thus as men who have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to confess that we, our institutions and ways of thinking, have made the bushel for them and held it down over their heads.  It is not every man who has the persistency and stamina of Professor Whitney, for instance, who can toil for years with beginning classes in French and German, never losing sight of his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of bringing it forward, until at last he achieves the success he has especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the world.  Where a Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of untoward circumstances, a dozen will probably fail because of circumstances.  We naturally look to our colleges for the evidences of learning, of enlightenment and culture.  We think of the capital invested in them, of the part they play in moulding the character of our young men, and we deem it a matter of course that they should be continually producing something original and independent.  But when we compare them with the German universities—­and the comparison is forced upon us whenever one of our graduates goes abroad to complete his studies or whenever we look into a recent German publication—­we are forced to exclaim, “What are our colleges about?  Are they incompetent, or asleep?” Neither one nor the other.  Most of our professors do the best they can.  But they are fettered by routine:  they are not stimulated and sustained by the consciousness that their private studies may be made directly available in the classroom.  They lead two lives, as it were—­one as professor, the other as thinker and reader—­and there is not the proper action and reaction between the two.

The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to apply.  We have only to convert our colleges into universities, our college instructors into professors after the German model.  Let us relegate all teaching, so called, to the schools, and let us give our professors permission to expand into veritable scholars discoursing to young men of kindred spirit.  Any one can see at a glance that from the wish to the accomplishment is a long way.  Upon some of us the consciousness is beginning to dawn that perhaps we have not even taken the first decisive step.  The best that can be said of our colleges is that they are in a state of transition.  We have increased the number of studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent of, sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college.  We have also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of inducing our young men to complete their studies at home.  Yet every year we see a larger number going abroad.  In those days of golden memory, both for Germany and for America, when Longfellow was gliding down the Rhine with Freiligrath, and Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at Goettingen, an American in Germany was