The Quaker colony of William Penn, following the example of the Anglicized Dutch colony of New York, established the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia--the metropolis of the colonies in 1755. Of these nine ante-revolution Colleges, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton maintain an equally high reputation, while Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, William and Mary and Dartmouth Colleges are more or less about the average standard of American Colleges. Governor Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, was a graduate of Oxford. He, with other English University colonists, conceived the idea of a College for this, the then youngest of the English colonies. The project of his friend, the Irish Bishop Berkeley, of Cloyne, of founding a College in the Bermudas having failed, he secured £10,000 of the Bishop's funds to aid him in his settlement of the colony. The seed sown by Oglethorpe bore fruit; and while Georgia was still a colony, provision was made for a generous system of education. D. C. Gilman, Esq. (President of the John Hopkins' University, Baltimore), in his admirable sketch of the growth of education in the United States during the last century, pays a high tribute to the nine Colonial Colleges to which we have referred. He says:-- "These nine Colleges were nurseries of virtue, intelligence, liberality and patriotism, as well as learning; so that when the revolution began, scores of the most enlightened leaders, both in council and upon the field (on both sides) were found among their graduates. The influence of academic culture may be distinctly traced in the formation of the Constitution of the United States, and in the political writings of Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Munroe and many other leading statesmen of the period. A careful student of American politics has remarked that nothing more strikingly indicates the education given at Cambridge than the masterly manner in which different problems of law and government were handled by those who had received their instruction only from that source."[18] [18] In illustrating the fact that college-bred graduates are considerably less numerous and less conspicuous in the professions and in political life than were men of a similar education 50 or 100 years ago, Mr. C. K. Adams, in the _North American Review_ for October, 1875, says that, "of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 36 were college-bred, and 15 of the 26 Senators in the first Congress; while now there are only 7 of the 26 Senators 'college-bred.'" He thinks that the comparison, if extended to the House of Representatives and the State Legislatures, would be still less favorable as to the number of college-bred men in these bodies.