in connection with that of others, in order that the faculty may strike a fair general average.  The number of hours that he is compelled, by the college curriculum, to pass per week in the recitation-room is seldom less than fifteen, and may be as high as twenty.  The classes themselves are ill-sorted and often troublesome, and are usually unwieldy by reason of their size.  The professor’s mind must be continually on the watch to prevent disorder and enforce attention.  Besides, as every one knows full well who has tried it, there is nothing so exhausting as to supply “brains” to those who either have not received their portion from Nature or else have squandered it for a mess of pottage.  Every professor-teacher can bear witness to the truism that one hour in the recitation-room is fully equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, 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