THOMAS IT. TAYLOR-NEED OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION. 
9 
cal colleges that have engineering courses, we shall have a complete list 
of all the forces at work. 
Then, summing up, we see that the vast belt of Gulf States, from Vir¬ 
ginia to Texas, and those south of Ohio, is occupied by about a half-dozen 
universities that offer engineering courses. To those who would be dis¬ 
posed to extend this list, I would say that I have purposely omitted those 
institutions that have a course in engineering, attached as a rider to the 
chairs of mathematics or physics. I have mentioned those that seriously 
offer courses in engineering subjects. 
Having given this review of the forces that have done their work in 
the past and are still in the field, I come to a consideration of the needs 
of engineering education in the South. The number of engineering 
schools is insignificant when considered in connection with the area cov¬ 
ered and the resources of this region. Many of our Southern States 
have State universities with well equipped law departments, but few of 
them have a corresponding engineering department, notwithstanding the 
fact that upon the engineer must always fall the responsibilities of devel¬ 
oping the resources of the State or nation. We complain of having to 
ship our cotton to New England and buy it back in its fabricated state, 
but until the South takes the problem in its own hands by establishing 
engineering and industrial schools, we shall depend upon Northern mills 
to work up our raw material, and upon Northern trained men to super¬ 
intend our industrial enterprises. When Thomas Jefferson was having 
his long fight in establishing the Universitj' of Virginia, he urged upon 
the legislature of the Old Dominion the necessity of higher education, 
and assigned as the principal reason for its creation the now self-evident 
truth that no State could hold its place in the onward march unless it 
provided means for training the statesmen that practically make the 
State. It can be added with just as much truth that no country or State 
can keep its place in the commercial world that does not provide within 
its own borders means for developing its raw material, whether of mind 
or matter. For the last twenty years Japan has had some of its subjects 
in nearly every prominent engineering school in the world, and, in addi¬ 
tion to this, about ten years ago she called an American, J. A. L. Wad¬ 
dell, a Troy man, to the chair of civil engineering in the Royal Univer¬ 
sity at Tokio. She sent her students to England to study law, to Germany 
to study military science, and to America to study engineering; and 
what is the result? Read the daily dispatches for the last three months, 
and you will see that no further argument is needed as to the necessity of 
engineering education. We trust that no such martial reason will ever 
require us to enter the lists; but we are fighting for commercial suprem¬ 
acy, and as long as we depend on other people to educate our industrial 
leaders, why, we’ll continue to fight without any tangible result in sight. 
