350 RURAL CALIFORNIA 



and agricultural improvement." This is notable for 

 its inclusion of agriculture in a category of the 

 greatest possible concerns of the new State and 

 notable also because agriculture is the only vocational 

 interest mentioned in such connection, although at 

 that date the State was just entering on its spec- 

 tacular career in gold-mining. Mining education and 

 research were provided for later; it is strange that 

 they were overlooked at the beginning, when the 

 public mind and the public purse were so full of gold. 

 However, agitation for the establishment of a college 

 of agriculture proceeded at all the fairs and assem- 

 blies of farmers and in farming publications of the 

 time just as agitation for a university was continued 

 in the "intellectual" assemblies and publications of 

 the professional classes. The farmers desired a col- 

 lege of their own without high-brow domination; the 

 religious denominations each desired that the insti- 

 tutions they established should develop into a "uni- 

 versity" and some of them adopted the name for their 

 academies in anticipation of such event. The deter- 

 mining force which merged conflicting views and 

 ambitions was the Morrill Act of 1862 under the 

 provisions of which the State organized the Univer- 

 sity of California to constitute the "industrial col- 

 lege" and to inherit all the educational bounty which 

 the United States has poured out to endow and to 

 promote higher education. Thus the two unrelated 

 duties imposed by the first constitution of California, 

 viz., to create a University "for the promotion of 

 literature, the arts and sciences" and "to promote 



