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for instance, are literary students so exclusively literary, for the Harvard man is left to himself, and is given every opportunity, and even every encouragement, to develop a personality harshly individual. Sympathy and co-operation, national spirit or so-called "college spirit," are too often self-conscious, and every peculiarity of temperament, birth, clan, or native section, bad as well as good, is intensified. Excellent in some ways, unfortunate in other ways, as this state of affairs may be, it is influenced for the worse, speaking economically, by the fact that Boston society, the most oligarchical in America, has the controlling vote in Harvard undergraduate society, and students who are not, to some extent, known and approved in Boston have some initial difficulty in making themselves known and approved in Cambridge. This is true, of course, only in regard to the distinctly social club life, for literary clubs and artistic and athletic organizations are very rarely influenced by anything but the intrinsic worth of students in the special activities that they represent.

The intercourse between students and professors is again an arbitrary one, based on personal sympathies unrelated to courses and studies. A student has freedom of choice among all the professors, usually choosing those who harmonize with his own point of view, and too often those who serve to intensify his own narrowness and to encourage in him the line of least resistance. This line of least resistance is the greatest defect of the elective system, for among a very wide range of subjects for study some are inevitably easier than others, and some again are easy for certain students who have just enough natural aptitude in them to obviate the need of working and not enough to fit them for effective specialization. Certainly it is true that

in subjects which are easily grasped superficially the criterion is really higher than in subjects more difficult to grasp; and where all men can succeed to a certain extent it is all the more difficult to gain distinction. Visitors to Harvard are often struck by the study-schedule of the typical athlete, who is supposed to be a kind of dullard in mental matters, but whose work for the year sometimes consists of the esoteric combination of Slavic Literature, Anthropology, the History of Renaissance Sculpture, and Social Ethics. This is the unhappiest illustration of the elective system, for it simply means that these four studies are the easiest available for a man who wishes to do the minimum amount of study. It produces subsequently among Harvard graduates a very large class of men whose education consists almost wholly of a pseudo-culture, a touch-and-go familiarity with the surface of history, letters, philosophy and art, which is charming at dinner or tea, but quite ineffectual during the long solitary hours when a man builds up his character in accordance with the ideals which education ought to bring. Harvard lays upon each of her sons the entire responsibility of his own character; she expects a certain maturity, a certain decided tendency and intellectual aptitude in all those who register as freshmen; and only those who have this tendency, and who are strong enough to bear this responsibility, ought to be allowed to enter. And where such maturity exists, this responsibility is just as inspiring as it is disastrous where the maturity does not exist.

This indicates the immense importance of choosing the right university for the particular student. Harvard is full of men whose one great mistake has been the choice of Harvard, who are not yet ripe for the responsibility of an individual point of view. Such

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men find themselves carried hither and thither by mere sensations, intoxicated by a thousand conflicting impressions, unable to focus upon one cumulative idea. Side by side one sees the dilettante who gathers a little good from everything and the eccentric who exaggerates his native awkwardness and narrowness of mind and manner. one sees also the fine, broad, tolerant and determined man who was able from the first to guide himself, and whose choice of studies and companions has led him unerringly into an individualism conscious of mastership in some particular respect, and yet sympathetic with all other kinds of mastership. Such a man is not hindered by required work which can be of no special cumulative value to himself, for he is able himself to choose enough work which is sufficiently disagreeable to strengthen his will, and which has for him an intellectual as well as a moral value.

To this ultimate position of a university, so dangerous to the unfit, so help ful to the fit, the work of President Eliot has tended through innumerable ramifications, political as well as social and cultural. The policy of interchange of professors and co-operation with other American universities characteristic of recent years at Harvard has taken on a political aspect in accordance with the recent international policy of the American government. For a number of years there has been an informal interchange of professors with Oxford and Cambridge represented at Harvard by such men as Mr. Bryce and Professor Murray; and this idea has been extended to a formal international entente with Germany and France. The German Emperor has always shown the greatest interest in Harvard, has given the nucleus of the now flourishing Germanic Museum, has sent through Prince Henry of Prussia messages of his good-will, and

has personally appointed the annual lecturers from the University of Berlin, including men as eminent as Professors Ostwald and Kühnemann. Harvard has seconded these cordial relations by conferring an honorary degree upon Prince Henry, by emphasizing the study of German among undergraduates, and by sending her most distinguished professors to Germany. Each university gives its own professor leave of absence on full pay, and pays the visiting professor £240 for travelling and living expenses during his three months of residence. The courses of French lectures maintained for several years in Cambridge by the Cercle Français, on the foundation of Mr. James H. Hyde, have lately been supplemented by the appointment of Harvard professors to lecture at the University of Paris and at other French universities, a post which has been successively filled by Professors Barrett Wendell, Santayana, Coolidge, and George P. Baker. Mr. Hyde also maintains in the Graduate School a resident fellowship held by a nominee of the French Government, and has cooperated in the establishment at the University of Paris of a similar fellowship to be held by an American student nominated by the Harvard Corporation.

The Summer School of the University has long been characterized by an international note, and, what is even more important to Americans at a moment when the finer democracy of old New England is being eclipsed by many less idealistic forms of democracy, by an interstate note which serves to bring the older American traditions intimately before the attention of the newer regions of the Middle West and the Pacific Coast. From a couple of courses in chemistry and botany and field-work in geology taken by a handful of students, the Summer School has developed into a well-organ

ized institution, offering courses in the classics, archæology, public speaking, English, modern languages, history, psychology, economics, philosophy, education, theory of design, landscape architecture, architecture, music, mathematics, astronomy, surveying, shopwork, physics, chemistry, botany, geology and physical education-comprising seventy-five courses in the summer of 1906. To this school there came every summer for six weeks in Cambridge between seven and eight hundred students from all over the country, some of them students of Harvard College, who are permitted to count many of the courses as work done for their degree, but the greater part teachers in other colleges and in secondary schools. The summer students are not only given free use of the resources of the University, but are also provided with special evening lectures and readings, and with weekly excursions to places of interest in the neighborhood. Lodgings and public dining-halls are thrown open at minimum rates to visitors from every section of the country, who take back with them some distinct idea of the most scientic methods of modern teaching as well as refreshing and vivid memories of the birthplace of the nation and the home of American letters. The international bearing of the Summer School has been quite as distinct, especially with regard to the Spanish Islands of the West Indies. In 1900, 1,273 Cuban teachers of both sexes, most of whom could speak little or no English when they came, were brought to Boston in Government transports and provided by subscription with board, lodging and university instruction in language, literature, history and the science of education, and with excursions to supplement the lectures in geology and American history, before they were safely sent back to Cuba. In 1904 a party of Porto Rican teachers, number

ing 353, were received in Cambridge and given systematic instruction in English. Two years later a company of Chinese students came from various parts of the Chinese Empire at the expense of their Government, and were tutored during the summer in preparation for entrance upon regular college work at Harvard or elsewhere in the autumn.

The intensive growth of the University has been even more marked than the extensive, if the effects have been less certainly good. The relations between the faculty and students of Harvard College, just as in the Graduate Schools of Law, Medicine and Theology, have been Germanized and depersonalized into a pure intellectualism. There is no rule laid down by the faculty except that students shall keep their university appointments, or, in other words, "cut" only a limited number of lectures, and pass their examinations. The authorities seek no other hold over undergraduates except in the arbitrary moral supervision of the proctors, who, under the direction of the regent, prevent loud noise and music after certain hours, and keep undesirable visitors out of the college dormitories. The direct requirement laid upon the students is that they shall creditably pass seventeen courses of study, each consisting of three lecturehours a week, and that at all times they shall maintain a standing at least proportionate between this result and the length of time they have been at the University. Although four years is the usual time given to the degree, it has become possible of late years to finish in three and a half or three years, students being allowed to take six courses a year. This lays the stress rather on the intellectual than the social side of college life, and tends to break up the feeling for one's class or class-mates, and once more tends to make companionship arbitrary.

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There is no social unit smaller than the whole college, the classes having grown too unwieldly for anything more than a political unity, such as the general supervision of class officers. only other kind of unity is the unity of special forms of activity, or the unity of men who have reached prominence in some respect. The social clubs, of which there are nine in recognized standing, are made up of men from all classes, and are independent of anything more specialized than civilization itself. There are also the Pen and Brush Club; the Stylus, a literary club; the Symposium, a debating club; and the Signet, which seeks to gather together from each class twenty-eight men who are conspicuous in all departments of thought and activity. Beyond this there are numberless societies which combine the members of the smaller clubs into larger groups, thus destroying part of the unity of the smaller clubs, and so large that they lose unity in themselves. It must be said that these combinations and recombinations of students, by which club-life at Harvard is controlled by a comparatively small group of men, most of whom are members of many clubs and societies, not only tends to prevent unity outside the charmed circle, but destroys unity even within it. The smaller clubs are not marked off from each other too definitely for members of many of them to be common members of several larger clubs or societies. This tends rather to form a club-caste, or, in other words, a system with most of the defects of unity and few of its qualities. The truth is that undergraduate society is made up largely of cliques, the inevitable effect of the forced individualism of Harvard. The more individual a man becomes, the smaller becomes also the number of men with whom he is congenial, and the average Harvard undergraduate has too few of the larger

human qualities upon which all men combine. This is illustrated by the self-conscious effort to arouse college enthusiasm before the great inter-collegiate football games. There is only one student-song which all undergraduates sing with undivided and unashamed enthusiasm, "Fair Harvard" itself, which all right-minded students feel to be out of place upon the athletic field. Beyond this, there is a simple cheer, nine "ras "and three "Harvards," which amounts to a succession of fiery grunts, the one form of utterance universal to mankind. This monotonous repetition of the single syllable "ra” (which, however, can be made to express many varied forms of emotion) is conspicuous among the polysyllabic and arbitrary noises made by the supporters of the opposing team, and although its superior dignity and simplicity are always recognized, it is often thought a sign of snobbishness by other universities, which tend to develop their students away from individualism, and, as a result, enable them to combine in many arbitrary expressions of feeling without any tinge of self-consciousness. To this result the caste club-system also contributes, for it tends to civilize members of the caste to a point where football is considered, if not a diversion of the lower animals, at least a little disturbing to the sensibilities of gentlemen: and the fact that the caste is accessible to all who are able to civilize themselves sufficiently keeps it before the minds even of those to whom it is inaccessible, and sets the social standard for the whole University.

It is these defects of individualism which are obvious in the under-graduate relations with other universities. The student of one university sees another university almost exclusively in intercollegiate games, and it is exactly in those games that all the defects of individualism are most apparent. But

to what university do the graduates of Princeton and Yale go to study law, medicine and philology? To Harvard. And the reason for which they ridicule Harvard athletics is exactly the reason for which they choose Harvard for serious advanced study. That individualism, whose effect upon those not sufficiently developed to profit by it is a pseudo-culture, a cynicism, or an effeminacy, makes, in those who are sufficiently developed for a breadth of appreciation, moral as well as intellectual, and for an intensity and mastership in special departments of thought.

This pre-eminence of the professional schools of the University has been attained by one fundamental rule: that every student shall have a preliminary degree in arts or science before entering. By thus ensuring a certain more or less uniform standard of general mental equipment, the schools naturally attract masterly professors, who are able to assume certain premises and to proceed on a solid basis, an immense advantage in time and efficiency to all the students. haps the greatest value of this provision is that it ensures in the professional men of the future a general education which cannot fail to have an enlightening effect upon their special practice.

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The general tendency is to look upon the degree of A.B. mainly as a preparation for one of these graduate schools. The finality of the old-fashioned undergraduate life, with all its human sigThe Contemporary Review.

nificance, is giving way before the increasingly intellectual modern idea of effective specialization, which is forced upon the attention of freshmen immediately upon entrance into college. Fellowship itself tends to become, in President Eliot's phrase, "serviceable fellowship"; undergraduate life, constantly reminded of its economic value and duty, prodded into efficiency, ceases more and more to be care-free, irresponsible or impressionable, and becomes self-conscious, deliberate and immoderately mature. Undergraduates who have a sense of propriety have accepted this uncongenial situation with all its consequences, and have recognized once for all that so-called "college life," with its songs, its musical instruments, and the point of view that lies behind this local color, is now once for all a thing of the past. It is revived from time to time with a misplaced enthusiasm, but only to the scorn of those who are dignified enough not to bicker with the inevitable.

For inevitable and inexorable is that intellectualism which, in the coming generation, will sweep away the gentle sentiments of Puritan tradition, and make of Harvard the factory of American imperialism. Year after year the Harvard type grows less and less distinct as the American type more and more defines itself: with the College the old-fashioned humanist fades away, with the University the efficient practitioner of the future emerges.

Van Wyck Brooks.

THE PROBLEM OF AERIAL NAVIGATION.

In the September number of this Review Professor Simon Newcomb has written a most interesting article under the above heading. Interesting it is as embodying the ideas of a profound 1 The Living Age, Oct. 24.

thinker, and also as presenting a view of the subject such as is opposed to that more generally held. He concludes by asking that if his conclusions are ill-founded their fallacy will be shown. The gist of his article, I take

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