soon learn to know and to trust him. The American schools at Athens and now at Rome, the American expedition to old Babylon have annexed the acropolis and the forum and the ruins of so many royal palaces to—America. These are now a part of every true American university.
Were even this disadvantage of distance greater than it is for the race who have learned to trust the jealous ocean, the nightmare once of every Roman, by way of compensation, the American university is assigned under the principles of the division of labor many a field which to cultivate the world looks to it. The investigation of the Red Man's civilization, the study of his dialects, is preëminently the contribution which American anthropology and glossology is expected to make. The very fact that our republic has become the meeting ground of varied races and nations constitutes it also a laboratory for the ethnologist and sociologist which the European may well begrudge to his American colleague. The very degradation of our municipalities renders them great trial fields for the elucidation of the pathology of muncipal government, that cannot but attract and reward the devotee to political science. America has a history; if its archives do not teem with dusty regesta and papal bulls or imperial franchises and charters, the formative period of our republic, its constitutional development and much more was not unworthy the searching acumen of a von Hoist That American finance and political economy tempt the schooled mind by the very exuberance of the experiments we have indulged in stands to reason. American independent scholarship and the American university have both by their earnestness and the vastness of their peculiar opportunity won the right to full recognition in the republic of science.
"Who reads an American book?" could, not many decades ago, be the insolent skepticism of one who deemed the virgin bride of the setting sun too much engrossed in material work and worry to attune her lyre to song worthy of intonation in presence of British minstrels. Today the taunt of assumed superiority is changed to eager summons for the American muse to sound her
