perfect products of the Old World for æsthetic and social enjoyment, she ought to be satisfied with nothing short of perfection in the realms of intellectual life. This is costly and difficult of attainment, like the technique of an art: how difficult and how costly public opinion in America as yet hardly recognizes. To form such an ideal, to make the average man realize it, is probably one of the most urgent tasks of the present day for American specialists in higher education. Our second criticism has been made already; it refers to the women's Colleges, to their long hours of work, and to the apparent absence of repose and opportunity for thought and individual development consequent upon such excessive demands on the students' time. We can add nothing to what has been said already-we can only reiterate it. Probably this defect, like the former, is ultimately due to one cause, which we have attempted to explain in the previous paragraph. To try to do too much in a given time often comes from an incorrect idea of the labour necessary to finish one thing perfectly. It is only natural that in a country where the industrial conquest of a continent, elsewhere the work of two thousand years, has been achieved in two generations, the average man should consider that the intellectual kingdom is also to be taken by violence. The American scholar knows already the arduousness of the task; Germany has taught him; as yet he has not often sought his scholarship in England; in time the average man will learn the truth also. Here, as in other questions, the best hope for the future is that the two great nations of the Englishspeaking race may come to know one another better. Each has something to give the other; their commerce should be not only in wheat and in textiles, in cotton and in steel, but in the weightier matters of knowledge and truth. To aid such a consummation is, we conceive, the purpose of the Gilchrist Educational Trust in sending their travelling scholars to America. To have been privileged to take a part, however small, in the attainment of such an end is, to the writer of this report, not only an honour, but a joy. |