Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 46]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

20

History University of Illinois

forth as they desire to make professional men for public use. As a general fact, their own multitudes do, and wUl 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 LITERATUBE, 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." Turner emphasized the fact that it was important to begin with the higher institutions and pointed out that the failure of many schools in the east and elsewhere was due to the fact that they had not recognized this fundamental truth. "No people ever had, or even can have, any system of common schools and lower seminaries worth anything, until they first founded their higher institutions and fountains of knowledge from which they could draw supplies of teachers, etc., for the lower. We would begin, therefore, where all experience and common sense show that we must begin, if we would effect anything worthy of an effort. " I n this view of the case, the first thing wanted in this process, is a NATIONAL INSTITUTE of SCIENCE, to operate as the great central luminary of the national mind, from which all minor institutions should derive light and heat, and toward which they should, also, reflect back their own. This primary want is already, I trust, supplied by the Smithsonian Institute, endowed by James Smithson, and incorporated by the U. S. Congress, at Washington, D. C. 1 ' To co-operate with this noble Institute, and enable the Industrial classes to realize its benefits in practical life, we need a University for the Industrial Classes in each of the States, with their consequent subordinate institutes, lyceums, and high schools, in each of the counties and towns."