ence was narrower in fact than in theory. It began in the district school, and ended there for most of the population. In the older communities colleges, generally under religious control, carried a few boys on to law, medicine, and theology. In the newer regions, where land grants had been pledged to public education, State seminaries and universities belied their name, and did the work of indifferent high schools. Of technical training there was almost none except in the United States Military Academy at West Point. Railroad and canal promoters turned thither for chief engineers, who made the surveys, and often retired from the army to manage the roads. George B. McClellan, after a young man's distinguished career in the regular army, was president of a railroad when the Civil War began. A divorce between education and the affairs of the world grew clearer as science began to demand recognition in the thirties. Here and there a president saw the need for a wider angle in the collegiate vision. Francis Wayland realized it at Brown, whose presidency he assumed in 1826. Horace Mann, as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, worked toward it after 1837. But the general mandate upon the college president was that he should be a father to his boys, and "by timely interference prevent bad habits, detect delinquencies, and administer reproof and punishment." The college faculties clung to the old precedents in the curriculum. College education declined in general repute in the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the crystallization of the course, perhaps the rejection of science, perhaps the arrogance of the classics caused it; but whatever the reason there were fewer collegiate students in 1870 than in 1830. The studies of F. A. P. Barnard, who started Columbia upon a modern course when he assumed her presidency in 1864, give the estimate that in 1830 the United States had 645 such students per million of population, in 1850 only 497, and in 1869 but 392. An effort to arrest the decline — for there was no despair of education - - brought religion, capital, and the frontier spirit into conjunction. In the summer of 1862 Congress, having completed its homestead system and having for a dozen years contributed Land-grant directly to the building of the Western railroads, colleges passed the Morrill Act endowing in every State a land-grant college of agriculture and mechanic arts. Only a handful of the States already had such colleges, the Michigan Agricultural College (1857) at Lansing standing out as the earliest of its kind; but every State accepted the proposed lands and applied them shortly to an existent college, to the State university, or to a new creation. The universities of Wisconsin, California, Illinois, and Minnesota received impetus from this toward a new curriculum and standard. In New York the subsidy was added to the benefaction of Ezra Cornell whose university opened in 1868. In Pennsylvania the new State college was chiefly a school of agriculture. In Massachusetts the proceeds were divided between an agricultural college and the Institute of Technology. The result of federal policy was most striking in the Western schools, but it was real throughout the whole Union. As the agricultural colleges were enlarged and strengthened, as they added experiment and research, and began in another generation to show positive results in discovery and invention, they tended to lessen the gap that had separated education and life before the Civil War. The growth of education in State and land-grant universities stimulated the religious zeal that had dotted the Religious country with its foundations since colonial days. colleges In the East, Hicksite Friends opened their Swarthmore College in 1869; the Congregationalist college, Carleton, at Northfield, Minnesota, began work in 1870; the Boston University of the Methodists was a complete and going concern by 1873, as was the Episcopal University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, by 1876; and from this time until the munificence of John D. Rockefeller reopened the University of Chicago under Baptist rule in 1892 there was continuous pressure to stimulate the old and start new projects for education within the safeguards of religion. The wealth of Americans flowed freely into all of these |