EZRA CORNELL-1864-1874 295 



added to them the pastors of all the principal churches, 

 Catholic and Protestant. This breadth of mind, even 

 more than his munificence, drew me to him. We met sev- 

 eral times, discussed his bill, and finally I reported it 

 substantially as introduced, and supported it until it be- 

 came a law. 



Our next relations were not, at first, so pleasant. The 

 great Land Grant of 1862, from the General Government 

 to the State, for industrial and technical education, had 

 been turned over, at a previous session of the legisla- 

 ture, to an institution called the People's College, in 

 Schuyler County; but the Agricultural College, twenty 

 miles distant from it, was seeking to take away from it 

 a portion of this endowment; and among the trustees of 

 this Agricultural College was Mr. Cornell, who now 

 introduced a bill to divide the fund between the two 

 institutions. 



On this I at once took ground against him, declaring 

 that the fund ought to be kept together at some one insti- 

 tution ; that on no account should it be divided ; that the 

 policy for higher education in the State of New York 

 should be concentration; that we had already suffered 

 sufficiently from scattering our resources ; that there were 

 already over twenty colleges in the State, and not one of 

 them doing anything which could justly be called univer- 

 sity work. 



Mr. Cornell's first effort was to have his bill referred, 

 not to my committee, but to his ; here I resisted him, and, 

 as a solution of the difficulty, it was finally referred to a 

 joint committee made up of both. On this double-headed 

 committee I deliberately thwarted his purpose throughout 

 the entire session, delaying action and preventing any 

 report upon his bill. 



Most men would have been vexed by this ; but he took 

 my course calmly, and even kindly. He never expostu- 

 lated, and always listened attentively to my arguments 

 against his view; meanwhile I omitted no opportunity to 

 make these arguments as strong as possible, and especially 



