HE PLANTING OF COLLEGES IN THE NEW WORLD.

Our national existence came into full bloom under the light of a
Christian civilization. The political, social and religious
institutions were sufficiently well organized in the Old World to be
advantageously introduced, with some modifications, into a young
nation in the New World.

The early colonists first founded a church, then a school, and then a
college. They felt that the colonial organization was incomplete
without a college to inculcate such piety, virtue and intelligence as
would preserve and perfect the highest social order and secure the
blessings of liberty. These colleges, modelled at first after the
universities of Europe, soon mapped out a pathway for themselves, and
have now come to occupy a unique place in our national life.

The Pilgrim Fathers sought to establish in the New World three great
principles: civil and religious liberty, and to make education their
corner-stone. The scholarly impulses were so dominant at this early
day that when the entire population of New England did not exceed four
thousand, the people determined to establish a college, which Cotton
Mather says "was the best thing they ever thought of." It is estimated
that this meager population contained as many as one hundred men who
had received the training of Oxford and Cambridge. Sixty of them were
from the University of Cambridge; twenty were from Oxford, and others,
apparently, from the Scotch universities. The colleges they founded
show traces of all these institutions. These intelligent and refined
men, with breadth of culture and political foresight and public
spirit, constituted the chief source of greatness in the early days
of New England.

The three leading colonial colleges, Harvard, Yale, and William and
Mary, were planted and permeated with the spirit of republican liberty
and primitive Christianity. They began in a very modest way.

Harvard, the oldest of American colleges, was founded in the beginning
of the colonial days, only eighteen years after the Pilgrim Fathers
landed on Plymouth Rock, and when Boston was a village of twenty-five
or thirty houses, and when only twenty-five towns had begun to be
settled in the colony. In 1636, six years after the settlement of
Boston, the colonial legislature voted the sum of four hundred pounds
(equivalent to a tax of fifty cents to every person in the colony)
towards the founding of Harvard College, with the avowed purpose o