“I would allow the persons taking fellowships to use them in securing advanced instruction at whatever institution they may select at home or abroad. Probably the great majority would choose the best institutions at home, but many would go abroad and seek out the most eminent professors and investigators. Thus, eager, energetic, ambitious young American scholars would bring back to us the best thoughts, words and work of the foremost authorities in every department throughout the world; skill in the best methods, knowledge of the best books, familiarity with the best illustrative material. From the scholars thus trained our universities, colleges and academies would receive better teachers; our magazines and newspapers writers better fitted to discuss living political, financial and social questions; the various professions men better prepared to develop them in obedience to the best modern thought, and the great pursuits which lie at the foundation of material prosperity--agriculture, manufactures and the like--men better able to solve the practical problems of the world. Every field of moral, intellectual and physical activity would thus be enriched. All would be anxious to train students fitted to compete successfully for these fellowships, and the stronger institutions would be especially anxious to develop post-graduate courses fitted to attract these. I can think of no better antiseptic for the dry-rot which afflicts so many institutions of learning. The custom of shelving clergymen unacceptable to parishes in college professorships would probably by this means receive a killing blow.” Bishop Potter writes as earnestly on this subject, though from a different point of view: “We want place for men who, whether as fellows or lecturers, shall, in connection with our universities, be free to pursue original investigation and to give themselves to profound study, untrammelled by the petty cares, the irksome round, the small anxieties, which are sooner or later the death of aspiration, and fatal obstacles to inspiration. It is with processes of thought as it is with processes of nature--crystallization demands stillness, equanimity, repose. And so the great truths which are to be the seed of forces that shall new create our civilization must have a chance first of all to reveal themselves. Some mount of vision there must be for the scholar; and those whose are the material treasures out of which came those wonderful endowments and foundations which have lent to England’s universities some elements of their chiefest glory must see that they have this mount of vision.”