It can hardly be doubted that could Lord Palmerston have seen what I have seen of the changes in Germany, he would at least have placed the "damned," in another part of his famous sentence. These professors have turned their prowess into channels which have given Germany, in this scientific industrial age, a mighty grip upon something more than theories. It may be dull reading to tell the tale of damned professordom, but it is to Germany that we must all go to school in these matters.
The American chooses his university or college because it is in the neighborhood; because his father or other relatives went there; because his school friends are going there; on account of the prestige of the place; sometimes, too, because one is considered more democratic than another; sometimes, and perhaps more often than we think, on account of the athletics; because it is large or small; or on account of the cost.
The German youth, owing to widely different customs and ideals, chooses his university for other reasons. If he be of the well-to-do classes, and his father before him was a corps student, he is likely to go first to the university, where his father's corps will receive him and discipline him in the ways of a corps student's life, and rigorous ways they are, as we shall see. Young men of small means, and who can afford to waste little time in the amusements of university life, go at once where the more celebrated professors in their particular line of work are lecturing.
Few students in Germany reside during their whole course of study at one university. The student year is divided into two so-called semesters. The student remains, say, in Heidelberg two years or perhaps less, and then moves on, let us say, to Berlin, or Göttingen, or Leipsic, or Kiel, to hear lectures by other professors, and to get and to see something of the best work in law, theology, medicine, history, or belles-lettres, along the lines of his chosen work.
One can hardly say too much in praise of this system. Many a medical, or law, or theological, or philosophical student, or one who is going in for a scientific course in engineering or mining, would profit enormously could he go from Harvard to Yale, or to Johns Hopkins, or to Princeton, or to Columbia, and attend the lectures of the best men at these and other universities. Many a man would have gone eagerly to Harvard to hear James in philosophy, Peirce in mathematics, Abbot in exegesis, or to read Greek with Palmer; or to Yale to have heard Whitney in philology in my day; or now, to name but a few, Van Dyke at Princeton, Sloane at Columbia, Wheeler at the University of California, Paul Shorey at Chicago, and many others are men whom not to know and to hear in one's student days is a loss.