ergy, to two passed in
private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we might
say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the recitation: it follows
him to his study, and haunts him with the recollection of absurd
blunders made by young men who should have done better--the
dispiriting reflection that despite his best efforts the stupid and
indifferent will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these
every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is
pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline--that is, protracted
faculty-meetings, interviews with anxious or irate parents,
exhortations to the vicious to mend their ways--we shall probably come
to the conclusion that the professor's burden is anything but light.
We all have heavy burdens. But while admitting the universality of the
adage, we are nevertheless at liberty to ascertain if we cannot make
the burden of a particular man or class easier to bear by fitting it
to the back.

Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure us that
we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great change, in our
system of higher education. They dilate upon the indisputable fact
that most of our older colleges have made rapid strides within
the past ten years, augmenting their endowments, erecting handsome
buildings, establishing new departments of study and increasing the
number of students. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton,
Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in
point of money and men, as they are at this day. The inference is, of
course, if so much has been done in ten years, what may we not expect
by the end of the century? The University of Virginia holds its own,
notwithstanding the desolation wrought by the late civil war, and Ann
Arbor and Cornell have shot up with extraordinary vigor. There can be
no doubt that our institutions of learning are full of robust life.
And it is no less certain that this growth of resources is due to
private enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and
even non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them
with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a German.
But in studying the aspect of higher education it behooves us not to
lose sight of the fundamental principle that education is something
spiritual in its nature, and that it cannot be gauged by buildings,
by endowments, by the trappings of wealth--in short, by anythin