American Colonial Colleges 277
education (but were not invariably spent for their behoof) ;
and, following the usual means of supporting continental
universities at that time, the College was assigned certain
state revenues. An export tax of a penny a pound on tobacco
and the office of the surveyor general, with all the land fees
incident thereto, were granted to William and Mary. Al-
though these two sources furnished ample support during the
Colonial period, they collapsed in the Revolution; and as the
wealthy planters of Virginia had never been trained into giv-
ing up large sums for education, the College of William and
Mary fell on evil days. Her late President, Dr. Lynn G.
Tyler, saved her from extinction fifty years ago; her new
President, Mr. John Stewart Bryan, is endeavoring to make
her into a first-class liberal arts college. Every friend to
American higher education, and to the noble tradition of Vir-
ginian statesmanship that William and Mary did so much to
create, will wish him well.
Princeton, being founded by canny Scotch Presbyterians,
began her financial operations with a questing in England,
Ireland, and Scotland, which netted a relatively large sum.
Philadelphia and King’s College obtained permission from
the Archbishop of Canterbury for a joint “drive” in Eng-
land, in 1762. King’s, as we have seen, had been launched
on the proceeds of a lottery authorized by the provincial leg-
islature ; and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies this became a common means of raising money for
even the most religiously minded colleges.
Dartmouth College has the most amusing and distinctive
history, financial and otherwise, of all the colonial colleges.
It began as an Indian institution. It was a persistent delusion
of the colonial English that the proper way to civilize the
native American was to send him to college. Harvard had a
building erected by a missionary society in England, and in-