Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/344

338 To learn the elements of any science costs little. It can be learned at one end of a log with a great teacher on the other. It can be even learned without a teacher. But to master a science so as to extend its boundaries—this is quite another thing. More than a man can earn in a lifetime it costs to make a start—for this reason a university which provides means for such work is a very costly establishment; for this reason the investigator of the future must depend on the university. The nation with the best equipped universities will furnish the best trained men. On the universities the progress in manufactures and commerce must depend. Through the superiority of training Germany is passing England in the commercial world in spite of her handicaps of position and history. Through the excellence of her universities, without most of these handicaps, America is likely to excel both Germany and England.

As men of science are needed, they can not make themselves. Those with power can help them.-This fact has given the impulse to the far reaching gifts of Stanford, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Rhodes. These are not gifts but investments, put to the credit of the country's future. The people too have power. The same feeling of investment has led them to build their state universities and to entrust to them not only the work of personal culture, but of advancement in literature, science and arts. With general culture and professional training must go the advancement of knowledge, the progress of society, through the advancement of the wisdom and the power of man.