Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/55

Rh question, "Pourquoi la France n'apas trouvé d'hommes supérieurs au moment du péril?" The general answer was because France had allowed university education to sink to a low ebb. Before the great Revolution France had twenty-three autonomous universities in the provinces. Napoleon desired to found one great university at Paris, and he crushed out the others with the hand of a despot, and remodelled the last with the instincts of a drill-sergeant. The central university sank so low that in 1868 it is said that only £8,000 were spent for true academic purposes. Startled by the intellectual sterility shown in the war, France has made gigantic efforts to retrieve her position, and has rebuilt the provincial colleges at a cost of £3,280,000, while her annual budget for their support now reaches half a million pounds. In order to open these provincial colleges to the best talent of France, more than five hundred scholarships have been founded, of an annual cost of £30,000. France now recognizes that it is not by the number of men under arms that she can compete with her great neighbor Germany, so she has determined to equal her in intellect. You will understand why it is that Germany was obliged, even if she had not been willing, to spend such large sums in order to equip the university of her conquered province, Alsace-Lorraine. France and Germany are fully aware that science is the source of wealth and power, and that the only way of advancing it is to encourage universities to make researches and to spread existing knowledge through the community. Other European nations are advancing on the same lines. Switzerland is a remarkable illustration of how a country can compensate itself for its natural disadvantages by a scientific education of its people. Switzerland contains neither coal nor the ordinary raw materials of industry, and is separated from other countries which might supply them by mountain-barriers. Yet, by a singularly good system of graded schools, and by the great technical college of Zürich, she has become a prosperous manufacturing country. In Great Britain we have nothing comparable to this technical college, either in magnitude or efficiency. Belgium is reorganizing its universities, and the state has freed the localities from the charge of buildings, and will in future equip the universities with efficient teaching resources out of public taxation. Holland, with a population of four million, and a small revenue of £9,000,000, spends £136,000 on her four universities. Contrast this liberality of foreign countries in the promotion of higher instruction with the action of our own country. Scotland, like Holland, has four universities, and is not very different from it in population, but it only receives £30,000 from the state. By a special clause in the Scotch Universities Bill the Government asked Parliament to declare that under no circumstances should the parliamentary grant be ever increased above £40,000. According to the views of the British Treasury, there is a finality in science and in expanding knowledge.