UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882 [PAGE 65]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882
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59 that track crosses. It may and should include the designing and construction of the stations that make its termini; or of any other edifices that men need to use in business, or want to love as homes, or to admire as monuments of public munificence. The science of the chemist that may develop the art of the dyer, or the skill of the assayer and the metallurgist, or of the refiner of sugar, or of use in the thousand forms of usefulness to which chemistry reaches forth its helping hand; the science of the electrician that builds our telegraphs, or will illuminate our cities and brighten our homes; the art of the designer that lends beauty to the products of the loom, that shapes the clay of the potter into things of perrennial joy, that sheds its halo of delight over all things precious or commonplace, adding untold wealth to the crude products of rude mechanical toil—these, and a myriad more, in ways that science alone has opened and will open as the avenues to a livelihood or to a competency, are the lines of work that legitimately have place in the instruction of institutions of learning which the State has founded for the education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life. Nay, more: unless the institutions in question do provide in some manner and to some extent for instruction that shall bear fruit in some of these ways, as well as in agriculture, they are delinquent in their duty towards the law which created them and towards the needs of the public for whose benefit they were and are founded, for it needs no argument before this body to show that the g/eater the number, and the more diversified the nature, of the industries which occupy the labor and skill of a people, the greater will be the prosperity oi that people. It is no more fitting that all men shall be farmers, than that every farmer should raise only corn, or cotton, or hogs. When all farmers have learned how to make two blades of grass grow where but one grew before, there will not be occupation for as many grass-growing farmers as were required before that consummation had been reached. It is true that these colleges, save as teaching may be divided as before indicated, are bound to teach agriculture. It is equally true that they are required to teach a wide curriculum of science and art beside agriculture. But it is said that they do not teach agriculture, and that they draw the sons of farmers away from agriculture, and teach them to despise labor. Most statements of this sort are based upon observation limited to individual cases, and so far as I am able to observe, lack breadth of information. From the earliest days of the republic, farmers' sons have turned their backs upon the farm to enter upon pursuits which required less manual toil. That the farm has furnished largely the fresh blood that has enriched the learned professions with strong and noble exemplars, has been the boast alike of the farmers and of the professions. From the farms went the Washingtons and Jeffersons, the Clays and Websters, the Lincolns and Garfields, whose renown has been the aureole about the brow of our nation of free laborers. Never have I heard that even the farmers have mourned because such men exchanged the labor of their hands for the severer and more exhaustful labor of their brains. But even these men have never lost their affection for the soil whence they sprung; when wearied with the conflicts of the arena, whether victors or vanquished, they