n that ever sat on the box.

"'How is it, I should like to ask,' said one of our members, the other
day, 'that this faculty has gone on for eighty years managing its own
affairs and doing it well, and now within three or four months it is
proposed to change all our modes of carrying on the school? It seems
very extraordinary, and I should like to know how it happens.'

"'I can answer Dr. ----'s question very easily,' said the bland,
grave young man. 'There is a new president.'

"The tranquil assurance of this answer had an effect such as I hardly
ever knew produced by the most eloquent sentences I ever heard uttered."

The bland young man's innovations did not seem to do much harm to
Harvard, for under his administration, her financial resources have been
multiplied by ten, as has the number of her teachers, while the number
of her students has been multiplied by five. Dr. Eliot has grown into
the real head of the educational system of this country; his influence
has wrought vast changes in every department of teaching, from the
kindergarten to the university. It was his idea that common school
education and college education ought to be flexible, ought to be made
to fit the needs of the pupil. The result has been the broad development
of the elective system--broader than Josiah Quincy ever dreamed of. The
same system has changed the whole aspect of the teaching profession,
resulting in the demand for a competent training in some specialty for
every teacher.

Dr. Eliot, who is in a sense the first living citizen of America, has
not attained that position merely by success in his profession. He has
devoted time and thought to the great problems of our government, and
has taken an active part in many public movements--the race question,
the relations of capital and labor, the movement for universal
arbitration. He has been honored by France, by Italy, and by Japan, and
resigned from his great office, in 1909, at the age of seventy-five,
with mental and physical powers in splendid condition, not to retire
from active life, but to devote himself even more wholly to the service
of his countrymen. In this age of commercial domination, a career such
as Dr. Eliot's is more than usually inspiring.

In the history of the administration of Yale university, the most
striking personalities are the two Timothy Dwights and Noah Porter. The
first Timothy Dwight, born in 1752, and graduating from Yale at the age
of seventeen, bega