and practical judgment—­qualities which are developed by contact with the busy world.  Whoever has had the experience, knows that life in large cities is both stimulating and sobering.  It enlarges one’s range of ideas and sympathies:  it also keeps idiosyncrasies within proper bounds.  The individual does not lose his individuality, but rather intensifies it:  he loses only the exaggerated sense of his own importance.  We must regard it, then, as unfortunate that so many of our seats of learning are out of the world, so to speak.  Our professors would probably do their work better—­that is to say, with greater freshness of spirit—­and would exert a wider influence, were they thrown more in the company of men of the world.  In like manner, our colleges would play a more direct part in the affairs of the country.  The history of the German universities suggests a lesson.  Is it a mere accident that the oldest and the youngest German universities are in large cities?  In the Middle Ages, before the political organization of the country had fairly entered upon its morbid process of disintegration, we find Vienna, Prague[2] and Leipsic heading the list.  Subsequently, each petty duke and count, moved by the sense of his autonomy, sought to establish a university of his own.  The Reformation increased the spirit of rivalry.  Most of these second- and third-rate universities have passed away or have been merged in others.  The three youngest, Berlin, Munich and Strasburg, are all in large cities, and are all three the direct offspring of political and educational reorganization.  As Germany is now constituted, it would be impossible to found a new university in a small town.  Such places as Jena, Erlangen, Greifswald, Rostock, Marburg and Giessen barely hold their own against the strong movement in favor of concentration.

[Footnote 2:  Heidelberg comes between Vienna and Leipsic, but Heidelberg was then a much more important town than at present.]

The wholesome influence of large surroundings upon students is perhaps even more marked than upon professors.  History teaches us with singular clearness that small towns are precisely the ones in which student character is distorted out of all proportion.  No better example can be found than the University of Jena.  From the time of its foundation down to the present century the name of Jena stood for all that was wild, absurd, and outrageous.  In a village whose permanent population did not exceed four thousand, students were crowded by hundreds and thousands.  To speak without exaggeration, they ruled Philistia with a rod of iron, in defiance of law and order, and not infrequently of decency itself.  On this point we have an eye-witness of unquestionable veracity.  In 1798, Steffens, a young Dane brimful of enthusiastic admiration for German learning, arrived in the course of his travels at Jena.  He gives the following account of his first impressions of German student manners:[3] “I