Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 23.djvu/214

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true policy is to finish the building. Sustain the School most thoroughly with the very best teachers that can be provided and then when everything is put in the most inviting and attractive form possible make the bill of tuition so low that it will allow even poverty itself to come and enjoy the abundant advantages offered by Methodists to the youth of Oregon. It is both wise and important that the MissY. SocY. should connect with the Missionary enterprise proper in Oregon a direct control of Educational matters "in; my opinion." "To what extent" this should be carried is a question more difficult to answer. Perhaps the following thoughts will be in place. The Oregon Institute ought to be under our control in its several department of Instruction, of Finance, and Religious influence. The principal should be a married man of a family if his wife could take hold of some department in the Institute so much the better (But the mistress of a family in Oregon has her hands full without teaching) he should be not a whit behind the very chiefest in literary abilities & scholarship. A Minister of the Methodist Episcopal (Itinerant of course). This man should be able to fall back on the MissY. SocY. for support if a deficiency exists at any time; but in all probability unless the funds should temporily be appropriated to the finishing of the building, no such deficiency will occur.

If when he comes some enterprising young man of education would volunteer on his own resources to come and fill such post in Educational matters as might be vacant he might usefully labor. If you were here you would say a school ought to be started in Oregon City on private responsibility to furnish educational facilities, Else the public and some of our people too will take up with the pressing and attractive invitations of the papists to send to their schools. Every device that gowned priests and wily Jesuits and Ladies Superior and Sisters of charity can lay under contribution is Even now held out to induce protestants to send to their school. And hence I answer your question promptly "Our refusal to connect this interest with our other operations will have a tendency to throw the literary training of this rappidly increasing population into the hands of the Roman Catholics and thereby give them an influence over the public mind which will prove greatly injurious to our future success." "Our refusal to take back the Oregon Insti