisfied when the stomach is full and the senses satiated.

In a recent and admirable address to a college society Bishop Potter fairly stated and answered the current sneer at the higher education, as follows:

“We are met by a spirit which it is time, I think, that we recognize, as there is a need that it should be challenged. We Americans are, ofall peoples under the sun, supremely a practical people. No mechanism is invented, no book is written, no theory is propounded, but that straightway there is heard a voice demanding: ‘Well, this is all very interesting, very novel, very eloquent; but what, after all, is the good of it? To what contrivance, to what enterprise can you hitch this discovery, this vision of yours, and make it work? How will it push, pull, pump, lift, drive, bore, so that, employed thus, it may be a veritable producer? Yes, we want learning for our young men, our young women; but how can it be converted by the shortest road and in the most effectual way into a marketable product?’ ‘The man of the North,’ says De Tocqueville, writing of our North, ‘has not only experience, but knowledge. He, however, does not care for science as a pleasure, and only embraces it with avidity when it leads to useful applications.’ And the worst of such an indictment is the fact that it is still so often true.

“The conditions of this generation demand that we should be reminded that, beyond bodies to be clothed, and tastes to be cultivated, and wealth to be accumulated, there is in each one of us an intellect to be developed and, by means of it, truth to be discerned, which, beside all other undertakings to which the mind of man can bend itself, should forever be foremost and supreme. The gratification of our physicalwants, and next to that the gratification of our personal vanity or ambition, may seem to many people at once the chief end of existence and the secret of the truest happiness. But there have been men who have neither sought nor cared for these things, who have found in learning for its own sake at once their sweetest rewards and their highest dignity.

“The vocation of the scholar of our time becomes most plain. He is to take his stand and to make his protest. With a dignity and a resolution born of the greatness of his calling and his opportunity, he is to spurn that low estimate of his work and its result which measures them by what they have earned in money or can produce in dividends. Here, in his counting-room or his warehouse, sits the plutocrat who has amassed his millions, and who can forecast the fluctuations of the market with the unerring accuracy of an aneroid barometer. To such a one comes the professor from some modest seat of learning among the hills, minded to see his old classmate of other days, to grasp his hand again, and to learn, if it may be, how he fares. And the rich man looks down with a bland condescension upon the school-fellow who chose the company of his books rather than the companionship of the market-place, and as he notes, perhaps, his lean and Cassius-like outline, his seedy if not shabby garb, and his shy and rusticmanner, smooths his own portly and well-clad person with complacency, and thanks his stars that he early took to trade. Poor fool! He does not perceive that his friend the professor has most accurately taken his measure, and that the clear and kindly eyes that look at him through those steel-bowed spectacles have seen with something of sadness, and something more of compassion, how the finer aspirations of earlier days have all been smothered and quenched! In an age which is impatient of any voice that will not cry, ‘Great is the god of railroads and syndicates, and greater yet are the apostles of ‘puts’ and ‘calls,’ of ‘corners’ and pools!’ we want a race of men who by their very existence shall be a standing protest against the reign of a coarse materialism and a deluge of greed and self-seeking.

“But to have such a race of men we must have among us those whose vision has been purged and unsealed to see the dignity of the scholar’s calling. One may not forget that among those who will soon go forth from college halls to begin their work in life there must needs be many to whom the nature of that work, and in some sense the aims of it, are foreordained by the conditions under which they are compelled to do it. One may not forget, in other words, that, with many of us, the stern question of earning our bread is that which most urgentlychallenges us, and which we cannot hope to evade. But there is no one of us who may not wisely remember that, in the domain of the intellect as in the domain of the spiritual and moral nature, ‘the life is more than meat and the body than raiment,’ and that the hope of our time, or of any time, is not in men who are concerned in what they can get, but in what they can see. Frederick Maurice has well reminded us how inadequate is that phrase which describes the function of the scholar to be the acquisition of knowledge. Here is a man whose days and nights are spent in laborious plodding, and whose brain, before he is done with life, becomes a store-house from which you can draw out a fact as you would take down a book from the shelves of a library. We must not speak of such a scholar disrespectfully; and in a generation which is impatient of plodding industry, and content, as never before, with smart and superficial learning, we may well honor those whose rare acquisitions are the fruit of painful and untiring labor. But, surely, his is a nobler understanding of his calling as a scholar who has come to see that, in whatsoever department of inquiry, it is not so much a question of how much learning he is possessed of, as, rather, how truly anything that he has learned has possessed him. There are men whose acquirements in mere bulk and extent are, it may be, neitherlarge nor profound. But when they have taken their powers of inquiry and investigation and gone with them to the shut doors of the kingdom of knowledge, they have tarried there in stillness and on their knees, waiting and watching for the light. And to these has come, in all ages, that which is the best reward of the scholar—not a fact to be hung up on a peg and duly numbered and catalogued, but the vision of a truth to be the inspiration of all their lives.”

Among the departments of higher education at which the self-styled “practical” man turns up his nose are the mental, moral and political sciences. They are sneered at as a mass of mere theories; good enough, perhaps, to help intellectual natures otherwise unoccupied to pass away the time, but of no practical good in the world. Yet President Gilman, whose mind runs largely upon applied science, says of these studies:

“They have twofold value—their service to the individual and their service to the state. It is by the study of the history of opinion, by the scrutiny of mental phenomena, and by the discussion of ethical principles, that religious and moral character is to be developed. The hours of reflection are redeemed from barrenness and made fruitful, like sand-plains irrigated by mountain-streams, when they are pervaded bythe perennial currents which flow from the lofty heights of philosophy and religion. Above all other educational subjects in importance stands philosophy, the exercise of reason upon those manifold and perplexing problems of existence which are as old as humanity and as new as the nineteenth century. For its place in a liberal education no substitute need apply. What is true of the moral sciences in reference to individual character may be said of the historical and political sciences in relation to the state. That nation is in danger of losing its liberties, and of entering upon a period of corruption and decay, which does not keep its eye steadily fixed on the experience of other nations, and does not apply to its own institutions and laws the lessons of the past. The evils we complain of, the burdens we carry, the dangers we fear, are to be met by the accumulated experience of other generations and of other climes.”

Yet this distinguished teacher would not, like some men of equal note but less breadth of character, have the college student restrict himself to these departments of study. He shows himself abreast of the times when he says:

“A liberal education requires an acquaintance with scientific methods, with the modes of inquiry, of observation, of comparison, of eliminating error and of ascertaining truth, which are observed by modern investigators. Such anacquaintance may be better secured by prolonged and thorough attention to one great department of science, like chemistry, physics, biology, or geology, than by acquiring a smattering of twenty branches. If every college student would daily for one or two years devote a third of his study time to either of the great subjects we have named, or to others which might be named, he would exercise his faculties in a discipline very different from that afforded by his linguistic and mathematical work. He would not only find his observing powers sharpened; he would find his judgment improved by its exercise on the certainties of natural law. He would never afterward be prejudiced against the true workers in science, nor afraid of the progress of modern learning. Whatever might be his future vocation, ecclesiastical, educational, or editorial, he would speak of science with no covert sneer and with no suppressed apprehension. The more religious his nature, the more reverent would he become. In public affairs which call for a knowledge of science, he would know how to discriminate between the quack and the authority, and he would be quick to perceive in how many departments of government the liberal use of scientific methods is now imperatively demanded.”

If no other purpose could be attained by raising the standard and broadening the scope ofsuch of our colleges as aspire to the rank of universities, and of sending to them all of our young men who sincerely desire a liberal education, there would be the enormous gain, to each student, of association with men of his own kind. Such association elsewhere is almost impossible in this land of scattered population and magnificent distances. Many ill-balanced “cranks” might have been spared us could active, restless, inquiring minds have been placed amid congenial surroundings instead of chafing against barren environments and consuming their minds over trivialities. Edward Everett Hale is credited with the saying: “The main good of a college is not in the things which it teaches; the good of a college is to be had from the ‘fellows’ who are there and your association with them.” President Dwight, of Yale, while dissenting from the sweeping first clause of Mr. Hale’s assertion, admits:

“But ‘the fellows’ did me much good in the way of my education. I had a most excellent and worthy set of friends, especially in the last year of my college life. My associations with them drew me out of myself, and gave me, in the best meaning of the term, the sense and the impulse of good-fellowship. As bearing upon my preparation for my life’s work, this association did much to give me that common sense, and sympathy, and warm-heartedness, and love ofyoung men, and comprehension of their nature and their feelings, the value of which is so great to a college teacher. The college friendships, in their best development, came to me at the most fortunate period—in the later years of the course. They came at a time when they could operate most healthfully and happily upon all that I had gained from my studies and my teachers, and rounded out for me, if I may so express it, the education which belonged to the university.”

One requisite to the greater success of our higher colleges is a better class of students. When fees for matriculation and tuition formed an important part of the income from which a school had to maintain itself, an applicant’s defects of preparation or personal character were winked at; but this no longer is necessary at Yale, Harvard or any of the half dozen younger universities which have been richly endowed. No one should be received as a student who does not “mean business” and who is not quickly responsive to the influences about him. Says Prof. Shaler, of Harvard:

“It is very clear that the essential aim of our higher educational establishments is to take youths who have received a considerable training in preparatory schools, who have attained the age of about eighteen years, and have begun to acquire the motives of men, and fit them for the higher walks of active life. To the youth mustbe given a share of learning which may serve to enlarge to the utmost his natural powers. He must be informed and disciplined in the art and habit of acquiring information. He must also be disciplined in the ways of men, in the maintenance of his moral status by the exercise of his will, in self-confidence and in the faithful performance of duty for duty’s sake. Every influence which tends to aid him in putting away the irresponsible nature of the child should be brought to bear; every condition which will lead him to send forth his expectations and ambitions from his place in the school to his place among men should surround him.

“Once bring a young man clearly to feel that his career in life is fairly begun when he resorts to college or the professional school; let him but conceive that his place in life is to be determined by his conduct in preparation for it, and we bring to bear a set of motives which are morally as high as the ordinary motives of discipline are low in the moral scale. Just so far as the work of a student abounds in suggestions of his work in the world, so far as his teachers by their conduct, as well as by their words, serve to arouse his manly, dutiful sense, the education effects its true end. Every youth who is fitted to be a student in our higher colleges or universities will quickly respond to the stimulus he feels in passing from the disciplinary conditions of childhoodto those which are fit for men. If he be in spirit capable of scholarly manliness, we may be sure that his imagination has forerun the conditions he has met in his lower schooling. He has longed for something like the independence and responsibility of manhood; for an advance to the place of trust to which he is bidden.”

Our higher colleges should not become retreats for that large, lazy, irresponsible class of young men and women who mistake fondness for reading for a desire to study. There is no more deceptive creature alive than the juvenile book-worm. He is like the English king who became noted as “the most learned fool in Christendom.” Neither should feebleness of body be regarded as an indication of vigorous intellect; this mistake has filled colleges as disastrously as pulpits. The seriousness of ill-health is not an intellectual purpose; it is a mental disease, and should be treated by the gymnasium instructor—not the college professor. President White, in outlining the university of the future, said:

“A long observation of young men and young women has taught me that there is infinitely greater danger to their health, moral, intellectual and physical, from lounging, loafing, dawdling and droning over books, than from the most vigorous efforts they can be induced to make; and I believe that most thoughtful teachers will agree with me on this point. In order to meetany danger of the sort suggested, it will be observed that I have insisted on a proper examination as to physical condition at the same time with the regular examinations for scholarships and fellowships, and also upon frequent reports from the successful candidates as to health as well as progress. The expectation of such examinations and reports would do much to guard and improve the health of ambitious young scholars in every part of the country.”

Our higher colleges contain some admirable instructors, but the average quality is not yet what it should be. President Gilman says:

“For the ordinary instruction of under-graduate students men of broad, generous, varied culture are needed; men who know the value of letters and of nature in a plan of study; men who understand their own views because they are watching the necessities and the transactions of to-day with the light of historical experience; men who believe that character, intellectual and moral, is more important than knowledge, and who are determined that all the influences of college life shall be wholesome. Such teachers as these have hitherto constituted the faculties of American colleges; their names may not have been made renowned by any new discoveries or by the publication of any great treatises, but they have impressed themselves on generations of pupils who have in their turn helped to formthe best institutions which maintain the nation. It will be a great misfortune to American education, if, in choosing specialists for collegiate professorships (as must be done in future), the authorities fail to make sure that these specialists are men of general cultivation, of sound morals and of hearty sympathy with the youth they are to teach.”

But what are college trustees to do? Most of the great gifts to colleges are for special purposes—the erection of buildings, the purchase of instruments, the founding of a library, the purchase of a telescope, but seldom for the purpose of securing a valuable addition to the faculty by an endowment which would yield a sum that would justify a man of high attainments in abandoning a lucrative profession and devoting himself to education. Says President Gilman:

“Is it not time for all who are interested in college foundations to call for large donations for the increase of ‘the wages fund?’ Ought not the college authorities to keep in the background their desire for better buildings, and insist that adequate means must first be provided for the maintenance of instruction? It will be suicidal if a prosperous country like this suffers its institutions of learning to be manned by men of second-rate abilities because they are cheaper, and because the men of first-rate powers are turned away from the work of higher educationto the professions of law and medicine, to the ministry and to business pursuits, as giving more hope, more comfort and more freedom, with equally good opportunities of usefulness and with prospects of higher honor. It will be a shame if the hoary head in a college, instead of being a crown of glory, is a sign of poverty and neglect. A college professorship should be liberally paid, and with an augmenting salary, so that, in this respect, it may be at least as attractive as other careers which are open to intellectual men. If the very best men are not secured for the work of instruction, and if they are not made so easy in their pecuniary circumstances as to be free from care on that account, farewell to intellectual advancement, farewell to literary progress, farewell to scientific discovery, farewell to sound statesmanship, farewell to enlightened Christianity; the reign of bigotry and dulness is at hand.”

Our colleges need more scholarships and more fellowships. It ought to be possible for any one desirous and deserving of a good education to obtain it, whether he be son of a prince or son of a pauper. It ought also to be possible for a brilliant and studious graduate to be specially rewarded and encouraged by being supported by his Alma Mater so long as he continues his studies to some purpose and for the benefit of the college. The “fellow” of an English universitymay be a mere loafer; his title and its accompanying allowance of money call for no return; they are merely rewards for what has already been done. President White says:

“I would allow the persons taking fellowships to use them in securing advanced instruction at whatever institution they may select at home or abroad. Probably the great majority would choose the best institutions at home, but many would go abroad and seek out the most eminent professors and investigators. Thus, eager, energetic, ambitious young American scholars would bring back to us the best thoughts, words and work of the foremost authorities in every department throughout the world; skill in the best methods, knowledge of the best books, familiarity with the best illustrative material. From the scholars thus trained our universities, colleges and academies would receive better teachers; our magazines and newspapers writers better fitted to discuss living political, financial and social questions; the various professions men better prepared to develop them in obedience to the best modern thought, and the great pursuits which lie at the foundation of material prosperity—agriculture, manufactures and the like—men better able to solve the practical problems of the world. Every field of moral, intellectual and physical activity would thus be enriched. All would be anxious to train studentsfitted to compete successfully for these fellowships, and the stronger institutions would be especially anxious to develop post-graduate courses fitted to attract these. I can think of no better antiseptic for the dry-rot which afflicts so many institutions of learning. The custom of shelving clergymen unacceptable to parishes in college professorships would probably by this means receive a killing blow.”

Bishop Potter writes as earnestly on this subject, though from a different point of view:

“We want place for men who, whether as fellows or lecturers, shall, in connection with our universities, be free to pursue original investigation and to give themselves to profound study, untrammelled by the petty cares, the irksome round, the small anxieties, which are sooner or later the death of aspiration, and fatal obstacles to inspiration. It is with processes of thought as it is with processes of nature—crystallization demands stillness, equanimity, repose. And so the great truths which are to be the seed of forces that shall new create our civilization must have a chance first of all to reveal themselves. Some mount of vision there must be for the scholar; and those whose are the material treasures out of which came those wonderful endowments and foundations which have lent to England’s universities some elements of their chiefest glory must see that they have this mount of vision.”

Higher education does not require that college discipline, direction and supervision should be abated; on the contrary, it demands more active exercise of all these functions. Some quite good and earnest men go to college only to read; their proper place is a large library in a city. Others, taking advantage of “elective” studies, want to plunge into a groove and remain there. Elective studies have their advantages, but young men are seldom fit to select for themselves. Says President Bartlett, of Dartmouth:

“From the fact that he has not been over the field, the youth is incompetent to judge what is the best drill and culture for him. And while diversity of ultimate aim may modify the latter part of the basal education, specialism comes soon enough when the special training begins. And those institutions seem to me wisest which reserve their electives till the last half of the college course, then introduce them sparingly, and not miscellaneously, but by coherent courses. A general and predominant introduction of electives is fruitful of evils. It perplexes the faithful student in his inexperience. It tempts and helps the average student to turn away from the studies which by reason of his deficiencies he most needs. It gives opportunity to the lazy student to indulge his indolence in the selection of ‘soft’ electives.”

Fortunately discipline is not so hard to maintainin American colleges as in European universities. There are some “hard boys” at Harvard, and the Yale Cubs often make night hideous at New Haven, nevertheless the American student is generally more respectable and law-abiding than his foreign brother. Says President Eliot, of Harvard:

“The habitual abstinence from alcohol as a daily beverage, which the great majority of American students observe, explains in some degree the absence in American institutions of all measures to prevent students from passing the night away from their college rooms or lodgings. The college halls at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton stand open all night; while at Oxford and Cambridge locked doors and gates, and barred and shuttered windows, enforce the student’s presence in his room after 10P.M., but are most ineffectual to restrain him from any vice to which he may be seriously inclined. There is more drunkenness and licentiousness at Oxford and Cambridge than among an equal number of American students; but this fact is due rather to national temperament, and to the characteristics of the social class to which English students generally belong, than to anything in university organization or discipline. Among manly virtues, purity and temperance have a lower place in English estimation than in American.”

So sensible are the mass of American studentsthat when the question of undergraduate participation in college management was raised at Dartmouth the college societies reported adversely on the plan, and the college paper, edited by students, manfully asserted, after a plea for strong government, “What our colleges really need is more of West Point.”

Between proper government and amateur police work, however, there is a wide difference. Ex-President McCosh, of Princeton, who was a studious, quiet man, whom no one could have suspected of sympathy with wild hilarity, said:

“There may be colleges, but they are few, which are over-governed by masters who look as wise as Solomon, but whose judgments are not just so wise as his were. In some places there may be a harsh repression of natural impulses, and an intermeddling with joyousness and playfulness. I have known ministerial professors denounce infidelity till they made their best students infidel. The most effective means of making young men skeptics is for dull men to attack Darwin and Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall, without knowing the branches which these men have been turning to their own uses. There are grave professors who cannot draw the distinction between the immorality of drinking and snowballing. It is true that we have two eyes given us that we may see, but we have also two eyelids to cover them up; and those whohave oversight of young men should know when to open and when to close these organs of observation. I have seen a band of students dragging a horse, which had entered the campus, without matriculating, into agoody-student’s room, and a professor with the scene before him determinedly turning his head now to the one side and now to the other that he might not possibly see it. I have witnessed a student coming out of a recitation-room, leaping into a wagon, whose driver had villanously disappeared, and careering along the road, while the president turned back from his walk that his eyes might not alight on so profane a scene.”

But between mere fun and out-and-out brutality Dr. McCosh drew the line sharply when he said:

“It is certain that there are old college customs still lingering in our country which people generally are now anxious to be rid of. Some of them are offsets of the abominable practices of old English schools, and have come down from colonial days, through successive generations. Thus American hazing is a modification of English fagging. It seems that there are still some who defend or palliate the crime—for such it is. They say that it stirs up courage and promotes manliness. But I should like to know what courage there is in a crowd, in masks at the dead of night, attacking a single youthwho is gagged and is defenceless! It is not a fair and open fight in which both parties expose themselves to danger. The deed, so far from being courageous, is about the lowest form of cowardice. The preparations made and the deeds done are in all cases mean and dastardly, and in some horrid. I have seen the apparatus. There are masks for concealment, and gags to stop the mouth and ears; there is a razor and there are scissors, there are ropes to bind, and in some cases whips or boards to inflict blows; there are commonly filthy applications ready, and in all cases unmanly insults more difficult to be borne by a youth of spirit than any beating. The practice, so far from being humanizing, is simply brutalizing in its influence on all engaged in it. It does not form the brave man, but the bully. The youth exposed to the indignity this year is prepared to revenge it on another next year. A gentleman who knows American colleges well tells me that in those in which hazing is common in the younger classes the very look of the students is rowdyish. It is astonishing that the American people, firm enough when they are roused, should have allowed this barbarity to linger in our colleges, great and small, down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century of the religion of purity and love.”

Our universities and more progressive collegesare slowly but surely reshaping themselves on the lines indicated in the foregoing pages, and the time is not far distant when no graduate can be excused for being merely book-stuffed instead of educated.

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