of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry.  We are indeed a young country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in weakness, in poverty, in despondency.  Whoever doubts our ability to do as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the teachings of history—­overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was only where she had been in 1618.  That we should take Germany for our standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor.  Although we are connected with England by common descent, institutions and language, although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted considerable influence over our own, we do not observe our young men going in numbers to England and France to receive their final training.  Their instinct leads them to Germany.  For one American graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French ecoles, it would be easy to count ten doctors 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