with his arm as they went slowly up the stairs. He had extinguished the light below before they came up. All the house seemed dark but for a glow of fire-light coming through an open door on the first landing. It was the door Philip Tredennis had seen open that first night when he had looked in and had seen Bertha sitting in her nursery-chair with her child on her breast.

There they both stopped. Before the Professor's eyes there rose, with strange and terrible clearness, the vision of a girl's bright face looking backward at him from the night, the light streaming upon it as it smiled above a cluster of white roses. And it was this that remained before him when, a moment afterward, Bertha went into the room and closed the door.

Robert Underwood Johnson.

A Great Metropolitan University. WE have no great university in New York, but the feeling is very general in the community that, before long, we must have one. Of denominational colleges, more or less fully equipped, we have quite a number, but there is not one among these which can lay claim to the title of a great university; not one which is to the city of New York what Harvard is to Boston, Yale to New Haven, and Johns Hopkins to Baltimore. Unquestionably the most prominent and the most dignified among our local institutions of learning is Columbia College, with its associated schools, and the question is naturally being asked by the friends of higher education in this city, whether this in many respects admirable institution might not serve as a nucleus for the future university. Columbia has an able corps of instructors, and has of recent years shown a laudable tendency to adapt itself, though slowly, to the demands of the age. It is not very long since a School of Political Science was established and placed under the direction of a competent professor, and quite recently steps have been

taken toward the establishment of a School of Modern Languages, in which extensive facilities will be offered for linguistic and literary study. In spite of these timely innovations, however, the college is, in certain other directions, deficient, and scientific study occupies a very subordinate place in its curriculum. Only elementary instruction is offered in the School of Arts, in chemistry and geology, and even this is elective. In physics there are opportunities for more advanced study under an excellent professor; and, in fact, in other scientific branches, it is not the instructors but the curriculum which is at fault. In essentials the college still seems to adhere to the traditional English system, in which Latin, Greek, and mathematics hold the places of honor, and other studies are but grudgingly allowed, and occupy an uncertain footing. Latin and Greek prose and metrical composition and exercises in choral scanning are, according to the “Circular of Information," obligatory partly in the Freshman and partly in the Sophomore year; and among the senior electives are archaic Latin and lectures on the Elements of Comparative Philology. Now, if this were all elective, there could be no

possible objection to including it in the college course; but, to devote time to drilling men in the writing of Greek verse, while leaving them in ignorance of the anatomy and physiology of their own bodies, and leaving it to their option whether they will inform themselves as to the significance of the physical phenomena which daily meet their eyes, seems, to say the least, a very narrow policy, and indicates, on the part of the framers of such a curriculum, a lack of sympathy with the great intellectual movements of the century. It is the conservatism of its trustees, in this regard, which makes the friends of Columbia College doubtful as to whether it possesses sufficient elasticity and progressive vitality to expand into a great university, responsive to every need of the age. If this doubt is justified, there can be no question that, before many years, the college will be superseded by an institution which will be in closer sympathy with the scientific tendencies of modern life. That this would be a misfortune to the college its friends can scarcely fail to appreciate.

The charter of Columbia (then King's) College is dated October 31, 1754. It has always maintained a close connection with the Episcopal Church, and particularly with Trinity Parish, to which it is indebted for a large share of its endowment. Its traditions were naturally derived from Oxford and Cambridge, and its course of instruction was modeled in accordance with that of its English prototypes. However, by the establishment of its Law School (1858), its Medical School (1860), and its School of Mines (1863), the college has gradually departed from these traditions, and there is nothing in its charter to prevent it from developing still further in the direction we have endeavored to indicate. The English universities have, of late, become aware of their mediæval infirmities, and the recent parliamentary commission has recommended some radical changes, which will modernize and secularize both their curriculum and their semi-monastic organization. It is as well understood in England as it is in Germany, at the present day, that it is useless to fight any longer for the supremacy of classics and mathematics, and that there are other studies which are entitled to at least an equal rank as agencies of culture. What a university has to do is, therefore, to offer the most extensive facilities for the pursuit of every branch of human knowledge, and to accord no artificial prominence to any one study which tradition may have invested with a fictitious virtue. If the old undergraduate course must be retained (and it is, in our opinion, in need of essential modifications), then there should be provided opportunities for advanced postgraduate study, such as have already been provided at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. That there is a vital demand in a city like New York for something more than elementary instruction in geology, chemistry, physiology, philology, and a dozen other sciences that might be named, can scarcely be questioned. Where is the institution to be found that satisfies this demand? In the Columbia School of Mines, lectures are delivered by men competent in those sciences which have a direct professional value to mining engineers, and the Medical School confines itself likewise to the single aim of training professional men for their future calling. Strictly scientific work, such as is done at

the Physiological Institute of Berlin and the College de France, finds no place in any New York institution of learning. Therefore our doctors who wish to attain exceptional proficiency in any special branch of their profession go to Paris, Berlin, or Vienna; philologists who wish to acquire a thorough scientific training go to Berlin or Leipsic; and, in fact, every scholar who aims at something more than respectable mediocrity spends a year or two at a German university. It ought to be perfectly evident to any one who has seen the great number of American faces in the German lecture-halls, that there is an urgent demand for something better in the way of scientific training than America now offers. These young men, many of whom have to borrow the money that maintains them while studying, go abroad not from preference, but because they cannot find what they want at home. New York, with all her magnificent churches, hospitals, and business palaces, has hitherto satisfied itself with mediocrity in learning, and has never endowed any institution sufficiently to raise it to the dignity of a university worthy of this metropolis; but, judging from the discussions we have heard of late in many quarters, the city is becoming aroused to a consciousness of its need, and when this moment shall have arrived the great Metropolitan University will be removed from the region of possibility to that of fact.

It is popularly supposed that Columbia College possesses a more than sufficient endowment to undertake the work which we have here outlined; but those who are more intimately acquainted with her affairs assert that this is by no means the case. The two new buildings which have recently been erected have absorbed a large share of her income for several years to come, and a third one, which is to occupy the plot where the old college now stands, will still further reduce her resources and prevent her from extending her usefulness in accordance with the demands of the times. It is therefore obvious that a larger endowment is needed, and it is scarcely doubtful that her many wealthy and influential friends and alumni would respond liberally to an appeal issued under the authority of her president and board of trustees. The college has been sufficient unto itself in times past, and though never refusing gifts, has not, so far as we know, stimulated the interest and loyalty of her alumni by annual reports of her wants, such as are issued by the president of Harvard, or by direct appeals for aid. Accordingly, there is a general impression abroad that Columbia is rolling in wealth, and really wants no more money than she has. This self-sufficiency is, undoubtedly, very dignified, but it has many and obvious disadvantages. Large sums of money, which might be offered to Columbia if the public were impressed with the fact that she needed them, find their way elsewhere, and that healthy interest which is aroused and kept alive by constant public discussion is allowed to languish, because the institution, while pursuing the even tenor of its way, holds aloof from the burning educational questions of the day, and thus furnishes no food for discussion.

The president of Columbia, who is an able and progressive man, would spare no effort to make his college second to none in usefulness if the financial condition of the institution warranted him in under

taking well-recognized but expensive reforms. That the board of trustees, notwithstanding its conservative attitude on certain subjects in the past, would second him in every well-considered effort having this end in view, can scarcely be doubted; but until the financial problem shall have been satisfactorily solved, the board can hardly be expected to adopt any scheme involving heavier outlay. In the meanwhile, New York is waiting for her great university, and it is by no means an imaginary danger that Columbia, if she neglects her opportunity, may wake up some morning and find herself confronted with a formidable rival.

Slave or Master?

A COLORED clergyman of some education and much native wit was once discoursing to his congregation on what the apostle calls "the sinfulness of sin." "There are those, my brethren," he said, "who tell us that there is no such thing as sin; that man is created with certain appetites and propensities; that these were made to be gratified; and that, whenever we gratify them, we do that which is perfectly lawful and right." The last sentence was spoken with some emphasis; and four or five of the "leading brethren," understanding that it was the proper place to respond, punctuated the parson's falling inflection with a stalwart "Amen!"

The chorus in the colored meeting-house, like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, may be supposed to reflect the philosophy of the period. To an acute observer, the close relation between what is sometimes called the "advanced" thought of the day and the rude notions of the lowest stratum of society is often apparent. You shall find the fine-spun theories of materialistic science reduced to their lowest terms in the mouths of men in country groceries and city beergardens. The sentiment which the colored brethren rather infelicitously applauded-how does it differ from this dictum of Karl Vogt?" Free will does not exist, neither does any amenability or responsibility, such as morals and penal justice, and heaven knows what, would impose upon us. At no moment are we our own masters, any more than we can decree as to the secretions of our kidneys. The organism cannot govern itself; it is governed by the law of its material combination." The doctrine that the colored clergyman was endeavoring so laudably, but with such indifferent success, to controvert, how could it be more clearly stated than in these words of Moleschott? -"Sin lies in the unnatural, and not in the will to do evil. Speech and style, good and bad actions, courage, half-heartedness, and treachery, are all natural phenomena, and all of them stand in a direct relation to indispensable causes as their natural consequences, just as much as the revolutions of the globe.”

This kind of philosophy enters into the thought and speech of the most ignorant and depraved classes of the community to a considerable extent. Doubtless there is need of considering the disabilities that inhere in diseased organisms,-the hereditary tendencies to evil by which virtuous purposes are impeded; our judgments of our fellow-men will often be modified by such facts. But the "charity," or the "science," that denies human responsibility finds its proper issue and its natural votaries in the slums.

It is not, however, with the theological consequences of this philosophy that we are now concerned, but rather with its effect upon the education and training of the young. A doctrine that denies free will, and makes of man only a bundle of appetites and impulses and propensities whose law is in themselves, destroys not only religion and morality, it destroys also the foundations of education, and makes discipline a solecism. A logical deduction from it is the notion that pupils should study only what they like to study, and when they like to study; and that children should do only what they like to do, and when they like to do it. Modern theories of education are tinged by this notion; it finds place in the regimen of the home and the curriculum of the university. The popular lecturer who criticises the Old Testament with the fairness, erudition and wit of a stump-speaker, sneers at the old-fashioned notions of obedience and discipline; says that children ought to follow nature in the formation of their habits; and his audiences applaud the sentiment. It does not take such ideas long to filter down through all the strata of society, and thus to affect, in many ways, the conduct of old and young. Do we not note an increasing tendency to depend on moods and impulses? "I don't feel like work," is often proclaimed as the sufficient excuse for idleness. Disrelish for any particular pursuit is mentioned as ample reason for abandoning it. Even the paupers who beg at your door justify their failure to find employment by telling you that the labor offered them is not congenial.

Of course this plea has always been made, and, so long as the original sin of indolence continues to be so deeply rooted in human nature, it will be made; but it seems that now this vice of human nature is to be well-nigh elevated into the rule of life.

It is a pestilent notion. In it lurks the disorganizing force by which characters and communities are undermined and ruined. There never was a strong character that was not made strong by discipline of the will; there never was a strong people that did not rank subordination and discipline among the signal virtues. Subjection to moods is the mark of a deteriorating morality. There is no baser servitude than that of the man whose caprices are his masters, and a nation composed of such men could not long preserve its liberties.

This is a truth that the young must lay to heart. It will be a sorry day for this world, and for all the people in it, when everybody makes his moods his masters, and does nothing but what he is inclined to do. The need of training the will to the performance of work that is distasteful; of making the impulses serve, instead of allowing them to rule, the higher reason; of subjugating the moods instead of being subjugated by them, lies at the very foundation of character. It is possible to learn to fix the wandering thought, to compel the reluctant mental energy, to concentrate the power upon the performance of a task to which there is no inclination. Until this victory has been gained, life holds no sure promise; the achievement of this conquest is the condition of future success. No matter how splendid may be the natural gifts, unless there is a will that can marshal and command them, the life is sure to be a failure.

Even in the fine arts the highest inspirations wait on those who have learned to work. The poets who

never write except when they are in the mood, who do not learn to hold their minds firmly down to the work in hand, to justify the thought and shape the utterance, are not among the immortal bards. To the man who has wrought long and faithfully in perfecting the art of expression, in studying the subtile shades of meaning and the subtile tones of music that are found in words, and in combining them so that they will harmoniously tell some master truth of human experience, or show some phase of natural beauty, many a strain of beautiful and perfect melody comes suddenly; but it is because the molds of beauty were fashioned in the poet's mind by long and painful study. What is true of the poetic art is true of every other; the condition of artistic success is faithful work and thorough training.

The young men in the colleges know that training is indispensable to physical perfection. They know that the men who eat and drink just what their appetites crave, and take their exercise only when they feel like it, never win the boat-races or the foot-ball matches. It should not be difficult for them to see that mental and moral power, without which success and happiness in life are impossible, are equally dependent on discipline. The body will not do its best work unless, as a great authority says, it is "kept under "; and what is true of the body is equally true of the mind; its whims and caprices and moods must be brought under the subjection of a masterful will; the man must become not the servant, but the ruler of his own nature.

The Press and the New Reform.

THE platform seems to have had less to do proportionately with the triumphs of the principles of civil service reform than it had to do with the triumphs of anti-slavery principles. It would appear that the new political reform owes more to the arguments of writers than to the eloquence of speakers. We by no means intend to disparage the labors of speakers in Congress, in political conventions, in the pulpit, and elsewhere; but it should not be forgotten that the great work of educating the people in the matter of the new reform has been mainly by means of the printing-press, by means of books, pamphlets, and periodicals.

When Mr. Curtis, in a recent number of "Harper's

Weekly," writes of the late Thomas Allen Jenckes, of Rhode Island, as "The Father of Civil Service Reform," he does justice to one who should not be overlooked in the apportionment of honors. But Mr. Curtis is hardly the man to give a full and truthful account of the entire struggle, for modesty might occasion a serious hiatus in the story. As an orator, and in his office as President of the Reform Association, Mr. Curtis's labors have been great; but, as a writer and editor, they have been greater. Mr. E. L. Godkin should be mentioned with Mr. Curtis among those whose pens have been powerful in bringing about the just-begun reform. The wider dissemination of Mr. Curtis's political writings, in the pages of a popular illustrated weekly, is to be taken into the account; but the influence of "The Nation" upon the great body of thoughtful minds in all sections of the country can hardly be over-estimated. Not only the direct teachings of "The Nation" on the subject of civil service reform have been of incalculable value at this epoch in our history, but the tone that this journal has helped to impart to political thinking and discussion in general has been of the greatest importance.

We have named Mr. Curtis and Mr. Godkin especially; but we think it no more than just that Dr. Holland's convinced and convincing writings on this subject, in these columns, should be mentioned in this connection. Many of the monthly magazines and reviews have, moreover, welcomed papers by such able and persistent promoters of the reform as Mr. Dorman B. Eaton and Dr. Washington Gladden; and many of the religious weeklies and a certain number of the daily newspapers have kept up for years an able and earnest advocacy of the reform, though in these cases it is not so easy to detect the individual writers and single them out for the praise they deserve.

But, as we have said, the great reform is really only just begun. The adaptation of these new methods to our political system, the proper enforcement of the law, the extension of the reform to the machinery of our State and municipal governments,- these, also, are matters not so much for oratorical discourse and appeal as for the alert watchfulness and calm arguments and warnings of the press. Our political writers have by no means finished their work, with relation to the civil service; there is, if anything, more need of vigi. lance and wisdom than ever before.

Conway's "Emerson at Home and Abroad." * THE numerous readers of Mr. Conway's earlier books are accustomed to think of him as an insatiable explorer of facts and traditions, an enthusiastic heroworshipper, and a littérateur of unfailing vivacity and almost unerring tact. His drawbacks have seemed to

*Emerson at Home and Abroad. By Moncure Daniel Conway. Boston: Jas. R. Osgood & Co.

lie in a certain exuberance of material, some neglect of arrangement, and an occasional want of minute accuracy in details. It is pleasant to see that, as time goes on, he gains more and more self-mastery, and puts his faults behind him. In this book we find him at his best. Even that which has been criticised as a slightly over-confidential and too autobiographical tone, in the opening chapter, is so frank and ardent as really to disarm all objection; and it has its peculiar value as giving the key-note for the whole

book. It is the tribute of a pupil to the master, and it is essential to such a tribute that the pupil should give some revelation of himself.

There is here and there a passage in the book which suggests that it was written in England,—the spelling of "favour" and "storeys," the estimate of Emerson's early income in pounds sterling, and the pains taken (p. 33) to explain that “it was the rule in the [Emerson] family to distribute their possessions equally between the members of their family." The absence of an index is also a defect more common in English books than in American; but the flavor of the book has that essential Americanism which Mr. Conway's long English residence has not at all impaired, and there is even a distinct air of oldfashioned transcendentalism about the titles of the chapters. "Fore-runners," "Sursum Corda," "Sangreal," "Concordia," and "The Python" remind us anew of the ardent young prophet who once essayed to give "The Dial" a new lease of life in Cincinnati, and still remains true to his early visions.

It is in the story-telling faculty that we are chiefly reminded how the prophet has become a magazinist; and certainly no single volume has yet brought together so many fresh memorials of Emerson as are here combined. At the very outset, with his wonted appetite for a good bit of symbolism, Mr. Conway emphasizes the fact that the first American Emerson was a baker, and points out that his great descendant furnished the bread of truth to men (p. 132). Probably, if we looked far enough into the genealogy of any eminent person, we should come to some such apt analogy; as in the fact lately brought to light by Mr. Kennedy, that the pioneer Whittier's chief outfit for America was a bee-hive. Those who have visited the house of Goethe at Frankfort will remember the paternal horse-shoes converted into lyres above the front door, and our American bards seem to be as neatly provided with appropriate emblems.

It was in a letter to Mr. Conway that Mr. Emerson wrote a sentence which has already been widely circulated: "They say the ostrich hatches her egg by standing off and looking at it, and that is my present secret of authorship" (p. 14). There is another charming letter to him on the birth of a child (p. 15). Mr. Emerson told Mr. Conway that no early intellectual experience had ever so influenced him as Wordsworth's description of the effect of nature on the mind of a boy (p. 50); that he had used his sermons as material for his essays (p. 65); and many other private confidences. There are also very interesting statements illustrative of Emerson's influence in England, the best of these being the fact that Professor Tyndall wrote "Purchased by Inspiration" in his copy of Emerson's "Nature" as being the book which first gave an active impulse to his mind.

Mr. Conway has also had access to some peculiarly valuable unpublished materials, apart from his own recollections; as in the case of an important correspondance between Mr. Emerson and the late Mrs. Lyman of Northampton (pp. 59-60); of a letter from Emerson to Mr. Ireland, describing his first visit to Carlyle (p. 75); and of an exquisite letter by Emerson to a youth who had sent him some verses. "They have truth and earnestness, and a happier hour may add that external perfection which can neither be com

manded nor described" (p. 124),—which last phrase sums up all the canons of criticism in ten words. But perhaps the best of all the new matter in the book is the description by Miss Sarah Hennell of a visit made to her family by Emerson in 1848, where he saw "George Eliot," then Miss Marian Evans, and so remote from fame as to be mentioned by Miss Hennell as "Mary Ann." "He was much struck with Mary Ann (Miss Evans); expressed his admiration many times to Charles-That young lady has a calm, serious soul"" (p. 338). It seems quite characteristic of both that, when Emerson asked her "What one book do you like best?" she answered, "Rousseau's Confessions," and he said, "So do I. There is a point of sympathy between us" (p. 339).

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We find some errors in Mr. Conway's book, but they are mostly such as would naturally be made by one writing in England about American affairs, after slight points of time and locality had grown dim in memory. Rev. James Freeman Clarke did not "surrender his pulpit rather than exclude Theodore Parker from it" (p. 9), but he merely endangered it. Some of his influential parishioners left him, but he and his church went on. It is not "a mistake" (p. 86) to attribute to the New England Quakers the naked exhibition several times charged upon them, nor has Mr. Whittier proved that this was merely the reaction from Puritan whippings. Southey's Commonplace Books" contain a long extract from the diary of an English Quaker of that period, who vindicates these naked performances as proper symbolical acts, without resorting to any such justification as Mr. Whittier has offered. The " Boston Museum" (mentioned on p. 160) is not a systematic collection of natural history, but is mainly a theater; Mr. Conway must mean the "Museum of Comparative Zoölogy' " at Cambridge. Emerson was not made LL. D. at Harvard in 1867, but in 1866 (p. 162). Mr. George William Curtis was not graduated at Harvard, but at Brown University (p. 237). Mr. Alcott's twentydollar gold piece (p. 247) is reduced by several narrators to five or ten dollars. The name of George Searle Phillips is curtailed to "George Searle Phil" (p. 329), probably through some typographical misfortune. It was not at Longfellow's funeral, but on the way home from it, that Emerson spoke of having forgotten that poet's name (p. 382).

Exception might be taken to some of Mr. Conway's points of criticism or description. When he says of Emerson (p. 136): "He studied the sciences carefully, always keeping abreast of their vanguard," he goes too far. Emerson, after all, approached science as a literary man, not as a scientist, and simply read about it instead of studying it. There is sometimes a little inconsistency, as where Mr. Conway says (p. 112) that, from the time Emerson began to read "Landor," "his tone became less fervid and prophetic, and more secular," and then afterward remarks (p. 123): "In the first discoverable scrap of Emerson's writing there is to be found nearly the same literary style as in his last. The only authors whose influence seems traceable are Shakspere and Montaigne." On the other hand, some of his remarks are singularly acute and valuable, as this: "It would be difficult to cite from any generation authors so various in air and style as those whose minds have been personally