fluences attending the arrangement have been most happy. Less college police by far is necessary than in separate institutions, and many healthy restraining and elevating forces can be commanded which are otherwise out of the question.

While the aim of the founders and formers of Iowa College has been to produce the highest style of intellectual work and culture possible, from the materials coming to their hands; and while though appliances aside from the living teacher have until lately been lacking from sheer poverty-the last results and processes in each department of instruction have been sought, and among nearly 3000 persons more or less taught there have been those who have proved how good work could be done the highest end has been an earnestly Christian training. The numerous revivals, often occurring year after year, the happy transformations of character in them, the tone of the college, the place of the daily prayer meeting,-instituted in 1852 or 1853, and maintained ever since-all show how far, with the Divine blessing, this end has been secured. The theological seminaries and pulpits of New England, as well as of the West, and foreign missions, are already in debt to Iowa College, and the debt is yearly increasing.

In these twenty-two and a half years since the first Freshman class entered, the property of the college has grown from the $1,362 and thirteen town lots secured at Davenport, to a little over $200,000. Of this amount a little over $90,000-counting in subscription notes and pledges on which interest comes into the treasury-is for endowments. Five chairs are endowed in part; three are not endowed at all; and besides what is needed for these $129,000 in all-a new college professorship, that of Natural History, Natural Theology, Physiology, and Botany, should be immediately created, requiring $20,000 more. Funds for the support of tutors, lecturers, and other assistants are also pressingly called for, as well as for teachers of music, drawing, painting, gymnastics, &c. And this is only to mention what is of immediate necessity of this kind.* A little more than a year

*One single suggestion beyond these limits-self-imposed-is ventured upon. No facilities for the study of Astronomy are now possessed by the college. This indeed is but common in the West-Chicago University being the one grand exception. Yet the position at Grinnell-1500 feet above the sea—is singularly

ago, "East College"-the old Female Department building intended for "Grinnell University"-was burned, and the fine stone building erected since in its place has exhausted the insurance money and the subscriptions made for it, and yet lacks $14,000 for its completion. New buildings are also now required for the scientific departments of instruction, for a Ladies' Boarding Hall, and for the Academy and the Normal Course. All these objects could be accomplished with $250,000 --including the endowments named above—and the institution for which there has been so costly an expenditure of toil, and self-denial, and prayer, placed beyond all possible competition, in a position of exceptional power and usefulness. The simple and only way to lessen conflicting enterprises at the West, and conflicting solicitations at the East, both of them harassing beyond all expression and almost beyond Christian endurance, is to make those colleges whose foundations are deep and tried and strong, and whose deserts are superior and unquestionable, so vigorous and adequate with large single gifts as to end the strife.

The direct, practical, and sure way to carry out the now declared policy of the Western College Society, derived from the Iowa College enterprise, and maintained by that through struggles and delays and disappointments and sufferings in which but for prayer, heart and flesh would have often failed-the policy of "one college for a State"-is to increase the investments in its beneficiary colleges on a scale more ample than has ever been contemplated. The Benedict endowment of $20,000 is the largest single benefaction to Iowa College in more than twenty-two years; Mrs. Hale's fund of $35,000 is the largest made to Beloit College in more than twenty-five years; Illinois College has just received from Mr. Samuel A. Hitchcock its largest donation ($50,000) in more than forty years. Is any college in the land more needy or more deserving of gifts of $100,000, $200,000, $300,000, or $500,000 than these? Would such generous bestowals anywhere on earth produce grander favorable for this study above that of college grounds near the ocean or the lakes. The instruments of New England institutions have been carried by the doors of Iowa College for observations in Wyoming Territory on the Union Pacific R. R., which could be far better made there than where the instruments belonged. A telescope like that of Chicago, with a spectroscope like that just received at Bowdoin, would at Grinnell be of the very highest service to science.

and more precious results? It is not the college alone which a large gift just now would endow in Iowa; it is a circle of Puritan churches soon to number hundreds and to outnumber those of old Puritan States; it is a magnificent commonwealth, whose people will presently be counted by millions. The thing should be "done suddenly." It cannot be done on too ample and generous a scale, or too soon. Three professorships are today vacant, two of which have never been filled, for lack of endowments, and these are essential ones. A single gift of $50,000 would fill them at once. A still larger gift, such as multitudes of Eastern institutions have received within ten years past, would crown the exceptionally central and advantageous position, and the deeply interesting history of this Christian college, with a commanding influence in the great commonwealth and a power for good as exceptionally wide-reaching and enduring.

ARTICLE III.*-COLLEGES AND STATE UNIVERSITIES.

EDUCATION, universal education, is one of the permanent themes of American thought and interest. Whatever else may enlist our attention, we can never be long unmindful of this one great interest of American society. No other great nation ever entrusted so much to the virtue and intelligence of the people, and no other nation has ever taken so much pains to render the people worthy of the trust committed them.

This watchful care of education has been greatly characteristic of us as a people in all our past history. But at no time in all our national life has there been a more imperative necessity of earnest and candid thoughtfulness on this subject than at present. That whole system of arrangements on which we rely for the education of the nation, needs to be re-examined, with a view to the proper adjustment and proportions of the several parts to the whole, and to one another. Not that any sudden revolution in our system is either desirable or possible. Whatever may be true in other lands, nothing worthy the name of revolution has ever been possible, in any part of our system. There is nothing in respect to which our national life is more misapprehended than in respect to this. Other nations are apt to suppose that every thing American is the extemporaneous creation of a motley multitude of impracticable theorizers. No conception could be further from the truth. It is because the thinkers of the old world have so generally fallen into this error, that they have so often and so utterly failed to understand us.

From the beginning, nothing that we have been or done has originated in the brain of the speculatist. Our own national life is a natural and spontaneous growth, from seeds whose existence and presence were coeval with our origin as a people. Nobody ever invented our Township system, our State govern

*It is thought that the readers of the New Englander will be interested in the different aspects of this important subject, as they are presented by well known educators in different parts of the country.-EDS. NEW ENGLANDER.

ments with their local administration, or even the peculiar features of our Federal Republic. They are one and all growths from seeds which Providence planted here, when North America began to be peopled by men of European origin.

Thoughtful men in all lands look with reverence upon the history and present condition of England, as the growth of ages, and confidently predict for her a long and glorious future. Her social state was not planned by an architect and built according to his model, like her cathedrals and her cities; it grew under the superintending care of Providence, like her oaks. But the same thing is no less true of the great American off-shoot from England. It is no human invention, but a product of mighty social forces by which it has been from the beginning developing and maturing. Constitutions and systems, in our country, are not, as in France, the extemporized creation of some coup d'état,-some dark and bloody night of revolution; but as in England, vital products matured by time. The only difference in this respect between the mother and the daughter is the difference of age.

Of no part of our social life is this more entirely true than of our system of education. It is not, either as a whole or in any of its parts, the creation of any one mind, or even of any generation; originally education was with us entirely religious in its aims. The common schools of early New England sprung from a solicitude that all the people, without any exception, should be so far instructed as to be intelligent readers of the Bible. The thought seemed quite shocking to those fathers of our country, that any child should be reared up among them without being familiarly acquainted with those oracles of God. For this reason they established schools for all the children in every community, and required that the school-master should accompany every band of emigrants that pressed into the surrounding wilderness. In like manner their colleges were founded and sustained with religious care, that there might be an unbroken succession of learned and cultivated men, to serve God in the more responsible and influential positions both in Church and State. All the schools of the early days of New England were as truly religious in their aims as their churches.