46 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
France, Belgium, and Germany combined — after having spent over 
thirty years in the study of the needs and possibilities of the people, 
he, in urging upon the legislature the necessity of providing for higher 
education, defined the objects of a higher institution of learning as 
follows: 
“To form the statesmen, legislators, and judges, on whom public pros- 
perity and individual happiness are so much to depend; to expound the 
principles of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of 
nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound 
spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary 
restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to d<3 whatever does 
not violate the equal rights of another; to harmonize and promote the 
interests of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, and by well in- 
formed views of political economy to give a free scope to the public 
industry; to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their 
minds, cultivate their morals and instill into them precepts of virtue 
and order; to enlighten them with mathematical and physical science, 
which advance the arts and administer to the health, the subsistence, 
and the comforts of human life; and, finally, to form them to habits of 
reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to 
others and of happiness within themselves. These are the objects of 
that higher grade of education, the benefits and blessings of which the 
legislature now propose to provide for the good and ornament of their 
country, the gratification and happiness of their fellow citizens.” And 
further on in the same report, as if he was contemplating the closing 
instead of the beginning of the Nineteenth century, he said: 
“Some good men, and even men of respectable information, consider 
the learned sciences as useless acquirements; some think they do not 
better the condition of men; others that education, like private and indi- 
vidual concerns, should be left to private individual effort, not reflecting 
that an establishment embracing all sciences which may be useful and 
even necessary, in the various avocations of life with the buildings and 
apparatus belonging to each, is far beyond the individual means and must 
either derive existence from public patronage or not at all.” I have made 
rather full extracts from the reports and letters*of Jefferson for two rea- 
sons. First, to emphasize, if necessary, the fact that the duty of the 
State to scientific education in this government of ours was clearly and 
distinctly stated by not only one of the few leading thinkers of our early 
history, but by the very man who taught so ably the doctrine of States’ 
rights and the duties of a State as a unit to itself; and second, to impress 
this fact upon those who boast that their political creed is taken pure 
and unmixed from the Sage of Monticello. It can be added by way of 
parenthesis that to Jefferson we owe two of our strongest and most 
