Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Ag Building [PAGE 26]

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aims and purposes from those already established in many parts of the country* The courses of study in the colleges and universities existing when this new university was organized were adapted only to fit men for the so-called learned professions, law, medicine, etc. In this new university the leading* studies were those related to agriculture and the mechanic arts. Whereas the other universities tended to withdraw their students from the pursuits of industry, this new university would aim by linking learning- more closely to labor and by bringing the light of science more fully to the aid of the productive arts, to en amor the sons and daughters of the fanner and the artisan with their pursuits. There is no law in Illinois establishing a university of the general or older sort. There never has been such a law. There is a law establishing an industrial university. If this university has any legal existence or standing, it is as an industrial university. By the intention of its founders, by its organic law, by its lawfully authorised courses of study, by the will of the people of Illinois it is an industrial university, not less, not more. In his address delivered on the occasion of the inauguration of the Illinois Industrial University that great man, Dr. Newton Bateman said: " What then is the grand distinguishing feature, purpose, hope of this university? In my view it is to form a closer alliance between labor and learning—between science and the manual arts, between man and nature* between the human soul and God, as seen and revealed through His works. " It is to endeavor so to wed the intellect and hearts of the students we educate, to the matchless attractions of rural and industrial life, that they will with their whole soul prefer and choose that life and consecrate to it the results of skill and power that may here be gained. These I hold to be the aims of this university. And we hope to attain them, not by a less expensive and thorough course of instruction than it given in other universities, but by a somewhat different course and more especially by emphasizing from the begin* ning to the end those studies and sciences which look away from the literary and professional life and toward the pursuits of the agriculturist and the

artisan."

Congress in 1862 made a liberal g-rant of land scrip to each State of the Union for the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one college in the several States accepting the benefits of the grant, whose leading object should be to teach branches of learning as related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and