of Goettingen or Heidelberg. Our young
men are not attracted to the German universities by such factitious
considerations as cheapness of living or the acquisition of the
language, but by sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.
Some of the most important fixed principles have been already touched
upon, but only one can be developed in this place. It is, that if
we are to establish a system of higher education, we must begin by
recognizing freely and fully the distinction between teacher and
professor. We must perceive the importance of having two sets of
men--the one to teach, the other to investigate; the one engaged in
training boys to learn, the other in showing young men how to think.
When and how this distinction is to be established, in what special
form it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is
to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who returns
after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting with dignified
pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of course upon the
institution that conferred it as the _ne plus ultra_. But riper
experience, contact with the sharp corners of American prejudices
and peculiarities, renewed familiarity with our social, political,
commercial and literary life, will gradually convince him that a
German university is not a thing to be plucked up by the roots and
transplanted bodily to American soil. We have rather to take our
native stock as we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the
German. One trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts
will be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than
one department in a German university will be of little avail in an
American, and conversely we shall have to create some that do not
exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of the great power exerted by
the newspaper press, it might be desirable to have a course of study
for those who think of taking up journalism as a profession. In such
a course, political economy, constitutional and international law,
English and American history, and the modern languages and literatures
should constitute a full and serious discipline. It is not probable
that the study of philology will ever attract the same attention here
that it does abroad. Our needs lie in the direction of the natural
sciences rather than in the direction of history and linguistics. But
we should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these sciences
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