Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/548

544 reports nine and so does Alabama; Rhode Island has one and Connecticut three, but North Carolina has fifteen, Georgia and Virginia each eleven and Tennessee twenty-four. Yet out of a total of 157 millions of productive funds held by American colleges, the south has but fifteen; of eight and a half million books in college libraries, the south holds but one and a quarter millions; the value of her scientific apparatus is a little over a million against a total valuation of seventeen millions, and of grounds and buildings eight and a half millions in a total of 146 millions. The total annual income available for the higher education in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kentucky is nineteen thousand dollars less than the yearly income of Harvard University, The efficiency of this income is still further reduced by being divided among a multitude of institutions. Ten feeble colleges are a poor substitute for one strong one. Out of forty institutions in the United States with productive funds amounting to a million and over, but five are in the south; of twenty-one with productive funds of between half a million and a million, but one. As to colleges for women, in 1890 sixty-eight per cent, of all such institutions—classing as colleges institutions empowered to give degrees—were in the south, while seventy-eight per cent, of the endowment of that group of institutions was held by twelve colleges in the North Atlantic states. The increase of endowment for women's colleges since that date has been preponderantly in institutions at the north.

So far as can be gleaned from public records, there are three southern state universities which in thirty years have received no 'benefaction ' whatsoever. It is true that in 1878 one of them reported hopefully that it had received some samples of cotton in different stages of growth, and some silk cocoons, but the visions of prosperity thus evoked were not fulfilled. Another term of barren years set in, and though as an emblematic gift—the substance of things hoped for—the cocoons were most happy, as an educational endowment they left much to be desired. Occasionally the southern college not otherwise favored has reported a gift of books, but there has been an ominously large proportion of 'public documents' in these lists, and libraries of country clergymen—hardly treasuries of modern thought, it is to be feared. These facts show another difference, in addition to the quantitative one, between the educational opportunities which have been open to the young men and women of the north and south.

The usual way of meeting an array of facts such as these is to refer to Mark Hopkins on his log as the true measure of the quality of a college, but unfortunately in no way does a scanty endowment tell so against an institution as in securing able teachers. The greatest scholarship, the exceptional ability in teaching, the strong and winning