The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

Another peculiarity of the phrase was its indefinableness. After it had come into use, and had been conjured by for several years, there appeared not long ago in one of our newspapers a ‘symposium,’ contributed to by many of our foremost citizens. The purpose of this broadside was, if possible, to define ‘The Cambridge Idea.’ I do not know where, in so small space, so much good civics can be found as in that broadside, which ought to be printed and spread widely over the country. The curious thing about the many articles contributed was that they greatly differed. They embraced the largest variety of sentiments. Each writer was sure that what he mentioned was precisely what the phrase meant. The chairman of the Harvard Board of Preachers, in addressing a large audience in a campaign of ours two or three years ago, essayed to define it as ‘The Christian Idea.’ Another speaker, also before a large audience in a later campaign, made bold to affirm that ‘The Cambridge Idea’ was not an idea at all, but an ideal, Cambridge's ideality. It is not improbable that this speaker, like the preceding, was right; but it is beyond question that, had the phrase started under the name of ‘Ideal’ or ‘Ideality,’ it would not have survived a day.

That must be a very large symbol of thought which could become, so soon, so abidingly, amongst such diverse persons, within such a large population, and with such spontaneity, such a standard or measure of civic and ethical values, as this phenomenal state of things indicates. Furthermore, there is something nobly inspiring about it, and that quite independently of neighborhood. I have seen, for example, many audiences beyond Cambridge, and even beyond Massachusetts, gathered to listen to some account of what has been happening among us, who—when this point of the description was reached, and the striking circumstance was held forth of a great and heterogeneous city bowing to the sway of such a phrase as this, and of its profound and transcendental meaning—would give way to the most enthusiastic applause, so that they needed, in some instances, to be restrained, if the speech were to go on; and I have known them to express the heartfelt desire that such a phrase might break forth likewise amongst them, and become equally regnant.