steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging from
obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars and are
bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go," they can be
imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany what we cannot get
at home. Your schools of science and your post-graduate courses may be
well enough in their way, but they do not give us what we are after,
and we cannot afford to wait until they may be able to give it. Some
of the professors are first-rate men--perhaps just as good as any
we may meet in Germany--but what does their learning, their science,
avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the best
that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if we are ever
to rival them we must do the same."

It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less to see them
carried into effect. But the defect which they bring to light will not
be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign
healer. Time is a negative factor: it only enables the forces of
Nature to do their positive work. But schools and colleges are not the
product of the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively
the work of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our
institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape our
educational institutions. By having a definite result in view, and
willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we fail either in
clearness of vision or persistency of will, we cannot expect the
result to come of itself. The present university system of Germany,
which might seem to a careless observer the natural outgrowth
of German life, is the result of hard thinking and strenuous,
well-directed effort. We should not commit much of an exaggeration
were we to call it the deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von
Zedlitz and Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other
German states in her wake. They and their associates and followers,
Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed, iron-willed
men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their energies to the
task. They emancipated the schools from the control of the clergy,
and established the principle that teaching is a distinct vocation,
requiring special training, over which the state has supervision;
furthermore, that the state should pronounce who is fit and who is
not fit for university education, thereby abolishing
entrance-examinations, a