of the University of Cambridge, 1826, § 11); for the division of the instruction into departments, with a professor at the head of each department responsible for its efficiency (§§ 58 and 60); for the division of classes according to proficiency (§ 61); and for the consideration, to a limited extent, of the desires of students in the arrangement of their studies (§ 63). These provisions originated in the overseers, and were adopted by the corporation and overseers against the judgment of the 'immediate government,' or faculty, and obtained but very imperfect execution; but they gave to George Ticknor, Smith professor of the French and Spanish languages and literature, the means of demonstrating, during the ensuing ten years, in the single department which he organized and controlled, the admirable working of a voluntary system."

TICKNOR'S RESIGNATION.

In 1835, when Ticknor resigned his professorship, he reviewed his fifteen years' work at Harvard in a letter from which the following significant passage is taken. He says: "Within the limits of the department I have entirely broken up the division of classes, established fully the principle and practice of progress according to proficiency, and introduced a system of voluntary study, which for several years has embraced from one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty students, so that we have relied hardly at all on college discipline, as it is called, but almost entirely on the good disposition of the young men and their desire to learn. If, therefore, the department of the modern languages is right, the rest of the college is wrong; and if the rest of the college is right we ought to adopt its system, which I believe no person whatsoever has thought desirable for the last three or four years."

ORIGIN OF TICKNOR'S EDUCATIONAL IDEAS.

Now the question arises, where did George Ticknor get all these advanced ideas of university education, upon which Harvard has been growing from more to more during two generations? Not in Cambridge,1 surely, for Ticknor was a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Cambridge faculty bitterly opposed his innovations. Not from Mr. Prescott and the board of corporation, for he first inspired them with the policy which the faculty for a long time successfully obstructed. The college environment was not favorable to the evolution of educational theories utterly at variance with the scholastic experience of nearly two cen

1 Germs of an elective system appear to have existed at Harvard College as early as 1824. Among the questions proposed to the immediate government of Harvard College by the committee of the board of visitors, October 16, 1824, was the following: ' "Question II. How far have the students a choice as to what studies they may pur

sue?

"Answer II. The Juniors have an option between Hebrew and several other studies, viz, French, mathematics, Latin, and Greek; and the Seniors between the recitations in chemistry and in fluxions."

turies. It may be suggested that Ticknor came home from Goettingen and from European travel with a new educational philosophy which he was eager to put into practice. But he says: "When I came from Europe [1819], not having been educated at Cambridge, and having always looked upon it with great veneration, I had no misgivings about the wisdom of the organization and management of the college there. I went about my work, therefore, with great alacrity and confidence; not, indeed, according to a plan I proposed in writing, but according to the es tablished order of things, which I was urged to adopt as my own, and which I did adopt very cheerfully."

Called the very next year, 1820, to a professorship in the University of Virginia, with more than double his salary at Cambridge, and in frequent correspondence with Jefferson after the year 1815, Ticknor had sufficient occasion and opportunity to become acquainted with Jef ferson's educational ideas. Ticknor was a Bostonian, always on the alert for new and suggestive things. That he was deeply interested in the new institution is shown by his visit in 1824, and by his letter to William H. Prescott, the son of the man who, from the first, was Ticknor's avenue of approach to the corporation of Harvard College. The year before, in 1823, when Ticknor had proposed making this visit to Virginia, Jefferson had, by letter, distinctly emphasized the following points as characteristic of the new educational departure in Virginia:

ANALYSIS OF JEFFERSON'S VIEWS.

(1) The abolition of a prescribed curriculum for all students, and consequently the overthrow of the class system.

(2) The introduction of specialization, or, as Jefferson phrased it, "exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them [students] for the particular vocations to which they are destined."

(3) The elective system, or "uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend."

(4) The reduction of discipline to a minimum, "avoiding too much government, by requiring no useless observances, none which shall merely multiply occasions for dissatisfaction, disobedience, and revolt,"

etc.

ANALYSIS OF TICKNOR'S REFORMS.

Let us now analyze the reforms actually introduced into the modern language department at Harvard by George Ticknor, and reviewed by himself in 1835.

(1) The division by classes had been broken up in the modern language courses.

(2) Progress was recognized according to "proficiency." (This is the only standard of progress which has ever been recognized in the University of Virginia.)

(3) Voluntary study, or the elective system.

(4) Reliance on the good disposition of the students, rather than upon discipline.

This correspondence of ideas, to say the least, is very remarkable. There are other likenesses between reforms urged by Ticknor at Harvard and certain ideas of Jefferson. For example, Ticknor urged "instruction by subjects rather than by books, so that, for instance, a student should not merely read Livy and Horace, but learn Latin." The creation of well-organized departments, controlled by a single responsible head, was also one of Ticknor's favorite notions, which was carried into effect, however, only in the teaching of the modern languages. Ticknor had three or four tutors1 under his direction. His was the only department thus responsibly organized under the law of 1825. The system corresponds exactly to Jefferson's plan for autonomous "schools," one of the most efficient systems of department administration in modern academic life. Ticknor was absolutely alone in representing these advanced ideas of university education and administration. In 1835 he wrote: "I have been an active professor these fifteen years, and for thirteen years of the time I have been contending, against a constant opposition, to procure certain changes which should make the large means of the college more effectual for the education of the community. In my own department I have succeeded entirely, but I can get these changes carried no further. As long as I hoped to advance them, I continued attached to the college; when 1 gave up all hope, I determined to resign."

THE QUESTION STATED.

The whole spirit of Ticknor's educational reforms was clearly foreign to his environment. His ideas were far in advance2 of his age, and yet they were identical, in many respects, with the ideas of Jefferson. That they were consciously borrowed from him is not asserted, but the possibility of a connection between the educational projects of the two men has been already suggested. The question is here stated: Did Jefferson and Ticknor come to absolutely the same educational conclusions in independent ways, or was some influence wafted northward from Monticello, whence Jefferson for many years had been scattering seeds of thought and suggestion. A single copy of one of Jefferson's printed educational reports, like that noticed in the North American Review in 1820, would have explained the whole situation to Ticknor. Jefferson borrowed many of his own educational notions from that Jardin des Plantes-the schools of Paris, and the universities of the Old World. The elective system was then, and is now, the life principle of higher Francis Sales, Charles Folsom, and Charles Follen all taught in Professor Ticknor's department.

2 President Eliot, in his report for 1883-84, said (p. 10): "Professor Ticknor, who had so effectively promoted the legislation of 1825, was a reformer fifty years in advance of his time. Professor Longfellow, succeeding Professor Ticknor, held in the main to his methods, and the reform gradually gained new ground."

education in Europe. Ticknor must have seen it in operation at Goettingen. But the point of inquiry is this: Did Ticknor devise that entire group of advanced ideas independently of the personal influence of Thomas Jefferson, who had been writing to him for ten years before those ideas were adopted at Harvard, and who called Ticknor to a professorship in Virginia five years before the reform of 1825?

It must have required considerable gathered momentum of interest to cause Ticknor to travel all the way from Boston to Virginia to see an institution of learning. The writer had to spend some months in studying the history of the University of Virginia before he could muster enough zeal to take a few hours' trip by cars from Baltimore to Charlottesville. There was not a railroad in the country when Ticknor made his visit to the University of Virginia. Having announced his intention to do so eighteen months before, what was Ticknor's motive in putting himself to all this trouble? There is a psychological element in the problem. One must discover a sufficient cause to induce a man to travel six hundred miles by stage-coach and the slow conveyances of that period, and to be prepared to endure with patience the annoyance of bad roads and the discomfort of bad inns. Probably Ticknor had no idea of leaving Boston to become a professor in the University of Virginia. What was he thinking of in such a long journey southward? Possibly for the reformation of Harvard College he was seeking the best American model. He was going to see Jefferson's new university "fairly opened." He found "the system" "more practical" than he had feared. He found "an experiment worth trying."

MADISON'S LETTER TO TICKNOR.

Ticknor's interest remained unabated. On the 6th of April, 1825, James Madison wrote to George Ticknor: "Our University has been opened with six or seven professors, and a limited but daily increasing number of students. I shall take a pleasure in complying with your request of such information as may explain its progress. In compiling a code of regulations, the University has had the benefit of that of Harvard, which was kindly transmitted. Of all exchanges, that of useful lights ought to be the freest, as doubling the stock on both sides, without cost on either. Our University is, as you observe, somewhat of an experimental institution. Such, however, is the nature of our federative system, itself not a little experimental, that it not only excites emulation without enmity, but admits local experiments of every sort, which, if failing, are but a partial and temporary evil; if successful, may become a common and lasting improvement.

JOSIAH QUINCY AND THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

In the life of George Ticknor, it is said (Vol. I, p. 368) that after Dr. Kirkland's resignation, in 1828, and after Josiah Quincy's succession to the presidency, a new spirit and vigor were infused into Harvard College, 17036-No. 2--9

and Mr. Ticknor "had no longer the same difficulties to contend with as in earlier years." The biographer of Quincy says he favored the elective system. It is interesting to note that, the very next year after his election, President Quincy began to inquire about the origin and methods of the University of Virginia. In the writings of James Madison, then rector of the University, is a letter to Joseph C. Cabell, indicating that the line of inquiry which George Ticknor had first opened, by his visits to Monticello and Montpellier, and by his correspondence with Jefferson and Madison, was now leading even the president of Harvard University to a knowledge of Jefferson's original ideas, particularly with reference to theological education.2

The following is the extract in question:

"I have received a letter from Mr. Quincy, now president of Harvard University, expressing a wish to procure a full account of the origin, the progress, and arrangement of ours, including particularly what may have any reference to theological instruction; and requesting that he may be referred to the proper source of all the printed documents, that he may know where to apply for them. Can a set of copies be had in Richmond, and of whom? Mr. Quincy is so anxious on the subject that he was on his way to the University when the report of the fever stopped him." The historian of Harvard University was doubtless properly sup plied with annual reports by Joseph C. Cabell.

1

FRANCIS WAYLAND AND THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

There was another college president who, twenty-one years later, not only set out for, but actually reached the University of Virginia. That Quincy: Life of Josiah Quincy, 442. President Quincy in his History of Harvard University, II, 344–353, 369, gives some account of the changes attempted in 1825. He says George Ticknor had recommended to the overseers "that the division into classes should be abolished, and the whole course be thrown open, as in some foreign universities." The latter statement has weight, but this very elective system made both Ticknor and Quincy interested in the University of Virginia.

A writer in the North American Review, January, 1820, had called attention to a rather startling fact. Speaking of the profession of divinity, the writer said: "No provision is made for instruction in this department in the University of Virginia. As this is probably the first instance in the world of a university without any such provision, our readers will perhaps be gratified with seeing the portion of the report in which this subject is mentioned: 'In conformity with the principles of our Constitution, which places all sects of religion on an equal footing; with the jealousies of the different sects, in guarding that equality from encroachment and surprise; and with the sentiments of the Legislature in favor of freedom of religion, manifested on former occasions, we have proposed no professor of divinity; and the rather, as the proofs of the being of a God, the creator, preserver, and supreme ruler of the universe, the author of all the relations of morality, and of the laws and obligations these infer, will be within the province of the professor of ethics, to which, adding the developments of these moral obligations, of those in which all sects agree, with a knowledge of the languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, a basis will be formed common to all sects. Proceeding thus far without offence to the Constitution, we have thought it proper at this point to leave every sect to provide, as they think fittest, the means of further instruction in their own peculiar tenets.'"

3 Madison to Cabell, March 19, 1829.