t urged the monks of the olden time to turn their backs
upon the world and bury themselves in cloisters were praiseworthy:
but for such havens of peace, letters might have perished. When the
Reformation was carried out in England, and the sequestration of
Church property left immense convents idle, it was only natural that
the newly-established colleges and halls should convert the buildings
to their own uses. The dormitory system of Oxford and Cambridge,
accordingly, has an historic right of being; and, growing by natural
laws, it has become so rooted in the national life that nothing short
of a political revolution, greater even than that of the seventeenth
century, could eradicate it. The founders of our earliest colleges
were governed by the desire to make them conform as closely as might
be to the English model. There is scarcely the trace of a disposition
to look to the institutions of continental Europe for guidance. This
was a matter of course. The founders of our colleges and the men
whom they selected to be teachers were Englishmen by descent or by
education, trained after the English fashion--seeking freedom in
America, yet at heart sympathizing with English thought, English
habits and English prejudices. Hence the establishment of our
dormitory system--not at once nor in all the fullness of a system. The
colleges were at first little more than schools. The scholars boarded
with the professors: there were no funds for the erection of separate
buildings. But soon we see the evidences of a persistent effort to
make each college an embryonic Oxford or Cambridge. Harvard, Yale and
Princeton before completing the first half century of existence were
committed to the dormitory system. Other colleges have followed the
example thus set. The exceptions are too few to need enumeration.

The mildest judgment that can be passed upon the system is that it has
cost us dear. Were all the figures accurately ascertained and summed
up, were we able to see at a glance all the money that has been
expended for land and brick and mortar by the hundreds of colleges
between Maine and California, even such an aggregate, startling enough
in itself, would fail to reveal the whole truth. We should have to
go behind the figures--to consider what might have been effected by a
more judicious investment of those millions--how many professorships
might have been permanently established, how many small colleges, now
dragging out a sickly exis