thousand at Harvard, five thousand at Ann Arbor,
and nearly the same at Lincoln, Nebraska.

It will not do to assume that those who graduate at big colleges are big
men, any more than to imagine that folks who reside in big towns are
bigger than those who live in little villages. Perhaps the greatest men
have come from the small colleges: I believe the small colleges admit
this.

And surely there is plenty of good argument handy, in way of proof; for
while Harvard has her Barrett Wendell, with his caveat on clearness,
force and elegance; and Ann Arbor has Cicero Trueblood, Professor of
Oratory, whose official duty it is to formulate the College Yell; yet
Amherst, with her scant five hundred pupils, has Professor David P.
Todd, the greatest astronomer of the New World. I really wonder
sometimes what a University that stands in fear of Triggsology would do
with Professor Ernst Haeckel, whose disregard for tradition is very
decidedly Ingersollian! The actual fact is, Ernst Haeckel, the world's
greatest thinker, belongs in the little town of Jena, in Germany. At the
village of Coniston, you see the little hall where Ruskin read the best
things he ever wrote, to a dozen or two people.

At Hammersmith, the limit of a William Morris audience was about a
hundred. At Jena, Ernst Haeckel sits secure in his little lecture-hall,
and speaks or reads to fifty or sixty students, but the printed word
goes to millions, so his thoughts here expressed in Jena are shots heard
round the world.

American pedagogic institutions are mendicant--they depend upon private
charity and are endowed by pious pirates and beneficent buccaneers. The
individuals who made these institutions possible very naturally have a
controlling voice in their management. The colleges in America that are
not supported by direct mendicancy depend upon the dole of the
legislator, and woe betide the pedagogic principal who offends the
orthodox vote. His supplies are cut short, and purse-strings pucker
until his voice moderates to a monotone and he dilutes his views to a
dull neutral tint. I do not know a University in the United States that
would not place Ernst Haeckel on half-rations, and make him fight for
his life, or else he would be discharged and be reduced to the sad
necessity of tilting windmills in popular lecture courses for the
edification of agrarians. The German Government seeks to make men free.
It even gives them the privilege of being absurd; for pion