CHAPTER XIX.

CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT.

ON HAPPINESS TWO ESTIMATES OF PRESIDENT ELIOT-HIS CONTEMPORARIES AN EARLY APPRECIATION OF HIS ADMINISTRATIVE ABILITIES

-AS A TEACHER IN HARVARD

PERIOD OF RECONSTRUCTION

FIGURES

HIS

EDUCATIONAL

THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM - SOME FACTS AND
PHILOSOPHY AT ᎻᎬᎪᎡᎢ Ꭺ DEMOCRAT

AS AN ESSAYISTHIS INFLUENCE WITH STUDENTS-A RELIGIOUS MAN-
AS AN ADMINISTRATOR-CHARACTERISTICS. THE SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE.

Earthly happiness is not dependent upon the amount of one's possessions or the nature of one's employment. Enjoyment and satisfaction are accessible to poor and rich, to humble and high alike, if only they cultivate the physical, mental, and moral faculties through which the natural joys are won. Any man may win them who, by his daily labor, can earn a wholesome living for himself and his family. A poorer population may easily be happier than a richer, if it be of sounder health and morality.

Neither generations of privileged ancestors, nor large inherited possessions, are necessary to the making of a lady or gentleman. What is necessary? In the first place, natural gifts. The gentleman is born in a democracy, no less than in a monarchy. In other words he is a person of fine bodily and spiritual qualities, mostly innate. Secondly, he must have, through elementary education, early access to books, and therefore to great thoughts and high examples. Thirdly, he must be early brought into contact with some refined and noble personfather, mother, teacher, pastor, employer, or friend. These are the only conditions in peaceful times.

Charles M. Sist

PEAKING at the Harvard Commencement dinner in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, then vice-president of the United States and now its president, a graduate of Harvard, said that perhaps the most distinctive feature of the work done at Harvard University by its president, Charles William Eliot, was the way in which he has made it thoroughly national and thoroughly democratic in character.

The president of Yale University, Arthur T. Hadley, at a dinner of Harvard graduates in 1900, said: "I wish to propose to you the health of President Eliot, who, by his work, his example, his thought, and his fearlessness, has given every educational institution the right to claim him."

In these cordial words of President Hadley, the estimate of President Eliot as an educator, commonly held by his colaborers in the noble teaching profession, is voiced. Obviously, a man so highly esteemed by men so eminent as President Roosevelt and President Hadley should be understood and appreciated by all men. As a matter of fact, there are probably few men of equal length of public service and grade of character in the nation so misunderstood or underrated by the public, as the veteran but virile president.

He has lived long enough, however, to see the theory of education, which he has championed at Harvard, triumph, and to have it conceded by those competent to judge, that probably no other person in the history of American education, save Horace Mann, has so deeply stamped his ideals on our scheme of popular education. Like Mann, he has had to fight to win; and he has had to fight against much the same conservative forces. During the struggle he has known

"Many a grim and haggard day

Many a night of starless skies.”

Mann's statue stands side by side with Daniel Webster's in front of the state capitol of Massachusetts to-day. Possibly the time will come when Eliot's and Hoar's will find a like place of distinction. At any rate, it is worth noting that the old commonwealth keeps producing, generation after generation, publicists like Webster and Hoar and educators like Mann and Eliot.

Thomas Jefferson, by laying the foundations of the Uni

versity of Virginia; John Witherspoon, of Princeton, by his brilliant playing of the dual rôle of college executive and patriot; Eliphalet Nott, of Union, Francis Wayland, of Brown, Mark Hopkins, of Williams, by their inspiring personal influence on young men ; James McCosh, by his success in building up the resources of Princeton through impressing men of wealth with their duties as stewards; and Henry Barnard, by his pioneer work as journalist, for the profession, have all played conspicuous parts in the history of American education. But Horace Mann and Charles William Eliot,the one by his influence on primary and secondary schools, and the other by his influence on the universities, colleges, and secondary schools of the country,-have a sum total of achievement credited to them which rightly puts them in a class by themselves, the class of constructive educators.

Since he was inaugurated president of Harvard University in October, 1869, then only thirty-five years old, Mr. Eliot has seen a generation of public men pass away. So that to-day he speaks with the authority of age as well as that of station. Of the Corporation and the Faculty of Harvard in 1869 he is the only survivor. Of New England representatives in the United States Congress when he entered upon his responsible career, Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, and Senator Hale, of Maine, are the best known survivors. Of the great group of New England authors then regnant, only Julia Ward Howe, Edward Everett Hale, and T. W. Higginson remain. Of notable educators, the distrust and condemnation of some of whom he was early made to know because of his spirit of innovation and reconstruction, Theodore Woolsey and Noah Porter, of Yale, Julius H. Seelye, of Amherst, Mark Hopkins, of Williams, Frederick A. P. Barnard, of Columbia, and James McCosh, of Princeton, have died; and Daniel C. Gilman, of Johns Hopkins, Andrew D. White, of Cornell, and Charles K. Adams, of Wisconsin, have retired. The only college or university executives in the country with a national reputation whose terms of office approach his in length are James B. Angell, of the University of Michigan, and Cyrus Northrop, of the University of Minnesota. He is the Nestor of American educators.

In venturing to appraise such a career as President Eliot one realizes at the outset that it has been long enough and

constant enough in its aim to provide sufficient data for an appraisal. Vigorous in health and ambitious for further service as the man still is, and fruitful and effective as he bids fair to be for many years to come, he will not alter in essential attributes of character. He may reveal to the many some of those elements of his character hitherto seen only by the few. But the flower and the fruit will be but the certain product of roots that long ago struck deep in rich soil, and of a trunk and branches that long since were clearly defined against the sky.

It is a useless, but none the less tempting, venture of the imagination to try to conceive what would have been the state of religion in the United States-and in New England especially had Phillips Brooks not failed as a school teacher and then entered the ministry of the church to play the part of a liberal prophet. It is equally tempting and futile to imagine how different the history of Harvard University and of the higher education of the United States might have been had Charles William Eliot accepted an offer of a salary (large for the times and for one so young) of $5,000 a year as treasurer of a large cotton manufacturing establishment in Lowell, Mass., offered to him shortly after his graduation from Harvard in 1853. Thus early in his life had wise men detected in him latent capacities as an administrator. But the youth had ancestors and kinsfolk who were friends of and exponents of learning, as well as ancestors who were successful merchants. Several of them had been clergymen; not a few had been donors to Harvard; all of them had been lovers of the humanities. His father, Hon. Samuel A. Eliot, had been the patron of fine music in Boston, and a friend of the discharged prisoner when discharged prisoners had fewer friends than they have to-day. Both his uncle, after whom he was named, and his father had studied theology; and his only living son, Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, president of the American Unitarian Association, well maintains the family tradition and spirit to-day. Service of humanity through the ministry of a learned profession, therefore, was an ideal present in the home in which the youth was simply, piously, and nobly reared. Hence it is not altogether surprising that he chose the profession of educator and not the calling of treasurer of a cotton mill.

From 1854 to 1858 he served as tutor in mathematics at

Harvard while studying advanced chemistry with Prof. J. P. Cooke. From 1858 to 1863 he was assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard. During 1863-65 he was in Europe studying chemistry and investigating the educational methods of the European schools. From 1865 to 1869, when he was called to Harvard as president, he was professor of analytical chemistry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It was while busy teaching chemistry, and busy, also, with speculations as to how the new scientific thought was to modify and transform, perchance, educational ideals and methods, that Professor Eliot found himself, in 1868, compelled, as an alumnus, to face the problem of the future of Harvard. The Rev. Thomas Hill, D.D., the president, had resigned.

The honor of presiding over the destinies of Harvard even in those days, when the educator's rank in the community was not as high as it is now, was not one to go a-begging. Tradition called for a safe, reputable clergyman, such as Presidents Walker or Hill, or a man of eminence in public life such as Presidents Everett and Quincy, had been. The idea of choosing a youth of thirty-five, a scientist (then a term suspected somewhat even by liberals), who was untried as an administrator, shocked the conservatives. Early in the campaign champions of Professor Eliot had appeared. He had powerful backing of various sorts. He had written for the Atlantic Monthly articles on the New Education which had disclosed to the public his thorough acquaintance with the best thought on education in European circles, while his candor in pointing out defects in American education revealed a quality of mind not very common in the country at the time or now, and to be revealed by him many times afterward in his speeches and writings.

In view of the choice that was made, and in view of the fame which John Fiske won later in his life, it is worth while to go back to one of his earliest communications to The Nation, written in 1868, when he was a graduate student at Harvard, in which unsigned editorial on the situation at Harvard he warned those responsible for the choice of president against selecting either a Philistine, a Tory, a Radical, or a Sectarian.