A community in which the clergyman is the chief citizen is a community in which attention is paid to the highest and most abstruse subjects. For the clergyman ministers to the intellect, appeals to the refined taste, and seeks to lift the ethical standards of society. He may or he may not be a teacher of politics, but it is his constant endeavor to enrich the spiritual nature of his constituency. The vigor of intellect, the refinement of taste, the appreciation of great truths, the determination to live worthily, qualities that characterized the people of New England in the seventeenth century, were in a large degree the work of the clergymen of the age, and these clergymen were graduates of Harvard College.

The College also had trained no small number of physicians and of lawyers. Physicians were the more numerous. In the first ten classes appeared no less than five members who had the right to practice medicine. One of the five was Leonard Hoar, who became president. The demands for the service of lawyers were less numerous and usually less urgent. Nevertheless, thirteen of the graduates of the earlier decades came to occupy high judiciary positions in the Colony. In the three great professions, therefore, as well as in literature and teaching, the College had made rich contributions for the enlargement, enrichment, and security of the new commonwealth.

But apart from specific results the College stood in the community as a monument to the worth of mind. Its seal set forth the ultimate value of truth, a value which a new and a democratic community is in grave peril of forgetting. Its seal also declared "Christo et ecclesiae," an ideal which a society obliged daily to toil for daily bread is liable to lose. The college, therefore, represented the continuity of learning and the preciousness of the scholastic and educational tradition. It embodied the supremacy of character as the purpose of spiritual idealism. It stood for life and not for living. It embodied the old cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, and fortitude, and the new cardinal virtues of hope, faith, and charity. It represented wh mother of Increase Mather said to her son when he w fant, that she desired God to give him grace and "Child," she said, "if God make thee a Good Ch

a Good Scholar, thou hast all that ever thy Mother Asked for thee.” 1 The college sought to represent good scholarship and a noble type of piety in the community.

self

It is also not to be forgotten that the influence of the College through its graduates upon the mother country was not slight. Out of the first twenty graduates, twelve went to England, and eleven of the twelve there remained. Those who went to England were largely those who had been born there. The opportunity open in the Commonwealth to the graduate of the Puritan college of the New World was certainly less attractive to noblest souls than that which the New World itself could offer. The attractiveness of the new life was indeed strong for hardy, denying souls. A new world was to be conquered, a new civilization formed, an old race under new conditions to be set forward in its progress. But most men are not hardy and are not self-denying. The sons of the immigrants had come to America under the direction and tutelage of their parents. On reaching manhood's estate not a few of them seemed to be willing to return. A fellowship at one of the English universities was worth forty pounds, a tutorship at Harvard four pounds. One member of the Class of 1650 obtained an Oxford fellowship of the value of sixty pounds. The most famous of all the men who returned to England was Sir George Downing. His mother was a sister of the first governor of Massachusetts. A member of the Class of 1642, he was one of the two men first appointed as tutors. Within four years after his graduation he returned to England. He became a confidential adviser of Cromwell, and filled important offices at home and abroad for the Great Protector. On the Restoration he came into relations quite as intimate with Charles II. The king well rewarded him in money and place. His whole career is as interesting as a romance. In early New England, apparently, his name was synonymous with that of Judas. His name in England lives in Downing Street, occupying land given to him by the king, and also in Downing College, which was founded in 1800 under the will, after long litigation, of his grandson.

So strong was the movement in the first years of the college for graduates to return to England that the Commissioners of the United Colonies recommended that the General Court of Massachusetts should influence parents to cause their sons to improve their abilities in the service of the Colonies, and not to remove into other countries. But as the number of students who had been born in England diminished, and the number of those who had been born in the New World increased, the tendency to return lessened. Political antagonisms, moreover, arising between the old country and the new proved to be a better preventive than personal counsel.

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CHAPTER II

THE SECOND COLLEGE: WILLIAM AND MARY

THE first attempt to establish the higher education in New England was native in its origin and early progress. The first attempt to establish the higher education in Virginia was foreign. Both attempts were made alike by the people and by the government.

Twelve years after the settlement of Jamestown, and one year before the Mayflower came to Plymouth, the Virginia Company in old England made a grant of ten thousand acres of land for the foundation of a university at Henrico. Nine thousand acres were to be used as the endowment of a seminary for the English, and a thousand acres for the education of the Indians. In the same year the English bishops raised fifteen hundred pounds to aid Indian education. Two years later a subscription of one hundred and fifty pounds, and a grant of one thousand acres of land, were made for the preparatory school at Charles City. About the same time Sir Thomas Dale, who was twice governor of the colony, and who during his lifetime served with honor in three-quarters of the globe, started a subscription in India, where he was at the time in service, for the founding of a school in Virginia. The sum of seventy pounds was raised for the purpose. The Court was ready to promote so good a work, and ordered the money to be paid over to the Virginia Company. There is evidence of the making of other small contributions. The good will and generosity of the government were evident. Settlers came over to occupy the university lands. George Thorpe, of the Privy Chamber, was sent to be a director of the University.

These philanthropic endeavors for education were made in the teeth of fearful conditions. From the fourteen thousand immigrants who came to Virginia in the fifteen years following

the first landing in 1607, less than thirteen hundred were surviving in 1622. The wealth of vegetation that attracted the settler became the cause of malaria which killed him. Of the remnant of less than thirteen hundred, more than a quarter lost their lives in the Indian massacre of 1622. The decimation was more terrible than that which Plymouth suffered in its first winter.

But within two years after the Indian massacre a still further attempt was made to found a college. On an island of the Susquehanna (now included in the State of Maryland), remote from the danger of assault by the Indian, it was proposed to found a university which should bear the name " Academia Virginiensis et Oxoniensis." The association of the name Oxford with the attempt is pleasantly significant, for the first attempt to establish a university in New England is associated with the name of the University of Cambridge. As if to emphasize the quixotic character of the movement, it was specially proposed to include in the university a school of art. But this further attempt failed. Its chief advocate, Edward Palmer, was not unlike some other founders, more distinguished by energy than by wisdom.

Although as early as 1619 petitions were read in the General Assembly, convened at James City, respecting the erecting of a university or college, yet, despite the aid of the mother country, no result followed. It was not till fifty-three years after the landing that the colony itself became deeply and generally interested. In the year 1660 the colonial Assembly of Virginia voted that" for the advance of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken upon purchases for a Colledge and free schoole, and that there be, with as much speede as may be convenient, housing erected thereon for the entertainment of students and schollers," 1 It was also voted at the same time that the Commissioners of County Courts should take subscriptions for the proposed college, and that the Commissioners should coöperate with the vestrymen of parishes for the raising of money. A petition was also made to the Governor, Sir William Berkeley,

Hening's "Statutes of Virginia,” ii, xxv, quoted Adams' College of William and Mary, p. 12.