Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/748

 732 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

civic policy which tend to work themselves out in fact and history, if not in word and theory, when city development gets arrested at the town stage.

VIII. Unfair as it would be to English, not less would it be to American civilization, as a whole, to impute to it the conception of civic status restricted to the limitations of the railway engineer, or even of the chamber of commerce. The United States is not only the country of railway cities and railway kings ; it is also the country, par excellence, of schools, universities, and educationists. The American "schoolmarm" balances the American Viking, and the world trembles in the hope and expectation that some day she may succeed in taming and domesticating him. In no other way, probably, can his disforestings and devastations be effectually stopped, and his destructive energies converted to more con- structive ideals.

If we define a "university" as a degree-granting institution, then there are over seven hundred universities in America. It is the aspiration of every American city to possess its own univer- sity. The university is, in a sense, the cathedral a somewhat truncated one, doubtless of the American city, and every citizen is unhappy until his city gets what he conceives to be its full com- plement of culture, in the possession of a university. Here as elsewhere the principle holds, Cujus regio, ejus religio; and we may agree with Herder's saying that "the school is the workshop of the spirit of God," provided we are allowed the proviso of de- fining the divine artificer as the God of that region. Minerva is building again her temples over the land, and nowhere more assiduously than in the United States.

These 700 to 800. American universities are, it is true, reduced to more modest dimensions in the impartial list of the Minerva Jahrbuch. The German Compilers of this annual census of the academic world admit only 70 universities in the United States. This number compares with a list of 21 universities in Germany, 1 6 in France, 18 in Great Britain, 78 in the rest of Europe, and for the whole world 236.

How far may we accept a certain vague popular sentiment