Influence of College-Bred Men.

Charles F. Smith, of the University of Wisconsin, has the following communication in The Nation of January 31:

"The paragraphs in The Nation of December 20, 1894, making the fifty-three 'immortals' whose names are inscribed on the drum of the dome of the new House of Representatives in Boston a text for emphasizing the influence of college-bred men, are wholesome reading, and seem to have been much commented on in college journals. They have called to my mind an investigation made some years ago to ascertain what proportion of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and of the framers of the Constitution were college-bred men.

So far as I could ascertain from 'Appleton's Cyclopaedia of Biography,' of the fifty-six 'signers' twenty-six were college graduates, while ten more received classical training, though they did not attend college. Of the twenty-six college-bred 'signers,' Harvard furnished eight - Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, William Ellery, Elbridge Gerry, R. T. Paine, William Hooper and William Williams; Yale four - Oliver Walcott, 1747; Phillip Livingston, 1737; Lewis Morris, 1746, and Lyman Hall, 1747; Princeton two - Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush; William and Mary three - Thomas Jefferson, C. Braxton, and George Wythe; College of Philadelphia three - William Paca, Matthew Hopkinson, and James Smith; Cambridge (Eng.) three - Arthur Middleton, Thomas Lynch, and Thomas Nelson; Edinburgh - John Witherspoon. James Wilson studied at Edinburgh, St. Andrews, and Glasgow, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton at several foreign Jesuit colleges, as well as law at the Temple.

Of the sixty-one men commissioned to attend the Constitutional Convention thirty-one were college-bred, and five of the remainder had what might be called a liberal education, though they did not attend college. Of these Harvard furnished six - Rufus King, Elbridge Gerry, Francis Dana, Caleb Strong, John Pickering, and Benjamin West; Yale four - Abr. Baldwin, Jared Ingersoll, W. S. Johnson, and Wm. Livingston; Princeton nine - James Madison, Gunning Bedford, Jonathan Dayton, Oliver Ellsworth, Luther Martin, Alexander Martin, Wm. Patterson, W. C. Houston, and W. R. Davie; William and Mary five - John Edmund Randolph, George Wythe, James McClurg, and J. F. Mercer; Columbia (King's) two - Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris; College of Philadelphia two - Thomas Mifflin and Hugh Williamson; Oxford (Eng.) - Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; Glasgow R. D. Spaight; Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Glasgow - James Wilson. Of the thirty-nine whose names were appended to the document, seventeen were college bred men.