Do you say that this endowment may be too large? Compare the endowment for the increase of intellectual wealth with any one of a thousand endowments for the increase of material wealth. Look at the hotels of your great cities. Some of them have cost more than the entire outlay in buildings for advanced instruction throughout whole States.
But it may be said, "Why not devote all your resources to agricultural experiments and instruction?" I answer—1. The law of the United States does not allow it. 2. Because in the interest of agriculture itself we should educate men to develop other industries. What is the great want of our Western States at this moment? Greater agricultural production? No. What they want is, the development of great and varied manufacturing industries, so near them that it shall no longer take two-thirds of a bushel of corn to carry the other third from producer to consumer.
And, finally, it is objected to the "new education" that it is godless. There is nothing new in this charge. It has been made against every great step in the progress of science or education. And yet it has certainly been found that although ideas of religion are changed from age to age, the change has tended constantly to make these religious ideas purer and nobler. The majority of the Fathers of the Church held the new idea of the rotundity of the earth incompatible with salvation. Martin Luther thought Copernicus a blasphemer for his new idea that the earth revolves about the sun, and not the sun about the earth. Dean Cockburn declared the new science of Geology a study invented by the devil, and unlawful for Christians. When John Reuchlin and his compeers urged the substitution of studies in the classics for studies in the mediæval scholastic philosophy, their books were burned, and they themselves narrowly escaped the same fate.
No, my friends; every study which tends to improve the industry of mankind makes a man nobler and better. Every study which gives man to know more of the history of his race, gives him to see more and more clearly the finger of Providence in history; every study which brings his mind into contact with the thoughts of inspired men as exhibited in our literatures, builds up his manliness and his godliness, and every study which brings him into close contact with Nature in any of its fields not less surely lifts him "through Nature up to Nature's God."
I have thus sketched very meagrely the growth thus far of the "new education." Its roots are firm, for they take fast hold upon the strongest material necessities of our land; its trunk is thrifty, for it is fed by the most vitalizing currents of thought which sweep through our time; nay, the very blasts of opposition to this growth have but strengthened it; the winter of discontent through which it has passed has but toughened it; and in agriculture and every branch
