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Reflections and Comments 1865-1895
by Edwin Lawrence Godkin
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The progress made by the cottager in driving the boarder away from some of the most attractive places, both in the hills and on the seaboard, is very steady. Among these Bar Harbor occupies a leading position. It was, for fully fifteen years after its discovery, frequented exclusively by a very high order of boarders, and probably has been the scene of more plain living and high thinking than any other summer spot on the seacoast. It was, in fact, remarkable at one time for an almost unhealthy intellectual stimulation through an exclusively fish diet. But the purity of the air and the grandeur of the scenery brought a yearly increasing tide of visitors from about 1860 onward. These visitors were, until about five years ago, almost exclusively boarders, and the development of the place as a summer resort was prodigious. The little houses of the original half farmers, half fishermen, who welcomed, or rather did not welcome, the first explorers, grew rapidly into little boarding-houses, then into big boarding-houses, then into hotels with registers. Then the hotels grew larger and larger, and the callings of the steamer more frequent, until the place became famous and crowded.

All this while, however, the hold of the boarder on it remained unshaken. He was monarch of all he surveyed. No one on the island, except the landlords, held his head higher. There was one distinction between boarders, but it was not one to wound anybody's self-love: some were "mealers," or persons eating in the hotel where they lodged; and others were "haul-mealers," or persons who were collected and brought to their food in wagons. But this classification produced no heart-burning. The mealer loved and respected the haul-mealer, or wished him in Jericho, and the haul-mealer in like manner the mealer, on general grounds, like other persons with whom he came in contact, without any reference to his place of abode. All were covered by the grand old name of boarder, and that was enough. A happier, easier, freer, and more curiously dressed summer community than Bar Harbor in those early days was not to be found on our coast.

We do not know exactly when the cottager first made his appearance on those rugged shores, but it is certain that his approaches were more insidious than they have ever been anywhere. He did not proclaim himself all at once. The first cottages were very plain structures, which he cunningly spoke of as "shanties," or "log huts," in which he simply lodged, and went to the hotels or neighboring farm-houses for his food in the simple and unpretending character of a haul-mealer. For a good while, therefore, he excited neither suspicion nor alarm, and the hotel-keepers welcomed him heartily, and all went on smoothly. Gradually, however, he threw off all disguise, bought land at high prices, and began unblushingly to erect "marine villas" on it, with everything that the name implies. He has now got possession of all the desirable sites from the Ovens down to the Great Head, and has surrounded himself with all the luxuries, just as at Newport. The consequence is, although the sea and sky and the mountains and the rocks retain all their charm, the boarder is no longer happy. He finds himself relegated to a secondary position. He is abashed when on foot or in his humble buckboard he meets the haughty cottager in his dog-cart or victoria. He has neither dog nor horse, while the cottager has both. He was once proud of staying at Rodick's or Lyman's; now he begins to be ashamed of it. He finds that the cottagers, who are the permanent residents, have a society of their own, in which he is either not welcome or is a mere outsider. He finds that the very name of boarder, which he once wore like a lily, has become a term of inferiority. Worse than all, he finds himself confounded with a still lower class, known at Bar Harbor as "the tourist"—elsewhere called the excursionist—who comes by the hundred on the steamers in linen dusters, and is compelled by force of circumstances to "do" Mount Desert in twenty-four hours, and therefore enters on his task without shame or scruple, roams over the cottager's lawn, stares into his windows, breaks his fences, and sometimes asks him for a free lunch. The boarder, of course, looks down on this man, but when both are on the road or on the piazza of the hotel how are they to be distinguished? They are not, and cannot be.

The worst of it all is, however, that the boarder finds that the cottager has enclosed some of his favorite walks. He can no longer get to them without trespassing or intruding. He can only look wistfully from the dusty high-road at the spots on which he probably once "rocked" with the girl who is now his wife, or chopped logic with professional or clerical friends, whom "the growth of the place" has long ago driven to fresh fields and pastures new. There is something very interesting and touching about these old Mount Deserters of the first period, between 1860 and 1870, who fled even before the enlargement of the hotels, and to whom cottages at Bar Harbor are almost unthinkable. One finds them in undeveloped summer resorts in out-of-the-way places along the American coast, often on the Alps or in Norway, or on the Scotch lakes, still tender, and simple, and unassuming, and cheery, older of course and generally stouter, but with the memories of the mountains, and the rocks, and the islands, of the poor food, "which made no difference, because the air was fine," still as fresh as ever, but without a particle of bitterness. They wander much, but wander as they may they find no summer resorts which can have for them the charm of Frenchman's Bay or Newport Mountain, and no vehicle which touches so many chords in their hearts as the primeval buckboard, in the days when it could only be hired as a great favor.

The cottager, too, sets no bounds to his pretensions as to territory. His policy, apparently the old policy of the conqueror everywhere, is to let the boarder go up the coast and discover the most attractive resorts, and allow him to report on them in the newspapers, write poetry about them, lay the scene of novels and plays in them, and then pursue him and eradicate him from the soil as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes a resort far more beautiful to the eye than the boarder there is no denying. He covers it with beautiful houses; he converts the scraggy, yellow pastures into smooth, green lawns; he fills the rock crevices with flowers; he introduces better food and neater clothing and the latest dodges in plumbing. But these things are only for the few—in fact, the very few. An area which supports a hundred happy boarders will only bring one cottager to perfection. Moreover, it is impossible, no matter how much the country may flourish, that all Americans who leave the city in summer should by any effort become cottagers. The mass of them must always be boarders and remain boarders, and we would warn the cottagers that it may become dangerous to push them too hard and too far. Much farther east or north on the coast they will not go without turning on their persecutors. They will not put up with the shores of Labrador or Greenland, no matter how hot the season may be. The survival of the fittest is a great law, and has worked wonders in the animal world, but it must be remembered that it has to work in our day in subordination to that greater law of morality which makes weakness itself a strong tower of defence.

The future at all our leading seashore places, in truth, belongs to the Cottager, and it is really useless to resist him. His march along the American coast is nearly as resistless as that of the hordes who issued from the plains of Scythia to overthrow the Roman Empire. He moves on all the "choice sites" without haste, with the calm and remorselessness of the man who knows that the morrow is his. He has two tremendous forces at his back, against which no boarder can stand up. One is the growing passion, or fashion, if any one likes to call it so, of Americans to live in their own houses, both summer and winter. This is rapidly taking possession of all classes, from the New England mechanic, who puts up his shanty or tent on the seashore, to the millionaire who builds his hundred-thousand dollar villa on his thirty-thousand dollar lot. Everybody who can seeks to be at home all the year round, let the home be never so small or humble, and the life in it never so rough. This is a change in the national manners which nobody can regret, but it is a change from which the boarder must suffer, and which must cost him much wandering and many tears. The other is the spread of the love of the seashore among the vast population of the Mississippi Valley, whose wealth is becoming great, for whom long railroad journeys have no terrors, and who are likely now to send their thousands every year to compete with the "money kings" of the East for the best villa sites along the coast. And be it remembered that although our population doubles every twenty-five years, our rocky Atlantic shore, which is what all most love to seek—the sand is tame and dreary in comparison—remains a fixed quantity. It only extends from New York to Eastport, Me., and it only contains a limited number of building lots. These are now being rapidly bought up and built on, or hold on speculation, and in some places, where land only brought ten dollars an acre fifteen years ago, are held at monstrous prices.

To fight against these tendencies is useless. The wise boarder will not so do, nor waste his time in bewailing his fate. It is absurd for him to expect that long stretches of delightful shore will be left wild and uninhabited and unimproved, for him to walk over for three or four weeks every summer. Not even the Henry George regime would oust the cottager, for under it he would simply rent what he owns; a cottager he would still remain. Finally, the boarder must remember that though the cottager, like woman, when he is bad is very bad, when good is delightful. Nothing the American summer has to show can surpass a cottager, and we rejoice to know that the number of good cottagers every year grows larger. At his best though he may be stern in the assertion of his rights of property, there is no simpler, honester gentleman than he, and the moral earnestness with the want of which the more austere boarder has been apt to reproach him, grows very rapidly after he gets his lawn made and his place in order.



SUMMER REST

The question has occurred to a good many, and has been more than once publicly asked, When do the people who frequent "Summer Schools" of philosophy, theology, and the like, which are now showing themselves at some of the watering-places, get their rest or vacation? At these schools both the lecturers or "paper" readers and the audience are engaged in the same or nearly the same work as during the rest of the year, and therefore in summer get no rest. We have been asked, for instance, whether a clergyman or professor who has a period of leisure allotted to him in summer, in order that he may "recruit," as it is called, is not guilty of some sort of abuse of confidence, if, instead of amusing himself or lying fallow, he goes to a Summer School, and passes several weeks in discussions which, to be profitable either to himself or his hearers, must put some degree of strain on his faculties.

The answer undoubtedly is, that nobody goes to a Summer School who could get refreshment through sheer idleness. One of the greatest mistakes of the Middle Ages, and one which has come down to our own time in education, in theology, and in medicine, was that all men's needs, both spiritual, mental, and physical, are the same; and it long made the world a dreadful place for the exceptional or peculiar. In most things we have given up the theory. It was soonest given up as regards food, because the evidence against it was there plainest and most overwhelming, in the severe suffering inflicted on some people by things "disagreeing with them," as it was called, which others relished and profited by. It has only been surrendered with regard to children and youths, however, after a hard struggle. The idea of a young person being entitled to special treatment of any kind—that is, having in any respect a marked individuality—remains to this day odious to a great many of our theologians and teachers. It is, however, rapidly making its way, and has already obtained a secure footing in some of the colleges. It is the hotels, perhaps, which are now the strongholds of the old doctrine, and in which a person who wants what nobody else wants is considered most odious; partly, of course, because he gives extra trouble, but mainly because he is considered to be given up to a delusion about himself and his constitution. There is probably nothing which excites the anger and contempt of a summer-hotel clerk more than a request for something which is not supplied to everybody or which nobody else asks for. We remember once irritating a White Mountain hotel-keeper extremely by asking to be allowed to ride up Mount Washington alone, instead of in a party of forty. He not only refused our request, but he punished us for making it by selecting for our use the worst pony in his stable, and watching us mounting it with a diabolical sneer.

There is, however, still a good deal of intolerance about people's mode of spending their vacation. Those who take it by simply sitting still or lounging with no particular occupation, are more or less worried by the people who take their rest actively and with much movement and bustle. So also the young man who goes off fishing and hunting, on the other hand, scorns the young man who hangs about the hotels and plays lawn-tennis, or goes to picnics with the girls—a rapidly diminishing class, let us add. A correspondent, who takes a low view of sermons, wrote to us the other day complaining of some mention which recently appeared in our columns of Mount Desert as a good place for "tired clergymen," and wished to know what there was to tire them, seeing that they did nothing but produce two essays a week, which need not be very original. The truth is, however, that everybody's occupation, including that of the young man who does nothing at all, does a great deal to tire him. What probably tires a minister most is not the sermons, but his parishioners; and we suspect that nine-tenths of the ministers, if they made a clean breast of it, would confess that rest to them meant getting away from their parishioners, and not in getting away from the sermons. Sermon-writing in our day, when the area over which a preacher may select his subject is so greatly widened, is probably to a reflective man a great help and relief, as furnishing what nearly every student needs to stimulate study—a means of expression. Sustained solitary thinking is something of which very few men are capable. To keep up what is called active-mindedness nearly everyone needs somebody to talk to. Conversation with a friend is enough for most, but those who have more to say find a sermon or a magazine article just the kind of intellectual stimulus they need. What probably most wears on a clergyman's nerves are his pastoral duties, which do not consist simply in consoling people in great trials, but in listening to their fussy accounts of small ones. Nine-tenths of a minister's patients, like a doctor's, do not know what is the matter with them, and consult a physician largely because they take comfort in talking to anybody about themselves, and doctors and clergymen are the only persons who are bound to listen to them. A professor or teacher is somewhat similarly situated. His business is the most wearing of human occupations—that of putting knowledge into heads only half willing to receive it, and persuading a large number of people to do their duty to whom duty is odious.

To these men, a Summer School of philosophy or theology, or anything else, must be repose of the best sort. It gives light work of the kind they love, free from all nagging, and in good air and fine scenery. At such schools, too, one finds uses for "papers" that no periodical will print, and which no audience would assemble to listen to in a city in the busy part of the year, and to many men an audience of any sort, interested or uninterested, is a great luxury.

The persons who perhaps find it hardest to get rest in summer are brokers. Their activity in their business and the excitement attending it are so great, that quiet to them, more than to most other men, is a hell; so that their vacation is a problem not easy of solution, except to the rich ones, who have yachts and horses without limit. Even to those, every day of a vacation has to be full of movement and change. An hour not filled by some sort of activity, spent on a piazza or under a tree, is to them an hour wasted. A land where it was always afternoon would be to them the most "odious section of country" on earth. The story of one of them, who in Rome lost flesh through pining for "the corner of Wall and William," is well known. Such a man finds nearly all summer resorts vanity and vexation of spirit, because none of them provides excitement. The class known as financiers, such as presidents of banks and insurance companies, is much better off, because it has Saratoga. Its members have generally reached the time of life when men love to sit still, and when the liver is torpid, and they are generally men of means, and wear black broadcloth at all seasons, as being what they have from their youth considered outward and visible signs of "respectability" in the financial sense. What they need is a place where they can have their livers roused without exercise, and this the mineral water does for them; where they can see a good deal going on and many evidences of wealth, without moving from their chairs; and where their financial standing will follow them; and for this there is perhaps no place in the country like Saratoga. Newport has not nearly as much solidity. It is brighter and gayer and more select, but though it contains enormous fortunes, a great fortune does not here do so much for a man. It has to bear the competition of youth and beauty and polo and lawn-tennis. The young man with little besides a polo pony, an imported racquet, and good looks counts for a good deal at Newport; at Saratoga he would be nobody.



THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES

The London Daily News, in the course of an article on what it calls "International Reproaches," refers to the fact that there is much that is "traditional" in them. It thinks that, both in America and in France, the qualities and peculiarities attributed to English people are derived, to a great extent, less from experience than from inherited tradition. "We hear that Englishmen are rude to ladies; that they fail to yield them precedence at the ticket-offices of steamboats and railway stations; that they complain of everything that is given them as food; that they occupy more than their share of public conveyances with multitudinous wraps, sticks, and umbrellas. They assert themselves, it would seem, when they have placed 3,000 miles between themselves and their old home. There is, however, in all these complaints the ring of old coin." In the same way it says that the Parisian of the boulevards still believes the English man to be a creature who wears long red whiskers of the mutton-chop species, and wears a plaid—although, as a matter of fact, the typical Englishman of to-day does not look like this at all.

Anyone interested in the matter might make a very queer collection of types which, having disappeared from actual life, survive in the popular imagination, and by surviving keep alive international prejudice, hostility, suspicion, or distrust, and which go on doing duty in this way for years and years, until suddenly some fine day it is discovered that they are out of date and must in future be dispensed with. There is, for instance, our old friend, the stage Irishman. How often have our hearts been touched by the qualities of gratitude, devotion to sentiment, faithful friendship, and heroism of this noble creature. No doubt, there must have been a time when he was as common in Ireland as he has been in our day in melodrama. But the Irishman, as he exists in New York, and as he is described by those who have seen him at home, is strangely unlike the type. He is a decidedly practical, hard-headed man, with a keen eye to the main chance, a considerable fondness for fighting, and a disposition which we should call the reverse of sentimental. Harrigan and Hart represent the actual Irishman in America capitally at their little theatre in Broadway, yet the stage Irishman is to multitudes of Americans a more real creature than the actual Irishman, and we suppose there is hardly a Democratic statesman from one end of the country to the other who has not constantly before his mind an image of him, by the contemplation of which he solves many of the knottiest problems of contemporary politics.

Then there is the Dundreary Englishman, first-cousin or lineal descendant of the Englishman so dear to the French imagination. Dundreary really represents, as we know very well, when we think about it, a past type of swell as extinct as the dodo. It is not common any longer for English swells to change all their rs to ws, and to spice their sentences with "aw-aws." We have numbers of them over here every year, but we do not hear them talk nowadays the once familiar Dundreary language. Yet there is hardly a newspaper in the United States whose funny man does not assume for the benefit of his readers that Dundreary is alive, and every now and then reproduce him with gusto. It is not in Punch that we find Dundreary, but in the funny department of the Oshkosh Monitor and the "All Sorts" column of the Bungtown Clarion. Even Puck contributes to perpetuate the belief in the continued existence of Dundreary by devoting a column a week to observations on American society in the Dundreary dialect, which thirty years ago might have been decidedly funny.

Punch still has John Bull as a national type; but it shows great reserve in the use of him, and now continually resorts to Britannia as a substitute. Is not this because our old friend John is now only a survival, a tradition of the past? The bluff, stout, honest, red-faced, irascible rural person—of whom the photographs of John Bright remind us—has really been supplanted by a more modern, thinner, nervous, intellectual, astute type. For English use the Yankee type of Uncle Sam still seems to represent America, although it belongs to the past as much as slavery or the stage-coach. He would be a bold man who should undertake to say what the national type is now; but it is safe to say that it is not a long, thin, cute Yankee, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat with brass buttons, whittling a stick, and interlarding his conversation with "I swan!" and "I calc'late." If Mr. Lowell were writing the "Biglow Papers" now, would "Uncle S." serve his purpose as he did during the war? By a merciful dispensation of Providence, however, Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam still live on in the imaginations of large masses of conservative Englishmen, and no doubt enable many a Tory to people the United States with a race as alien from that which actually inhabits it as Zulus would be.

In the same way it may be possible—to the Providence that guides the destinies of nations nothing is impossible—that the rude Englishman is, as the Daily News suggests, getting to be a survival. The Daily News's portrait of him is fair enough, though it would require Americans who have suffered from him to do him real justice. He is, or, was, a very rude person, and always seemed to take great delight in "asserting himself" in such a way as to produce as much general annoyance and discomfort as possible. During the war he had a brilliant career. He used to come over and express great surprise at the silly fuss made about the Constitution and secession, and profess an entire inability to discover what it was "all about." If they want to go, he always said, why don't you let 'em go? What is the use of fighting about the meaning of a word in the dictionary? It was in small things as in great. When he went into society he dressed to suit himself, and not as gentlemen in England or anywhere else do, thus contriving to exhibit a general contempt for his host and his friends. When his meek entertainer ventured to offer him some American dish which he did not like, he would frankly warn his companions against it; and if he asked for sugar in his coffee he would, in the same outspoken way, explain that he always sweetened it "when it was bad." One of his favorite topics of conversation was the awful corruption and rottenness of American society and politics, and he dwelt so much upon this that it often seemed as if what he was really interested in was to find out whether the people he was staying with, and being entertained by, were not themselves, if the truth were known, rotten to the core.

He was a very rude man, and he did exist. But is he gone, or going? Is the time coming when we shall have to regard him too as a survival, and admit that the rude Englishman is a creature of the past? Time and continued international experience can alone settle this question. There are, however, bitter memories of past sufferings at his hands in hundreds of American homes, that make it better for both countries not to probe the subject too deeply.



WILL WIMBLES

Mr. Thomas Hughes's attempt to provide a refuge in Tennessee for the large class of young Englishmen whom he calls "Will Wimbles," after one of Sir Roger de Coverley's friends in Addison's Spectator, is said to be a failure, owing mainly to the poverty of the land and the remoteness of the markets. An acute writer in the Pall Mall Gazette maintains that there is another and more potent cause to be found in the quality of the Will Wimbles. The Will Wimbles are the young men who are educated in the public schools and universities, or at least in the public schools, and are turned out into the world between eighteen and twenty-one, without any special training whatever, but with the manners and instincts of gentlemen, and with entire willingness to take to any calling but the lower walks of "trade." The great body of them are the sons of middle-class parents—clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and small squires—whose means are very moderate, and who have to submit to more or less privation in order to send their sons to the public schools at all. They do it in order to launch them in the world unmistakably in the gentle class, and in order to enable them to form their first social relations in that class. Unfortunately, however, as the writer in the Pall Mall Gazette points out, the tone and temper of the public schools, and their way of looking at life, are the products of a vague, but none the less powerful, assumption that every boy is the son of a man with about five thousand pounds a year. The whole atmosphere of the school is permeated with this assumption. The boys' code of manners is formed in it. Their intercourse with each other is more or less influenced by it, and they all look out on the world, up to their last day at school, with the eyes of youths whose home is a well-equipped manor-house surrounded by a prosperous estate.

The love of the middle-class Englishman of every age for this point of view is curiously exemplified in the social articles, not only in the "society paper," properly so called, but in the Saturday Review. The troubles and perplexities and minor disappointments of life form a favorite topic with the writer of the "sub-leaders" in this last-named paper, but they are always of the troubles, perplexities, and disappointments of a landed gentleman who keeps hunters, and has a stud groom and extensive covers. He hardly ever examines the state of mind of anyone less well-to-do than a younger son whose means only allow him to hunt two days in a week instead of six, and who has to rely on invitations for his shooting. These and their sisters, cousins, and aunts, apparently form the reviewer's entire world, and the only world in which there are any social phenomena worth discussion. It is, in other words, a world made up exclusively of "gentlemen," and of the persons, male and female, who wait upon them. Its sorrows are the sorrows of gentlemen, and arise mostly out of the failure of some amusement, or the loss of the money with which amusements are provided, the missing of some social distinction, or the misconduct of "upper servants." It is, however, really the only world that the English public-school boy or university man sees, or hears of, or thinks about while in statu pupillari. This is true, let his own home be never so modest, or the sacrifices made by his father to secure him the fashionable curriculum be never so painful. The result is, of course, that when his "education" is finished, he is really only prepared for what is technically called a gentleman's life. He has only thought of certain employments as possible to him, and all these are exceedingly hard to get. The manners of the great bulk of mankind, too, are more or less repulsive to him, and so is a good deal of the popular morality. In short, he is turned out a Will Wimble—or, in other words, a good-hearted, kindly, gentlemanly, honorable fellow, who is, however, entirely unfitted for the social milieu, in which he must not only live, but make a living.

Mr. Hughes's idea has been that, though he dislikes trade, and is a little too nice for it as now carried on, at least on the retail side, he has an innate liking and readiness for agriculture, and that, if enabled to till the soil under pleasant, or at least not too novel, social conditions, he would do it successfully. Out of this the Rugby, Tenn., experiment has grown, and if it has not actually failed, as some say, it is certainly too early to pronounce it a success. At all events, the signs that it is going to fail are numerous. Among them is the deep disappointment of the settlers, few of whom probably realized not only the monotony and drudgery of labor in the fields—these things can be borne by men with stout hearts and strong arms—but its effect in unfitting a man for any kind of amusement. There has been much delusion on this subject in this country, where far more is known by the reading class about all kinds of manual labor than is known in England. The possibility of working hard in the fields and keeping up at the same time some process of intellectual culture, has been much preached among us both by educational projectors and social reformers, though nearly every man who listens to them here knows the effect of physical toil in the open air in producing sleepiness and mental inertness. It is not surprising, therefore, that it should find ready acceptance in England among people who think ability to bear a hard day on the moors after grouse, or a long run in the saddle after the hounds, argues capacity to hoe potatoes or corn for twelve hours, and settle down in the evening, after a bath and a good dinner, to Dante, or Wallace, or Huxley.

Will Wimbles are much less common among us than in England. We fortunately have not a dozen great endowments used in turning them out, or a large and rich society occupied in spreading the gentlemanly view of life. But they, nevertheless, are more numerous than is altogether pleasant. The difficulty which our college graduate experiences in getting room for what the newspapers call his "bark" on the stream of life, is one of the standing jokes of our light literature. We have no schools which take the place of the English public schools in our scheme of education. But the view of life which prevails in the English public schools and turns out the Will Wimbles, is more or less prevalent in our colleges, and tends to spread as the wealth of the class which sends its boys to college increases. In other words, colleges are to a much greater extent than they used to be places in which social relations are found, rather than places of preparation for the active work of life. This last character, indeed, they almost wholly lost when they ceased to have the training of ministers as their main function. Scarcely any man who can afford it now likes to refuse his son a college education if the boy wants it; but probably not one boy in one thousand can say, five years after graduating, that he has been helped by his college education in making his start in life. It may have been never so useful to him as a means of moral and intellectual culture, but it has not helped to adapt him to the environment in which he has to live and work; or, in other words, to a world in which not one man in a thousand has either the manners or cultivation of a gentleman, or changes his shirt more than once a week, or eats with a fork.

College education is prevented from suffering as much from this source in popular estimation in England as it does here, by the fact that, owing to the peculiar political traditions of the country, college-bred men begin life in a large number of cases in possession of great advantages of other kinds, such as hereditary wealth. Here they have almost all to face the world on their own merits, and in so far as they face it feebly or unskilfully their defects are set down in the popular mind to the fact that they went to college. If the discredit ended here, it would perhaps be of small consequence. But it may be safely said that the college graduate is never seen groping about in a helpless and timid way for "a position," and shrinking from the turmoil and dirt of some walks of life, without spreading among the uncultivated a contempt for culture and increasing their confidence in the rule of thumb. The mere "going to college" is recognized as a sign of pecuniary ease, and of a desire for social advancement, but not as preparation for the kind of work which the bulk of the community is doing, and thus makes mental culture seem less desirable, and cultivated men less potent, especially in politics.

The question is a serious one for all colleges, and it is not here only, but in England and France, that it is undergoing grave consideration. In Germany society may be said to have been organized as an appendage to the universities, but here the universities are simply appendages to society, which is continually doubting whether their existence can be justified.

THE END

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