telescope does not dispense with eyes; the printing press or the lecture
room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to ourselves, we must
be parties in the work. A university is, according to the usual
designation, an alma mater, knowing her children one by one, not a
foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.

I protest to you, gentlemen, that if I had to choose between a so-called
university, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence,
and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide
range of subjects, and a university which had no professors or
examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together
for three or four years, and then sent them away as the University of
Oxford is said to have done some sixty years since, if I were asked
which of these two methods was the better discipline of the
intellect,--mind, I do not say which is morally the better, for it is
plain that compulsory study must be a good and idleness an intolerable
mischief,--but if I must determine which of the two courses was the more
successful in training, moulding, enlarging the mind, which sent out men
the more fitted for their secular duties, which produced better public
men, men of the world, men whose names would descend to posterity, I
have no hesitation in giving the preference to that university which did
nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with
every science under the sun. And, paradox as this may seem, still if
results be the test of systems, the influence of the public schools and
colleges of England, in the course of the last century, at least will
bear out one side of the contrast as I have drawn it. What would come,
on the other hand, of the ideal systems of education which have
fascinated the imagination of this age, could they ever take effect, and
whether they would not produce a generation frivolous, narrow-minded,
and resourceless, intellectually considered, is a fair subject for