HEARINGS BEFORE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE. 455 
even in our own State there are amiable and friendly critics who occa- 
sionally tell us that we have gotten all our money from the Federal 
Government. Now, the occasion of such a statement is this: The 
State of New York sold the land scrip that it received in 1862 at the 
figures that I mentioned. When it was more than half sold Mr. Ezra 
Cornell, then a State senator, who until middle life was a laborer get- 
ting a dollar or a dollar and a half a day and then grew rich and 
became immediately an earthly providence, desired to have the pro- 
ceeds of the grant turned over to an agricultural institution—not to 
Cornell University because it was not then in existence, but to an agri- 
cultural institution at Ovid, where the State insane asylum now is. 
But this scheme was defeated by the friends of the different colleges 
who wanted the money divided among their institutions. Mr. Cornell 
and his colleague, Andrew D. White, thought that was a plan to fritter 
away the money without doing any good. Whereupon Mr. Cornell 
said: ‘*I will found a university at Ithaca with an endowment which I 
will present to it, provided you will turn the whole of that land scrip 
over to it for the purposes mentioned in the act of Congress.” That 
was done. Later Mr. Cornell said to the State: ‘‘ You are selling this 
scrip at 40 and 50 cents an acre, and I will buy it from you.” The 
State could not sell it for more. There was a glut of land all over the 
country. He said: ‘‘I will hold it until prices go up, and I will pay 
the interest on my investment and protect the property from trespass 
and fire, and whatever profits I thus make from holding this land I 
will turn over as a gift to the new university under one condition— 
that such gift shall be recognized as the private gift of Ezra Cornell, 
and be free from all restrictions cinpoed by act of Congress on the 
moneys received from the sale of the scrip.” 
The State of New York accepted that offer. Mr. Cornell went on 
and carried that land out of his own pocket. After Mr. Cornell’s 
death, the trustees of the university continued to carry the land for 
some years longer, and in the end a large profit was made out of it. 
At one time the whole of it was under contract of sale for a million 
dollars, but the would-be purchaser backed out. A larger sum was 
eventually made out of it. But the point that I wish you gentlemen 
to understand is that everything in the shape of profit that was made 
by Mr. Cornell, and after him by his successor, Henry W. Sage, and 
the trustees, by holding these western lands was, under the conditions 
of Mr. Cornell’s contract, his private gift to the university, absolutely 
unrestricted by any conditions attaching to the donation by Congress 
of the public lands in 1862. ; 
This is not a mere statement of mine. The courts have settled it. 
We received some years ago a gift, a legacy, of between $1,000,000 
and $2,000,000. At that time the charter restricted the holdin; sof 
Cornell University. The friends of the testatrix attacked the will on 
the ground that Cornell University was incapacitated to receive the 
gift, as it already held property in excess of the limitations of its 
charter. Those limitations have since been removed, but of course 
that would not have any retroactive effect. Now, the university had 
absolutely no plea to make but one, and the lawyers, ingenious as 
these gentlemen always are, seized on this contention that Mr. Cor- 
nell’s gift to the university was not a private gift, but was a part of 
the Federal land grant, and consequently that Cornell University did 
