inalienable birthright. Said Madame de Staël to Napoleon: "Pour instruction upon the heads of the French people; you owe them that baptism."

Cousin, the great French philosopher, after visiting various countries and examining their systems of education, upon his return to France said, in the celebrated report that he made to the Chamber of Deputies: "Do whatever else you please, you have done nothing until you have supplied France with education!" Sir, in the light of recent events these words were almost prophecy; and we have done nothing, absolutely nothing, unless we have legislated for the very highest interest of the people, their advancement in science, in art, in a wide and universal culture. I place the people themselves above all their possessions. And Mr. Webster, in a speech in Richmond, Virginia, quoting the sentiment of the illustrious daughter of Necker, said there was "no duty so solemn, no responsibility so fearful, as that resting on the statesmen of this Republic of making broad and universal the diffusion of education amongst the masses of the people." I most heartily adopt this sentiment.

THE HIGHER INSTITUTIONS.

When it comes to those higher institutions for the promotion of human knowledge, which the State is bound equally to provide, and which require the aggregation of buildings and libraries, and apparatus, professors, and students in all departments I have been and am for concentration. It is the only possible way to success. In the words of Ezra Cornell, "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."

THE STATE UNIVERSITY AND ITS PROPER SUPPORT.

This is the State University, with all its departments as idealized in our State Constitution, and such as we are laboring to build up at Columbia, a locality central in position and in all respects suitable, with one department, the school of mines and metallurgy, located at Rolla, in the County of Phelps; there located by the policy of the Legislature on account of the variety of minerals found in that district of the State, and the mining operations carried on, and yet still more to be carried on in the future-such an institution as we can with its present means, and a happy combination of circumstances, build up with comparatively small aid from the State. Today we were actually asking less than States around us are freely giving to their universities, almost without argument, and upon the reports of their wants, made after examination by committees. Upon the same judicious plan a joint committee of the two Houses, composed of fifteen members, has made its examination, and reports the smallest appropriation sufficient to meet the most urgent wants of the industrial departments of the institution. May we

hope that the same action will take place in this enlightened body, and in the same spirit, as took place in the Michigan Legislature but the last winter? Judge Walker, in his address at the recent inauguration of President Angell, says: "The committees of the Legislature came to see and learn our necessities and wants. They made their reports and recommended the appropriation of $75,000 for a recitation-room building, and without lobbying or besieging the halls of legislation the appropriation was promptly and freely made." But, two years before that, the Legislature had appropriated a sum of $15,000 a year, making the annual income of the institution now over $100,000. Michigan University is a great success; her fame has gone to every civilized country. She has, at this very time, no less than twentyeight students from Missouri. The University of Michigan has been a success, and has achieved fame for the State, simply because she has had the means to do so. Is it to be expected that we can do the same work with less than one-fourth of her means, to say nothing of her accumulated capital in the form of libraries and other indispensable appointments?

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY.

No State institution of learning can achieve its true end, or do honor to its State, without the means to do so. This is the simplest truism; yet I doubt whether any five years' progress of Michigan has surpassed the progress of our own University during the past five years and since the State gave its first aid. It is the professional schools of law and medicine that gather the large number of students at Ann Arbor, and give to the institution its wide-spread fame. Our enrolment during the present semester, or half-year, will reach over three hundred-only fifty less than that of the farfamed University of Virginia, even with her professional schools, and equal to three-fifths of that of Michigan University, without the professional schools.

THE STUDENTS NOT BOYS, BUT MEN, AND REPRESENTING ALL PARTS OF THE

STATE.

It is, too, a most gratifying fact that while the students are (with exception of less than a dozen) from Missouri, they are in about equal numbers from north of the river and from south of it, indeed from all parts of the State, about as are the members of this General Assembly. Nor are they mere boys, but men (excepting thirty young women), and they fairly represent the rising talent and influence of the State. Had younger students been encouraged to enter the institution, the count of numbers would have been much greater.

PROSPECTS IF NECESSARY MEANS ARE GIVEN.

With the necessary aid from the State to meet the present exigencies of the institution in the completion and proper equipment of the industrial departments, so that chemistry may be taught by the student himself making analyses of soils and minerals, and that other branches may be taught in the same way by practice and experiment, we may expect a very large increase of numbers. It is of the utmost consequence that we do all in our power to maintain the continued and growing prosperity of the institution in all its departments. It was Napoleon the Great who said, "Nothing is so successful as success." Success begets success. This is a law in human affairs. With the aid now asked for, the next year will be more prosperous than any that has preceded. We have good reason to expect and believe that the institution will soon come up to the standard of the first American colleges, and that its position as such will be everywhere felt and acknowledged, and that it will confer honor upon the State itself.

THE OTHER SIDE.

But, sir, I will not contemplate the other side of the picture. If nothing should be done, this State institution will not only have reached its goal, but there is great reason to fear it will actually fall back; professors will be discouraged, students will be disappointed - and what shall the farmers, and mechanics, and miners say, and have reason to say?

WHAT THE AGRICULTURALISTS, THE MECHANICS, AND MINERS WILL SAY. May they not say, and will they not say, "The lawyers, and the doctors, and other professional men have their schools with public endowments; we now, for the first time in the history of the State, come forward with our petition for aid in a kind of education adapted to our peculiar wants. We want the means of experiment and practice. We must have them, if we are to keep pace with the spirit and progress of the times. We ask less for our industrial institutions than has been granted in Iowa, or Illinois, or Kansas, or even in the new and feeble State of Nebraska, with her 120,000 people and $100,000,000 or less of taxables. We have the literary and scientific advantages of the University, and hence ask only for the industrial department -the department set aside for us, the farmers, the mechanics, and the miners."

So wisely have these interests been administered, and such is the economy of connecting the industrial departments with it, that our call upon the State treasury is one-half and even two-thirds less than in those States where a

different policy has been pursued. Shall we then, Mr. President, turn our backs upon such an appeal?

THE EFFECT OF NOT TRULY REPRESENTING THE INDUSTRIAL CLASSES. If we do, there is not an agricultural paper in the State, or out of it, that will not express regret and dissatisfaction; there is not an agricultural or mechanical association nor an industrial convention, where is concentrated the intelligence of our people, that will not seek to reverse our action and procure a right representation of the people's feelings and interests. If there is anything in regard to which unanimity prevails among the best industrial men everywhere, it is the education that they require, and the education. that they will have.

EFFECT UPON THE GROWTH AND PROSPECTS OF THE UNIVERSITY AND ALL ITS DEPARTMENTS.

If I could conceive that the Legislature would not act favorably upon the Bill before us, that it would not meet the pressing wants and necessities of the institution as reported and recommended by the committee, I should expect to see great discouragement; in such case there would be reaction, there must be. The students in the agricultural department, who entered upon their studies at the opening of the school, cannot have the practical chemistry in the analysis of soils which belongs to their best year's course; the building, now covered and closed in, will stand desolate, unfinished, and unoccupied. This condition of things produces its injurious effect upon all departments of the institution, and upon the public mind. We must not, sir, by our inaction, or our non-action, permit this condition of things. We must not lose the prestige of yearly progress. We must not lose what it will require years of labor to regain. We must not stop the impulse that is carrying us forward. That the State will make the necessary appropriations, as every State is making them or has already made them, no man can seriously doubt. Now, now is the time to make the smallest sum count the most in carrying forward this great interest. Next year, or the year after it, will not do. There is a crisis in the affairs of institutions of learning, as in those of men and of nations.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE LAND-GRANT.

But, Mr. President, we reach another very important point in our plea for our industrial institutions. How came we by the agricultural and mechanical fund that is to endow and support these institutions, or rather by those lands which, when disposed of, are to give us (the State of Missouri) a fund for this object? They are the gift of Congress to the State; and a like gift, in the ratio of representation, was made to all the States. How came Congress to make this grant or gift? The history is an interesting one, and well illustrates the character of our energetic, practical business men. They had become thoroughly convinced by their own wants and deficiencies, and after discussion in pamphlets and newspapers and in conversation, that there must be at new class of institutions, or an enlargement of American education as then existing, to meet the specific wants of the industrial classes. They went with their demand to Congress. By petition, by agitation in every possible way, by delegations to that body, by correspondence throughout the country, they pressed their demand. After a great struggle, after reports and counter reports by committees, and after a Presidential veto, they finally succeeded, for this class of men, the bone and sinew of the land, always will succeed. Think you, sir, if we vote them down now and here, that they will not have their Missouri industrial institution— their agricultural college and mining school? The grant was made of land equal in area to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and in value equal to $15,000,000, and what for? I answer in the words of the grant itself, "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes." No such magnificent grant for objects of education was ever before made. The institutions endowed and growing out of this grant cannot but produce an effect upon our American civilization. The grant has already produced its effect upon our American institutions of education. It has encouraged and stimulated the States. It has awakened individual munificence, so that within the last ten years (since the grant was made, July 2, 1862) such gifts have been made to American institutions of learning as never in the history of the world have been made to any object or for any purpose. The specific object of the grant is for industrial education to unite, if you please, head-work and hand-work; to guide muscle by brain; to get more from the soil; to multiply and, at the same time, save labor by the aid of machinery and invention; to improve the breed of all domestic animals; to aid in mining operations and the reduction of ores; to assist the geologist, the mineralogist, and the chemist - in short, to enable men to live better and with less labor, by better understanding the laws of nature.