Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 443]

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History University of Illinois

all so as to fit them for the great practical uses of the industrial classes of the State, we trust your honorable bodies will see at once to be still more impracticable and absurd, if not radically unequal and unjust in a free State like ours. III. Your memorialists therefore desire not the dispersion by any mode, either direct or indirect, of these funds; but their continued preservation and concentration for the equal use of all classes of our citizens, and especially to meet the pressing necessities of the great industrial classes and interests of the State, in accordance with the principles suggested in the message of his Excellency the Governor of the State, to your honorable bodies; and also in the recent message of Governor Hunt of New York, to the legislature of that State, and sanctioned by the approval of many of the wisest and most patriotic statesmen in this and other States. The report of the Granville Convention of farmers, herewith submitted and alluded to, as above noticed in the message of our Chief Magistrate, may be considered as one, and as only one, of the various modes in which this desirable end may be reached, and is alluded to in this connexion as being the only published document of any convention on this subject, and as a general illustration of what your petitioners would desire, when the wisdom of the Senators and Representatives of the people shall have duly modified and perfected the general plan proposed, so as to fit it to the present resources and necessities of the State. We desire that some beginning should be made, as soon as our statesmen may deem prudent so to do, to realize the high and noble ends for the people of the State, proposed in each and all of the documents above alluded to. And if possible on a sufficiently extensive scale, to honorably justify a successful appeal to congress, in conjunction with eminent citizens and statesmen in other States, who have expressed their readiness to co-operate with us, for an appropriation of public lands for each State in the Union for the appropriate endowment of Universities for the liberal education of the Industrial Classes in their several pursuits in each State in the Union. And in this rich, and at least prospectively, powerful State, acting in co-operation with the vast energies and resources of