A Chair in Russian.

The telegraph announces that Mr. Samuel Hill of Seattle has established an endowment for a chair of Russian language and literature at the University of Washington. Mr. Hill is one of the overseers of Harvard University, and a man of large fortune. His latest gift to education resembles those remarkable endowments established by the will of Cecil Rhodes.

Samuel Hill's money will build in the city of Seattle, one of the three great Pacific ports from which American goods have started to flow to Asiatic Russia, an instrument through which Americans may come to have some grasp of the meaning and the soul of Russia. Such a gift is not only empire building by trade building--it is university building by empire building. It carries out the idea of the late Seth Lowe that our great American universities should stand primarily for the paramount expression of life in the particular section where each ahappens to lie.

It is an idea that always has had its appeal, because it is real. It will in most cases work itself out instinctively without the definite purposing of university authorities. But Samuel Hill definitizes and accelerates it by founding a chair of Russian at the American gateway to Russia. It is through such movements that the growth and staying power of our foreign trade expansion is to be assured. Chicago Evening Post.