Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/562

546 "We are, however, concerned with the sense or nonsense of the ideas of President Seelye, Mr. Ely, and their coterie of professorial socialists, only in a secondary degree. Our purpose is to show that the old Oxford spirit is being bred again in this country through the agency of highly-endowed educational institutions. Here, as always, where artificial protection is afforded to incapacity and mediævalism, we find the old neglect of facts, the old servility to prejudice and power, the same proneness toward the past, the same complacent carelessness and assurance of statement. Here, as ever, we find the old protective tone, the old ecclesiastical air—the old air of taking the public under the writer's wing. Had we space, numerous passages might be cited showing the patronizing and wholly foreign way in which the laboring-classes are regarded. And, of course, the same class-spirit is shown, as it always has been, in the bearing toward classes who are rising by their own unaided exertions to predominance (not, of course, of the political kind—else malign complexions would grow smiling) in the country. And the resistance of the Oxford bishops to Cobden and to Gladstone is singularly well paralleled by the jealousy shown by our endowed professors toward the great railroad managers, the great bankers and merchants and manufacturers, who are doing more for the comfort and happiness of mankind than any equal number of individuals in the world. And "The Nation's" remark (No. 1110), at the close of a review of one of Professor Ely's books, that "Dr. Ely seems to us to be seriously out of place in a university chair," was, while conceived in the right spirit, not literally true; for such men inevitably gravitate toward such positions.

Now, what is the rationale of the matter? Why is it that specially protected classes acquire such a pronounced class instinct as is found in English clergy, in state officials, and in endowed professors? In the first place, every agency has a tendency to persist in those activities and modes of thought in which it set out; and when new agencies spring out of old ones, the result is the same. Thus, through educational institutions, the eighteenth century forces its ideas on the nineteenth, Europe on America, and Harvard on California and Michigan. Then there is the natural class jealousy, exhibited by all organisms; by France as against Germany, America as against England, labor against capital, spiritualist against materialist, by every man against a rival. And when endowments or state support render a class totally distinct and altogether independent of those influences which govern the rest of mankind, both causes work great effects. The result is similar to the coagulation of the blood caused by tying up a limb and preventing a free circulation within it. First there is annoyance, and then the isolated part becomes the seat of a disturbance which may threaten the life of the organism. I believe that any person who observes the air, the social temper, which surrounds educational institutions, especially those richly endowed, will find the effect