cannot endure forever." This is the
gospel of historical students. A part of their work has been to expose
popular fallacies, and to show up errors which have been made through
partiality and misguided patriotism or because of incomplete
investigation. Men of my age are obliged to unlearn much. The youthful
student of history has a distinct advantage over us in that he begins
with a correct knowledge of the main historical facts. He does not for
example learn what we all used to learn--that in the year 1000 the
appearance of a fiery comet caused a panic of terror to fall upon
Christendom and gave rise to the belief that the end of the world was at
hand. Nor is he taught that the followers of Peter the Hermit in the
first crusade were a number of spiritually minded men and women of
austere morality. It is to the University that we owe it that we are
seeing things as they are in history, that the fables, the fallacies,
and the exaggerations are disappearing from the books.

To regard the past with accuracy and truth is a preparation for
envisaging the present in the same way. For this attitude towards the
past and the present gained by college students of history, and for
other reasons which it is not necessary here to detail, the man of
University training has, other things being equal, this advantage over
him who lacks it, that in life in the world he will get at things more
certainly and state them more accurately.

"A university," said Lowell, "is a place where nothing useful is
taught." By utility Lowell undoubtedly meant, to use the definition
which Huxley puts into the average Englishman's mouth, "that by which we
get pudding or praise or both." A natural reply to the statement of
Lowell is that great numbers of fathers every year, at a pecuniary
sacrifice, send their sons to college with the idea of fitting them
better to earn their living, in obedience to the general sentiment of
men of this country that there is a money value to college training. But
the remark of Lowell suggests another object of the University which, to
use the words of Huxley again, is "to catch the exceptional people, the
glorious sports of nature, and turn them to account for the good of
society." This appeals to those imbued with the spirit of the academy
who frankly acknowledge, in the main, our inferiority in the
scholarship, which produces great works of literature and science, to
England, Germany, and France, and who with patriotic ea