Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 433]

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392

Hutory University of Illinois

for this purpose, an wo elect our rulers, from our own ranks, to aid and serve, not to domineer over and control us. And this done, we will not only beat England, and beat the world in yachts, and locks, and reapers, but in all else that contributes to the well being and true glory of man. I maintain that, if every farmer's and mechanic's son in this state could now visit such an institution but for a single day in the year, it would do him more good in arousing and directing the dormant energies of mind, than all the cost incurred, and far more good than many a six months of professed study of things he will never need and never want to know. As things now are, our best farmers and mechanics, by their own native force of mind, by the slow process of individual experience, come to know, at forty, what they might have been taught in six months at twenty; while a still greater number of the less fortunate or less gifted, stumble on through life, almost as ignorant of every true principle of their art as when they begun. A man of real skill is amazed at the slovenly ignorance and waste he everywhere discovers, on all parts of their premises; and still more to hear them boast of their ignorance of all "book farming," and maintain that "their children can do as well as they have done;" and it certainly would be a great pity if they could not The patrons of our University would be found in the former, not in the latter class. The man whose highest conception of earthly bliss is a log hut, in an uninclosed yard, where pigs of two species are allowed equal rights, unless the four-legged tribe chance to get the upper hand, will be found no patron of Industrial Universities. Why should he be? He knows it all already. There is another class of untaught farmers who devote all their capital and hired labor to the culture, on a large scale, of some single product, which always pays well when so produced on a fresh soil, even in the most unskillful hands. Now such men often increase rapidly in wealth, but it is not by their skill in agriculture, for they have none; their skill consists in the management of capital and labor, and, deprive them of these, and confine them to the varied culture of a small farm, and they would starve in five years, where a true farmer would amass a