HOW PRESIDENT ELIOT WAS ELECTED.1

IN September, 1868, the office of president became vacant by the resignation of the late Rev. Dr. Thomas Hill (my beloved classmate and friend). The Corporation had the responsibility cast upon it of finding a suitable successor. Two members of the Board were and long had been connected with the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, whose works were at Lowell, Hon. John A. Lowell and Hon. Francis B. Crowninshield, the former as one of the directors and the latter as treasurer. . . . Three years and a half before that time it had become necessary to appoint a new superintendent (locally called agent) of the mills at Lowell. This position is one of great difficulty, requiring not only thorough knowledge of business, but capacity to manage a great body of operatives, keep them satisfied and contented, and obtain the greatest product from their intelligent labor.

By some means, while Mr. Eliot was tutor and assistant professor at Harvard, the treasurer and directors had formed a high opinion of his executive ability and his skill in the general management of affairs. The superintendency was offered him at a salary of $5000 a year and the use of a house. This was a large compensation for the times, two thirds more, in money, than the then established salary of the President of Harvard. The offer was a tempting one to a young man thirty-one years of age and of limited means. Mr. Eliot was in Rome when the offer was received. After a week's reflection he decided to stick to education as the business of which he knew the most, and for which he thought himself best fitted, and the appointment was declined. A few weeks later he was invited to a professorship in the then newly established Institute of Technology, to be opened in Boston, Oct. 1, 1865, with a much smaller salary; and, that offer being in the line of his studies and his ambition, it was accepted. Thus the Merrimack Manufacturing Company missed a valuable superintendent who might have increased the dividends of the stockholders, and there was reserved to the College one who was destined to become its president with a long and brilliant administration.

It was natural that Mr. Crowninshield and Mr. Lowell, who had become impressed in 1865 with Mr. Eliot's capacity and capabilities, should in the winter of 1868–9 bring him before the Corporation of the College

1 The late W. A. Richardson, '43, Chief Justice of the Court of Claims, contributed to the Register of the New England Historic Genealogical Society for January, 1895, the article from which the following extracts are taken. He stated that the article first appeared in The University Magazine for December, 1892. — Ed.

as a suitable person for president. To the four other members of that body Mr. Eliot was well known, and I apprehend it was an easy matter to obtain their unanimous vote for his election. He was also somewhat known to the Overseers, being himself a member of the Board, to which he had been elected by the alumni on Commencement Day, 1868, under the then newly adopted system of election.

In February and March, 1869, while the presidential vacancy still remained unfilled, there appeared in the Atlantic Monthly two articles on "The New Education," which were known to have been written by Mr. Eliot. These articles were so full of deep thought and progressive ideas that they made a decided impression on the Overseers and friends of the College, and unmistakably marked their author as the man for president. I have always thought that those articles contributed largely, if not to his nomination, at least to his ultimate confirmation by the Board of Overseers.

He was elected by the Corporation March 12, and nominated to the Overseers March 18, 1869. Many of the Board doubted the expediency of trusting so great responsibilities to so young a man. His age was much below that of any former president, except the first, Henry Dunster, who held the office in the day of small things for the College, during whose whole fourteen years of service there were graduated but seventyfour persons.

The nomination, on the day of its presentation, was referred to a committee of four, who made their report April 7, unanimously recommending that the election be confirmed. Still a majority of the Board hesitated. The matter was put over to an adjourned meeting, April 21. On that day it was voted "that the communication from the Corporation in reference to the election of Mr. Eliot as President of the University be referred back to the Corporation."

Subsequently, May 19, the Corporation replied that "they remain unanimously of the opinion that their action in electing Mr. Eliot is adapted to promote the best interests of the University." In the mean time a majority of the Overseers had evidently come to the consciousness of the fact that youth is an objection to which time is constantly applying a remedy, while age is always advancing with increasing infirmities and disabilities. Old men will go on very well in the beaten track they have traveled for years, but for enterprise and vigorous action young men of ambition and elements of growth are much better. An informal vote was taken at that meeting, and resulted fifteen in the affirmative and nine in the negative. On a formal ballot, which immediately followed, the nomination was confirmed by a vote of sixteen to eight, and Mr. Eliot was declared elected. The wisdom of the choice has been proved by

more than twenty years of successful administration, during which the College has prospered as it never prospered before.

What I have written in relation to Mr. Eliot is drawn from personal knowledge. About the time he was offered the position of superintendent of the Merrimack Mills I was one of the directors of the company, of whom I am the last survivor, and the offer is now known only to himself and to me. When he was chosen President of the College I was one of the Board of Overseers, serving the last year of my first term by election of the legislature, under the old but not the oldest system. Having been reëlected by the alumni under the new system, I continued to serve on the Board for six years thereafter while he was preparing the ground, planting the seed and developing of his ideas, the steady growth of which I have ever since watched with deep interest and with great pride for my Alma Mater.

William A. Richardson, '43.

PRESIDENT ELIOT AS AN EDUCATIONAL REFORMER.1 WHEN President Eliot was elected, George S. Hillard, meeting him on the street, said to him, "Do you know what qualities you will need most out there at Harvard?" President Eliot replied that he supposed he would need industry, courage, and the like. "No," said Mr. Hillard; "what you will need is patience - patience - patience." So it has proved. All these reforms have required ten, twenty, or thirty years for their accomplishment. The two reforms now pending are by no means new. The extension of the franchise to graduates of the Professional Schools was proposed eighteen years ago; and the definition of requirements for admission which is now before the Board of Overseers is the working out of principles announced twenty-four years ago, and contained in germ in the inaugural address. Yet this marvelous patience has been no idle waiting for the lapse of time, but the steady pressure of one who was confident that he was right, and sure that, if urged at every opportunity, the right would gain adherents and ultimately prevail.

President Eliot's reforms have all been rooted in principles and purposes which at bottom are moral and religious. He has gone up and down the whole length of our educational line, condemning every defect, denouncing every abuse, exposing every sham, rebuking every form of incompetence and inefficiency, as treason to the truth, an injury to the community, a crime against the individual. To his mind, intent on mak

1 Extract from an article in the Atlantic Monthly for March, by President Hyde of Bowdoin College.

ing God's richest gifts available for the blessing of mankind, a dull grammar school is an instrument of intellectual abortion; uniformity in secondary schools is a slow-starvation process; paternalism and prescription in college is a dwarfing and stunting of the powers on which the prosperity of a democratic society must rest; superficial legal training is partnership in robbery; inadequate medical education is wholesale murder; dishonest theological instruction is an occasion of stumbling more to be dreaded than "that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be cast into the depths of the sea."

Such has been the work of this educational reformer. What, then, has been his reward? For the first twenty-five years he was misunderstood, misrepresented, maligned, hated, with and without cause. It may be that it is an essential element of the reformer's make-up that, in order to hold firmly and tenaciously his own views against a hostile world, he should be somewhat lacking in sensitiveness, and at times seem to take a hostile attitude toward those who differ from him. This, at any rate, seems to have been characteristic of President Eliot during the early years of his long fight for educational reform. In later years, now that most of his favorite reforms are well launched, and his services in their behalf are acknowledged with gratitude on all sides, there has been manifest a great change, amounting to the kindliest appreciation of temperaments widely different from his own. Even in the days of his apparent hardness he was never known to cherish personal animosity on account of difference of views. At the time when the fight was hottest in his own Faculty, meeting an assistant professor, most outspoken in antagonism to all his favorite measures, who had received a call to go elsewhere, he said to him, "I suppose you understand that your opposition to my policy will not in the slightest degree interfere with your promotion here." Partly owing to the triumph of his views even in the minds of most of his old opponents who survive, partly owing to the change which the years with their increasing cares and sorrows have wrought in the man himself, he has come to be universally trusted, admired, and loved by all who know him well. Yet his chief reward has been that which he commended to another, "the great happiness of devoting one's self for life to a noble work without reserve, or stint, or thought of self, looking for no advancement, hoping for nothing again."

No one can begin to measure the gain to civilization and human happiness his services have wrought. As compared with what would have been accomplished by a series of conservative clergymen, or ornate figure-heads, or narrow specialists, or even mere business men, such as by the uninformed he has most erroneously sometimes been supposed to be, his leadership has doubled the rate of educational advance, not in Har

vard alone, but throughout the United States. He has sought to extend the helping hand of sympathy and appreciation to every struggling capacity in the humblest grammar grade; to stimulate it into joyous blossoming under the sunshine of congenial studies throughout the secondary years; to bring it to a sturdy and sound maturity in the atmosphere of liberty in college life; and finally, by stern selection and thorough specialization, to gather a harvest of experts in all the higher walks of life, on whose skill, knowledge, integrity, and self-sacrifice their less trained fellows can implicitly rely for higher instruction, professional counsel, and public leadership. In consequence of these comprehensive reforms, we see the first beginnings of a rational and universal church, not separate from existing sects, but permeating all; property rights in all their subtle forms are more secure and well-defined; hundreds of persons are alive to-day who under physicians of inferior training would have died long ago; thousands of college students have had quickened within them a keen intellectual interest, an earnest spiritual purpose, a "personal power in action under responsibility," who under the old régime would have remained listless and indifferent; tens of thousands of boys and girls in secondary schools can expand their hearts and minds with science and history and the language of other lands, who but for President Eliot would have been doomed to the monotonous treadmill of formal studies for which they have no aptitude or taste; and, as the years go by, hundreds of thousands of the children of the poor, in the precious tender years before their early drafting into lives of drudgery and toil, in place of the dry husks of superfluous arithmetic, the thrice-threshed straw of unessential grammar, and the innutritious shells of unrememberable geographical details, will get some brief glimpse of the wondrous loveliness of Nature and her laws, some slight touch of inspiration from the words and deeds of the world's wisest and bravest men, to carry with them as a heritage to brighten their future humble homes and gladden all their after-lives. In such "good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over," has there been given to this great educational reformer, in return for thirty years of generous and steadfast service of his university, his fellow-men, his country, and his God, what, in true Puritan simplicity, he calls "that finest luxury, to do some perpetual good in this world."

William De Witt Hyde, '79.