surprise to Englishmen to be
told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only
Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities,
ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the
ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United
States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various
countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at
many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that
offered by either of the great English universities, while that of
Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.[167:1] And it must be remembered
that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more
systematically studied in America than in England.

Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges and universities" of
America--"the multitude of institutions the promoters of which delude
themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take";
and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those
institutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have passed
since he wrote--to note into what lusty and umbrageous plants have grown
such institutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though
one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated.
That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford
or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in
twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to
be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average,
much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs
are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not
merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad
form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth,
moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way
towards even the creation of an atmosphere--not the same atmosphere as
that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another
Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St.
Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."

"We may build ourselves more gorgeous habitations,
Fill our rooms with painting and with sculpture,
We cannot buy with gold the old associations----."

But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calcul