Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 447]

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History University of Illinois MEMORIAL

OP THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL CONVENTION OP THE STATE OF ILLINOIS

To tlie Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of tine State of Illinois: We would respectfully represent: That we are members of the industrial classes of this state, actively and personally engaged in agricultural and mechanical pursuits. We are daily made to feel our own practical ignorance, and the misapplication of toil and labor, and the enormous waste of products, means, materials and resources that result from it. We are aware that all this evil to ourselves and our country, results from a want of knowledge of those principles and laws of nature that underlie our various professions, and of the proper means of a practical application of existing1 knowledge to those pursuits. We rejoice to know that our brethren in the several learned professions have to a good degree availed themselves of these advantages, and have for years enjoyed their benefit. They have universities and colleges, with apparatus, libraries voluminous and vast, able and learned professors and teachers, constantly discovering new facts, and applying all known principles and truths directly to the practical uses of their several professions and pursuits. This is as it should be. But we have neither universities, colleges, books, libraries, apparatus, or teachers, adapted or designed to concentrate and apply even all existing knowledge to our pursuits, much less have we the means of efficiently exploring and examining the vast practical unknown that daily lies all around us, spreading darkness and ruin upon our best laid plans, blighting our hopes, diminishing our resources, and working inevitable evil and loss to ourselves, to our families and to our country. Some think one half—no intelligent man thinks that less than onethird or one-fourth of the entire labor and products of our state, are made an annual sacrifice to this needless ignorance and waste. Knowledge alone, here, is power, and our relief is as clearly obvious as our wants. We need the same thorough and practical application of knowledge to our pursuits, that the learned professions enjoy in theirs, through their universities and their literature, schools and libraries that have grown out of them.