March, 1912.] 



257 



Miscellaneous) 



state governments to provide for in- 

 creasing demands in these directions ; 

 students are not lacking, practice both 

 in agriculture and engineering is giving 

 respectful attention to your utterances ; 

 all this indeed because after nearly five 

 decades of strenuous and almost heart- 

 breaking struggle, whatever have been 

 your mistakes, you have demonstrated 

 your right to exist and thereby have 

 won public confidence. The colleges and 

 stations for whose upbuilding you have 

 laboured hard and loyally are now public 

 utilities of great importance. They are 

 an intelligent and directive force in the 

 conservation of our resources, both 

 social and material. In brief, these in- 

 stitutions have come to be a national 

 asset of gieat and permanent value. 



But now that the hardships and dis" 

 couragements incident to the establish- 

 ment of the new and the untried are 

 past and public confidence is won, now 

 that you are reasonably well equipped 

 and have the plastic minds of thousands 

 of young men and women with which 

 to work your will, the time has come to 

 ask this question : Are these agencies 

 established and maintained by public 

 funds, doing work of a kind and in a 

 manner, under the conditions which 

 have developed, that is calculated to 

 most fully promote public welfare ? 

 No one will deny the assertion, I am 

 sure, that colleges were brought into 

 existence not for the purpose of pro- 

 viding a fraction of one per cent, of 

 our young men and women with a col- 

 lege education as an individual favour, 

 but to be constructive and conserving 

 factors in building and maintaining a 

 strong nation. " The community has 

 come to be convinced that education is 

 the most competent means for the pre- 

 servation and enrichment of itself." 

 With this end in view, is their work 

 wisely planned and directed? 



A consideration of this comprehensive 

 question requires that we bring to mind 

 the directions along which the colleges 

 and stations exert their influence in the 

 exercise of their proper functions. These 

 directions are mainly three : — 



1. The public relations of educational 

 agencies, 



2. The enlargement of the body of 

 knowledge. 



3. The development of the vocational 

 and social efficiency of the individual. 



It is my purpose to direct your atten- 

 tion chiefly to questions involved in 

 the college training of young men and 

 women and the development of know- 

 ledge, but I ask your indulgence while I 

 33 



briefly refer to the first phase of influence 

 which I have mentioned :— 



As to the influence of the land-grant 

 legislation and its results upon the public 

 or governmental relations of educational 

 agencies, there can be no doubt that 

 one of the consequences of this legis- 

 lation is a strong movement toward 

 the injection of federal aid, and the 

 federal control necessarily, accompany- 

 ing the expenditure of federal money; 

 into secondary education that so far 

 has been exclusively supported and con- 

 trolled by the State. The concrete ex- 

 pression of this movement is the intro- 

 duction into Congress of bills providing 

 for the annual expenditure of vast sums 

 of federal money in aid of normal 

 schools and high schools in the various 

 States. The policy proposed, if made 

 effective, would have far reaching re- 

 sults, and for this reason it should be 

 considered by this body in the spirit of 

 wise statemenship with reference to 

 ultimate results rather than on the basis 

 of any immediate financial advantage 

 that might accrue to states or insti- 

 tutions. 



It is well for us to keep in mind this 

 law so well formulated by an educator 

 of long experience, " that the efficiency 

 of public education becomes the greater 

 as the responsibility for carrying it 

 forward is more directly and immediate- 

 ly felt." This admirable expression 

 of a sound principle may be supplement- 

 ed by the statement that an efficient 

 system of public education cannot be 

 imposed upon a community by aid from 

 without, but must be gradually deve- 

 loped from within. 



Moreover, the broadcast precipitous 

 distribution of public funds into loca- 

 lities where there does not exist the 

 understanding and preparation neces- 

 sary to their wise expenditure is sure to 

 result in lamentable waste. This would 

 be a less regrettable result however, 

 than the influence of outside aid upon 

 the spirit of initiative and self-depen- 

 dence of the people, in the absence of 

 which no progress is made in any enter- 

 prise whatever. The school-district 

 system once widely in vogue in the 

 eastern states, where each political unit 

 was practically a pure democracy, while 

 expensive, possessed certain advantages 

 of simpilicity and directness because of 

 the close relation of the citizen to the 

 school. It was a system that gave 

 large latitude to the individual develop- 

 ment of boys and girls and was far 

 removed from the mechanisms of highly 

 concentrated systems that are inelastic 

 and attempt to force square boys and 

 girls through round holes. While the 



