rnio nCDT



1862-1887.
Massachusetts Agricultural College.












AGRICULTURAL
LIBRARY,

UNIVERSITY

~~ OF

CALIFORNIA.



COMMEMORATIVE



ADDRESSES.



MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE.



ADDRESSES



DELIVERED AT THE MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE,
JUNE 21st, 1887, ON THE 25th ANNF
PASSAGE OF THE MORRILL

ACT.




AMHERST, MASS.:
J. E. WILLIAMS, BOOK AND JOB PRINTER.

1887.



Main Lib.
Agric. Ij ei ,



:-*: %.






MEMORIAL ADDRESS



CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS, LL. D.,
President of Cornell University.



THE MORRILL LAND GRANT.

It was a remarkable evidence of the confidence and the composure
of our federal legislature that in 1862, just twenty-five years ago,
they were able to give their thoughts to the framing of that far-
reaching act, in commemoration of which we are to-day assembled.
It was at one of the most anxious, if not one of the darkest periods
of our terrible war. The first great organized advance of the feder-
al forces was just coming to a disastrous end. The Peninsula Cam-
paign in which were centered all the nation's hopes had taken time
for the most complete preparation in order that no repulse might be
possible. Fair Oaks, Gaines Mill, Mechauicsville, Cold Harbor,
Malvern Hill, names that even now send a shudder into thousands
of American homes, had followed in rapid succession, and our baf-
fled army took up its retreat on the second of July, the very day on
which, by the signature of the President, the act in which we have
now so much interest, became a law. Little did the people think
that at the very moment they were watching, with bated breath and
tearful eyes for every new sign of success or repulse, there was go-
ing forward to completion in the halls of legislation at the National
Capitol, a great act of statesmanship which in after years would
bring the people together, as we are assembled here to-day.

And yet a great act of statesmanship it was. In the few moments
I shall detain you it will be my effort to show that its spirit was con-
ceived in accordance with the best traditions of our country, that its



272142



provisions were in harmonious accord with the general spirit of the
time, and that it was fraught with the means of incalculable advan-
tage to the nation. To these three considerations, then, I briefly in-
vite your attention.

Within the last twenty-five years the policy of rendering national
and state aid to educational institutions has sometimes been gravely
questioned. It has been asserted that the work of education, in any
other than a purely elementary sense, should be left to the care of
private benevolence. This, however, was not the doctrine of the
fathers. As was so eloquently shown fifty years ago, when the ora-
tor selected to represent Harvard, and Amherst, and Williams plead-
ed the cause of the colleges before the Legislature of Massachu-
setts, it was the states acting in their organized capacity, that pro-
vided for the means of higher education as well as for the common
schools.

Look at the facts of that early history. Years before the famous
common school law was passed, provision had been made for the
founding of a college, by means of a tax levied upon the whole peo-
ple of the Colony. As Mr. Everett said, scarcely had the feet of
the Pilgrims taken hold of Plymouth Rock, when a year's rate of the
Colon} 7 was levied in order that the higher learning might have a
home in the New World. Nor was the child of this parentage left
to any such precarious support as might be afforded by private be-
nevolence. The Court Records of Massachusetts in the colonial
period are sprinkled over with evidences of the most solicitous care.
It was in the days of poverty. The subsistence of the president
and the professors or tutors, as they were then called, was immedi-
ately dependent on the bounty of the commonwealth. Appropria-
tions for buildings and for lands were from time to time made. The
income of the ferry between Boston and Cambridge was appropriated
by the General Court to the use of the college. The legislature se-
lected the controlling board. In short, Harvard College was an in-
stitution of the government, founded by.it, supported by it and con-
trolled by it. Before the days of independence arrived, more than
a hundred different statutes had been spread upon the legislative
record for the purpose of guiding and assisting this child of the in-
fant state. Even in the constitution of 1780 it was declared forever
to be the duty of the legislature to encourage higher learning and
especially the University at Cambridge. And it was not until the
sons of the college had multiplied and grown rich, that the legisla-



ture said to them as late as 1865 : you can now care for your benig-
nant mother better than I can, therefore I pension her off and en-
trust her fortunes to your generous keeping.

The policy of Massachusetts was the policy of Connecticut.
Long before Elihu Yale gave the final impulse for the founding of
the college which was to bear his name, the General Court had care-
fully considered the establishment of such an institution. The sub-
ject was postponed from time to time, not because there was any
question as to the propriety of founding such an institution ; but be-
cause the population was as } 7 et too sparse and too poor to furnish the
pupils for two colleges in New England. And so it was not till more
than sixty years had passed after the founding of Harvard that the
second New England College was established. But after its estab-
lishment its history was much like that of its elder sister. During
the whole of the last century, as the first President Dwight has said
in his History, it was to the bounty of the Legislature of Connecticut
that the support of Yale College was chiefly due. Again and again
all other resources failed. It was the legislature that erected old
Connecticut Hall and gave to it the name of its benefactor.

Then look at the history of Dartmouth. The college began as a
work of charity. Gradually it grew into something more than a
secondary school. But during the years of its early growth, it never
hesitated to call for aid upon the Legislature of New Hampshire ;
and its call was seldom heard in vain. It educated many of the sous
of Vermont, and in due time it called upon the Green Mountain
State for its share of assistance. A cheerful recognition of the ob-
ligation was the result. The land of a township was given to the
college, and a record of the fact was stamped into the history and
upon the map of the state by giving to the town the name of the
college president.

What was true of the method that prevailed in New England was
also true of the South. William and Mary, the second college estab-
lished in the Colonies, took its name from the. royal benefactors who
made the first large contribution for its support out of the public
treasury. The Colony was also taxed in behalf of the institution.
A part of the value of every pound of tobacco raised in Virginia had
to go into the treasury for the benefit of the college. This contin-
ued throughout colonial days. And when Jefferson conceived the
plan of the University of Virginia, in some respects the grandest ed-



6

ucational project ever devised in America, though he was inclined to
intrust less authority to the government than any other of our fore-
fathers, he endeavored to make the institution as much a part of the
educational system of the state as were the common schools them-
selves.

This method of supporting the colleges, moreover, was not only
universal, it was also effectual in that it planted and nourished into
maturity colleges of a high order of merit even in the infant days of
our national life. Not only were admirable scholars made, but they
were made in large numbers. The standards of those days, it is
true, were somewhat different from the standards of our days ; but
one who looks at what was done, while recognizing great differences,
will hesitate long before he pronounces them inferior. A recent and
eminent superintendent of education in your own state not long
since pronounced the opinion that the standards of higher education
in colonial days were not simply relatively, but actually higher than
the standards of the second half of the nineteenth century. I am
not here to corroborate this statement or even to express an opinion
on that point. But we may regard it as certain that the schools that
could train the men of revolutionary days were efficient and were
among the most valuable institutions of colonial time.

And when we pass on from colonial days to the days of the re-
public, we find that the propriety and the justice of these methods
were universally recognized. That first great ordinance which still
sheds its benign influence over the Northwest, provided that
"Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
And from the day of that benignant provision to the present time,
no territory has been organized and no state has been admitted to the
Union without provision that a part of its domain shall be set apart
for higher learning as well as a part for the common schools.

Thus it is that I hold the Land Grant of 1862 to have been in
strict accordance with the best traditions of our educational history.

The second part of my thesis is that the Morrill Land Grant was
in strict accordance with the spirit of the present time.

We, doubtless, sometimes talk flippantly and unwisely of what we
call the spirit of the age. And yet the age in which we live has cer-
tain peculiarities which we can hardly go astray in trying to char-
acterize. They are so distinctly marked, indeed they are so generally
acknowledged and understood that even to speak of them, subjects
one to the charge of dealing with the common-place. But the relation



of these characteristics to matters of education is so important that
I shall venture briefly to speak of them.

During the middle ages the work of the schools was limited to
the education of those who were to go into the learned professions.
It is even a matter of some doubt whether the great Charles, the
organizer of schools in France and Germany could himself write or
read. It is certain that one of the greatest of French military lead-
ers, as late as the time when the Renaissance was beginning to dawn,
was absolutely illiterate.

Nor was this condition of affairs a singular one, or one that should
excite our surprise. Before the introduction of the Baconian philos-
ophy, the methods of looking at the problems of life were the reverse
of the methods that have now come to prevail. Aristotle said, " Look
into your own minds, study the nature of thought, look into the nature
of things, and thus you will be able to reason out the course of con-
duct you ought to pursue." The Aristotelian philosophy prevailed
until the seventeenth century. At length came Bacon and Descartes.
Their methods were the opposite. They said, study things not so
much in their nature, which you cannot know anything about by a
process of reasoning as in their characteristics and relations. You
are to reason from their external appearance and characteristics which
everybody can investigate and in some sense at least understand into
their internal natures. Thus it was that the Baconian or inductive
philosophy had for its aim the setting of all thinking beings to the
examining of the things everywhere about them. It taught not only
that the domain of thought, but also that the domain of action, was
open to the scrutiny of human intelligence. It exhorted everybody
to pry into whatever there was within the range of observation.
Examine the methods of nature, in order to discover the laws of
nature. Examine the habits of animals in order to become acquainted
with the laws of their development. Study the rocks, the trees, the
plants, the flowers, in fact, study all the domain of nature, in order
to discover the secrets of nature. The exhortation was followed in
the course of the last century by the birth of what are called the Nat-
ural Sciences.

It is not singular that this method immediately began to insist on
the examination of institutions as well as the things of nature. Here-
tofore, the rights of the church, the rights of the king, the rights of
all governing powers, rested, not on any evidence that such forms
and methods by actual experience had been shown to conduce to the



largest happiness of man, but rather on some preconceived right that
was founded on authority either human or divine. But now came a
change. The Baconian philosophy taught that men might examine
the conduct of government ; and they drew the logical inference that
if they might examine, they might act on the results of examination.
This they did not hesitate to do. It is an interesting fact that the
immortal work of Bacon which embodied and put into permanent
scientific form the results of his studies and the substance of his phi-
losophy was published in 1620, the very year of the Pilgrims at Ply-
mouth, just twenty -two years before the vigorous outbreak of the
English Revolution.

Now what was the educational significance of this movement?
Why, simply this. It opened the whole realm of nature as the legit-
imate field of investigation and study. Before this time the work of
the schools and universities had been confined to developing the minds
of the pupil and the teaching of the four learned professions theol-
ogy, medicine, law, and pedagogy. Universities had been established
in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in all
parts of Europe, but in no one of them were studies carried on in
accordance with the modern investigating spirit. This is not strange,
for the sciences had not yet been born. They could not come into
existence till the investigating or inductive methods of study had
come to prevail, and these methods it was that the Baconian philoso-
phy ushered in.

A change of this nature was necessarily slow in making itself
observed. But there was here and there a man who caught the new
spirit and preached the new doctrine. The most enlightened man of
the next generation was Milton. He had in the vast stores of his
mind all the wealth of ancient learning. But he saw the full signifi-
cance of the new philosophy and so every page of his tractate on
Education is redolent with the modern spirit. Here are some of his
words, "I call therefore a complete and generous education, that
which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all
the offices, both private and public of peace and war." This com-
prehensive definition might not inaptly be emblazoned as a motto
upon the walls of every one of the institutions founded by the Mor-
rill Grant of 1862.

But the doctrine of Milton was slow in permeating educated soci-
ety. Institutions of learning are proverbially conservative. The
universities resisted all change until the necessity of change made



9

itself everywhere apparent. A century passed on during which the
ideas of Bacon and Milton were gradually infiltratrating themselves
into the minds of the people. Then came the great book of Adam
Smith on the Wealth of Nations, a book which is entitled to this
distinction that by combining the Aristotelian with the Baconian
methods it sought to establish a science of wealth on a philosophical
basis. The premises and the reasoning on which conclusions were
founded were not in my judgment without great errors ; but the book
had its bearings on education scarcely less important than its bearings
on political economy and finance. Its teachings were essentially this :
the best thing government can do with men, as a rule, is simply to
protect them against abuses from their fellows, and then let them
alone. This doctrine, however faulty, and civilization is now teach-
ing that it is full of faults, carried with it this logical conclusion.
If it be true, that men will most successfully work out their own for-
tune and destiny, when not interfered with by government, it follows
that they must acquire the general intelligence suitable for self guid-
ance, and, consequently, that far more generous provisions for edu-
cation must be made than had ever before been provided for.

These doctrines of Adam Smith, moreover, were in complete har-
mony with what are commonly called the revolutionary doctrines of
the latter part of the last century. Jefferson, as well as Adam Smith,
preached the doctrine of letting men and things alone. And it was
precisely because kings and parliaments and nobles and hereditary
lords would not let men and things alone, that the revolution came
on in America, and, a little later, in France.

There is another phase of the course of events that is worthy of
note. While the revolutionary ideas in regard to the proper attitude
of government toward the people were taking root there was another
revolution going on which had even greater significance. The Bacon-
ian doctrine of investigation was beginning to bear fruit. As a con-
sequence the modern sciences had come into being. In all parts of
the world every bright boy was looking into things. P^very intelligent
man was thinking of the ways by which his means of subsistence
could be improved. You know the result was the most remarkable
succession of inventions that history has ever known anything about.
The power loom, the spinning jenny, the application of steam to the
driving of machinery, the cotton gin, the invention of the locomotive
engine, the building of roads and canals, not only changed the meth-
ods of existence from top to bottom, but also made everybody the
2



10

near neighbor of everybody else. Contemplate one or two simple
facts. At the middle of the last century it was still the regular
method of conveying freight in England between London and the
interior to put it into crooks thrown across the backs of mules, and
send it along the narrow pathways that crossed the country. But
what a miracle was soon wrought. When Emerson visited England
about the middle of the present century he recorded in his " Notes "
that the working power of steam in Great Britain alone, was equal
to the strength of six hundred millions of men : and that thirty-six
thousand ships were employed in carrying British products lo distant
parts of the world. What a mighty revolution was that?

It is interesting to note that these two revolutions, the political
and philosophical on the one hand, and the social and economic' on
the other, were strictly contemporaneous. As we said that the date
of the Novum Organum was the date of the Pilgrims ; so we may
note that the date of the "Wealth of Nations" and of the patents
of Watt and Bolton were all within the years of our revolutionary
war.

Now it is a curious fact, that although it was in England that
these two revolutions had their origin, it was also in England that
the educational results of these revolutions were slowest and latest
in making themselves felt. The reason, however, is not far to seek.
England was the first to take advantage of the new inventions.
Factories had sprung into existence on every hill side and on every
stream, and British goods had taken possession of every market in
the world. The statesmen in France and Germany saw that nothing
but a systematic establishment of technical schools would regain for
the nations of the continent the industrial importance which they
had lost. And so industrial and technical schools were rapidly es-
tablished. The Ecole Poly technique came into existence in 1795.
A school of similar purpose was established at Chalons in 1802 ; an-
other at Angers in 1811, and another at Aix in 1843. The still more
famous Ecole Centrale at Paris came into existence in 1829 with its
array of schools for the education of mechanical engineers, civil en-
gineers, chemists and architects. Besides these there were estab-
lished a vast number of trade schools of every kind, with shops for
the teaching of methods of working in wood and iron and brass and
other metals. In Paris alone there are more than a hundred such
schools open alike to natives and to foreigners.

In Germany the activity in this direction has been even more



11

marked. Austria has seven great technical schools and Prussia has
nine. The new home of the Polytechnic at Berlin, perhaps the fin-
est educational building in the world, has, it is said, accommodations
for no less than four thousand students.

Moreover, besides these great centres of the higher grades of tech-
nical education, there is a vast number of schools of a more elemen-
tary grade. These are grouped about every industrial nucleus in the
country. In Hamburg alone nearly a hundred teachers are employed
to give instruction in technical and industrial subjects to the thou-
sands of pupils that* throng the rooms. At the little mountain city
of Chemnitz 'in Saxony there are five higher technical and trade
schools, and so successful have these schools been within the past
few years in producing skilled labor, that from the single county of
Nottingham, in England, it is said that more than half a score of
great manufacturing firms have transferred their machinery to Sax-
ony in order to avail themselves of the superior workmanship that is
there offered. And it is in this way that Germany, by means of
her technical schools, is taking from England her industrial suprem-
acy.

At last England has come to see her danger. At Manchester, at
Sheffield, at Birmingham, and in London technical schools of some
merit have recently been established. At last the scholastic tran-
quility of Cambridge even has been disturbed by the noise of the
saws and the lathes and the planing machines of a technical school ;
and even old Eton, that has rested for centuries in its quiet beauty
under the shadows of Windsor Castle, and for centuries has been
the favorite school of the scions of nobility, has been obliged to yield
to the universal demand. By establishing a technical annex she, how-
ever unwillingly, has paid tribute to the inevitable.

But this is only one phase of the general .movement. The other,
that which pertains to agriculture, is equally striking and equally im-
portant.

Agricultural schools were established in Germany early in the pres-
ent century. But it was not till after Liebig in 1844 published his
famous work on "Chemistry as applied to Agriculture" that any real
impulse was given to agricultural schools. But Liebig proved be-
yond the possibility of doubt two things. The one was that however
great the draft upon the soil, the fertility may be fully maintained
and even increased by restoring to the soil the mineral and the organ-
ic matter taken from it at the harvest. The second truth, and. one



12

even more important than the other, was that the proportions and
quantities of the ingredients taken up by the crop are so variable and
so different under differing circumstances that nothing less than a
careful and scientific study of soils 'will enable one to restore those
ingredients in the most efficient and economical proportions. It was
accordingly held that for the encouragement of such studies, schools
of .agriculture must be multiplied.

And from that day to this the number as well as the efficiency of
the schools has steadily increased. Prussia alone has four higher
agricultural colleges with some eighty professorships ; she has more
than forty lesser schools, all having model farms ; she has five spe-
cia.l schools for the cultivation of meadows and the scientific study of
methods of irrigation ; she has one special school for the teaching of
those who desire to reclaim swamp lands ; she has two special schools
for teaching the growing of fruit trees in industrial nurseries ; she has
a school for teaching horse-shoeing ; one for teaching silk raising ; one
for the raising of bees ; and one for teaching the cultivating of fish.
Besides all these she. has twenty special schools for the education of
gardeners ; and fifteen schools for the training of those who are to
cultivate the grape.

The example of Prussia has been imitated by the other German
states. The little Kingdom of Bavaria, scarcely larger than Massa-
chusetts, has twenty-six agricultural colleges, besides more than two
hundred agricultural associations. Wurtemberg, still smaller in
area, has sixteen colleges, and seventy-six associations. Baden,
with a population of only a million, has fourteen agricultural col-
leges besides four schools of gardening and forestry. Saxony, with
its dense population of two millions compacted into a space hardly