84 
mechanic arts, and to give more money without restriction would be to simply 
give further Impetus in the wrong direction. 
R. II. Jesse, of Missouri. I feel compelled to emphatically dissent from much 
that has been said on this subject 
I take it that Congress knew what a college was just as well as we knew 
what a college is: that Congress said what it meant and meant what it said 
when it established colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts. It is very true 
that the standards of admission to college at that time were not what they are 
today. But college meant as truly then as it does now an institution that is 
based upon secondary education. And if the colleges were not up to their 
presold rank, the same is true of the secondary schools. The college was based 
upon secondary education as truly in th.it day as it is now. in my opinion, to 
ose any portion of the money coming from the Federal Government, either 
through the land-grant act of 1862 or through the appropriation act of 1890, for 
udary education, is a misappropriation of Federal money. 
Any State that wants to do so may. out of the State treasury, appropriate 
money for secondary education — that is to say. for the preparatory department of 
its college of agriculture: but I think that any State which does that commits 
a blunder. I say this with profound conviction. I want to give a little of 
my own experience in Missouri. In 1S91 there was no standard of admission 
to any department of the University of Missouri. Any student could get in with 
an application and a fee. We began to raise the standards of admission to all 
departments of the university, until to-day there is no department that does not 
demand for admission a first-class high school education. As we raised the 
standards of the other departments we at first left the college of agriculture 
behind. The faculty of the college of agriculture contended that the condition 
of the rural communities in Missouri would not admit of any standards of 
admission to that department. But in getting all the other departments to the 
]>oint where they rested on the high school system I conceived the notion that 
that department ought to go up too. It had a small attendance ; everybody 
seemed to avoid it who could get into any other department. The men who 
came and failed to get into other departments dropped into the college of agri- 
culture rather than go home again. It was a catch-all of the other departments, 
but it did not catch enough to be respectable in numbers. I brought the ques- 
tion before the faculty of agriculture. The whole faculty went against me 
except one man. After debating the thing an appeal was taken to the board of 
curators. I wrote to every prominent college of agriculture in the United 
States, asking what they thought about the propriety of demanding high school 
education for admission. I was greatly astonished and greatly pleased at the 
unanimity of the answers, for almost without exception these colleges declared 
that a good high school education ought to be demanded. I submitted those 
letters to the board of curators, who, after carefully considering the matter, by 
a unanimous vote decided that the college of agriculture should be raised to a 
parity with the other departments of the university and that admission should 
be based upon a high school education. The next fall the enrollment in the 
college was far greater than it ever had been before, and it has been growing 
steadily ever since. In the present year the enrollment in the freshmen class 
is exactly twice what it was a year ago. When we made the college of agri- 
culture thoroughly respectable in its entrance requirements, men began to come 
to it. and men are now forsaking other departments to enroll in that of agri- 
culture. 
Various devices have been employed for bridging the gap between the elemen- 
tary schools and the college of agriculture. The most notable of those attempts 
is the Minnesota experiment. In this case there is between the college and the 
