ANNUAL REPORT—INDUSTRIAL NEEDS. 
35 
one as compared with like gifts to some of the older states, 
was munificent and should have inspired in the state a cor¬ 
responding disposition to do its full share in the noble work 
of providing scientific instruction for the industrial classes of 
our people. 
This, however, it seems not to have done. The gift of 
240,000 acres of land was reluctantly accepted, and has since 
been managed, not in the interest of education, as it was the 
sacred duty of the state to manage it, but in the supposed 
interest of local communities and private speculators. Such 
improvements as have been made have come out of the pro¬ 
ceeds of the county bonds, and there is, as yet, no such 
instructional force in the department as is necessary, or as 
would have been there to-day had the state done its share in 
the work of endowment. 
If the people are inclined to complain that more has not 
been accomplished by Wisconsin’s college of agriculture and 
the mechanic arts let them send their complaints to the legis¬ 
lature, at whose door lies the sin of niggardly dealing, if not 
of absolute fraud. 
WCRTHY IDEALS. 
It is a grand thing to have the molding of an empire while 
yet the elements are plastic -to take the best thoughts and 
sentiments of all times and make of. them institutions that 
will endure through afier generations. 
It is an opportunity with which the people of this new con¬ 
tinent have been favored as have no other people in all history. 
For here there was no need of the always difficult and most 
tedious work of pre-demolition. Amplitude of area, abund¬ 
ance of the best possible material, the experiences of all the 
past, and principles well refined in the furnace of trial,—these 
were ours. We could build as we would. 
It is a work which each new state, as it takes its place at the 
front in the march of empire, may undertake with increased 
advantage, because enriched by a knowledge of all that has 
been clone or tried before. 
