PLAN FOR INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITIES. 



The patrons of our University would be found in the former, not in the latter class 

 The man whose highest conception of earthly bliss is a log-hut, in an uninclosed yard, 

 where pigs of two species are allowed equal rights, unless the four legged tribe chance to 

 get the upper hand, will be found no patron of Industrial Universities. Why should he 

 be? He knows it all already. 



Their is another class of untaught farmers who devote all their capital and hired labor 

 to the culture, on a large scale, of some single product, which always pa3'S well when so 

 produced on a fresh soil, even in the most unskilful hands. Now, such men often increase 

 rapidly in wealth, but it is not by their skill in agriculture, for they have none; their 

 skill consists in the management of capital and labor, and, deprive them of these, and con- 

 fine them to the varied culture of a small farm, and they Avould starve in five years, where 

 a true farmer would amass a small fortune. This class are, however, generally, the fast 

 friends of education, though many a looker on will cite them as instances of the useless- 

 ness of acquired skill in farming, whereas they should cite them only as a sample of the 

 resistless power of capital even in comparatively unskilful hands. 



Such institutions are the only possible remedy for a caste education, legislation, and 

 literature. If any one class provide for their own liberal education, in the state, as they 

 should do, while another class neglect this, it is as inevitable as the law of gravitation, 

 that they should form a ruling caste or class by themselves, and wield their power more 

 or less for their own exclusive interests and the interests of their friends. 



If the industrial were the only educated class in the state, the caste power in their 

 hands would be as much stronger than it now is, as their numbers are greater. But now 

 industrial education has been wholly neglected, and the various industrial classes left still 

 ignorant of matters of the greatest moment pertaining to their vital interests, while the 

 professions have been studied till trifles and fooleries have been magnified into matters of 

 immense importance, and tornadoes of windy words and barrels of innocent ink shed over 

 them in vain. 



This, too, is the inevitable result of trying to crowd all^beral, practical education into 

 one narrow sphere of human life. It crowds their ranks with men totally unfit by nature 

 for professional service. Many of these, under a more congenial culture, might have be- 

 come, instead of the starving scavengers of a learned profession, the honored members of 

 an industrial one. Their love of knowledge was indeed amiable and highly commendable; 

 but the necessity which drove them from their natural sphere in life, in order to obtain it, 

 is truly deplorable. 



But such a system of general education as we now propose, would (in ways too nume- 

 rous now to mention) tend to increase the respectability, power, numbers, and resources 

 of the true professional class. 



Nor are the advantages of the mental and moral discipline of the student to be over- 

 looked; indeed, I should have set them down as most important of all, had I not been 

 distinctly aware that such an opinion is a most deadly heresy; and I tremble at the thought 

 of being arraigned before the tribunal of all the monks and ecclesiastics of the old world, 

 and no small number of their progeny in the new. 



It is deemed highly important that all in the professional classes should become writers 

 and talkers; hence they are so incessantly drilled in all the forms of language, dead and 

 living, though it has become quite doubtful whether, even in their case such a course is 

 most beneficial, except in the single case of the professors of literature and theology, with 

 whom these languages form the foundation of their professions and the indispensable 

 struments of their future art in life. 



