SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 225 



the question of labor unions in politics joined with that of orien- 

 tal labor a rich promise and foreboding of trouble for the days 

 to come. It is the reaching fingers that get the burns, but it is 

 the folded arms that compose to sleep. 



In 1857 Michigan was in things cultural still the frontier, and 

 the establishment here of agricultural education handed back 

 a firebrand into the complacent usage of the East. To speak 

 of torches tied to foxes' tails and sent into the standing grain of 

 the Philistines is only an agricultural figure of speech, and in- 

 competent to express the trouble and germs of trouble thereby 

 infused into the entire circulatory system of all American educa- 

 tion. The agricultural colleges and the state universities which 

 in many states have included the colleges and have been infected 

 with their spirit are a distinctive product of the West, and have 

 embodied a fresh and vitally new idea of education and what it is 

 all about. Centuries of separation from the life-need that begat 

 it had made the mechanism of education largely a formal in- 

 strument of discipline. The significance of the agricultural 

 college for the whole trend of American education was its naive 

 effrontery in frankly seeing for life-training a new connection with 

 real life-use, and this significance exceeds, in service to the 

 nation, even the weight of the benefits wrought for the tilling 

 and the tiller of the soil. 



Within the fifty years that have followed upon the beginning 

 of your Michigan experiment, and under the quickening influence 

 of your venture and others that succeeded it, the whole nation 

 of teachers has been assuming a new conception of the whole 

 meaning of their task. It is coming to them, not through a 

 priori reasoning, for of that they did enough before, but through 

 observance and practice of your frontier venture. They now 

 seem to be learning that education inheres not in what you put 

 into a man, or what you hang onto a man, nor yet in sterilizing 

 him, or shaving him down to a standard shape ; but in giving 

 him, such as he is, and such as his life-activities may be, the 



