66, to
provide ministers for the Dutch Reformed churches; and of Dartmouth,
in 1769, from which it was hoped at first that the evangelization of
the Indians would proceed.

=Character of the colonial college=

These colonial colleges in their histories bear a great resemblance to
one another. They were almost all born in poverty and led a desperate
financial existence for many years. In some cases survival was
possible only as the result of the untiring self-sacrifice of some
great personality like Eleazar Wheelock, the first president of
Dartmouth; in all cases, of the devotion of teachers and officers.
Their beginnings were all small; in some cases the president was the
only member of the instructing staff and taught all the subjects of
the curriculum. The students were few in number, the equipment was
simple, the buildings usually consisting of a house for the president,
in which he often heard recitations, a dormitory for the students, and
a college hall. Libraries, laboratories, and recreational facilities
were usually conspicuous by their absence. In fact, as the curriculum
consisted almost exclusively of philosophy, Greek, Latin, rhetoric,
and a little mathematics, there was no great need of much equipment.
The classics were taught by the intensive grammatical method; in
philosophy there was a great deal of dialectical disputation;
rhetoric was studied as an aid to oratory; mathematics included only
arithmetic and geometry. The aim of instruction was, not to give a
wide acquaintance with many fields of knowledge for cultural and
appreciative purposes, but rather to develop power through intensive
exercise upon a restricted curriculum. But the value of the materials
utilized to produce power which would function in oratory, debate, and
diplomacy is splendidly illustrated in the decades before the
Revolution. The contest between the colonies and the mother country
was essentially a rational contest in which questions of
constitutional law and, indeed, of the fundamental principles of civil
and political existence were debated. Splendidly did the leaders of
public opinion in the colonies, almost every one of whom was a
graduate of a colonial college, defend the cause of the colonists in
pamphlet and debate. And when debate was followed by war, twenty-five
per cent of the twenty-five hundred graduates of the colonial colleges
were found in the military service of their country. At the close of
the struggle for ind