;AuGUST 16, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



205 



discussing them as great national issues. 

 If we could get national attention concen- 

 trated upon our educational problems year 

 after year as one of the fundamental is- 

 sues going to the very life of the nation 

 itself, we should make vastly greater prog- 

 ress than we do. And this attention we 

 shall get when we recognize the essentially 

 national character of education by making 

 educational policy a part of national 

 policy. When the federal congress dis- 

 cusses educational questions as fully, as 

 completely, as they discuss questions of de- 

 fense and the tariff and internal improve- 

 ments, we shall be in a way of securing 

 for educational issues that attention which 

 is necessary to their continuous and rapid 

 solution. 



Intimately connected with this fact, 

 namely, the necessity of securing national 

 attention for the consideration of national 

 problems, if we wish to hasten their solu- 

 tion, is the further one that we could ad- 

 vance with far greater certainty and with 

 far greater speed, our national standards, 

 i. e., the standards of the people taken as 

 a whole and in their local organizations, 

 if we can get before the nation, as a whole, 

 a proper standard of what education means 

 and what education ought to mean. 



The nation then, and not merely the lo- 

 cal school district or commimity or state, 

 must become an educational unit in all 

 grades of education. 



It has already become so to a certain ex- 

 tent. It is becoming so more and more 

 every passing day. Unequally, it is true — 

 in spots only — here and there, but steadily 

 and persistently. The federal government 

 has granted lands for the support of ele- 

 mentary education in nearly all the states 

 of the union within whose territory were 

 to be found large stretches of government- 

 owned land. In fact the federal grants 

 were the foundations of the school funds 



in the vast majority of the states of the 

 union. But the federal government has 

 not been content with this. It began some 

 fifty years ago the policy of developing 

 within each state in the union a higher 

 institution of learning supported in large 

 part, first by federal grants of land; sec- 

 ond, by the grants of money realized from 

 the sale of lands ; and finally, by grants of 

 money raised by the general revenue sys- 

 tem of the government. To-day we have 

 sixty-seven such institutions which owe a 

 part, or the whole, of their income to the 

 action of the federal government. The 

 aggregate value of the permanent funds 

 and equipment of these land grant colleges 

 themselves exceeds to-day $125,000,000. 

 The total income of these institutions in 

 1910 was nearly $23,000,000. It would 

 take an endowment fund of over $450,000,- 

 000 to produce this income. 



We take pride here in Illinois in the fact 

 that it was an Illinois farmer and pro- 

 fessor who first formulated this plan, and 

 that the legislature of Illinois was the first 

 American legislature to stand strongly be- 

 hind this policy of federal grants to higher 

 education within the states. It has be- 

 come the greatest scheme of an educational 

 endowment which the world has ever seen. 

 The federal government itself contributes 

 only a small part of the total funds neces- 

 sary for the support of these institutions, 

 but it was the giving of that small part 

 which made the rest of it possible, which 

 stimulated local and state interest, which 

 by fixing national standards stimulated 

 the nation to rise to these standards. I 

 have very little doubt myself that if it had 

 not been for the action of the federal gov- 

 ernment in making these appropriations 

 for the development of agriculture and the 

 mechanic arts within the states, we should 

 be a whole generation behind what we are 



