In nothing can Germany manifest a better-grounded feeling of national
pride than in this, its university system. Politically inert, divided
into petty states, powerless, the ever-ready prey of more active or
ambitious neighbors, it has played a pitiful _rôle_ in the world's
history, with annals made up of petty feuds and jealousies and
tyrannical meannesses, never working as one people, save when driven to
extremity. With countless differences of dialect, manners, customs, it
is one and national in nothing save in its literature, and feels that,
through the high culture of its scholars, through the new paths its
men of science have opened, through the profound investigations of
the learned in every sphere, it holds its place at the head of every
intellectual movement of the age. It feels that its universities are the
laboratories whence issue the thoughts whose significance the world is
ever more and more ready to acknowledge. France even, selfish and proud
of its past supremacy in all things, has within the last quarter of a
century laid aside much of its exclusiveness, and a Germanic infusion is
perceptible through all the mannerism of the latest and best productions
of the French school. Comparatively of late years is it, that the
English mind has fairly come in contact with this German culture. Its
first loud manifestation may be heard in the prose of Carlyle and his
school; yet even now its influence has permeated our whole literature so
much, that, when reading some of our latest poetry, tones and melodies
will come like distant echoes from the groves on the hillsides where
warble the nightingales of Germany.

A most unpractical people, however, the Germans, who have been so active
in almost every possible field of speculation, have produced nothing
which could give one unacquainted with their university system a true
notion of its workings and actual state. Much has been written on
Pedagogy, its history general and special, the common schools and