228 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



of technical, but of general education as well, for the farmer and 

 mechanic, and the general spread of these ideals of higher educa- 

 tion will inevitably advance the cause of democracy. 



It is difficult, of course, to formulate a satisfactory philosophy 

 of history. It never has been done, perhaps it can never be done 

 until history is closed, when it would have but little interest for 

 anybody. But certainly this great movement toward democracy 

 which is characteristic of all countries, the enormous increase 

 in wealth, the destruction of time and space involved in the gen- 

 eral application of steam and electricity, the ever- widening scope 

 of popular education, all these things have worked together, 

 each upon the other, each supplementing and strengthening the 

 other, to bring about that marvelous revolution which has made 

 possible this development of agricultural and mechanical educa- 

 tion on the one hand and which has itself been enormously 

 furthered by this very education. 



The demand for special, professional education, the training 

 of the farmer and the mechanic, is one which few people trained 

 in the old education ever comprehended or were ever able to esti- 

 mate at its true value. It has not been very long, of course, in 

 this country since there w^as little faith in the value of special 

 education on anybody's part. It was the habit, even in the sphere 

 of the so-called learned professions, to insist that the best way 

 for a man to learn his business was to go into practical life as 

 soon as possible, or at any rate get into touch with practical life 

 as closely as possible from the very beginning. The ideal of 

 the physician was to have the boy get into the doctor's office as 

 soon as possible and clean his horses and wash his bottles as the 

 only reasonable road to learning therapy or preparing oneself 

 for the practice of medicine. Entrance into a lawyer's office 

 and the copying of legal documents and sweeping out of the 

 office and building fires in the winter time was recognized as the 

 practical method of preparing for admission to the bar. For 

 neither of these professions was college education considered any 



