ART. IV.-BEECHER ON COLLEGES.

An Address, delivered at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Union Literary Society of Miami University, September 29, 1835. By LYMAN BEECHER, D. D. Cincinnati: 1835.

A SECOND edition of this address has appeared at the west, under the title of "a plea for colleges," a title which describes the subject of the discourse, as that of the first edition describes the occasion on which it was delivered. The discourse-which in every feature bears strong marks of its paternity—is a vindication of the system of liberal education which the colleges of this country are designed to give, and which in various degrees of efficiency they generally do give to their pupils.

Colleges are public institutions. To the public the guardians and teachers of colleges, however constituted, are continually accountable. On the public favor they are constantly dependent, not only for students, but for those continued benefactions which are necessary to enable them to lead, or even to keep pace with, the progress of improvement in the world around them. The chief value of this pamphlet is, that it pleads the cause of colleges, not only with men of cultivated minds, but with the people at large.

To the people at large, at least to all who are disposed to bear a part in efforts for the advancement of the welfare of our country in this and coming ages, the question of the utility of college or university education, and of what it ought to include; the question of the right constitution of colleges, and of what belongs to their proper management and discipline; and the question of the extent to which such institutions ought to be multiplied, are questions of moment. Every parent who desires to educate his son for any liberal profession, every citizen who has either influence or money to bestow, even in slender contributions, for the establishment or support of literary institutions, should be able to form an opinion intelligently on these questions. Some of these points are very ably managed in the pamphlet before us; and the fact, that this publication, though bearing Dr. Beecher's name, has not yet found its way into a general circulation this side of the mountains, induces us to indulge in a more extended notice than we commonly bestow upon discourses made and published on similar occasions.

Why are colleges needed? Why is the public called upon to endow institutions for the higher departments of education? Why is the call continually made for the extension of such endowments?

Colleges are needed, because without them there cannot be that division of labor, that distribution of functions among the various

members of society, which constitutes civilization. In the words of Dr. Beecher,

The attempt to produce a social equality by assigning to every man the supply of his own wants, is to hang weights upon society, and chain it down to barbarism. The multiplication of enjoyment, and the division of labor for the supply, is the only method of filling the earth with a dense, intelligent, virtuous, joyful population, equal to the capabilities of man, and the revealed purposes of Divine Mercy. To economize and retrench, may be a temporary duty indicated by the vastness of the work to be done, and the small amount of numbers and capital engaged in it. But the stated policy of heaven is to raise the world from its degraded condition, by amplifying immeasurably its sphere of action, and its facilities and motives to enjoyment. In the primitive age of the christian dispensation, the requisite means of its propagation were provided by rendering life uncertain, and property valueless by its insecurity. But this was on the eve of the downfall of civilized society into a thousand years of darkness and barbarism-and is not the method by which God will elevate the whole family of man from barbarism, to the highest possible condition of purity and peace, and social enjoyment. As the world, by the power of the gospel and the Holy Ghost, comes under the influence of religion, and the number and the capital of christians increase, God will enlighten, and elevate, and purify the condition of the world-not by persecution and disaster, but by the augmentation of liberty, and the safety of life and propertyby the facilities of art, the increase of capital, and men of enterprise, who will use this world as not abusing it, and appropriate their income under the guidance of the wisdom which is from above. It is under the providential influence of this fundamental law of divided labor, that the great departments of agriculture, commerce, and the arts have been assigned to different hands, educated for their work; while to another and a large class has been assigned the instruction, and discipline, and government of the mind. To the perfection of science and the arts, an order of educated men has always been requisite; but for the education, and discipline, and control of mind itself-of universal mind-of mind free as air, and so intelligent and virtuous as to be itself the universal legislator and executive and voluntary subject of its own laws-the best talent which God has delegated to men, and the best culture which man can bestow, are unquestionably required. In this necessity, literary institutions have originated in all civilized nations, to qualify the portion of mind which is destined to act upon mind, for the various spheres of professional instruction, and moral and religious cultivation.' pp. 3, 4.

Under free political institutions, the very definition of which is, or ought to be, free scope for all the talents and energy of every citizen, the demand for a class of highly educated men, and for places of education from which such a class shall be supplied, is greater than under any other form of government.

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'In despotic governments, literary institutions have constituted a monopoly of intellectual power-an aristocracy of literature and cultivated mind,-light upon the mountain top, while the valleys sat in darkness-fountains in high places, whose streams sent down a penurious supply to the plains below. It answered well the purposes of despotism, in qualifying the few to govern by force the unreflecting multitude. But in a republic, where the whole people legislate, and public sentiment is the supreme executive, the intellectual and moral culture of the nation must become universal and elevated, demanding an increase of colleges and professional men proportioned to the elevated standard and universality of education. A nation can no more educate itself for a republican government, without colleges, and academies, and schools, and professional teachers, than it can feed and clothe itself without agriculturists and manufactories.' p. 4.

Colleges then are for the whole commonwealth; and the idea that they are for the benefit of a particular class in the community, is only one of those chimeras with which malignant or ambitious men sometimes attempt to abuse the ignorant. The funds which endow a university are not for the benefit of its professors, to support them in sinecure stations, to make them a privileged order, or to enable them to get a living more easily than the merchant or the mechanic gets his. "Mental labor is as really labor as muscular action, and the operatives in our colleges and seminaries and schools are as truly and eminently working-men, and work as many hours, and, in respect to the taxation upon health and strength, work as hard, as the husbandman on his farm, or the artizan in his workshop." Nor is there any class of laborers whose labor subserves more directly the welfare of the whole commonwealth. The means of education which colleges afford, are not for the exclusive benefit of the men who are actually educated within their walls. Every man who has an intelligent and highminded lawyer to advise him in regard to his rights, instead of an ignorant quibbling pettifogger,-every man who can call to his aid in sickness, a scientific physician, instead of giving himself up to die by steam and lobelia,-every man who can put his children under the tuition of a well informed instructor, instead of such a teacher as might be found in one of the hovel-schools of Ireland,every man who has the privilege of hearing the gospel expounded by an educated pastor, instead of waiting on the ministry of an Abyssinian monk, shares in the benefits which colleges and universities confer on society.

But besides all this, in every community where colleges and universities are endowed and open to the public without distinction of rank or sect, they are yet more immediately the common inheritance of every citizen. They bring education, in the highest sense of the word, within the reach of the middling and even the humbler classes in society. The journeyman mechanic, or the day

laborer, who at the age of twenty-one begins a course of honest industry, as his own master, knows, that if God shall give him a son of promising talents, he may, with ordinary diligence and no extraordinary success, be able to secure for that son an education which shall be worth more to him than the wealth of a nabob. In the university class-room, the poor man's son stands on the same level with the sons of the rich, and from the university they go forth with equal advantages for the toil and conflict of life. In this country, and in every other civilized land, the colleges and universities open to young men of talents from the middling and poorer classes, the surest and shortest road to eminence. Take away these institutions, and you take away from every poor man an invaluable part of his inheritance as a citizen of such a country.

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'Colleges and schools are truly the intellectual manufactories and workshops of the nation, and in their design and results, are preeminently republican institutions. They break up and diffuse among the people that monopoly of knowledge and mental power which despotic governments accumulate for purposes of arbitrary rule, and bring to the children of the humblest families of the nation a full and fair opportunity of holding competition for learning, and honor, and wealth, with the children of the oldest and most affluent families-giving thus to the nation the select talents and powers of her entire population, and counteracting the tendencies to voluptuous degeneracy, by a constant circulation in the body politic of the unwasted vigor of its most athletic In this manner the extremes of rich and poor meet togetherexcluding patrician and plebeian contentions, by the constant changes which justice produces in elevating the lower classes, and rewarding every man according to his talents and deeds; uniting the nation by a constant communion of honor and profit, and the wide-spread alliance of the ties of blood. The colleges of a republic are eminently the guardians of liberty and equality, and the great practical equalizers of society. So great is the wealth of this nation, and so fast accumulating, that were it not that by collegiate education the children of the poor can hold competition with the sons of the rich, the entire cultivated intellect of the nation would soon be in the families of the rich, and the children of the poor doomed to an iron cast of hopeless inequality of intelligence and influence.' p. 5.

Regarding the subject in this point of view, it is easy to see why colleges must be largely endowed. Endowments are necessary, that the college may offer education at less than cost, and may thus bring down the expenses of a liberal education within the reach of the greatest possible number of families. Let the principle be established, that those who receive instruction at colleges and universities, shall pay all the wages of instructors, and besides that, shall pay full interest on all the capital invested in grounds and buildings, in libraries and apparatus, and what will be the result? First, a liberal education is too expensive to be

hoped for by those who have only a competency. The rich have a monopoly of the higher branches of knowledge. Next, as none but rich men's sons are liberally educated, there is an end of that class of liberally educated men who are so much needed, and whom endowed colleges always supply to teach in academies, in private schools, in common schools, and by various agencies to diffuse knowledge in all directions. As things now are, thousands who never go near a college, receive instruction from the alumni of colleges; but let there be no alumni of colleges, save those who belong to the aristocracy of wealth, and whence are these teachers to be provided?

There is yet another view of this topic. No small part of the wealth of every civilized community,-by which we mean the amount of conveniences and comforts in the possession of the individuals and families of that community,-is to be ascribed directly to the employment of science in devising means for the more rapid production of wealth. Take away from any commuC nity the means of education in the sciences, and you take away the possibility of such improvements. Let colleges be so organized, that none but the rich shall be able to obtain a scientific education, and you diminish indefinitely the number of those minds which are likely to make discoveries in science, or to apply such discoveries to the improvement of the arts and processes of productive industry. In the year 1789, the son of a New-England farmer, a young man in his twenty-fourth year, who by adding to the profits of his manual labor the profits of teaching a district school, had acquired in part the means of pursuing study, entered Yale College. In 1792, the same young man, having received the honors of his college, went to Georgia as a teacher, to earn the means of pursuing his studies still farther. There, at the solicitation of persons engaged in agriculture, he applied his native talents, disciplined by education, and guided by the lights and landmarks of science, to the work of inventing machinery, that should facilitate the production of the great staple of southern agriculture. The result was the cotton-gin, which has not only augmented the wealth of the southern States by more than one hundred millions of dollars, but by reducing the price of cotton, and every thing that can be fabricated of cotton, has had the effect of bringing a far greater share of physical comforts, and consequently of all the outward means of happiness, within the reach. of every inhabitant of christendom. Every body that wears a cotton shirt, or cotton stockings, or sleeps under a cotton-stuffed comfortable in winter, or reads a book printed on cotton paper, is the richer for the education of the young man who went to college from Westborough, Mass. in May, 1789. If Yale College had never done any thing for the public benefit, besides affording to VOL. VIII.