chiefly by an assessment on the college incomes, a capitation tax on
all undergraduates, and the fees attending matriculation, examinations,
and the granting of degrees. The examinations are numerous. Every
student on entering is required to pass, or to claim exemption from,
an entrance examination. In either case he pays £3 to the university,
and upon admission to any honor course or "tripos" to qualify for
the degree of Bachelor of Arts £3 more is exacted. The income of the
university from these examination fees alone amounts to £9,400 per
annum, £4,600 of which goes to pay the examiners. In America this is
supposed to be a part of the professor's or instructor's duty, no
additional remuneration is allowed, and hence it does not become
necessary to make an additional tax upon the students' resources. The
conferring of degrees is also made a very profitable affair. Each
candidate for the degree of B. A. pays out £7 to the voracious 'varsity
chest, and upon proceeding to the M. A. a further contribution of £12
is requested. In this way the university makes about £12,000 a year,
and, as though this was not sufficient, she requires a matriculation
fee of £5 for every student who becomes a member. By this means another
annual £5,000 is obtained. It must be remembered that these fees are
entirely separate from the college fees. When the £5 matriculation for
the latter is taken into consideration and the £8 a term (at Trinity)
for lectures, two thirds of which the student does not attend, when it
is understood that all this and more does not include living expenses,
which are by no means slight, and that there are three terms instead of
two, as with us, it will be obvious that Cambridge adheres very closely
to the rule that to them only who have wealth shall her refining
influence be given. That the greatest universities in existence should
render it almost totally impossible for aught but the rich to obtain
the advantages of their unusual educational facilities jars with that
idea of democracy of learning which an American training is apt to
foster. But, as we shall point out later, an aristocracy of learning
may also have its uses.
[Illustration: HENRY SIDGWICK, Litt. D., Trinity. Knightbridge
Professor of Moral Philosophy.]
With all the revenues the university collects from colleges and
students, amounting in all to about £65,000, Cambridge still finds
herself poor. Some of the colleges, notably King's and Trinity,
are extremely wealthy, but the university remains, if not exactly
impecunious, at least on the ragged edge of financial difficulties.
The various regius and other professorships, inadequately endowed by
the munificence of the crown and of individuals, have each to be
augmented from the university chest. The continual repairing of the old
laboratories and scientific apparatus, the salaries to lecturers, to
proctors, bedells, and other officers, cause a continual drain on the
exchequer, which, with the rapidly growing need for larger laboratories
and newer apparatus, has finally resulted in an appeal to the country
for the sum of half a million pounds.
[Illustration: DONALD MACALISTER, M. A., M. D., St. Johns. Linacre
Lecturer of Physics.]
It has been seen that the drains on a student's pocket are very
considerable at Cambridge, owing to the number of perquisites showered
by the colleges on their Fellows, and it may appear that this state
of things is unjust and wrong. At present Oxford and Cambridge are
practically within the reach of only the moneyed population. According,
however, to a plausible and frequently repeated theory, it is not the
function of these universities to meet the educational needs of the
mediocre poor. The writer's critical attitude toward the financial
system in vogue at Cambridge is a proper one, only on the assumption
that a maximum of education to all classes alike at a minimum of
expense is the final cause and desideratum of a university's existence.
But if one assumes that Oxford and Cambridge exist for a different
purpose, that the chief end they propose to themselves is individual
research, and the advancement, not the promulgation, of learning, it
must be admitted that their system has little that is reprehensible.
According to this standpoint the students only exist by courtesy of
the dons (a name for the Fellows), who have a perfect right to impose
upon the students, in return for the condescension which is shown them,
what terms they see fit. And they argue that this view is the historic
one. The colleges were originally endowed solely for the benefit of
a certain limited number of Fellows and scholars. The undergraduate
body, as it at present exists, is a later growth, whose eventual
existence and the importance of which to the university was probably
not anticipated by the college founders. Starting with this, the
defenders of the present _régime_ would point out, in addition, that
there are other English institutions where the poorer classes may be
educated, that Cambridge and Oxford are not only not bound to take upon
themselves this task, but that they actually subserve a higher purpose
and one just as necessary to the development of English science and
letters and to the education of the English intellect by specializing
in another direction. The good of a philosopher's lifelong reflections,
they would say, is not always manifest, but the teachers who instruct
the nation's youth are themselves dependent for rational standpoints
upon the labor of the greater teacher, and they act as the instruments
of communication between the most learned and the unlettered. So Oxford
and Cambridge are the sources from whose fountains of wisdom and
culture flow streams supplying all the academic mills of Britain, which
in their turn are enabled to feed the inhabitants. It would be absurd,
they maintain, to insist that the streams and the mills could equally
well fulfill the same functions. Cambridge and Oxford instruct just so
far as so doing is compatible with what for them is the main end--the
furthering of various kinds of research and the offering of all sorts
of inducements in order to keep and attract the interested attention of
classical butterflies and scientific worms. How well they succeed in
this noble ambition is known throughout the civilized world.
Mr. G. H. Darwin, a son of Charles Darwin, has recently had occasion
to mention the enormous scientific output of Cambridge University.
After saying that the Royal Society is the Academy of Sciences in
England, and that in its publications appear accounts of all the
most important scientific discoveries in England and most of those
in Scotland, Ireland, and other parts of Europe, he goes on to state
that he examined the Transactions of this society for three years and
discovered that out of the 5,480 pages published in that time 2,418
were contributed by Cambridge men and 1,324 by residents.
In view of these facts, and despite the shortcomings of this university
as a teaching institution, it is to be hoped that private generosity
will answer her appeal for financial assistance. Her laboratories are
a mine of research, and it is in them and in the men who conduct them
that Cambridge is perhaps most to be admired.
[Illustration: SIR G. G. STOKES, Bart., M. A., LL. D., Sc. D., F. R.
S., Pembroke. Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.]
The Cavendish Laboratory of Physics, where Clerk-Maxwell and afterward
Lord Rayleigh taught, and which is at present in the hand of their
able successor, J. J. Thomson, is a building of considerable size
and admirably fitted out, but the rapidly increasing number of young
physicists who are being allured by the working facilities of the
place, and by the fame of Professor Thomson, is rendering even this
splendidly equipped hall of science inadequate. The physiological
laboratories are many, they are completely furnished with appliances,
and a large number of students are there trained annually under the
supervision of one of England's most eminent living scientists,
Michael Foster, and his scarcely less able associates--Langley, Hardy,
and Gaskell. Chemistry, zoölogy, botany, anatomy, and geology have
each their well-appointed halls and masterly exponents. The names
MacAlister, Liveing, Dewar, Newton, Sedgwick, Marshall Ward, and Hughes
are not easily matched in any other one institution. Indeed, it is
when one stops to consider the intellects at Cambridge that it becomes
a dangerous matter to institute comparisons, and to say that this
discipline or that is most rich in eminent interpreters. In science,
at any rate, and in all branches of science, Cambridge stands alone.
Not even Oxford can be considered for a moment as in the same class
with her. And of all the sciences it is undoubtedly in mathematics
and astronomy that the supremacy of Cambridge is most pronounced. The
names of Profs. Sir G. G. Stokes and Sir R. S. Ball will be familiar to
every reader, while those of Profs. Forsythe and G. H. Darwin and Mr.
Baker will be familiar to all mathematicians. In classics Cambridge,
while not possessing a similar monopoly of almost all the talent,
still holds her own even with Oxford. Professors Jebb, Mayor, and
Ridgeway, and Drs. Verrall, Jackson, and Frazer constitute a group of
men second to none in the subjects of which they treat. Professor Jebb
is also one of the university's two representatives in Parliament.
In philosophy Cambridge has two men, Henry Sidgwick and James Ward,
the former of whom is perhaps by common consent the first living
authority on moral science, while the latter ranks among the first of
living psychologists. These men, while representing very different
philosophical standpoints, unite in opposition not only to the
Hegelian movement, which, led by Caird and Bradley of Oxford, Seth and
Stirling of Edinburgh, threatens the invasion of England, but also to
the Spencerian philosophy. The latter system has not many adherents at
either university, but the writer has been told by Professor Sully that
the ascendency of the neo-Hegelian and other systems is by no means
so pronounced elsewhere in England. The Spencerian biology, on the
contrary, has been largely defended at Cambridge, while Weismannism,
for the most part, is repudiated there and at Oxford.
The teaching at Cambridge, as at all universities, is of many grades.
In many subjects the lectures are not meant to give a student
sufficient material to get him through an examination, and a "coach"
becomes requisite, or at any rate is employed. This system of coaching
has attained large dimensions; its results are often good, but it
means an additional expense and seems an incentive to laziness, making
it unnecessary for a student to exert his own mental aggressiveness
or powers of application as he who fights his own battles must do.
The Socratic form of instruction, producing a more intimate and
unrestricted relation between instructor and student, and which is
largely in operation in the States, is little practiced in England.
In science the methods of instruction at Cambridge are ideal. That
practical acquaintance with the facts of Nature which Huxley and
Tyndall taught is the only true means of knowing Nature, is the key
according to which all biological and physical instruction at these
institutions is conducted.
[Illustration: JAMES WARD, Sc. D., Trinity. Professor of Mental
Philosophy and Logic.]
In the last half dozen years two radical steps have been taken by both
Oxford and Cambridge--steps leading, to many respectable minds, in
diametrically opposite directions. The step backward (in the writer's
view) occurred when the universities, after much excitement, defeated
with slaughter the proposition granting university degrees to women.
It was simply proposed that the students of Newnham and Girton, who
should successfully compete with male students in an honor course,
should have an equal right with the latter to receive the usual degrees
from their alma mater. After industrious inquiry among those who were
foremost in supporting and opposing this movement the writer has
unearthed no objection of weight against the change. "If the women
were granted degrees they would have votes in the senate," and "It
never has been done"--these are the two reasons most persistently
urged in defense of the conservative view; while justice and utility
alike appear to be for once, at any rate, unequivocally on the side
of the women. Prejudice defeated progress, and students celebrated
the auspicious occasion with bonfires. The step forward was taken
when the universities and their colleges decided to throw open their
gates to the graduates of other universities in England, America, and
elsewhere for the purpose of advanced study. But here, as in other
things, Cambridge leads the way, and Oxford follows falteringly. The
advanced students at Cambridge are treated like Cambridge men, they
have the status of Bachelors of Arts, and possess in most respects
the advantages, such as they are, of the latter; while at Oxford the
advanced students are a restricted class, with restricted advantages,
and their relation to the university is not that of the other
students. In Cambridge the movement which has resulted in the present
admirable condition of affairs was largely brought about by the zeal
and enterprise of Dr. Donald MacAlister, of St. John's College, the
University Lecturer in Therapeutics, a man of wide sympathies and
ability, and whose name is closely associated with this university's
metamorphosis into a more modern institution.
THE WONDERFUL CENTURY.[1]
A REVIEW BY W. K. BROOKS,
PROFESSOR OF ZOÖLOGY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.
Every naturalist has in his heart a warm affection for the author of
the Malay Archipelago, and is glad to acknowledge with gratitude his
debt to this great explorer and thinker and teacher who gave us the law
of natural selection independently of Darwin. When the history of our
century is written, the foremost place among those who have guided the
thought of their generation and opened new fields for discovery will
assuredly be given to Wallace and Darwin.
[1] Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1899.
Few of the great men who have helped to make our century memorable
in the history of thought are witnesses of its end, and all who have
profited by the labors of Wallace will rejoice that he has been
permitted to stand on the threshold of a new century, and, reviewing
the past, to give us his impressions of the wonderful century.
We men of the nineteenth century, he says, have not been slow to praise
it. The wise and the foolish, the learned and the unlearned, the poet
and the pressman, the rich and the poor, alike swell the chorus of
admiration for the marvelous inventions and discoveries of our own age,
and especially for those innumerable applications of science which now
form part of our daily life, and which remind us every hour of our
immense superiority over our comparatively ignorant forefathers.
Our century, he tells us, has been characterized by a marvelous and
altogether unprecedented progress in the knowledge of the universe and
of its complex forces, and also in the application of that knowledge
to an infinite variety of purposes calculated, if properly utilized,
to supply all the wants of every human being and to add greatly to the
comforts, the enjoyments, and the refinements of life. The bounds of
human knowledge have been so far extended that new vistas have opened
to us in nearly all directions where it had been thought that we could
never penetrate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of
learning in the ever-widening expanse of the universe. It may, he
says, be truly said of the men of science that they have become as
gods knowing good and evil, since they have been able not only to
utilize the most recondite powers of Nature in their service, but have
in many cases been able to discover the sources of much of the evil
that afflicts humanity, to abolish pain, to lengthen life, and to add
immensely to the intellectual as well as the physical enjoyments of our
race.
In order to get any adequate measure for comparison with the nineteenth
century we must take not any preceding century, but the whole preceding
epoch of human history. We must take into consideration not only the
changes effected in science, in the arts, in the possibilities of
human intercourse, and in the extension of our knowledge both of the
earth and of the whole visible universe, but the means our century has
furnished for future advancement.
Our author, who has borne such a distinguished part in the intellectual
progress of our century, shows clearly that in means for the discovery
of truth, for the extension of our control over Nature, and for the
alleviation of the ills that beset mankind, the inheritance of the
twentieth century from the nineteenth will be greater than our own
inheritance from all the centuries that have gone before.
Some may regret that, while only one third of Wallace's book is
devoted to the successes of the wonderful century, the author finds
the remaining two thirds none too much for the enumeration of some of
its most notable failures; but it is natural for one who has borne his
own distinguished part in all this marvelous progress to ask where the
century has fallen short of the enthusiastic hopes of its leaders, what
that it might have done it has failed to do, and what lies ready at
the hand of the workers who will begin the new century with this rich
inheritance of new thoughts, new methods, and new resources.
The more we realize the vast possibilities of human welfare which
science has given us the more, he says, must we recognize our total
failure to make any adequate use of them.
Along with this continuous progress in science, in the arts, and in
wealth-production, which has dazzled our imaginations to such an extent
that we can hardly admit the possibility of any serious evils having
accompanied or been caused by it, there has, he says, been many serious
failures--intellectual, social, and moral. Some of our great thinkers,
he says, have been so impressed by the terrible nature of these
failures that they have doubted whether the final result of the work
of the century has any balance of good over evil, of happiness over
misery, for mankind at large.
Wallace is no pessimist, but one who believes that the first step in
retrieving our failures is to perceive clearly where we have failed,
for he says there can be no doubt of the magnitude of the evils that
have grown up or persisted in the midst of all our triumphs over
natural forces and our unprecedented growth in wealth and luxury, and
he holds it not the least important part of his work to call attention
to some of these failures.
With ample knowledge of the sources of health, we allow and even
compel the bulk of our population to live and work under conditions
which greatly shorten life. In our mad race for wealth we have made
gold more sacred than human life; we have made life so hard for many
that suicide and insanity and crime are alike increasing. The struggle
for wealth has been accompanied by a reckless destruction of the
stored-up products of Nature, which is even more deplorable because
irretrievable. Not only have forest growths of many hundred years been
cleared away, often with disastrous consequences, but the whole of
the mineral treasures of the earth's surface, the slow productions of
long-past eras of time and geological change, have been and are still
being exhausted with reckless disregard of our duties to posterity and
solely in the interest of landlords and capitalists. With all our
labor-saving machinery and all our command over the forces of Nature,
the struggle for existence has become more fierce than ever before,
and year by year an ever-increasing proportion of our people sink into
paupers' graves.
When the brightness of future ages shall have dimmed the glamour of our
material progress he says that the judgment of history will surely be
that our ethical standard was low and that we were unworthy to possess
the great and beneficent powers that science had placed in our hands,
for, instead of devoting the highest powers of our greatest men to
remedy these evils, we see the governments of the most advanced nations
arming their people to the teeth and expending most of the wealth and
all the resources of their science in preparation for the destruction
of life, of property, and of happiness.
He reminds us that the first International Exhibition, in 1851,
fostered the hope that men would soon perceive that peace and
commercial intercourse are essential to national well-being. Poets and
statesmen joined in hailing the dawn of an era of peaceful industry,
and exposition following exposition taught the nations how much they
have to learn from each other and how much to give to each other for
the benefit and happiness of all.
Dueling, which had long prevailed, in spite of its absurdity and
harmfulness, as a means of settling disputes, was practically abolished
by the general diffusion of a spirit of intolerance of private war; and
as the same public opinion which condemns it should, if consistent,
also condemn war between nations, many thought they perceived the dawn
of a wiser policy between nations.
Yet so far are we from progress toward its abolition that the latter
half of the century has witnessed not the decay, but a revival of the
war spirit, and at its end we find all nations loaded with the burden
of increasing armies and navies.
The armies are continually being equipped with new and more deadly
weapons at a cost which strains the resources of even the most wealthy
nations and impoverishes the mass of the people by increasing burdens
of debt and taxation, and all this as a means of settling disputes
which have no sufficient cause and no relation whatever to the
well-being of the communities which engage in them.
The evils of war do not cease with the awful loss of life and
destruction of property which are their immediate results, since they
form the excuse for inordinate increase of armaments--an increase
which has been intensified by the application to war purposes of those
mechanical inventions and scientific discoveries which, properly used,
should bring peace and plenty to all, but which when seized upon by the
spirit of militarism directly lead to enmity among nations and to the
misery of the people.
The first steps in this military development were the adoption of a new
rifle by the Prussian army in 1846, the application of steam to ships
of war in 1840, and the use of armor for battle ships in 1859. The
remainder of the century has witnessed a mad race between the nations
to increase the death-dealing power of their weapons and to add to
the number and efficiency of their armies, while all the resources of
modern science have been utilized in order to add to the destructive
power of cannon and both the defensive and the offensive power of
ships. The inability of industrious laboring men to gain any due share
of the benefits of our progress in scientific knowledge is due, beyond
everything else, to the expense of withdrawing great armies of men
in the prime of life from productive labor, joined to the burden of
feeding and clothing them and of keeping weapons and ammunition, ships,
and fortifications in a state of readiness, of continually renewing
stores of all kinds, of pensions, and of all the laboring men who must,
besides making good the destruction caused by war, be withdrawn from
productive labor and be supported by others that they may support the
army.