The demand of institutions of learning for endowment receives special emphasis at the present by the decreasing rate of interest.  It is difficult, every college treasurer knows well, so to invest funds with safety as to cause them to return more than five per cent, interest.  Ten years ago in the East it was as easy to secure seven, as it is now to secure five, per cent.  In one year one college saw its income decrease many thousand dollars by reason of this decrease in the rate of interest.  Bowdoin College is distinguished for the success with which its funds are administered.  At the present these funds are said to pay about six per cent, interest, but it is a rate higher than many colleges are able to gain.  By this decrease the salaries of professors, the income of scholarships, and the entire revenue, suffer.

Many reasons might be urged in behalf of benevolence to institutions of learning.  Funds thus given are as a rule administered with extraordinary financial skill.  Their permanence is greater than the permanence of funds in trust companies and savings banks.  Harvard, the oldest college, Yale, the next to the oldest (with the exception of William and Mary), have funds still unimpaired, still applied to the designs of those who gave them in the first years of their incorporation.

Gifts to a college are, moreover, an application of the right principle of benevolence of helping those who help themselves.  The trustees, the professors, are, in proportion to their income, the most generous.  Not seldom do they pledge a year’s salary for the benefit of the institutions which they officially serve.  The first nineteen donors to Tabor College, Iowa, several of whom were its officers, gave no less than sixty per cent. of the assessed value of their property.  The efficient president of Colorado College has been engaged in making money for his college in legitimate business, in preference to making his own fortune.  The students, as well as the officers, of colleges endeavor to help themselves to an education in all fitting ways.  The keeping of school, the doing of chores, the running of errands, the tutoring of fellow-students, suggest the various ways in which they endeavor to work their way through college.

Those who thus donate their money, in amounts either large or small, foster the highest interests of the nation.  From institutions of learning flow the best forces of the national life.  Literature, the fine arts, patriotism, philanthrophy, and religion, thus receive their strongest motives.  The higher education in the United States is most intimately related to the master-minds of American literature.  Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, were in part created by Bowdoin and Harvard.  Among the most efficient officers of the late war were the graduates of the colleges.  Without the college the ministry would become a “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal” indeed, and without a learned ministry