to create such agencies, realizing that in a democracy public opinion was in the last analysis the controlling force. The state university became thus an educational trust, but one governed by and responsible to the people. Harvard University is also a trust-perhaps the largest trust in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts-but while it is the creature of the commonwealth it is not governed by it, nor related directly to the educational system of its state. As it is engaged, however, in large measure in interstate commerce, it may be that, if President Taft's recommendations are carried out, it will take out a federal license and be subject to the scrutiny of the Interstate Commerce Commission like other trusts!

The outcome of half a century of growth under this new conception of democracy shows still a striking difference in the educational status of these Western commonwealths and those of the Eastern seaboard. Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, California, Minnesota represent a different stage of educational consciousness from that which one sees in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Pennsylvania, for example, is one of the oldest and richest of the states of the Union. It has no debt and an enormous income. In no other state has the individualistic conception of education lingered longer. The state has never come into a conception of education from the standpoint of the whole people. As a consequence its public school system is still in the rudimentary stage; its normal schools are private enterprises whose stock is in the hands of individuals, and the normal schools and many of its colleges are engaged in the work of secondary education. The principal evidence of a statewide interest in education is to be seen in a series of appropriations to private institutions—colleges, hospitals, and charitable concerns—which makes education in that old and rich state a part of the politics in which Pennsylvania has achieved so bad an eminence.

No one can estimate the consequences of this educational movement begun in the Southern states, but first put into

motion about the middle of the last century in these great commonwealths of the Central West. Here for the first time on new soil was inaugurated a series of schools reaching from the highest to the lowest, created by the conscious act of the whole people and responsible to them.

Of the school system thus inaugurated the state university which crowned it was the most striking achievement and remains to-day the best evidence we have produced in our democracy of the ability of the people to create and conduct the agencies which they need for their own development. In no other nation of the world have institutions of the higher learning been developed so quickly, so essentially democratic and on the whole serving so well the needs of a democracy as do the best of our state universities. If our American democracy were to-day called to give proof of its constructive ability, the state university and the public school system which it crowns would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which the democracy could offer.

This does not mean that the path of the tax-supported university has been always amid the green pastures or that it has always trod the straight and narrow way. For many years even the best of these institutions led a precarious existence, and to-day only a few have risen to the independence and the dignity of true university life.

The state university of fifty years ago was launched upon the uncertain sea of politics. It has been a part of the work of every state university to educate the people of its state to the conception that partisan politics could not be mixed into the administration of a university without poisoning the very spirit for which it stood. It took years for this lesson to be learned.

There are many states in which a public opinion capable of supporting and nurturing a true university is still in the making. The regents of the new State of Oklahoma, the political experiment station of our Union, began their administration two years ago by turning out a competent

president and some of the best teachers and appointing in their places personal selections of the board. This body of trustees still conducts the institution on the theory that the trustees are to administer as well as to govern.

In the University of Florida last year an able president was forced to resign against the wishes of his own board of trustees by the use of political pressure and in deference to the cry for numbers. The fine old Commonwealth of Kentucky-the state of brave men and fair women-is educationally near the bottom of our list of states. The president of its State University has recently resigned. In no other state is educational leadership more needed at this moment than in Kentucky. It was a situation in which the trustees had the opportunity to do a great service to their state by finding such a leader and calling him to the presidency. They responded to this opportunity by choosing a politician entirely out of touch with educational methods and incapable of educational leadership.

In these and many other states the coming of the university into its true place must wait the development of a virile and sensitive public opinion which will hold trustees to a strict account. There is in truth no more concrete proof of the high stage of civilization of an American commonwealth than a state university controlled by the state, but free of partisan politics, and there is no surer mark of a high order of civic efficiency in a state than its ability to produce a competent board of trustees for a great university.

The nearness of the state university to the political life of the people is at once its danger and its opportunity. The older colleges of the Eastern states-Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth-started as quasi-state institutions. They threw off this connection later partly on account of denominational influence, but mainly because of their distrust of a government directly from the people-a phenomenon not uncommon in a democracy. It is the great glory of the stronger state universities that they have met this issue and won. Every decade has seen a growing public opinion in

each state which holds the university above partisan politics and still keeps it in close relation to the whole body of the people. Every decade sees these universities stronger forces in democratic leadership. And notwithstanding such disappointments as those to which I have referred, the stronger state universities are to-day independent of partisan political pressure, and in every state-it may be slowly and with discouragement-the state university is finding its way to a leadership of the intellectual and moral forces of the state. In no section of our country has this progress been so marked in the last decade as in the Southern states. To-day in all these states the state university and the system of public schools are going forward at an astonishing pace. There is no more inspiring movement in our nation than this educational renaissance in the South.

During its fifty years of history the state university has also suffered as to its standards and ideals from the same causes which have affected other universities-the prevailing American superficiality and the rage for numbers. Very slowly are we coming to admit, whether in tax-supported colleges or in those on private foundation, that bigness and greatness are not synonymous terms. Success has not yet come to be a function of educational righteousness in the minds of the people.

In this matter the state institutions have sometimes found themselves under stronger temptations than even the privately endowed colleges. The strongest appeal to the legislator has hitherto been on the score of numbers. When the member of the legislature has been told that the state university or the state school of agriculture and mechanic arts is overcrowded by the hundreds of students which throng its halls, he has naturally given little thought to the methods by which these students were brought there; still less has he appreciated that in many cases they were obtained by the rankest advertising and by openly robbing the high schools. For the purpose of impressing the legislature, a student is a student, whether he is studying elementary

arithmetic in the sub-freshman classes or scientific agriculture in the college. The registration lists of students in some of these institutions remind one of the inventory of the Kansas farmer who, in advertisement of an auction sale, announced thirty-two head of stock. When the stock came to be sold, the thirty-two head were found to embrace two horses, one mule, a cow, and twenty-eight hens. No institutions which approach a legislature with such an argument can reasonably object when the politicians seek to play the same game with the college.

The most serious result of this unlimited competition for students has been that in many states the state university has been led into a betrayal of its duty to the secondary school system. There is no obligation which in a statesupported university is more clear and more important than that of nurturing and developing the secondary schools. The only method by which the state university can do this is to maintain for itself honest and reasonable standards of admission and to respect the field of the high school, not to trench upon it. The state university which itself undertakes to conduct secondary school work-unless as a temporary measure in a period of educational adjustment-is hindering the development of a true secondary school system. The university helps the secondary school best when it sets up fair standards and enforces them; when it holds the high schools responsible for good results, not when it undertakes to do the high schools' work for them; when it gives the secondary school system a wise, fair, and sympathetic scrutiny, and leads it into increasing thoroughness and efficiency. One decent high school at a county seat is worth more to that county in the way of intellectual stimulus than a few scattered students sent up to a secondary school maintained by a weak-kneed university.

In the effort to maintain such standards and to lead the high schools to uniform and reasonable standards the state universities of many states have been embarrassed by the presence of a large number of weak colleges which, while