In the thirteen Southern states there are as many as 90 denominational colleges for men, most of them, however, having the co-educational feature. This gives an average of seven to each state, Tennessee and Missouri notably leading with 15 each. In the aggregate these 90 institutions have, or had in 1903, in their collegiate departments, 943 professors and 7,549 men students and 2,177 women; they also have in their preparatory departments 5,270 boys and 3,633 girls, with a teaching force of 411; they report 198 graduate students and 3,428 in professional departments. The grand total is 1,354 instructors and 24,255 students, men, women, boys, and girls. Taking for the sake of comparison the state colleges in these states, we find, exclusive of mechanical and agricultural institutions, 689 instructors in the colleges, and the number of students foots up 3,588 men and 768 women; preparatory departments, 600 men and 148 women, with a teaching force of 32; graduate students 167 and professional students, 2,173. These figures give totals of 721 instructors and 7,347 students. This is to say, that there are three and one-third as many students in the 90 denominational colleges as there are students in the 13 state colleges, or nearly 80 per cent. of the entire number. These figures give, if nothing else, the extent of the influence of the denominational colleges. Whatever the nature of the training they furnish, it touches for better or worse the most people in this Southern country.

It is when we turn to material equipment and resources that we realize most the limitations of the denominational colleges. For example, in the general matter of property the 90 colleges give an aggregate of values to the amount of $13,165,311; the thirteen state colleges $5,951,349; the latter have libraries footing up 437,000 volumes, the former 918,436; in scientific apparatus and equipment the colleges supported by the state furnish a valuation of $860,649; those of the church only $945,093. That is to say, the valuation of the physical equipment of the 90 church institutions is hardly more than twice that of the 13 state institutions. This deficiency becomes all the more glaring if we take out the

three or four denominational colleges whose equipment really equals or surpasses that of the largest and best state colleges. As to endowment we reckon the total for the denominational colleges to be $9,591,528, and that of the state colleges to be $4,808,730. Here again, however, two things are to be considered: first, a few denominational institutions have comparatively large endowments, thus greatly reducing the proportion among the rest; and, secondly, the large annual appropriations by the state for current expenses make similar assessments by some of the churches seem hardly worth counting. Now the income from endowment and appropriations to the state colleges reaches a total of $980,662; that to the denominational colleges $797,488. However, there is a striking and notable difference in the incomes from tuition fees, small colleges receiving more annually from this source than their corresponding state colleges with considerably more students. The denominational colleges receive from this source $740,288; the state colleges only a total of $174,842. It is clear from this that, while the churches have been far from either adequately equipping or endowing their institutions, they have made partial compensation through a tuitionfee paying patronage. And this is a considerable gain.

Now to sum up the physical aspect of the denominational colleges in the mass, we may say that, including property, libraries, scientific apparatus, and endowment, these colleges represent invested capital to the amount of $23,601,931, and their total income from all sources is $1,437,726. These sums are immense in the aggregate, though they shrink into pittances when divided among 90 institutions. They measure, however, the faith, zeal, and activities of the church in what it regards as a special and necessary kind of education. We have a right to ask whether so much capital has been wisely invested, whether, in a word, denominational education as we understand it is worth all that has been put into it. The answer to these questions leads naturally to some considerations with reference to the influence of denominational education.

In the first place, these colleges have been what we call small colleges. In a true sense, moreover, they have been

colleges of the people. Planted in country places, or small towns or villages, their patronage has been mainly local, or drawn from a comparatively narrow circle, rarely going beyond state lines. They have thus brought education to the people who might not have gone out to seek it. In this even a superficial observer will see that they have served as tremendous social, intellectual and moral uplifting forces in special sections, doing a work, I am persuaded, no other kind of institution could have done. This phase of their influence is well described by that acute and sane observer, Mr. James Bryce, in his American Commonwealth (vol. 2, p. 568): "They set learning in a visible form, plain, indeed, and humble, but dignified even in her humility, before the eyes of a rustic people, in whom love of knowledge, naturally strong, might never break from the bud into the flower but for the care of some zealous gardener. They give the chance of rising in some intellectual walk of life to many a strong and earnest nature who might otherwise have remained an artisan or store-keeper, and perhaps failed in these avocations. They light up in many a country town what is at first only a farthing rushlight, but which, when the town swells to a city, or when endowments flow in, or when some able teacher is placed in charge, becomes a lamp of growing flame, which may finally throw its rays over the whole state in which it stands."

This has been and will still continue to be a part of the general mission and influence of the denominational colleges. With scant resources in most instances, meagre equipment and a limited faculty in point of numbers, they have trained men through the discipline of a few fundamental studies into intellectual mastery, and through the dominating influence of the church they have unfailingly kept before their students high ideals of christian character. They have insisted that if both intellectual power and moral power are to be fully effective, the one must be thoroughly moralized and the other thoroughly intellectualized. And who shall say, whatever method we may pursue, that this conception is not worth preserving and strengthening in our educational thinking and practice? Anyway, without losing sight of moral training through christian teaching, the denominational colleges have

also served largely to intellectualize the life of their constituency, and this constituency has been the majority of people at the South.

Further, the denominational college has been and is an effective element in popular education through the agencies it is able to use in reaching the people. Every one knows how largely the mere matter of propaganda enters into the whole question of education at the South. It frequently resolves itself into the simple proposition of how we shall reach the masses, convince them, win them, and move them to action. You cannot always get at them through the newspapers or indeed through legislative enactments. The appalling amount of illiteracy in the South is not as shocking in statistical reports as it is when we are meeting it actually alive in men and women. Here, in the wholly illiterate who see but dimly, you have a great inert, if not positively hostile, power which has to be overcome before they will pay taxes, build school-houses, or indeed send their children to school. Clearly in dealing with such as these we shall be put to our best resources to get the educational idea to work as a sort of leaven. We shall not be able to do it by dint of logical reasoning on the advantages of education or by an eloquent description of that fine vision which now and again comes to us all in our optimistic moments, a vision of an intelligent, trained democracy doing the world's work in the noble glow of altruistic motives. Quite other methods must be used. Indeed, not one, but many methods will be found necessary, and even then the leavening process will lag painfully, and it will require all the optimism and faith we have to trust to the slow results of time. There is an imperative necessity, therefore, for educational missionary work and for employing without stint every agency that can possibly be used to get at the mass of people.

Now I ask, What has the denominational college to do with this all important propaganda-missionary phase of the Southern educational problem? I answer much. In the first place, it is at the head of a church system that uses all its machinery for active, persistent educational propaganda,—a propaganda that, while appealing to religious motives, is be

coming less and less colored with what has been called sectarianism, that has nothing to do with church doctrine as this is generally understood, and all to do with the larger question of human betterment through education-education for all the people. The denominational college, then, has at its command, at least in the three largest churches in the Southern states Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian — organized boards, into whose hands is given the important duty of systematic educational campaigning, if the phrase may be now allowed. The chief aim is to bring education before the people and to put it deeply upon their conscience. The Southern Methodist Church furnishes a notable example of what has been done in this respect. Only a few years ago it was engaged in an officially authorized movement toward general and higher education, conducted with great earnestness and enlisting the very best talent at the command of the church. All of its resources for reaching the people were brought into use and there is probably not a corner of the South, by mountain and by swamp, where the moral, indeed, the religious duty of education was not preached and enforced. A sort of popular educational "revival" was attempted in order to mark the incoming of the new century and to show, from the standpoint of the church, the thing most needed. The definite measurable results were the raising of more than a million and a half dollars for educational purposes and a large increase in the number of students attending schools controlled by the church. But we have absolutely no way of measuring adequately the far more important results which must come from the bringing of the fundamental matter of education before all classes of people with the force and authority of the christian church. Everywhere in the South there are more children in the schools, there are better school houses and better teachers and teaching, and, what is greatly worth while in the present stage of the problem-education! education! education! is still ringing in the ears of the people as never before.

But it is not only through educational boards that the church is able to get the matter before the people. The individual preacher is himself a sort of educational missionary.