Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/271

XXXVI.

It may be well at this point, though we may anticipate some of our steps, to consider whether the exemplary standard thus raised by the Provost narrowed the door of admission to the young applicant, and served in the course of years to maintain a minimum number of graduates as compared with the other well known and older institutions in the land. To this cause if it existed may be added a city location of the College and Academy, wherein was at first no stated home for the student from the interior and which deficiency was only in part remedied within a few years. Harvard, and Yale, and New Jersey, and William and Mary, each graduated more pupils than Philadelphia and King's College together, '.within the twenty years following 1756. Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, and Williamsburg were small places, possibly chosen for scholastic sites on account of their freedom from the turmoil of large centres, though the first named was within sound of one. Harvard and Yale drew matriculants from the New England Colonies and some even from New York; Princeton's supply came as well from Pennsylvania and New York as from New Jersey, the Presbyterian element in Philadelphia contributing largely to it. The College of Philadelphia could only draw from its own province and the Lower Counties as they were termed, but at the same time attracted many from Maryland, when William and Mary within the period under review had but two Maryland graduates. But Philadelphia had the honor of graduating Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant in 1763, a graduate of Princeton of 1762, which of itself was a testimony to its higher standard. Columbia drew from the churchmen of New York and some West India youth, notably Alexander Hamilton, though the latter's studies were interrupted by the approach of the Revolution. Of the three hundred and eighteen graduates of William and Mary within these two decades, three hundred were Virginians, of whom were Jefferson, Monroe, and Marshall, two from Maryland, one from Jamaica, the three Murrays, sons of the Earl of Dunmore, and to the honor of the college