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Items of Interest Gathered Here and There
Standardizing 'Education.
When Mr. Carnegie established his Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, he may or may
not have had in mind a unification and standard
izing of college education in North America; but
that is something which his great gift is likely to
accomplish.
The nominal purpose of the Foundation is to pro
vide a fund the income from which may provide
retiring pensions for aged professors in such non
sectarian colleges of the United States, Canada and
Newfoundland as are not supported by the state.
This purpose has been strictly adhered to, but in
order that it might be accomplished, it has been nec
essary for the president and trustees to do much
preliminary work. What is a college? What is
“non-sectarian ” ? Does a small grant from a state
'Constitute state support? These and other similar
questions were fundamental.
In order to settle the first one, the officers of the
Foundation were obliged to establish certain stand
ards of admission, curriculum and graduation, to
which every institution which desires its professors
to benefit by the fund must conform. The direct
result is. a general raising of the standard of col
lege education throughout North America.
The result of the investigation into the secta
rianism of colleges is having the effect of defining
more clearly than has ever been done before the
relations between various denominations and the
colleges with which they have been related by
bonds of one sort or another. This, too, is a gain.
Still a third result is the establishment of a uni
form system of accounting among college treasurers,
which, in turn, will make possible a better knowl
edge of and a chance for wise suggestions concern
ing the investment of college funds.
The value of participation in the benefit of this
fund is keenly felt by the colleges. A large part
of the time of the trustees is devoted to investigat
ing the claims of American institutions which desire
that their professors shall share in the pensions
yielded by the fund.
* *
The Knight of Labrador.
Fifteen years ago a brilliant young English sur
geon by the name of Grenfell set out from London
with a case of medicine and surgical tools, a Bible,
and a small sea-going craft, for the little known
coast of Labrador. He had heard that there was a
people up there that needed him, needed his Bible,
and his medicine-chest, and, with Anglo-Saxon de
termination, he was going, to fill the need.
That unknown mariner-missionary has now become
the famous Sir William Grenfell, Knight of the deep
sea fishermen of Labrador. A contributor to Hu
man Life (February) writes of Dr. Grenfell and his
work as follows:
“There probably isn’t another man in the world
whose work is in any way similar to that performed
by the now famous mariner-missionary, Dr. Wil
liam T. Grenfell. For fifteen years he had labored
among the hard-faring fishermen off Labrador and
The Banks, facing constantly the perils of land
and sea in his path of duty up and down the two
thousand miles of ‘the worst coast anywhere in the
world.’
“The Doctor is the best-beloved man in that
frozen Northland, and many a ‘Thank God!’ has
escaped a sufferer’s lips when the Doctor’s hospital
ship hove in sight. His great mission of help and
healing has brought him very near to the hearts of
these brave fisher-folk.
“Four good-sized hospitals has he established up
there that have helped alleviate an untold amount
of pain. He has founded co-operative stores where
the fishermen can now get fair prices for their
catches and not, as heretofore, be at the mercy of
traders, who paid them in provisions and kept them
hopelessly in debt. A mill also has been erected by
him, and everywhere and always he preaches the
Gospel in a simple, human way, that touches the
souls of his rugged and wide-spread flock.
“Dr. Grenfell has said that his first resolve to be
come a missionary was after hearing the noted
The Golden Age for February 27, 1908.
evangelist, the late Dwight L. Moody, speak in Lon
don, a great many years ago. To the people of
Labrador that was indeed a momentous incident,
for to it they owe all. the things that the Doctor
has achieved for them since he started the Labrador
Deep Sea Mission. Thanks to his noble work there
are better homes, fewer saloons, more chapels, more
prosperity, and happier wives and children in that
bleak and frigid country today than there were
twenty years ago.
“The Doctor occasionally gets down to our cities
and tells a few people what’s going on up there, but
as he is a very modest man, most of the information
comes from other sources. He never asks for
money or makes any appeal; but now and then he
tells the story of the need; and the facts speak for
themselves. Not long ago $20,000 in one season was
given him by appreciative Americans for his splen
did cause.
“When the ice closes in, this ‘good physician’
changes from his ship to his dog-sled, to perform his
long journeys, but a herd of reindeer, which has
just been sent him from Norway, will in the future
provide him with a speedier method of transit, and
enable him to spread his beneficent activities over a
wider area.
“Owing to the frequency of frozen legs among the
fishermen, artificial limbs are constantly needed by
the Doctor. That he is not without a sense of humor
in this connection is evidenced by the story he
likes to tell of the gift from an American minister
of some wooden limbs, and of ‘the aged fisher
man’s wife who is now peregrinating the rocky
coast on the legs of the Rev. Ozra Davis.’ ”
n h
Philanthropy as a Career.
The death of a man who gave up making millions
at the age of fifty-four, and spent the rest of his
seventy-seven years in giving them away, is suffi
ciently notable to call out wide-spread newspaper
remark. Morris K. Jesup, whose life ended in
New York City last week, was interested in such
diverse objects of beneficence as orphans, half-or
phans, colored students, theological students, fresh
air children, maltreated animals, the deaf and
dumb, forest preservation, Peary’s polar trips, ex
peditions to collect antediluvian fossils, and the
Protestant College in Syria. The New York Sun
says of the Syrian school:
“This school of civilization surprises every new
beholder. Having previously entertained, perhaps,
some vague idea of a ‘college’ in which a handful
of native youth sit at the feet of the local mission
ary and subject themselves with more or less of
cynical interest to pious efforts at sectarian prose
lytism, with incidental secular instruction, the vis
itor discovers, generally to his immense astonish
ment, what the Beirut institution really is. He finds
a thoroughly organized and perfectly crystallized
university with a faculty of eighty or more accom
plished and eminent men, and nearly a thousand
students from all parts of the Turkish Empire, from
the Greek islands, from Egypt, from the Sudan,
from Persia, from India, from the very heart of
Arabia, pursuing both academic and professional
studies under physical and intellectual conditions
precisely similar to those obtaining in any Ameri
can college of equivalent importance. Planted
prominently on a modern New England-like campus
overlooking the sea are the extensive stone dormito
ries, the chapel, the library, the laboratories, the
museums of natural history, of archeology and of
art, the technical schools, even the gymnasium and
athletic field of our well-understood domestic sys
tem. In the dignity and completeness of its physi
cal establishment the Syrian College is on a par
with most of the colleges of equal dimensions here
at home; its advantages over the American institu
tions are the unrivaled beauty of its site and the
incomparably varied field of its usefulness.”
The college was founded by Dr. Daniel Bliss and
is carried on by his men, but a great part of its ac
tivity and usefulness has been made possible by Mr.
Jesup’s interest and generosity. Its broad-minded
policy is sketched thus by the same paper:
“There is at Beirut absolute control of the natural
impulse to make the college an instrument 9f active
and direct propagandism; to attack aggressively the
various creeds of its students and to make conver
sions, or a seeming conformity of faith, the pi ice of
a liberal education. The ‘heathen’ who goes to
Beirut does not become the object of coercive so
licitation. Indeed, beyond the formal requirement
of attendance at the chapel service, such as was
long common to the denominational colleges of
America, the student is free and respected in the
exercise of his own religious convictions, and the
moral influence operating on him is a thing of at
mosphere of which he is scarcely conscious. The
result is that the strictest of Wahabite Mussulmans
from Nejd, the most orthodox of Jews, the fasridious
Hindu, the usually intolerant Christian of the Orien
tal churches, the Maronite, the Druse, the Sunite,
and the Shiite are found together in the college
library, helping each other in the use of reference
books, or on the football field amicably and even
fraternally commingled in the fiercest of rushes, pre
cisely as is the case with the more homogeneous
population of Amherst or Princeton or Dartmouth.
“Where else on earth can this condition be found
to a similar extent, or manifested in so striking a
fashion? How can you exaggerate its interest as a
fact or overestimate its significance as a factor in
the making of the future history of the Near East?
“Thus it happens that at the uttermost end of
every camel-track leading across the Syrian desert
from regions inhabited by the graduates or students
of the Beirut College, Mr. Jesup’s name has come
to be as well known and loved, and the features of
his face as familiar, as they are in Central Park
West. The Syrian Protestant College, which he
helped so much to create and sustain, is a part of
the lasting monument to his manifold activities.”
—The Literary Digest.
Votes Tor Women.
The recent presence in this country of one of the
so-called “suffragettes” of London has called atten
tion to the differences in the position of women in
Great Britain and the United States. Women, both
married and single, may be voters in England, on
the same terms as men, in all elections except for
members of Parliament. In point of fact, fewer
women in England qualify as voters than might be
expected, and many of those who might do not
vote.
Englishwomen have long taken an active interest
m politics, but chiefly as helpers of their husbands
or brothers. The presence of an attractive wife or
sister on the platform during a campaign for elec
tion to Parliament has turned the scale for many a
candidate. Women have not hesitated to speak on
the hustings and to do energetic and effective cam
paigning.
Within the last three years a movement has been
on foot to obtain the full suffrage for women. The
methods employed have been novel, to say the least.
Women have forced their way into the House of
Commons, shouting their grievances, and resisting
arrest for disturbance with woman’s special weapons
-—the scream and the scratch. They have flocked to
Liberal meetings, and interrupted the speakers with
reminders of their broken promises. Monster gath
erings in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park have
been held by them. Most striking of all, many of
the “suffragettes” have gone to jail for their cause,
and served sentences for assault on officers.
These methods look strange to the American wo
man. She is accustomed to get what she wants
more easily than her English sister. Whatever a
large number of American women want, they are
sure to come by sooner or later. Witness the steady
improvement of the laws governing women in the
last half century —and this without a single shriek
on their part, not to say a scratch.
But the Englishwomen know their own men, and
if they think their welfare is likely to be furthered
by riot and voluntary martyrdom, their American
friends can but view them with mingled pity and
amusement. —The Youth’s Companion.
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