The Value of Honorary Degrees.
IN a timely article in the July Century, on Academical Degrees, especially Honorary Degrees in the United States, ex-President Theodore D. Woolsey, of Yale, thus comments on the present system of conferring titles:— "We have also a right to say that this distribution of honorary degrees is to a great extent unmeaning. It fails of selecting the most worthy; it disappoints many, as is probable, and gratifies a few, and those few not, of course, the best fitted to fill the place; it by no means selects the most learned and useful scholars, but rather those who have an artificial or undeserved prominence. The desire to obtain the honor is a desire which no man should indulge, and yet the uncertainty and unreasonableness of the rules of selection provoke such a desire, especially in persons who have no good claims by which it can be justified. If the honor of a doctorate in theology is given to ministers of one denomination, it will, in the end, be given to those of another—not in order to discourage a learned ministry, but owing, in part, to the sway of the spirit of equality, and because, in part, it gives a title which is as good as if the largest university had conferred it, as well as a standing in the upper section of one's fellow-ministers. Perhaps, too, it may help him in getting a good parish. The social distinction conferred on a man by an academical honor, whether deserved or not, is not an inconsiderable motive for desiring and even for seeking it; and the value of titles is, perhaps, nowhere more highly esteemed than in a democratic country like ours. Thus the official title which attaches itself to a person in a civil, military, judicial, or political sphere is commonly given rather than the Christian name, not merely because it is shorter to say Colonel or Mayor, or Mr. Smith, but also because it is supposed to afford pleasure to the person so addressed. It is owing to these causes that addresses by word of mouth, or on the covers of letters, have gradually fallen down from their original honorary meaning, so as to be open to almost all men—such titles, we mean, as Esquire, Master or Mr., and Honorable. In this widening of the use of titles they come to mean, at length, little or nothing, and, instead of distinctions, are bestowed on all men. Who that adds the title of Esquire to a name on a letter ever thinks of the aristocratic employment which it once denoted? It is getting to be very much the same in regard to doctorates in theology. They carry with them no evidence of learning, but only a certain indefinite superiority above others in the same sacred calling."