I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch before
anybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but football had
already begun for the day in the campus costing two million dollars, and
classes were over. I saw five or more universities while I was in
America, but I was not clever enough to catch one of them in the act of
instruction. What I did see was the formidable and magnificent machine,
the apparatus of learning, supine in repose.

And if the spectacle was no more than a promise, it was a very dazzling
promise. No European with any imagination could regard Columbia as other
than a miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair appeared to have
been brought into being, physically, in less than twenty years. Building
after building, device after device, was dated subsequent to 1893. And
to my mind that was just the point of the gigantic affair. Universities
in Europe are so old. And there are universities in America which are
venerable. A graduate of the most venerable of them told me that
Columbia was not "really" a university. Well, it did seem unreal, though
not in his sense; it seemed magic. The graduate in question told me that
a university could not be created by a stroke of the wand. And yet there
staring me in the face was the evidence that a university not merely
could be created by a stroke of the wand, but had been. (I am aware of
Columbia's theoretic age and of her insistence on it.) The wand is a
modern invention; to deny its effective creative faculty is absurd.

Of course I know what the graduate meant. I myself, though I had not
seen Oxford nor Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my dream
of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying to
myself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition." Criticism
fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprison