er he graduated at New Haven. Look at the Harvard lists:--Everett was
appointed Professor of Greek at twenty-one; Benjamin Peirce, of
Mathematics at twenty-four; and Agassiz was not yet forty when he came
to this country. For fifty years Yale College rested on three men
selected in their youth by Dr. Dwight, and almost simultaneously set at
work; Day was twenty-eight, Silliman, twenty-three, and Kingsley,
twenty-seven, when they began their professorial lives. The University
of Virginia, early in its history, attracted foreign teachers, who were
all young men.

We shall hope to secure a strong staff of young men, appointing them
because they have twenty years before them; selecting them on evidence
of their ability; increasing constantly their emoluments, and promoting
them because of their merit to successive posts, as scholars, fellows,
assistants, adjuncts, professors and university professors. This plan
will give us an opportunity to introduce some of the features of the
English fellowship and the German system of privat-docents; or in other
words, to furnish positions where young men desirous of a university
career may have a chance to begin, sure at least of a support while
waiting for promotion.

Our plans begin but do not end here. As men of distinction, who have won
the highest rank in their callings, are known to be free, we shall
invite them to come among us.

If we would maintain a university, great freedom must be allowed both to
teachers and scholars. This involves freedom of methods to be employed
by the instructors on the one hand, and on the other, freedom of courses
to be selected by the students.

But this freedom is based on laws,--two of which cannot be too
distinctly or too often enunciated. A law which should govern the
admission of pupils is this, that before they win this privilege they
must have been matured by the long, preparatory discipline of superior
teachers, and by the systematic, laborious, and persistent pursuit of
fundamental knowledge; and a second law, which should govern the work of
professors, is this, that with unselfish devotion to the discovery and
advancement of truth and righteousness, they renounce all other
preferment, so that, like the greatest of all teachers, they may promote
the good of mankind.

I see no advantage in our attempting to maintain the traditional
four-year class-system of the American colleges. It has never existed in
the University of Virginia; it i