Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 462]

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Industrial Universities for the People

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in this matter, is no less intelligent, marked and decisive, than that of their agricultural brethren, though they have fewer organs and advocates. Why should we halt in our career? What have we to fear? We and our cause, are at this moment stronger than all the legislatures, and congresses, and colleges on the continent, even if they were all pitted against us. But the great majority of them are most warmly and efficiently for us. They are our ablest and most valued advocates and friends. There may be "old fogies'' among them: so there are among us: these fossil remains of a prior formation always will exist everywhere. It is well they do; for without them we should never be able to demonstrate the floods of darkness and prejudice that have, in past ages, deluged the human mind. In this case there are no more of these old conservatives, now extant, than will be really needed by our new universities as cabinet specimens of a monkish age just gone by. They will serve as a connecting link between the mummies of the catacombs, and the whirling, buzzing, living, lightning world of our own time. Some few of these philosophic owls affect to be greatly distressed lest a war of classes and professions should be provoked in this effort, because, forsooth, we are obliged to speak distinctly and decidedly of the peculiar wants, duties and rights of the different classes of society. Now the history of the whole world shows there never was and never could be such a war of classes incited by any means whatever, in any State or community, unless there was ample and justifiable reason for it; and whenever such reasons may exist, the sooner such a war comes, the better, if the unjust causes are not at once removed. Do these alarmists, then, pretend that any such causes exist in this country, connected with the scheme of industrial and professional education ? We do not believe it: such an assumption is a slander upon the institutions of the country, as well as the men in it. So far from it, no other single subject could be named, to which the whole heart of all the freemen of this Republic, of all classes and professions, would so spontaneously and unequivocally respond. Let those who always take a | 1 vance, as though the whole continent were paved with r o t ^ ^ ^ f s , tread as carefully as they please: but let those who are tffcMfl?' vance like men, with fearless step, as if on the green, I K H B amid brave and generous freemen like themselves.