New York State Education Department
DRESSES BY ANDREW S. DRAPER LL.B. LL.D.,
COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION
CONTENTS
1 The Mayflower : Fore and Aft 3
2 America's Educational Debt to the Dutch 26
3 The University Presidency 37
4 Address at the Inaugural Exercises of President James at
the University of Illinois CQ
5 Remarks at Southern Educational Conference, Columbia,
S ' C 55
6 Synopsis of Remarks at State Teachers Association, 1905,
at Syracuse, N. Y eg
7 Inborn qualities in the Character of General Grant 60
8 Factors in the Making of the Medical Profession 76
9 Abstract of Remarks at New York State Grange, 1906, at
Geneva, N. Y gg
The Trend in American Education ox>
ALBANY
NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
1906
STATE OF NEW YORK
EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Regents of the University
With years when terms expire
1913 WHITELAW REID M.A. LL.D. Chancellor - - New York
1917 ST CLAIR MCKELWAY M.A. L.H.D. LL.D. D.C.L.
Vice Chancellor - - - -- Brooklyn
1908 DANIEL BEACH Ph.D. LL.D. ------ Watkins
1914 PLINY T. SEXTON LL.B. LL.D. Palmyra
1912 T. GUILFORD SMITH M.A. C.E. LL.D. - - - - Buffalo
1907, WILLIAM NOTTINGHAM M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. - - Syracuse
1910 CHARLES A. GARDINER Ph.D. L.H.D.^LL.D. D.C.L. New York
1915 ALBERT VANDER VEER M.D. M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. Albany
1911 EDWARD LAUTERBACH M.A. LL.D. New York
1909 EUGENE A. PHILBIN LL.B. LL.D. New York
1916 LUCIAN L. SHEDDEN LL.B. ------- Plattsburg
Commissioner of Education
ANDREW S. DRAPER LL.B. LL.D.
Assistant Commissioners
HOWARD J. ROGERS M.A. LL.D. First Assistant
EDWARD J. GOODWIN Lit.D. L.H.D. Second Assistant
AUGUSTUS S. DOWNING M.A. Pd.D. LL.D. Third Assistant
Secretary to the Commissioner
HARLAN H. HORNER B.A.
Director of State Library
EDWIN H. ANDERSON M.A.
Director of Science and State Museum
JOHN M. CLARKE Ph.D. LL.D.
Chiefs of Divisions
Accounts, WILLIAM MASON
Attendance, JAMES D. SULLIVAN
Educational Extension
Examinations, CHARLES F. WHEELOCK B.S. LL.D.
Inspections, FRANK H. WOOD M.A.
Law, THOMAS E. FINEGAN M.A.
School Libraries, CHARLES E. FITCH L.H.D.
Statistics, HIRAM C. CASE
Visual Instruction, DELANCEY M. ELLIS
THE MAYFLOWER : FORE AND AFT
FOREFATHERS' ADDRESS, COOPER INSTITUTE, NEW YORK CITY 1905 IN
THE POPULAR LECTURE COURSE OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION
Not much is certainly known concerning the architecture or the
equipment of the Mayflower. Not even her name is mentioned in
the original Pilgrim documents. No authentic description of her
exists. It is surely known that she was of about 180 tons burden.
The usual type of the English trading vessel of her day is ascer-
tained. She was, of course, a wooden vessel. As certainly, she
had sails and was propelled by wind. She was probably a " three-
master." She must have been about 80 feet long, 22 or 23 feet
wide and n or 12 feet deep. She was short and blocky as com-
pared with our modern vessels. Doubtless she had relatively high
decks, with cabins or staterooms, at the bow and stern, and a low
deck in the middle, under which there were also cabins. We must
forgive a young scapegrace by the name of Billington, who was one
of the ship's famous company, for frightening everybody almost
to death by firing off a blunderbuss in his father's cabin, when
there was powder scattered about and a fire " between decks,"
because he unwittingly led Bradford to mention the cabin " between
decks," and the fire, and the " many people " warming themselves,
in the Governor's record. Very likely such kitchen conveniences
as the vessel had, with storerooms, were under the main forward
deck. She doubtless carried several relatively large guns on the
spar deck amidships, with lighter ones astern, and probably one
piece of larger caliber and longer range upon the forecastle. Of
course she had several small boats and we know that the Pilgrims
had a shallop stowed between the decks, which they had to cut
down in order to bring along.
Her captain's name was Jones. He probably had a compass box
and hanging compass, for that instrument had been invented by
an English cleric twelve years before, and Bradford refers to it.
He could hardly have been without the crude maps of Cabot, Smith,
Gosnold and other daring seamen, but he was without exact charts
of the western waters. The ship carried the then new flag of
the United Kingdom of England and Scotland, for it had been
decreed fourteen years before by the son of the Queen of Scots
upon coming to the English throne. It was the old flag of England
upon the old flag of Scotland, the red cross of St George upon
2065673
4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
the white cross of St Andrew. It was not the present flag of the
United Kingdom, for since then the flag of Ireland, the cross of
St Patrick, has been added.
Very little is certainly known of the doings of the Mayflower
either before or after her famous voyage. There is some confusion
because her name was popular and was used by many English ves-
sels. If a log of her great voyage was kept, as doubtless there was,
it has been lost. We know that that voyage took sixty-seven days.
The ship was so badly strained by storms that little sail was used.
There was some alarm about safety. The ship returned from the
new Plymouth to London in thirty-one days. Many of the Pilgrims
were seasick and were taunted by a profane sailor who told them
he hoped to throw half of them overboard before the journey
was over and that then he would make merry with their goods.
But before they were halfway over, the hardened wretch died with
a " grievous disease " and was the first to go overboard. He went,
accompanied by the Pilgrim opinion, in which we join, that it
was " the just hand of God upon him." The ship was over-
crowded, cold, wet and unhealthful. There was great physical
discomfort as well as mental anxiety and heartbreaking recol-
lections, through a surprisingly long and boisterous voyage.
But the " fore and aft " is used not so much with reference to
a vessel as to a history. The Mayflower in American thought is
not so much a ship as an institution, not so much an instrument
as a migration, and not so much a thing as a memory and an
inspiration. The " fore and aft " of the Mayflower refers not
merely to the bow and the stern of a ship no larger than we send
every day to the fishing banks, but to the fore-warnings and the
after-results of the not very large but very potential events which
transferred the fathers of the Republic from the Old World to
the New, and initiated a most astonishing, a most beneficent and
an altogether resistless advance in the affairs of men.
When this little crude and comfortless vessel reached a port
and discharged her burden upon the New England coast she had
made her name famous for all generations. She had brought over
not only men and women whose character had been cast in heroic
mold, but as their instrument she had brought also the founda-
tion principles of a new and a better civilization. She opened up
a new and a freer intellectual and moral outlook. She started a
new scheme of government which would give the equal chance
to every one. She initiated a movement which was to quicken
the thinking and better the living of men and women for all time
and in all quarters of the earth.
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 5
The landing, Thursday, December 21, 1620, made a red-letter
day in. the splendid and fascinating story of human progress. On
that day the Anglo-Saxon race first got permanent foothold upon
the great western world. Other great races had been in American
waters and upon the American shores before. Civilization owes
much to some of them; but they came short in the qualities which
impelled the Saxon stock to possess the land and dedicate it to
such a freedom as the world had never known. Other Englishmen
had been here before, but they had not been moved by the spirit
of the Pilgrims. Jamestown was a dependency, not a colony.
There was lack of wives and mothers and daughters at Jamestown.
Jamestown was Cavalier in politics and Conformist in religion.
Plymouth had even passed the outer gates of Puritanism into the
realm of rebellion, separatism and independence. Jamestown bent
the knee to the king, with thoughtless readiness, for the sake of
his favors. Plymouth, with a more rational love for the motherland
than a selfish spirit ever knew, quickly became a self-assertive,
a self-governing colony, which would not only plant and water
and enlarge English liberty in a wilderness but would save English
liberty to the English realm itself. Jamestown was moved by the
hope of gain ; Plymouth breathed the pure and inspiring spirit of
unselfishness. One was weighted with the narrowing and doomed
spirit of autocracy, and in the face of great undertakings melted
away; the other, uplifted by the invigorating spirit of democracy,
gained the force and fiber and balance which are the best reward
of men and women who struggle, conquered the new land, and
laid down the great principles upon which free government must
rest to be enduring. . .
It is a singular and" suggestive fact that the original home of
the Pilgrims was lost to the world fcr near two hundred years.
It was known that they came from Holland. Their names and their
acts surely enough made them Englishmen. Scholars had every
reason to believe that they came from somewhere in the eastern
counties of England which lay against the North sea and had been,
most deeply stirred by the war for religious freedom against the
Spaniards in the Netherlands. Those counties were for long years
the storm centers of religious and political-religious turmoil in the
kingdom. They developed the largest religious independence and'
supplied most of the English-Christian martyrs. Many from these-
counties had gone over to the continent for religious and political'
freedom. It was known that several colonies of these people had
found their way to the Low Countries. It was natural to suppose
that the Pilgrims came from that region, but for near two centuries
6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
the Pilgrim story rested upon surmise alone. The thread of authen-
tic history was broken and the ends seemed completely lost.
They were found by accident. It was known to students that
Governor Bradford had left behind him a history of the settlement
of Plymouth. It had never been printed. The early writers re-
ferred to it down to the year 1767. From that time all trace of
it was gone. The historians spoke of it as lost, and guessed about
what had become of it. The belief was common that when the
British soldiers evacuated Boston in 1776 they carried the manu-
script with them. In 1844 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford,
a very able man, published a book which was but little read
entitled The History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America.
It was only after ten more years that some quotations in this book
touching Pilgrim history, which the writer said he had obtained
from a manuscript found in the library of the Bishop of London,
at Fulham, led some one to surmise that the manuscript was none
other than the Bradford history. Investigation established the fact
beyond a doubt. The priceless value of the unprinted book was
not suspected by the eminent prelate in whose possession it was.
But there it was, still in manuscript form, the only comprehensive
and authentic account of the Pilgrim colony in the world. The
Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1856, caused it to be copied
and published. Forty years later the original was generously, and
with stately ceremonies, returned to Massachusetts by the English
authorities through the fraternal offices of the English church and
the gracious approval of the English Queen.
The manuscript makes a book eleven and one half inches long,
seven and one half inches wide, and one and one half inches thick.
It has two hundred seventy pages. It is bound in parchment, once
white but now brown and worn with age. It has been much
scribbled upon by the irreverent children in the Bradford family.
It is kept in a safe especially prepared for it in the State Library
at Boston. The state of Massachusetts has rendered a distinct
public service by publishing it in attractive form and selling it at
a nominal price. No true American can ever read a transcript
of this book but with absorbing interest and respect. None will
ever look upon the original except with awe. for it must forever
stand as the main source of information concerning the advance
of the forefathers of the Republic from obscurity to the very
pinnacle of world fame.
This Bradford manuscript locates them at the opening of the
seventeenth century at " Sundrie towns and villages, some of
Nottinghamshire, some of Lincollinshire. and some of Yorkshire,
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 7
where they border nearest together." Cotton Mather, in a sketch
of Bradford, had mentioned that the latter was born at Ansterfield.
There is no Ansterfield in England. The loss of the original manu-
script and the turning of the u upside down in Mather's copy,
had befogged inquirers for nearly two hundred years. No tradi-
tion of the Pilgrim exodus, could be found among the people of
any English neighborhood. The Bradford manuscript recovered
the trail. The " Snndrie towns and villages " were Scrooby,
Austerfield, and Gainsborough, on or near the great post road
from London to Edinburgh, now the main line of the Great
Northern Railway.
Now let us go back and see the conditions in England from
1600 to 1620, out of which these people came. It was before the
truth about the solar system had been accepted. The telescope
was invented, and the first four satellites of Jupiter, the rings of
Saturn, and the phases of Venus were discovered in these two
decades. It was while our forefathers were in Holland that Galileo
W 7 as punished by the Inquisition for saying that the earth was
round and moved in space. Neither the barometer nor the
mercurial thermometer was known. The circulation of the blood
had not been discovered. There were no clocks with oscillating
pendulums. It was sixty years before the discovery of the law
of gravitation, Newton's Principia was presented to the Royal
Society in 1686. There was no knowledge of the original or
prismatic colors, and none of the progressive motion of light. It
was more than a century before it was demonstrated that the
surface of the earth has an orderly and geological stratification.
No one thought of water being composed of oxygen and hydrogen
gases.
Life was monotonous, slow and serious at the opening of the
seventeenth century. Eew of the people could read and write.
There were nobles who lacked that accomplishment. There were
no free schools. Oxford and Cambridge, with here and there a
fitting school for sons of noble birth, comprised the English school
system for that and a much later time. Most of the people lived
in cottages thatched with straw. There were no stoves: even
chimneys were practically unknown. Pewter dishes were aristo-
cratic inventions which promised to drive out wooden ones. Table
knives were beginning to assert themselves, but fingers did for
forks many long years yet. There was no china-, nor even tin-
ware upon the table. The weaving was done by hand power.
Friction matches were in the future. Looking-glasses were just
beginning to come over from France to take the place of little
8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
steel reflectors. Underclothing was not used. The queen had
the monopoly of starch. There was not even a weekly paper in
all England; and it was a full hundred years before there was
a daily paper in London. There were 225,000 people in London
but there was not a street light in the city for an hundred
sixty years after this. There were no pavements, or water pipes,
or sewage systems. Fires were not uncommon, but there were
no fire engines. If one were afflicted by flame he did escape the
rough hoof of a professional fire department. The conditions
menaced health continually. There was lack of wooden floors and
carpets ; the dirt floors were covered with rushes and the houses
were often foul. Fens, forty or fifty miles long, reeked with
miasm. Where the people gathered in towns the filth gathered
also. Bathing was not common. Smallpox, measles and scarlet
fever were thought all the same. The masses had no physicians.
The death rate was one to twenty-three; now it is one to forty.
It was more than two hundred years before illuminating gas, before
sails were aided by steam upon the high seas, before railroads,
before portraiture by instantaneous processes, before cheap postage
and prepayment by stamps. The forests were great and many
and the roads very bad. The few letters were carried, at irregular
intervals, on horseback, about five miles an hour and for a charge
larger than a day's wages. When Elizabeth died it took three
days and three hours to carry the news at top speed from London
to York, 190 miles. There were no steam engines for any pur-
pose. Of course, electricity had not touched life with its revo-
lutionizing charm. In short, very little of the conditions of life
of three hundred years ago remain to us save the land, and the
sea, and the sky.
It was the age of faith but not of reason. Moral sense was
intense and at times dreadfully perverted. To put all the people
of that day in one characterization would be as much a mistake,
of course, as to put all the people of our day in one class. There
were four classes, viz, the sovereign, citizens, yeomen, and laborers.
The larger the class the less control it had. Crimes were frequent
and were terribly punished. There were more than two hundred
offenses punishable by death. The sheriff was the principal officer
of the crown. The gallows appeared at every turn in the king's
"highway. Gastly human heads were common sights on London
bridge. Life was much more than austere. The pulpit was
narrow and unrelenting. The stage was coarse. Sports were
gross. Social standards were not what they are now. The great
Elizabeth herself was both indelicate and profane in speech. It
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 9
remained for a Puritan parliament to pass an act banishing any
who would not promise to attend church, and later to resolve
" That pictures in the royal galleries which contained pictures of
Jesus and- the Virgin Mother should be burned, and that Greek
statues should be given over to Puritan stone-masons to be made
decent." If it was the age of faith, it was quite as much the age
of superstition. Ordinary happenings brought the 'most grievous
omens. Witchcraft was common in Old England before it was
in New England. It was believed that the end of the world was
near. The common life, the ordinary thought, and the political
institutions were impassable barriers to an intellectual advance.
The religious revolutions produced armies which broke out the
roads for the intellectual and political advance. Luther almost
a century before had denounced the sway of the universal church
and nailed his ninety-five theses upon the church door at Witten-
berg. The world knows the result. Calvin gave the world his
coldly logical and thought-provoking creed. All northern Europe
was in a great religious strife. The first great battle for religious
toleration in the Low Countries was well advanced to its successful
issue. It was a long and bloody one. The roar of the battle was
heard in England and the heroisms of the Dutch inspired English-
men. The English had stood for rights and fought battles them-
selves before then. The refusal of the Pope to sanction the divorce
of Henry the Eighth from Catharine years before had joined the
resentment of the King to the tendencies of the people and made
England a Protestant country. The Puritan armies were gathering
for all that Puritanism now implies to us.
If the England of the beginning of the seventeenth century was
ignorant and superstitious, it was by no means insipid. If the
great Queen who had ruled more than forty years was as vain
and voluptuous as her mother, Anne Boleyn, she was as daring
and aggressive as her father, Henry the Eighth. If she lied, she
held the exceedingly convenient theory that the word of a queen
was not to be kept unless doing so would, as she viewed it, pro-
mote the ends of the state. If she swore in a way to abash the
troopers of her armies, she doubtless imagined that it had to be
done and that whatever queens did they should do right royally.
Any woman who in that day could gather three thousand fine
gowns was not lacking in the spectacular or in impressiveness.
Any woman who could govern her own kingdom completely, and
at the same time half govern the kingdoms of France and Spain
and Holland was not lacking in assurance, or in force, in sagacity
IO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
or in statesmanship. Whatever else she was, she was a self-reliant,
an undaunted, and a- devoted English queen.
.And the people were not lacking in spirit, either. Their tradi-
tions inspired them: the faith of their leaders made their acts
sublime. Their history ran back to great deeds of arms. They
had slender ideas of constitutional rights, but they knew what the
Great Charters meant: their fathers had put their hands to the
hilts of their lumbering old swords in the very presence of the
king more than once, and they would do much more when Elizabeth
was gone and a weaker monarch was in her place. The Almighty
was stirring these hardy people. Men of genius were coming out
of the common herd. Those were the years that produced Bacon
and Spenser, Sidney and Hooker, Raleigh and Shakspere. The
world was soon to know that it produced statesmen and military
captains too. And it produced men who could follow with terrific
and fateful force, as well as men who could lead.
Naturally the northern and eastern counties felt the quickening
impulse first. Things' are always moving in Scotland. There was
much then doing in Scotland. John Knox had been preaching
sermons and printing books and Andrew Lang had told James the
Sixth that there were two kingdoms in Scotland and that although
he was the king in one he was only a very ordinary member in
the other. There was even more doing in Holland. There was
much going and coming across the North sea, and it was telling
upon the thought of the northeastern counties. Brave little Holland
had been fighting Spain and the Inquisition for thirty-five years.
An hundred thousand of her sons had laid down their lives for
religious liberty. But. thank God, she was succeeding. She was
driving the tiger back to his lair. The dread work she had been
doing in recovering her northern shores from old ocean and in
driving the most dangerous military empire of a thousand years
from her southern borders, was making great men and women.
They were celebrating their victories by establishing free schools :
they were setting up universities upon the little fringe of land
they had recovered from the ocean and dedicated to freedom with
their best blood. Religious freedom was bringing political free-
dom. Political freedom was developing material resources and
industrial capacity. The manufactures and commerce of the
Netherlands had become first in the world.
Spain was not the enemy of Holland alone. An hundred years
before. Columbus, in her name, had discovered America. She had
become the most powerful kinedom upon earth, and indulged in
dreams of world conquest. She was thinking: of world empire.
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT n
She was subjugating all the world by methods so horrible as to
deserve the execration of mankind for all generations. All Europe
became involved. It was the kingdom of Spain and the Pope on
one side, and England, France and Protestantism on the other.
Holland received the severest blows because she presented the most
intrepid front. When William the Silent appealed to Elizabeth
for aid she promised it as she did to Henry of Navarre, but she
toyed with them both. There was no thought of keeping the
promise unless the time should come when it was necessary to
strengthen Spain's other enemies in order to keep Spain out of
England. That time did come and the Queen dispatched to Holland
six thousand troops gathered in the eastern counties. In time they
returned and brought back a new knowledge of war and a new
and better knowledge of peace, of industries, and particularly of
religious and political freedom. Elizabeth also brought over wool-
carders and weavers, and other skilled workmen from Flanders,
to help on English manufactures. In all this she was unconsciously
ripening the eastern counties for revolution. Men and women grow
through their work. Labor quickens the thinking and clarifies the
moral sense. The thinking and the moral sense force an advance.
If resisted they start a revolution.
When Henry the Eighth parted company with the Pope, who
justly, kindly and courageously refused his divorce, he went about
setting up a more accommodating church establishment of his own.
Creeds or manners of worship, or protests against them, meant
little to him. It was simply a question of kingly or political
expediency. He tried to use the Protestant movement for his own
ends. The result was an English Protestant state church, and a
very great, a very rich, and a very autocratic one it soon became.
Protestantism was for half a century a direful and continuing
tragedy. Its life was probably saved through its alliances with
the kings. It is not so strange that it came to take on kingly
ways. Its cathedrals and vestments became so magnificent, its
ceremonies so formal, its demands so extravagant, and its power
so subversive of liberty that protests arose out of the ranks of the
Protestants. These became vehement and the martyr fires were
lighted. Out of these protests and out of these fires came Puri-
tanism, as noble a spirit as ever breathed among men in troublous
times.
Its first outbreak was of course in the eastern counties. What
historic ground those English eastern counties are ! Up and
down their fair meadows, where the walls and the hedges stand
in such dignity and peace, over the beautiful landscapes which the
12 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
red poppies color so gorgeously Briton, and Celt, and Roman, and
Saxon, and Norman, and Teuton, and Gaul have shaken the very
earth beneath their feet in terrific contention. Here imposing
Roman walls yet stand in mute testimony of a mighty world-
power outdone by the pertinacity, the steadiness, and the heroism
of the Saxon. Here great Norman churches yet bear splendid proof
of the mighty qualities of a hardy people who ruled Britain for
four hundred years, in the end to be absorbed into the British
life. Here the hardiest manhood of hardiest nations had combined
in the evolution of a yet greater people. They were ripe for great
events. They were the first to see the new lights of a new liberty
across the German ocean. The impulse sent many of them across
that ocean to a freedom not yet ripe in the motherland. Singly
and in companies they went over to gain it. But, aside from one
immortal company, they who stayed accomplished more than they
who went, for they organized a revolution : they struck off the
head of a king; they set back the prerogatives of the throne to
the mark fixed by the Commons in the Parliament House ; and they
secured the new and yet greater liberty for all English colonies,
for all time, in all parts of the world.
Elizabeth, too, just like her father, played fast and loose with
religious questions. She was doubtless devoid of religious feeling.
Her diplomacy enabled her to keep her kingdom together through
the peril of outside foes, and even after the destruction of the
Armada and , the removal of danger from without, her sagacity
availed her to the end of her reign. But to her credit be it said
that she had the wit to soften the persecutions and consent that
" heretics " might move out and carry their " heresies " along with
them. When she died in 1603, the man, the people, the conditions,
and the policies came together which quickly involved the kingdom
in a great conflagration.
James, the son of Mary of Scotland, who succeeded the woman
who had beheaded his mother, was something of a student and
more of a pedant. Of course he was cursed with the nonsense
which possessed all the kings. In his view a king ruled by right
divine: he claimed the attributes of the living God: he thought
he had power to make and unmake laws without being bound to
obey them : the duty of his subjects was passive obedience to
his will. He also went about shaping the church to his own notions,
that it might give strength to his throne. He coerced opinions,
sharpened persecutions- and forbade emigration. His pedantry
unwittingly did the Puritans and all churchmen a very great service
by giving them a new version of the Bible in English. It quickened
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 13
their faith, and became the law of their lives. It intensified in-
dividualism. It put God yet higher above church and state. It
made the right of private judgment supreme, a cardinal doctrine
of their faith, a thing to be upheld, as a matter of course, with
their lives. It hastened the revolution. The issue was soon on.
Men lined up in sets and factions, in parties, and soon in armies,
and the division lines were the same in the church and in the
state.
There were three of these parties. First, there was the Royalist
party in the state, the Conformist party in the church. It was the
party of the King. With coddling and flattery it upheld his most
extravagant assumptions. It was the party of the bishops, and
stood for intensifying the ceremonials and adding to the magnifi-
cence of the church. It bound throne and church together and
made king and bishop one. Second, there was the party of the
opposition in the state, the nonconformists in the church. It was
the reform party. It was opposed to regalia, and ceremony, and
ostentation. It was for purifying things with a vengeance, but for
staying in the church and doing it there. Its members came to
be called Purists or Puritans. It is true that its creed was politi-
cally accommodating quite as much as religious. It was only, up
to its lights. It was not for separating the church from the state.
It was for simplifying worship and for purifying the church.
But this party, as much as the other, was for controlling the state
and for being controlled by the state.
A new force came into the world. Puritans accomplished what
they undertook. They came to exceed all expectations. And, truth
to tell, when they did they fell into some of the very things they
had complained of before. They remind us of people we ourselves
have seen. Perhaps they remind us of everybody but ourselves.
The rank and file were rude and unlettered, narrow and austere
men. They had much yet to learn and their descendants have since
learned much. They were not free from faults, but their faults
were on the outside. They were jeered in their day, and they
have been jeered in ours. But they were sound at the heart.
With prayer in the camp and song in the saddle, they rode rough-
shod over king, and bishop, and aristocracy together. They did
much which they might better have left undone. But they did more
that religion and liberty had to have done. It is needless to say
that here was the great political party and here the mighty army
that changed the courses of English history.
Then as is usual, there was the small third party. It differed
more radically from the other two than thev differed from each
14 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
other. It was English in feeling and purpose, and wanted to
remain such, but it was bent upon genuine and complete religious
freedom. It was against the king because it believed he usurped
_English liberty. It was opposed to a national church because it
thought the church should be wholly independent of the state. It
had no favors to ask ; and it had no thought of conquest ; no care
to control. It believed the established church inherently wrong,
and beyond reform. It looked upon the crown as a wholly
invulnerable power in the kingdom. It stood for all that the Puri-
tan party stood for, and more : for generosity, for toleration, for
government on a basis that would live and let live. It knew little
of politics and cared nothing about place and power. It did not
lack the fighting qualities of Puritanism, but believed it not worth
while to fight for the reorganization of a state church which would
not cease to be a state church after reorganization.
The Brownists, or Separatists, as these third party people were
called, were ripe for complete religious freedom now, and because
they thought they could get it in no other way they were ready
to separate from the English church and the English people and
at once cut off associations which they held most dear. Wherever
they went, they hoped to carry whatever they loved that was under
the English flag, and there was much, but whether they could do
that or not, they were bent on separatism because that was the
only door to full religious and political freedom. They would go
in sorrow ; but their faith made them go.
Breeding and environment certainly have much to do with life.
It has taken more time than was intended to learn the conditions
and the thinking out of which our American forefathers came.
We learn quite as much of them as we are likely to find 'out other-
wise, when we see that they came out of these hard conditions,
out of this rugged people, out of these ultra eastern counties, out
of all this turmoil, persecution and suffering, out of this yearning
for religious liberty, out of this courage and heroism, out of this
small, despised, sane, pious and independent third party in the
politics and religion of the English realm.
The center of the separatist movement in England was in the
region where the counties of Lincoln, York and Nottingham corner
together. Here are a dozen small villages, no larger now than
three hundred years ago. They are about four hours, and one
hundred fifty miles, from London. In these villages a separatist
church, afterward the Pilgrim church, was organized in the dawning
days of the seventeenth century. Its being was known only to its
members. Thev worshiped in secret, for they dared not openly.
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 15
For years its members threaded their way along the bypaths and
across the meadow to one house and then to another to satisfy
their souls in Christian concourse. The most common meeting
place and doubtless the residence of the most members, though
probably not the largest village then, and certainly not now, was
Scrooby. The American visitor can not but wonder that so small
a place could have been the central home of the Pilgrim company.
In 1.890 it had a population of two hundred nineteen. Bawtry,
one mile, and Austerfield, two miles to the north, with Gains-
borough, twelve miles to the east, were well represented in the
movement. This last named little village, Gainsborough, is the " St
Oggs " of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss.
From this same region another congregation of Separatists, under
the pastorship of Rev. John Smith, or Smyth, had preceded the
Pilgrims to Holland, and settled in Amsterdam. Bradford says of
them, " But these afterwards falling into some errors in ye Low
Countries for ye most part, buried themselves and their names."
Still other English colonies had crossed the North sea and estab-
lished churches in the Netherlands : but they have wholly disappeared
from history.
The congregation of most interest to us decided to go to Holland
in 1607, four years after the succession of the pedant king. This
congregation was composed of very plain people. Bradford, as
his manuscript abundantly proves, was a very well educated man.
He had had some experience in the public service. William
Brewster had been an undergraduate student at Cambridge. The
portrait of but one member of the Mayflower company has come
down to us : that of Winslow in the State House at Boston. He
did not come from the Pilgrim district, but was a young printer
from London, and his brother-in-law, Degory Priest, a hatter;
Isaac Allerton was a tailor ; William White a wool carder ; Samuel
Fuller a weaver; most of the others were farmers and laborers.
A ship was hired and a day appointed for departure from the port
of Boston, forty or forty-five miles away. Though they could
not remain and worship as their consciences led, yet to go away
was to violate the law and the King's command. Elizabeth had
the sagacity to allow " heretics " to go out of the country ; James
forbade it. After all were on board the master betrayed them into
the hands of the King's officers, who rifled them and otherwise
subjected them to the sorest indignities. They were thrown into
prison for a month ; then the greater part were sent back to their
old homes, in popular disgrace, in times of great stress and danger.
Seven were bound over to the assizes. It is strange that none
were hanged. We know that not long before three Separatists
l6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
were hanged for nothing but their faith, and that the King con-
gratulated himself upon having suppressed the sect by the
hangings.
The next year they secretly bargained with a Dutch shipmaster
to take them from a point on the coast remote from any town. The
women and children and goods were sent to the place by a round-
about way, in a small boat, down the Idle and the Trent rivers.
The men walking across the country reached the appointed place
first and went aboard the vessel. A storm arising, the master
moved out into deeper water ; before the women came the plan
was discovered, and the Dutch master put to sea to escape arrest.
The women and their little ones, in great sorrow and terror, were
taken by the constables, and for weeks were carried from one place
to another. They had no homes to be sent to. It was hardly a
crime to follow husbands and fathers. In time the officers were
glad to be rid of them, and they were allowed to go as best they
could. After months of the sorest trials, the families and company
were reunited in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, then the first com-
mercial city of the world.
Here they lived a year. They differed from the Separatist con-
gregation which had gone before them from Gainsborough to
Amsterdam. That congregation had in the meantime been led over
from Calvinism to Arminianism. This, of course, was unthinkable
to the Pilgrims. Because of this, and of dissensions in the other
English churches there, and to avoid controversy with other people,
they determined to move. John Robinson, their great pastor, had
determined their attitude with a piety which does him credit, and
he also defended that attitude with a sagacity which shows that
he was an unusual man. But they wanted Christian quietude.
Leyden attracted them. It was the most beautiful city of Holland,
forty miles from Amsterdam, with a university and a population
of a hundred thousand people.
Two years later, May 5, 1611, a house and lot were conveyed to
Robinson and three others who were members of the congrega-
tion. The fact that the title was taken to four persons jointly
indicates that it was something more than a residence. It was
doubtless the church and the residence of the pastor combined.
It must have been quite a pretentious house, for the purchase
price was something like $12,000. It stood between St Peter's
church and the canal, and almost under the shadow of the Uni-
versity of Leyden. which was established in celebration of the
Dutch victory over Spain through the cutting of the dikes. As
things went in those days, the colony was evidently thrifty and
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 17
prosperous. The Leyden records are not lacking in proof that
they were respected.
Hard investigation by students has thrown some light on the
eleven years residence in Leyden. The homes were mostly in one
neighborhood. Robinson and Brewster did some work in the uni-
versity. Their stay in Holland was nearly identical with the period
of the truce which the valor of the Dutch arms had forced Spain
to make. The country, for the first time in a generation, was at
peace. The Pilgrims were at peace, too. They found work and
did it. They prospered, met their obligations, and were respected.
They avoided contention. They set up a church without inter-
ference and worship was entirely free. When put to the test,
they practised what they had preached. There was a Scotch Pres-
byterian congregation in the city. They had fellowship with it.
They received English Walloons and French Huguenots into their
membership. Better still, their distinct opponents, members of the
Church of England, were received into fellowship. Here was
material prosperity and religious peace such as they had never
known before. How grateful it must have been to them !
A matter of considerable significance has been brought to light
by the English records. William Brewster and Thomas Brewer
set up a Pilgrim press in Leyden. Brewer furnished the money,
and Brewster some of the brains and a large part of the nerve.
They printed some literature, secretly and anonymously, upon the
right of worship, and the usurpations of kings, and sent it over
to England and Scotland in beer hogsheads. They knew how to
make literature and how to put it where it would do the most
good. The English King would doubtless have preferred that the
hogsheads had contained what they were made for. Indeed, dyna-
mite would have pleased him quite as well as Separatist literature.
He found it out. In a fury he demanded that the Dutch officials
should stop this business, and arrest and send over to him the
men who were guilty of it. The Dutch authorities had some need
of and stood in some fear of this English King, but the Dutch
could always be exceedingly deliberate when they would. There
was a formidable and pretty nearly interminable diplomatic cor-
respondence. But the frenzy of the King finally forced action.
Then the Dutch seized the type, but allowed the man to escape.
Brewster was a fugitive for a year, and was never taken. Once
when the opportunity did offer they sent a drunken bailiff after
him. and the instrument of the law very appropriately brought
back the wrong man. The modern methods of Scotland Yard or
the Metropolitan Police were not employed. Brewer was im-
l8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
prisoned for a year. But he was quite safe and well fed in a
prison of a people who had known what it was to stand in need
of rescue from religious persecution themselves. The demands of
the English king for his delivery to English officers were many and
ferocious but the Dutch found legal obstacles in size and numbers
which do them credit. Dutch sympathy and good heartedness and
Dutch wits, as well, very likely saved the spilling of this Pilgrim
blood.
They had in Leyden what they most wanted peace and quiet
but in time a new menace developed and a new situation confronted
them. In the eleven years they did not much increase in num-
bers and the hour was at hand when the war with Spain was
to be resumed. Bradford says " There was nothing but beating
of drums and preparing for war." It was quite possible that -Spain
might yet triumph and then their situation would be worse in
Holland than in England. In any event they were more than
likely to lose their identity as a society and a church and be
swallowed up and obliterated in the Dutch life. Their children
began to have ideas and outlook wholly unlike their own. Some
of those children were already intermarrying with the children of
the Dutch. " We were likely to lose our language and our name
of English." Their love for the motherland and for the funda-
mental rights guaranteed by the English constitution which their
fathers had wrested from the kings in the Great Charters did not
abate. They mourned because of " the little good we did or were
likely to do the Dutch in reforming the Sabbath," and they longed
for the more general and possibly more enduring civic institutions
which they knew the English flag ought to imply. Some of them
wanted to move again, and to a place where they could have and
could themselves interpret and administer the English law without
menace from either an alien people or the selfishness and officialism
of the English King.
About this move they were not agreed. They discussed the mat-
ter " not rashly, in a distracted manner, but upon joint and serious
deliberation, often seeking the mind of God in fasting and prayer."
They did not agree. They divided in nearly equal parts. It was
not in anger. They had no acrimonious troubles. Winslow says,
and his word is conclusive. " Never people upon earth lived more
lovinglv, or parted more sweetly, than we the church at Leyden
did."
Half of them initiated arrangements to go to the English colonies
in America, as yet unoccupied save by savages. Perhaps if all
went well the other half would join them by and by. Each com-
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 19
pany was to be a church by itself but membership was to be inter-
changeable, '" without further dismission or testimonial " they could
go or come at their pleasure. Not many of the other half ever
joined them. They did disappear in the Dutch life. After the
death of Robinson, five years later, their organization disintegrated.
After twenty years more nothing is known of them. There is no
trace of their English names in Leyden or Amsterdam today. The
half who came over the sea ventured splendidly and suffered un-
speakably, but they cut their names deep on the scroll of the
immortals.
Of the negotiations and the bargains for the " Speedwell " and
the " Mayflower," of the final farewells, the disappointments and
discomforts consequent upon the wretched condition and the aban-
donment of the " Speedwell," of the sufferings on the voyage, and
of all the incidents, and particularly of all the surmises and infer-
ences which any student may find in the literature of the subject, we
can not stop to speak.
It was the younger, more ambitious and venturesome of the
Leyden church who moved to New England. Nearly all were
below middle life and so far as is known but one couple was above
fifty years of age. It was a winnowed company. Again and
again, in England, at Amsterdam, in Leyden, upon the turning back
of the " Speedwell," they had gone out from others and left the
less resolute ones behind. But for the youth, hardiness, faith and
determination of the expedition it would have wholly failed and
probably utterly perished.
There were one hundred and two passengers upon the May-
flower. One died at sea. A child was born upon the ocean and
they called his name " Oceanus." The young wife of Governor
Bradford, only twenty-one years of age, was drowned and three
others died, and another child was born in Plymouth harbor while
the place of embarkation and settlement was being determined.
All told there had been one hundred and four but deaths and births
made the number ninety-nine. At the landing there were seventy-two
males and twenty-seven females. Of these, twenty-four men and
eighteen women were heads of families. There were twenty-two
sons or male relatives and ten daughters or female relatives in
these twenty-four families. Clearly the families were not large;
the parents were yet young. There were fifteen single men who
came apart from their families. There were fourteen males and one
female classed as servants or workmen.
The start from Leyden was in July, and from Old Plymouth in
September. The landing at New Plymouth was in December.
20 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
They were transplanted from bright summer in the Old World
to stern winter in the New, from the comfortable homes of a
settled and attractive city to a barren, a rock-bound, and an ice-
bound coast.
They laid out " the street " where Plymouth looks out across
the bay to the northeast. Now it is " Leyden street." On either
side they built their crude cabins. Nearest the shore they placed
the " Common House," and on the hill, beyond the " sweet brook,"
they lifted the structure which was to be fort and church together.
Next to it, for obvious reasons so far as the fort, but not the church,
was concerned, was the abode of Captain Standish.
There was little room in these crude cabins, but there would
soon be more. Hardy as the forefathers were, many could not with-
stand the sorrow and the cold. In the first year thirty-eight males
and fifteen females died. It was more than half their number. Of
these, thirteen were husbands and fourteen were wives. The deaths
of fourteen of the eighteen wives is suggestive. None of the
daughters died and but three of the sons, and these sons were
in two families in which the parents perished. It is not at all
hard to believe that these mothers sacrificed themselves in order
that their children might live.
Of the 24 households four were completely obliterated. Nine
husbands and wives found burial together. Five husbands had
been left widowers and one wife a widow. But three couples
remained unbroken and but two were not called upon to mourn
a member of their families gone. Five children lost both parents,
three others were made fatherless, and three more motherless. With
old ocean behind and the wilderness in front, and savage life all
about them, and grim death continually among them, the spirit
of the colony never gave way. Before the Mayflower started on
her return voyage at the middle of April forty-seven of them had
died, but not one of the survivors turned back with the returning
vessel. Again they were separated and winnowed. While they cast
furtive and sorrowing glances to the sails that were sinking beneath
the eastern sky, the resolute outlook was" to be westward. A new
nation had gained foothold in the New World.
There is no doubt of the intention to make the landing further
south although there is some uncertainty as to why the purpose
was not realized. Both the Dutch and the English desired this
colony upon their New World soil. The colonists themselves in-
clined to the English side and had procured a charter for a situa-
tion upon English soil, but to the south of the " North " or " Hud-
son " river. Finding themselves out of their own, if not of the
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 21
Captain's, reckoning, and believing that they were outside of the
rule of the English law, they made a written, an independent and
a self-dependent compact of government, in the cabin of the May-
flower, and forty-one men signed it. It was the first pure democ-
racy with a written constitution in the world. Bancroft has said
that it was the birth of constitutional liberty.
For some years they held their goods and labor in common.
They had mortgaged their future to serve the world. For their
transportation they assumed a debt which they were long years
in paying but which they in time discharged to the uttermost
farthing.
We can not dwell upon the minor incidents of the splendid story.
Life was earnest, severe, unrelenting; was borne steadily and buoy-
antly. Labor began to be rewarded. Quietude prevailed. Num-
bers slowly augmented. Spirit and purpose came out of the gloom.
Institutions gradually developed upon unique and enduring lines.
That spirit has become the spirit of America. Those institutions
have enlarged into the distinguishing institutions of the Republic.
In ten years five hundred people had gathered. Some relations
with the Indians and with the Dutch at the mouth of the Hudson
had been -established. In another ten years an additional five
hundred people had gathered and other little villages began to
show. These last ten years were the years in which Charles
governed England without a Parliament, sharpened persecution,
enlarged emigration, prepared the way for a revolution, and
led on fatefully to his own tragic doom. When the Long Parlia-
ment resumed government in the name of the people, English immi-
gration to New England almost ceased. No other immigration than
English had really commenced. So the little colony grew but
slowly after 1640; but when it was fifty years of age a dozen little
settlements were on the map.
But the tyranny of the King had wrought other results irr
America than the sending of a few more Separatists to the little
colony at Plymouth. In the second decade of its struggling life
a much stronger English settlement had been made forty miles up
the bay, where and from which the city of Boston has since grown.
Tn that period quite twenty thousand English men and women
had made their homes upon the shore of the upper bay. They
were not only much stronger in numbers than the people at Ply-
mouth, but, man for man, they doubtless averaged stronger in
wealth, in education, and in the power of material accomplishment.
Thev certainly outdid Plymouth in their monarchial tendencies,
in their aristocratic proclivities, in their aptitudes for managing
22 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
things, and in their spiritual fanaticisms and frenzies. They were
Puritans, and like the Puritans in Old England they were Pro-
testants against and still the adherents of the English state
church, the opposers of the English King and yet the supporters
and defenders of the English political system.
If we grasp the religious and political situations in Britain
at the time of the first migration of the Pilgrims to the Nether-
lands, we will the more easily understand the distinctions and the
relations of these two English colonies upon the rock-bound Massa-
chusetts coast and the ensuing course of political and religious
history in America.
Between the Puritan and the Pilgrim was little or no difference
so far as religious beliefs or theological philosophy were concerned.
Both were the products of Calvinism and of repeated revolutions
and reformations. Their differences related to forms, ceremonies,
^methods, and to freedom of thinking and independence of action.
"But these differences comprise the fundamental and distinguishing
-'characteristics of the American nation in the world.
The Puritan movement was political more than theological. The
inevitable opposition which always develops to the government in
a constitutional system took on the feelings and the forms of
Puritanism in the British kingdom. The Puritan protested against
"the claims of the kings and the doings of the King's party in the
-state and in the state church. But he had no thought of leaving
ithe kingdom or separating from the church. He was for con-
trolling both. He wanted to march at the head of the procession.
He wanted to determine where the procession should march, how
it should dress, what it should think, and who should be in it.
When he could do that he was content ; and when he did it he
did much as his Royalist opponents did when they had the power
to do it.
The Puritan had no understanding of the equality of all men
before the law. That was beyond his limitations. As far as he
could get in that direction was the equality of Puritans, or, indeed,
to be more exact, the equality of those who were in the higher
classes, for there were higher and lower classes in the Puritan
theocracy.
The Puritan knew little of religious freedom. His creed was
coldly intellectual and it was not softened by the experiences of
his life. His visage was long, his manners strained, his religion
exact and often narrow, and his thinking unrelenting. His battles
cast him in the heroic mold and made him an effective instrument
in changing world history.
THE MAYFLOWBR: FORE AND AFT 23
He was certainly a bigot, a timely and necessary bigot, but a
bigot all the same. He had his work .to do and he did it. It was
his mission to clear the way for something better. He knew little
of freedom and democratic institutions but he opened the road for
religious freedom and democratic institutions. He wrought even
better than he knew. When he had done his work he had to
make way for the more tolerant spirit and the wider outlook
which his singing, his praying, and his fighting had made possible.
The Puritan was not, by -any means, exclusively of English
blood and English speech. He developed almost coincidently in
other lands. Wherever he developed he was the product of the
same causes and the forerunner of the same ends. In many ways
he was the spiritual counterpart of, and very likely his religious
qualities were in a measure fixed by those of, the Jesuits of the
Roman Catholic church. In whatever land he grew and whatever
speech he used, he followed his faith and he acted up to his lights.
Now a more tolerant and enlightened people than could live in his
day may well be predisposed to lift their hats to him.
The Pilgrim was a Puritan, but he was more. He was opposed
to the English church because he was opposed to any state church.
Therefore he had separated from it and he never expected to go
back. He held that kings and parliaments had nothing whatever
to do with the free flow of religious worship. That was a matter
for the individual man and for religious bodies voluntarily asso-
ciated together. He was modest, plain and democratic in his own
proceedings, but he was for all men and all churches acting upon
their own beliefs and following their own sweet will. At Leyden
he received members of all churches into his communion. At
Plymouth he did the same. He was not carried away by frenzy;
there were no hangings for witchcraft by the Pilgrim. He did
not lose his head over " Papists," "Anabaptists," and whoever
differed with him in opinion. He was hospitable to all. The
beleagured Baptist found succor at his door. A Catholic mis-
sionary speaks in his journal of Bradford's kindness to him, even
of his preparing a fish dinner for him because it was Friday. At
the- upper colony they would have let him go hungry, if they
had not found grounds enough for sending him to jail for the
sin of differing with them not about the fundamental beliefs
in a common Christianity but about the mere forms of religious
expression and the mere manner of Christian worship.
The Pilgrim had no love for the English political system because
that system was inseparably associated with the regulation, direc-
tion and coercion of religious life. It was using religion for
24 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
political ends. He feared the English crown and he expected no
favors. The fundamental political rights which his countrymen
had years before wrested from the king were quite as dear to
him as to the common run of Englishmen. That is why he was
back under the English flag. But he knew that those rights had
been almost overturned again by the aggressiveness of the later
monarchs. He despaired of regaining them. He lacked the
political, property, and educational interests of his Puritan brother
in reforming and controlling the state for his own ends. And
anyway, he was without the physical strength and the military
power. His feelings, his methods and his outlook were far from
those of the Puritan. That is why he had separated himself from
the state at an early day and was now few in numbers and in the
wilderness. He had organized a church of his own and a state
of his own but they were separate institutions.
The Pilgrim was neither an anarchist nor a usurper. He did
not fall short and he did not overreach. He was opposed to
political interference with religion and he was opposed to oppres-
sion for the mere purpose of enlarging the dangerous power and
sustaining the sensual magnificence of the throne. But he believed
in as much government as was necessary for the largest good and
the best development of all.
He took to governing as naturally as men of English speech have
always done. From the compact in the cabin of the Mayflower
to the merger with the Puritan colony seventy years later, he
had all the government that was necessary to govern, and not
enough to become a menace and a nuisance. Nine years after
landing, a man of the immortal Mayflower company killed a neighbor
in a quarrel. There had been no courts for there had been no
use for them. But the colony met the emergency and proceeded
deliberately and regularly. This little company of four or five
hundred souls constituted a court, appointed a public prosecutor,
drew a jury, adduced and made record of the proofs, afforded
opportunity for defense, found a verdict of guilty, and imposed
a sentence of death. Then they carried the record to the Puritan
colony, forty miles away, for advice upon its regularity, and after
approval they executed the sentence with dignity, with impressive-
ness, and with sorrow.
Migration over the sea did not quickly change the Pilgrim or the
Puritan when neither expected to be changed by it. In the Old
World and in the X T ew the Pilgrim was a kindly, tolerant, generous,
religious, democratic, quiet and retiring character, who had com-
pletely developed into a Separatist and an Independent. In the
THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 25
Old World and in the New the Puritan was a strong, religious,
intolerant, autocratic, aristocratic and aggressive character, with
no concept of religious liberty and with every purpose to rule
rather than to leave the state. The Puritan came to the New World
when forced out of the old one; the Pilgrim came as early as he
could and of his own free choice.
Looking aft, it is not difficult for us to see which of these peoples
was to endure. When the colonial union came it had to be upon
the lines settled at Plymouth. The character and rectitude of both
and particularly the power and forcefulness of one combined with
the political principles and religious freedom of the other in the
making of a splendid American state. When the American Union
came, it had to be on the lines which the Pilgrims of the May-
flower had laid down, enforced by the qualities which were inherent
in Puritanism.
It would be as absurd as it would be unjust to assert that this
country owes all that it has and all that it is to the Pilgrims. The
Puritans have had a great part, and other nations than the English
have had great parts in the upbuilding of America. Brawn and
brain and character have come from all the peoples of the earth
to break our soil, and subdue our forests, and open our mines,
and develop our industries, and manage our overwhelming enter-
prises. Our flag is more attractive, our intelligence is quicker,
and our feelings nobler, because all peoples have been welcomed to
these shores and because religion is free and all churches may
dwell together in Christian quietude and fraternal accord. But
it is not too much to say that all the others have had more to do
than the Pilgrims had to adjust themselves to the plan and spirit
of the Republic. And it is neither absurd nor unjust to any to
say that the genesis of our political theories and of our religious
separatism and independence goes back with all distinctness to
the few and humble but very great men and women who moved
out of England into Holland for freedom's sake, who came hither
on the Mayflower, and who will always of right be known as the
Forefathers of the Republic.
AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH
ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE HOLLAND SOCIETY OF
NEW YORK AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA
Reprinted from the published proceedings
Mr President: The honor of the invitation to smoke a long pipe
and eat a Wiener-ivurst and drink some beer [laughter] with the
Holland Society, and incidentally to name some of the things which
Holland has conributed to the advance of the world and to the
upbuilding of democratic institutions in America was the more
distinct to me because of the fact that, unlike all of you, I have
no Holland blood. [Laughter] But for the abounding good-
fellowship I might feel strange in this glorious company of
thoroughbred Dutchmen, in spite of the fact that I have been
familiar with the clatter of the wooden shoes of my old friend,
Colonel John Vrooman upon the turnpikes of the Commonwealth
for a generation. [Laughter and applause]
I have studied Dutch history rather attentively and always with
the conviction that in the writings of American historians Holland
and her people have hardly had a fair show. [Applause] It may
as well be said at once that the story of no people is filled with
harder thinking or embellished with more splendid heroisms.
[Applause] But even under a Holland roof, I am going to pre-
pare myself for paying the respect which I feel for your fore-
fathers by first paying the respect which I owe to my own.
[Laughter]
My father was an undiluted and, even after seven generations
in America, pretty nearly an unsubdued English Puritan ; and my
mother was as pure and true, as cheerful and gentle a Scotch-
Irish Covenanter as the. world ever saw. These were two very
tolerant and forbearing peoples [laughter] and very likely it is
to the mixing of all this toleration that I owe the interest I have
in the " reminuisances " [laughter'] of all other peoples. [Applause]
Hardly a day's walk from the corners of the three English
counties where the original homes of the Mayflower Pilgrims were
found after evading the search of scholars for more than two
hundred years, lies the little hamlet from which the first pair of
my paternal grandparents in America came to Boston with one
of the earliest Puritan migrations. For seven generations and
26
AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 27
until my mother unsettled the practice each son and grandson
in the direct line won a Puritan maiden for his wife. If those
six Puritan girls were as winsome as George Bouton makes
Priscilla or Katrina, for that matter, [laughter], and I swear
that they were, every one of them, then there is proof enough
that if any one of those men had gone any farther he would have
fared a great deal worse.
But the time came when even the Puritan maiden had to stand
aside. In 1806 a young man near Belfast in Ireland with the
Scotch name of Sloan and the Bible name of Samuel, and with
a religion as Scotch as his name, came to the town of Argyle in
our county of Washington. Before doing so he plighted his troth
with a girl whose name, Rachael MacMinn, was as Scotch and as
much of the Bible as his own, and whose body and soul made her
as sweet and beautiful a human flower as ever grew in any land,
that when he had found the place for their home he would return
for her and they would go and make it together. The troth was
kept and one of their daughters was the girl who interrupted
the sway of the Puritan maiden in our family. It must be admitted,
however, that with my marriage it was completely restored.
[Laughter]
I am rather glad that my blood was mixed. If the ingredients
were not vicious or insipid it is quite as well that they should
act upon each other. If the English Puritan and the Scotch
Covenanter had much in common they surely had enough in
difference, and each was sufficiently opinionated to dispute that
the other made the world without any help, or set quite all of
the stones in the foundations of American institutions. Perhaps
it is the mixture that makes me considerate of Dutchmen and it
may help me to treat fairly of the ingredients which old Holland
contributed to the making of America. [Laughter]
A thousand years ago great throngs of people from the parts of
middle and northern Europe adjacent to the high seas moved to
the westward and compounded a new nation in Britain. Through
qualities which were inherent and which were modified and
strengthened in the process of assimilation that new nation showed
qualities which were then unknown and were very great. It showed
appreciation of the natural right of every man and of the true
functions of the combined strength. It developed both initiative
and self-control. It limited the prerogative of the king without
destroying the kingdom. It began to stand for the systematic
restraint which is vital to security and for the freedom which is
the life current of intellectual progress. It showed considerable
28 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
spiritual life guided by some measure of rational thinking; it
advanced very slowly yet steadily in the arts and sciences ; it gained
in outlook and accomplishment through doing. Above all it organ-
ized representative assemblies and courts to declare rules of law,
and it organized armies and navies and used them to command
order and enforce law more systematically than had ever been done
before.
But all this was the slow, heavy, labored process of centuries.
Through all this unfolding the power of the king was decisive,
most of the time conclusive, and that power distinctly and
successfully opposed the uplifting of the people. The masses were
sodden and ignorant. There was not democracy enough to break
its way through.
In the midst of this a new continent was discovered and thinly
peopled by slight migrations from all the nations of the world.
Here the power and thought and law and methods of Britain
were dominant, but remoteness, life in the open, and other new
factors which entered in, developed a people very unlike the English
people, a nation with ideals wholly different from those of the
'British nation. Frankness would say that pretty nearly all rule
became distasteful. Foreign rule became intolerable. Separation
had to come. Indeed one of the foremost of recent English writers
has said that it had to be in order to save English liberty. It
came by violence. A new nation emerged, retaining of necessity
the language of England and what was good of the English political
system. Because the separation was .by violence there was conse-
quent hate, and the process of national differentiation was prompt
and decisive.
But a little people, with such antecedents and such expectations,
were not to be left alone. Soon history began to repeat itself.
The very peoples who a thousand years before had sent vast throngs
to compound the British nation sent greater throngs over wider
seas to coalesce with the resultant stock and compound still another
nation. Each of these throngs brought much. Every nation of
the earth has given something. The differentiation has become
more and more conclusive until there has emerged a mighty peo-
ple with characteristics of speech, thought, dress, energy, business
versatility and aggressiveness, diplomatic directness, passion for
discovery and genius for invention, religious sense and political
theories, which are recognizable at once in every part of the world
and respected wherever recognized. [Applause]
What each people has broueht to us is now a grateful theme
for all of us. The chemical affinity has become so complete that
AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 2Q
the sun has gone down on the day of apprehension or of jealousy.
We have come to see that the factors of most worth to us are
strongest in the men and women who honor their forefathers
and are truest to the inspiring memories of their fatherland.
[Applause]
The factors of the American national life are not numbers alone,
not brawn and muscle alone, not mines and farms and factories
alone. Bluff and pretense were inevitable with a small but nervy
people facing such problems ; and there were some who mistook
them for the distinguishing features of the national life. Large
numbers, cheerful humor, the genuine culture which comes from
ceaseless work, the eligibility of the commercial situation, com-
plete agreement upon political theories and an orderly settlement
of new questions, with the steadying and broadening which come
of increasing accountability, have compounded original factors into
a new national entity which does not expect to meddle with other
peoples but which does expect to be reckoned with in the general
affairs of a globe in which we all have some interest and are charge-
able with some responsibility. [Applause]
The original factors of our national life came to us because
they could not find their opportunity in other lands, because they
were rejected by the prevailing political systems of other nations.
Free religious feeling which would not be bound by an unre-
ligious theological system and would not be used to bind the
thought of a people ; industry which would have some reward
in accomplishment ; genius which could do things and throbbed
for wider opportunities ; imagination which could foresee higher
living ; fellowship which insisted that every man should have his
fair chance; scientific research which could let in the truth upon
the superstitions of the ages ; unfolding social and political opinion
which was coming to see that a government must make the most
of every one and gain the love of every one to be of account to
men ; these were the primary elements of our national life, the
factors which- gave fiber and flavor to the American spirit in the
world. [Long applause]
Of these the share which Holland brought is surely not to be
held second to that of any other people. [Cries of "Good"] At
the beginning of the seventeenth century, the opening of our period
of permanent colonization, she had above all the other nations
the qualities which now distinguish the American life. She had
gained those qualities through a manner of life which has always
made freemen and through decisive democratic tendencies which
even then had been ripening for centuries. [Applause]
30 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Nothing is more manifest and surely nothing is more gratifying
to the student of education than the unvarying companionship in
all history of the democratic and the educational advance. Even
as far back as the fourteenth century the independence of the cities
in the Netherlands had led to common schools and universities.
The results of the German Reformation were particularly decisive
and enduring in the Low Countries. In the early sixteen hundreds
primary and secondary schools became common and were opened
to boys and girls alike. These prepared the Dutch people for
deeds of greatest moment to the world. Work is the making of
the worker. Carlyle was right when he said that the lifting of
the marshes up above the ocean, and the driving of Spain out
of the Netherlands were the making of a free and virile people.
It took forty years of unspeakable suffering and a hundred thousand
lives to break the grasp of the Inquisition. If the schools quali-
fied a people for fighting the first great world battle for liberty
to a successful issue the result made the extension of the schools
inevitable. Universities became the permanent memorials of mili-
tary victories in Holland and the union of Utrecht was followed
by an order that " all the inhabitants of towns and villages within
six weeks find good and competent scho'olmasters." May says
" the whole population was educated ; the higher classes were
singularly accomplished." Brodhead says that " schools were
everywhere provided, at public expense, with good schoolmasters
to instruct the children of all classes in the usual branches of
education." Motley says "It was a land where every child went
to school, where almost every individual inhabitant could read and
write. Where even the middle classes were proficient in mathematics
and the classics, and could speak two or more modern languages,
and where the whole nation with but few exceptions were pro-
ducers of material and intellectual wealth." [Applause]
These great impulses appeared directly in the industrial activities
and in the fine arts, the literature, the scientific study, the political
theories and the common life of the country.
Agriculture was diversified and intensified. Science was really
used for the first time in trying to ascertain the potential power of
an acre of land. The agricultural colleges of America are even
now going back to those people for assistance. [Applause]
Craftsmanship in wood and metal and leather and in the textile
fabrics and dexterity in all household and useful arts reached a
development which was notable, and is so still.
The Holland art of that period brings us the finest portrayal
we have of the best life there was in the generations when society
AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 3!
was getting upon its feet. It turned from impossible angels and
men and devils, from weakling princes and slumpy mistresses, to
men grown virile in their country's service, to genuine mothers
and real babies, to the home and to family life, to horses at work
and cattle that could bellow, to windmills and dikes and boats
and hardy sailor folks, to golden meadows and gorgeous sunsets,
and to all of the scenes and effects which Dutch artists saw.
[Applause] In all of these, Dutch art was prolific. But it was more
than prolific. In technic, in harmony of color, in quick recognition
of the beauty of the scene, in the interpretation of character, in
the exemplification of religious feeling, which was both rational and
devout, it produced a distinct school of art which stands in a
class by itself unto this day. [Applause]
Literature was not censored and science was dignified and en-
couraged. In the three hundred years after 1573 there were 4700
students from England and the United States in attendance upon
the University of Leyden, under the shadow of which our Pilgrim
forefathers rested securely for eleven years.
All this freedom produced the first near approach to a pure
democracy in the world. [Applause] A republic grew and wrote
a constitution and each of the seventeen provinces which constituted
it had a constitution of its own. Douglas Campbell has traced
a score of the salient features of that political system, the powers
and limitations of the presidency, the organization of the national
senate, religious toleration, freedom of the press, manhood suffrage,
written ballots, free schools for girls and boys alike, the inde-
pendence of the judiciary, the absence of primogeniture, the record-
ing of conveyances, public prosecutors, the protection of persons
charged with crime, amenability to the civil laws alone, and many
others which are fundamental in our own political system. And in
doing that he proved the source from which they came.
Now all tliis came to its maturity in the Netherlands just before
the great Puritan movement in England and just before the first
permanent colonization of America. The center of the Puritan
movement was in the northeastern counties, the counties which are
against the German ocean. The Dutch controlled the carrying
trade of the world. Their seamen were continually in the English
ports. Out of these counties Elizabeth had sent six thousand Eng-
lish troops to aid the Dutch against the Spanish when duplicity
would suffice no longer. She little realized that when they came
back they would bring the germs of a revolution with them. Into
these counties she had brought spinners and weavers from Flanders
without foreseeing that they would teach a great deal besides dex-
32 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
terity in their art. These counties produced the greater part of
the early English Christian martyrs and the great body of the
20,000 men and women who migrated to Massachusetts bay in
the twenty years following 1630 when Charles was ruling the realm
without a Parliament and preparing the way for the notable trial
in the Parliament house and the still more notable scene which
followed. Perhaps those counties did even better, for they pro-
duced the greater part of the Puritan parliamentary leaders. They
not only produced old Cromwell but his regiment of Ironsides.
They were the seat of the Separatist movement which was the
unexpected" and at that time the totally unrecognized climax of Eng-
lish Puritanism. They were the homes of the Plymouth Pilgrim
Fathers. No one can read the literature of the subject with an
open mind, and remember that Englishmen are not very subject to
spontaneous combustion, without knowing full well that all these
things which meant so much to England and to America followed
sharply upon the developments in the Netherlands and were
ushered in by the mighty fires which lighted up the dome of
Heaven's temple from across the North sea. [Prolonged applause]
The Pilgrim Fathers, scattered abroad in England, flew to Hol-
land for refuge in the very year in which the Dutch arms had
triumphed over Spain and forced a truce of twelve years with
Philip. When they applied to the burgomasters of Leyden for
leave to reside in that city this indorsement, discovered recently
in the Archives at the Hague and sufficient to place every freeman
and certainly every American under lasting obligations to the peo-
ple of Holland, was placed upon the margin of their petition.
" The Court in making a* disposition of this memorial declare thai
they refuse no honest persons free ingress to come and have their
residence in this city, provided that such persons behave themselves,
and submit to the laws and ordinances; and therefore the coming
of the Memorialists will be agreeable and welcome. This done
at their Council House I2th February, 1609." If I were a Dutch-
man, and as thrifty as Dutchmen are. I would write that over my
doorway in letters of gold. \ Applause}
At the end of the truce they migrated to the New England,
coast. They intended to settle at the mouth of the Hudson or
below. No one knows now whether it was treachery or an honest
mistake which landed them on the " rock-bound coast." While
the Pilgrims were in Leyden the Dutch settled here upon Manhattan
island; then the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth; and later the Puri-
tans at Boston. These were the first permanent settlements of
civilized peoples in America. The Dutch and the Pilgrims were
AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 33
weak in numbers and in resources. Up to 1630 neither numbered
a thousand souls. The Puritans were strong in numbers, gaining
20,000 people in twenty years ; speaking relatively they were rich,
powerful and learned.
Each of these peoples brought with them to the new country
the beliefs and the institutions which were theirs in the old country.
The Dutch brought the democratic theories which they had
developed through a splendid and heroic history. The Pilgrims
held to the faith and the thinking which had made them Separatists
from the English state church and caused them to be hunted out
of the English state, with such modifications and growth as twelve
years in Holland had given to them. The Dutch came for com-
merce which was no less legitimate then than now. [Applause]
They assumed, as of course, that the manner of life and the thinking
of the fatherland would continue here. The Pilgrims came because
of their love for their English speech and English ways, because
they feared that if they remained in Holland they would wholly
disappear in the Dutch life (of the half of the company remaining
in Ley den no trace can be found after twenty-five years), and
because they must have the religious and political freedom which
they could not have in England. The Puritans were not seeking
religious or political freedom. They maintained class distinctions
and distinguished between the nobles and the commons. They
were an intolerant religious sect; and with the same sternness
which cut off the head of the king and set up the commonwealth
in the mother country, they imprisoned, banished and hanged any
man or woman who differed with them and gave promise of
destroying the harmony of the sect. They were associated with
a party which was the same in the state religion and in the politics
of England, and they had no thought of separateness or inde-
pendence. They believed in the union of church and state. Their
government erected the church building, paid the minister, and
managed the affairs of the church. No man had any part in the
government who was not a member of the church.
But neither numbers nor wealth, nor even scholarship nor re-
ligious enthusiasm, were to determine the character of American
institutions. ] Applause] When the Pilgrims ^and the Puritans
coalesced in the colony of Massachusetts it had to be upon prin-
ciples which started in those northeastern English counties and
came to their full flower in the Netherlands. Old England with
the help of New England mip-ht overthrow by force the little
Dutch colonv at the mouth of the Hudson but when union came
in America it had to be upon the principles for which those Dutch-
34 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION" DEPARTMENT
men stood, and which even in the dark hour of overthrow they
never surrendered. [Prolonged applause]
It has been a very common habit to credit the origin of our com-
mon school system to England and to Puritanism although England
has never had a system of common schools. The English edu-
cational system comprised colleges with preparatory schools for
sons of noble birth; not until w r ithin the memory of men of middle
age has English policy undertaken to enforce elementary teaching
upon all the children of the people. New England followed Old
England. The first New England school was a college and the
next was a Latin school. All of the New England schools before
1670 were classical schools established to be tributary to the col-
lege. Very likely they had to bend their work to the elementary
branches to make up for what was not done at home but the
universal plan was that the primary work should be at home by
the parents if they could or the minister i they could not. Happily
they recorded all they did but there is no evidence of any school
whatever in the Plymouth colony for full fifty years after the
landing or of any elementary or common school among the 20,600
people at Boston for more than forty years after the founding
of the city. The Massachusetts schools received no girls until
1789, one hundred and fifty years after the settlement, and re-
ceived them for only half time for forty years after that. The
Puritans had nothing in common with other people. How were
they to have common schools? If the old heroes could return to
earth and hear some things which their descendants claim there
would be some castigations without formal trials if not some hang-
ings without the benefit of clergy. [Laughter]
The Dutch colonial charter of 1629 decreed that " the colonists
shall, in the speediest manner, endeavor to find out ways and
means to support a minister and a schoolmaster that thus the
service of God and zeal for religion may not grow cold and be
neglected among them." That is quite as good as the phrase
about not letting learning " perish in the graves of their fathers "
in the Massachusetts law enacted 18 years later. [Applause]
A Dutch schoolmaster was an official of the state and when he
was sent a school resulted. Upon the petition of the colonists
an official schoolmaster was sent over from Holland in 1633 and
a school was opened upon this island of Manhattan. It was the
first school of which there is any record in America. It was open
to all and it was supported out of the common moneys of the
colony. It has continued under changing political conditions and
therefore tinder differing: auspices until this day. Other similar
AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 35
schools, two public schools of secondary grade, and a dozen schools
under private management with the government approval, were
established upon this island in the thirty years before the English
arms took possession of it. [Applause]
In the ensuing century and down to the opening of the Revolu-
tion the English royal governor and the Dutch colonial legislature
were in frequent conflict over schools. The result was that prac-
tically nothing was done. No act of the English government favor-
able to schools appears in all that time except the reluctant approval
of two Latin schools for limited periods ; there was no act and
no consent which was inconsistent with the uniform English policy
of advanced schools for the nobles and no schools at all for the
people.
If the democratic advance and the common enlightenment first
brought from Holland to America the germs of the great free
elementary school system of the country and give New York the
honor of the first free school of the land, her Dutch antecedents
give New York her primacy in being the first state to appropriate
state moneys to encourage primary education, the first to establish
state supervision of schools, and the first to relate all the schools
in a uniform system which has become universal. [Applause]
And surely there is something of their differing origins signi-
fied in the fact that all of her sister states preceded Massachusetts
in writing the guaranty of religious freedom in their constitutions;
while New York, which never had a state church and was never
tinctured with intolerance, was the first organized government
in the world to enshrine in her fundamental law the sacred pledge
of absolute spiritual independence and of political action without
ecclesiastical intervention. [Applause]
But it must not be surmised that the forefathers of the Holland
Society were an unreligious people. There were forty editions
of the Bible or of the New Testament printed in Holland before
there was one in England. It was their religion which made
them refuse to permit their religion to be bound, which enabled
them to anticipate by two hundred years the attitude of America
and refused to be taxed without their corfsent, which impelled
them, with little return save the duplicity of the English queen,
to stand as the shield and helper of England until the very seas
were crimson with their blood. It was their religion which led
them to become the heroic and historic representatives of the
principles upon which democracy may advance and free institu-
tions may endure. [Applause]
3
36 NfcW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
The Dutch were a little people but they were greater than the
largest. Their thinking, their religion, and their valor broke out
ihe roads over which democracy was to find the way to a new
civilization. All Americans are under special and enduring obliga-
tions to them for surely they were the first to declare the funda-
mental principles of our Republic. [Long applause]
THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY
ADDRESS AT NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS IN CONNECTION WITH THE
INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT JAMES
By courtesy of the Atlantic Monthly
There are at least four features which distinguish university work
in America and exercise a decisive influence upon the form of
government in American universities.
The first grows out of the universal democracy of the country
and the common ambitions of the people. Every one who shares
in the spirit of the country wants to go to the top and continually
hears that he may if he will seize his opportunities. He has no
thought of following his father's work unless, as is quite improb-
able, it is in line with his special ambitions. The need of the best
training is now everywhere recognized. The secondary schools
have become a part of the common school system and every teacher
in high school or academy leads his students very near to the point
of thinking that they will lose their chance in life and even be
discredited if they do not advance to college or university. The
university life is now specially attractive to the young and they
want a share in the pleasure and enthusiasm of it. This brings
to the universities great numbers who in other days never went
to college ; who in other lands would not go now. Many of these
must be both led and pushed.
Then, the common thought about liberal education has changed.
It is no longer only classical, culturing, disciplinary ; it must pre-
pare students not only for the multiplying professions but for the
multiplying industries. It trains one for work which may dis-
tinguish him. Cultivated aimlessness is no longer the accepted 1
ideal of American scholarship. Culture which is not the product
of work, either mental or manual, with some definite point to it,
is held to be at secondhand, only skin-deep, and not to be taken
seriously. It must not be said that mere strength and steadiness
in holding a job are the marks of an educated man. There must
be native resourcefulness and versatility, sound training and serious:
study, discrimination in means and methods, and rational appli-
cation to real things in life in ways that bring results of some
distinct worth to the world. It makes little difference what one
does, but he must do something. The all-important fact is not
37
38 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
that real learning may now be found in all businesses though
that is important but that one must do something of recognized
value to be held a scholar. It may be not only in letters, or science,
or law, or medicine, or theology, but it may also be in administra-
tion, in planning and constructing, in mechanics, in agriculture,
.in banking, in public service, in anything else worth while.
If one's powers of observation, of investigation, of expression
and of accomplishment, lead him to do something of real concern,
to do it completely and quite as well as, or better than, others can
do it, and impel him to open up new vistas and methods of doing
other things of larger moment, he has a better right to be held
an educated man than he who incubates the unattainable and brings
forth nothing. And not only have educational values changed,
but educational instrumentalities have changed. Books and aca-
demic discussions have their part, but in many directions it is
now a minor part. Things are taught and learned, new insight
and the power to do are gained, through actual doing. And not
only is the training through doing rather than through reading
and talking but the opportunity of selection extends to every sub-
ject and every study. It requires buildings and equipment and
teachers never before within the means of an institution. It has
revolutionized the scope, the possessions, the plans and methods, the
offerings and the outlook of the universities. While this is com-
ing to be true in a measure in other countries, the unconventional
freedom, the industrial aggressiveness, and the unparalleled volume
of money going into university operations in this country have
given us the leadership of a world movement in higher education.
Again, university revenues come from men who have done things
and want other things done. It is exclusively so in the private
institutions, and the people and their representatives who vote
appropriations to the state universities have no other thought.
While few are so short-sighted as to be opposed to a balanced and
harmonious university evolution, still money is provided more freely
for the kinds of instruction in which the providers are most inter-
ested. This, of course, gives shape and trend to the development.
But it does more: it creates the need of teachers not heretofore
adequately prepared or not prepared in adequate numbers. The
vastness, the newness and the unpreparedness of it all create the
need of general oversight and close administration. Even more,
when teachers are not supported by student fees, but are paid
from the university treasury without reference to the number of
students they have or very sharp discrimination about the quality
of work they do, there is no automatic way of getting rid of
THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 39
teachers who do not teach or of investigators who do not produce.
Some competent and protected authority must accomplish this and
continually reinforce the teaching staff with virile men. The
competition between institutions rather than between men, and
the natural reluctance at deposing a teacher, are producing pathetic
situations at different points in many American universities and
are likely to become the occasion of more weakness in our university
system than has been widely realized.
Yet again, the sentiment of this country does not agree, and
doubtless will never agree, that American universities shall stand
for more " scholarship " without reference to character, or that
boys shall be allowed to go to the devil without hindrance for
the lack of university leadership or to accommodate administrative
cowardice or convenience. Students will have to be controlled
and guided in this country, and American universities will have
to have leaders who are leaders of morals as well as of learning
and who will stir the common sense and use the common senti-
ment through the authoritative word spoken in the crowd.
One may lament that our universities are not copied upon Ger-
man or English models ; that overwhelming numbers of students
are going to them ; that all who go are not serious students ; that
we are moving in new educational directions; that our professors
are not made to live on fees; and that there is neither a care
for superficial culture without much regard for true scholarship,
nor a vaunting of mere scholarship without reference to moral
character. The labor is lost. These things are so ; they are right
because they are so; because they are the outgrowth of the com-
pounding of a great new nation in the world and because they are
the logical outworkings of a marvelous advance in the thinking;
of men who are free to do some thinking for themselves.
It is hardly worth while to be troubled because we can not see
the road beyond the turns that are ahead. There is a road beyond
the turns or one will be made. President Pritchett of the Massa-
chusetts Institute, in a recent address at the University of Michi-
gan, published in the September Atlantic, discusses, without
answering, the question " Shall the University become a business
corporation?" Dr Pritchett ordinarily does things exactly and"
completely. He can answer questions particularly when he asks
them of himself. He did not answer this one because the answer
is so obvious. He used his question to express a very common
skepticism. Of course the university can not become a business
corporation with a business corporation's ordinary implications.
Such a corporation is without what is being called spiritual aim
40 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
is without moral methods. Universities are to unlock the truth
and turn out the test and the greatest men and women; business
corporations are mainly to make money. If this is a harsh char-
acterization, it can not be denied that it has been earned by
the great business corporations with which the great uni-
versities must be compared if they are to be compared with any.
A university can not become such a corporation without ceasing
to be a university.
The distinguishing earmarks of an American university are its
moral purpose, its scientific aim, its unselfish public service, its
inspirations to all men in all noble things, and its incorruptibility
by commercialism. But that is no reason why sane and essential
business methods should not be applied to the management of its
business affairs. It is a business concern as well as a moral and
intellectual instrumentality and if business methods are not applied
to its management it will break down. If they are not to be
employed, the university with its vast accumulations of materials
and men must be a mistake or, worse yet, a wrong. It is neither
a mistake nor a wrong or it would not be here. It is neither
an accident nor an impulse: it is a growth, the deliberate product
of conditions, of means and of thought. It is a great combina-
tion of material resources and moral forces essential to modern
competitions, the needed inspiration of all factors in the popula-
tion for large areas of territory, and its usefulness depends upon
giving the management both moral sense and worldly knowledge.
The responsible authorities in the management of a university
are the trustees, the president, and the faculty. Legal enactments
settle in some measure the exact functions of each, but common
knowledge of the kinds of government which succeed when much
property and many interests are involved, as well as the imperative
necessities of the particular situation, have gone much further to
establish the governmental procedure in the university. While the
immediate purpose is to exploit the functions and powers of the
university president, some reference, necessarily brief, must be
made to the prerogatives and duties of the trustees and faculty.
A vital principle in all government involving many cares and
interests is tersely expressed in the statement that bodies legislate
and individuals execute. It goes without saying that legislation
must be by a body which is both morally responsible and legally
competent, and common observation proves to us that it must con-
cern a real situation, to be of any real worth. If it involves special
knowledge, it must be by men who have the knowledge or who
will respect the opinions of others who have.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 4!
The trustees of a university are charged by law, either statutory
or judge-made, or by widely acknowledged usage, with that general
oversight and that legislative direction which will make sure of
the true execution of the trust. They are to secure revenues and
control expenditures. They are to prevent waste and assure results.
They are never to forget that they represent the people who
created and who maintain the university. They are not to rep-
resent these people as a tombstone might but as living men may.
They are to do the things their principals would assuredly do
if in their places to enlarge the advantage to the cestui que trust.
This is a heavy burden. It must be assumed that it is given to
picked men who are especially able to bear it; who would not
give their time to it for mere money compensation, but are happy
in doing it for the sake of promoting the best and noblest things.
The trustees do not live upon the campus and they are not
assumed to be professional educationists. Their judgment is likely
to be quite as good upon the relations of the work to the public
interests and as to what the institution should do to fulfil its
mission as that of any expert would be. To get done what they
want done, they must enact directions and appoint competent agents.
The individual trustee has no power of supervision or direction
not given to him by the recorded action of the board. What they
do is to be done in session after the modification of individual
opinions through joint discussion. It must be reduced to exact
form and stand in a permanent record. Trustees make a mess
of it when they usurp executive functions and they sow dragons'
teeth when they intrigue with a teacher or hunt a job for a patriot
who thinks he is in need of it. They are bound to regard expert
opinion and to appoint agents who can render a more expert
service than any others who can be procured. They are to keep
the experts sane, on the earth, in touch with the world, as it were.
They are to sustain agents and help them to succeed, and they are
to remove agents who are not successful. From a point of view
remote enough and high enough, they are to inspect the whole
field. They are bound to be familiar with all that the institution
is doing. They are to be alert in keeping the whole organization
free from whatever may corrupt, and up to the very top notch of
efficient public service. There is too much money involved to per-
mit of foolishness, too high interests at stake to allow of vacilla-
tion and uhcertainty. Under a responsibility that is unceasing
and unrelenting they must learn the truth and never hesitate to
act. And they must find their abundant reward, not in any
material return to themselves, but in the splendid fact that the
42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
great aggregation of land and structure and equipment, of great
teachers and aspiring students, of sacred memories and precious
hope and potential possibilities, is doing the work of God and
man in the most perfect way and in the largest measure which
their knowledge and experience, their entire freedom and their
combined energy can devise.
The business of university faculties is teaching. It is not
legislation and it is not administration, certainly not beyond the
absolute necessities. There is just complaint because the neces-
sities of administration take much time from teaching. It lessens
the most expert and essential work which the world is doing.
It seldom enlarges opportunity or enhances reputation. It is true
that teachers have great fun legislating but it is not quite certain
that, outside of their specialties, they will ever come to conclusions
or that, if they do, their conclusions will stand. The main advant-
age of it is the relaxation and dissipation they get out of it.
That is great. And, in a way, it may be as necessary as it is
great. Of course teachers could not endure it if they were always
to conduct themselves out of the classroom as they do in it.
Perhaps others would also have difficulty in enduring it. They
are given to disorderliness and argumentation beyond any other
class who stands so thoroughly for doing things in regular order. It is
not strange. It is the inevitable reaction, what some of them would
call the psychological antithesis, I suppose. Nor is it to be repressed
or regretted for it adds to the effectiveness and attractiveness of the
most effective and attractive people in the world. All this is often
particularly true of the past masters in the art. No wonder that
Professor North, who taught Greek for sixty years at Hamilton
College " Old Greek," as many generations of students fondly
called him wrote in his diary that it would have to be cut in
the granite of his tombstone that he " died of faculty meetings,"
for he was sure that some day he would drop off before one would
come to an end.
But the needs of the profession ought to be met by directing
the surplus of physical and intellectual energy into really useful
and potential channels, such as athletics, or battling over academic
questions with the doughty warriors of other universities. Speak-
ing seriously, university policies are not to be settled by majority
vote. They are to be determined by expert opinion. The very fact of
extreme expertness in one direction is as likely as not to imply
lack of it in other directions. Experts are no more successful than
other people in settling things outside of their zone of expertness.
Within that they are to have their way so long as they sustain
THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 43
themselves and the money holds out. But the resources are not to
be equally divided. University rivalries are not to be adjusted by
treaties between the rivals. More of university success depends
upon keeping unimportant things from being done in a mistaken
way than in developing useful policies and pursuing them in
the correct way. Department experts are to determine depart-
ment policies, college experts college policies, and university ex-
perts university policies.
What the President of the United States is to the federal Con-
gress, the president of the university is to the board of trustees.
It has not long been so, because American universities are recent
creations. When colleges wer'e small, when the care of their
property was no task, when all of a college were of one sect
and theology was the main if not the only purpose, when there
was but one course of study and the instruction was only bookish
and catechetical administration was no problem at all. There
was nothing to put a strain on the ship. Even though there was
no specific responsibility and no delegation of special functions
with immediate accountability, possessions did not go to waste,
frauds did not creep in, and injustice and paralysis did not ensue.
It may easily be so now in the smaller colleges ; it can not be
so in the great universities. The attendance of thousands of
students, the enlargement of wealth and of the number of students
who go to college without any very definite aim, the admission
of women, the more luxurious and complex life, the greater need
of just and forceful guidance of students, the multiplication of
departments, the substitution of the laboratory for the book, the
new and numberless processes, the care of millions of property
and the handling of very large amounts of money, and the con-
tinual and complete meeting of all the responsibilities which this
great aggregation of materials and of moral and industrial power
owes to the public, have slowly but logically and as a matter of
course developed the modern university presidency. It is the
centralized and responsible headship of a balanced administrative
organization, with specialized functions running out to all of the
innumerable cares and activities of the great institution. It is the
essential office which holds the right of leadership, which has
the responsibility of initiative, which is chargeable with full in-
formation and held to be endowed with sound discretion, which
may act decisively and immediately to conserve every interest and
promote every purpose for which the university was established.
It may be well to specify and illustrate. Conditions are not
whollv ideal in a university. Men and women not altogether ripe
44 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
for translation have to be dealt with. Real conditions, often un-
precedented, -have to be met. Not only effectiveness within, but
decent and helpful relations with neighbors, constituents and the
world are to be assured. Some authority must be able to do
things at once and some word must often be spoken to or for
the university community. When spoken, it must be a free word,
uttered out of an ample right to speak.
An American university may be possessed of property worth
from three to thirty millions of dollars. This is in lands and build-
ings and appliances and securities. These things may be legis-
lated about, but that is not the care of them. To keep them from
spoliation and make the most of them there must be expert care
through a competent department but in harmonious relations with
an ever present power which has the right and responsibility of.
declaring and doing things.
The very life of the institution depends upon eliminating weak
and unproductive teachers and upon reinforcing the teaching body
with the very best in the world. Unless there is scientific aggres-
siveness in the search of new knowledge some very serious claims
must be abandoned and some attitudes completely changed. No
board ever got rid of a teacher or an investigator no matter how
weak or absurd except for immorality known to the public. The
reason why a board can not deal with such a matter is the lack
of individual confidence about what to do and of individual re-
sponsibility for doing nothing. But. with three or four hundred
in the faculty, the need of attention to this vital matter is always
present. No board knows where new men of first quality are
to be found : no board can conduct the negotiations for them or
fit them into an harmonious and effective whole. The man who
is fitted for this great burden and who puts his conscience up
against his responsibility can hardly be expected to tolerate the
opposition of an unsubstantial sentiment which would protect a
teacher at all hazards, or the more subtle combination of selfish
influences which puts personal over and above public interests
when the upbuilding of a university is the task in hand.
Not only must the teaching staff be developed, the work must
be organized. It must develop a following, connect with the cir-
cumstances and purposes of a constituency, and lead as well as
it can up to the peaks of knowledge. It is not necessary that all
universities cover the same lines of work or have the same
standards. It is not imperative that all have the same courses or
courses of the same length. It is necessary that all serve and
uplift their people. But how? A master of literature will say
THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 45
through classical training and literary style; a scientist will say
through laboratories; a political economist will say through his-
tory and figures and logic; an engineer will say through roads
and bridges and knowledge of materials, and the generation and
transmission of power, and skill at construction ; and a professional
man will say through building up professional schools, providing
no mistake be made about the particular kind of school. Some
one of wide experience, having a scholar's training and sympathies,
possessed of a judicial temperament and with decisiveness as well,
must have the responsibility and the initiative of distributing re-
sources justly as between the multifarious interests and binding
them all into an harmonious and effective whole. Difficult as that
is, it is not the heaviest burden of university leadership. Ideals
must be upheld and made attractive: they must be sane ideals
which appeal to real men, and not only to old men, but to young
men. There must be no mistaking of dyspepsia for principle, no
assumption that character grows only when powers fail ; but a
rational philosophy of life by which men may live as well as
die. Nor is this all. There must be forehandedness. Someone
must be charged with the responsibility of peering into the future
and leading forward. New and yet more difficult roads must be
broken out. Someone in position to do it must be active in
initiating things. He must see what will go and, quite as clearly,
what will not go. Subtle but fallacious logic and a vast deal of it
must be resisted, greed combated, conceits punctured, resources
augmented, influences enlarged, forces marshaled for practical
undertakings, and the whole enterprise made to give a steadily
increasing service to the industrial, professional, political and moral
interests of a whole people.
Then there is the management and guidance of students. One
may as well complain because this country is a democracy as
to repine because the sons and daughters of the masses want to
go to college. There is no ground for regret in the fact that
our universities are not just like some universities over the seas.
We have much to learn from them and we are likely to learn
much. We have quite as much to avoid. It seems too much to
expect to work un-American ideas, and perhaps loose habits, out
of American students who study in Europe, when they come home.
We are different from them because of our circumstances and
political history, because of our spirit and outlook. That is reason
enough why our universities are different from theirs.
It is useless to question whether all who come to the higher
educational institutions are wise in coming. They are coming 1 .
46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
The work will have to be broad enough to meet their needs. Nor
is it worth while to bewail the fact that all who come are not
serious students. Their purposes are good enough and serious
enough according to their lights. Their preparation is what has
been exacted by the university and provided by the high school.
Some of them have to be pulled up and pushed along but the
process often brings out most unexpected results. Students are not
all angels, but every student is worth being helped by an angel up
to an angel's place. The task is upon the people who undertake
to manage universities. Students have to be directed in companies
but dealt with individually. They may be directed by a rule : when
they break the rule they must be dealt with by a man. It must
be a man who can stand pat for all that ought to inhere in a
university; but such a man will get on best if in addition
to being able to stand pat he is able to like boys ; he is likely
to' get on still better if he was once a rather lively boy himself;
or, at least, if he is a kind of man for whom a boy with some
ginger in him can find it in his heart to have not only considerable
respect but some regard and admiration.
This is not saying that college students are to be treated like
children. It is not implied that they are to be excused for being
ruffians. Quite the contrary is true. They are to be held exactly
responsible to law and rule and all well known standards of decent
living. There must be less viciousness in the life of American
universities or they must and ought to suffer seriously for it. It
is to be resented and punished far more forcefully than it has
been. Students who get into this kind of thing and persist in
staying in are to be punished, even to the point of being thrust
out and even though it changes the course of their lives and
breaks the hearts of fathers and mothers. The good of all is the
overwhelming consideration. A university is to be a university
and not something else. Of all institutions it is to stand for char-
acter and ideals. The universities are not to be closed and all
youth denied their advantages because a few abuse their privileges.
The punishment of the bad, if there are any bad, is the protec-
tion of all the rest. It is an essential safeguard to safe adminis-
tration and the wholesome living of the crowd. But is it not better
to hold all the boys we can from going to the dogs by keeping
in sympathy and touch with them, than it is to encourage them
into deviltry through the coldness or the downright dulness or
nervelessness or cowardliness of an administration?
The logic of the situation puts this burden upon the president,
or upon one working: with singleness of purpose with him. Likely
THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 47
the president can not deal with all directly, but that is no reason
why he should not go as far as he may. He must assume responsi-
bility for management, giving the right turn and inspiration to it.
It is essentially an executive function. The sun may well avail
himself of the assistance of a cloud to save his face when a board
of trustees begins to make preachments filled with benevolent
advice to a body of students ; and even the man in the moon may
be excused if he shuts one eye in contemplation, at the spectacle
of a university senate undertaking to deal with a college boy in a
scrape.
So much in reference to routine. The president who only fol-
lows routine of course falls short. He is to construct as well as
administer. He must initiate measures which will result in larger
facilities, in added offerings and enterprises, in searching out new
knowledge, in the wider application of principles to work, and
not only in the usual but in the better training of men and women
for distinct usefulness in life. He is not only to see that plans
are within the limits of revenues, that the physical condition of the
plant improves, that everything is clean and attractive, that the
faculty is scientifically productive, that the instruction is exact
and the spirit true; but he is to take the steps which will keep
the whole organization moving ahead. He must adopt and pro-
mote and give full credit for movements initiated by others when
their propositions are safe and practicable, but he must also be
alert in stopping movements which will not go.
Perhaps more important than all, the president is to declare from
time to time the best university opinion concerning popular move-
ments and the serious interests of the state. He must connect
the university with the life of the multitude and exert its in-
fluence for the quickening and guidance of that public opinion
which, as Talleyrand said, is more powerful than all the monarchs
who ever lived or all the laws which were ever declared.
The unity and security of a university can only be assured through
accountability to a central office. While every one is to have free-
dom to do in his own way the thing he is set to do, so long
as his way proves to be a good way, the harmony of the whole
depends upon the parts fitting together and upon definiteness of
responsibility and frequency of accountability. No self-respecting
man is going to administer a great office, or an office responsible
for great results, and have any doubts about possessing the powers
necessary or incident to the performance of his work. He will
have enough to think of without having any doubt upon that sub-
ject. There need be no fear of his being too much inflated with,
48 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
power. There will be enough to take the conceits out of him and
keep him upon the earth. If he can not exercise the powers of
his great office and yet keep steady and sane there is no hope
for him and he will speedily come to official ruin. It is not a
matter of uplifting or of inflating a man, but of getting a man who
can meet the demands of a great situation.
Of course, no one can realize the hopes which center in a uni-
versity presidency without being able to work harmoniously with
others. There must be true deference to the opinions of many and
scrupulous recognition of the just, though unexpressed, claims of
all. But he must never forget that administrative freedom is quite
as inviolable as any other freedom, even in a university. He must
mark out his official course for himself and bear the responsibility
of it without cavil. He must expect to suffer criticism and oppo-
sition, even contumely. He can not expect that the work he has
to do will make every one happy. It will discomfit many. In
one way or another they will give him all the trouble they can.
The protests will be the loudest because of the very acts for
which his office has been developed. But he may comfort him-
self with the reflection that if the job were not so heavy they
would have a cheaper man to do it, and that the extent of the
opposition is often the measure of real presidential business that
is being performed. In any event, his only hope is in success,
and he can not go around the duty which confronts him without
inevitable failure. Conditions may easily make a mere compro-
miser of him. If they do, the waves will speedily close over his
official remains forever. Some choice and magnanimous spirits
will help him ; but he need entertain no doubt that there will be
plenty more on every side to try out the stuff that is in him,
and that they will diligently attend to the trying out process until
enough occurs to convince them that his wisdom, his rational
conception of his task, his love of justice and sense of humor,
his constructive planning, his independence, and his fearlessness,
are sufficient to prove him worthy of as great an opportunity for
usefulness and honor as ever comes to any man.
All this calls for a rare man. He ought, in the first place,
to be reasonably at peace with mankind and in love with youth.
He must have the gift of organizing and the qualities of leadership.
He ought to have been trained in the universities, not only for
the sake of his own scholarship, but that he may be wholly at
home in their routine and imbued with their purposes. He must
be moved by public spirit as distinguished from university routine
or mere scholarly purpose. He must be a scholar but not neces-
THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 49
sarily in literature or science or moral philosophy. It is quite
as well if it is in law, or engineering, or political history. He
must be sympathetic with all learning. He can no longer hope
to be a scholar in every study. He can hardly hope to administer
such a trust or fill such a post without some knowledge of and
considerable aptitude for law. His sense of justice must be keen,
his power of discrimination quick, his judgment of men and women
accurate; his patience and politeness must give no sign of tiring,
and the strength of his purpose to accomplish what needs to be
done must endure to the very end. Yet he must determine dif-
ferences and decide things. He must have the power of expression
as well as the more substantial attainments. Beyond possessing
sense, training, outlook, experience, resistive power, decisiveness,
and aggressiveness, he ought to be a forceful and graceful writer
and at least an acceptable public speaker. In a word the presi-
dent of an American university is bound to be not only one of
the most profound scholars but quite as much one of the very
great, all round men of his generation.
ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESI-
DENT JAMES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
Mr Chairman and Men and Women of the University of Illinois:
The distinguished presence, the impressive procedure, and the
function and purpose of this great university convocation are
surely sufficient to make it memorable. Other gatherings for the
discussion of many subjects of the highest import to higher edu-
cation in America have been associated with this assemblage. The
effort to accompany an installation with an educational advance
has been evident. The gracious attendance of the representatives
of many American and of some foreign universities lends very sub-
stantial assistance to this effort. Taken together, the exercises may
rival if not surpass any previous undertaking in the interests
of the higher learning in the Mississippi valley.
Of very considerable interest to all, the occasion is certainly
of profound significance to this university. We are now at the
heart of the business for which we invited so many. We are
taking a step of the very first magnitude in our affairs. We
are conferring a very great honor. We are imposing a very great
burden. It is through the bestowal of a very great office. We
are come not merely to ratify an appointment or to deliver keys
but to give a new leader the expression of our confidence and
the assurance of our help. We would not disguise our understand-
ing of what it all implies to him, to us, and to all of the interests
of this institution. We would invest this occasion with all serious-
ness. With solemnity we pledge our support. Realizing both the
need and the meaning of it, we offer words of cheer and the
best wishes which a buoyant and expectant people can lay at the
feet of a new administration.
This is not the day for reminiscence, but it is the day for reflec-
tion, as well as the day of hope. Rational outlook rests upon a
true understanding of what is and what has been. In university
building the future can lift high its turrets only upon foundations
laid sure and true. There is no better exemplification of American
spirit anywhere than is found in the history of this university.
Without any aid from nature but a rich soil, without a single
helpful feature in the landscape, upon almost an exact plain, with-
out hill or tree or rock or river, it has made a campus as home-
like and ennobling as any one of us has seen. Without building
materials in the neighborhood, it has erected buildings at once
ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESIDENT JAMES $1
spacious and serviceable. With a school of architecture of its
own, without close association with the best architecture of the
world, with considerable of the feeling that a new building belonged
to an architect who had been trained by the university, and that
in time every graduate in architecture ought to be represented
by a building, it has, in one way or another, which need not be
specified here, worked out or worried out a very respectable col-
lection of architectural effects. Located between and across the
border line of two small cities, it has risen above their rivalries,
made them useful suburbs, and given them a happy mission
even the housing of the people of a university. Started in an
environment not specially conducive to scholarly pursuits, it has
developed a setting which is beginning to support its work admir-
ably. Far from the geographical or popular center of the state,
it has overcome distances and become a conspicuous spot on the
map of Illinois. Without a large city to draw upon for students,
even beset with deep prejudices and sharp rivalries, it has filled
all the highways with happy young men and maidens, coming to
or going from its work. At a distance from large libraries and
without free association with the centers of scholarship, and until
now with very inadequate support, it has built up an instructional
force exceptionally able at many points and of very satisfactory
average strength. Under the disadvantages as well as the advan-
tages of a popular support and a democratic management it has
become widely celebrated for its unparalleled growth, and has
fought its way to a very high place in the list of large American
universities. One hundred out of the one hundred and two coun-
ties of Illinois, forty-three other states, and eight foreign countries
are represented in its student body. In the breadth of its offer-
ings and the measure and the loftiness of its ambitions it is second
to none. When it was robbed of most of its invested and much
of its operating funds, it succeeded in three weeks with the help
of the Legislature and Governor in converting its discomfiture
into better securities than universities ordinarily have, good, five
per cent everlasting bonds of the commonwealth of Illinois. Later
than all neighboring state universities in getting started, and ex
ceedingly slow in gaining moneyed support, it has at last won the
genuine pride and generous confidence of a state which can do
whatever it will for which all of us make most sincere acknowl-
edgments in the hope of yet larger favors still to come. Drawing
upon other universities and all other sources of supply for all
it can get. it is increasing its contributions to the scholarship of
the country and doing more than was ever foreseen to train the
52 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
young men and women of a rich and imperial state to the serious
business of making the most of themselves through intelligent and
tiring work of every kind and through a rational use of the results
of commercial and industrial prosperity.
This state is fortunate in that its state university and its agri-
cultural and mechanical colleges are .being developed together.
The work of each supports the other. It is producing a very large
institution, one with broad foundations and innumerable offerings.
With all of the departments here where there is small need of
physicians, its medical colleges are where medical men are most
in demand and at the largest center of medical education in the
world. All in all, it is accumulating students with a rapidity which
is creating a responsibility beyond compute.
We all know this, but it is well to express it. It gives us
strength. We are equal to it. By common assent and intuitive
impulse this institution is now to be made great as well as big.
The state university development in America is one of the very
greatest as well as the" most surprising movements in world edu-
cation. It is the logical outgrowth of the democratic advance.
Few will say that the state universities are not already as potential
as the universities which have preceded them. In opportunities to
serve a people through the applications of learning to diversified
life, as well as in the aspiration and the strength to make that service
great, they are ranking university operations everywhere. Illinois
expects to lag behind no other state in the generosity and the
intelligence of her doing for the higher learning. She provides
the means and calls the best men she can get fo*- her service. Then
she wants a new advance. She will not temporize with oppor-
tunity. She will not tolerate excuses. She will go forward. With
profound regard for all the states around her, with the warmest
appreciation of the aid she is getting from other universities, and
the most unqualified assurances of reciprocity, the keynote of this
great week at the University of Illinois sounds a decided advance
to higher and stronger ground.
One who has the gifts and the strength to lead this advance
is to be envied the opportunity. I wish I could compound the
thinking and express the reflections and the hopefulness of us
all. The suggestions, born of my thinking and my experience,
which bear upon this hour and the future of this university, are
in these plain and fundamental, briefly stated propositions:
Serve the commonwealth of Illinois, not only in her industries,
but in her political theories and practices, in rearing noble ideals
of true culture, and in strengthening her conception of the moral
ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESIDENT JAMES 53
obligations of such a people. Do it when sure of your ground, even
though it compels the saying of some things which, at the moment,
many of her people may not like to hear.
Aid every educational activity, whether public school or parish
school or proprietary school, whether endowed college or profes-
sional school, or private or public library, or study club, or what-
ever else it may be, if it has the purpose of enlarging knowledge
or extending culture in or out of the schools. Be true to every
other university. Never forget that meanness defeats itself. In.
education the way to get rich is through enriching others.
Bring to this university the best scholars who can be procured"
in any part of the world. There are no artificial barriers and no
political boundaries in the democracy of learning. Pay what you
have to pay in order to have the best instruction in the country.
That is one of the leading things for which the last administration
was disposed to give way to the new one. The old one could have
gone on in the old way. It was believed that a new leader could
take some important steps more surely than the old one. If not
taken, an opportunity will be lost. He is here to fill the gap of
opportunity to the full. Let the fact be established and let the
country come to know that no more new truth is likely to be
dug out anywhere, and no better instruction provided anywhere,
than at the University of Illinois.
Develop young men in the faculties by giving them their oppor-
tunities ; and assure them just credit for all the work they do. Do
not stunt them by letting them think that they are so very much
larger than they really are.
Enter into student sympathies and share student outlook. Brace
up the timid and the hesitating. Find ways to put surplus energies
to useful ends. Give all plenty of good work to do. Forgive the
ones who are a trifle too active but not so very bad. Let the
vicious know that there is no place for viciousness in the affairs
of a university. Command the situation through the stirring of
sentiment, through the development of opinion, and through re-
liance upon that moral sense which in the last analysis is always
overwhelming in a university crowd.
Let justice and sense stand, whoever falls. Let there be a day
in court for all. Be as just to a student when a teacher is at fault
as to a teacher when a student is in trouble.
Fight for absolute cleanness. Insist that everything shall com-
port with the purposes of such an institution. Demand that every
one in the service shall have undivided devotion to the work which
he undertakes. Avoid expenditures which do not commend them-
$4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
selves to the good sense of sane and experienced men. Reject all
extravagancies. When money is expended see that a dollar buys
the value of a dollar. Stand for nothing until convinced; shrink
from nothing merely because some one may be discomfited.
Mr President, administer your splendid estate, and execute the
high purpose for which this great aggregation of material things
and of intellectual and moral forces is maintained. Do it without
fear or favor, without thinking much of the hazards or of the
compensations, and the people of the commonwealth of Illinois,
and the Almighty God, will take care of you.
The real growth and strength of this university have hardly
appeared. The future will overshadow the past. Hearts, minds,
money, boundless energy, the public interests and the common
pride are all enlisted to carry the University of Illinois to a place
of the very first significance in American education. All that is
wanted is a scholarly, a sane, and a fearless leadership. If one
-can not supply it, another will. With one accord we think we have
"found the man who can.
I am transferring to him not only a title but an opportunity;
Tiot only an office but my hope and my confidence that he may
^enlarge it. I did not impair this office : it is a greater office than it
"used to be. It is as precious a thing as I shall ever have to give.
Before I could transfer it with cheerfulness and with confidence
I have been obliged to think more deeply than have many others
of the needs of the situation here and in another state, and of
the adaptation of men to differing work. My attachments are no
stronger there than here. The decision came out of a mental
process which has tried out feeling and broken some strings. The
new president has been an all-important factor in the case. But
I am ready. The attributes of the new leader give me confidence
and the universal acclaim makes me know that all is well.
A true son of Illinois ; with the fine lineage of her best pioneers ;
with native pride in her history; with scholarly appreciation of
her resources and of her intellectual development; with a mature
and balanced understanding of her needs, as well as with patriotic
enthusiasm for all that may uplift her ; a severe student, trained
in the best schools of the world; a virile teacher; a publicist of
wide reputation ; an experienced and trenchant administrator ; we
envy him the gifts and the opportunity which will let him impress
lives, shape ends, weave his name into the history of this university,
and add to the greatness of his state; and we give him all the
cheer that can spring out of song, with all the sincerity that can
breathe through prayer.
REMARKS AT SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL CONFER-
ENCE, COLUMBIA, S. C.
Reprinted from the published proceedings
Mr President, and You My Friends of the Southern Educa-
tional Conference: I am sure I should have been very glad indeed
if my name could have been omitted from the list of speakers,
because of the lateness of the hour and particularly because we are
all waiting to hear the concluding speech, by His Excellency, the
Governor.
But as the way is open, I am glad to express the pleasure I
have found in my visit to Columbia and in the proceedings of the
conference. It is my first visit to Columbia and my first attendance
upon the conference. I am bound to tell you that I came with
high expectations. I have experienced southern hospitality before
and I knew that we would be graciously entertained. I knew you
would not invite us here unless you were anxious to follow your
invitation with a sincere and genuine welcome. For the last ten
years I have been associated with one of the great state univer-
sities, and that has led me to know something more than I other-
wise might about the State College of South Carolina, located
here. I knew that that institution, with other educational activities
of the city, must have cooperated with the prevailing conditions
to develop a society of rich and unusual culture at the South
Carolina capital. Yet, Mr President, I am bound to say that
some of us surely, and perhaps all of us, have had some object
lessons in generous hospitality and magnificent kindliness which
exceeded our expectations and which have made us fast friend*
for life. [Applause]
I have heard a great deal said from this platform about
" problems." All earnest people have problems. I do not want
you to think you have a monopoly of them in the South. In the
great metropolis of the Union there are educational problems
quite as serious as any in the Southern States. I suppose that
in the heart of the city of New York there are three quarters
of a million of people who know little or nothing of democratic
government or of American institutions. They hardly know th#-
English language at all. They are as yet foreign to our life and
our outlook. They are to be absorbed into our citizenship. Their
56 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
children, and they have lots of them, are to be trained in our
schools. And those very people have a considerable part in estab-
lishing and managing the schools which are to do that work. If
educational problems made people poor, I suspect that each of us
would be as poor as any two of you put together. [Laughter]
We who have been together in this conference understand each
other pretty well. We all have some form of citizenship in the
democracy of learning. We know something of the fundamental
principles of that institution 1 . We have come down from the
North not to parade our intellectual estate or to patronize you,
but to learn something and if possible to give you a word of cheer
and enrich ourselves by the giving. In the democracy of learn-
ing, the only way to get gain is to give away as much as one
can. [Laughter and applause] About the only way one can get
much in such work as this is by lifting all the rest as much as
he can. In the democracy of learning there are no political,
sectarian, state or sectional lines. We all mingle together to put
in our experiences and our thinking and to take out of the common
accumulations whatever we most need. Before the good-fellow-
ship, the generosity, the energy, and the enthusiasm generated in
these conferences, difficulties give way and the mountains shrink
into mole hills. [Applause]
Educational work in America is unique. This is the land of
opportunity. It is the national policy that every man and woman,
every boy and girl, shall have a right to an education suitable
to his situation. Every one is to have a chance to lift himself
above the situation in which he was born. Even more, it is the
national belief that it is a sound national policy to aid and encourage
every one to make the most of himself. The more we can make
of each one of the individual units in our citizenship the greater
and stronger does the nation become. All the nations do not
accept that. In some lands statesmen are afraid of it. But we
"believe in it. It is the plan of the North and it is the plan of
the South. The same thing that brings us into common fellowship
and stirs our common sympathies in our educational conferences
distinguishes the American nation in the world. [Applause]
I have been especially interested in the reports made to the
conference by the different state superintendents of schools from
nearly all of the Southern States. I was prepared for a good
^howing for it recently devolved upon me to review, for publica-
tion, the educational legislation of the last year in all of the states,
and from that examination I knew that there was an educational
revival sweeping across the Southland [applause], but the definite
REMARKS AT SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL CONFERENCE 57
reports of new buildings, more teachers, enlarged salaries, im-
proved preparation of teachers, and all of the accessories of a
better school system are most gratifying. And let me say that
nothing in this conference has stirred my admiration more than
the able and heroic treatment of the matter of school attendance
and of the illiteracy consequent upon nonattendance, presented
to us by Superintendent W. H. Hand of Chester in this state.
[Applause] One must face the real facts when he would accom-
plish a great work. He who knows a subject of importance to his
people and tells them the truth even though it be distasteful, renders
the public a distinct service and deserves the highest commenda-
tion. [Applause]
I must not detain you longer. I thank you with all my heart
for all that my journey to this beautiful old city and to this con-
ference has meant to me, and I trust that the opening year may be
surcharged with pleasure and progress for all of you. [Applause]
SYNOPSIS OF REMARKS AT STATE TEACHERS ASSO-
CIATION, 1905, SYRACUSE, N. Y.
The Commissioner opened the discussion by a casual allusion
to an article on Needed Educational Legislation printed on the
official program, and relating to teachers' salaries, pensions,
permanency of tenure, etc., and remarked that the article did not
seem to be " surcharged with spiritual aim." He thought such
matters all right as mere incidents, but not entitled to highest rank
in the deliberations of a great state association of teachers. He
would help increase the salaries of teachers whenever the oppor-
tunity came, and would promote pension legislation whenever there
could be any general or logical agreement upon the subject, but
was hardly prepared to put the major share of productivity into
such matters. As to permanency of tenure, there was not much
more to be desired.
Dr Draper proceeded to say that since the unification act went
into effect the time had been largely occupied in combining and
reorganizing the Department forces and methods of procedure.
This difficult task had been about completed and the Department
was now ready to take up some new educational business. Not
much had been accomplished as yet, but the time had come for a
distinct revival of educational activity.
He thought that, speaking generally, the teaching force had
improved decisively in the last two decades, and not much was
necessary in that connection except to keep on doing what had
already been commenced, with such occasional incidental changes
in plans as experience would suggest.
The Commissioner thought the Department and all interested in
the educational work of the State should join forces to accomplish
the following ends which he discussed: .
1 Better professional supervision of the teaching in the country
schools.
2 The raising of low grade secondary schools up to the standards,
whether they were large schools or small ones.
3 The more complete enforcement of compulsory attendance
and child labor laws with a view to the reduction of illiteracy,
which was much too great in the State, and particularly in the
rural districts.
53
REMARKS AT STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION 59
4 A more distinct college and university influence in all of the
middle and lower schools and in all of the other educational activi-
ties of the State.
5 A stronger feeling of fraternity" between public and private
schools and between all agencies for uplifting the intellectual
level.
The Commissioner spoke of the work the State Department was
doing in the asylums and prisons; also of the work in the way of
establishing and developing libraries and other agencies for aiding
people to improve themselves outside of the schools.
He asked all teachers to study in the next year the subject of
business and trade schools, with particular reference to young
children who will probably not go to high school and almost
certainly will not go to college. He thought something more
decisive and logical would have to be done in this direction and
the attitude of the State Department should be taken advisedly and
should accord with the best sentiment of the teachers of the State.
The Commissioner spoke of the great need of a new State
building for the State Department, including the State Library
and State Museum, suggesting the stimulating influence of such a
building upon the intellectual interests of the State, and asking
the support of all in securing it.
In conclusion, Dr Draper urged the consolidation of all edu-
cational interests and the truest cooperation between all educational
forces, giving assurance of the best help, without fear or favor,
that the Education Department could give and soliciting the best
support that all interested could give the Department. v
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT
GRANT'S BIRTHDAY EXERCISES, STATE NORMAL COLLEGE
ALBANY, N. Y.
On the bluff overlooking the old town of Galena, in the very
northwestern corner of Illinois, stands a small and very ordinary
brick house. Nothing distinguishes it from other houses that are
common in the neighborhood. While this house, in that place,
forty-six years ago was doubtless a comfortable habitation, yet the
unpainted front, the small panes in the windows, the wooden steps,
the little front door, and the narrow hall with the steep stairs com-
ing down to the entrance, tell us plainly that it was not above the
common run and that the people who then lived in it must have been
either in trying circumstances or exceedingly unpretentious.
In the summer of 1860 a man, wife, and four children three boys
and a girl, the oldest eleven years of age became tenants of this
house. The man was thirty-eight years of age. He had been born
in Ohio of very intelligent and well to do, but not conspicuous,
parents. In his boyhood his father operated a tannery and owned
a farm. The lad detested the tannery, did not like manual work
anyway, but had to do it and preferred that upon the farm, and
particularly that in which horses were used. He went to school
but little. In one way and another he managed to travel about more
and gained wider general knowledge than any other boy in town.
At seventeen his father procured him an appointment to West Point.
He did not want to go, but his father provided the necessary reso-
lution. He showed but little interest in strictly military affairs.
His study of the tactics was not enthusiastic and the drill seemed a
nuisance. When made a sergeant, the seventeenth, and there were
only eighteen in the battalion, he did so poorly that they lost little
time in making him a private again. But his sound character, his
readiness in mathematics, and his superior horsemanship saved him,
and in 1843 ne graduated, number twenty-one in a class of thirty-
nine.
Stationed at Jefferson Barracks at St Louis, as a brevet second
lieutenant of the 4th Infantry, he employed the time he could get
away from the routine of the post in cultivating the acquaintance of
a worthy young w r oman, whose family was of considerable promi-
nence and lived comfortably five miles out of town. He had been
so assiduous about this that when he was ordered away to the war
in Mexico she promised to become his wife.
60
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 6 1
He thought the war with Mexico was unholy, but he followed
the flag and gained some distinction as a strategist and a straight,
hard fighter. The war over, he married and then served with the
troops upon the Pacific coast until 1854. The army in time of
peace had no attractions for him, certainly none which compensated
for isolation from his wife and children. He became a captain, but
the pay of that rank would not support his family on the other side
of the mountains and the. enforced separation became wholly intoler-
able. He resigned his commission and came home. The reasons
for resigning and the manner of his life for the next six years have
been called in question by some writers. There is no reason for it.
The impulses which led to his retirement from the army were in his
nature and they are worthy of commendation. Aside from that, he
was not in strong health : he inherited some tendencies to consump-
tion. He has told us of his reasons for leaving the army and of his
manner of life in the following years. His word removes uncer-
tainty. He engaged in unimportant, natural, honorable enterprises
which he hoped would enable him to live with and support his
family. His undertakings did not succeed and he went to Galena
to share in the leather trade with his father and brothers.
Old residents of Galena say he made but little impression upon
the town. He was quiet, unobtrusive, serious. Once or twice he
was asked to look after the procession at a local celebration, and did
it noiselessly and well. Beyond this he was unknown and little seen
except in the store and on his coming and going between that and
the house on the hill. On these walks he was frequently accom-
panied by some of his children, and at times had a basket on his arm.
for he did the family marketing and then carried the meats and
vegetables himself, according to the custom of the time and the
place.
The woman of the family was substantial, educated above the
average woman of the time, a good mother and a genuine housewife.
The children were like other children. The family life moved for-
ward in the ordinary way. We can readily believe that there was
much to discourage, for there was nothing to foreshadow future
prominence. But we know that the family was happy, for it was
bound together by love which could endure stress and storm.
On the bluff overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades, in the
upper part of the city of New York, upon ground at once pictur-
esque and historic, hard by one of the very first of American uni-
versities, stands a magnificent mausoleum. It compares favorably
with any structure in the great city, or indeed in the land. The
tombs of Britain's great men at Westminster, of Napoleon in the
62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
heart of Paris, of the Hohenzollern kings at Potsdam, of Washing-
ton at Mount Vernon, of Lincoln at Springfield, are not more
magnificent, more dignified, more impressive. It is a voluntary
testimonial to a great national character. The states contended
with each other for the honor of providing it; but the people estab-
lished it without invoking any governmental function. In the crypt
under the great dome stand, side by side, a noble pair of granite
coffins. One holds all that was mortal of the father at Galena, and
the other, by his special stipulation, has since received the body of
the mother. Over all, in heroic letters, is the name of " GRANT."
Between me modest home at Galena and the great mausoleum at
Morningside Heights there developed a unique career of universal
human interest. It extended through a period of twenty-five years.
It was a decisive factor in making the course of history in America.
It will never cease to influence the thought and the life of the world.
We can not today trace all the lines or fill in all the details of that
marvelous career. The picture is a completed one and our country-
men are familiar with it. The purpose of the hour is to point out
the qualities which, when the opportunity came, led that career to
move out of obscurity, to increase steadily in volume and in power,
and to push through the gravest obstacles and the severest criticism
to the very pinnacle of world fame with such apparent ease and
such clockwork naturalness as to surprise mankind.
There is no need to idealize the character of General Grant: in
its humanity and its reality it appeals to the world. His name and
his fame became great because of the things he did. But what
he did was not by chance. It came of qualities which were inherent
in his character. Those qualities were sharpened by training and
seasoned by hard experience, it is true. But they were peculiarly
his own, and they vere so independent and so unexpected, were
expressed in ways so unlike those commonly associated with con-
spicuous military achievement, and were so invariably successful
that the character which embodied them speedily advanced to first
place in the esteem of his countrymen and the thought of mankind.
The conditions which were to require him, to find him, and to
make him very great through service to his country, had not arisen
when he went to make his home in the Illinois town. They came
in the following year. When they came he was the first to recog-
nize them. He began military operations at ,once. He organized
a company, and rejected the proffer of its command. He offered
his service to the government and expressed some confidence in his
ability to command a regiment. His overture was overlooked. He
went to the capital of Illinois and engaged in military work. Some-
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 63
thing has been said about his return to the army being accidental;
about the possibility of his being out of the Civil War altogether.
He recognized no such accident or possibility. Circumstances of
time or place or rank were uncertain. He had some feeling about
what he could best do or about what might belong to him. He was
ready to pocket it if need be, but not unless it need be. He has told
us that not for a moment did he doubt of being in the army through
the war; that in war one does not have to ask leave of anybody to
fight for his country. As a fact he was in the service from the very
beginning. In a few weeks he was commanding a regiment, and
in a few months an army.
First and above all the character of Grant was sincere. In mili-
tary affairs his judgment was entirely confident and almost unerring;
in business matters it might slip ; but it was always sincere and
just, always natural and always genuine, always modest and
steadfast.
The world had associated glittering show and spectacular effect
with military genius. He hated them. He wore nothing in the way
of a uniform beyond the requirements of the regulations. His dress
in active service conformed to the rough conditions. It hardly
seemed to be a uniform. There was little or nothing about it to
sustain his rank. In his eating and sleeping he accepted the lot of
the ordinary soldier. In his work he could outlast them all. He
loved a good horse. He never exhibited himself on horseback.
There was no riding along the lines before the onset, no cavorting
on parade. There was no parade unless for discipline. But he
could ride through wind and storm, mud and slush, days and nights
together, sick or well, to accomplish military ends. No reality ever
did or ever will appeal to the American heart more than that of the
commanding general, upon a good horse, in the Wilderness, in the
pelting rain and sleet, in the now historic blue overcoat of the
common soldier, with the wounded and fluttering life of the nation
in his keeping, yet as calm as a summer morning, as precise as clock-
work, as confident as fate, as grim as death itself.
The first years of the Civil War, at the fields of military interest
in the east, were marked by dress and parade, by marching and
countermarching, by the pomp of officers, the multiplicity of orders,
the ready assurances of early and overwhelming victories. But not
much ground was gained. Commanders lacked aggressiveness or
feared failure, and when the sentiment of the country forced a move-
ment the slaughter was appalling, and without compensating results.
The gloom was deep and the feeling ominous.
In these conditions an obscure man, without bluster, had worked
his way up to an opportunity in the west. He got poor encourage-
64 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
ment from his superiors ; jealousies assailed and intrigue encom-
passed him, but he seized the opportunity all the same. He drove
the enemy out of Fort Henry, took possession, and moved at once
upon Fort Donaldson. He had perhaps fifteen thousand men : there
were twenty-one thousand defending the fort. He invited battle
upon an open field, without avail. He made ready for the assault
by land and water. Just as the advance was ordered he received a
note from the Confederate commander his old comrade at West
Point and in the Mexican War asking for delay, and the appoint-
ment of commissioners to arrange capitulation. Any other man
would have accepted the overture with joy. He thought one could
settle the terms easier than two, and better without commissioners
than with them, and replied, " No terms except an unconditional
and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move
immediately upon your works.'' The surrender came instantly and
upon his terms. A portion of the garrison had escaped in the
night, but sixteen thousand men marched out, stacked arms, ate his
rations, and were sent to the north as prisoners of war. The man
who had done it said nothing beyond his official reports, and they
were the briefest possible statements of facts, devoid of self-lauda-
tion, free from gush and speculation, but filled with the confidence
and outlook of one who could accomplish things even upon the
dread field of an overwhelming fratricidal war.
The surprise of the country was only exceeded by its joy. Could
it really be that a man had done something of consequence, and
without talking about it? How the great heart of the nation
throbbed at the news of a substantial and unclouded victory ! And
how the people stood amazed at the silence and the modesty of the
victor! What an official babel there must have been when a man
became conspicuous by his very silence! But there were other
officers and older generals in the service who had not planned all
this. There was enough of official consternation and shameful self-
love in high military places to remove the man from command ;
but the voice of the people soon put him beyond danger from such
things. The nation gave him its admiration and its confidence.
His brief reply to Buckner became the slogan of the Union cause
in the camps, and at the battle front of the armies, and in the homes
and upon the hustings of the people. Could the man sustain all
this? Had he the qualities which could stand such prosperity?
Steadiness and quiet, with Shiloh, and then Vicksburg with its
thirty thousand prisoners of war, soon gave the answer. After
Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge he was accepted as the coming
general in chief of all the armies. Congressional thanks, and
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 65
medals, and presentation swords, and promotions, came speedily.
A special rank was created for him, and before long he was moved
to the center of the fearful carnage in the east and made commander
in chief of all the armies of the Union. He had himself become
greater and stronger through the two years of wondrous doing.
The armies and the people had been educated also. Steadily,
silently, confidently, he moved on to the mighty climax, leading
greater armies, exercising larger powers, assuming weightier re-
sponsibilities, forcing heavier battles, winning yet grander victories.
Spottsylvania, Five Forks, the Wilderness, Petersburg, Appomatox
these brief words tell the fearful and the wondrous story.
It is certainly an inspiration to see an obscure man, in a brief
period and without favoring circumstances, recognized as the fore-
most military commander produced by the world in a long cycle of
time. Other qualities than sincerity were necessary to make this
possible. What were they?
He proved to be a great organizer. The objective point in his
military organization was the highest efficiency of the individual
soldier. The soldiers of his legions were citizens and freemen.
He knew the value of patriotic devotion and of free and safe indi-
vidual initiative in the ranks ; he understood the methods which
would produce such efficiency as could be secured from mercenaries,
and what other treatment would gain that higher efficiency which
marks the cooperative work of heroic and conscientious freemen.
In his own character he combined ^the spirit of the patriotic citizen
with the ways of the trained and experienced officer of the regular
army. Commander and men were fighting together, not for pay,
not for conquest, not for a soldier's fame, but for the freedom of the
oppressed, for the life of the Republic, for the rehabilitation and
the continuance of democratic government in the world. His mili-
tary discipline recognized and reckoned with this great fact. Free-
dom of opportunity and adequate support, forceful and trustworthy
leadership with a modicum of control would enable such men to
swing the sword of the nation to the overthrow of its enemies, and
then bind up the wounds and bring together the sections for the yet
greater unfolding of its unparalleled career.
The supply and medical departments of his armies had first and
best care. He knew the need of rations and the worth of shoes.
The law of the camp and the march made for whatever comfort
could be obtained, for freedom of action, for self-control, for
enthusiasm, for elasticity, and for fighting power. His sense of
justice was clear and balanced, quick and stern. He never spoke
in sepulchral tones to make himself impressive. He was never
66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
known to be excited and never heard to use an oath. He tolerated
no nonsense: he accepted no lame excuses: he regarded no rank.
He would remove a division commander in the front of the battle
line if the facts seemed to require it : he would do it with real and
manifest regret, but he would not hesitate about it. If in time he
found he had made a mistake or gone too far, he would have genuine
satisfaction in making the best amends he could in the presence of
the army, or before the country. He acted upon small matters and
large matters with equal readiness. He dealt with every problem
presented : he decided at once : his ways were modest and quiet :
his words were few, but every one counted: when he had spoken
the thing seemed to be settled. He was serious but he did not
trouble himself about results. He knew his ground and he knew his
men. There might be an immaterial slip here and there, but the
general results were the ones he wanted. The armies solidified :
they grew in strength and waxed in spirit: they gained veteran
form. Led by such a citizen and such a soldier, the Union Army
of citizen soldiers became the most intelligent and the most scien-
tific, the most extended, the freest, and yet the most homogenous
and effective fighting machine in all history.
Grant proved to be a strategist. He knew personally or he knew
all about the leading men to whom he was opposed, and reasoned
with much accuracy as to the course they would take. He studied
the field and saw where the vantage ground would be. He seemed
able to see from the beginning to the end of a campaign, and events
happened as he expected. He seldom got into a tight place. If
he was surprised, no one knew it. He moved his forces with
celerity and in ways which ensured the results he had planned.
But if he was a strategist by intuition, the quality was not the
factor he depended on most to gain his triumphs. His battles
were won by straight, hard fighting. He took the initiative and
forced the issue. He gave his enemy no rest. He never seemed
to care about what his enemy might do, and always reasoned that
the fellows on the other side were as tired and certainly as scared
as he was himself. No one will ever know how he would have con-
ducted a defensive campaign. He was fitted by nature to lead
offensive campaigns. He did not rest when a campaign was won.
Before one end was gained he had started towards another. His
self-confidence was and is startling. In the Vicksburg campaign
he called in the division commanders and asked their opinions. He
did not agree with them and he disregarded their conclusions, and
says in his " Memoirs " that that was as near as he ever came to a
council of war. He was quite accustomed to close his brief report
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 67
of a battle won by saying what would be done next and at once.
This trait appeared early and remained to the close of his military
activity. Nothing appalled him. In the midst of awful events,
when the intricacies of the situation w r ere paralyzing and the com-
motion distracting, when tens of thousands of lives and the fate of
the nation seemed to depend upon what he did, he wrote his orders
and reports with readiness, clearness, and confidence most amazing.
Hear anew his words to the War Department in the darkest hotfr
of the Wilderness campaign : " We have ended the sixth day of very
hard fighting. The result up to this time is very much in our favor.
But our losses have been heavy, as well as those of the enemy. We
have lost to this time eleven general officers killed, wounded and
missing, and probably twenty thousand men. I think the loss of
the enemy must be greater. I am now sending back all my wagons
for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and propose to
-fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."
He set at naught the science of warfare laid down in the books.
He was criticized for it. He hunted and haunted the enemy. He
sought battle on terms equal or unequal. Again and again he
hurled the legions of the Union against a brave, and alert, and
desperate foe. The slaughter was heartrending. At home, a
thousand miles from danger, the weaklings quailed and the poltroons
called him a butcher. Nothing could be more outrageous. There
was not a coarse or a gross thing in his character. No man was
ever moved by a spirit more gentle, or directed by feelings more
tender. He hated war. He realized his responsibility and knew
for what he stood. He felt that the lives of his armies, and to an
extent the lives of his enemies, were in his hands. He was an
economist in human life, and a conservator of human sorrow. He
knew that the quicker the order, the heavier the onset, the hotter the
pursuit, the sooner would the bright sun of peace break through the
awful clouds, and shed its light over a Republic which had proved
its right to live.
The inside character of Grant is revealed in the close of the war
even clearer than in its conduct. He had taken for the guide of his
personal conduct the motto, " Treat your friend so that if he be-
comes your enemy he can do you no harm, and treat your enemy so
that he may become your friend without humiliation." He acted
upon it in all the events of his military career. It barred familiari-
ties on the one side and left no room for jealousies on the other. No
one ever doubted his independence: no one ever dreamed of coerc-
ing him. But the commanders of armies, Sherman, Sheridan,
Thomas, McPherson, and a host of others great in our history, for-
5
68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
got that their training had been broader and their experience greater
than his, as they gave him their friendship and submitted to his
clearer vision, his surer guidance, his more unerring justice. So
it was in the momentous events which marked the very climax of
his military career. When the glad hour of surrender came he
yielded all that a chivalrous and generous soul could give. He did
what he could to make peace real, and to have industry and pros-
perity follow in the footsteps of peace. But he knew his ground
and stood to it. When an erratic President would disavow his
parole of the insurgent armies and try their leaders for treason, he
threatened to resign his place at the head of the army and espouse
the cause of his former enemies. When Sherman made terms with
Johnson, which mixed political with military matters, because upon
the march to the sea he had been out of touch with the authorities
for many weeks ; when Stanton charged Sherman with treason, and
the country was in an uproar, and the government ordered Grant to
hasten to Sherman's headquarters, take command of his army and
renew hostilities, the General in Chief slipped down into the Caro-
linas, set Sherman straight, told him how to fix the matter himself,
and left before the army or the enemy knew of his presence. All
that he said and all that he did in those days, so great in our history,
was guided by generosity to his brothers in arms, by his keen sense
of justice to all the world, and by the longing of his soul for a
genuine and lasting peace.
. Doubtless the fame of Ulysses S. Grant will for all time rest
mainly upon his military achievements. Great as those achieve-
ments were, however, they are very far from constituting the sum
of his service to the country. He was twice nominated to the presi-
dency without a dissenting voice in the national convention, and
twice elected by overwhelming popular majorities. History has not
yet done, but will in time do, his two terms in the presidency ade-
quate justice. No executive ever stood for the dignity and integrity
of the Union more steadfastly than he, or did it in more troublous
times.
He followed a Presidewt who was not in sympathy with his party,
or any party, whose erratic qualities had practically paralyzed the
executive departments of the government for four years. Nothing
had been done towards reconstructing governments in the insurrec-
tionary states, nothing towards recovering the law where war had
overthrown it, nothing towards settling the obligations entailed by
the war and resuming the normal business standards and financial
methods of peace, nothing towards resuming the relations of
brotherhood and restoring a true Union, nothing towards adjusting
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 69
the strained relations which the unusual incidents of the war had
made with many foreign powers. There were scandals touching
the federal service. The President may have been too confiding.
He knew more of military men with their trained obedience to
regime than of men who make their living out of politics. On all
sides the hatreds were deep, the controversies acrimonious, the out-
look overcast and foreboding.
The man was in a new place, and military ways would no longer
suffice. But the fundamental qualities of his character, his sim-
plicity, and his genuineness, still served him. He held opinions and
expressed them. He exercised the veto power freely. He sat at
the head of the council table, every inch the President. After full
opportunity for discussion, the quiet man at the head of the table
exerted a decisive influence upon the result. There was new aggres-
siveness in the routine of administration. The star route thieves
were punished. Irresponsible clans, which met new conditions and
much provocation with unlawful and murderous methods, were
hunted down. The moonshine distilleries were destroyed. The
government mails and the government engineers began to go freely
on their way. The feeling that there was a federal power strong
enough to protect its officers and agents in the performance of their
work, and honest enough to punish those who abused its trust, began
to abound in the land.
But this is far from being all. Reconstruction of the dismantled
governments in the insurrectionary states went forward. There was
great bitterness it is true. There were many mistakes undoubtedly.
The conditions were unprecedented. It was the accepted belief that
the control of the South could not at once be placed in the hands
which had but just prostrated all government there. The present
understandings were impossible then. The men through whom
the administration had to act were frequently a hard lot. But
reconstruction went forward all the same. Before the end of his
second administration the Soldier President saw the legal and con-
stitutional union of the states completely restored.
Happily the immaterial things in administration, the things which
cause the most commotion because all can talk about them, are in
time forgotten. The great things undertaken by a steady soul and
a free hand remain and become greater. There were great things
done by President Grant which will become yet greater in the light
of history. He helped on popular education : the excellent scientific
work of the government is largely traceable to his sympathetic
feeling: he inaugurated a humane and rational treatment of our
Indian wards: he was the first President to stand for reform in
7 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
appointments, promotion on the basis of merit, and protection in the
civil service. The fifteenth amendment, giving citizenship, regard-
less of color, the logical sequence of our political theories and of
emancipation, became a part of the Constitution in his first term.
While legal rehabilitation was going forward, the outlines of a
new Union were shaped and the spirit of the new Union was
tempered by the sense and the sympathy of the President. The
chief instrument of war became the main reliance of peace.
A concrete example, which may never have been in print, will
illustrate. Just after General Grant became President, at the hey-
day of patriotic exultation, the Republican members of the Senate
determined in conference to erect in the city of Washington a more
elaborate memorial of the triumph of the Union than had been
dreamed of before. The intention was to represent all the forces
of the Nation the Congress, the regular and volunteer armies, the
navy, the auxiliary organizations, and all the rest, which had com-
"bined to overthrow the Rebellion, in a costly and enduring group
of statuary which should signify the fact to future generations. It
was easily settled in the party caucus that the figure of General
Grant should typify the regular army in this group. Then a com-
mittee was appointed to wait upon the President and ask his cooper-
ation in the enterprise and his advice as to other figures which might
be included. A member of the committee has since described the
interview to me. The impatience of the President was scarcely con-
cealed while the plan was being unfolded to him. As soon as it was
laid bare he said with much feeling that the scheme was in his
judgment a bad one, that he had no claim upon his countrymen
beyond that of all other men and women who had done what they
could, that the last things the nation needed were reminders of the
war, that the representatives and the people of the South were to
enjoy Washington with the representatives and the people of the
North, and that nothing should be erected in the streets of that city
which would be disagreeable to any section or class of the people,
and that the committee must be assured not only that the judgment
of the President was opposed to their conception but that the official
attitude of the President would be positively antagonistic to it.
That ended the particular matter, but the incident illustrates quali-
ties which were inherent in a great man.
Two great, conspicuous acts in national statesmanship will forever
do honor to the sound judgment and testify of the personal courage
of President Grant in civic administration. Each of these acts
requires a book for adequate exploitation. They must be passed
with a paragraph.
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 7 1
The first was the complete settlement of our troubles with Great
Britain, growing out of the unsympathetic attitude of many leaders
of the party in power in English politics during our Civil War, and
the consequent building (in English ports) of the Confederate cruis-
ers, which in our sore straits had taken the attention of our armed
vessels away from the suppression of the Rebellion and driven our
merchant marine from the seas. For years our State Department
had been asserting the claims of American citizens to reparation.
The demands had been met by ridicule in the English press and dis-
dain in the English foreign office. The American jingoes talked
w y ar. The President caused our claims to be asserted with dignity
and directness, but he avowed his confidence that the time would
come when the English sense of justice, and the desirability of
international comity, would lead to a recognition of our demands.
War for the collection of money was unthinkable. He neither
sneaked nor blustered. His words made a more profound impres-
sion abroad than at home. When the Franco-Prussian War
threatened the equilibrium of Europe, apprehension quickened the
English sense of international justice. A joint high commission
was appointed to take the matter up. When the commission met
the British representatives refused to proceed, or even to consider
the arbitration of the subject, if indirect damages were to be insisted
upon. Direct damages meant the loss directly resulting from the
destruction of property, and were finally measured at fifteen million
five hundred thousand dollars. Indirect damages covered the cost
of the prolongation of the war, smart money for injured feelings,
and the like, and were estimated at from two to three thousand
millions of dollars. The talking element of the dominant party
was for the larger demands : the fellows who, in the main, fight but
with their tongues were for war : the opposition party was for any-
thing to harass and sever the dominant party. The President said
we could not honorably demand what Britain could not honorably
pay, and that we should be content with an expression of regret and
the payment of the direct losses. There was a great political
uproar. There was intrigue in the administration councils. But
Grant had his way. His way recalled Mr Motley from the English
mission, and removed Senator Sumner from the chairmanship of
the committee on foreign relations of the Senate, and precipitated
such a breach in his party that a large element refused to support
him for reelection. He had his way all the same: and his way
secured fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars for American
claimants, a suitable apology from the government of Great Britain,
modifications of the law of the high seas which have come to be
72 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
recognized by all the nations, and a firmer peace with the mother
country and all the world. And his way resulted in his reelection
with a decisiveness both unexpected and unprecedented.
The other great act of General Grant's presidency was the veto
of the bill further inflating the currency and further deferring the
time for making good the promise of the government to redeem its
paper obligations in coin. His trial was a sore one. The times
were hard. The country had just passed through a financial panic.
The demand for more circulating currency was imperative. The
apparent necessities of party were urgent. A clear majority of
the cabinet, of his party associates in Congress, and doubtless of the
rank and file of the party which had twice made him President,
hoped the bill would be signed. The President listened. At the
last hour he went to his library late at night and all by himself he
wrote one message to Congress signifying his reluctant approval of
the bill, and another vetoing it. He made each paper as strong as
he could. He was trying himself. .When through, he determined
that the veto message was the more logical and sound. He sent
it in. The integrity, the business sense of the country came quickly
to the support of his attitude. That message advanced the credit
of the country in every market of the world and strengthened the
foundations of a system of national finance capable of supporting
the industrial and commercial evolution of our rapidly accumulating
population. It did more. It put a premium upon moral courage
and developed more steadiness and stamina in the homes, and the
shops, and the factories, and the centers of trade throughout the
land. And it gained us larger respect at every seat of learning
and at every political capital in the world.
In a tour around the world, following his presidency, the General
received every mark of respect and honor that the people and the
governments of other nations could show him, and reached home,
by way of the Pacific, amid the universal acclaim of his countrymen.
So warm and enthusiastic was the expression of regard that mis-
guided party leaders conjured with his great name once again for
the presidency. The move \vas not of his seeking. His attitude
was that of modest and passive acquiescence in the wishes of his
people. But the results were acrimonious, humiliating, in some
ways tragic.
But his fine metal never lost its splendid edge. The casual
acquaintance which it had been my privilege to establish with him
when serving as a member of the committee of the Legislature
appointed for his reception and entertainment in 1881 made it proper
for me to pay my respects to him when we met in a Chicago hotel
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 73
in 1882. As we conversed there came a knock at the door. Open-
ing it, the General read the name upon a card that was handed him
and instantly said to the boy, " You will tell this person that I do
not want to see him." Partly closing the door and then opening
it again he repeated, " Boy, please remember precisely what I say :
you will tell this person that I do not want to see him." His man-
ner was as unruffled as the summer sun. " Why did you not say
that you were engaged," inquired Mrs Grant. " Because, if I had
he would have come again," was the reply. Wifely interest forced
an immediate though somewhat reluctant and embarrassing explana-
tion : " Well, that was a reporter from a daily paper which wants an
interview," the General said. " Yesterday this paper abused Presi-
dent Arthur for appointing Colonel Walter Evans of Louisville as
Commissioner of Internal Revenue, on the ground that he had once
supported me. The paper has the right to condemn the President
and also the right to criticize me, but when it condemns the Presi-
dent for nothing but because he appoints an old and entirely worthy
friend of mine to office it is time that I resent it." Who shall say
that this was not proper discrimination prompted by commendable
self-respect ?
His remaining years were encompassed by bitter suffering and
sorrow. He thought his sons might be as successful in the business
as he had been in the military world. Who can blame him for
that? He gave his name to a firm in Wall street embracing his
sons and another. The other proved a polished scoundrel and pulled
down financial ruin and debt and intense humiliation upon an
honored head. The General gathered up all he had, and pawned
his medals and presentation swords, to meet his obligations. But
this was by no means the sum of his suffering.
Although his sturdy will gave him great endurance, his body was
never strong. Pain was very familiar to him and he seemed spe-
cially susceptible to accidents and hurts. Many times in his cam-
paigns he had to rise above serious bodily suffering to command
the issue of great events. In 1884 he had a fall which compelled
him to go upon crutches for months, and from which he never
recovered. The last time I saw him was when he came into Mr
Elaine's room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on crutches to pay his
respects to the candidate of his party, although the two men had
never been in personal accord. Just after this, disease in its
dreadest form fastened upon him.
He commenced to write the history of his life, that the proceeds
might provide his family the means of living. The dread mes-
senger stood at his elbow and withheld the service of the summons
74 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
that he might complete his self-imposed and gracious task. The
cancerous growth in his throat made the suffering intense and in
time speech became impossible. He never murmured : his calm-
ness and steadiness were as sure as ever : his heart grew yet warmer
to his people, his mind yet clearer upon the enduring interests of
his country, as he went on with his writing. And as he wrote of
reconciliation between the sections and the factions, the old bitter-
ness did give way, the love of all his countrymen gathered around
him, and the people became united in a common sorrow.
To his physicians he expressed the hope that they could be instru-
mental in prolonging his life that he might finish his work. As he
worked, the last act of the Forty-eighth Congress created for him
anew the grade of General in the army, which he had vacated upon
his accession to the presidency, and the final act of President
Arthur's administration placed him in it. In all this, partizanship
receded and was stilled. With one accord the people of all sections
and all opinions demanded it. His life was prolonged until his
task was finished. He closed the book with the words, " Man pro-
poses, but God disposes." It was his last will. It ensured his
family a competency. It gave to his country a noble example, a
benediction, and an inspiration. It was all he had to give. But it
was much. It was more than any other of his generation could
give. With work finished, he waited the end with composure and
with confidence, and the thought of all the people gathered at the
cottage on the mountain top to await the end.
On the morning of July 23, 1885, on my usual walk to daily duties
in the capital of the nation, I had stopped a moment, as was my
wont, to admire the beautiful equestrian statue of McPherson, the
gallant commander of the Army of the Tennessee, whose life was
given to his country before Atlanta. There was a sharp stroke by
the fire alarm on the city's bells. I looked up to the flag on the
Treasury Department, and instantly it dropped half way down the
staff. Looking at my watch it was 8.24; and I knew that but a
moment before the light had flickered out on Mt McGregor, that a
devoted husband and father had passed out of a loving family circle,
that a great national character had passed on to the inexorable
judgment of history, and that a kingly spirit which had put itself
at peace with all the world was at one with the hereafter.
We knew before today that General Grant had the gift of military
genius. The ground over which the hour has carried us must
have illustrated the fact that he had other qualities which were very
great. They by no means made for strife ; they by no means pointed
to war. They were factors in civic as well as in military leadership.
INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 75
Sincerity, genuineness, gentleness, patience, steadiness, judgment,
force, endurance, self-respect and patriotism were inborn qualities
of his character, and peace was the best loved word in his
vocabulary.
The last public scene in the career of this great captain was not
what he would have made it, but it was very properly an imposing
one. The people moved by common impulse to our great city by
the sea. The offices, and shops, and marts of trade were closed.
The press, the pulpit, the schools, the clubs, gave expression to the
universal grief. The army and navy of the United States were
there in impressive form. The veterans of the Union armies he
had commanded, and of the Confederate armies he had opposed,
gathered in fraternal concord, to signify their affectionate and
patriotic sorrow. The President and his Cabinet; the Congress;
the Supreme Court ; the officers, the legislatures and the militia of
the states ; and civic organizations without number, joined in the
long march to the tomb. The cortege reached from the Battery
to Morningside, and beyond. And through the August heat of
the great city, through a throng of sorrowing people so great that
no man could number it, the endless line of civic black and military
white, and crimson, and blue, and gold, with arms reversed and
banners draped, with slow music and measured tread, bore the
mortal remains of Grant to their dignified and historic resting place
on the banks of the Hudson, to the shade of a great university, and
to that peace which he had longed for so fondly and had done so
much to conquer. "Ashes to ashes : dust to dust." He has gone ;
but the memory of such an one remains and becomes the splendid
inspiration of the nation, the priceless heritage of the generations
which follow after.
ADDRESS AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE ALBANY
MEDICAL COLLEGE, UNION UNIVERSITY
Mr Chancellor, Mr Dean, and more especially you, Young Men
of the Class of 1906:
You are entering the medical profession. You have had a very
substantial preparatory training and have been given about all your
heads will hold of the theoretical technic and methods of medicine.
The difference in capacity between now and when you have come
to be fifty years of age, and the difference in quality between what
you get through lectures and will get from practice are rather
delicate matters which I haven't the heart to obtrude upon you in
the presence of your mothers and sisters, and other fellow's sisters,
who have come to add to the gaieties of your graduation day.
Moreover, I am without the knowledge, and trust I am lacking in
the temerity, to attempt to discuss the technical or scholarly or
professional side of medicine. Happily it is unnecessary because
you are so full of theory that you could not absorb more of that
kind of thing just now. Moreover since assuming the burden of
this address, and in contemplation of it, I have read a recent maga-
zine article on the Ebers papyrus, found between the legs of a
mummy laid away some seven thousand years ago, which shows
that doctors were earnest if not so common, that diseases were
about as well known and as well classified, and that the uses of
drugs were about as well recognized then as now. Instead of aiding
me, this article has forced me to abandon some 'contemplated
observations upon the later history of the medical profession and
the marvelous progress of modern medicine. But there are some
things which any intelligent or experienced layman may say which
ought to command the interest of the medical profession. From a
point of view outside of the profession, and yet out of an experience
that no one can say is very brief, and also out of my every day
official business, some observations ought to be evolved which are
worthy of your graduation hour and of a moment's thought.
You are entering into relations with the medical profession.
What is a profession, anyway? It is an association of persons
united in spirit because engaged in the same business, occupied
by the same studies, and moved by the same aims. The business
can not be performed by mere physical effort, nor indeed by mere
76
FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 77
repetition and copying. It is intellectual business and must rest
upon a scientific basis. There must be training for it which will
enable one to recognize somewhat obscure indications, to ascertain
facts on his own account, to reason logically about them, and to
come to independent conclusions worthy of the common support
of all because the conclusions are the inevitable result of man's
sincere, intellectual, experimental, study of God's unalterable
truths. Between these persons there must be respect and frater-
nity: there must be genuineness and generosity. Jealous regard
for the honor of the gild must control the meannesses which were
given in some measure to all of us, and genuine enthusiasm for the
success of the gild's business must travel in double harness with
earnest desire for the progress of the world's good. Moving and
inspiring these persons there must be a proud history, stirring
traditions, time-honored usages, mountain peaks of particular
achievement, and a literature with substance, flavor, and inspiration
in it.
There is no profession with a longer or a more eventful history
than medicine: there is none marked by such serious study or such
splendid accomplishment: there is none whose work must not of
necessity be expressed by tongue or pen which has such a volumi-
nous literature: there is none upon which men and women are so
absolutely dependent ; and there is none so attractive to scoundrels
and so sheltering to scoundrelism, in spite of all that multitudes
of anxious physicians and all decent people have seemed able to do.
Not until recent years has it been deemed necessary in America
to surround the medical profession with legal safeguards and
regulations. In all of the leading countries of Europe England,
France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Austria-Hungary,
Greece, Italy, Switzerland, admissions to the medical profession
were regulated by law and conditioned upon serious scientific
training before there was much done in that direction by any
American state. In all of these countries the conditions of admis-
sion are probably more exacting now than in any American state.
In this land of the free, where so many people seem to think that
nobody is to be prevented from doing anything, the time is very
distinctly remembered when the very common usage implied that
holding a doctor's horse, attending the door, and picking up the
catchwords and forms of medical practice, were about all that was
needed to qualify one for the legal right to practise in the medical
profession. The laws, made by the legislatures and laid down by
the judges, assumed without sufficient reason that the natural
intelligence and self-interest of the people were all that were neces-
78 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
sary to protect them from imposition. Not until long after the
universities had developed medical faculties and these faculties,
with the more commercial and ephemeral medical schools, had
turned out many men who were trained in general culture, in
scientific research, and in practical experience, was the medical
practice placed upon any lawful or professional footing.
Nineteen years ago it was my honor and pleasure, as now, to
make the commencement address to the graduating class of the
Albany Medical College. At that time only five states in the
Union exacted an examination for a license to practise medicine.
The only sure basis of training graduation from a recognized and
approved school of medicine was nowhere insisted upon. Now
a diploma from a recognized medical college, in addition to a
licensing examination defined by statute, is required in 26 states.
In 31 states a medical diploma alone does not confer the right to
practise, and but eight of these states require nothing more than
an examination.
It is not too much to say that in erecting this legal and recog-
nizable basis for medical practice in America, New York has been
distinctly foremost among the states. Her experience has shown
her the necessary steps: she has been the first and gone the furthest
in taking those steps, and, wherever professional self-respect is
the keenest and public sentiment is the ripest, other states are
following her footsteps in the effort to gain her plane.
And it takes nothing from the great credit which belongs to many
others to say that the largest single share of honor for this splendid
advance is due to one whose professional skill and reputation has
recently led to his advancement to the presidency of the American
Surgical Association; who is just now on his way from Europe
where he has been to represent the American medical profession at
the International Congress of Physicians and Surgeons; who,
happily, was only last week and in his absence again elected a
Regent of the University of the State of New York by the Legislature
because of the distinct need which the State has of his service to
medical learning, the enthusiastic though gentle guide of the
Albany Medical College Dr Albert Vander Veer.
When we specify the conditions of admission to medical practice
in New York, we point out the most exacting requirements in
America. They have been fixed by men of large experience and
very high ideals in the profession and by courageous men in public
life who have been willing to follow the best professional leadership.
All admissions to practice must be upon examination by a state
board of medical examiners, appointed by and under the supervision
FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 79
of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York,
and before one is allowed to take the examination the following
facts must appear:
1 He must be 21 years of age. If nature has its course, that is
easily met.
2 He must have good moral character. So long as this may
be proved by the certificates of friends, it will not be difficult.
3 He must have four years of satisfactory preliminary prepara-
tion in an approved school of academic grade. This is arbitrary
and there is no dodging it.
4 He must have four years of satisfactory work in an approved
school of medicine. This is also arbitrary and has to be completely
performed. The specified work in institutions of approved aca-
demic and professional standards is the all-important advance.
Plans for establishing a combined college and professional course,
which will shorten the time one year, are in progress. It is clearly
desirable that everything be done to economize time and encourage
the scientific preparation in the universities. Institutions are
stronger than individuals: organized and public training is more
substantial than individual and private tutoring. The universities
train in the fundamental sciences much better than the average
school of medicine is likely to do.
5 He must have the degree of bachelor or doctor of medicine,
conferred by an approved and registered medical school having
authority to confer it.
One who has all these qualifications, and in addition thereto is
fortified with $25, may enter the State medical examination, and
if he passes it the board of examiners will certify that fact and
he will then receive from the Regents of the University a license to
practise medicine in New York State, which he must register in the
clerk's office of the county in which he is to try to do business, and
then he may practise the healing art upon all who think they stand
in need of it, and will permit him.
Now it would be wholly unjust to exact all this of our own medical
schools and our own medical students, and then allow physicians
and surgeons who have been licensed in other states, where the
schools are less substantial and the exactions are less severe, to
come in here on the same plane as our own practitioners. To stop
this, no one is allowed to come in from another state without exam-
ination, but the University is authorized to register and recognize
work in medical schools in other states, and, indeed, in other coun-
tries, where the minimum graduation standard is not less than that
fixed by our statutes for New York medical schools, and to admit
80 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
their graduates to the examination provided they have the other
qualifications required; and the University may also accept not
less than five years' reputable practice by a practitioner in another
state in lieu of both the preliminary and professional training, but
only to the extent of permitting him to try the examination.
The statutes also authorize the University to indorse medical
licenses granted in another state so as to make them good in this
State, when satisfied that the requirements in the other state are as
exacting as in this State, and that the other state will reciprocate
in like manner ; but little has yet definitely resulted from this author-
ity because but one or two states are able to meet our standards
of requirement.
The only states with legal standards fixed in the law which permit
reciprocity are New Jersey and Michigan. We have recently had
negotiations with New Jersey which have led to an acceptance of
their medical licenses here and of ours there. Some other advances
in that direction have been made. Some discussion of the matter
is now in progress with the medical authorities of Pennsylvania.
But there must clearly be legislation in Pennsylvania, as in prac-
tically all other states, before we can accept their licenses. But
many are moving. At a conference of state medical examining
and licensing boards held last week at Columbus, O., at which Ohio,
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and per-
haps some other states, were represented, three determinations of
very considerable importance were reached:
1 It was determined to adopt in the different states the New
York standards of measurement of preliminary education. The
term "count" is to be used and is to uniformly mean one recita-
tion a week for a year in a recognized high school or academy.
2 It was determined to recommend that a medical student's
certificate entitling to admission to a professional school shall
represent 60 counts, 30 of these counts to be in specified subjects,
of which 10 shall be in English, 10 in mathematics, 5 in Latin and 5
in physics, with the further provision that after 1908 there shall
be required 10 counts in Latin. This is of course not enough,
but it is a fair start.
3 A committee was appointed to arrange a medical school
course which shall be at least uniformly required as the basis
of the medical license, and it was determined that this must em-
brace bacteriology, histology, embryology, osteology, anatomy,
physiology, toxicology and chemistry. Again, it must be said
that this is not enough but it is a good start.
FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 8l
All of these determinations were reached with unanimity. These
conferences and the boards which they represent are without legal
competency to enforce these determinations, but the best profes-
sional sentiment is setting rightly in the western states, and
when those states really start to do a thing they do it very
abundantly. New York has peculiar satisfaction in seeing her
policies accepted with such courage in the great central states
as to promise their general adoption in the nation.
The New England states are singularly delinquent about state
standards for admission to the medical profession. The reasons
are obvious but the fact is likely to stand in the way of inter-
state professional comity for a considerable time. However, it
must not be overlooked that there are many medical schools of
high grade in New England, graduating large numbers of thor-
oughly trained young men, and it would be manifestly unreason-
able to doubt that the leaders of the medical profession in
several of the eastern cities are at least as learned, as skilled and
as high minded as any in the world. The trouble is not that
New England is lacking in learned medical men but that she does
not shut out the ignorant or dishonest ones.
California, Michigan, New Hampshire (a good and lonely
exception in the New England States), New Jersey, New York,
Ohio and Wisconsin are the only states which require a full
high school course before the medical school and the state
examination. In the other states the admission requirements
at the medical schools are very slight. No state requires a col-
lege course in advance of the professional school, but the schools
of medicine of Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities do re-
quire it. In twenty-six states a diploma from a recognized
medical school must precede and be followed by a state licens-
ing examination, and in nine other states there must be a
licensing examination, without the medical school diploma,
but of course there are schools and schools, and examinations
and examinations.
There are many other statutory provisions, and many penal-
ties for evading the law in New York which are intended, so far
as lawmaking can do it, to insure substantial character and
scientific competency in the medical profession, and to protect
the people against charlatanism and chicanery and violations of
the law are now being prosecuted with considerable vigor.
But I have already given more time to this side of my theme
than I can afford, for I want to present another.
82 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Not because of any suspicion that you are not all honorable
men, but because you hear so much and must needs think so
much upon the laws which fix the conditions of admission to the
medical profession, and because the profession claims such excep-
tional manhood, I must remind you that the wisest laws can only
protect and can not make a profession, and that he who enters
here with any expectation of winning honorable place in this pro-
fession must more than meet the bare demands of the laws. He must
have plans in his mind and purposes in his heart which will help
enforce the laws but are wholly above and independent of the law.
The gist and essence of a learned profession must appear in
the learning and high mindedness of its members ; in their pride
in its history; in their jealous regard for its good name; in their
eagerness for their share in the fraternal spirit which pervades
it, and in their sincere desire and intelligent power to give it
character and make it serviceable to mankind. No man has any
right to become a load upon a profession. If he enters one think-
ing of the commercial advantage it is going to be to him, rather
than of the inspiration to self-activity he may get out of it, and
of the support and honor which his hard labor and serious study
may bring to it, he is wanting in the first and most vital require-
ments for admission. The services of different men to a pro-
fession must be very different in kind and extent, but all may
bring it honor and respect; and all who are not anxious to do
that and who will not do valiant battle for it on occasion ought
to get the benefit of a professional boot at the point where the
stairway of shame descends to a wide back door.
The medical profession has" some special attributes which claim
particular reflections. If any men ought to exemplify and en-
force physical, intellectual and moral cleanliness, they are the
men in the medical profession. They know about aseptic dress-
ings, and they ought to apply them to themselves. Because he
is chargeable with a knowledge which recognizes filth at first
sight, and is bound to stand for health, strength and cleanliness
at all times and in all things, the doctor who is weak, immoral,
or unclean becomes a conspicuous and contemptible spectacle
among men.
The medical profession is in a special sense a scientific pro-
fession. It runs down to and rests upon the fundamental and
exact sciences. It applies them to the highest interests of men.
There has been too much ignorant and heartrending blundering
in medical practice by men who claimed an expert knowledge
which they did not possess. Experience has shown that society
FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 83
must protect itself. No amount of scientific training can make
men honest: a smattering of it seems to make men dishonest,
for it almost inevitably leads to false pretenses. A frank and
honest man with no scientific training but a very large practical
experience is a safer practitioner and a more respectable char-
acter than one who assumes to base his treatment of injury and
disease upon a scientific knowledge which every true scientist
knows is halting, inaccurate, and uncertain. One without a
very full knowledge of chemistry and bacteriology, and a very
considerable knowledge of physics and of physiology, zoology,
histology, and embryology, and one without a sharp nose for
investigation and without scientific methods which will reach
down to a foundation that will stand and lead out to conclusions
that are definite has no business dealing with the serious problems
of human physical life.
Young man, you have the fundamentals of scientific knowledge
and this studious method ; or, if you have not, you have it in you
to get it ; or, if it is not in you to get it, then you are trying to
break into the wrong profession. And the very least that the
medical profession can ask and the public can demand of you is
that when a sufferer asks your aid you shall with the utmost
pains and by the fullest physical examination ascertain what
the trouble is, if it is in )iou to know, and if it is not that you shall
claim the assistance of a true pathologist who can find out. When
you know what the matter is, you will be more likely to know what
to do to take care of it, and when you do know, proceed with assid-
uity and courage and exactness and completeness to do it, or claim
the aid of another who will. If you do not know and if you can not
do, at least spare people the infliction of any unnecessary lying about
it, or of any treatment which may be worse than the disease.
There is much to tempt one into wrong in the medical profession.
The respect of men and professional success alike depend upon your
not giving way to it. You will be found out when you do. The
judgment of a community is intuitive and inexorable. There are
fussy and fidgety and weak-headed people who enjoy bad health
and will have no physicians who do not encourage their belief
that they must necessarily have it. And there are physicians who
fall in with that sort of thing for the sake of the fees. But such
physicians have to be content with such patients, for other patients
do not want them. And where there is one person of that kind
there is an hundred of the other kind who want health and prefer
to employ an honest and genuine man who will tell them the truth
and help them to have health. Of course, a little harmless bam-
84 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
boozling of an heroic soul may be warranted in a real exigency now
and then, but the doctor who is fool enough to attempt to bamboozle
the wrong man when there is no exigency ought not to complain if
he pays for his mistake by the loss of his job and the destruction
of any reputation he may have. You may possibly be forgiven for
not telling unfortunates that they are as sick as they are; but if
you tell people that they are worse than they are, so that if they die
you will be on the safe side, and if in some way they live you will
get credit for a miraculous cure, your over smartness will surely
find you out. If you fondle and deceive patients in order to
enlarge your fees you will do your patients a great wrong but you
will do yourselves a greater wrong because while you are doing it
you will be polluting your own soul and robbing yourselves of
ambitious and enlarging reputations. It will be much better in the
long run to keep in the middle of the road and in company with the
truth.
The medical profession is a sympathetic as well as a scientific
profession. The very soul and spirit of it must spring out of
human sympathy. As fine traditions as any that have grown out
of man's experiences are associated with the work of the family
doctor. There is some reason to fear that he may be passing away.
The conditions of modern living, the methods of modern business,
the vast extent of really skilled specialization in medical practice,
and the growth of hospitals, all tend to commercialize the medical
profession. In two great buildings directly opposite each other on
State street in Chicago there are the offices of a thousand doctors.
They never see the homes of many of their patients, and too many
of them never see any home life at all for they live in hotels and
boarding houses themselves. They are excellent men and they are
better educated than doctors were in other days, but they must miss
some of the factors which are needful to the harmonious evolution
of a true physician's life, because that life relates to the homes and
the family circumstances and relations of his clientele.
Be true to the men and women who employ you. Don't be gab-
blers. Keep their secrets and serve them with undivided regard for
their interests rather than your own. Don't nurse jobs instead of
patients. Do your work ; do it thoroughly ; be gentle and true, at
times resolute and decisive; attend to your business with all the
expedition you have, and then get out. It will be infinitely the
better policy.
It is too bad that people seem so unable to get rid of a doctor who
has become a piece of the family bric-a-brac, when they really want
to. The only national society yet to be organized, which I can
FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 85
think of, is one which will give the members courage to get rid of
physicians of whom they have tired, and who have more nerve than
they have themselves. If one doesn't like a lawyer he goes to
another with his next case, but if he doesn't like his physician he
holds on to him with a sternness which philosophy has never ex-
plained and experimental psychology has never yet solved. If
men and women were not so subject to claptrap and pretense, they
would have better health, pretenders would not be so common nor
so persistent, and physicians of worth would be more widely recog-
nized and more uniformly regarded. There is room here for just
one more philanthropic national organization and we ought all to
give support to one that would take this good cause in hand.
It needs no mere theory and no bare logic, to show that science
and sympathy must go together in the successful practice of medi-
cine. The life of every successful physician makes it obvious
enough. The lower ranks of the profession are full of men who
blunder along and hold on to a weakling or an unfortunate with
all of the persistence which credulity permits ; but the upper ranks
of the profession hold the really successful men in whom humane
sympathy unites with learning to develop the great souls whom
the world recognizes on the instant and for whom it is always
eager to remove its hat. The men who are capable of service and
who are anxious to serve are the only men worthy of recognition
in the medical profession.
Help the poor. Do not be imposed upon, but do not withhold
service because one can not pay. It is not the function of the medical
profession to regulate fees. Do all the work you can get for what-
ever you can get and do it just as loyally as you can, whatever the
pay. It is about all you will be good for for a dozen years. You
won't be entitled to dictate terms for a good while. If you accept
this theory you will soon have work, you will grow in skill and
in repute, and you will in time be able to dictate terms. Don't
expect to gain the position of an eminent physician or surgeon
without going through the long, many, hard years of service and
of anxiety that that man has bravely, studiously and generously
given to gain learning, skill, eminence and respect.
And all of us have some sort of a claim upon the most eminent
and successful medical men, and the quaities that have made those
men successful lead them to respect it. One who has served who-
ever called, for small fees or no fees, at all times of day or night,
and has come to the time when he can do it no longer and must of
necessity discriminate and may in a way fix his own terms, may no
longer be bound to respond to every call ; but he is bound to have
86 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
young men around him who will, and to keep them under his guid-
ance, and to go himself when the exigency demands it.
If I can not afford to pay the Dean of this medical college for
attending me in my distresses and am obliged to take up with one
so inexperienced as you, I am at least entitled to have" Dr Ward
come in and see me before you let me die without any reason, and
have him tell you in my presence how well you have been doing,
and then take you out in the other room and tell you to stop and
do something else.
They tell a story of my friend, Dr Newell Dwight Hillis of
Plymouth Church, that I do not vouch for but that may easily be
true. The story is that when Dr Hillis was serving a small church
in Evanston, Mrs Hillis being desperately sick the young preacher
called an eminent specialist.Dr John C. Webster, of Chicago, whose
ministrations were completely successful. Dr Hillis worried about
the bill and after a little went over and said, " Dr Webster, I can
not pay you at once but I want to know what your bill is and I will
soon arrange it. Here is $50. It is all that I can pay now. Money
can never discharge my debt for such eminent services as yours.
If you will tell me the amount of your bill so that I may have it in
mind I will pay it in full just as soon as I can." Dr Webster
replied, " You keep your money. I owe you as much as you do me
and doubtless I shall need you as much as you will need me. You
have made as good in theology as I have in medicine. I would like
to exchange works with you. I will keep Mrs Hillis out of Heaven
as long as I can, if you will keep me out of Hell as long as you can.''
I can not hope to get in the high station of Dr Hillis but I submit
that I ought not to be compelled to forego the services of the Dean
of the Medical College on an exceptional occasion only because he
may stand in need of more theology than I am able to provide.
The medical profession is bound to be more than clean and pure
and square, more than scientific, and more than sympathetic. It
must be steady, cheerful, courageous, optimistic and confident. It
is bound to put courage into people to the end that doctor and
patient may work together in meeting exigencies and finding the
way back to normal health. Half the worth of half the doctors is
in their buoyant and bracing temperaments.
The medical profession is more than all that : it is a patriotic pro-
fession. It is expert upon the principles which the state must
observe to be healthful, and concerning the practices which society
must prevent if we are to live in crowded settlements with any
degree of comfort and safety. We look to this profession to set up
the machinery which may assure the common heilth and to provide
FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 87
schools, laboratories and hospitals, always expensive, which will
make modern scientific knowledge available to the mass and meet
the needs of the many who must inevitably be overtaken by acci-
dent and disease under the swiftly moving and dangerous conditions
of our complex life.
You are entering an ancient, a learned and an honorable profes-
sion. It is a profession which lays equal claim upon the funda-
mental sciences and the manly virtues. It is distinguished by the
fact that it is itself largely responsible for the marvelous scientific
advance of the last generation. It is filled with sympathy and gener-
osity. It is a courageous and patriotic profession. It attracts
scoundrels and is often used to shelter meanness and vice. It is
a laborious profession. You will have to earn your bread in the
sweat of your brows and you will have to win any fame you get by
a nobility of purpose that will stand all tests, by study which will
keep you at the front of the scientific advance, and by zeal for service
which always opens the door of opportunity. You have just as high
rights as any body. Do not fear. Take your self-confidence in
your hand. The outcome is with you. You will have to elect and
you will do it soon. You will stumble along in uncertainty, think-
ing much of yourself, wondering why you are not appreciated, and
soon coming to mediocrity out of which you can never rise ; or you
will at once give yourselves up to a splendid service and in time
bring honor to a great profession. No one is going to plead with
you or stay with you forever to get you to do it. If you haven't got
fiber and force enough to move out and up on your own account,
there are plenty of others who have. And they are the ones who are
entitled to the world's best help because they have got it in them
to help the world.
ABSTRACT OF REMARKS AT NEW YORK STATE
GRANGE, 1906, AT GENEVA, N. Y.
More than seventy per cent of the people of this State are living
in cities. New York city is doubling in size in thirty years. This
means that city interests and theories are likely to predominate in
the political, social, religious and industrial life of the State. Then
farmers will have to readjust themselves.
Our State agriculture is waking up. The splendid advance in
dairying, in truck farming particularly on Long Island, in fruit
culture particularly in western New York, in flowers and orna-
mental plants, and in the canning of fruits and vegetables, is all very
encouraging. But agriculture does not wake up as fast as the other
businesses of the State.
We have a State that can do anything. There is no good rea-
son why the New York farmers should let the western farmers
carry much more than corn and wheat past their doors to the great
eastern markets. W r hy do we not raise more beef cattle, more
draft horses, more sheep and more swine for New York, Phila-
delphia and Boston and for Europe? If it is said that it is because
of lack of feed, it may be answered that the State can raise any-
thing. The fault is not so much with the farms as with the
farmers. If the farmers do not know how to do it, the Agri-
cultural Experiment Station and the Agricultural College must tell
them.
What is needed is farming on a larger scale, a better chemi-
cal knowledge of the soils and a closer adaptation of crops to
soils, a better understanding of the demands of the markets, good
relations with the railroads, and more courage. The Agricultural
Experiment Stations serve every farmer in the Mississippi valley.
There is none in the country better than the one here in Geneva.
It is anxious to serve. The only uncertainty is about the anxiety
of the farmers to make use of it.
Farming, the success or failure of it, has much to do with the
farmer, with the manner of his life and that of his wife and
children, with his intelligence, and with his happiness. If New
York farmers can make more money they will have better schools.
With railroads, and trolleys, and telephones, and newspapers, and
the daily free delivery of mails, the farmers ought to have better
homes and quite as good schools as the people in the cities
88
REMARKS AT NEW YORK STATE GRANGE, 1906, GENEVA N. Y. 89
*
have. There must be not only a good elementary school within
walking distance of every farmhouse, but a good high school within
easy driving distance of it. The little roadside schools must be
connected with village high schools. The supervisory district must
be so small that a superintendent can visit each country school
once a month and that the teachers can all come together for in-
struction as often.
All the people of the State are to live together. We are to live
and help live. Every resident of New York city has interest in
the prosperity of every New York farmer. The reverse should be
true also. Farmers must dispel prejudices and get rid of old routine
that does not fit new conditions. Cooperation, not criticism, is
the essence of modern success. There is no greater State in the
Union. . Look at her history, her splendid commercial situation,
her wealth and her opportunities. Let all the people work together
to make the most of these things. Those who do will make most
headway for themselves.
THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION
Reprinted from Appleton's magazine by courtesy of Messrs D. Appleton
& Co.
Americans are ever ready to try out new propositions. Not
many Americans are very discriminating about projects. The
spirit of the country is not satisfied until suggestions have been
put to the practical test. If individual and personal initiative is
needed, any number of people will supply it; if public action is
necessary, nearly everybody will support it. As individuals, and
even more as a people, we are bound to get all of the possibilities
out of all the things we chance to think of. Our native energy
and common optimism are ever disposed to experiment, and our
free-flowing democracy and our much legislation make it easy
enough to do so. If something results we are very happy for we
have made an addition tOL our already very good collection of
national assets; if nothing results there is no harm we have had
the fun which we get out of experimenting, and the laugh which
we associate with failure. It all stimulates productivity. It puts
a premium upon the novel; but it makes headway and brings out
great results. Our energy and our optimism are valuable national
properties. They lead us into some passing blunders, but they
give us many enduring results.
It is strikingly so in matters educational. It is the intention of
the people who control the destiny of the" United States to do every-
thing, to try out every manner of experiment, which may raise the
common level of intelligence and enlarge the opportunity of the
boy or girl, the man or woman, in the crowd. It comes pretty
near being the national religion. It leads to some incidental
absurdities, but to more very striking and permanent advances.
There is apparently some growing doubt in the land about all
men being created equal. There is even some skepticism about
the laws being wholly without favor, or at least about their being
administered so that the rights of all are exactly alike ; but there is
no doubt whatever of the common determination that every
American boy or girl shall have his or her full opportunity through
an absolute equality of right to an education. That, at least, has
by the common impulse become the first law of our land. The
sense of proprietorship in the educational system is universal, and
the purpose to make that system the widest and the best in the
world is not at all obscure.
9
THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION QI
The early thought of the nation about education the thought
which our English forefathers brought from over the sea has
completely changed. It is not something good which government is
to encourage, but something vital which government must provide.
And the government which is to provide it must of necessity be
sovereign as well as local and administrative. The educational
system is no longer a system which shall supply the elements of
knowledge or the primary instruments for gaining knowledge,
but a system which is expected to supply all the knowledge which
any son or daughter of the State has the preparation and the will
to come and take. It no longer acts through schools alone, but
through libraries, museums, clubs, lectures, publications, -and all
other instrumentalities which may po'ssibly raise the level of the
intellectual plane.
And when so much in every direction is being attempted at
public expense, through officials who are not always experienced
and who get no credit for being conservative, there must be a good
deal of commotion much of the time, and no little uncertainty
about the net results.
Teachers and other professional managers naturally respond to
the popular impulse ; not a few of them capitalize it. When the
vox populi uniformly sounds an advance, when the educational
associations are ravenous for something new to discuss, when the
daily newspapers discriminate in favor of things that are novel,
when celebrity is dependent upon proposing something out of the
ordinary, teachers, like other classes of our resourceful fellow
countrymen, are not likely to be weighed in the balance and found
wanting. And it must be admitted that they enjoy it. Even if
discussion and agitation do not bring forth results that are lasting,
they supply the intellectual pastime which teachers sorely need.
But propositions and projects are not tendencies. Even dis-
cussions which entertain for an interminable time and movements
which take forever to come to something or nothing, are not trends,
but only persistencies, in education. The national character goes
on unfolding in its own exclusive and imperial way. It adopts
and adapts what can enlarge and enrich the soul of the Republic:
all the rest comes to naught. American education accepts and
incorporates what can add to the intellectual stores, the mental
culture, the philosophical sense, and the industrial productivity
of a free people ; the rest is forgotten.
One can not traverse the last twenty-five years of American
educational progress without seeing many developments which
are so substantial and decisive, and withal so completely accom-
92 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
plished, that they must have become permanent. That period has
been marked by truly marvelous advances, not only in the pro-
fessional but in the common thought of the nation. It i* not too
much to say that no such educational advance has been made in
all the other history of democratic government and of the English-
speaking race. So rapidly and confidently has universal education
moved in this country and in our generation that the outlines of
the national educational system of the future begin to appear.
A very distinct differentiation of the schools into elementary,
secondary and higher grades, for the purpose of administration,
is going forward. The professional mind is making it and the lay
mind is accepting it. It is advantageous to each grade of schools
because it puts each upon its own ground and holds each to its own
responsibilities. It makes educational values more stable and
constant, and it fixes standards capable of wider use. It discredits
pretenders and helps to clear away popular confusion.
In the last thirty or thirty-five years the system of collegiate
schools has advanced in numbers, in character, in attendance, in
the multiplicity of offerings, and in the measure of public support
and popular interest, to an extent which is alike surprising and
gratifying to educationists. The college system is giving far more
uplift and direction to all schools than the people realize. True
as to all parts of the country, this is most emphatically true in the
newer parts where democracy has little to hamper it, where new
institutions have not come into conflict with older ones which had
pretty good rights to the ground and could neither give way nor
easily change in character, theory, spirit, relations, or outlook.
The sure trend of our educational system is certainly more clearly
apparent in the newer states where both the national and state
governments have freedom and disposition to cooperate with ex-
ceedingly ambitious people who are setting up new institutions.
It is particularly true concerning institutions of advanced grade
which are providing a general rather than a local service.
Of course no unfavorable implications are cast upon the eastern
and older colleges. Indeed, it is doubtless true that some of them
are entitled to more credit for having broken away from educa-
tionally hide-bound constituencies and supposedly settled theories,
for having accepted the guidance of liberal and masterful leaders,
and for having possessed the courage and asserted the freedom
necessary to wider service, than the western pioneers with a
necessarily wider because a later outlook and with less hindrances
than the eastern pioneers are for drawing upon the world's later
experiences and making at first hand, controlling, supporting and
THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 93
shaping to their own ends what the country most needs in the way
of both upper and lower schools.
Any substantial uplift in a system of education must come from
above. Any great improvement or advance in" a class of schools
must come from a class of schools higher up. This fact is now
actually coming to be recognized by the lower schools themselves
in America, and that of itself is giving unwonted trend and charac-
ter to the national school system. But it necessarily follows that
the factors which enter into the scheme and give turns to the plans
of the upper schools exert a very strong influence upon the Icind
of uplift and the direction of the development which those schools
give to the middle and lower schools.
In the older states three or four of the better colleges of our
fathers have in the last generation developed into leading univer-
sities with most of the faculties which educational traditions and
modern philosophical and material development make needful.
In the meantime the other earlier colleges are getting their ratings
and finding their real work in a somewhat exclusive field, but
finding new satisfaction in occupying that field with added useful-
ness and honor. And many new institutions have been established,
to fall into one class or another of the higher institutions. The
stronger of these institutions in a very great measure, and the
others in some measure, are giving tone and breadth to our national
scholarship. But on the whole it must be said that they are doing
this through their graduates, through our professional and business
affairs, through the teachers they have trained for other colleges
and universities, rather than through any very direct bearing
which they have had upon the lower schools. They have sustained
no organic, nor indeed any very sympathetic, connection with
lower schools and their main influence upon the middle schools has
had reference to getting students for themselves and to having
them prepared to meet their- own circumstances and their particu-
lar demands. Not more than two or three of the older universities,
of which Harvard and Columbia are conspicuous examples, have
provided substantial offerings in educational science and adminis-
tration, or really undertaken in a rational way to study, to train
teachers for, or to give energy and direction to the schools below
them. With these very rare exceptions, the older universities and
colleges have given only very indirect and disjointed, and often
very self-interested, aid to the -primary and secondary school
systems which have been maturing very rapidly and substantially
all around them.
In all states west of New York and Pennsylvania, and in many
94 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
of the southern states, a distinctly new class of advanced institu-
tions has grown up. In many cases they came into being before
the Civil War, and often they were established and provided with
revenues by the state Constitutions. In several instances the
state universities already established were given the federal grants
of common lands and public moneys for research; in other cases
these grants resulted in new institutions of the more distinctly
agricultural and mechanical type. With or without this aid, the
state universities began to enlist the enthusiastic interest and
financial support of the people of their states in the seventies and
eighties, which became even more decisive in the nineties, and has
now gone so far as to completely assure not only their continuance
but their continually enlarging and absolutely decisive influence
upon all of the educational activities of their states.
If we were to name twenty of the largest American universities,
counting by buildings, equipment, faculties, revenues, offerings,
libraries and attendance, fully fifteen of them would be state
universities. Several of these have faculties numbering from three
hundred to five hundred teachers, representing every culturing,
professional, philosophical and industrial interest of our widely
diversified modern education; and their student bodies often include
from three thousand to five thousand people. Their assured sup-
port in popular sympathy and public money is alike munificent
and magnificent. Several have conferred more than a thousand
degrees each at their recent June commencements. Their gradu-
ates are of course most numerous in their own states, but they are
not unknown in any part of the country, nor indeed in any part of
any country where something worth while is going on.
The influence of Columbia and Harvard and Yale and some
others upon these western universities will always be gratefully
admitted, but that should not disguise the fact that they have
individuality, purpose and outlook very thoroughly their own.
Refraining from comparisons as idle as odious it is moderate to
say that in ambition and energy, in the variety of their work and
the plane of their standards, in the seriousness and the democratic
resourcefulness of their students and the steadily augmenting
power of their graduates, and particularly in what they are doing
for the industrial development and the sane thinking of the coun-
try, they have come to give a decisive trend to the future of Ameri-
can education.
To bring out the special bearing of this work, under the particu-
lar environing influences, on literary culture, on the political
sciences, on scientific research, on law, medicine and architecture,
THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 95
on all lines of engineering, and upon the constructive and agricul-
tural industries, very much might be justly said. But we must
now be content with briefly pointing out its relations to the middle
and the lower schools.
In all parts of the country the secondary schools have become
an integral part of the public educational system. In all of the
Central, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific states the universities have
also become a part of that system. In the East the public school
system has twelve grades ; in the West it has sixteen. The extent
to which the university has become a part of the common school
system may be seen from the following bare statements: (a) It
lays out the courses for the high schools. (6) It supplies a very
considerable part of the high school teachers, (c) It inspects the
high schools regularly by its own officer, (d) It admits students
to the university without examination, from approved high schools,
and under the stimulus of popular demand all of the high schools
must become worthy of approval, (e) The university takes a
keen interest in elementary school questions and is an ever present
influence in the teachers associations. (/) It makes the common
schools the laboratories of its education department, (g) It re-
sponds to all popular demands and becomes a potent factor in
determining educational legislation and shaping educational policy.
(h) It is free and all ambitious eyes are turned toward it; it is
popular and all boys and girls in the high schools think about
going to it. (i) It naturally comes to be looked upon as belong-
ing to all the people and as the responsible head and guide of the
public educational system.
Of course, this affects the university itself as much as the rest
of the system, and again of course, it brings out a university suited
to the needs of a busy, prosperous and ambitious people, who want
the best in the world educationally and are determined to make
very free use of their power to have -it. In other words, it is bring-
ing out in our states a new style of university which is already
giving decisive trend to the national system of education. And a
process which has gone so far in all the states save a half dozen
seems likely to be adopted in every state where existing universi-
ties do not meet every need at a nominal cost. In newer and older
states it is sure to become yet more decisive in its influence.
Again let it be said that in all this there is no element of implica-
tion against the older universities or the literary colleges, which
find all the work which they can do thoroughly and well. In-
heriting much from European thought and forms, shaped by
American conditions when classical training was the sum and
96 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
professional employments the goal of college work, they^have
aided and been themselves influenced by the development of a
distinctly new class of institutions of higher learning, which have
been obliged by the democratic advance in political science and
industrial prosperity to defy both English and German models,
train for both scholarship and character, and provide practically
free instruction in any study to any qualified person.
If one will realize that this great and popular university develop-
ment within the public educational system is universal in the
states which embrace the centers of population, of industrial pro-
ductivity, and of political control in our country, one will be able
to appreciate something of the overwhelming trend which it is
giving to our education. There is nothing like it anywhere in the
world, for there are no other political institutions which must give
every one his chance; there is no other nation which realizes so
keenly that its true greatness depends upon making the most of
every individual unit, without regard to sex, or circumstances of
birth, or church associations; and there is no other people with
whom education comes so near being an absolute and universal
passion.
Passing now from what seems to be the overwhelming trend in
our comprehensive system of education, namely the development
and diffusion of the higher learning as an integral part of the system
of common schools, let us inquire about the more specific results
of this and some associate influences which are operating in our
intellectual affairs.
Our entire system of schools, higher and lower, is moving toward
resourcefulness, to the training which fits one for successful living
in our complex civilization. The mere rudiments which enable
a child to read and write are far from sufficient in the elementary
schools, and the linguistic studies which are merely culturing, in the
old sense of the term, are no longer in the highest favor in the
advanced schools. The early ideals are passing away. The little
child must be trained to see, to think, to do, and to express him-
self; the college student must get the knowledge, the purpose, the
power, the steadiness, and the endurance which accomplish sub-
stantial results, through mental or manual labor. Culture which
gains recognition in this country must be more than skin-deep and
must come from the reactionary discipline of work upon the work-
man.
The trend of our higher education, up to the present generation,
was toward respectable polish for the idle rich, and toward some
preparation for the learned professions. The trend of our higher
THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 97
education now is toward a much better preparation for the pro-
fessions and toward very complete preparation for all of the skilled
employments, all of the constructive industries, and all of the com-
mercial activities.
The more complete preparation for the professions has arisen
from within the professions themselves and has resulted very
largely from legislation limiting admissions to the professions. It
is but just to say that in this the State of New York has been fore-
most. In requiring (a) four years' satisfactory work in an approved
school of academic grade; (b) four years' satisfactory work in an
approved professional school, with the bachelor's degree from an
institution duly empowered to confer it, as conditions for admis-
sion to the State licensing examination, and (c) in sharply limiting
the use of the terms college and university, New York has given
real trend to professional education and professional standards,
which many of the states about her are happily beginning to
adopt.
In this connection it would be a mistake to omit mention of the
decisive tendency to prepare for the professions in professional
schools which are associated with the universities, rather than in
offices or in independent institutions. This has led many inde-
pendent professional schools to seek alliances with universities.
It is surely making both the preliminary and professional training
much stronger and it is leading a much larger number of students
to more thorough training than they would otherwise get. When
we recall how recently there was little preparation, either scholastic
or technical, for the professions in America, and how superficial
much of the training in independent schools by lecturers who were
carrying on regular practice has been, we have special satisfaction
in realizing the extent and excellence of the work which the univer-
sities are now doing for professional learning and expertness in
America.
The aggressive work of the universities, other than that which
is in preparation for the learned professions, has come to be in the
courses which are fundamental in administration and in the most
successful carrying on of the commercial activities and the con-
structive and manufacturing industries. There is large demand
for training in the chemistry which enters into agricultural and
manufacturing activities, in all lines of engineering, in the econom-
ics of productivity and trade, and in the technic of all the businesses
which follow after them. There is more demand also for the
basic work of the political sciences. The demand is the largest
where the equipment and teaching are the best. Of course this
98 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
all relates back to and shapes the courses in the high schools, and
in some measure in the elementary schools.
It is doing more than causing the lower schools to prepare stu-
dents for the higher schools. It is developing a rather common
belief in the crowd that a university which does little besides berate
the lower schools about suitably training students for itself, is not
doing overmuch for education; that young people must be trained
for subordinate places in business and for manual skill in the trades
as well as for the colleges and for positions claiming deep scientific
knowledge; that the high schools have not yet accomplished all
they ought *in this direction, and that there is "something lacking
in the way of training the masses of children in the elementary
schools for efficiency and contentment in the situations in life
which they are likely to occupy; that something in the way of
public trade schools must be established for the children of the
masses at a rather early age, and that the universities and colleges
are called upon to recognize that fact and help realize it. In a
word, the very development of the higher learning is creating the
common thought that more must be done for the elementary
learning, that not so much is being done for those who do not go to
college as for those who do, and that more must be done to adapt
the training of the masses to probable environment and to the
inevitable conditions of hand labor and other self-respecting and
useful employments.
One of the most gratifying developments of recent years in
School administration relates not more to the better understand-
ings and the warmer friendships between schools of different
grades than between public and private schools, and between
schools in one section of the country with those in another. Presi-
dents and principals and superintendents and teachers are begin-
ning to learn that one gets rich in education not by withholding
but by giving, and that prosperity attends an institution which
knows enough to adhere to its own business when it ought and to
aid other institutions when it may. This knowledge is propa-
gating deeper mutual respect and closer fraternal regard. Coopera-
tion, rather than competition, is coming to be the policy of the
schools.
This growing disposition toward mutual helpfulness recognizes
no state lines or other political boundaries. It is indifferent to
provincialism, to sectarianism, to politics, and to all other forms
of exclusiveness. That there is a "democracy -of learning" which
embraces men and women who live in every state and every land,
and which gives its ennobling inspiration to persons of every class
THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 99
or race, or church or party, and which is going to aid every intellec-
tual and moral interest of mankind at every opportunity, is coming
to be known wherever there are men and women who are moved
by the spirit which God has placed in every human breast. It is
making the widest, the finest, the most inspiring, and the most
influential fraternity that the world has ever known.
In later years there has been a very significant enlargement of
the understanding that the true functions of a democratic state
justify it in entering upon divers educational activities outside of
the schools. It is coming to be accepted without cavil that the
state may not only build up a state library for the use of state
officials, legislators and judges, but a state library for the aid of
the professions, or for any other interest which may be aided by a
collection of books which it can not itself easily secure or maintain;
that books may be loaned from the state library to any one needing
them; that local libraries are to be encouraged, subsidized and
guided ; and that traveling libraries may be sent about the state to
quicken study in every direction. This tendency goes beyond
libraries: it extends to museums and all collections which may
interest and instruct the crowd; it is very jealous of original his-
toric manuscripts and mementos; it sends standard pictures to the
schools and all manner of institutions, and it gives helps to art
centers, reading circles, study clubs, lecture assemblies, and all
other intellectual activities whether they are individual or asso-
ciated.
The tendency is going yet further. It is extending scientific
research to matters concerning the public health, and even to
commercial and industrial activities. It would extend every
facility to sane and logical thinking and to all rational doing.
One state erects laboratories for the chemical, microscopical, and
bacterial examination of diseased tissue; another analyzes all
drinking water sent to its scientific laboratories and determines
whether or not the specimens are free from contamination ; another
conserves the animals in its forests and propagates the fishes in its
waters; another works up its clays into forms both useful and
beautiful; another measures the carbon in its coals; another tells
its farmers how to add to the potentiality of their acres and what
crops will command the readiest markets; and yet another shows
its railroads how to get a maximum of speed and hauling power at
a minimum of cost. All this and much more is going on often
all of these things, and more, in the same state. The tendency is
growing rapidly. It seems destined to give even more decisive
turns to the future of our education and our civilization.
IOO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
The truly significant thing about it is that the more and the
better it is done the stronger is the popular support. There is no
socialism or paternalism about it. It is merely the outworking of
the fundamental American doctrine that in education the masses
have the same right of opportunity as the classes. It is using the
combined political power to gain the educational results in a short
time which without that power a few favored people may get in a
long time, and often keep to themselves for a yet longer time. It
is all illustrative of the inherent spirit of the country and of the
roads which that spirit is bound to break out and follow.
The growing culture -as well as the ever developing business of
the country is quickly reflected in our schools. There is no country
in which the changes .are so frequent and the accumulations so
apparent, and the progress so rapid; and there is none in which all
this so quickly affects the situations and policies of the schools.
This is well illustrated in the architecture and the multiplying
adornments of the newer school buildings at nearly all of the
centers of population." It appears also in the art courses which
are making their way into the programs of the schools. The great
wealth of the country which embellishes and cultures so many
homes does the same for the schools with this difference, that
the influence of it is even more widely and sanely exerted in the
schools than in the homes, because the schools are not so likely to
be inherited by the superficial and idle rich, with all that is implied
thereby. The schools are, in a way, becoming more and more the
accumulating and distributing points of the country's culture as
well as of the country's justice and prosperity.
Of course, the large fortunes are producing some excessive and
unwholesome luxury in the life at some of the universities, but
there is no more democratic and leveling institution in the world
than an American university, and the 4 students who use their
wealth grossly and live riotously are no less likely to lose standing
in the common sentiment of the crowd than they are to meet their
fate in the semester examinations.
The physical training which is now required very uniformly of
the mass of college students, and the extent to which sports have
been organized are giving manifest turns to our newer education.
There is a new respect for health and a new enthusiasm for physical
accomplishment. There is a new valuation upon sport and a
wider interest in keeping it clean. The whole thing is doing much
to attract youth to the high schools and colleges and is exercising
an unmistakable influence upon the life in the elementary schools.
Of course there are and will be excesses, but on the whole the in-
THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION IOI
fluence is good. Children endure pain with less whimpering; life
in the open is not only generating new power but creating new
ideals ; and the thinking of young people in both city and country
grows more sane and ambitious through the striking development
of physical training in the schools and of organized interscholastic
sport.
No one can foresee the destiny of the Republic, but that there is
an educational purpose abroad in the land which has never before
been so pervasive and so ambitious in any land seems clear. It
is the spirit of a mighty people, gathered from the ends of the
earth, enlightened by the world experiences of a thousand years.
It is the spirit of a people with outlook and expectancy. They
expect to use the wealth and the political power of the nation to
make certain that every son and daughter of the nation shall have
the fullest and freest educational opportunity. The functions of
the state concerning every manner of educational activity, in and
out of the schools, are being steadily enlarged and strengthened
through the initiative or the common desire of the multitude.
Growing appreciation is giving greater heed to the advanced insti-
tutions and bringing them to the aid of all institutions and there-
fore to the intellectual quickening of the entire country. Every-
thing that the nation, the state or the municipality can do to aid
true learning, without any injustice, it is to be made to do. And
the learning which aids doing and the culture which is the product
of labor are to be of the most worth.
DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY
A 000 038 636 7
