r a
college that counts more than a curriculum; the association with others,
students and teachers, the communal life, the common adventures and
scrapes, the common sports, yes, and as it will be sometime, the common
worship. It is through these that life works and character develops, and
to this development and instigation of life the school and college
should work more assiduously, minimizing for the moment the problems of
curricula and pedagogic methods. If I am right in this there is no place
for the "correspondence school," while the college or university that
numbers its students by thousands becomes at least of doubtful value,
and perhaps impossible. In any case it seems to me self-evident that a
college, whatever its numbers, must have, as its primal and essential
units, self-contained groups of not more than 150 students segregated in
their own residential quad, with its common-room, refectory and chapel,
and with a certain number of faculty members in residence, the whole
being united under one "head." There may be perhaps no reason why,
granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number
until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state
university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an "university"
with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate
mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social "unions" as large
as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for
safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies. A
college such as this is a mob, not an organism, and as a mob it ought to
be put down.

I said at the outset of this lecture that we could not lay the present
failure of civilization to the doors of education, however great its
shortcomings, for the causes lay deeper than this. I maintain that this
is true; and yet formal education can not escape scatheless, for it has
failed to admit this decline while acknowledging the claim set up for it
that it could and would achieve this end. Certainly it will incur a
heavy responsibility if it does not at once recognize the fact that
while it can not do the half that has been claimed for it, it can do far
more than it is doing now, and that in a very large degree the future
does depend for its honour or its degradation on the part formal
education is to perform at the present crisis. To do this it must
execute a _volte face_ and confess that it can only dev