The College Is The college lies very close to the people. Distinctions of caste may manifest themselves occasionally, and yet the college is stoutly and we believe per manently democratic. Its relation to the better side of our national life has been profoundly intimate from the beginning. The graduates of Harvard and Yale in New England, of Princeton and Columbia in the Middle States, and of the College of William and Mary in Virginia contributed powerfully to the forma tion of our republic. Edmund Burke attributed the °intractable spirit)) of the Americans to "their education? and by this he meant the col lege education. "The wrote President Stiles, of Yale, shortly after the Revolution, "have been of signal advantage in the present day. When Great Britain withdrew all her wis dom from America this revolution found above 2,000 in New England only, who had been edu cated in the colonies, intermingling with the people and communicating knowledge among them? John Adams of Harvard delighted to find in President Witherspoon of Princeton as high a son of liberty as any in America's Hampden-Sidney College in Virginia, founded about the time of the Revolution, incorporated in its charter the following clause: "In order to preserve in the minds of the students that sacred love and attachment which they should ever bear to the principles of the ever-glorious Revolution, the greatest care and caution shall be used in selecting such professors and mas ters, to the end that person shall he so elected unless the uniform tenor of his conduct mani fest to the world his sincere affection for the liberty and independence or the United States of America.D And from that day to this the
collegiate spirit and the national spirit have been at one. Rightly, indeed, did our apprecia tive French visitor, Baron Pierre de Couhertin, perceive that the place to find "the true Ameri cans)) is in our college halls; ((les vrais Ameri rains, la base de la nation, l'espoir de ravenir.D Scarcely one in a hundred of our white male youths of college age has gone to college. But this scanty contingent has furnished one-half of all the of the United States, most of the justices of the Supreme Court, not far from one half of the Cabinet and of the na tional Senate, and almost a third of the House of Representatives. It has furnished a great contingent to the professions and almost the entire personnel of the best faculties of law, medicine and divinity. It is increasingly rep resented in business and engineering and the leading newspapers and reviews. No other single class of equal numbers has been so potent in our national life. See AMERICAN UNIVER