my limits or to become my officeholders. I establish my own free
colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax
all others at their full valuation." There is not a college in the
country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms. The
state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely. It
can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and
facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public
and private schools. We see the operations of such a system very
plainly in Michigan. Not only does the university at Ann Arbor
overshadow completely the private colleges, but the "union schools,"
administered under its auspices, are--to borrow the expression of one
of its graduates--"killing" the private schools. We may rest assured
that whatever the people of a State or of the United States is
earnestly bent upon having, will come.

Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has done--whether we are
indeed ripe for thorough change--whether a change is to be effected
by direct State action or indirectly by the mere pressure of public
sentiment--whether we have real need of a body of professors and a set
of universities such as Germany possesses--whether we are to make
our higher as well as our primary education non-sectarian,--are all
questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to come. It is
also possible that one or the other of them may, in legal phraseology,
be sprung upon us at any time. Not to be taken unawares, we have
to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse
ourselves of one misconception.

The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the
eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because
circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old