Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 262]

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History University of Illinois

causes combined. When any number of men at their own free will and accord commence any enterprise in the State however needful and good, independent of all legislative control, and primarily designed to promote their own peculiar personal, or educational, or religious views and ends, it is self-evident that whether such an enterprise may result well or ill to the public, it can lay no shadow of a joint claim, either legally or morally, on the treasury of the State, No State can possibly undertake to discharge any such debts. It does indeed sound very strange for learned and sensible men to come forward and urge such claims upon our legislators, on the express ground that the people and the common schools of the State are hostile to them. My general experience and observation has been, that, legislators are not very apt to jump aboard of a ship, simply because they are told that it is sinking. However, these are revolutionary times, and we do not know what strange leaps men may take. "The reason of the hostility of the common schools towards colleges so far as it exists, is equally apparent. These gentlemen still affect to lay legitimate claim to the old i College or University ? fund of the State, which was some years ago in part given to the interest of the common schools to endow the State Normal University. They say in their report: 'The friends of colleges in this State have stood silent, though neither dead nor sleeping, and have seen the income of this College Fund devoted to the common schools of the State, in the Normal University.I Now, Messrs. Editors, many of our citizens well recollect that while this old college fund was being disposed of, at all our called conventions, at all our meetings with the legislature, wherever we met, we were sure also to meet the attorneys and representatives of some of these same old colleges, and sometimes the Presidents and Professors of the colleges themselves, most vehemently urging their claims to these same funds, and on precisely the same grounds they now take. I was never in Springfield in my life when any portion of these funds was in issue, but what I met more or less of them, as our most vehement and bitter opponents; and if they had had their way the common schools would have had no State school for teachers, and the State would have had no Normal University to this day: and, long before this, the funds