AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE • 441 



one was liberally educated unless he had entered and passed through 

 that straight and narrow way by which a chosen few had journeyed to 

 the honors of graduation; and yet when a college student had reached 

 all these honors, he was really less disciplined in useful training, and 

 less fully equipped with needed information than the present graduates 

 of our high schools. A college course at Harvard or Yale, and in all 

 institutions which, like the University of Michigan, then followed in 

 their wake, was of one stereotyped pattern transmitted from mediiieva] 

 times, much better fitted for monks and ecclesiastics than for the widen- 

 ing and exacting requirements of practical, modern life. Just about the 

 period when this College was opened, the American people began to 

 realize the need of directing educational agencies to more useful ends 

 and of enlarging the scope of college instruction. Michigan, by the intro- 

 duction of elective courses in her University, and the establishment of 

 this institution, and afterward of the Michigan School of Mines, both of 

 which are especially designed to qualify its students with technical as 

 well as general knowledge, may justly be claimed as a pioneer in a great 

 movement of educational reform which has extended to other states and 

 afforded models for the high schools and colleges of the whole land. 



ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL QUESTIONS AT THE FRONT. 



Coincident with this revolution in the system of education and in a 

 measure the result of it, has been the creation of a wider and deeper in- 

 terest in economic questions and in all those branches of practical study,, 

 which prepare the citizen for a useful career, and fit him for eflficient 

 effort in pursuits which, in promoting the industrial and economic wel- 

 fare of communities, of necessity elevate them to a higher social, political 

 and moral plane. Twenty-eight years since, the authorities of this Col- 

 lege honored me with an invitation to make the commencement address,, 

 and in an endeavor to discharge that duty, it was my aim to show that as 

 justice is the end and i^urpose of that political organization we call the 

 state; as that of a normal school is the art of school instruction; as that 

 of the university is genera;l mental training and culture; so the ultimate 

 special purpose of the Agricultural College is wealth, by which was 

 meant that its particular sphere is the cultivation of the industrial or 

 wealth-producing arts. It was my design to prove from history that Ihe 

 development of these arts is the basis of all intellectual progress, of the 

 advancement and preservation of liberty, and that it is the chief impulse 

 to the onward march of civilization. I recall, as one of the specially 

 gratifying remembrances of the occasion, that Professor Kedzie, at the 

 close, advanced and took my hand, saying: ''When you began by stating 

 the proposition that wealth and the production of wealth form the dis- 

 criminating work of this institution. I was disposed to dissent, but in 

 the light of your application, it challenges my heartiest concurrence." 



AN INDUSTRIAL AGE DEMANDS INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION. 



No forty years in the world's history so forcibly as the last forty, illus- 

 trate the remark of Mr. Lloyd Brice in the North American Review for 

 the current month that "industrial evolution is civilization;'' and to this 

 College, in providing for industrial education is to be given the credit of 

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