STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 87 



have a very bracing climate, and which is distinguished for producing 

 some of the most profound thinkers and scholars of the world, and there 

 plant our Industrial College for the practical education of the future 

 miners and farmers of California. 



To go into a populous commercial city, where the students will he 

 entirel}' removed from the fields of their future operations and all the 

 healthful influences of the country, and cop.!*tantly exposed to all the 

 enervating luxuries and contaminating vices of city life, so well and 

 surely calculated to unfit them for the energetic and successful pursuits 

 of tlicir future callings, to establish an Industrial College for the prac- 

 tical and experimental education of those who are to become the leaders 

 in developing the vast mining and agricultural resources of California — 

 seems to us a proposition so absurd that we can scarcel}' believe it to be 

 sincere, especially if it be made by persons claiming the benefits of a 

 climate so peculiarly and exclusively calculated to promote and sustain 

 vigorous intellectual effort, or practical and useful thought. 



While we would urge no location, for the particular benefit of that 

 location, and unless it be one calculated to promote the general good, we 

 do protest in the name of the industrial classes of the State, in whose 

 interests we have a right to speak, against fixing a college, to be estab- 

 lished particulaty for their benefit, in such a location as will surely defeat 

 the real objects for which it is intended. 



A failure on the part of the jigriculturists and miners, occupying the 

 broad, saluorious valleys, and the invigorating mountainous regions of 

 the State, thus to protest against such a proposition, involving, as it 

 does, a double injury and insult to them, would, in our judgment, be an 

 unanswerable argument in favor of the truth of the absurd proposition 

 which has called forth these remarks — namely, that this great and noble 

 State of ours, celebrated alike for the invii^oratino- influences of its 

 climate, and the general intelligence and practical and penetrating busi- 

 ness energy of its people, has but one place or locality in it " fitted for 

 sustained study and vigorous intellectual effort." 



But, one more remark upon the proposition in general of establishing 

 an industrial or scientific college in a city in preference to the country: 

 " God made the country; man made the cit}'." 



Are God's or man's laws proposed to be taught in the institution ? If 

 the former, then certainly tlie college should be located in the country, 

 where tiie works of God, or the Book of Nature, can bo used as the 

 most important, as it is the only absolutely correct and never failing 

 text book, to which the student, when he goes out into the countr}^ and 

 engages in the business for which he has been educated in the college, 

 will have constant occasion to refer. 



If, however, the laws, or ways and customs of the residents of cities, 

 usually adopted in deahng with the miner and the farmer in reference 

 to their respective possessions or productions, are the subjects to bo 

 taught in the college, then we confess it should be located in the city — 

 an(i the State may thus avoid the immediate outlay of any of the 

 means it has now or may hereafter have on hand for the erection of 

 buildings for such college, as the streets are a much better and more 

 efficient school to learn such things than the inside of any collegiate 

 walls can be. This fact will prove a happy circumstance to the State, 

 as she will, if she adopt this course, at no distant day need all the money 

 thus saved with which to enlarge the capacity of her State Prison — a 

 necessit}' for which Avill thus be created. 



Ui^ou this poiut Mr. C. L. Flint, late Secretary of the State Board of 



