Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 607]

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iddress to the Vihmns of Morgan County

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of a class who intend to devote their lives to the pursuits of agriculture, practical science, and the mechanic arts. It claims that this largest class of our young men shall have the same chancei for a special education in their destined pursuits as the lawyer or the physician have in theirs. It is a recognition of the great fact of the day, that the farmer, the engineer, and the artisan, claim, and must have, the aids of a scientific education, pursued under advantages and on a scale hitherto unknown in our educational systems* The great advanco evidently before us in the importance of the agricultural interest; the extensive application of machinery to agricultural operations; the rising value of lands in our State—all demanding that every aid that science can give shall be systematically imparted—call for some new educational institution, controlled by State authority, and devoted to this great paramount interest of our people. The proposed system is one designed to give to labor its natural rights, to impart to the laboring man a conviction that his calling is second to no other, and to banish the servile maxim t h a t ' ' he who thinks is lord of him that toils." These considerations have at length so far established themselves as to receive the endorsement of the National Legislature, and its action upon the subject is worthy the representatives of a free and progressive people. Congress has, by a late act, the material provisions of which we give below, not only recognized, the wants alluded to, but placed such an institution within reach of every State in the Union: "There shall be granted to the several States, for the purposes hereinafter mentioned, an amount of public land to be apportioned to each State a quantity equal to thirty thousand acres for each Senator and Representative in Congress to which the States are respectively entitled by the apportionment under the census of 1860. | | f # * * * # # * J | # * # All moneys derived from the sale of the lands aforesaid, by the States to which the lands are apportioned, and from the sale of land scrip hereinbefore provided for, shall be invested in stocks of the United States, of the States, or some other safe stocks yielding not less thanfivepercentum upon Hie par value of said stocks, and the moneys so invested shall constitute a perpe-