one student to every 217 of the population.

The Austria-Hungary Empire had in 1891 eleven universities, eight of which were in Austria, with 1,112 professors and 14,272 students. The remaining three were in Hungary and had 322 professors and 4,098 students. There were for the same year in Switzerland nine universities, with 434 professors and 2,619 students.

The Catholic Church in Italy continued for years to exert an unprogressive and anti-intellectual influence. The present government of Italy, however, is fully awake to the importance of a university education for the people, and now maintains several universities at a large annual outlay.

This brief outline reveals the facts that all civilized nations are encouraging and maintaining schools for the higher education of the people, and suggests that a comparative study of them is both helpful and fruitful.

Many of the universities in the Old World lack the stimulus of the strong Protestant denominational influence and the marked religious character of the American colleges. They consequently fail to attain the highest results for the general good, but they are inaugurating an intellectual movement which will eventuate in a more glorious future.

II.

THE PLANTING OF COLLEGES IN THE NEW WORLD.

Our national existence came into full bloom under the light of a Christian civilization. The political, social and religious institutions were sufficiently well organized in the Old World to be advantageously introduced, with some modifications, into a young nation in the New World.

The early colonists first founded a church, then a school, and then a college. They felt that the colonial organization was incomplete without a college to inculcate such piety, virtue and intelligence as would preserve and perfect the highest social order and secure the blessings of liberty. These colleges, modelled at first after the universities of Europe, soon mapped out a pathway for themselves, and have now come to occupy a unique place in our national life.

The Pilgrim Fathers sought to establish in the New World three great principles: civil and religious liberty, and to make education their corner-stone. The scholarly impulses were so dominant at this early day that when the entire population of New England did not exceed four thousand, the people determined to establish a college, which Cotton Mather says "was the best thing they ever thought of." It is estimated that this meager population contained as many as one hundred men who had received the training of Oxford and Cambridge. Sixty of them were from the University of Cambridge; twenty were from Oxford, and others, apparently, from the Scotch universities. The colleges they founded show traces of all these institutions. These intelligent and refined men, with breadth of culture and political foresight and public spirit, constituted the chief source of greatness in the early days of New England.

The three leading colonial colleges, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary, were planted and permeated with the spirit of republican liberty and primitive Christianity. They began in a very modest way.

Harvard, the oldest of American colleges, was founded in the beginning of the colonial days, only eighteen years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, and when Boston was a village of twenty-five or thirty houses, and when only twenty-five towns had begun to be settled in the colony. In 1636, six years after the settlement of Boston, the colonial legislature voted the sum of four hundred pounds (equivalent to a tax of fifty cents to every person in the colony) towards the founding of Harvard College, with the avowed purpose of training young men for the ministry. This sum was increased in 1637 by the munificence of John Harvard, who was a graduate of Cambridge, and a finished scholar and clergyman from England. He gave eight hundred pounds and his library, consisting of three hundred volumes, towards the endowment, whereupon the college took his name. "The colony caught his spirit," says Boone. "Among the magistrates themselves, two hundred pounds was subscribed, a part in books. All did something, even the indigent; one subscribed a number of sheep; another, nine shillings' worth of cloth; one, a ten-shilling pewter flagon; others, a fruit dish, a sugar spoon, a silver-tipped jug, one great salt, one small trencher salt, etc. From such small beginnings did the institution take its start. No rank, no class of men, is unrepresented. The school was of the people." There is nothing in history to parallel the heroic spirit and boldness of these early settlers in attempting to found a college, surrounded as the people were with poverty, scanty subsistence, and savage enemies. They did not realize the wisdom of their liberality and sacrifice and its influence upon the future civilization of the Western World. Harvard College was located at Cambridge, with a single building, on less than three acres of land. It was supported by government appropriations and private philanthropy. For years the college was financially embarrassed. The salaries were small, and for nearly one hundred years were paid out of the colonial treasury. The President received a salary of $600. The total grants made to the college by the colony during the first century amounted to about $8,000. The total annual income from all sources at the close of the first century of its history was but £750. Down to 1780 the total amount contributed out of the public treasury was $68,675 and 3,793 acres of land. Individuals in England and America had likewise given $90,412.

No one at this period would have dared to predict that Harvard College would have in 1892 an endowment of $12,000,000 and an annual revenue of more than $1,000,000, with seventeen departments of instruction, three hundred teachers, and three thousand students. But such has been the phenomenal growth of some of our American institutions.

Among the colonial colleges, that of William and Mary is one of the most important. As early as 1617, an attempt was made in England to raise money to found a college among the Virginia settlers. In 1619, fifteen hundred pounds were in the hands of the treasurer, and ten thousand acres of land were granted by the Virginia Company. A preparatory school was founded two years later, but owing to the Indian massacre of 340 settlers which followed, the enterprise was suspended. The effort to found a college was subsequently revived in 1660. The Virginia Assembly enacted that "for the advancement of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken for a college and free school." Nothing came of this until 1688, when a subscription was taken from wealthy planters for twenty-five hundred pounds for the college. Five years later (1692) the first royal educational charter in America was granted. The college was established at Williamsburg, Virginia, and was given £2,000 and 20,000 acres of land, a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland, and the duty on furs, skins, and liquors imported, besides other fees and privileges of the Surveyor General's office. "In its royal foundation, its generous endowment, and liberal patronage," says R. C. Boone, "it stands in sharp contrast to the early years of Harvard. This was established by the Puritans, and stood for the severest of ultra-orthodox though dissenting Protestantism; that was founded to be and was an exponent of the most formal