The "Cambridge Modern History" in its preface said, that history has been a long conspiracy against the truth and that we must now go back once more to the original documents. "It has become impossible," the editors declare, "for the historical writers of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student continually finds himself deserted, retarded, misled, by the classics of historical literature, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals and official publications in order to reach the truth." In no department of history is this expression more true than in that of education, and especially of science and the relation of educational institutions to scientific development. No man should now dare venture to say anything about the state of science at any time in the world's history who has not seen some of the books written at that time. Above all, no one should venture to make little of the past on the strength of what religiously prejudiced writers have said about it. This story of the mediaeval universities is most illuminating from that standpoint. They were {152} scientific universities closely resembling our own. It has become the custom to talk of them as if they were institutions of learning that accomplished nothing, and wasted their time over trifles. We often hear of how much time was wasted in dialectics in the Middle-Age universities, but surely it was not more than is wasted over technics in our modern university. Hundreds of books were written about the quips and quiddities of logic, but thousands of volumes are full of technics and most of our scientific journals are crowded with it. Let us, then, if for no other reason than our fraternity with them, begin to do justice to these old universities. Their scholars were ardent and zealous, their professors were enthusiastic and laborious. The tomes they issued were larger and their writings more voluminous than those of our own professors. They are hard reading, but no one must dare to criticise them unless he has read them, and, above all, no one must make little of them without knowing something about them at first hand. This is scholarship; the secondary information that has been popular is sciolism. Let us get back to scholarship. That is what we need just now in America. {153} IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION {154}