Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/85

Rh to enable more students in the secondary and technical schools to complete their education.

In all these ways, facilities would be afforded for providing the highest instruction to a much greater number of students. At present there are almost as many professors and instructors in the universities and colleges of the United States as there are day students in the universities and colleges of the United Kingdom.

Men of science, our leaders of industry, and the chiefs of our political parties all agree that our present want of higher education—in other words, properly equipped universities—is heavily handicapping us in the present race for commercial supremacy, because it provides a relatively inferior brain-power which is leading to a relatively reduced national income.

The facts show that in this country we can not depend upon private effort to put matters right. How about local effort?

Any one who studies the statistics of modern municipalities will see that it is impossible for them to raise rates for the building and up-keep of universities.

The buildings of the most modern university in Germany have cost a million. For up-keep the yearly sums found, chiefly by the state, for German universities of different grades, taking the incomes of seven out of the twenty-two universities as examples are:

Thus if Leeds, which is to have a university, is content with the 4th class German standard, a rate must be levied of 7d. in the pound for yearly expenses, independent of all buildings. But the facts are that our towns are already at the breaking strain. During the last fifty }ears, in spite of enormous increases in ratable values, the rates have gone up from about 2s. to about 7s. in the pound for real local purposes. But no university can be merely a local institution.

What, then, is to be done? Fortunately, we have a precedent admirably in point, the consideration of which may help us to answer this question.

I have pointed out that in old days our Navy was chiefly provided by local and private effort. Fortunately for us, those days have passed away; but some twenty years ago, in spite of a large expenditure, it began to be felt by those who knew that in consequence of the increase