what West Point is to the military." Finally, it will be remembered that it was in 1856 that Morrill began his work for the land colleges by offering the resolution, "that the Committee on Agriculture be requested to inquire into the expediency of establishing one or more national agricultural schools upon the basis of the naval and military schools." It is clear that up to that time he had neither formed nor accepted any definite plan - a thing to bear in mind when we come to consider the claims of others to his achievement.

What is clear from this brief survey is that the idea of agricultural and industrial colleges, to be supported by the State, either by donations of public lands or other subvention, was in the air. Morrill did not invent it nor discover it, but it was so congenial to his own views, it responded so closely to a need which he had experienced, that he embraced it with conviction; he framed a legislative measure which should give it effect, and he devoted himself to it with such patience, tenacity, skill, and sweet temper that after five years of labor he brought it to pass.

Many years passed by and no one seems to have thought to question Morrill's full title to whatever honor or credit belonged to the legislation. He was everywhere acclaimed the father of the land-grant colleges; his name was carved on their buildings; his portrait hung in their halls. The first intimation of a question about his part in the matter appears in a letter written on February 5, 1894, to President Atherton of the Pennsylvania State College.

Most of the letter refers to the colleges and is worth quoting, notwithstanding some repetition. The sentence which I have put in italics, "I do not remember of any assistance prior to its [the bill of 1857] introduction," was evidently in answer to a question.

1 Carnegie Foundation Bulletin, no. 10, p. 77.

MY DEAR SIR:

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 5, 1894

Your favor of the 2d inst. has been received. I have not leisure to fully answer all of your questions, but will briefly touch upon some of them:

My service began in the House of Representatives in 1855. I soon noticed (first) that large grants of lands were made for educational as well as for other purposes, and that the older States were receiving little benefit from this large common property. Second, that the average product of wheat per acre in the Northern and Eastern States was rapidly diminishing, while in England, under more scientific culture, it was doing far better. Some institutions of a high grade for instruction in agriculture and the mechanic arts, I knew had been established in Europe. Third, the liberal education then offered at our colleges appeared almost exclusively for the instruction of the professional classes, or for ministers, lawyers, and doctors, while a far larger number, engaged in production and industrial employments, would be greatly benefited by appropriate higher education. Few of the then existing colleges surrendered much time to practical sciences, which deserved greater prominence, and offer a larger field to liberal education.

My first bill, under such considerations, was introduced, and passed both houses, in 1858. I do not remember of any assistance prior to its introduction. After that Colonel Wilder of Massachusetts, Mr. Brown, President of the People's College, New York, and others, encouraged members of Congress in its support. My own speech was about all it had in its favor, but there was talk as well as a report of a committee against it. Cobb of Alabama and Spinner (?) of New York were opposed to it. In the Senate it had the earnest support of Senators Wade and Crittenden and Pearce.

It was vetoed by Buchanan, who suggested that he might have approved a bill providing for a professor of agriculture in some college of each State. Of course I had then to wait for a change of administration, and in 1862 again pushed through the bill, amended so as to endow the colleges with more land. Senators Harlan and Pomeroy there aided its passage. There was never any doubt about the approval of President Lincoln. Buchanan left Washington at once after March 4, 1861.

The value of the land grant to colleges was considerably di

minished by the large amount of railroad grants and bounty lands competing in the market at that time.

President Atherton continued to give the subject careful study and six years later published an address, "The Legislative Career of Justin S. Morrill," in which there appears no shadow of doubt as to Morrill's full and complete authorship of the Land-Grant College Act.

The only serious attempt to question Morrill's title to the authorship of his act came after his death and was inspired as much by institutional as personal pride. It took form in a pamphlet written by Edmund J. James, President of the University of Illinois, and was published by the University in the year 1910. Its controversial purpose was conveyed by its title "The Origin of the Land Grant Act of 1862 (The So-called Morrill Act) and some Account of its Author Jonathan B. Turner." The intention was to transfer the credit for the paternity of the land-grant colleges from the East to the West, from Vermont to Illinois, from Morrill to Turner, and the interest of the University of Illinois lay in the fact that Turner had been a teacher in Illinois College, the precursor of the University.

This was more fully stated in the sub-title of the pamphlet which reads: "The State of Illinois and the Land Grant Act of 1862 (the So-called Morrill Act)":

Thesis

It is proposed to prove in this paper that Jonathan B. Turner, at one time professor in Illinois College at Jacksonville, Illinois, was the real father of the so-called Morrill Act of July 2, 1862, and that he deserves the credit of having been the first to formulate clearly and definitely the plan of a national grant of land to each State in the Union for the promotion of education in agriculture and the mechanic arts, and of having inaugurated and continued to a successful issue the agitation that made possible the passage of the bill.

The thesis contains three claims: (1) that Professor Turner was the real father of the Act of July 2, 1862; (2) that he was the first to formulate the land-grant plan; and (3) that he inaugurated and continued the agitation that made possible the passage of the act.

It is only with the first that we have any real concern. The question of invention or discovery does not come within our range, though we think such invention probably long antedated Professor Turner; nor need we discuss the "agitation that made possible the passage of the act," although this also seems to us beyond the power or knowledge of Professor Turner or any individual so circumstanced.

Professor Turner, we learn from the University of Illinois pamphlet, was Jonathan Baldwin Turner, educator, lecturer, and farmer, who was born in Templeton, Massachusetts, in 1805, studied at Salem Academy and Yale College, was Professor in Illinois College, Jacksonville, Illinois, from 1833 to 1848, and died on January 10, 1898, nearly a year before Morrill's death. He was an active, energetic apostle of education, enthusiastic over new ideas and methods, and devoted to a plan for an Industrial University which he had devised and which he urged with great zeal. He had taken a disgust for the classic type of education. "A classical teacher," he wrote, in his plan for a State University, "who has no original, spontaneous power of thought, and knows nothing but Latin and Greek, however perfectly, is enough to stultify a whole generation of boys and make them all pedantic fools like himself." And further he added, "It may do for the man of books to plunge at once amid the catacombs of buried nations and languages, to soar to Greece, or Rome, or Nova-Zembla, Kamstchatka, and the fixed stars, before he knows how to plant his own beans, or harness his own horse, or can tell whether the functions of his own body are performed by a heart, stomach, and lungs,

or with a gizzard and gills. But for the man of work thus to bolt away at once from himself and all his pursuits in after life, contravenes the plainest principles of nature and common sense."

It does not appear that the claim that Turner was the author of Morrill's bill was seriously put forward until both had been dead at least ten years. A tentative suggestion to this effect was, indeed, broached in 1894, but it was quenched when an inquiry about Professor Turner was directed to Senator Morrill, and he replied, "I do not happen now to know Professor Turner, though I do remember when my bills were before Congress a Western professor came to see me and heartily espoused the idea. It may have been Professor Turner. It is so long since, I have forgotten his name, as I saw a large number of professors, some who favored my idea and some who did not."

Enthusiastic and energetic as he was, Professor Turner was only one voice in the chorus of advocates, "practical educators," who between 1840 and 1860 made themselves heard in the East and the West. And if one may hazard a conjecture, it is that a Congressman from Vermont would have been more likely to hear of Professor Partridge of Norwich or Professor Hitchcock of Boston. The number of the reformers and their plans was so great that a plain man might be excused for confusing them and it does not appear that Professor Turner's stood out before the others. In fact, when the Commissioner of Patents included three of these in his Report for 1851, he made Turner's "Plan for an Industrial University" the last of the three.1

Returning to the University of Illinois bulletin, we find there several specific statements in support of the claim that Professor Turner was "the real father of the so-called Morrill Act": (1) that "he even succeeded in determining the

1 Carnegie Foundation Bulletin, No. 10, p. 77.