say, “I, the state, exact such and such qualifications of all who seek to practice law or medicine within my limits or to become my officeholders.  I establish my own free colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax all others at their full valuation.”  There is not a college in the country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms.  The state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely.  It can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public and private schools.  We see the operations of such a system very plainly in Michigan.  Not only does the university at Ann Arbor overshadow completely the private colleges, but the “union schools,” administered under its auspices, are—­to borrow the expression of one of its graduates—­“killing” the private schools.  We may rest assured that whatever the people of a State or of the United States is earnestly bent upon having, will come.

Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has done—­whether we are indeed ripe for thorough change—­whether a change is to be effected by direct State action or indirectly by the mere pressure of public sentiment—­whether we have real need of a body of professors and a set of universities such as Germany possesses—­whether we are to make our higher as well as our primary education non-sectarian,—­are all questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to come.  It is also possible that one or the other of them may, in legal phraseology, be sprung upon us at any time.  Not to be taken unawares, we have to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse ourselves of one misconception.

The misconception is this:  that what Germany accomplished in the eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old country and we are a young country.  The circumstances are not so very different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is in our favor.  We are a union of thirty or forty States:  in the Germany of the eighteenth century there were three hundred.  Ever since the adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection.  Will it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have acquired these blessings only within our own day?  We are a nation of forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources.  The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry brutally ignorant and servile, the national character—­to all appearance—­ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching back to the gloom