mal school sinking fund moneys in State warrants, as hereinafter provided for, has been so paid into said general fund. When the principal of said bonds shall have been fully paid and the general fund of the State reimbursed for interest on said bonds as herein specified, then and thereafter the proceeds of the sales of such lands and timber shall be disposed of as may by law be provided. This is not the place to enumerate the merits or to extol the objects of the institutions that the university land grants and the grants for the colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts have called into being or have encouraged. All that has been repeatedly done elsewhere. But attention may be asked to two judgments which appear to justify the most strenuous exertions in promoting the cause of higher education. The first of these dicta relates to higher spiritual education and contains a passage very frequently quoted, or rather misquoted; the second is from a recent report of a British commission on technical education. In the preface to his Questions Contemporaines, Mr. Ernest Renan criticises his own and this country in the following language: The false idea being still alive in France that education should be given only to those children whose social position in after life will warrant it, and therefore that to cultivate and to instruct the poor is to sow wants and ambitions which it will be impossible to satisfy, nothing can be definitely accomplished until that idea is repudiated. The strength of the education of the peasantry in Germany is due to the strength of higher education in Germany. It is the university which makes the school. It is said that the elementary teacher conquered the Austrians at Sadowa. Not at all. It was German science and German virtue that conquered at Sadowa. It was Protestantism, it was philosophy, Luther, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel that conquered at Sadowa. The education of the masses is the result of the high culture of certain classes. The people of those countries which, like the United States, have created a great school system for the people without a serious higher instruction shall for a long time yet expiate their fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their coarseness, their superficiality, and their lack of general intelligence.2 Or if it is proper to take the French literary savant's "instruction of a class of persons," or perhaps as he would have said, "a class of instructed persons," as meaning the same thing as a "general diffusion of knowledge," his apprehension concerning the defects of education in this country as regards parlor manners was antedated nearly a century by a warning as regards politics. In his Farewell Address, Washington said: "Promote, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge; for in proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened." Turning from the value of higher education as a preparation for entering into the realm of culture and for the discharge of the duties of citizenship, we may regard the subject from a purely business standpoint. During the year 1896 a British commission visited Germany and reported on the technical education of that country. From that report the following quotation is made: 3 In fact, our recent visit has brought it clearly home to us that the Germans have not ceased to believe in the value of higher scientific education. On the contrary, they appear now to attach greater importance than ever to the connection between such higher scientific training and the development of manufacturing industry. No nation, especially if not overburdened with capital, would continue to erect and equip institutions for advanced instruction and scientific research without a firm conviction of their industrial value. The demand, too, for such higher teaching seems to increase as the facilities for providing it are This now famous phrase is usually gotten to read Sedan instead of Sadowa. 2 Questions Contemporaines, 3d ed., preface, p. vii. Report on a visit to Germany with a view to ascertaining the recent progress of technical education in that country, being a letter to His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, K. G., Lord President of the Council, by Sir Philip Magnus, Mr. Redgrave, Mr. Swire Smith, and Mr. Woodall. (These gentlemen were on a commission that reported about thirteen years ago. See report of this Bureau for 1882-83, pp. 268, et seq.) enlarged. For whereas in 1884 we stated that the total attendance at the poly technicums was little more than 2,000, the attendance of students at Charlotten burg alone, irrespective of the Berlin University, is now 3,000, while the number o students in the physical and electro-technical laboratories at Darmstadt is already in excess of the accommodation. Indeed, it is worthy of remark that the sam object which called into existence some forty or fifty years ago the technical uni versities has recently led to their extension and development in a new direction As far back as that period Germany began to prepare herself for becoming a man ufacturing people. It was her belief in the future application of chemistry to industrial purposes that led to the erection and equipment at a great cost of chem ical laboratories and to the encouragement held out to students to pursue their studies in those laboratories for a period of five, six, or even seven years. The success that has attended the efforts of the Germans to appropriate many impor tant branches of chemical manufacturing industry is well known, and the depend ence of those industries on the researches of chemical experts employed in the works is generally recognized. At the Badische Analin-und Soda Fabrik alone are now employed 100 scientifically trained chemists and 30 engineers. Her bril liant achievements in the field of chemical industries have encouraged her to establish well-equipped electrical laboratories and to develop the practical teach ing of physics with the view of assisting the electrical trades, which are compara tively of recent growth. Nevertheless there is a precaution to be taken in all experimentation, not only in the fields of intellect and gentility, but in that of industrial education. This is to be patient in awaiting returns, especially if inferior methods be used. Professor Atwater, while chief of the Experiment Station Office of the Federal Agricultural Department, has spoken on this subject to this effect: Whoever has had experience in field experiments and has taken the pains to look through the mass of reports of such work that has accumulated during the past fifty years in Europe, as well as in this country, must be impressed with the smallness of the visible result in proportion to the expenditure of labor, thought, and money. The great difficulty is that the conditions, particularly of soil and weather [and he might have added social conditions], are entirely beyond not only the experimenter's control, but also his means for measuring them; and what is still worse, inequalities of soil which are hidden from his observation are often responsible for a large part of the differences in yield, so that the results give entirely wrong answers to the questions he is studying. While the importance of duplication of trials and of continuing them through a series of years can not be too strongly insisted upon, it is also very desirable that investigations should be made with special reference to the improvement of the methods of experimenting. The acts of 1862, 1889, and 1890 have been frequently referred to in the foregoing, and it is useful, perhaps, to summarize their provisions as the most important efforts made by the people of the United States to foster higher scientific education. Federal laws regarding institutions created by the act of 1862 and modified or enlarged by those of 1887 and 1890. SYNOPSIS OF THE LAW OF JULY 2, 1862. To establish colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts. 1. The grant. 2. The object of the grant. Ten per cent or less of the entire gross proceeds of The interest of the entire remaining gross proceeds An annual report shall be made regarding the prog- There shall be appropriated annually, until the pro- 2. The object of the subsidy. There may be expended out of the first annual ap- There shall be established under the direction of the SYNOPSIS OF THE LAW OF AUGUST 30, 1890. 1. The annual subsidy. There shall be annually appropriated until the pro- 2. The object of the subsidy. The amounts annually received by each designated An annual report shall be made by the president of Federal laws regarding institutions created by the act of 1862 and modified or enlarged by those of 1887 and 1890-Continued. SYNOPSIS OF THE LAW OF JULY 2, 1862-Con tinued. 3. The conditions attached to the grant. act. SYNOPSIS OF THE LAW OF MARCH 2, 1887Continued. 3. Conditions attached to the subsidy. The legislature of each State must formally accept Each station shall annually, on or before February Bulletins shall be published by each station at least 4. Federal jurisdiction. The Secretary of Agriculture shall furnish forms. Whenever there is unexpended a portion of an SYNOPSIS OF THE LAW OF AUGUST 30, 1890-- 3. The conditions attached to the subsidy. 4. Federal jurisdiction. The Secretary of the Interior is charged with the proper administration of this law, and the treasurer of each college shall report to him (and the Secretary of Agriculture), on or before the 1st day of September of each year, a detailed statement of the amount received in virtue of this law and its disbursement, and if any State misapplies or loses any portion of the appropriation and does not replace the same the Secretary of the Interior shall withhold all subsequent appropriations, and notify the President of the United States of his reasons therefor; but the State may appeal to Congress, and if Congress uphold the Secretary, the amount withheld shall be covered into the Treasury. STATE AID TO HIGHER EDUCATION. The first and all-important active power of Congress is the obligation "to lay and collect taxes and duties." It is well known that nothing of this kind has been done by that body for higher educational institutions. The millions spoken of above have arisen not from taxation, but from the sale of lands. The extraordinary slowness with which new ideas, if left to themselves, are disseminated, so that practically the large mass of people, as Burke says, are fifty years behind the times,' has caused the Federal Government to provide agencies for the investigation and careful compilation of new conceptions concerning public health-intellectual, moral, and physical-and national interests, but no institution for the classroom instruction of young persons has been established by the Federal Government, except for the education of the officers of the Army and Navy, the emancipated slaves, and for the wild Indians. The Federal Government has given lands; it is left to the States to tax the property of its citizens for higher education, with which the Federal Government has had nothing to do except so far as the acts of 1890 and 1887 are concerned, and the limitations imposed by the acts of 1787 and 1862 as to the use of the funds granted during those years. Let us see how the States have availed themselves of this privilege of taxing themselves for higher education. In making this study it is convenient to single out the State of Massachusetts for her early action; the State of New York for her administratively comprehensive action; the State of Virginia for her treatment of the university as the universitas scientiarum of the schoolmen, or the "Einheit der Lehre" of the Germans, and the State of Michigan as effecting a sort of hybrid of these three, at first, in 1817, with marked preference for the Virginia idea, then of the New York idea of a university distributed all over the State, and finally of the Massachusetts college idea combined with the Virginia idea again, as in the first place, when the paper institution on the Jeffersonian plan, called University Michigania, or Catholepistemiad, was characterized by the French Revolutionary craze for bastard verbal compounds from the classic languages. In Massachusetts, says Prof. C. K. Adams, we find the legislature, before the seventeenth century had half run its course, doing six different acts in connection with higher education-to wit, by making a grant for a college (Harvard), by laying an annual tax to support it, by fixing its location, by superintending the erection of its buildings, by appointing a curator paid by the State, by removing an incumbent and appointing his successor. In other words, in order to found a college, Massachusetts, though having fewer than 4,000 inhabitants, gave £400 in cash, the annual earnings of the Boston-Charlestown ferry, and to a man who had promised that he, as president, would devote his life to building up the college 500 acres of land, and when he failed turned him out forthwith. This was in 1636-1640. The ministers of George III, one hundred and It is very rare indeed for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as raro to be right in their speculation upon th cause of it. I have constantly observed that the generality of people are fifty years at least behind in their politics. There are very few who are capable of comparing and digesting what passes before their eyes at different times and occasions so as to form the whole into a distinct system. But in books everything is settled for them without the exertion of any considerable diligence or sagacity. For which reason men are wise with but little reflection and good with little self-denial in the business of all times except their own. (Present Discontents.) 2 Catholepistemiad-the place where knowledge or all the sciences are taught. A professorship was called a "didaxia." Absurdities of this kind are common to revolutions. The French Revolution turned 1793-94 into "the year 1;" so did the revolting Sicilians in their age; so did Rienzi. The later scholastics changed their names-Schwartzerde became Melancthon black earth, etc. Mr. Jefferson wanted the States on the Northwest to be called Michigania, Polypotamia, etc. |