Arbor and Cornell have shot up with extraordinary vigor. There can be
no doubt that our institutions of learning are full of robust life.
And it is no less certain that this growth of resources is due to
private enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and
even non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them
with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a German.
But in studying the aspect of higher education it behooves us not to
lose sight of the fundamental principle that education is something
spiritual in its nature, and that it cannot be gauged by buildings,
by endowments, by the trappings of wealth--in short, by anything
material. Endowments and buildings are only the means; unless the
end to which these means are subservient be clearly perceived and
persistently followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance
rather than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.

Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of college
instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen years, or are
they likely to change essentially within the coming twenty-five? In
the year 1770 the greatest genius of Germany entered the walls of the
old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete his education. He
has bequeathed to us a faithful record of his studies, his amusements,
his daily life. Connecting this Strasburg experience with the previous
experience at Leipsic, we know what it meant in the eighteenth century
to be a German student. We know that the professors in those days were
pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that university-life stood
little if at all higher than our own present college-life. But when
Goethe died, in 1832, the universities of Germany had reached their
prime. Since then they have made no gain. It may be doubted if the
professors, on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality
and vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago.