American Colonial Colleges 249
Hence the leadership in American higher education was lost
by Virginia to a less ancient and splendid colonial unit known
as New England.
Harvard College was established at a place which had
been a wilderness six years before, in a colony whose history
was less than ten years old, and by a community of less than
ten thousand people. The impulse and support came from no
colonizing company, church, government, or individual in
the Old World, but from an isolated people hemmed in be-
tween the forest and the ocean, who had barely secured the
necessities of existence. No such achievement can be found
in the history of modern civilization; and in the eight cen-
turies that have elapsed since Abaelard lectured by the Seine,
there have been few nobler examples of courage in maintain-
ing intellectual standards amid adverse circumstances than
the founding and early history of the Puritans’ college by
the Charles.
The state which so early established this college was no
common plantation, and her inhabitants no ordinary people.
They were Puritans, representing the left wing of the Eng-
lish Reformation, fleeing from the Anglo-Catholic reaction
led by Archbishop Laud. They had come over under univer-
sity-trained leadership, intent on transplanting English soci-
ety whole, shorn only of what they regarded as corruptions.
About one hundred alumni of the University of Cambridge
and thirty of Oxford came to New England before 1646;
which means that there was at least one college man to every
thirty-five families, a proportion much higher than existed in
England of that day, or than exists in the United States of
today. These English university men naturally wished their
sons to have the same educational advantages as themselves,
and it would have been far beyond their means to educate
them in England.
Undoubtedly the dynamic motive in founding our earliest