PREJUDICE AGAINST INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS. £05 



PREJUDICE AGAINST INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS. 



Bv T. C. ABBOTT, LL D., President of the Michigan State Agricultural College. 



A few winters ago I met in Washington a very pleasant and 

 intelligent gentleman, who from his large wealth was about to 

 give some sixty or seventy thousand dollars for the advancement 

 of higher education. He had been for some years, and was still, 

 the president of a State Agricultural Society, and was commis- 

 sioned by the Governor, under a State law, with almost despotic 

 power over cattle suspected of a prevalent disease. These were 

 evdiences of the high esteem in which he was held. 



He was a farmer. Did he then endow some chair of agriculture, 

 or agricultural chemistry, of veterinary science, of horticulture, 

 of zoology, or entomology, in some institution ? Did he fit out an 

 experiment station, like some of those in Germany, to analyze 

 fertilizers, to study the fattening properties of different kinds of 

 food, and their digestibility, or to study any other of the perplex- 

 ing problems which his own business could have suggested to 

 him ? Did he exemplify on some farm the effects of high culture, 

 like Mechi, or of thorough drainage, or in some such way make 

 the lessons of an advanced agriculture visible to less informed 

 farmers ? Did he help along an agricultural college, or establish 

 an agricultural library ? 



None of these. He found the science that was the most ad- 

 vanced of any, the one that government supports at a great annual 

 tax upon the people, and nobody complains, — the science that 

 had last year (1874) an additional sum of $150,000 from the public 

 treasury and the command of our navy ; ignoring the struggling 

 endeavors of agriculture to become a science, this farmer gave his 

 thousands to endow another workshop of astronomy. 



Ue is no sinner above the rest of us. We are willing to be fed 

 by agriculture, and clothed by practical machinery, but if these 

 and kindred industrial arts claim any place beside the Greek and 

 Latin, mathematics and its applications, especially astronomy, 

 beside metaphysics, law, medicine, theology, literature, they are 

 frowned away because of their working-day clothes. 



