method?

[Illustration: UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA]

To the casual visitor, such as myself, unused either to universities or
to the vastness of the American scale, Columbia could be little save an
enormous and overwhelming incoherence. It so chiefly remains in my mind.
But the ingenious humanity running through the whole conception of it
was touching and memorable. And although I came away from my visit still
perfectly innocent of any broad theory as to ultimate educational values
in America, I came away also with a deeper and more reassuring
conviction that America was intensely interested in education, and that
all that America had to do in order to arrive at real national, racial
results was to keep on being intensely interested. When America shall
have so far outclassed Europe as to be able to abolish, in university
examinations, what New York picturesquely calls "the gumshoe squad" (of
course now much more brilliantly organized in America than in
Europe), then we shall begin to think that, under the stroke of the
wand, at least one real national, racial result has been attained!

* * * * *

When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which constitute the visible part
of Harvard University, I perceived that, just as Kensington had without
knowing it been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain lost
little old English towns that even American tourists have not yet
reached had without knowing it been imitating the courts and chimneys
and windows and doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Harvard had
a very mellow look indeed. No trace of the wand! The European in search
of tradition would find it here in bulk. I should doubt whether at