Chapter 2
The condition of contemporary institutions for superior instruction in the old world is full of promise. The importance of building up great universities is conceded by nearly all nations. In the judgment of Mr. L. D. Wishard, the Foreign Secretary of the College Y. M. C. A., there are 500,000 young men in Asia in the high-class institutions.
The government of Japan, that has lately joined the Western nations in the onward march of civilization, gives enlightened direction to higher education. There are, besides the Imperial College of Tokio, five great secondary schools located in different centers throughout the empire, which serve as feeders to the university. There are 5,000 youth in Christian colleges and schools in the kingdom. In the Christian university at Kioto there are 600 youth pursuing a college education under Christian teaching.
China has always encouraged colleges for the education of her magistrates. "The literary class consisting of the graduates, and those who attend the examinations for degrees, numbering some two and a half millions, are the rulers of China."
There is a growing tendency to universal education in India. "It is computed," says Bishop Hurst, "that in the small area of Calcutta and suburbs there are 28,000 alumni who have completed the curriculum in the five Christian colleges. There are about 2,000 who are alumni or students of the Calcutta University, and there are 1,000 youths besides who are studying up to the matriculation examinations of the university." The English language is the medium of instruction in all these institutions. It may not be wide of the mark to suppose that in all India there are not less than 40,000 natives who have graduated at some school of high grade, and that ten per cent. of the number have passed the university degrees. The number is now more probably 50,000. These men enjoy the highest respect and are the recognized leaders of native thought. Already many are, and many more are to be judges, lawyers, magistrates, professors, teachers, orators, physicians, engineers, merchants, authors and journalists of the country.
The University of Fez, in Morocco, established in the eighth century, is one of the oldest universities outside of Asia. The Mohammedan University at Cairo, in Egypt, has more than 200 instructors and 10,000 students assembled from Europe, Asia and Africa to be instructed in the Moslem faith.
If we turn to Europe, we find that the planting and enlarging of the institutions for superior instruction has the most hopeful outlook. In Great Britain and Ireland there are 11 universities with 834 professors and 18,400 students. Besides, there are the old established and excellent schools at Eaton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby.
A new era for the classical schools of Germany began in 1783, when Baron Sedlitz, encouraged by Frederic the Great, was able to revive "the dormant sparks planted in them by the Renaissance and they awoke to a new life, which since the beginning of this century has drawn the eyes of all students of intellectual progress upon them." Germany had in 1890, 250 gymnasia and 22 universities. The latter are manned by 2,431 instructors and have 31,803 students, or one student to every 151 of the population.
France has 19,152 students in her professional and technical schools. There are fifteen institutions of higher learning in the University of France, with 180 professors and 12,695 students. These are under the control and patronage of the State. The government appropriated in 1889-90, 12,000,000 francs for university purposes. Besides, there were expended in the same year 99,000,000 francs for new buildings for the advancement of higher education. In 1890, there were 598 professional chairs in the several universities, in which were taught 17,630 students, or one student to every 217 of the population.
The Austria-Hungary Empire had in 1891 eleven universities, eight of which were in Austria, with 1,112 professors and 14,272 students. The remaining three were in Hungary and had 322 professors and 4,098 students. There were for the same year in Switzerland nine universities, with 434 professors and 2,619 students.
The Catholic Church in Italy continued for years to exert an unprogressive and anti-intellectual influence. The present government of Italy, however, is fully awake to the importance of a university education for the people, and now maintains several universities at a large annual outlay.
This brief outline reveals the facts that all civilized nations are encouraging and maintaining schools for the higher education of the people, and suggests that a comparative study of them is both helpful and fruitful.
Many of the universities in the Old World lack the stimulus of the strong Protestant denominational influence and the marked religious character of the American colleges. They consequently fail to attain the highest results for the general good, but they are inaugurating an intellectual movement which will eventuate in a more glorious future.
II.
THE PLANTING OF COLLEGES IN THE NEW WORLD.
Our national existence came into full bloom under the light of a Christian civilization. The political, social and religious institutions were sufficiently well organized in the Old World to be advantageously introduced, with some modifications, into a young nation in the New World.
The early colonists first founded a church, then a school, and then a college. They felt that the colonial organization was incomplete without a college to inculcate such piety, virtue and intelligence as would preserve and perfect the highest social order and secure the blessings of liberty. These colleges, modelled at first after the universities of Europe, soon mapped out a pathway for themselves, and have now come to occupy a unique place in our national life.
The Pilgrim Fathers sought to establish in the New World three great principles: civil and religious liberty, and to make education their corner-stone. The scholarly impulses were so dominant at this early day that when the entire population of New England did not exceed four thousand, the people determined to establish a college, which Cotton Mather says "was the best thing they ever thought of." It is estimated that this meager population contained as many as one hundred men who had received the training of Oxford and Cambridge. Sixty of them were from the University of Cambridge; twenty were from Oxford, and others, apparently, from the Scotch universities. The colleges they founded show traces of all these institutions. These intelligent and refined men, with breadth of culture and political foresight and public spirit, constituted the chief source of greatness in the early days of New England.
The three leading colonial colleges, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary, were planted and permeated with the spirit of republican liberty and primitive Christianity. They began in a very modest way.
Harvard, the oldest of American colleges, was founded in the beginning of the colonial days, only eighteen years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, and when Boston was a village of twenty-five or thirty houses, and when only twenty-five towns had begun to be settled in the colony. In 1636, six years after the settlement of Boston, the colonial legislature voted the sum of four hundred pounds (equivalent to a tax of fifty cents to every person in the colony) towards the founding of Harvard College, with the avowed purpose of training young men for the ministry. This sum was increased in 1637 by the munificence of John Harvard, who was a graduate of Cambridge, and a finished scholar and clergyman from England. He gave eight hundred pounds and his library, consisting of three hundred volumes, towards the endowment, whereupon the college took his name. "The colony caught his spirit," says Boone. "Among the magistrates themselves, two hundred pounds was subscribed, a part in books. All did something, even the indigent; one subscribed a number of sheep; another, nine shillings' worth of cloth; one, a ten-shilling pewter flagon; others, a fruit dish, a sugar spoon, a silver-tipped jug, one great salt, one small trencher salt, etc. From such small beginnings did the institution take its start. No rank, no class of men, is unrepresented. The school was of the people." There is nothing in history to parallel the heroic spirit and boldness of these early settlers in attempting to found a college, surrounded as the people were with poverty, scanty subsistence, and savage enemies. They did not realize the wisdom of their liberality and sacrifice and its influence upon the future civilization of the Western World. Harvard College was located at Cambridge, with a single building, on less than three acres of land. It was supported by government appropriations and private philanthropy. For years the college was financially embarrassed. The salaries were small, and for nearly one hundred years were paid out of the colonial treasury. The President received a salary of $600. The total grants made to the college by the colony during the first century amounted to about $8,000. The total annual income from all sources at the close of the first century of its history was but £750. Down to 1780 the total amount contributed out of the public treasury was $68,675 and 3,793 acres of land. Individuals in England and America had likewise given $90,412.
No one at this period would have dared to predict that Harvard College would have in 1892 an endowment of $12,000,000 and an annual revenue of more than $1,000,000, with seventeen departments of instruction, three hundred teachers, and three thousand students. But such has been the phenomenal growth of some of our American institutions.
Among the colonial colleges, that of William and Mary is one of the most important. As early as 1617, an attempt was made in England to raise money to found a college among the Virginia settlers. In 1619, fifteen hundred pounds were in the hands of the treasurer, and ten thousand acres of land were granted by the Virginia Company. A preparatory school was founded two years later, but owing to the Indian massacre of 340 settlers which followed, the enterprise was suspended. The effort to found a college was subsequently revived in 1660. The Virginia Assembly enacted that "for the advancement of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken for a college and free school." Nothing came of this until 1688, when a subscription was taken from wealthy planters for twenty-five hundred pounds for the college. Five years later (1692) the first royal educational charter in America was granted. The college was established at Williamsburg, Virginia, and was given £2,000 and 20,000 acres of land, a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland, and the duty on furs, skins, and liquors imported, besides other fees and privileges of the Surveyor General's office. "In its royal foundation, its generous endowment, and liberal patronage," says R. C. Boone, "it stands in sharp contrast to the early years of Harvard. This was established by the Puritans, and stood for the severest of ultra-orthodox though dissenting Protestantism; that was founded to be and was an exponent of the most formal ceremonialism of the Church of England. The one was nursed by democracy; the other befriended by cavalier and courtier. Endowment for the one came from the purses of an infant and needy settlement; the other was drawn from the royal treasury. The one was environed and shaken for a hundred years by the schisms of a controversial people; the roots of the other were deep in the great English ecclesiastical system." This college has been called a school of statesmen. It was here that Jefferson, Randolph, Tyler, Monroe, Blair, Marshall, and other prominent statesmen received their training.
The history of Yale College is full of interest. The original design of the founders of the New Haven Colony was to establish a college. A lot was set apart for this purpose as early as 1647. A plan was proposed in 1698 to found a college, and to be placed under the general care of the churches. In 1700, sixty-three years after the founding of Harvard College, a society consisting of eleven ministers met to take the initial step. At a second meeting, in the same year, each of the trustees, numbering ten of the principal clergymen of the colony, were without money, but they brought forty volumes of books, and, placing them on a table, presented them to the body, saying in substance: "I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony." This was the humble beginning of Yale College. The colony had a population at this time of fifteen thousand people, fifty of whom were college-trained men. The outlook for this college was not very encouraging, in view of their limited means and scattered population. The work, at first, lacked system and unity. In 1718, the college was permanently located at New Haven, Connecticut, and named in honor of Elihu Yale, who was born in Boston in 1648. He received his education in England, and was afterward made Governor of Madras, and, later, Governor of the East India Company. His donation to Yale College was largely in books, and amounted to five hundred pounds. This gift was followed by that of Rev. George Berkely, who gave ninety-six acres of land in Rhode Island and one thousand volumes to the library. The college received for its support, in a century and a half, $100,000 from the commonwealth of Connecticut. It has been supported chiefly by private means. In 1890, there were 143 instructors and 1,500 students. There is no college in America that has a more enviable reputation for giving a thorough Christian education to the thousands of youth who have gone forth from her halls of learning.
It is a matter of record that our ancestors showed much self-denial, courage, and genius, to turn aside from the work of organizing a new social order, and the readjustment of themselves to their surroundings in a new country to provide for the higher education of the people. The founders and supporters of these colleges, as a rule, were men of high intellectual and religious character, and worked intensely and earnestly for the highest good of society. It would prove an inestimable blessing to our nation if every American citizen were inspired with the zeal of the early colonists in behalf of the cause of higher education. They, out of their poverty, poured their gifts into the treasury of the colleges in order to leave future generations a great and glorious heritage. Gratitude should prompt us to excel them in our love for the education of the present and future generations by cheerfully giving of our abundance for the same high and holy ends.
Other colleges were founded within the century. Aside from the three colonial colleges, six more were founded prior to the Revolution, and four during the war of independence. Following the Revolution was a period of expansion, and by the close of the century there were twenty-four colleges established. These colleges, scattered throughout the Union, appeared as a galaxy of stars in the literary firmament of the nation. They were founded and located as follows:
_Institution._ _State._ _Date._
1. Harvard, Massachusetts, 1637 2. William and Mary, Virginia, 1693 3. Yale, Connecticut, 1701 4. Princeton, New Jersey, 1746 5. University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, 1749 6. Columbia, New York, 1754 7. Brown, Rhode Island, 1764 8. Dartmouth, New Hampshire, 1769 9. Queen's Rutgers, New Jersey, 1766 10. Hamden-Sidney, Virginia, 1776 11. Washington and Lee, Virginia, 1782 12. Washington University, Maryland, 1782 13. Dickinson, Pennsylvania, 1783 14. St. Johns, Maryland, 1784 15. Nashville, Tennessee, 1785 16. Georgetown, Dist. of Columbia, 1789 17. University of N. Carolina, North Carolina, 1789 18. University of Vermont, Vermont, 1791 19. University of E. Tennessee, Tennessee, 1792 20. Williams, Massachusetts, 1793 21. Bowdoin, Maine, 1794 22. Union, New York, 1795 23. Middlebury, Vermont, 1795 24. Frederick College, Maryland, 1796
It remained for the nineteenth century to exhibit in the New World an unprecedented multiplication and expansion of institutions of higher learning.
At the opening of the century there were only twenty-four colleges in the United States. Thirty years later the number had reached forty-nine. In 1850, there were 120 colleges, manned by 1,300 teachers, with 17,000 students. There were besides 42 theological seminaries, 35 medical schools, and 12 law schools.
By 1890, the number of colleges and universities had grown to 415, having 7,918 instructors and 118,581 students. There were in the same year 117 medical schools, with 7,013 students, and 54 law schools, with 4,518 students. These facts bear witness to the determination of the American people to satisfy the needs of their higher nature, and not to rest content with material growth and the bare necessities of life.
The spirit of our early ancestors was never more manifest than in their earnest advocacy of religious liberty, and their protest against all ecclesiastical authority. The numerous settlements in different sections of the country, with their different nationalities and diverse religious opinions, tended to multiply the religious denominations and to establish churches with divergent aims and plans. These independent sects gave rise to a great number of schools claiming to be colleges. These schools they regarded as essential and supplementary to their churches. Harvard owes its origin to non-conforming clergymen. The Episcopal Church claimed William and Mary College. The Congregationalists of Connecticut founded Yale. Princeton was founded under the auspices of a Presbyterian synod, and Brown was established by an association of Baptist Churches. One hundred and four of the first one hundred and nineteen colleges established in the United States had a distinctively Christian origin. Their founders intended that they should be, in some sense, ecclesiastical as well as religious. Notwithstanding their diversity, there was unity in their general character and design. While they maintained a denominational character, they were in nowise illiberal, and set up no religious test for entrance.
The Christian Churches have been not only pioneers of education, but their followers recognize as never before the power and efficiency of the Christian College to further the Kingdom of God on earth. Out of 415 colleges in 1890, 316 of them were under the control of some religious denomination. These were distributed in 1890 among the several denominations as follows: Methodist, 74; Presbyterian, 49; Baptist, 44; Roman Catholic, 51; Congregational, 22; Christians, 20; Lutheran, 19; United Brethren, 10; Protestant Episcopal, 6; Reformed, 6; Friends, 6; Universalist, 4; Evangelical Association, 2; German Evangelical, 1; Seventh Day Adventist, 1; New Church (Swedenborgian), 1.
The leading denominations are especially active in promoting the cause of higher education. We summarize the educational work of a few of them:
The Congregational Churches, with a membership of 525,097, had, in 1890, thirty-eight schools of distinctly college rank, with 1,034 instructors and 13,601 students. This denomination has generously endowed many of her colleges. She has been pre-eminent in her efforts to extend a liberal education to the people.
The Roman Catholic Church in the United States claimed to have, in 1894, 116 colleges, 637 academies, and 768,498 pupils in parochial schools. This church, that numbers among its adherents one-tenth of the population of this country, has one-fourth of all the colleges.
The Regular Baptists of the United States have one hundred and fifty-two chartered institutions of learning, with an endowment and property valuation of $32,162,904. Of these, seven are theological seminaries, with 54 professors, 776 students, and $3,701,620 of endowments and property. Thirty-five are universities and colleges open to both sexes, with 701 professors and instructors, 9,088 students, and endowment and property to the amount of $19,171,045. Thirty-two are colleges exclusively for women, with 388 professors and instructors, 3,675 students, and endowment and property, $4,121,906. Forty-seven are seminaries and academies, male and co-education, with 369 professors and instructors, 5,250 students, and endowment and property worth $3,787,793. And thirty-one are institutions of learning for colored people and Indians, several of which are chartered colleges, with 279 instructors, 5,177 students, endowment and property worth $1,380,540.
Among the church families in the United States the Presbyterians stand third, having about 1,500,000 members, 13,476 organizations, and church property valued at $94,869,000. They have always been favorable to the higher education of ministers and people, and therefore liberal in support of the better class of schools and colleges. They now have under their immediate care 56 colleges, with an enrollment of 10,143 students. The estimated value of property owned by these institutions is $6,780,600, and their permanent endowment funds amount to $6,891,800. There are, besides, four colleges which are jointly owned and patronized by Presbyterians and Congregationalists. In addition there are some forty classical academies, under the care of different Synods and Presbyteries, which have over 3,000 students, and property whose net value is over $1,000,000. Fourteen theological seminaries are scattered over the country, with more than 1,200 students. These have property and endowments amounting to $8,164,762. This makes the total investment of the churches in classical institutions and seminaries to reach the large sum of $22,837,162. Immediately connected with these halls of learning are some 700 of the church's finest scholars and most devoted Christians acting as teachers, while 14,343 of the best and brightest young men and women sit at their feet as learners.
Methodism has been a great educational force in this country. It took its rise in a university, and its leaders were trained in the oldest of English universities. The Methodist zeal for higher education has put her in the front ranks of the moral and educational forces of the age. Though among the youngest of Christian bodies of this country, the magnitude and extent of her educational work is second to none.
The Methodist Episcopal Church comprises less than one-half of the Methodists in the United States, yet she has 49 institutions of collegiate grade, with property and endowment of over $17,000,000, and from the 6,000 students there are sent out annually 1,500 graduates with the Bachelor's degree. In 1892, she had 195 institutions of learning of every grade, with property and endowment valued at $26,000,000, with 2,343 professors and teachers and 40,026 students.