6 



ucational project ever devised in America, though he was inclined to 

 intrust less authority to the government than any other of our fore- 

 fathers, he endeavored to make the institution as much a part of the 

 educational system of the state as were the common schools them- 

 selves. 



This method of supporting the colleges, moreover, was not only 

 universal, it was also effectual in that it planted and nourished into 

 maturity colleges of a high order of merit even in the infant days of 

 our national life. Not only were admirable scholars made, but they 

 were made in large numbers. The standards of those days, it is 

 true, were somewhat different from the standards of our days ; but 

 one who looks at what was done, while recognizing great differences, 

 will hesitate long before he pronounces them inferior. A recent and 

 eminent superintendent of education in your own state not long 

 since pronounced the opinion that the standards of higher education 

 in colonial days were not simply relatively, but actually higher than 

 the standards of the second half of the nineteenth century. I am 

 not here to corroborate this statement or even to express an opinion 

 on that point. But we may regard it as certain that the schools that 

 could train the men of revolutionary days were efficient and were 

 among the most valuable institutions of colonial time. 



And when we pass on from colonial days to the days of the re- 

 public, we find that the propriety and the justice of these methods 

 were universally recognized. That first great ordinance which still 

 sheds its benign influence over the Northwest, provided that 

 "Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." 

 And from the day of that benignant provision to the present time, 

 no territory has been organized and no state has been admitted to the 

 Union without provision that a part of its domain shall be set apart 

 for higher learning as well as a part for the common schools. 



Thus it is that I hold the Land Grant of 1862 to have been in 

 strict accordance with the best traditions of our educational history. 



The second part of my thesis is that the Morrill Land Grant was 

 in strict accordance with the spirit of the present time. 



We, doubtless, sometimes talk flippantly and unwisely of what we 

 call the spirit of the age. And yet the age in which we live has cer- 

 tain peculiarities which we can hardly go astray in trying to char- 

 acterize. They are so distinctly marked, indeed they are so generally 

 acknowledged and understood that even to speak of them, subjects 

 one to the charge of dealing with the common-place. But the relation 



