POSTSCRIPT.--The American university system is a very large subject, to which none but a specialist could do justice, and that in a volume, not a postscript. Nevertheless I should like slightly to supplement the above allusion to it. In the first place, let me quote from the _Spectator_ (February 12, 1898) the following passage:--
"Some of the American Universities, in our judgment, come nearer to the ideal of a true University than any of the other types. Beginning on the old English collegiate system, they have broadened out into vast and splendidly endowed institutions of universal learning, have assimilated some German features, and have combined successfully college routine and discipline with mature and advanced work. Harvard and Princeton were originally English colleges; now, without entirely abandoning the college system, they are great semi-German seats of learning. Johns Hopkins at Baltimore is purely of the German type, with no residence and only a few plain lecture rooms, library, and museums. Columbia, originally an old English college (its name was King's, changed to Columbia at the Revolution), is now perhaps the first University in America, magnificently endowed, with stately buildings, and with a school of political and legal science second only to that of Paris. Cornell, intended by its generous founder to be a sort of cheap glorified technical institute, has grown into a great seat of culture. The quadrangles and lawns of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton almost recall Oxford and Cambridge; their lecture-rooms, laboratories, and post-graduate studies hint of Germany, where nearly all American teachers of the present generation have been educated."
Some authorities, however, deplore the Germanising of American education. A Professor of Greek, himself trained in Germany, and recognised as one of the foremost of American scholars, confessed to me his deep dissatisfaction with the results achieved in his own teaching. His students did good work on the scientific and philological side, but their relation to Greek literature as literature was not at all what he could desire. This bears out the remark which I heard another authority make, to the effect that American scholarship was entirely absorbed in the counting of accents, and the like mechanical details; while it seems to run counter to the above suggestion that the university system tends to raise the level of culture while lowering the standard of erudition. At the same time there can be no doubt that the immense width of the field covered by university teaching in America must, in some measure, make for "superficial omniscience" rather than for concentration and research. The truth probably is that the system cuts both ways. The average student seeks and finds general culture in his university course, while the born specialist is enabled to go straight to the study he most affects and concentrate upon it.