New England, as everyone knows, has long been schoolmaster to the Nation. There one finds concentrated in a comparatively small area the chief universities, colleges, and preparatory schools of the United States. Why should this be so? It is true that New England, more than any other section, was dedicated to education from the start. But I think that something more than this is involved.

How did it happen, for example, that the state university, that great symbol of American democracy, failed to flourish in New England as it did in other parts of the country? Isn't it a bit odd that the three states of Southern New England (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) have had state institutions of university status only in the very recent past, these institutions having previously been A + M colleges? Was it supposed, perchance, that A + M (vocational training, that is) was quite sufficient for the immigrant class which flooded that part of the New England world in the post Civil War period, the immigrants having been brought in from Southern Europe, to work in the mills, to make up for the labor shortage caused by migration to the West? Is it not ironical that Roger Williams's state, Rhode Island, should have been the very last of the forty-eight to establish a state university? The state universities of Maine, New Hampshire, And Vermont are older and more ``respectable''; they had less immigration to contend with.