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Illinois Plan for Land Grant Colleges

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t ion which included a university for the industrial classes in each of the stated of the American union. This plan, which was destined to play so notable a role in the fight for industrial universities, was not the result of hasty consideration. For nearly twenty years he had been turning over in his mind the educational needs of Illinois. He had given public expression to his views on education a year or more previous to the Granville convention at a Pike county teachers1 institute and probably also at a public meeting in Griggsville,5 In speaking of these earlier meetings some fifteen years later, Turner said that so far as he was aware it was the first time that such a scheme of public education was ever proposed to mankind. He himself was astonished at the reception his ideas were accorded by the teachers. He had searched patiently for these ideas in the field and in the classroom, in the workshop and in the home. To him they were truth, that was all. But among his hearers were those who accepted them joyfully, almost hysterically, like something on the order of salvation long sought and finally found; and others, particularly in the months following the Granville meeting, who rejected them frantically, vehemently "assailed, ridiculed, and denounced them as absurd, revolutionary, disorganizing, and above all utterly visionary and hopeless, even if desirable.? ,e For many years Turner had been oppressed with a sense of

There has been considerable confusion regarding the exact date of these addresses. I n 1865 Turner stated that they were delivered " a b o u t the year 1848 or 1849. M Illinois State Agricultural Society, Transactions, 5: 36. Paul Selby, a friend of Turner, in a letter to W. L. PiUsbury expresses the opinion that the date was 1850. Mrs. Carriel gives the text of an address delivered by Turner as president of the Illinois teachers institute at Griggsville, May 13, 1850. Carriel, Life of Turner, 74-94. There was a meeting of the Pike county institute in Griggsville on this day but its printed proceedings make no mention of Turner. Moreover, the Pike County Free Press does not even refer to the meeting of the teachers' institute a t that time. I t would seem that Mrs. Carriel mistook, the GranviUe for the Griggsville address, for the quotation from the speech contains an extract from the Prairie Farmer that did not appear until the issue for November, 1851. Without doubt Turner spoke before the Pike county teachers' institute at Barry later in the year. Pike County Free Press, October 24, 1850. Although the Free Press does not record the fact it is possible that he may have addressed a public meeting in Griggsville on his way home. Illinois State Agricultural Society, Transactions. 5 : 36.

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