This happy issue has commonly been the fate of schools founded by "friends of the people" for the aid of struggling young men, and where this transition is made in good form there is commonly, if not invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic life in the schools.
In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way best at home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the "humanities".
This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than anywhere else, in the life-history of the American colleges and universities of recent growth.

There may be many exceptions from the rule, especially among those schools which have been founded by the typically reputable and ritualistic churches, and which, therefore, started on the conservative and classical plane or reached the classical position by a short-cut; but the general rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer American communities during the present century has been that so long as the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and precarious acceptance in the scheme of college life.

But so soon as wealth begins appreciably to accumulate in the community, and so soon as a given school begins to lean on a leisure-class constituency, there comes also a perceptibly increased insistence on scholastic ritual and on conformity to the ancient forms as regards vestments and social and scholastic solemnities.

So, for instance, there has been an approximate coincidence between the growth of wealth among the constituency which supports any given college of the Middle West and the date of acceptance--first into tolerance and then into imperative vogue--of evening dress for men and of the decollete for women, as the scholarly vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the seasons of social amenity within the college circle.

Apart from the mechanical difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely be a difficult matter to trace this correlation.