Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 426]

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Industrial Universities for the People

885

all possible frankness and clearness, the outline of impressions and convictions that have been gradually deepening in my own mind, for the past twenty years, and let them pass for whatever the true friends of the cause may think them worth. And I answer, first, negatively, that this want cannot be supplied by any of the existing institutions for the professional classes, nor by any incidental appendage attached to them as a mere secondary department. These institutions were designed and adapted to meet the wants of the professional classes, as such—especially the clerical order; and they are no more suited to the real wants of the industrial class than the institution we propose for them, would be suited to the professional class. Their whole spirit and aim is, or should be, literary and intellectual—not practical and industrial; to make men of books and ready speech—not men of work, and industrial, silent thought. But the very best classical scholars are often the very worst practical reasoners; and that they should be made workers is contrary to the nature of things—the fixed laws of God. The whole interest, business, and destiny for life of the two classes, run in opposite lines; and that the same course of study should be equally well adapted to both, is as utterly impossible as that the same pursuits and habits should equally concern and befit both classes. The industrial classes know and feel this, and therefore they do not, and will not, patronize these institutions, only so far forth as they desire to make professional men for public use. As a general fact, their own multitudes do, and will forever, stand aloof from them; and, while they desire to foster and cherish them for their own appropriate uses, they know that they do not, and cannot, fill the sphere of their own urgent industrial wants. They need a similar system of liberal education for their own class, and adapted to their own pursuits; to create for them an INDUSTRIAL LITERATURE, adapted to their professional wants, to raise up for them teachers and lecturers, for subordinate institutes, and to elevate them, their pursuits, and their posterity to that relative position in human society for which God designed them.