but they did bring it up to a few hundreds
over twenty thousand pounds. The managers,
delivering themselves up to unrestrained
enjoyment of a good dabble in the mud-pie
making of our maturer years—bricks and
mortar, produced a handsome edifice, with a frontage
of nearly two hundred feet, battlemented tower,
gable roofs, and lofty gothic windows. Rooms
made, of course, to the windows, instead of
windows to the rooms, were often spacious only
in height. Lofty they must be, because the
ceiling is usually looked for somewhere above
the top of the window; and the bottom of the
window, itself lofty, would be so high above the
floor that a student might have to stand on a
chair to see the ground outside. There was a
dining-hall so high that, without making it a
bit too low, a very fine museum has been got
by laying a floor midway across it. But on the
whole, no doubt, a very durable and handsome
college was erected, which by some trouble and
thought has, in course of years, become as
convenient and comfortable as if the architect
himself had been vulgar enough to care for the
convenience of its inmates. The architect—
several of his craft have done the same within
the present century—considerably exceeded his
estimates. The managers of the new college
were sanguine, and had all their experience to
buy; there was no other agricultural college
in the country by whose early mistakes they
might profit; so they began, like heroes, with an
offer of board, lodging, practical and scientific
education, all for thirty pounds a year. What
could be more desirable than that? " How lovely
the intrepid front of youth!" Experience the
first showed that while each student paid thirty
pounds a year for everything, he cost the college
thirty-two for meat and drink alone. That
being so, how was the debt on the buildings to
be met? How were the teachers to be paid?
Out of the profits of the farm? Aye, but
that, too, was managed at a loss. There
was a bright ideal notion that students should
become practically acquainted with every
detail of farm work—hoeing, digging, paring
turnips, feeding sheep, and so forth; but that
if they did field labour they gave service worth
wages, and should be credited with wages of
their work. Thus it was thought that their
industry might pay some part of the cost of
their maintenance. And, behold, there was a
book kept in which every student was credited
with the wages of such work as he did on the
farm. Such work! Well. The same bright
speculation is to be tried under different and
far more hopeful conditions at the new Cornell
University in New York.

The plan of the Cornell Institution, which
has enrolled our countryman, Mr. Goldwin
Smith, among its professors, is partly based
upon the good later results obtained at
Cirencester. About six years ago Mr. Ezra Cornell,
of Ithaca, New York, who had made a large
fortune by telegraphy, visited the college at
Cirencester with Colonel Johnstone. He afterwards
made his offer to the New York government
of more than a hundred thousand pounds,
in addition to the considerable grant of land
from Congress to a state that would provide
agricultural teaching, on condition that the
whole should go to the founding of a single
institution, not as a grant to be divided among
several districts. The result is the Cornell
University in the State of New York, one
department of which is planned upon the
model of Cirencester, and forms the only good
agricultural college in the United States.
There is a large agricultural school at Yale, but
it is not very efficient. Mr. Cornell was told at
Cirencester of the complete failure there of
the system of paying students wages for field
labour. Nevertheless he means to try it in
America, but not in the same form. The large
endowment makes the teaching practically
gratuitous in his new university. The farmwork
is not required of any as a necessary part of
the routine, but it is open to all. Thus it is
thought that the poorest father may send an
industrious son to this new institution, with
the assurance that while he receives intellectual
training he may earn enough to pay his moderate
expenses, finding also suitable work ready to his
hand, and a state of opinion among his fellows
trained to recognise it as both useful and honourable.
In fact, we are told by newspapers that in
this first session of the CorneU University some
youths entered three months before the classes
opened for the sake of earning two dollars a
day through haying and harvest towards their
winter expenses. The Cirencester students did
not work like men who labour for a living.
When the poor student at a Scottish university,
who supplies, doubtless, another of Mr.
Cornell's models, is proud to earn by work of his
hands in leisure time the money spent on
cultivation of his intellect, he works nobly, indeed,
but under the strong joint pressure of need
and ambition. The common labourer works to
feed himself and his wife and children; but the
young student whose actual wants are paid for
by his father's cheque, and who goes out with
a troop of light-hearted young fellows in his
own position to play at field labour in the name
of education, and to have his earnings put
down to his father's credit, is the most
unprofitable of all known sorts of farm servant. He
turns work into play, smokes under hedges,
and even when he does get through a certain
quantity of work, is not to be relied upon for
doing it at the right time, or thoroughly.
When the business of the college farm required
that certain work should be completed in a
certain field by a particular day, the chance
would be that it was not done, or done badly,
if it was entrusted to the students. To the
students of that day: we speak of times
completely gone, of difficulties conquered, partly
by abandonment of efforts in a wrong direction;
but the results of the first years of work
in the Agricultural College at Cirencester were
disappointing. In the year 'forty-eight the
nanagers found that they had overdrawn their
account at the bank to the extent of about ten