upon the foundation of a college training, the training in the liberal arts and sciences. The ministry is another instance.

"It rather looks, then, and has come to look so plainly, since we get the best results from men who have had the college training as well as the professional training that schools who want to give the best legal training and only the best legal training, the schools who want to give the best medical training and only the best medical training, and the schools who want to give the best engineering and only the best engineering training, are making themselves into what we call 'graduate schools,' are requiring a part or all of the liberal training which the college affords as a prerequisite at entrance upon professional training.

"Again, if we look out over our public life to-day, those who, for instance, are curious after each election to see how many of the men elected into high office by the ballot of their citizens have had college training, we see from year to year an increasing number of college men in public office where the burden of public duties falls heaviest, in our highest public offices. If one simply recalls the last three incumbents of the White House at Washington, we not only have had three college men, one after the other, but strangely enough those three men, each one in his own time and his own class, was a leader in scholarship. He was the man who was taking the most of that which the college had to offer. All three were members of the society of Phi Beta Kappa. In the last presidential campaign all those men contended against each other, and the three leading candidates for Vice-President - - it so happened that every one of the six was a college man. Strangely enough each one of the six was a trustee or a member of the board of some college. One of the three was a Phi Beta Kappa, one of the others came out of a college where there was no Phi Beta Kappa society, so we don't know where he stood. He might have richly earned the honor, but did not receive it. Eighty per cent. of the last Senate of the United States were men bearing academic degrees, although I suspect that many of these were law school degrees, without college degrees underneath them. But there were very many college degrees, of liberal arts and sciences, in the Senate. Seventy-five per cent. of the House of Representatives held academic degrees. If we look then out over the citizens of the land, remembering that only about one in a hundred is a college man, we see what these figures signify as to what the college is doing, what the college has done, in the service of the community, the State and the nation.

"The gentleman now in the White House was very recently a humble college president. His predecessor made a very rapid transition from the White House to a professorship in Yale University. For my own part I doubt if any closer relationship between the White House and colleges is desirable than that relationship recently illustrated in national politics.

"The next field of selection for the college man is business, and as business has increased in magnitude, in dignity, in complexity, and in power, more and more college-bred men have risen to positions of importance in the direction of large business affairs. Whether there is not something more which even the college of liberal arts and sciences can do for the graduate who is going into business, is a matter of which many colleges are now thinking. We have not in the past had before us, perhaps, the particular needs of the increasingly large number of men who are going into business. Yet, events show that that is not universally the case, because in two of our New England colleges in recent years there have been founded graduate schools of business administration and finance, thus recognizing definitely that business has come to be one of the learned professions; perhaps that learned profession which requires the most many-sided training, because the relations of business perhaps reach wider, require greater range, require quite as much vision as any of the learned professions that we are apt to consider as learned professions, such as law, medicine, the ministry, or teaching.

"The business problem is a more complex problem than any of the problems that I have mentioned, as being the field of the other so-called learned professions.

"I presume it is now true in most of our colleges that half at least, if not more than half of the graduates leave college with the definite intention of going into business. That being the case, ought we not, perhaps, to think somewhat more of these men and the occupation which they are about to enter than we do?

"The college of liberal arts and sciences will never consider it to be its function to teach the details of any calling or profession. That is not what it is in existence for. That is not its chief purpose. But at the same time we may perhaps find cultural material of a sort which will give the survey over the field of business that certain courses in college give over law, over theology, over medicine, over engineering. If that be true, then we are under obligations to search for this new cultural material.

"Some of it we already have in economics and also in sociology. But there again there is a field for thought as to whether the bearing is sufficiently brought out and emphasized.

"The college receives a good many suggestions first and last as to her shortcomings, as to the things that she ought not to do that she is doing, as to the things she ought to do that she is not doing. Sins both of omission and commission are very freely and very generously laid at our door every day, and they are all welcome. Criticism of our colleges is one of the most wholesome signs so far as the college is concerned in the condition of public sentiment.

"We did not have it fifty years ago. At least it did not find the voice that it has found in recent days. Public criticism, looked at philosophically, is the measure of public interest. There is a far more

active, a far more lively, and to some extent a more enlightened interest in our colleges to-day than there ever has been before. And for that reason more people are thinking on the subject, some thinking without adequate direction or knowledge because some of the criticisms which come to the college come from those who are fighting straw men, fighting spectres which have no real existence, but the criticism is still welcome because it is of great usefulness to the college, while holding its own head steady as to where it belongs, and what it should do, to know the appearance which it presents to all sorts and conditions of men, and the college is delighted that all sorts and conditions of men are thinking about the higher education.

"The colleges are not on the defensive. They should not be. If any college appears to be on the defensive it is either being misunderstood or else it has misunderstood its own function. We are rather sharply criticizing ourselves, and I fancy that men in colleges who are right close to the workings of the college, always have had misgivings. They ought not to have power and authority unless they have misgivings about what they are doing; because progress comes from a certain kind of discontent, a clear vision of defects and shortcomings, which enter into all of our human institutions. And yet the college need not feel as a whole that it is missing its purpose in the light of the results which the college is achieving, and the public service which the college is so clearly meeting, and meeting it strongly and well."

The Toastmaster. The first speech that I ever heard that I can now remember was by the President of Bowdoin College, at the close of the Civil War, General Chamberlain, and I have the very great pleasure of presenting to you his successor in that very great office, President Hyde of Bowdoin."

President Hyde of Bowdoin College

"Mr. President, Mr. Toastmaster, and Gentlemen of the City Club. This is the first time in the thirty or more years of its existence that the Association of Colleges in New England have faced an audience, or even so much as that more formidable shadow of an audience, the reporter. And so, being called on to speak before an audience of this size, I feel a good deal as a young instructor in French felt when going to chapel one morning, he found that all the devout members of the faculty had been seized with the influenza and he was the only representative present. The boys all looked with eager expectation to his conduct of the exercises. He rose and said: 'Young gentlemen, as my vocabulary is very limited, and as I am an infidel, I think I will go pray.'

"If I am to break the tradition of this Association as President Nichols has already broken it, and say a word, I must say it in the spirit of the Association. When we college officers go before audiences and reporters there is enough of human nature in us generally

to present the best aspect of our institutions and put our best foot forward, but when we meet, as we meet here to-day and to-morrow, among ourselves, we open up the seamy side and confess our shortcomings, for a college has them.

"The college is a good deal in the condition at times of the deceased man whom his widow communicated with through a medium. When the connection was established, the widow asked, 'Is that you, John?'

"When we get among ourselves here at this meeting of the Association, we confess to ourselves frankly that running a college is not altogether heaven. There are weak sides about it. We realize that we have not been doing all that we ought to do for these young men that are entrusted to us for the four years.

"But we never get quite down to the movie level. We never quite fulfil the spirit of the lines that you may have seen:

"Johnny went to the movie tent to cultivate his mind;
He saw a lady shoot a gent, and went away refined.'

"When the elective system was first introduced and taken without qualification or limitation, and when a great many snap courses were left in the curriculum, it was altogether too easy. We did not do enough. We did not deal fairly with the community and these young men, and now I think that we are all recognizing that we must make a college education a serious and earnest thing. That a man who is to have all this spent upon him must earn the right by reasonable diligence in preparatory school, and still more by thorough work in the college. Boys will do just what you expect of them, no more and not very much less. If your standard is low and easy, they will come up to that or a little short of it. But if your standard is high and hard, they will come up to that.

"You may say that is unkind, uncharitable, to exact high standards and thorough work of young fellows at that stage of life; but the fact is that if you have a rigid requirement, give these fellows higher things to do in language, mathematics, and science, and hold them up to doing it, you don't lose half as many men as you do if you let the standard be low, for some will fall a little below any standard that you set.

"The problem of the college is to introduce something of that seriousness and earnestness in the undergraduate life that you ex

pect of young fellows when they come into your offices or into your stores or banking-houses.

"That we are all recognizing as our duty, to respond to these requirements. But then there is a greater duty than that, and we are just beginning to see what it is. College education thus far has been too democratic-too democratic intellectually, I mean. We have dealt with the great mass and have comparatively neglected the greater and abler minority. To put one man at a task at one end of the room, and put fifty or one hundred to two hundred fellows at the other end of the room, and call that teaching, is a mistake. It is a compromise with inefficiency. It should do something, something for everybody, however little. The problem now is to make college education, even in the undergraduates, not chiefly democratic, but intellectually aristocratic.

"The time has come when we must run limited trains with Pullman cars only over our educational roads and charge a higher intellectual fare to the man that travels on those limited trains. What do I mean by that? Why, this afternoon, President Garfield was describing to us in our session a course in municipal government, which he gave, starting with eight men, and now it has thirty men, where they make use of a bureau of municipal research, in which each man takes the city of his residence, or where he expects to live, and studies that, brings it in individually and spends an hour with the teacher on that subject, who in this instance is the President of the college. And so he gets directly at the heart of the subject.

"We do the same thing, or substantially the same thing, at Bowdoin in a little different way. We limit our course in municipal government to ten men, the best ten men in the institution, and then it is a prize to be coveted. It is no use to give boys rank as a reason for study, or money prizes. The real prize for taking an interest in the subject is a course where nobody who does not take a vital interest in it can get into that course.

"So we take our ten best men who in their history and government courses have shown that they have a deep interest in the subject. And so in literature, we take the half-dozen best men in that branch, and the six best members of the faculty in that line, and put those six students and those six members of the faculty together for a year. That is what I mean by running limited trains with Pullman cars only over our educational roads, and from this time on we must see that we do one hundred times as much for the best man as we do for the rank and file.

"For those men who get a vision, for those men who come under an expert leader into touch with a vital subject, those few men will do more for a community when they come together than the ninety per cent. of the men who do not rise to the height of thought and originality of men in first-hand contact with the subject.

"So our task is to give good, thorough, honest, capable discipline