Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/553

Rh value for value given—seems to be a conception which, though it has reached many people in a confused way, has not yet penetrated educational circles. These, like the clergy in former times, imagine themselves independent of the rules governing other men in the struggle for existence, and demand support as a caste, independently of the quality of the individual service rendered, or the amount of demand for it. This is the attitude of college men as a body. They have not yet accommodated themselves to the new age, which recognizes no privilege. And this feeling likewise governs the law, which still permits men to set up perpetuities, and control the administration of wealth years after they are in their graves, and after a society of which they had no idea has arisen.

The explanation is not as simple as the fact is plain. It is that with the advance of the United States to the position of the wealthiest nation of the earth, the wealthy and fashionable classes have naturally reverted to European standards in education and fashion, and thus a collegiate system which once fulfilled a real need in Europe, has been transplanted into our own uncongenial soil. For it is true that even the churning of Latin and Greek into unwilling minds once had its use; as is also true of slavery, of the feudal system, of church establishments, and of all other things. That use consisted in the social discipline involved in the creation of a class united by common interests and ideas which could assist the ecclesiastics and the police in restraining the barbaric vulgar. When modern educational institutions were founded the great necessity of society was the repression of lawlessness, of private war, and of all the elements making for social disorganization. Under the supreme instinct of self-preservation every nation in Europe put forth vast institutions to uphold order and some semblance of law. The feudal system, ecclesiastical power, monarchy, and education, were the chief engines evolved for this purpose. In turn, or at the same time, they fulfilled the need which produced them; and since then they have each slowly declined and are rapidly being forced to adapt themselves to the changed condition of mankind. But every institution retains the instincts which gave it birth; the tendency of every structure is to persist in that mode of activity with which it starts. So we find the aristocracy of England still "willin'," like Barkis, to take care of the people, in spite of the ungrateful and altogether improper ridicule of men like Mr. Labouchere; and the late book of Mr. Mallock, "The Old Order changes," is extremely interesting and instructive, both as the latest expression of this pleasing willingness and in the ferocity with which it treats those who object to being taken care of. So with ecclesiastical systems, in their decline as an autocratic caste, the same mediæval instincts show