As the superintendent of schools at St. Louis, to whom I had a letter from Washington, was confined to his house by illness, I took a letter from General Sherman to the president of an institution at St. Louis that goes by the name of the ‘Washington University.’ It is not a university in our sense of the word, but an institution for working connectedly the different educational resources of the place, beginning with the elementary schools, and passing up through grammar and high schools to a kind of polytechnic institution, in which arts rather than sciences are taught, the arts in truth being little more than the principles and practice of different trades and occupations. This seems to us a low view to take of education and of a university. But it is what is first wanted in a new country, where every man has to work for his bread, and everything has to be done. Higher culture is not for the existing, but for future generations. So think the people who manage this institution. And so think the people for whose benefit the institution has been established, except that they have little or no idea at all, as yet, of the ‘higher culture.’ They are beginning to be intolerant even of the time and money spent in teaching law and medicine, and of the position assigned to lawyers and physicians. It was in this spirit that a gentleman said to me, on the prairie between Chicago and Omaha, ‘What we want, sir, in this great country, is fewer graduates of law and medicine, and more graduates of the machine shop and agricultural college.’ This Washington University has had 800,000 dollars presented and bequeathed to it by citizens of St. Louis in the last eleven years; and as the war, and the collapse that followed the war, cover more than half of this period, the sum appears very considerable. This is in the spirit, and it is a very common spirit in America, of the times when our own colleges and schools were founded. The president told me that he came from New England to settle at St. Louis thirty years ago. He rode all the way. At that time the country was so little settled that he would ride by compass a whole day without seeing a log hut or a human being. He brought with him to St. Louis the ideas and the traditions of New England. His son had, following the example of his father, moved on westward. He had crossed the mountains and settled in Oregon, on the Pacific coast. His son had been brought up at St. Louis in the ideas and traditions of New England, and had taken them with him. In this way it is that the New England element, which is a distinct character, is kept up and propagated throughout the whole West. Other emigrants bring with them nothing of so tough and perdurable a nature; New Englandism therefore must spread till it has leavened the whole lump. [Sidenote: _America will not be Germanised._]