Part 2

Since the path that all people under popular government as well as under forms more despotic are pursuing so energetically and hopefully leads to the certain destruction of the foundations of civilization, what is the path that social science points out? What must they do to prevent the extinction of the priceless acquisition of fellow-feeling, now vanishing so rapidly before the most unselfish efforts to promote it? The supposition is that the social teachings of the philosophy of evolution have no answer to these questions. Believing that they inculcate the hideous _laissez-faire_ doctrine of "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost," so characteristic of human relations among all classes of people in this country, the victims of this supposition have repudiated them. But I propose to show that they are the only teachings that give the slightest promise of social amelioration. Although they are ignorantly stigmatized as individualistic, and therefore necessarily selfish and inconsiderate of the welfare of others, they are in reality socialistic in the best sense of the word--that is, they enjoin voluntary, not coercive, co-operation, and insure the noblest humanity and the most perfect civilization, moral as well as material, that can be attained.

Why a society organized upon the individualistic instead of the socialistic basis will realize every achievement admits of easy explanation. A man dependent upon himself is forced by the struggle for existence to exercise every faculty he possesses or can possibly develop to save himself and his progeny from extinction. Under such pitiless and irresistible pressure he acquires the highest physical and intellectual strength. Thus equipped with weapons absolutely indispensable in any state of society, whether civilized or uncivilized, he is prepared for the conquest of the world. He gains also the physical and moral courage needful to cope with the difficulties that terrify and paralyze the people that have not been subjected to the same rigid discipline. Energetic and self-reliant, he assails them with no thought of failure. If, however, he meets with reverses, he renews the attack, and repeats it until success finally comes to reward his efforts. Such prolonged struggles give steadiness and solidity to his character that do not permit him to abandon himself to trifles or to yield easily, if at all, to excitement and panic. He never falls a victim to Reigns of Terror. The more trying the times, the more self-possessed, clear-headed, and capable of grappling with the situation he becomes, and soon rises superior to it. With every triumph over difficulties there never fails to come the joy that more than balances the pain and suffering endured. But the pain and suffering are as precious as the joy of triumph. Indelibly registered in the nervous system, they enable their victim to feel as others feel passing through the same experience, and this fellow-feeling prompts him to render them the assistance they may need. In this way be becomes a philanthropist. Possessed of the abundant means that the success of his enterprises has placed in his hands, he is in a position to help them to a degree not within the reach nor the desires of the member of the society organized upon the socialistic basis.

In the briefest appeal to history may be found the amplest support for these deductions from the principles of social science. Wherever the individual has been given the largest freedom to do whatever he pleases, as long as he does not trench upon the equal freedom of others, there we witness all those achievements and discover all those traits that indicate an advanced state of social progress. The people are the most energetic, the most resourceful, the most prosperous, the most considerate and humane, the most anxious, and the most competent to care for their less fortunate fellows. On the other hand, wherever the individual has been most repressed, deterred by custom or legislation from making the most of himself in every way, there are to be observed social immobility or retrogression and all the hateful traits that belong to barbarians. The people are inert, slavish, cruel, and superstitious. In the ancient world one type of society is represented by the Egyptians and Assyrians, and the other by the Greeks and Romans. In the modern world all the Oriental peoples, particularly the Hindus and Chinese, represent the former, and the Occidental peoples, particularly the Anglo-Saxons, represent the latter. So superior, in fact, are the Anglo-Saxons because of their observance of the sacred and fruitful principle of individual freedom that they control the most desirable parts of the earth's surface. If not checked by the practice of a philosophy that has destroyed all the great peoples of antiquity and paralyzed their competitors in the establishment of colonies in the New as well as the Old World, there is no reason to doubt that the time will eventually come when, like the Romans, there will be no other rule than theirs in all the choicest parts of the globe.

It is the immense material superiority of the Anglo-Saxon peoples over all other nations that first arrests attention. No people in Europe possess the capital or conduct the enterprises that the English and Americans do. They have more railroads, more steamships, more factories, more foundries, more warehouses, more of everything that requires wealth and energy than their rivals. Though the fact evokes the sneers of the Ruskins and Carlyles, these enterprises are the indispensable agents of civilization. They have done more for civilization, for the union of distant peoples, and the development of fellow-feeling--for all that makes life worth living--than all the art, literature, and theology ever produced. Without industry and commerce, which these devotees of "the higher life" never weary of deprecating, how would the inhabitants of the Italian republics have achieved the intellectual and artistic conquests that make them the admiration of every historian? The Stones of Venice could not have been written. The artists could not have lived that enabled Vassari to hand his name down to posterity. The new learning would have been a flower planted in a barren soil, and even before it had come to bud it would have fallen withered. May we not, therefore, expect that in like manner the wealth and freedom of the Anglo-Saxon race will bring forth fruits that shall not evoke scorn and contempt? Already their achievements in every field except painting, sculpture, and architecture eclipse those of their rivals. Not excepting the literature of the Greeks, is any so rich, varied, powerful, and voluminous as theirs? If they have no Cæsar or Napoleon, they have a long list of men that have been of infinitely greater use to civilization than those two products of militant barbarism. If judged by practical results, they are without rivals in the work of education. By their inventions and their applications of the discoveries of science they have distanced all competitors in the race for industrial and commercial supremacy. In the work of philanthropy no people has done as much as they. The volume of their personal effort and pecuniary contributions to ameliorate the condition of the poor and unfortunate are without parallel in the annals of charity. Yet Professor Ely, echoing the opinion of Charles Booth and other misguided philanthropists, has the assurance to tell us that "individualism has broken down." It is the social philosophy that they are trying to thrust upon the world again that stands hopelessly condemned before the remorseless tribunal of universal experience.

In the light thus obtained from science and history, the duty of the American people toward the current social and political philosophy and all the quack measures it proposes for the amelioration of the condition of the unfortunate becomes clear and urgent. It is to pursue without equivocation or deviation the policy of larger and larger freedom for the individual that has given the Anglo-Saxon his superiority and present dominance in the world. To this end they should oppose with all possible vigor every proposed extension of the duty of the state that does not look to the preservation of order and the enforcement of justice. Regarding it as an onslaught of the forces of barbarism, they should make no compromise with it; they should fight it until freedom has triumphed. The next duty is to conquer the freedom they still lack. Here the battle must be for the suppression of the system of protective tariffs, for the transfer to private enterprise and beneficence, the duties of the post office, the public schools, and all public charities, for the repeal of all laws in regulation of trade and industry as well as those in regulation of habits and morals. As an inspiration it should be remembered that the struggle is not only for freedom but for honesty. For the truth can not be too loudly or too often proclaimed that every law taking a dollar from a man without his consent, or regulating his conduct not in accordance with his own notions, but in accordance with those of his neighbors, contributes to the education of a people in idleness and crime. The next duty is to encourage on every hand an appeal to voluntary effort to accomplish all tasks too great for the strength of the individual. Whether those tasks be moral, industrial, or educational, voluntary co-operation alone should assume them and carry them to a successful issue. The government should have no more to do with them than it has to do with the cultivation of wheat or the management of Sunday schools or the suppression of backbiting. The last and final duty should be to cheapen and, as fast as possible, to establish gratuitous justice. With the great diminution of crime that would result from the observance of the duties already mentioned there would be much less occasion than now to appeal to the courts. But, whenever the occasion arises, it should involve no cost to the person that feels that his rights have been invaded.

Thus will be solved indirectly all the problems of democracy that social and political reformers seek in vain to solve directly. With the diminution of the duties of the state to the preservation of order and the enforcement of justice will be effected a reform as important and far reaching as the suppression of chronic warfare. When politicians are deprived of the immense plunder now involved in political warfare, it will not be necessary to devise futile plans for caucus reform, or ballot reform, or convention reform, or charter reform, or legislative reform. Having no more incentive to engage in their nefarious business than the smugglers that the abolition of the infamous tariff laws banished from Europe, they will disappear among the crowd of honest toilers. The suppression of the robberies of the tax collectors and tax eaters, who have become so vast an army in the United States, will effect also a solution of all labor problems. A society that permits every toiler to work for whomsoever he pleases and for whatever he pleases, protecting him in the full enjoyment of all the fruits of his labor, has done for him everything that can be done. It has taught him self-support and self-control. In thus guaranteeing him freedom of contract and putting an end to the plunder of a bureaucracy and privileged classes of private individuals, the beneficiaries of special legislation, it has effected the only equitable distribution of property possible. At the same time it has accomplished a vastly greater work. As I have shown, the indispensable condition of success of all movements for moral reform is the suppression not only of militant strife, but of political strife. While they prevail, all ecclesiastical and pedagogic efforts to better the condition of society must fail. Despite lectures, despite sermons and prayers, despite also literature and art, the ethics controlling the conduct of men and women will be those of war. But with the abolition of both forms of militant strife it becomes an easy task to teach the ethics of peace, and to establish a state of society that requires no other government than that of conscience. All the forces of industrialism contribute to the work and insure its success.

* * * * *

"This thirst for shooting every rare or unwonted kind of bird," says the author of an article in the London Saturday Review, "is accountable for the disappearance of many interesting forms of life in the British Islands."

AN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY.

BY HERBERT STOTESBURY.

Most minds in America, as in England, if they think about the subject at all, impute to the two ancient centers of Anglo-Saxon learning--Oxford and Cambridge--an unquestionable supremacy. A halo of greatness surrounds these august institutions, none the less real because to the American mind, at least, it is vague. Half the books students at other institutions require in their various courses have the names of eminent Cambridge or Oxford men upon the fly leaf. Michael Foster's Physiology, Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics, and Bryce's American Commonwealth are recognized text-books wherever the subjects of which they treat are studied; while Sir G. G. Stokes, Jebb, Lord Acton, Caird, Max Müller, and Ray Lankester are as well known to students of Leland Stanford or Princeton as they are to Englishmen. One can scarcely read a work on English literature or open an English novel which does not make some reference to one or other of the great universities or their colleges, inseparably associated as they are with English life and history, past and present. Our oldest college owes its existence to John Harvard, of Emmanuel, Cambridge, and the name of the mother university still clings to her transatlantic offspring. The English institutions have become firmly associated in the vulgar mind with all that is dignified, venerable, and thorough in learning, but, beyond a vague sentiment of admiration, little adequate knowledge on the subject is abroad. American or German universities are organizations not very difficult to comprehend, and a vague knowledge of them is perhaps sufficient. The understanding, however, of those complicated academic communities, Oxford and Cambridge, is a matter of intimate experience. They differ widely from their sister institutions in other countries, and in attempting to give some conception of their peculiarities the writer proposes to restrict himself chiefly to Cambridge, because there are not very many striking differences between the latter and Oxford, and because the scientific supremacy of Cambridge is sufficiently established to render her an object of greater interest to the readers of the Science Monthly.

First of all, it must be borne in mind that throughout most of their history these institutions have been closely related, not to the body of the people, but to the aristocracy. This was not so much the case at first, before the university became an aggregate of colleges. Then a rather poor and humble class were enabled, through the small expense involved, to acquire the rudiments of an education, and even to become proficient in the scholastic dialectic. But ere long, and with the gradual endowment of different colleges, the expenses of a student became much greater, and, save where scholarships could be obtained, it required some affluence before parents could afford to give their sons an academic training. Hence, the more fortunate or aristocratic classes came in time to contribute the large majority of the student body. Those whose intellectual attainments were so unusual as to constitute ways and means have never been debarred, but impecunious mediocrity had and still has little place or opportunity. It is well to remember, in addition, that the Church fostered these universities in their infancy, that it deserves unqualified credit for having nursed them through their early months, and that it continues to have some considerable influence over the modern institutions. Finally, the growth of Cambridge and Oxford has largely been occasioned by lack of rivals in their own class. In this branch or that, other institutions have become deservedly famous. Edinburgh has a high reputation in moral science; Manchester is renowned for her physics, chemistry, and engineering; and London for her medical schools. But Oxford and Cambridge are strong in many branches. Financially powerful, they are able to attract the majority of promising and eminent men, whence has resulted that remarkable _coterie_ of unrivaled intellects through whom the above-named universities are chiefly known to the outer and foreign world. This characteristic has its opposite illustrated in the United States, where the tendency is centrifugal, no one or two universities or colleges having advantages so decided as inevitably to attract most of the best minds, and where, in consequence, the best minds are found scattered from California to Harvard and Pennsylvania.

The characteristic peculiar to Cambridge and Oxford, and which distinguishes them not only from American but also from all other universities in England and elsewhere, is the college system. Thus Cambridge is a collection of eighteen colleges which, though nominally united to form one institution, are really distinct, inasmuch as each is a separate community with its own buildings and grounds, its own resident students, its own lecturers, and Fellows--a community which is supported by its own moneys without aid from the university exchequer, and which in most matters legislates for itself. The system is not unlike the American Union on a small scale, with its cluster of governments and their relation to a supreme center. The advantages of this scheme might theoretically be very great. With each college handsomely endowed and, though managing its own affairs, entering freely, in addition, into those relations of reciprocity which make for the good of the whole, one can readily imagine an ideal academic commonwealth. And while the present condition of the university can scarcely be said to approximate very closely to such an academic Utopia, it yet derives from its constitution numerous obvious advantages which universities otherwise constituted would and do undoubtedly lack. The chief evils besetting the university are perhaps more adventitious than inherent; they are largely financial, and arise from carrying the system of college individualism too far. A description of the college and university organization may make this apparent. By its endowment a college must support a certain number of Fellows and scholars. The latter form a temporary body, while the former are more or less permanent, and therefore upon them devolves the management of the college. Business is usually done by a council chosen from the Fellows, and the election of new Fellows to fill vacancies is made by this select body. The head of a college is known as the master; he is elected by the Fellows save in one or two cases, where his appointment rests with the crown or with certain wealthy individuals. He lives in the college lodge especially built for him, draws a salary large in proportion to the wealth of his college, and exerts an influence corresponding to his intelligence.

The Fellows are in most cases chosen from those men who have achieved the greatest success in an honor course. At Cambridge College individualism has progressed so far that the Fellows of, say, Magdalen must be Magdalen men, the students of Queens', St Catherine's, or any other being ineligible save for their own fellowships. Oxford obtains perhaps better men on the whole by throwing open the fellowships of each particular college to the graduates of all, thus producing a wider competition. A fellowship until recently was tenable for life, but it has been reduced to about six years, the Fellows as a whole, however, retaining the power to extend the period of possession. And, further, the holding of a college office for fifteen years in general qualifies for the holding of a fellowship for life, and for a pension as lecturer or tutor. Thus a man is able to devote himself to research with little fear that at the latter end of his career he will lack the means of support. It is perhaps not too much to say that the offices of college dean, tutor, and lecturer are more perquisites than anything else. They are meant to keep and attract men of ability and parts. However, their existence reacts upon the student body by augmenting the expenses of the latter out of proportion to the benefits to be obtained. For instance, instead of utilizing one set of lecturers for one class of subjects, which all students could attend for a small fee, each of the larger colleges, at any rate, pays special lecturers, drawn from its own Fellows, to speak upon the same subjects each to a mere handful of men from their own college only. The tutor is another luxury inherited from the middle ages and therefore retained, and one for which the students have to pay dearly. The chief business of the tutor is not to teach, but to "look after" a certain number of students who are theoretically relegated to his charge. He looks up their lodgings for them, pays their bills at the end of the term, gets them out of scrapes, and draws a large salary. The tutorships seem to the writer to be a good illustration of how an office necessary to one period persists after that for which it was instituted has ceased to exist. When the students of Oxford and Cambridge were many of them thirteen and fourteen years of age, as in the fourteenth century, nurses were doubtless necessary, but they are still retained when the greater maturity of the students renders them not only unnecessary but at times even an impertinence.

The dean is not, as with us, the head of a department; his functions are not so many, his tasks far less onerous. It is before a college dean that students are "hauled" for such offenses as irregularity at chapel, returning to the college after 12 P. M., smoking in college precincts, bringing dogs into the college grounds, and other villainous offenses against regulations. A dean must also attend chapel. Some colleges require two deans to struggle through these complicated and laborious duties, though some possessing only a few dozen students succeed in getting along with one.