PRESIDENT ELIOT ON UNIVERSITIES.

President Eliot talked about the new Harvard that is and the Harvard that is to be in a rather interesting way at the recent semi-annual meeting of the Rhode Island Harvard Club at Providence. "It is quite evident," he said, "that whatever has been accomplished by even the highest seat of learning in this country, there is as yet no institution that comes anywhere near our ideal of what a university, in the proper sense of the word, ought to be. We have made great, very great progress during the past twenty-five years, but we have nothing like the great universities of Vienna, Leipsic, Berlin, or even Strasburg, not to speak of Oxford and Cambridge, in England. Ezra Cornell, himself not a liberally educated man, gave one of the best definitions of a university when he said that he would found an institution where anybody could learn anything. On the side of teaching, we have not enough teachers. At Harvard more is thought than ever of the importance of producing effect on character, of training men to respect themselves and rely on themselves. It used to be said that the college stood the student 'in loco parentis.'" The speaker did not accept this theory, inasmuch as there are various kinds of parents, and it was impossible from the very nature of the case that any college instructor would take the exact place of any, even the best parent. So, too, at Harvard the theory of what may be called "mechanical repression," such as prevails at military and naval schools, is not maintained. The student, without the pressure of a system of rigid rules, is taught self-respect and self-control. There is more freedom than there was twenty years ago, and the result is there is better order. So also the relation between teacher and student is of a far different character from what it once was. The influence which the young men exerted on each other is far better under this new system than under the old, and this influence is very powerful, very subtle, and at the same time efficacious in the production of great good. Such scenes as were witnessed in former days were not repeated. "Hazing," which once was barbarous, has now passed into the idiotic state, and no student who means to be a self-respecting gentleman would think of practising the senseless tricks of former days.