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THE DECLINE

AND

REVIVAL OF PUBLIC INTEREST

IN COLLEGE EDUCATION

An Address Delivered before the Graduates of
Oberlin C01.1.EGE June 20th 1893

By MERRITT STARR, A. M., LL. B.

(a. B., oberlin, 1875; A. B. AND LL. B., HARVARD, t88l.)

CHICAGO

PRESS OF CHARLES W. MAGILL

,893

THE DECLINE

AND

REVIVAL OF PUBLIC INTEREST

IN ^COLLEGE EDUCATION

An Address Delivered before the Graduate>s of
Oberlin College June 20th 1893

By MERRITT STARR, A. M., LL. B.

(A. B., OBERUN, 1875; A. B. AND I.L. B., HARVARD, t88i.>

CHICAGO

PRESS OF CHARLES W. MAGILL

'893

The Decline and Revival of Public Interest
IN College Education.

OUTLINE

1. There has been such a decline, recently followed by a revival. This is
shown by statistics.

2. The decline and revival are incidental to the larger tendency toward
centralization.

II.

What is being done, and what can be done, to check the decline?
What has caused the revival ?

How can the general public and the masses be inspired with fresh confi-
dence in the colleges ?

1. By fuller instruction in the history and causes of the present popular
and public movements, and of popular and public movements in general. That
is, by instruction in social science. Sociology embraces the needed studies.

2. By teaching the useful arts.

3. By university extension work and the university settlement.

III.

These branches' and forms of work are valuable, not merely for their
influence upon public interest. They are necessary parts of the best education,
and necessary to the preservation of our institutions.

The philanthropic purpose in which the colleges were founded is best sub-
served to-day by such instruction and work.

Note. — I have received valuable assistance in the preparation of the tables of statistics from
Mr. Glenn E. Plumb, '91 O. C

The Decline and Revival of Public Interest
IN College Education.

Mr. President, Ladies a7id GeiiUemen : I count myself fortunate in being
called to address you to-day.

The occasion itself is one that I prize ; and the subject upon which I am
permitted to speak has long been near my heart.

I bring a message of good cheer.

While the facts which I have to present are in some respects such as to
excite apprehension, yet their deeper meaning is that the opportunity for phil-
anthropical educational work was never so great as now, and that its rewards
were never so sure.

We love the day, because in it we celebrate our Alma Mater's birthday,
and the commencement day for each one of us as well. We come back from
the wander-jahre of twenty years to visit the old homestead once more. For
each one of us the day has its special meaning ; it stands for the love of Alma
Mater, the birthplace of better intellectual life and fellowship. It signifies
to us that culture is a basis of brotherhood. lyooking back, the whole of our
ong and struggling period of school life seems fore-shortened into a group of
beautiful commencement days. The best life of each class, of each society, of
each youthful scholar and orator and singer, shone out in those days, and the light
of those anniversaries throws its halo over the whole long procession of years.
The marks of progress are so numerous and pervading that we have difficulty
to recognize the old landmarks and find the old paths. We rejoice in the
advancement of the college; we feel enriched by her prosperity. When we
roamed these streets as Juniors, or sat by the fire of an evening, after the next
morning's lessons were prepared, we used to grow warm with enthusiasm for
the brave men who made her past. We used to hope that in some happier
time .she might be blest by benefactors who could give her nobler residence-
We anticipated for her a prosperous future ; and now we are gratified to see
these noble buildings of stone rising among the trees, and to realize that Spear
and Talcott and Lord and Baldwin and Peters and Sturges and Warner Halls
have been added to the housing of the school. They fulfill in part the dreams
of our youth. They are part of the

" — castles fair with stately stairways,"

that we u$ed to build in fireside fancies, as somewhat worthy of the high en-
deavor and splendid purpose with which the first foundations were laid. There

But still we
and

comes at times a nameless pang that many of the older landmarks have dis-
appeared— that we no more can

" — pass beside the reverend walls,
In which of old we wore the gown — "

" — rove at random through the town,
And see the tumult of the halls;"

" — hear once more in college fanes
The storm their high built organs make,
And thunder music rolling shake
The prophets blazoned on the panes."

We still may pace these streets and see the monument that commemorates the
patriotism of Company C, and the other soldier boys ; though we miss the
Laboratory and Tappan Hall, and Ladies' Hall and Colonial Hall, we have
found French and Society Halls still here as of old ; have entered the deserted
class rooms ; have seen

; " — the same gray flats again, and felt
The same, but not the same; and last
Up that long walk of elms we past
To see the rooms in which we dwelt: —

And those

Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art.
And labor, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land."

We are gratified that ten years have seen the Faculty grow in the num-
ber of professors and instructors from forty-five to eighty-eight ; that the
elective privilege has grown from nothing in 1873 to the magnificent list of
electives of advanced studies covering thirty-five terms' work or twelve full
college years, in 1893 5 ^^^ that the total number of hours of class instruction
offered by the college now reaches the magnificent number of 11,065. When
we reflect that the old fashioned normal college course consisted of four years
of thirty-six weeks each, and that each week's instruction consisted of three
hours of class work a day for five days in the week, or fifteen hours a week,
180 hours a term, or 540 hours a year, or in four years 2,160 hours of class
work; and reflect that 11,065 ^^^ offered the student now, while two full years
have been added to the Literary course, once known as the Ladies' course, and
two years more to the preparatory department, which has now been wisely
separated from the college and made an academy, we realize that more than
five times as much instruction is afforded now as then, and that the outward
growth has been even surpassed by that within.

This is in every way gratifying to the alumni. It shows that the younger
faculty of to-day have comprehended the measure of the example set before
them, and have labored with loyalty to the spirit of the past.

Turning backward a moment, it is ten years since we gathered to celebrate
the semi-centennial of the college. It is twenty years since I first entered these
walls. The tendencies of these twenty years is the subject to which I invite
your attention.

As I turn from the glowing picture of our Alma Mater's growth, I recall
an incident in the English parliamentary campaign of 1885, related by James
Russell Lowell. During the campaign Mr. Lowell attended a hustings meet-
ing, which was held in an old church turned into a hall. The church soon was
crowded to suffocation, and before addresses began it became necessary to open
the windows to secure ventilation. The committee found the windows of the
old church immovable, and then decided to have several of them broken open.
Fearing that the noise of the breaking might create a patiic in the crowd, they
asked the mayor of the city to explain the proceeding from the platform and
allay any tendency to fright. The mayor, who was an elderly baronet and
well educated man stepped forward to the edge of the platform and began his
announcement, but was interrupted by continual cries of "Gladstone," "Glad-
stone," and could not make himself heard, until he finally exclaimed: "Look
here ! I ain't a-going to make a speech. I've got something to say !" — which
secured attention. His phrase expresses my feelings to-day ; let me invite your
attention then to the following facts :

Looking beyond our own college walls to the history of the higher
education in the country as a whole, we find most striking evidences of
a decline and revival of public interest therein. After full recognition of the
marvelous growth of our educational institutions, and of the expansion of
educational work, when we examine the record of the growth of our popu-
lation, wealth and institutions, we are compelled to admit that the educational
growth has not kept pace with the growth in the other fields.

It is not a subject for which blame can be attached to any one, or to any
institution. The explanations of this fact are many. The vast immigration of
a population which has been mainly of little education, and little desire for
education, is perhaps the easiest explanation and the best one. The attend-
ance upon colleges since 1873 as announced by the National Commissioner of
Education may be summarized as follows :

TABLE I.
ATTENDANCE AT AMERICAN COLLEGES.

1874 56,692

1875 58,894

1876 56,481

1877 57,334

1878 57,987

1879. 60,111

1 880 60, 594

1881 62,435

1882 64,096

1883 not found in Government Reports.

1884 --65,522

1885 .65,728

1886 ._ ..67,642

1887 70,024

1888..... .75.333

1889 :.. 86,996

These statistics show plainly the effect of the financial depression following
the year 1873. We hppe that no similar decline will follow the financial re-
action of 1893.

The relation of college attendance to total population of the country is
shown by the following table :

TABLE II.

Year.

Population.

College Attendance.

Population. Percent-
age of increase over
that of preceeding
decade.

College Attendance.
Percentage of in-
crease or decrease.
(Decrease represent-
ed by minus sign.)

1860

1870

1880

1887

1888

31,443,321
38,558,371
50,155,783
58,882,312 (e)
60,128,958(6)
61,375,604 (e)
62,622,250
63,868,897(6)
65,115,544 (6)

54,969 (a)
49,163 (b)
60,594 (c)
70,024 (c)
75,333 (d)
86,996 (d)

102,970

107,234

114,419

•22,^^
•30^,

•IVA (*>
.20 (f)
.22

•24-«Q«o

.24

-15
.23

.15(f)
.25 (f)

1889

1890

1891

.43

.41

1892

(a) From census of 1860, Observations on Education, page xi.

(b) From Report of U. S. Commissioner of Education, 1879, pagre 104.

(d) From 2d Vol. Report of U. S. Commissioner of Education, 1888-9, page 1C95.

(e) Population of 1887, 1888 and 1889 have been estimated by taking the population of 1890 and de-
ducting respectively 1, 2 and 3 tenths from the increase since 1880. For 1891 and 1892 by adding 1 and 2
tenths respectively. Population for 1860, 1870, 1880 and 1890 taken from census returns.

(f) The percentages in general are calculated upon the totals of the preceding census year. Thus
the population of 1870 shows an increase over that of 1860 by .22 63-100 per cent of that of 1860. For 1887
and 1888 in each case the percentages are calculated upon the totals of 1880 as a principal.

The date of college attendance for 1890, 1891 and 1892 have been furnished me by the Honorable William
T. Harris, National Commissioner of Education. I wish to acknowledge here once for all the obligations
which I am under to him and his predecessors and their reports, and to the Honorable F. B. Sanborn,
formerly Secretary of the American Science Association, for these statistics, and for many suggestions
gleaned from the society's journals; also Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago, for many facts and
suggestions concerning university settlements.

The same tendency is still more clearly shown by the following table of
the percentage of college attendance to total population :

TABLE III.

Percentage of college attendance to total population.

54.969

i860 .00174

1870 .00129

1880.. .00120

1887 .00108

1888 .00125

1889 .00141

1890 .00164

1891 .00164

1892.. -00x75

31,443,321
49>i63

38,558,371
60.594

50,155.783
70.024

58,882,312

75.333
60,128,958

86,996
61,375,604
102,970
62,622,250

107.234
63,868,897
114,419

There was an actual decline in attendance upon the colleges from i860 to
1870, which may be accounted for by the effects of the- war, and of the more
rigorous sifting of the enumeration in the later years. The tables show a sud-
den and decided change in the proportion in 1888. The increase in college
population instead of relatively falling behind that of the total population, sud-
denly surpasses it, and continues so to do, in increasing proportion in 1889
and 1890.

This is the hopeful sign in the exhibit. Taking the generation together,
therefore, we find it has been one of relative decline in college interests, but
with a sharp revival of interest in the last five years.

Many reasons may be assigned for this change in 1888 and 1889. I think
the general prosperity of the country has been an important factor. Another
is that the years from 1882 to 1888 witnessed a decline in immigration.

But I see also another cause. The specific criticisms of the people upon
the colleges, and their requests for studies of culture, science and art, as well as
of discipline, were most cleady heard in the period from 1873 to 1883. At first
these were simply ignored. But finally they were granted a hearing, were res-
pectfully considered, and in part complied with. This recognition of the peo-
ple's demand has borne its legitimate fruit in the signs of reviving interest in
the last five years.

These facts were sufiicient proof of the tendency to decline and also of a
revival. That the tendency exists and has been recognized by leading educa-
tors is further evidenced by the following remarks of President Eliot on February
i6th, 1888: (See Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 26, page 250: "Can School Prog'-
rammes be Shortened and Enriched?"): "The anxiety with which men charged
with the conduct of college education look at this question is increased by the
relative decline of American Colleges and Universities as a whole. This rela-
tive decline, which was pointed out nearly twenty years ago by President
Barnard of Columbia College has been very visible of late years. The popula-
tion of the United States is supposed by the best authorities to increase about
one-third in every period often years. In the ten year period from 1875 to
1884 inclusive, the universities and colleges named in the tables published by the
National Commissioner of Education show an increase in their number of students
of 1 1 per cent instead of 33^3 per cent. If we select from the same tables the ten
year period from 1876 to 1885, the increase is 16 per cent. But the explanation
of this higher percentage of increase in that the total number of students in the
year 1876 was abnormally low, being 2,400 less than in the year 1875. If we
add to the institutions enumerated as universities and colleges all the schools of
science and all the higher institutions for the education of women, we still find
that the enlarged list of institutions has not gained students at the same rate at
which the population has increased, although the schools of science have made
very large gains in the decade referred to. Thus the increase in the number of
students in the universities and colleges and schools of science and women's
colleges, taken together, was only 23 per cent in the ten years from 1875 to
1884 inclusive.

Obviously there are serious hindrances affecting all the institutions which
receive young men and women at the age of eighteen or nineteen to keep them
under a liberal training for three or four years. One of these hindrances un-
doubtedly is that these colleges held too long to a medieval curriculum ; but a
greater hindrance in all probability is the burden imposed upon parents when

their elaborately educated sons cannot support themselves in their professions
until they are twenty-seven or twenty eight years old. Hence the importance
of the inquiry : ' Can School Programmes be Shortened and Enriched?' " He
finds the principal trouble in the preparatory shools, that they do not require
more of the boys from fourteen to sixteen who come to them ; that these boys
are put to work on studies suitable for boys of from eight to ten years of age.
He also urges the following necessities and criticisms of existing public and
preparatory schools :

1. The need of better teachers.

2. The need of making the programmes more interesting, and of beginning
literature, biography, elementary science and history at the bottom.

3. Diminishing the number of purely mechanical review lessons.

4. That children are held back to master what they come to in the courses,
wrongly arranged, and promoted only annually ; — that is, the over-development
of the class system, and the laying before the pupils of difficult reflective studies
at too early an age, and then holding them upon the studies until they can be
mastered.

5. The too great diminution of working school time by long vacations,
frequent short vacations, the shortening of the hours of school, etc.

The report of the New York State Superintendent of Education for 1888
(Andrews. Draper) contains the following: "There is a large uneducated
class in the State, and our statistics show that it is growing larger. The
attendance upon the schools has not kept pace with the advance of population.
Recent legislation forbids the employment of children under thirteen years of
age in any manufacturing establishment, but no adequate provision is made for
gathering them into schools. The number in the streets grows more rapidly
than the number in the schools. Indeed, nothing practical has ever been done
in this State in the way of compelling attendance upon the schools. The result
is sadly apparent, and the premonitions are full of warning."

In 1889 the same official says (page 13 of the report): "The total attend-
ance upon the schools when compared with the whole number of school age has
grown less and less with strange uniformity."

The Census Bulletin No. 53 gives the statistics of thirty-five States in
school population. Of these the gain in the school attendance was greater than
that in population in seventeen States, and was less than that in population in
eighteen States. Those in which the gain was less than that of the population
are the more populous States which contain the great bulk of our people, namely,
New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, Iowa, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, California,
Oregon, Utah, Wyoming ; while the great gains were made in Arizona, Arkan-
sas, North Dakota and other States where the educational advantages were
insignificant before.

The meaning of these facts is that there is a decline of interest in public
education as well as in higher education. I believe that still later, bulletin on
all the States and Territories shows a larger number of States in which there
has been an increase, and so raises the total percentage of school attendance to
population. But the facts as a whole still disclose that there has been such a

decline, and that we need to be aroused from our complacent feeling that we are
growing vitally in the education of mind and hand, as well as in numbers and
wealth.

Since the facts prove that there has been such a decline, although now
attended b}^ signs of a revival, it behooves us to enquire what has caused such a
decline, and how it may be permanently cured. I believe that the tendency has
been a part of a larger tendency, which pervades the history of the last twenty
years.

Looking back over the last twenty years, I have asked myself what is the
most important event or tendency in the history of education and of our
countrj^ and of the world ? The answers seem to me to be all summed up in
the tendency to centralization, to democratization, and, to use a stronger term,
the socialistic tendency.

These tendencies have manifested themselves in every branch of history.
Our census manifests it in the congregation of our people into large cities, and
the comparative diminution of the population in the agricultural districts.
Our business interests manifest it in the gradual absorption of all the leading
industries by the corporations, and they in turn by their gradual consolidation
into a few large corporations, and these again by the formation of trusts, and
the gradual accumulation of the wealth of the country into the hands of the few.

Among the masses the tendency is equally marked. We find there the
federation of numerous diverse labor organizations into a few national bodies.
The popular demand for equality finds expression in legislation to abolish
privileges, monopolies and abuses, and in Acts by the legislature declaring that
various forms of property, various trades and various callings, are impressed
with public uses ; and in yet other legislative Acts for the purpose of declaring
what those public uses are, and regulating and enforcing them.

The centralizing, democratizing, socializing movement is not likely soon to
spend its force. DeTocqueville has said that the progress of democracy is
"the most constant, the most ancient and the most permanent fact of history."
As a part of this tendency there has gone on the aggregation of the employees
and employers into opposing camps.

Karl Marx, writing for an older community nearly fifty years ago, stated
the view of the social democrats thus : " It is the sad side which produces the
movement which makes history by engendering struggle. From day to day it
becomes more clear that the conditions of production under which the capital-
istic class exist are not of a homogeneous and simple character, but are two-
sided, duplex, and that in the same proportion in which wealth is produced,
poverty is produced also ; that in the same proportion in which there is develop-
ment of the productive forces, there is also developed a force that begets
repression ; that these conditions only generate middle class wealth by contin-
ually destroying the wealth of individual members of that class, and by pro-
ducing an ever-growing proletariat."

We are forced to admit the existence of such a tendency in America.
Looking more closely we see that there has been in the past twenty years a

growing separation — a gulf between the people and the colleges ; that the col-
leges tend to educate their pupils away from the people ; and on the other hand
that the pursuits, the industries and the pleasures of the people tend to direct
their energies and their interests away from the colleges and higher institutions
of learning. The colleges and the people have in the past been drifting apart.

The country and the country academies have been the great feeders of the
colleges in the past. But it is now known that the farm population is declin-
ing in strength, and that the old-fashioned country academy has almost ceased
to exist. The people are moving into the cities, and the academies have been
supplanted by the city schools.

According to the census of 1880, 25 and 79-100 per cent of the people live
in cities having four thousand inhabitants or more. In 1890 this percentage
had increased to 32 and 21-100 per cent. If we include among the cities and
towns, towns of one thousand inhabitants and more, in 1890 we find 41 and
69-100 per cent of the people living in cities and towns. (See Census Bulletin
165). " And the rest of them want to;" remarked a friend to whom I showed
these statistics. Considering the suburbs of the large cities also, and the fact
that the tendency has been now going on for nearly three years more, we may
safely say that over one-half of the people of the United States now live in the
cities and towns. It is also plain that the colleges are now drawing and must
draw their students from the cities, and fit their graduates to live and work in
the cities more than the past. In so doing they must take account of the cities
special needs and tendencies.

With the depletion of the country, college attendance by farm boys and
girls has fallen off, while the colleges have not yet thoroughly taken hold of
the city life.

With the division of the people into two great bodies, the employers and
the employees — the propertied and the non-propertied portions — it has come
about that to a striking degree the uneducated people in the cities have massed
themselves together in one mass, while the educated people have been con-
verging themselves together in another mass. This is a part of the tendency
which led the people and the colleges to drift apart. The laboring people have,
in a measure, regarded the colleges as the institutions of the rich and the
learned, and as not for themselves ; as belonging to the adverse body, to the
hostile camp. As such the laboring people who had no part or lot in them for
themselves sought none for their children. Many efforts to banish this im-
pression have been met by the uneducated with distrust and suspicion. A
University Extension class among the laborers in Chicago was looked upon
askance by their leaders, and one remarked : ' ' There will be a prayer-
meeting snap in it in less than two months." Fearing to be ensnared by the
prayer-meeting snap, or some other device of his supposed foes, this laborer
sternly resisted the blandishments of education. In this he expressed the atti-
tude of the uneducated generally. On the other hand the laborers have been
judged as if faialy represented by the noisest and most bigoted of their class-
and their admitted ignorance has been thought to disqualify them from form

ing judgments on educational matters; and their wishes and interests have
been ignored.

Now, in so far as the tendency to centralization and democratization has
contributed to this division of the people into hostile camps, it has been un-
fortunate. I think that in itself it is neither good nor evil. It directly
increases the opportunities and possibilities for both good and evil. It makes
the work of the world easier, and the opportunity for every kind of work more
abundant. It is easier for the good man to do good and for the evil man to do
evil, in consequence of this drawing of the people together. The danger of the
situation results from the aggregating together of great masses of social units
in one community, who have no sense of common interest, who know no com-
mon weal ; — into hostile camps who regard each other with distrust.

Another element in the situation is the well known attitude of the body of
men who do the manufacturing and exchanging for the community, and of
whom only part have had the benefits of a higher education — the busi-
ness men. They still to an unfortunate degree regard the higher education
either as something sentimental for which they have no use, or as something
ornamental which they cannot use themselves, but which they wish for their
families, and are willing to pay for in proportion to the degree in which it will
prove an ornament.

II.

This being the situation, and the colleges being the sufferers thereby, what
ought the colleges to do in self-protection? How can this tendency be
checked ? How can the public interest in the colleges be revived ? How can
the loss in the country be met, and how can the people of the cities be
reached ?

Undoubtedly the first thing is to study properly the history and causes of
this present tendency itself. In studying this we find ourselves studying the
history and causes of all such movements, and learning their strength and
their weakness. We must do this to overcome the present difficulties. More-
over the difficulties which the colleges themselves feel are extended to their
graduates. The same prejudice which works against the college, works against
the college graduate ; and the college graduate needs to prepare himself by
study of this movement to efface such prejudice, the same as the college itself.
I am not now speaking of the college graduate for whom a place is already made
in life, but of the college graduate who has to make his own place, and who
belongs to the great majority.

The very education he has obtained has educated him away from the peo-
ple with whom he has to work, and from whom he has to receive his daily
bread, and upon whom his influence whether for good or bad is to be exerted.

This means that the colleges must not only study, but teach the history
and causes of this movement and of similar movements, and discourage what
is bad in it. This teaching must not be of mere generalities. It must be specific
work in the field of sociology. This work must not be of merely abstract princi-

pies, but of experimental work as well. Such topics, for example, as the pro-
vince of the government as a sanitary agent; the keeping and collection of vital'
and social statistics ; poverty and sanitation ; natural and artificial pauperism ;
the value of savings banks and building associations and benefit societies ; the
treatment by the state of the dependent members of society ; the study of
machinery and the factory system ; the study of the institutions making up the
frame work of municipal governments ; the study of the special moral and intel-
lectual needs of industrial communities ; an observance of all such organiza-
tions and institutions as are within reach ; these illustrate what I mean.

Society has changed more in the last tw5 generations than it had for
twenty generations before. A writer on railroads remarks that the world of
to-day differs more from that of Napoleon than that of Napoleon did from that
of Caesar. The railroad and steamship and electricity have revolutionized the
world. They have not only annihilated distance, but they have introduced
the migratory habit. They have not only brought Europe and Asia to our
doors, but they have set our own people wandering to and fro in the country.
Nine-tenths of the American people have changed their homes in the past ten
years. Not one-tenth of the people retain the homestead of their childhood.

The destruction of the home-keeping habit has carried with it the destruc-
tion of the powerful influences for stability and good morals which sprang from
the attachment to the home and the restraints of the home. In proportion as
the people move about the country from place to place they cease to have an
abiding interest in and fixed attachment to the place where they live; they cease
to feel the interests which make for the common weal ; they cease to become
members of the commonwealth ; they cease to have regard for the res publica.

Said Rufus Choate in 1845 :

' 'Accustomed to encounter every day, at the polls, in the market, at the
miscellaneous banquet of our Liberty, everywhere, crowds of persons whom we
never saw before, strangers in the country, yet just as good citizens as ourselves;
with a whole continent before us, or half a one to choose a home in ; teased and
made peevish by all manner of small, local jealousies ; tormented by the stimu-
lations of a revolutionary philanthropy ; enterprising, speculative, itinerant,
improving, studious of change and pleased with novelty, beyond the general
habit of desultory man ; it might almost seem to be growing to be our national
humor to hold ourselves free at every instant, to be and do j ust what we please,
go where we please, stay as long as we please and no longer ; and that the state
itself were held to be no more than an encampment of tents on the great prairie,
pitched at sundown, and struck to the sharp crack of the rifle next morning,
instead of a structure stately and eternal, in which the generations may come,
one after another, to the great gift of this social life. ' '

Our society has been unsettled during the last twenty years by a series of
revolutionary forces. Among them we may notice :

(i) The invention of new machinery, suddenly throwing masses of men
out of employment, and making other large numbers count simply as adjuncts
of machines and no longer as thinking men, and members of the community ;
and opening the paths of poverty and crime to those thus thrown out, and des-
troying the individuality of those who are given the new machine employment :

(2) The sudden entry upon new political duties by untrained citizens,
essaying stalesmanship, and also by those whose only training has been in the
fields of traffic and private gain, and who carry these ideas and training and
methods of promoting private gain into the council, into the legislature and
into Congress :

(3) The migration of whole cities and nations seeking new homes in our
midst, shaking ofi" the restrictions of their former homes, knowing and caring
nothing for those in the new homes in which they are placed ; and by their
example encouraging their neighbors of native or of some other kind of foreign
origin to disregard the restraints of life, and meet on a common ground of a
common disregard of all restraints :

(4) The stimulus to new thinking and the unsettling of all old ways of
thinking and old accumulations of wisdom, leading men suddenly to disregard
all history, the elimination of all restraints, and the forgetting that there are
any such things as principles ; and by a recrudescence of civilization, seeking
to begin the whole work of society anew :

(5) The recognition that the great property interests have been the recip-
ients of numerous special privileges and franchises from the Government, which
have been in part in the nature of delegations of governmental functions to the
private parties and combinations upon whom they have been conferred : that
such recipients of franchises conferring public governmental functions have
naturally come to regard them as simply private property ; a growing conviction
that while such grants of special privilege may have been necessar}^ and proper
at the time and under the circumstances when they were granted, that the time
has now come when the state should regulate such grants of public functions
and see that the public services for which they were created are performed ; and
that in time, without injury to existing rights, either of the grantees or of
others, and in proportion as the State develops the capacity to do its own work
and properly select its own servants, these public functions which have been
temporarily granted out to private parties should be resumed and directly
performed by the State.

This is going on in our midst. If the colleges seek to control this they
must formulate their work specifically to meet these evils and changes. To meet
the problems of new machinery and of the unemployed classes they must teach
the practical applications of political economy. For the problems of city politics
they must teach what the political institutions of the city are, and in what
their proper work consists. To meet the dangers of a society rendered
immoral by a shaking off of restraints on changing home they must furnish the
leaders, the watchmen, the men who can learn the hold which fraternity has
on all men. Against the bigotry of suddenly opinionated ignorance, they must
furnish the teachers and members of society who have the mastery that comes
from toleration and from a training in the use of scientific methods, whether
applied to the forms of anatomy, of fossil life, to government and forms of social
life, or to creeds and church institutions. It is by furnishing trained leaders who
know the laws of political economy, the political and municipal institutions of

our cities and our government, the laws of right and wrong, and the history and
experience through which they have been deduced, and the value of the lessons
of the past in history, thought and religion ; and who by toleration, fraternal
spirit, and a trained capacity to use the comparative method, the scientific
method ;-^that the colleges will regain their leadership in the community.
Against the dangers resulting from a confounding of public functions with pri-
vate property, and from the attempt to wrench them violently apart, they must
furnish men trained to recognize what public functions are, what private prop-
erty is, how they are distinguished ; and how, in cases where they have become
commingled, they can be gradually regulated and restored, each to its rightful
province.

All this means that our colleges must teach sociolagy. This means that
they are to take the study of life in society as the subject of scientific treatment,
and apply to it the methods of science in every branch, using the exact obser-
vation and comparative methods of science, the history and statistics of the
subject matter, and fearless criticism of existing institutions. It is by these
processes that the college men have been made leaders in the past. It is in
fields where they use these methods that they still are in the lead. By applying
them to social and industrial problems they will again obtain the lead. The
difficulties of the study and the easy assumptions which we all make, that
although the w^orld is ignorant, we at least know something about it, are well
set forth by Prof. Sumner in the Princeton Review of a dozen years ago, (Vol.
8, N. vS., page 303); among others the obstacles interposed by the men who
accept fixed and final dogmas from without about social living, by the gossiping
novelists and the Utopians, and the whimsical sentimentalists, by the half-edu-
cated men who, as he says, "may be relied on to attack a social question and
hammer it dead in a few minutes by a couple of commonplaces and a sweeping
a priori assumption." He named several of the difl&culties, but there are others
also. These are the general indifference, the lethargy of the people who are in
comfortable circumstances themselves, and who are absorbed and concentrated
in their private business ; and secondly, the habit among those who are inter-
ested in preserving the status quo of confusing Social science or sociology with
socialism, and socialism with communism, and communism with anarchy, and
students of social affairs with rebels.

To distinguish our science of sociology from all these dangerous tendencies,
let us quote its dictionary definition. It is the science of social phenomena
which investigates the laws regulating human society, the science which treats
of the general structure of society, the laws, habits, development and progress
of civilization, and all that relates to society; or to quote Prof. Sumner again,
"It is the science of life in society ; it investigates the forces which come into
action wherever human society exists. Its practical utility consists in deriving
the rules of right social living from the facts and laws which prevail by nature
in tlfe constitution and functions of society. ' '

A second measure by which the public interest and confidence in higher
education can be revived, is by the addition of instruction in the useful arts.

The masses of the people are now engaged in various subordinate capaci.
ties in carrying on the useful arts. Their lives are expended in them. For
most of them the work done is simply a means of support. It has no educational
quality. And, in tlie main, there has been no opportunity afforded to them for
any education in this field except what they could pick up for themselves.
There has been no alliance between the schools and the people in reference to
the work in which the people are employed. A very few of superior talents
and opportunities succeed in becoming foremen, emloyers, capitalists, invent-
ors and leaders of men. The great mass do their work without recognition that
it has in itself opportunities for advancement and for culture. And yet by
teaching the elements of the useful arts in the colleges, these institutions will
afresh convince the people that the colleges belong to them ; that there is no
gulf between college work and their work ; that their work itself has in it the
elements of culture and art ; that design and structure and decoration and serv-
ice (involving in turn the application of ideality, of exact science, of practical
utility, and of the principles of the fine arts) — are involved in every product of
the useful arts.

The carpenter and the stone-mason have the highest respect for the man
who knows the principles of architecture, who can design a building, who can
determine the strength of materials, who can adapt the styles of decoration to
the form of work and the nature of the materials used, who can determine in
advance the cost of construction, and determine the range and proportion
between decoration and structure ; and they have an eager desire to meet the
man who can impart to them some of his knowledge on these subjects.

The people who inhabit the tenement houses have the highest respect for
the men who understand the principles of sewerage, of ventilation, of healthful
construction, and economic heating and lighting. They are no more ignorant
of them, however, than is the average college graduate.

There are, roughly speaking, more than fifty thousand people in Chicago
occupying offices in upper floors reached by elevators. Several times a day
they use these elevators in going and coming from their offices. If an accident
should happen to the elevator, and the one man in each building who knows
how to regulate it and repair it should happen to be sick and away, in the great
majority of instances there would be no one competent to take his place and
set in order this indispensable piece of machinery ; and so we have the frequent
spectacle of an elevator out of order, and vast armies of people climbing and
descending many long flights of stairs without the capacity to help themselves
to the easier means of conveyance. Again, if the machine is partly out of order,
and ready at any moment without notice to plunge its cargo from the top of
the building to the bottom and imperil many lives, there is almost none among
them who has the eyes to see, or the knowledge to understand the danger, to
know whether the danger exists, and what to do to avoid it.

Still more are they ignorant of the nature and laws of the mysterious agent
which now carries all their messages and burdens — electricity.

The college graduate and the ignorant laborer meet on a common ground
of ignorance in the presence of the unseen forces and dangers presented by
the problems of construction of the great buildings and methods of transit of
our large cities. How much better would it be if they meet upon the common
ground of knowledge.

Is it right that while the work of the world is done by these forces, and
our lives and our happiness are becoming more and more dependent upon the
intelligent and scientific application of these forces to our needs, that the col-
leges which draw men to themselves and keep them there for several years in
order to impart to them a liberal education in the knowledge of the arts of the
world, should teach them next to nothing about these multifarious useful arts
by which they are surrounded, and upon the successful development of which
the work of their lives will depend ?

Fifty-six years ago occurred the graduation of the first class that went
through Oberlin College. Simultaneously with their graduation our great
Emerson delivered his great address entitled ' ' The American Scholar. ' ' (Aug-
ust 31st, 1837.) He spoke of the education of the scholar as coming from three
great fields — from nature, from books and from action. He plainly emphasized
that in our education there had been more of books than of nature or action,
and the necessity for all three.

Not long afterwards there came the great Agassiz into American educa-
tion, who taught that the great work of the scholar was to read God's thoughts
after Him, to study nature as an open book. Such was the force of his illum-
inating mind and commanding genius that in all our universities and colleges
the study of natural science received a fresh impetus, and the establishment of
special schools of science gave warning to the older institutions that they must
expand their work into the fields of nature, or be displaced. Of recent years
these studies have made most creditable advances in our own college. The
development in this line has been rapid in many places, and slower in others;
but swift or slow, the battle for the natural sciences has already been won.

There is no thinking man who denies the contention of Emerson and
Agassiz, that nature was the scholar's field no less than books.

The field of action, upon which Emerson insisted, remains still the untried
field in American colleges. You will see that the work in sociology and in
useful arts both have the new phase of being expansions into this field of
action.

Nearly twenty years ago, December 29th, 1874, our great preacher, Phillips
Brooks, was called on to address the Massachusetts Teachers' Association.
Taking for his theme the work of Milton as an educator, he said : "Milton's

ideas about education are really reducible to three great ideas, which may be
thus named — naturalness, practicalness and nobleness. These are the three
necessities of education which he is always trying to apply; and what has
modern education done more than this?"

You will see at once that these three great ideas insisted on by Milton and
brought forward and reinforced by Phillips Brooks, are the same as the three
insisted on by Emerson and enforced by Agassiz. The naturalness of Milton's
teaching was the nature in Emerson's. The nobleness in Milton's was the
ideality drawn from the inspiration of books in Emerson's; and the practical-
ness of Milton was the action of Emerson.

Emerson is easily our greatest thinker. He was himself also a practical
educator. Phillips Brooks has been the greatest preacher of our generation.
He w^as also an educated man and a practical educator. Agassiz has been our
greatest American teacher.

Milton was, as Brooks quotes Professor Seeley, "the most cultivated man
of his time, perhaps we might say the most cultivated man that ever lived in
England." He was at once the most cultivated man of his time, the greatest
of England's epic poets, a traveller, a cosmopolitan gentleman, a far-seeing
statesman, an indomitable champion of the people, Eatin secretary to Oliver
Cromwell, and what is especially to our purpose, in his later life he was a
practical school-master, and earned his daily bread by the teaching of English
boys.

When Emerson, and Phillips Brooks, and John Milton agree in telling us
that naturalness, and practicalness and nobleness, are the leading ideas of edu-
cation, that nature, books and action are men's teachers, what shall we say of
a system of education which ignores any one of these three fundamentals ?

As Brooks shows us, Milton's tract on education was no mere hurried and
amateur performance. It was a deliberate expression of the views of the first
man of his time, upon the business of his later life. Moreover, it was no mere
abstract generalization which Milton had in mind. He said :

* ' I deem it to be an old error of universities, not well recovered from the
" scholastick grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts
" most easie, and these be such as .are most obvious to the sence, they present
" their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective
' ' abstractions of logick and metaphysicks. ' '

"I should not then be a persuader to them of studying much when, after
" two or three years they have well laid their grouuds, but to ride out in com-
' ' panies with prudent and staid guides to all the quarters of the land, learning
" and observing all places of strength, all commodities of building and of soil,
' ' for towns and tillage, harbours and ports of trade. These ways w^ould try
" all their peculiar gifts of nature, and if there were any secret excellence
" among them would fetch it out."

"I call therefore a compleat and generous education that which fits a man
" to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously, all the offices, both private
" and publick, of peace and war."

"He would," says Brooks, " employ experts to teach the several arts" —
" procure as oft as shall be needful the helpful experiences of hunters,
" fowlers, fishermen, shepherds, gardeners, apothecaries, and in other sciences.

' ' architects, engineers, mariners, anatomists, who doubtless would be ready,
' ' some for reward and some without, to favor such a hopeful seminary. ' '

The man who insisted upon these practical useful arts as essentials of
education was not indulging in abstractions when he insisted upon practicalness
as a fundamental principle.

The same idea which animated Milton and Emerson, animated the fathers
who laid the foundations of this school ; and upon her seal they wrote the
motto "Learning and I^abor," because they believed that learning and labor
should go together. They taught their boys to work, to build the buildings in
which the college was housed, and to pursue the useful arts along with the
humanities and philosophies. In the course of time the houses all were built,
and the special elements in the situation which fostered the teaching of the
useful arts passed away. It is the one departure from the foundation upon
which Oberlin was built, that she did not continue to teach the useful arts. I
have found that the Oberlin men of the early day were all of them believers
and advocates of manual training for our schools, and the reason was that they
were taught manual training themselves.

What do we mean by useful arts? Such arts as architecture, ship build-
ing, engineering, and in that term including civil engineering, structural,
mining, electric, sanitary, hydraulic, chemical and steam engineering, the
mechanivSm and principles of machinery, mechanical and topographical draw-
ings, industrial chemistry, economic geology and metallurgy, modelling, indus-
trial drawing and designing. These are only illustrations of the useful arts.

Do you suggest that these are beyond the scope of the schools ? I reply that
they are taught to-day in many of our best schools. Cornell, and Harvard, and
Michigan, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and West Point
teach most of these ; and most of these schools teach many more. They have
set the example. These advanced schools whose prosperity suggests what we
well may hope for, and whose methods we well may emulate, have all put in
practice the great principles enunciated by Emerson and Agassiz, and Milton
and Brooks.

And this leads me to a consideration of what we have done here, and to a
comparison of the work of Oberlin with that of other representative schools.

Aside from the expansion in classics and mathematics, which has been
great, especially in the latter, the work has increased in the past ten years
on special lines as shown in the following table IV (see p. i8).

The actual total number of hours of instruction offered in all departments of the institution is
as follows :

Oberlin College 1 1 ,065

Oberlin Academy 2, ycx)

Oberlin Theological Seminary 2,361

Oberlin Conservatory of Music, estimated on basis of terms of work

shown in catalogue, with two hours per week in each study 8,064

Total hours of instruction 24,190

In modern
languages
and litera-
tures

In natural
sciences,
In phil-
osophy,
In history
and political
science and
sociology.

TABLE IV.

INCREASE IN SPECIAL LINES IN TEN YEARS.

)■ from 564 hours or 9.4 terms' work to 3,377 hours or 56.2 terms.

I
3

from 480 hours or 8 terms' work to 1,607 hours or 26.7 terms,
from 270 hours or 4.5 terms' work to 1,184 bours or 19.6 terms.

-from 160 hours or 2.6 terms' work to 1,004 hours or 16.7 terms.

Total,

7,172 hours or
1 19.2 terras' or
13.2 years' work
in 1892-93.

1474 hours, or

24.5 terms; or ^ ^^^

2.66 years work

in 1883. J

Remembering that in the old-time college year there were three terms
and that three studies were pursued each term, nine terms of studies consti-
tuted a year; it therefore follows that these branches filling 24}^ terms work for-
merly constituted two and one-half years of the entire four years' work ;
at the same rate it would require the unremitting work of a student for thir-
teen years to cover the ground in these four great divisions now. The
new electives in classics and mathematics, amount to three more years of
work, added to the original four years, so that the student who beginning at
the beginning would seek to cover the entire list of college studies in Oberlin,
would now be occupied for more than twenty years. This is readily verified
by dividing the total number of hours of lectures offered by the number of
hours in a years' work, H^^^=2o}4 years.

A detailed statement of the work offered at Oberlin in each of the
branches for the last five years is as follows :

TABLE V.

88-89

89-90

90-91

91-92

92-93

Mathematics

582
280
242
184
173
700
610
552
368
742
232
204
242
242
52

582
338
242
184
173
700
944
552
368
834
232
248
242
186
52

792
352

418
288
173
829
715
1154
887
547
329
278
238
184
52

739
250
304
549
251
662
728

1094

951

. 845

1184
299
583
209
110

1042

Physics and Astronomy

Chemistry and Mineralogy

Natural History

250

337

1020

Hebrew

160

Greek

811

Latin

968

French

1092

German

948

English

1337

Philosophy

1184

Bible.. .

375

Political Economy

673

History

331

Fine Arts

116

Useful Arts

474

This shows that our faculty have heard the demands of the people.

In the two following tables I have made a comparative exhibit of the work
done in these branches in Harvard, Copnell and Michigan universities, and in
Oberlin, Yale, Amherst, Vassar, Princeton, Williams and Dartmouth colleges,
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

TABLE VI.

Colleges.

Total Hours

Class Work for

Degree.

Total Hours

Prescribed

Work.

Remainder of
Hours Open
to Election.

Total Elective
Hours Offered.

Total Elective
and Prescribed

Harvard

1872
2161
2210
2340
2196
1982
2164
2128
2160
2208
2720

234
1121

300
1133
1062

844
1059

936
1569
1739

680

1638
1049
1910
1207
1134
1138
1105
1194
591
469
1840

24876

19930

20173

10932

7526

5462

4359

4176

3191

2877

18285

25138

Cornell

21050

IVTicliicran

20473

.Oberlin

Yale

Amherst

11065
8588
6306

Vassar

5418

Princeton.

5112

Williams

4760

Dartmouth

4616

Massachusetts Institute Tech . .

18965

Table 6 presents a summary of the total amount of work done in each.

In the following table 7 I have condensed the studies in each school into
the great heads of classics, mathematics, philosophy, and the group called
history, political economy and sociology, modern languages, natural science,
and the useful arts, as well as religious studies.

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By this you will see that Oberlin offers about half the amount of work
done in each of the three universities, about two-thirds of the amount at the
Institute of Technology, considerably more than that offered at Yale, and
nearly twice that offered at Amherst, and more than twice the amount offered
at either Vassar, Princeton, Williams or Dartmouth.

I may say here that if the amount of work done in the Oberlin schools of
music and theology were added to the college work in determining the total,
(as much of the work of the special schools of the universities is included in
their totals) the total of work offered for Oberlin would be about equal in
amount to that of Harvard, but I have confined these tables to the work of
the college alone.

It appears from this table that in the amount of work offered Oberlin is in
advance of the colleges in general, and behind the universities.

What are the 474 hours of useful arts taught at Oberlin? They are
branches of the department of mathematics, known therein as courses 5A, 5B,
II and 12, named engineering, mechanical drawing, force functions and analytic
mechanics, and it requires some expansion of the term to coUvSider all of these
as useful arts. If we should add to this list the three courses in physics, which
are at once scientific, and relate to the useful arts, it would add 198 hours to
the subject of equally useful arts, and deduct a similar amount from the heading
of natural science. You will see that Harvard and Michigan offer more than
five times as much and Cornell more than ten times as much instruction in the
useful arts as is offered here.

I may remark here that the present catalogue shows that the whole num-
ber of men in the institution is 683, while the whole number of women is 809,
and that the disparity in the number of men and women thus indicated has
existed for several years.

Mahy things may be said in explanation of this. Undoubtedly any one on
the ground is more familiar with it than I, but I have this suggestion to offer,
that the useful arts as they are practiced to-day* are preeminently the work of
men, and that if a well balanced course of study in the useful arts were added
to the curriculum, the prophecy is safe that it would increase the number of
men attending to at least an equality with the women in two years. Moreover
it would be only fair play to the men. The factor which accounts for plurality
of attendance of women is the conservatory of music. A course in the useful
arts will redress the balance.

A third method of connecting the colleges with the people is by college or
university extension. The whole basis of this work rests on the proposition
that the colleges are meant for the whole people. Relatively to the people who
are of suitable age to enjoy them they are enjoyed by about five per cent of the
people. Ought these vast educational plants to be enjoyed by only five per
cent of the people, and the other ninety-five per cent to go without them ?

Plainly not. Some means must be found by which to confer upon the other
ninety-five per cent some of the benefits of the higher education. If we cannot
give them the whole we can give them part ; and, whatever may be said as a
matter of permanent policy, certainly as a beginning, any part is better than
none. If the people cannot come to the university, let us take the university
to them. lyCt us make an extension of the benefits of the university to the
people who are unable to attend the university itself. The partial collegiate
course of two years now offered at Oberlin is itself a recognition of the need of
such extension, and an offer of it on the home grounds.

The movement for university extension is itself the specific educational
product of the twenty years under review. It was first begun in a simple way.
in England, shortly prior to 1873, and it received the sanction of the University
of Cambridge in that year. Almost at the same time, and independently thereof
Dr. J. H. Vincent began his work at Chatauqua for university extension,
though not calling it by that name. The English work resulted in the organi-
zation of a special society at I^ondon, composed of learned and wealthy men for
its support, in 1876. It received the support and participation of the University
of Oxford in 1878. In this country the first work in the cities was planned at
the Thousand Islands meeting of the American I^ibrary Association, in 1887.
It was tried in Buffalo, in Canton, Ohio, in Philadelphia and St. lyouis, in the
winter of 1887-88; and it received the indorsement of the University of the
State of New York in 1889, followed by the appropriation of ten thousand dol-
lars by the legislature of New York for the carrying of its work into effect as a
part of the educational work of the State in 1890. Ford's News writes of it in
1886: "The idea is taking hold of conservative Scotland, and it has already
been put in practice by the Universities of Australia. Many colleges have since
enlisted in it in America."

The University of Chicago boldly announced in 1891 that this work would
constitute an integral branch of the university's instruction, and it has been in
successful operation in the cities and towns within its field ever since.

The work done in university extension consists of lectures by university
professors to the people of the various cities and towns, in systematic courses
upon the subjects of university instruction, with most of the accompaniments of
university life except those of daily class room work and of residence at the
university. Literature, history, the principles and history of the fine arts,
political economy, sociology, the natural sciences, the useful arts, and the
study of the classics as branches of history and literature, constitute the princi-
pal subjects of instruction.

In England the work is carefully organized under the direction and
support of a great university or college, its professors and some of its
advanced students go to the several towns where the extension work is
carried on, and deliver courses of lectures on their specialties. Ordinarily
twelve lectures constitute a course. Elaborate printed outlines of the lect-
ures, with abundant lists of suggestive references to books, magazine arti-
cles, records of statistics, and (where appropriate) to the published decisions

of the courts, bearing on the subjects of the lectures, are placed in the hands of
the extension class in advance. Discussions follow the lectures, then a time
for private reading, followed by weekly hours of conference between the class
and the professor; and the results of the study are covered by written reviews
submitted by the members of the class. The town library becomes at once the
center of the work, and a people's college. When the class have become suffi-
ciently interested, the courses of study are grouped together and developed into
a continuous program. Students who wish to enroll themselves for a continu-
ous course, are designated by the university carrying on the work as "students
affiiliated with the university, ' ' and certificates and diplomas are issued, and
after a course covering several years and proper examinations, the successful
student receives a special degree. The Cambridge society uses a double test.
Certificates are granted to those who pass the examination only if the themes
and written reports which they have submitted during the whole course have
satisfied the lecturer. They are thus submitted to the double test of furnishing
frequent satisfactory reviews and of passing satisfactory final examinations,
testing both their sustained interest and their acquisition of knowledge.

This work did not come into existence without a demand. It is rather in
direct response to the oft-expressed criticism upon the colleges, that they did
nothing for the people; and in the work thus far done it has become plain that
the demand exceeds the supply.

For the audiences in general it substituted thorough and systematic treat-
ment of the subjects discussed, for the heterogeneous jumble of undirected read-
ing, and the old fasioned lyceum lectures. There is in the university lectures
a sustained interest about a particular subject, conducted by a qualified in-
structor, continued for a sufficient length of time to enable the audience to
aquire definite knowledge and clear views of their own. It is the imparting
of real knowledge.

It is the beginning for many of the boys of their actual going to college
and obtaining a thorough education.

For those who do not go to college it is the beginning of an intellectual
life which they otherwise would never have obtained. To all of us it empha-
sizes in a practical way what we all admit, namel}^ that education does not
stop with the conclusion of a course ; that it should go on through life ; that
the development of the man and the increase of his knowledge and his culture
should go on forever; and it affi)rds a better opportunity for continued cultiva-
tion than has heretofore been opened even to the college graduate. It brings
the higher education into every field where there is an opportunity for it, with-
out the expense of new institutions. It reinforces, and, to quote Ford' s News
again, "it strengthens all local appliances for education, whether schools, col-
leges, institutes, libraries, museums, art galleries, or literary societies ; it
combines with everything and interferes with nothing. ' '

Says Professor Melvil Dewey, secretary of the University of the State of
New York and State Librarian, (19th Critic, page 90), "Three conditions
prophesy the success of university extension. i. The growing difficulty of

keeping students in college long enough to complete the desired course. 2.
The steady tendency throughout the world to shorten the hours of labor, thus
leaving a margin of leisure in the lives of the bread-winner. To fill this grow-
ing time profitably and thus keep out mischief, is the gravest problem before
the student of social science. University extension offers an ideal occupation
for this new found leisure. 3. The willingness of the colleges to extend their
facilities, and of the university extension students to receive their benefits."

Like all other work, it should be made as nearly self-supporting as possi-
ble, and a suitable tuition fee should be charged. It will not be fully self-
supporting any more than the colleges now are, but neither should it be
gratuitous.

It will be exposed to all the difficulties of other educational enterprises ;
it will have its spurious imitations ; and it will be liable to the tendency of
exaggeration, and to that of calling things by large names, and to that of tak-
ing short cuts, and of being misapprehended to be a royal road to knowledge.
All these will be met, but, if handled wisely, avoided. It is scarcely more
open to these than are the colleges themselves.

It may be said that this work must be small and reach but an insignificant
fraction at best.

A local secretary of the university extension society of England says,
(12th Natio7ial Review, page 231): "This work has been going on silently
and quietly for the most part in many different centers of life and thought dur-
ing the past sixteen years ; in the large manufacturing towns of the north,
where the audiences have been chiefly workingmen, in the mining districts, in
country towns, and in fashionable watering places; in all about 116,000 people
have come under its influence, and of these 47,000 have gone up for the exam-
inations which follow every course. ' '

Forty-seven thousand candidates for examination. That means nearly three
thousand persons examined a year. A university with an attendance of three
thousand students is not a small or insignificant fraction of our educational
work. It is equivalent in numbers to two institutions of the size of Oberlin.
I recognize that this means attendance for three months probably instead of
nine, and that other reductions must be made in determining the total result.

If so much can be done in England under the auspices of its few universi-
ties, what may we not hope for in America ?

Said John Morley : * ' What is the object of the movement? What do the
promotors aim at? I take it that what they aim at is to bring the very best
teaching that the country can afford, through the hands of the most compe-
tent men, within the reach of every class of the community. Their object is
to give to the many that sound systematic and methodical knowledge which
has heretofore been the privilege of the few ; to diffuse the fertilizing waters of
intellectual knowledge from their great and copious fountain-heads at the
universities by a thousand irrigating channels over the length and breadth of
our busy indomitable land."

Following the university extension is the ujiiversity settlement, of which
Toynbee Hall in East London is the leader, and Hull House in Chicago the
best type in America. A university settlement is the settlement or residence
of a body of educators among the ignorant, for educational purposes. It is an
effort of cultivated, philanthrophic people to impart and apply education by
living among those who need education.

In the university settlement the same work that is done in university ex-
tension classes is carried on, with the addition that chosen leaders of the work
go and settle and make .their homes in the midst of the poor in the cities, and
afford to them both the privileges of university extension and also the oppor-
tunities for rational recreation, in so far as the bringing of those things into
their midst can do it. In a settlement the work is begun on the side of
enjoyment.

Laying before the people, first of all, the most refined kinds of enjoyment
to which they are already accustomed, they make these the avenues to some-
thing higher. It is simply the adoption in university work of St. Paul's excla-
mation that he would become "all things to all men, if thereby he could save
some."

I should not fail to say that in university extension classes and settlement
work, the instruction in sociology to which I have already referred, is given
especial prominence. The gathering together of people who are without edu-
cation and who are themselves factors in the social phenomena of which we
have spoken, affords the best possible field for experimental work in sociology.
It is a laboratory for the study of the problems of city life.

Hull House, Chicago, is a settlement occupying the former residence of
our benefactor, C. J. Hull, by whom our department of modern languages was
endowed, and for whose daughter, a graduate of our classical course, Miss
Fredrika Bremer Hull, the professorships in French and German were named.
It is primarily a residence of women of cultivation who desire to share the life of
the community and to have their neighbors share their privileges. It has been
the meeting place of a workingmen's club, where the leaders of the workingmen
themselves have presented their grievances and have been met in kindly spirit
by college graduates, by successful business men, and by interesting society
ladies, some of whom present the other side, and some of whom supply the
omitted facts ; some of whom by their gracious presence, sympathy and appre-
ciation, do more to convince the workingmen that they have a place in societ}^
than could be accomplished by years of argument. It stands on the West Side,
at No. 335 South Halsted street, among several foreign colonies. To the east
are 10,000 Italians; south, as many Germans; south-west, Polish and Russian
Jews; further south, Bohemians; north, Irish; and north-west, Canadian French.
This settlement includes the following branches : (i) college extension classes,
(2) kindergarten, (3) workingmen's social science club, (4) young women's art
club, (5) library (6) art gallery, (7) coffee house, (8) day nursery, (9) gymna-
sium, (10) play ground, (11) young ladies' home, (12) college men's settlement,
(13) free bathing house.

Add to these the Hull House Columbian Guards, who report on streets
and alleys, the Hull House Municipal Order League and other organizations.
For political work accomplished, witness the anti-sweating law, framed in Hull
House and passed by the political influence of its surroundings.

The ' * sweating system " is a name given to a system of sub-contracting
and sub-sub-contracting out various sub-divisions of large tasks of light manu-
facturing; principally of clothing. The work is finally done by small sub-
contractors with their families in their own homes, which are small tenement
quarters, where the work is carried on at all hours of the day and night, in the
same room with the cooking, sleeping, nursing of the sick, and all other family
affairs. In this way the contracting manufacturer at the head avoids the cost
of real estate and expense of maintaining factories ; and the clothing or other
manufactured product is correspondingly cheapened ; but the germs of disease
are frequently carried by clothing made in such surroundings to the homes of
the purchasers. It was to cure this evil that the Illinois anti-sweating law was
passed, forbidding the manufacture of clothing and certain other articles in
tenements used as dwelling houses, forbidding child-labor, and limiting the
hours of female contract labor on certain kinds of work.

The motives underlying the social university settlement are summed up by
Miss Jane Addams, of Hull House, thus: ''First, a realization that in demo-
cratic America nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses
of the people ; that political democracy alone will not uplift the people ; that it
is necessary to extend democratic equality beyond its political expression ; that
the blessings of refinement must be made universal if they are to be permanent.
A second line of motives is the impulse to share the race life and to bring as
much as possible of social energy and the accumulation of civilization to those
who have little; and the third springs from a certain renaissance of Christ-
ianity, a movement toward its early humanitarian aspects."

You remember the work of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton in the
Red Cross Society. Wherever there was war, they were present to pick up
the wounded — to mitigate its horrors — to humanize its methods — to relieve
its suffering.

To some this university settlement work is the Red Cross work of the
industrial warfare. It is the work of humanizing and softening the rigors of the
struggle for existence; and- this in itself is an ideal work of the highest order.

To others it seems as if this work takes a deeper hold of the situation ; —
that it is nothing less than the primary force which is to reorganize the indus-
trial army and give it the higher education as its objective ; that through it the
masses will learn to use their powers as a whole under the leadership of universi-.
ties : that we will learn to put away the fragmentary conceptions of the simply
economic man, who is simply a wealth producing and distributing animal ; or the
simply industrial man, who is simply a tool using aninjal ; or the simply political

man, who is the vote casting, office holding animal, and that instead of these we
will study man as a unit. Our Emerson again has told us that what we want
is not a tool user but a man ; "not a farmer but a man on a farm."

In political economy we have studied the economic, industrial man; in
political science we have studied the vote casting, office holding man.

In sociology we will study man himself in all his qualities, with all his
desires and springs of action, and in all his work.

Tyndall sat for years on the Grindelwald to see and learn the annual
movement of glaciers. Our own Wright has gone to far off Alaska to see their
operations in continental masses : our scientists are going to the ends of the
earth to find the materials of exact knowledge of worms and insects : the church
every year expends millions for the carrying on of remote foreign missions ; and
yet here at home in the large cities of our own country we find at once the
material for the highest and best work of science, viz., undisguised human
nature, more worthy if possible of the most patient and exact and prolonged
observation than all the materials of the lower sciences ; worthy the work of a
Tyndall, an Agassiz or a Wright ; and strange to say, this same material is the
material for the noblest of Christian missions. In these millions of city poor
we often find the heathen at our door ; more accurately speaking, they are
our suffering, wounded and dying neighbors, who fall in the industrial warfare,
whose wounds we can bind up, and to whom we can carry the bread of life ;
nay more, whom we must save if we would save our country, save our institu-
tions and save ourselves. They make and share our environment and our poli-
tical institutions. The benefits of higher education must permeate and elevate
these masses, or else in time disappear. Now the university settlement is the
scientific outpost from which we will observe and collect our facts for this
scientific study of man. It is the laboratory where we will work out the prob-
lems of city life.

It is the mission where we will teach the knowledge which is the word of
life.

It is only by taking our education, our science, our universities, our gospel
to the people that we will reach them. It is the best work that we have yet
found.

Glancing back over the stream of time for twenty-two centuries or more
(362 B. C.) you will recall the story of Mettus Curtius. The legend tells how
a gulf suddenly appeared in the forum, which was riven by a thunderbolt. The
aruspices declared that it could never be filled until what was dearest to Rome
was thrown therein. After many fruitless attempts to fill it with their pos-
sessions, Mettus came forward declaring that her citizens were the most valuable
possession of the city, the dearest things to Rome, and armed and on horseback
he leaped into the chasm, which forthwith closed over his head.

I have told of the gulf that separates the colleges from the people. It is
only by casting in what is dearest and best in our education and our life that it
can be filled. It is the colleges themselves, the higher education itself, the
bright and eager young graduates, the strong young men, the beautiful and

inspiring young women who are founding the college settlements in the midst
of this gulf, that will fill it up and bring the people and the colleges together.
As the fathers found nothing too fine or dear to impress and enlist in the old
industrial war, the war against slavery, so there is nothing too fine or dear
to be enlisted in the war against ignorance and selfishness, the industrial war of
to-day.

I look forward to the time when there will be a college men's settlement in
the heart of the manufacturing district of Chicago, where a man like our own
Professor King, or a Commons or a Cross can preside ; where all these lessons
that expand the heart and enlarge the mind can be taught to the boys too poor
to come here, and to the people too old to come here ; where in turn the college
boys who go to Chicago to make their way, and who have no home and few friends»
can go and find a city of refuge and a home, can find a college boarding house
and a college circle, can find a chapter of his college fraternity and literary
society and club, and for the period of from three to five years of struggle,
which they must undergo before they find their places, can meet the working-
men face to face and study the industrial life of the city. And I shall expect
in time a stream of young men who have had the first taste of education there
to find the way back here and to other colleges and universities for higher work.

In time I believe that the wealthy men of the country, those who are not
otherwise interested in education, will find that their work is better done
by the men from the college settlement neighborhood ; that men of more in-
dustry and less turbulence come from the settlement neighborhood ; that it is
more profitable to support the settlement than to support garrisons of their
property ; that they can fight disorder more successfully with schools than
with bullets ; that they will help the settlement, will help the boys who wish
to go from the settlement to the college, will found scholarships here for
the settlement graduates who come here, and in time will help the college itself.

It seems to me that the work of the college settlement is the most practical
Christianity ; that it is the work of human fellowship and service in which
Christ lived and died.

You have the fruit of the tree of knowledge in your keeping ; and you
have the ignorant multitudes about you. Give to them and share with them
freely, for it is the tree of life as well, and its leaves are for the healing of the
nations.

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Full text of "The decline and revival of public interest in college education. An address delivered before the graduates of Oberlin college, June 20th, 1893"

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