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REMARKS OF EX-GOVERNOR JOHN W. HOYT, LL. D., CHAIRMAN OF THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY COMMITTEE OF ONE HUNDRED.

[Before the Senate committee, January 24, 1896.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN: The hour accorded for this hearing having already expired, I may not say more on the subject under consideration than a very few words of a general character.

Opposition to the university measure is likely to manifest itself in certain quarters, and for reasons well understood; but the great body of educators, scientists, scholars, and statesmen who have studied the subject quite free from local and other special interest are in hearty accord with the movement, and will warmly support the Senate and House committees should they see fit to favorably report the pending bill. Faults and deficiencies it may have, which, if found, you will not fail to correct. It is proper to say, however, that the general features of it have been carefully considered by hundreds of persons deemed especially competent to judge, and that it was finally framed by the Executive Council designated for this and other purposes by the National University Committee of One Hundred, engaging the most earnest attention of it members; also that the bill has since been submitted to the scrutiny of members of the National Committee in all sections of the country.

I shall in due time submit the views of a great number of persons upon the general proposition as expressed both before the beginning of this present movement and since. It will appear that there is full concurrence among them on these several points, to wit: (1) That there is great need of an institution for purely post-graduate work; (2) that for many reasons which can not be challenged such institution should be established at Washington, where facilities of so many kinds, already furnished at great cost by the whole people through the Government, are present and but partially utilized; (3) that in addition to the priceless benefits which a post-graduate university of the highest type would confer, not only in the help afforded to college graduates who now seek at foreign institutions what they do not find at home, but also as the means of completing the American system of public education, and of furnishing to it and to all institutions of the country the very coordinating, stimulating, and elevating force so essential to general progress; and (4) that since these great needs can only be met by the Government of the United States, such beginning as is possible should be made without further delay.

VIEWS OF HON. JOHN A. KASSON, LL. D., LATE UNITED STATES MINISTER TO AUSTRIA, AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY, ETC.

[Presented before the House Committee on Education, February 1, and afterwards communicated to the Senate University Committee, by request.]

SIR: As one of the advocates for the establishment of a national university at Washington, I have been requested to forward to your committee the substance of the views which were presented by me before the House Committee on Education. The reasons for my support of the measure before your committee are undoubtedly largely influenced by my long association with the interests of the Western States, where educational institutions, excellent as they are within their limitations, have neither the endowment nor the facilities to keep pace with modern demands for higher education. Our young men with special genius for certain lines of study and research are balked in their development by the inadequacy of the means of education at their disposal. It is not gratifying to our national pride that even those who have wealth go by hundreds for this instruction to foreign universities, often resulting in the alienation of their patriotic instincts.

Here in Washington are found already the means and facilities for the pursuit of the higher university studies to a degree unequaled by any other town or educational center in America. Here are vast collections for the study of geology,

natural history, biology, comparative anatomy, anthropology, and of the history of inventive and other useful arts. Here are great libraries, both general and special, one of the latter admitted to be the best in the world. These collections are the property of the nation, and are continually growing. Original research in agricultural chemistry is continually going on in one Department of the Government. A variety of original investigations are perpetually in progress in the Smithsonian Institution, and in the geological division, and in the Coast Survey, which latter is unsurpassed, if equaled elsewhere in the world, in the authority of its scientific declarations. Here the higher work of astronomy proceeds by day and night, with an admirably equipped observatory and with a master astronomer who has received some of the highest scientific honors which Europe can bestow. Here are active and retired engineers of the Army, masters in road and bridge building, and in tests of economic materials and structures; and engineers of the Navy, masters in machinery and in shipbuilding Whatever sciences and arts are involved in and for our progress as a nation are here represented.

Why should all these vast resources of education lie unutilized and sterile for the instruction of the youth of America?

Here are an unequaled medical library and an unsurpassed medical museum. Why should the future healers of human diseases not be permitted to utilize them for their higher instruction?

Why should not the youth of our country have the benefit of the masterly teaching of hundreds of scientific specialists now in Government employ at the seat of government, in such manner and under such regulations as the Governmont shall direct?

The proposed university requires no vast aggregate of buildings for its purposes. It will require ultimately one building for its lecture rooms and laboratories. This will be the nation's memorial tribute to Washington, the first patron and real founder of the university. Its libraries are already built, its museums already constructed and filled. Its dormitory will be the city, its school of oratory and patriotism the Capitol of the nation.

An institution for higher education so founded and conducted will offer its advantages to the intelligent youth of the country of limited means-and they are the great majority, especially in the Western and Southern States, and I think it may be said of the Northern also-at less cost than in Europe, while cultivating in them the spirit of devotion to their own country. From it they will return to their own States prepared to lead their respective communities in the continuous march of civilization, of science, and of material development.

If this education, owing to the facilities already existing, can be furnished at less cost to the student than in other universities of the country, surely the people who have paid by their taxes for the plant already established are entitled to the benefit of the reduction. The great and controlling purposes of its foundation must be to effect the widest possible diffusion among our people of that education which all the foremost nations of the civilized world now recognize as essential to the maintenance of their rank, and to their progress in material welfare. No national investment yields such ample returns as that which enlarges the intelligence and capacity of the citizen. It is the seed which produces “an hundred fold.” The vast private contributions of our countrymen to the establishment of institutions of learning proves how well that maxim is understood in this Republic. Such contributions will also flow to this university when once Congress shall have completed its organization and assured its permanence. The "plain people" who go through life under the restraints of a forced economy, but who have laudable ambitions for their sons, will for all time bless the Congress that shall bring the best education within reach of their children.

These views are respectfully submitted.

Hon. JAMES H. KYLE,

JOHN A. KASSON.

Chairman of Senate Committee to Establish the University of the United States.

REMARKS OF HON. ANDREW D. WHITE, LL.D., EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL, LATE AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY, MINISTER TO RUSSIA, ETC.

[Before the committee, February 10, 1896.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN: It seems hardly worth while for me to take up much of your time, either with the opinions of leading men in favor of a national university at Washington, or with the fitness of Washington as the seat of a great university. All this has been very fully and cogently discussed already, and while I may touch upon it later, I prefer now to take up another point which seems to me of great importance, and which, so far as I know, has not yet been developed.

This point is, that the creation of a national university in this city by act of Congress is the logical result of the legislation of Congress upon public education thus far; that it is, indeed, the necessary supplement of what Congress has already done, and most worthily done, with the final approval of all thinking men who have given adequate attention to the subject, not only in this country, but in all other countries. I need hardly say that the action by the Federal Congress in favor of education in all its grades is no new thing. In laying the foundations of our great new States Congress made at the outset, and most wisely, reservations of public land for publicschool systems. This was done in obedience to a deep-seated political instinct. Every citizen who thinks closely upon the history of this and other republics knows that the republican form of government has always been the most difficult of all forms to maintain; that in the great majority of cases in the past, as a simple historical fact, it has not been maintained, and that the main fundamental thing in which this Republic differs from the great number of republics which in times past and in our own times have gone to ruin, is the fact that we have developed, and are developing, a people better fitted by education to exercise self-government than any other, save Switzerland, has ever done.

But Congressional action has not stopped with primary and secondary school systems. At an early day large appropriations were made for universities in the newer States, and with most noble results. It is true that some of the States have not done as well as others, but when we see growing out of these appropriations such great and beneficent institutions of learning as the universities of Michigan, of Indiana, of Illinois, of Iowa, of Wisconsin, of Minnesota, of California, and of other States, we must feel that the country has been far more than repaid for the national outlay upon these foundations.

A still more striking example of the carrying out of this same policy by Congress is seen in the Morrill act of 1862 That act provided for an institution in every State in which instruction should be given in science, pure and applied, in classics, and in military tactics. Proposed at first by the Hon. Justin S. Morrill, when he was in the House of Representatives, it was vetoed by President Buchanan, but, after a change in Administration, having been proposed again by Mr. Morrill, who had come into the Senate of the United States, it became a law by the signature of Abraham Lincoln.

Mr. Chairman, I believe that this act of 1862, known as the Morrill bill, was one of the greatest things in the history of this country, or of any country. That bill, as I have said, created in every State and every Territory of the United States a center for scientific, technical, classical, general, and even military instruction. It was very broad in its scope and liberal in its provisions, and has proved to be a vast benefit to every State and Territory, and therefore to the nation as a whole.

One very noble result of the bill is that, while all these institutions-about fifty in number-endowed by the United States are doing their full work, each is doing it mainly in accordance with the needs of the State in which it is situated, as determined by the legislature of that State and by the trustees and faculty of each institution. In all the management of these institutions there has been no trace of what has been stigmatized as undue centralization or as "paternalism."

S. Rep, 429-3

You have, no doubt, heard the story of the French minister of public instruction, who, when a gentleman was calling on him one morning, took out his watch, picked up a certain book, and opening it to a certain page, said: "Every college in France is occupied at this moment in giving instruction in a particular way on this particular page of this particular book." Nothing of this centralizing paternalism is to be seen in this great system which Congress has created. Every institution has its own autonomy; it governs itself in accordance with the needs of the State in which it is located, and each bears in mind that great truth enunciated by one of the profoundest men who has ever written on education, John Stuart Mlil, who says that the real danger in public systems of education is that sort of Chinese mandarinism which tends to make men all alike by educating them all in the same way. In the Morrill bill all danger from this source has been obviated. In Senator Walthall's State there is a system suited to the needs of his State, and so in Senator Sherman's State, and so in Senator Kyle's State, as in every other State of the Union.

But this is not all that Congress has done. Having found that these institutions were doing well with the endowments already given them, it, at a later period, increased their endowments and made them still stronger centers in science and literature, in general culture and mental discipline.

But these are not all the evidences of a great educational policy on the part of the United States which Congress has steadily followed out. By the Hatch Act it has created a great number of experiment stations in which scientific investigation, as related to agriculture, is carried on, and these have been, as a rule, attached to the existing institutions created by the Morrill Act, giving them still stronger and wider influence.

The result of all this has been that within the last forty years we have had what may be called a great revolution in education. At the middle of this century there were some 300 so-called colleges and universities, not one of them adequately endowed, and all together producing results which thoughtful men saw to be unsatisfactory.

No one can deny that strong men were graduated at these institutions, but they were in the main developed in spite of the system rather than by means of it. It is a simple fact that, as compared with the rest of the world, our collegiate and unversity system was at the middle of this century utterly inadequate and known so to be by every thinking man who gave attention to it. Here and there, indeed, as at the University of Virginia, at Harvard, at Yale, and a few other institutions, earnest efforts were made to improve the system, yet up to the middle of this century they had produced comparatively little result; but about that time one of these State universities created by the bounty of Congress, the University of Michigan, began to be developed, mainly by the efforts of Chancellor Henry P. Tappan and his compeers. It took on a more decidedly university character than any other university in the country had ever done.

At first this new development was but little known, but it finally attracted the attention of a very eminent professor at Harvard, the Rev. Dr. Hedge, and he called the attention of men interested in higher education throughout New England to it. The result was a new effort in the East; Cornell University came into being as a daughter of the University of Michigan, inheriting some of its best university methods, and the election of President Eliot to Harvard University began a new and most fruitful epoch there. I do not mean to say that there was any servile imitation either at Harvard or at Cornell of what had been done at the University of Michigan, but I do mean to say that the first impulse to higher education in the United States, which brought about this splendid educational revolution, or, as I would prefer to call it, evolution, of the past forty years, proceeded from a State University which owed its origin to an act of Congress.

Of all these creations by Congress I regard that which grew out of the Morrill Act as the most beneficent. As you have seen, it led to the establishment in every State

and Territory of the Union of a strong center for scientific and literary education and research, and I think that when we consider the time when this bill was passed we may regard the Morrill bill as one of the glories of this nation.

We have all heard it cited as perhaps the most glorious fact in the history of the old Roman Republic that at the very period when its most terrible enemies-the Carthaginians, under a leader up to that time invincible—were in camp near the city, the land on which this hostile, conquering army was encamped was freely bought and sold in the Roman market. This has always been adduced as a proof of a heroic belief on the part of the Roman people in the perpetuity of their institutions, and this has been counted one of their greatest glories, as showing that they never despaired of the Republic. But to my mind there is something in the passage of the Morrill bill in 1862 far grander than this act of the Romans. For it was at the very darkest period of the civil war; the time when it seemed to many that the union of these States was dissolved; the darkest period indeed, by far, that this Republic has ever known; that Congress thus decreed the creation of a strong educational center in each of the States and Territories, providing for the necessities of future generations; and this not only in the States then fighting for the Union, but also in the States at that time in arms against it. There is no other example of heroic confidence in the perpetuity of a nation equal to that thus offered by the passage of this act of Congress.

It did not, indeed, have the support of many men who were attached to the eastern colleges. Very little, if anything, was done for the Morrill bill by Harvard, or Yale, or the University of Virginia. It was the outcome of the thought and effort of a few men who had not enjoyed the advantages of these older institutions of learning. Fortunately, their thought and effort were recognized by Congress as patriotic and farseeing, and the Morrill bill became a law.

The first result of all these beneficent acts of Congress has been to develop directly a great system of education in literature and science, fitted to the needs of the whole country; but this is only a part of its work. It has done far more than that, for it has indirectly exercised an enormous influence for good upon the whole system of advanced education in the United States. The new and more vigorous growth of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Amherst, Brown, and a multitude of other great foundations among the older institutions of learning in the North, and indeed in all parts of the country, dates from the time when the influence of the Congressional acts on education began to be felt.

And now, Mr. Chairman, I come to the relation of the proposed legislation, upon all this great body of institutions for advanced instruction, and, indeed, for all instruction throughout this country. The first result of such a creation which I would name is its effect in meeting what, at this moment, is the greatest and most pressing need of all these institutions; the need of professors and instructors of the highest grade, thoroughly trained in research, and brought completely abreast of the latest and best thought in all those great fields with which universities and colleges have to do. Here it is that a university at Washington could be of vast use. Others have shown fully what enormous opportunities there are here for such research; the libraries, observatories, laboratories, collections of every sort, already vast, are constantly increasing.

Doubtless your attention has also been called to another pertinent fact, so evident to anyone giving attention to the subject, namely, the ease with which the foremost literary and scientific men, not only of this country, but of all countries, could be attracted to this city as professors and lecturers. It is rapidly becoming, in my opinion, the most attractive of modern capitals. No one of the greater capitals of the world is in all respects so well fitted for a winter residence, and few offer so many inducements of every sort to a temporary stay. Such a university as could be here created would seem, then, most likely to meet one of the greatest wants, perhaps the greatest want, at this moment, of all this mass of institutions, now existing, by

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