GIFTS TO COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.

BY CHARLES F. THWING.

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In the nineteen years since the close of the war, many institutions have been founded with munificent endowments, as Johns Hopkins, Smith at Northampton, Wellesley; and many more institutions have vastly increased their resources. Harvard's property has perhaps tripled in amount; Princeton's income, under the presidency of Dr. McCosh, has greatly enlarged; Yale's revenue has also received large additions. Colleges in every State have been the recipients of munificent gifts. Notwithstanding, however, these benevolences, most colleges are in a constant state of poverty. Indeed, it may be said that every college ought to be poor; that is, it ought to have needs far outrunning its immediate means of supplying them. Harvard is frequently making applications for funds, which appear to be needed quite as much in Cambridge, as in the new college of a new town of a new State. At the present time, colleges stand in peculiar need of gifts for general purposes of administration. Funds are frequently given for a special object, as the foundation of a professorship. But the amount may be inadequate. It is not expedient to decline the gift. Properly to endow the new chair, therefore, revenue must be drawn from the general funds, which thus suffer diminution. Donations are of the greatest advantage to a college, which are free from conditions relative to their use.

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The demand of institutions of learning for endowment receives special emphasis at the present by the decreasing rate of interest. It is difficult, every college treasurer knows well, so to invest funds with safety as to cause them to return more than five per cent, interest. Ten years ago in the East it was as easy to secure seven, as it is now to secure five, per cent. In one year one college saw its income decrease many thousand dollars by reason of this decrease in the rate of interest. Bowdoin College is distinguished for the success with which its funds are administered. At the present these funds are said to pay about six per cent, interest, but it is a rate higher than many colleges are able to gain. By this decrease the salaries of professors, the income of scholarships, and the entire revenue, suffer.

Many reasons might be urged in behalf of benevolence to institutions of learning. Funds thus given are as a rule administered with extraordinary financial skill. Their permanence is greater than the permanence of funds in trust companies and savings banks. Harvard, the oldest college, Yale, the next to the oldest (with the exception of William and Mary), have funds still unimpaired, still applied to the designs of those who gave them in the first years of their incorporation.

Gifts to a college are, moreover, an application of the right principle of benevolence of helping those who help themselves. The trustees, the professors, are, in proportion to their income, the most generous. Not seldom do they pledge a year's salary for the benefit of the institutions which they officially serve. The first nineteen donors to Tabor College, Iowa, several of whom were its officers, gave no less than sixty per cent. of the assessed value of their property. The efficient president of Colorado College has been engaged in making money for his college in legitimate business, in preference to making his own fortune. The students, as well as the officers, of colleges endeavor to help themselves to an education in all fitting ways. The keeping of school, the doing of chores, the running of errands, the tutoring of fellow-students, suggest the various ways in which they endeavor to work their way through college.

Those who thus donate their money, in amounts either large or small, foster the highest interests of the nation. From institutions of learning flow the best forces of the national life. Literature, the fine arts, patriotism, philanthrophy, and religion, thus receive their strongest motives. The higher education in the United States is most intimately related to the master-minds of American literature. Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, were in part created by Bowdoin and Harvard. Among the most efficient officers of the late war were the graduates of the colleges. Without the college the ministry would become a "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal" indeed, and without a learned ministry the church would languish. In the early years of the century, Mr. John Norris, of Salem, proposed to give a large sum of money to the cause of foreign missions. He was persuaded, however, to transfer the gift to the foundation of the Andover Theological Seminary, assured that thus he was really giving it to the missionary cause. So the event proved. For the first American missionaries were trained at Andover. Thus, he who gives his money to the college, gives it to the fostering of the highest and best forces in American thought and character.

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