Few towns in New England possess more charm, whether of nature or society, than the towns in which her long-established institutions of learning have taken root, flourished, and dominated the life of the community. New Haven, Cambridge, and Providence are all cities now with a heterogeneous population and large manufacturing interests, and they each contain thousands of inhabitants to whom Harvard, Yale, and Brown are of as little practical benefit or concern as if they were situated in remote Hawaii or Porto Rico. Nevertheless, the chief glory of each of these large towns is its institution of learning, and to each there come added beauty of life and elevation of tone because of the presence within its borders of so many thirsty and hungry students and highly educated and apt instructors. It would be idle, however, to claim, for instance, that Cambridge to-day is quite as unique and charming in its simplicity and purity of life, or quite as classic in its atmosphere, as it was in the days when the town was a village, when the university was a college, and when thought and manners were as ideal as James Russell Lowell in his essay, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his latest book, _Cheerful Yesterdays_, picture them. To study the American college town at its best, unsullied by the grime of industrialism and the temptations and conventionalities of city life, one must go to hill-towns like Amherst and Williamstown, Massachusetts, or Hanover, New Hampshire. But even there, standards of living and conduct among students and instructors have been changed and influenced by the habits and ideals of the universities and the cities. Hence, to see the American college town in all its pristine simplicity and beauty, one now has to go to the new New England, and visit such institutions as Oberlin, Beloit, Knox, Iowa, and Colorado colleges, concerning which, and others of their type, Mr. Bryce writes: “They get hold of a multitude of poor men who might never resort to a distant place for education. They set learning in a visible form, plain indeed and humble, but dignified even in her humility, before the eyes of a rustic people, in whom the love of knowledge, naturally strong, might never break from the bud into the flower, but for the care of some zealous gardener. They give the chance of rising in some intellectual walk of life to many a strong and earnest nature who might otherwise have remained an artisan or storekeeper, and perhaps failed in those avocations.”[62]