Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 434]

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Industrial Universities for the People

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small fortune. This class are, however, generally, the fast friends of education, though many a looker-on will cite them as instances of the uselessness of acquired skill in farming, whereas they should cite them only as a sample of the resistless power of capital even in comparatively unskillful hands. Such institutions are the only possible remedy for a caste education, legislation, and literature. If any one class provide for their own liberal education, in the state, as they should do, while another class neglect this, it is as inevitable as the law of gravitation, that they should form a ruling caste or class by themselves, and wield their power more or less for their own exclusive interests and the interests of their friends. If the industrial were the only educated class in the state, the caste power in their hands would be as much stronger than it now is, as their numbers are greater. But now industrial education has been wholly neglected, and the various industrial classes left still ignorant of matters of the greatest moment pertaining to their vital interests, while the professions have been studied till trifles and fooleries have been magnified into matters of immense importance, and tornadoes of windy words and barrels of innocent ink shed over them in vain. This, too, is the inevitable result of trying to crowd all liberal, practical education into one narrow sphere of human life. It crowds their ranks with men totally unfit by nature for professional service. Many of these, under a more congenial culture, might have become, instead of the starving scavengers of a learned profession, the honored members of an industrial one. Their love of knowledge was indeed amiable and highly commendable ; but the necessity which drove them from their natural sphere in life, in order to obtain it, is truly deplorable. But such a system of general education as we now propose, would (in ways too numerous now to mention) tend to, increase the respectability, power, numbers, and resources of the true professional class. Nor are the advantages of the mental and moral discipline of the student to be overlooked j indeed, I should have set them down as most important of all, had I not been distinctly aware that such an opinion is a most deadly heresy; and I tremble at the