Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 415]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

874

History University of Illinois

stock, or the navigation of the polar seas, instead of books treating of the peculiar nature and duties of his own profession, does any man suppose that these professions would exhibit the same love of reading and study, or attain the same mental discipline which they now do ? The idea is absurd. Give a divine or a lawyer a book on agriculture, and how soon it is thrown aside! And is it surprising that the farmer and mechanic treats other books on the same principle, and in the same way, for the same reason ? But how greedily they devour, in all our periodicals and pamphlets the few scraps that directly pertain to their own interests, and how soon new implements of life and power start up from their practical and creative minds out of every new idea in philosophy that dawns upon the race and claims its place in the crystal palaces, and its reward at the industrial fairs of the world? And are such minds on this great continent to be longer left, by the million, without a single university or school of any sort, adapted to the peculiar wants of their craft, while the whole energies of the republic are taxed to the utmost to furnish universities, colleges and schools adapted to the wants of the professional and military classes, who constitute not the one hundredth part of the population, and represent not the thousandth part of the vital interests of any civilized and well ordered community ? Are these pursuits, then, beneath the dignity of rational and accountable man? God, himself, made the first Adam a gardner or farmer, and kept him so till he fell from his high state. The second Adam, sent to repair the ruin of his fall, he made a poor mechanic called •I the son of a carpenter,'? who chose all his personal followers from the same humble class. Deity has pronounced his opinion on the dignity and value of these pursuits, by the repeated acts of his wisdom and grace, as well as by the inflexible laws of his providence compelling industrial labor as the only means of preserving health of body, vigor, purity of mind and even life itself. Where did Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, and Cincinnatus, the most illustrious of the Romans—Washington, the father of America, and Franklin, and Sherman, and Kossuth, and Downing, and Hugh Miller, and a whole host of worthies, too