trace of a disposition to look to the institutions of continental Europe for guidance.  This was a matter of course.  The founders of our colleges and the men whom they selected to be teachers were Englishmen by descent or by education, trained after the English fashion—­seeking freedom in America, yet at heart sympathizing with English thought, English habits and English prejudices.  Hence the establishment of our dormitory system—­not at once nor in all the fullness of a system.  The colleges were at first little more than schools.  The scholars boarded with the professors:  there were no funds for the erection of separate buildings.  But soon we see the evidences of a persistent effort to make each college an embryonic Oxford or Cambridge.  Harvard, Yale and Princeton before completing the first half century of existence were committed to the dormitory system.  Other colleges have followed the example thus set.  The exceptions are too few to need enumeration.

The mildest judgment that can be passed upon the system is that it has cost us dear.  Were all the figures accurately ascertained and summed up, were we able to see at a glance all the money that has been expended for land and brick and mortar by the hundreds of colleges between Maine and California, even such an aggregate, startling enough in itself, would fail to reveal the whole truth.  We should have to go behind the figures—­to consider what might have been effected by a more judicious investment of those millions—­how many professorships might have been permanently established, how many small colleges, now dragging out a sickly existence, too poor to live, too good to die, might have become vigorous branches in the tree of knowledge.  What have we in return for the outlay?  A series of structures concerning which the most ardent friend of the system cannot but admit that they are inelegant, uninspiring and unpractical.  Some of the newer dormitories at Harvard and Yale, it is true, are decided improvements.  They are well built and supplied with many conveniences that will serve to make student life less heathenish.  But they can scarcely be called beautiful, and they certainly are not inspiring.  The heart of the student or the visitor at Oxford swells within him at the sight of the grand architecture, the brilliant windows, the velvet turf.  It is pardonable in us to wish for ourselves a like refining beauty.  But is it not becoming in us to confess, without repining, that we cannot realize the wish?  Oxford is not merely the growth of ages:  it is the product of certain peculiar ages which have gone.  Men build now for practical purposes, not for the glorification of architecture.  The spirit of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will probably never return, or, if it should, it will come as a folk-spirit, neither springing from nor governed by the colleges, but carrying them along with it.  Hence, our colleges may content themselves with playing a less ostentatious part, and the most zealous alumnus need not think less of his alma mater for observing her limitations.