80 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



more years, and the general knowledge picked np here and there he became a 

 mechanic vrell-versed in all the principles and details of his profession. 



Our industries are an important factor in our body politic; not the control- 

 ling one, but a tremendously powerful one, and our future is to be largely 

 sha})cd by our ability to manufacture as well and as cheaply as any one else. 

 To do this we must put intelligence into our shops and theoretical instruction 

 into our schools. AVe must occupy this ground ourselves, with our own brains 

 and muscle. Two-thirds of our foremen and master mechanics are foreigners, 

 educated in the technical schools of Europe, or instructed by an apprenticeship, 

 which is not germane to our institutions. An apprenticeship is considered by 

 our young men but a remove from serfdom, and the only chance we have for 

 success is to import our skilled mechanics or educate them here. 



Hence tiiere is a place, and a large and well-defined one, for schools of tech- 

 nology; institutions where may be taught the sciences upon which our industries 

 depend. The mere shop is no place for this instruction; there is neither time 

 nor o})portunity to discuss the general principles upon which the industry is 

 based. There should be some place or institution capable of making an intel- 

 ligent meclianic; intelligent in all the principles of mechanics, in the law of 

 motion, of sound, of light, in the kinds and strength of material, of friction, in- 

 ertia, electricity, steam, chemistry, with just enough of the manual training 

 to demonstrate the principles. Such a mechanic with this knowledge can step 

 into a shop and in a short time distance the man who has no schooling in these 

 principles; he can sooner acquire the skill in his profession, and it will be of 

 more service in that his intelligence goes with it hand in hand. 



The object of our new department of mechanic arts is to supply this want. 

 Our purpose and wish is to take the young man who has an aptitude and taste 

 for mechanical industry from the shop, give him a thorough course in drawing 

 and design, thorough instruction in all those general principles which he can- 

 not obtain elsewhere, for the reasons heretofore stated, give him daily practical 

 work in the shop, and then return him to the shop, with a skill competent to 

 take his place as a journeyman, and an intelligence fitting him for foremanship;. 

 with a moral purpose not above working at the bench or the forge, and yet with 

 a Cttpab lity of handling men and aifairs. Such a man will as journeyman be 

 the first to be engaged and the last to be discharged; such a man is on the high 

 road, through the shop, to the head of his industry, a journeyman with the germ 

 and possibilities of a master mechanic. We do not seek to make men "bosses." 

 Our industrial foremen are a little shy of the " college-bred mechanic," for the 

 reason, as they say, "he is apt to have the big head." But that depends upon, 

 the college at which he is bred. We grant you that the tendency of the regula- 

 tion college whose purpose is a general and so-called liberal education is to 

 breed, to use the words of another, " a sort of contempt for manual labor and 

 the man who performs it, and to give its students very stilted notions about 

 culture and the exalted character of the work they must do because, forsooth,, 

 they are graduates." Such a man " is not calculated to blossom out into the 

 common-sense, aggressive, enterprising youug American, who is ready to do 

 anything honorable until something better offers, and who is sure to make his 

 "way in the world." Is it possible to have a college that shall educate the scholar 

 and yet save the artisan; that shall n)ake the man of culture and yet preserve 

 the farmer? We believe it is, and that the Agricultural College of Michigan is 

 such an institution. This leads us fully to consider finally the general purposes 

 of the college. The first one we will note is that it seeks to foster and encour- 

 age 



