Note 434 — Chapter VII · The Educational Work of the Jesuits in the Nineteenth Century.

The unqualified slurs of President Eliot against the Jesuit colleges were ably refuted by Rev. Timothy Brosnahan, S. J., Professor of Ethics at Woodstock College, Maryland, in his pamphlet: President Eliot and Jesuit Colleges, Messenger Press, New York, p. 36. The reception given to this booklet was remarkable. We refer the reader to a criticism in the Bookman, April 1900, by Professor Peck of Columbia University, N. Y. We quote only one little passage from Prof. Peck’s article: “Altogether we have not in a long time read anything which compacts into so small a compass so much dialectic skill, so much crisp and convincing argument, and so much educational good sense. We hope that President Eliot has been reading this over very carefully himself. He has been so long an autocrat in his own particular microcosm as apparently to make him somewhat careless when he addresses a larger public. In this case he has certainly been evolving argumentative material out of his inner consciousness, in the spirit of the person who first said tant pis pour les faits; and it is just as well that for once in a way he should have been brought up with a good round turn. As the information would probably never reach him from Harvard sources, we may gently convey to him the information that throughout the entire country professional educators, and men and women of cultivation generally, are immensely amused at the cleverness with which his alleged facts and his iridescent theories have been turned into a joke.”