James Woolworth, Commencement Address, 1872

Woolworth, James

A PDF copy of the published commencement address of James Woolworth, including handwritten notes and marginalia. Published following the first commencement at the University of Nebraska.

Woolworth, James

RG 00-05-00

Archives & Special Collections

1872

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E. W. Thomas
The duty of the State to provide higher instruction
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA,
AT ITS FIRST ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT,
JUNE 26th, 1872.
BY
JAMES M. WOOLWORTH, LL. D.
PRINTED FOR THE UNIVERSITY
BY ORDER OF THE REGENTS
1872.
[Drawing]
Ex Libris
In memory of
Edward Whittingham Thomas
Printed by
Gen. W. GRAY.
Omaha, Nebraska.
[Drawing]
Ex Libris
In memory of Edward Whittingham Thomas
Printed by
Gen. W. GRAY.
Omaha, Nebraska.
AN ADDRESS.
MR. CHANCELLOR,
And Gentlemen of the Faculty and Board of Regents:
ON the first day of March, 1869, Nebraska became a State.
She is but a few months over five years old. No other State
has, at that age, possessed as large a cultivated area, as
many miles of railroad, as large deposits in her banks, as
our's can boast to-day. These are just causes of congratulation.
They are facts, which may justly animate our pride,
and stimulate our efforts.
But we are here presented with a different and a higher
subject of gratulation. But five years old, the State of
Nebraska possesses an University, which, much more than
her improvements, industries and wealth, sets her, in the
comparison with other States at so young an age, far beyond
them all. With a plan of organization embracing every
department of learning; possessing an endowment adequate to
its complete maintenance, and already at work with abundant
appliances for instruction, this institution enjoys a
policy singularly liberal. Here is far higher cause for just
pride and elevated hope, than the growth, large and rapid
as it is, that can be measured by acres, and miles, and dollars
and cents.
The idea obtains that in the planting of new States, food,
raiment, houses, roads, money, and such like interests, are
[Handwritten notes on page]
Rapid progress of Nebr. in Material services.
Better still, Nebr. has a University
The idiom that is plenty new States, Material prosperity is all important, important.
Mr. Thomas scratched out the 9 in the year of Nebraska's statehood, and replaced it with a 7.
4 AN ADDRESS.
the all in all of effort and desire; that it is afterwards, and a
long time afterwards, that the culture of the nobler parts of
man's nature may have place in the public and social economy.
You remember that Virgil, in his mellifluous lines, pictures
the busy Phoenicians, under the direction of Dido and
of Æneas, during his amorous sojourn, building the walls and
streets and edifices of the young Carthage ; and that the
escaped from Troy, the sea and the anger of the gods, first
engaged in planting seats in Latium.
Many holding this notion thought the establishment of the
University premature : that the State was too recently settled,
for her children to have need, for years yet, of advanced
instruction ; that her small population did not contain students
in such numbers, as to warrant the large expenditures
required by it ; especially that our people were so busy, in
planting homesteads and opening farms on the prairies, and
building the dwellings and streets of the towns, that they
could not spare the youth from these occupations, to the
unpractical studies and generous culture of collegiate life.
In the minds, not of illiberal and uneducated partizans only,
but, even more, of good men, enlightened and patriotic men,
esteeming schools and learning of the highest rank, the inauguration
of this work a year ago, was impolitic, and likely
by an early failure, to indefinitely delay its ultimate success.
The foundation of Oxford and Cambridge are scarcely
traceable in the antiquities of prehistoric England; and the
histories of Yale and Harvard are almost coeval with the
colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. The heroic
founders of the glorious old English State, and of the bright
and vigorous Colonies of our own land, were to us, not an
example only, but an argument and encouragement. Casting
[Handwritten notes on page]
This has no application.
Therefore my thought that the establishment of the University was premature.
But in England & in New England the University was established at an early date and we should imitate them.
AN ADDRESS. 5
behind us all timid councils, with a bright prevision of
the future, we have planted the Commonwealth and the University
together ; together nursed their infancy ; together
henceforth they shall grow, with intertwining trunks, and
branches interlaced, each to the other lending a mutual
strength and grace, blossoming with flowers of a common
sweetness and beauty, and sheltering with a common beneficence,
a free, educated and proud citizenship.
I tender to you, Mr. Chancellor, and to your associates of
the Regents and the Faculty, my congratulations, and the
congratulations of the State, that your initial year has proved
the expediency of the early organization of the University,
and the wisdom of a liberal policy towards it. Students in
goodly number have come up hither; the severities of collegiate
studies have been eagerly sought ; the sober and thorough
curriculum has been patiently pursued. The success
of the venture has been assured, and the institution proven
a necessity of to-day.
I congratulate you, sir, that with good reason, you may
indulge in stimulating visions of future and early prosperity.
Beautiful is old age: beautiful as the soft mellow autumn
of a bright glorious summer. The good old man ; his garners
overflow with the blessings of a well spent life ; a State
whose records his civic virtues have illustrated, men whose
lives have been stimulated by his character, children whose
lives repeat his own, all press around him for the last gift of
his benediction ; in the midst of such a harvest he trustfully
awaits the end -- the most beautiful figure in all the world.
But, like Oxford and Cambridge, during the thousand
years of English story, and Yale and Harvard, amid the
[Handwritten notes on page]
Congratulate the officers on success of first year.
Don't quit see the application
Parse this sentence
(Opium)
6 AN ADDRESS.
splendid achievements of a century, this University, taking
an origin with the State, attending its progress, illustrating
its history, sharing its grand destiny of immortality, has
before it an old age that shall be rejuvenated with each
successive generation, and, in the midst of her gathered
thousands of children, and an infinitude of service, be a joy
forever.
The occasion seems fit, on which to explain why the State
should provide for her children such an institution as this.
My subject is, the duty of the State to provide the higher
instruction.
Before entering upon this large subject, two questions
demand a brief explanation; one, what is the true function
of government ; and the other, what is higher instruction.
Diverse opinions have been held as to the proper sphere
of government. One is, that it may concern itself with the
most personal affairs of the individual. It may dictate the
dogmas of his faith, and light the lurid fires of Smithfield
and the auto-da-fé. It prescribes the amusements, the
fashions, the hours and wages of work, and prices of food of
the people. It establishes monopolies, charters enterprises,
regulates trade, and subsidizes industries. It enacts a system
and course of education and enforces its blessings by penal
sanctions. It enters on its police rolls the birth of every
child, the history of every family, the character of every soul.
Like the sun, "it goeth forth from the uttermost part of the
heavens, and runneth about unto the end of it again, and
there is nothing hid from the heat thereof."
The opposite theory gives license to opinion, and liberty to
heresy. It consigns all charities to private benevolence; the
boon it offers suffering, is freedom from its intrusion. It
[Handwritten notes on page]
Why should the State establish a university
The True functions of government
2 Views
1st view.
Paternal System
Policeman System
AN ADDRESS. 7
commits industries to the laws of trade, and prices to the
regulation of demand and supply. It encourages science
only by the rewards its own triumphs win, entrusts education
to private care and supervision, and the whole social order to
the wayward, irregular, erratic operation of individual enterprise,
energy, impulse. According to its gospel, the only
attribute of government is to restrain crime; its only symbol,
a policeman.
These two theories, one, that government should do every
thing, the other that it should do nothing, are both false.
Truth lies in the via media. Some familiar illustrations will
discover it to us.
All civilized states provide courts of justice in which controversies
between individuals are determined. No other department
of government is so complex and expensive ; judges,
demanding large salaries from the State, as remunerations for
large services to its citizens ; jurors, drawn from the body of
the county, each leaving his own to attend to another's business,
twelve in number, making a vast aggregate of time and
labor, lost and not remunerated ; witnesses, likewise seized
from their own affairs, at like inconvenience and loss ; these
are parts, and only parts, of this complex system of judicial
tribunals. Court houses, sheriffs, clerks, bailiffs, writs, books,
writings, documents, and weary comings and goings and
waitings, enter into the incalculable costs of courts of justice.
All this vast machinery is set in motion, whenever an action
is brought by any individual to secure a right, personal to
himself. The expense almost always exceeds the value of the
interests involved. Lavished for his private good, he does
not defray it. His neighbors pay it, each contributing his
proportion. To provide these courts, supporting them with
[Handwritten notes on page]
1st Illustration
Both False
Illustrations
Courts of justice are at the expense of the community
An individual sets the court in motion.
Expense to public.
8 AN ADDRESS.
one man's money, while another uses them, this, as all
acknowledge, is a proper function of government.
Take another illustration. It is well settled that the State
should not prescribe opinions to her citizens. You may
believe what you will upon religious subject; that beneath
the forms or subsisting with the Bread and Wine, in the
Holy Eucharist, is the veritable Body and Blood of the Lord,
or that the Sacrament is a mere memorial of His death; that
Jesus was the Son of God, or an imposter; that there is, or
there is not a God. You may teach any belief in public, or
in private, by speech, by book, by newspaper. You may
organize your disciples, and project your dogmas upon society
by the intense force of associated effort.
And so too of political opinion. In this republic, advocacy
of an empire is permissible, and has in fact been permitted.
Under this government of laws, Trades-Unions, Crispans,
Internationals, Communists, Orangemen, remain unsuppressed
by judicial process. There is no opinion, however,
noxious, of which the State may lay hold. To regulate opinion,
is not within the legitimate sphere of government.
Again. Follow the lady who goes from her home of safety
and luxury, down the crowded street, through the reeking
alley, into the lazar house, bearing in her hands the corn and
oil and wine, beating in her heart a sweet sympathy to the
disease and despair that is gathered there. Communities of
Sisters animated by the same spirit, carry the ministries of an
ineffable beneficence to the woes of this poor broken humanity.
And yet, beyond the reach of all such services, how
many are they cries unheard, the wants unblessed, the misery
unrelieved, the sin unabsolved. And so you may have
St. Luke's Hospitals, but you must also have Blackwell's
Island. You may bless Mercy Hospitals, but the State must
AN ADDRESS. 9
build Asylums. Charities are partly within, and partly without,
the sovereign of the State.
How to harmonize the diversities of these three examples
is the question.
Trace the course of an action at law, to the trial, and to the
judgment, and thence to its ultimate issues. The parties
come into Court. Here is a trial. Here are the parties, -
plaintiff and defendant: no others. The forms, processes,
proceedings of the machinery of the law are put in operation
for them, and them alone. They are heard; all others are
silent. In due time, the Court decides the difference between
them, in favor of one and against the other. The judgment
is written up; the satisfaction is made; the record is closed;
there is the end. The dispute involved $100 or $1000; not
more: the expense of determining it was $100 or $1000; not
less. The parties did not pay it -- the Public, that is, you and
them. The State, the august Sovereign of us all, with its
vast retinue of officers and lavish expenditure of funds, attends
upon these private parties, to do their private service.
Where is the justice of taking one man's property and giving
it to another? Here, is deserved that climax of Cicero's accusations
against Cataline, profusus alieni, lavish of others'
goods.
But does entry of satisfaction close the record? Is there
the end? For those parties it is; but for society, for all
other involved in the same dispute, it is not the end. In
that action, a rule of law was evolved and declared, that
henceforth shall be a rule of law to all men everywhere. It
becomes strengthened by opinion, by manners, by use, by
the awful "hoar of age." Rules thus evolved, ascertained.
10 AN ADDRESS.
declared, form the whole body of law, and all society proceeds
upon them. When men trade, or take usury, or sail
ships, or plant schools, or rear churches, or endow charities,
they write those rules in their bonds, their wills, their character
parties, their deeds of trust. Thus the decision of one
cause, decides all others like it. Thus all suits are brought
on behalf of the plaintiff and all others similarly situated.
The fiction of the admiralty is a fact: all the world are parties
to every action.
Do you say you have no need of courts of justice? You
may never enter them; and yet, day by day, they sit in
judgment on your dearest interests, and always, by their
protection, hedge you in on every side. Do you say
that in paying for their support from funds collected in part
from you, the State takes your money and gives it to another?
You succeed to your ancestor's estate, compel payment
of your notes, enjoy the inviolable sacredness of your good
name, not indeed by judgments to which you are nominal
partie, but by sanctions which constrain the observance of
the obedient, as well as punish the faults of the transgressor.
The State does not take your money and give it to another;
it is guiltless of the Catilinarian crime, profusus alieni.
By a simple analysis of this familiar example, three
circumstances may be deduced. First those two litigants were
unable to frame a rule by which to adjudge their adverse
claims of right: second, by this service they were personally
benefited: thirdly, this service was a beneficence, not to
them only, but to the whole body of the citizens.
But, coming to our second example of freedom of opinion,
we are met by a contradiction. Persecution for opinion's
sake, has always justified itself by stigmatizing the errors it
aims at, as inimical to social order. The accusation against.
AN ADDRESS. 11
Socrates, was that he introduced new divinities and corrupted
the youth. The accusation which the High Priest wished set
up on the cross was, "He said, I am the King of the Jews."
The mild and philosophic Locke, in his letter on Toleration
says, that "no opinion, contrary to human society," with which
he classes the beliefs of the Papist and the Athiest , "are to
be tolerated by the civil magistrate." And the mischief
of political opinions inimical to the order of the State, is
even more apparent. So that liberty of thought and speech,
seems not to harmonize with the third circumstance, educed
from our first example. But, in truth, social order is not assured
by persecution of erroneous opinions. The maintenance
undisturbed of prevailing, of even correct opinions, is not an
unmixed good. The extirpation of adverse, even heretical
opinion by fire and sword, by social ostracism, is an unmixed
evil. It makes a desert and calls it peace. The enthusiasm
of an intellect, all aglow with exhilarating activity, may sometimes
overleap the just bounds of reverent thought, but even
that is better than a mental development cramped, reason
cowed, faith dead. Falsehood cannot long hold a place in the
immortal soul. In the midst of all his waywardness, man is a
seeker after truth; and when he finds it, he calls in his friends
and his neighbors, to rejoice with him that the lost is found.
Thus, it is with no contracted observation, but in a philosophy
enlarged by experience, that the test is to be applied.
And our third example lends further confirmation to our
theory. The domain of charity is shared by the public
assistance and private benevolence. We cannot forego the
stimulating example of the followers of Him who went about
doing good. Nor can suffering and want and despair in this
world, afford to lose the ministries of beneficent sympathy.
12 AN ADDRESS.
But, on the other hand, Society, for its own sake, cannot
leave unwashed the filth, unfed the hunger, undressed the
wounds, unhealed the disease, unblessed the misery, that
wallows, and multiplies, and sins, and conspires in the
festering centres of population.
And thus the State only supplements the works of the
citizen and is not aggressive; but, leaving to him whatever is
within his competency, only takes up the task where he is
unequal to it, and carries on the service, until the common
wants are all supplied. But it cannot be too rigidly insisted
upon, that these three conditions should all consist together,
in every exercise of the State authority. The individual
must be unable to achieve the benefit, by his unaided efforts.
It is intolerable for the State to aid an individual enterprise,
when individual effort is able, or, left alone, can become able,
to achieve success. It paralizes its own beneficiary: worse
still, by the mere process of dispensing the subsidy, the power,
patronage, influence of the State is amplified to dangerous
proportions. And, on the other hand, the interference of the
State must be serviceable to the individual. Else he is laid
under contribution beyond his just proportion of the public
burden. And more than all, the whole body of citizens must
be sharers in the benefit, or the subsidy, to the full extent of
it, is a burden upon other interests equally deserving, and the
first axiom of liberty is violated, that the property of one
citizen cannot be taken from him and given to another. The
whole history of liberty illustrates and exemplifies these three
conditions of public interference with private interests.
It remains now to explain what is the higher instruction.
Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, form the elements.
AN ADDRESS. 13
of education. They contain potentially all learning; without
them, no achievement in letters is possible. Reading, beginning
with the spelling out of syllables, going through the
delightful conceits of Mother Goose, the sing-song of first,
second and successive readers, reaches around all languages,
dead and living, that play and sparkle in the effervescence of
lyric song, stride with the lofty step of epic and tragedy, and
glow red hot with the fervid passion of patriotic eloquence.
The science of numbers, starting with addition, leads the child
step by step, by a continuous path, through the problems of
Algebra and the demonstrations of Geometry to their developments
in the Calculus, until by the processes thus learned,
he calculates the magnitudes, traces the ellipses, foretells the
appearing of the stars. Geography, from the outline of the
surface and grand divisions of our earth, on the one hand
goes on to tell of its geology and chemistry, by which it was
crystalized and developed, and the engineering by which its
face has been transformed; and, on the other hand, leads
through the grand, sad, shifting scenes of history, whose
endless tale is, of races chasing each other across its face,
nations rising and falling, and civilizations blossoming in
glory and fading in decay. All learning is at unity with
itself.
Schools below the college, do no profess to teach much
more than the elements of learning. They carry one only a
few steps on in the endless pathway of scholars. In his
Greek and Latin, with the same painful process by which he
learned to read, the pupil spells out his lesson, word by word
and sentence by sentence. Algebra bounds his mathematics,
and a brief chronology is the extent of his history.
But his entrance into college is a point in his progress.
14 AN ADDRESS.
When fit to enter there, he has mastered the elements of the
classics, and their beauties begin to open before him. He now
delights in the vivid picturings of the Homeric verse, ascends
to the sublimity of the tragedy of Eschylus, and floats upon
the clear placid stream of Ciceronian philosophy. In painfulness
and weariness, he has achieved the elements of the
illimitable science of numbers; henceforth he enjoys and is
absorbed in the severe processes of mathematics, and is
thence, by evenly advancing steps, conducted ever onward,
until science, in her loftiest moods, taxes his exhilarated and
expanding mind. Study has now become its own exceeding
great reward.
The elementary schools fit the youth for business. It
teaches the processes by which the farmer keeps his accounts
with his hands, the banker calculates his cent per cent, the
merchant traces the courses of trade and foresees the rise
and fall of prices. He is fitted also to learn by himself the
duties of free citizenship, and meet the demands of intelligent
society.
But in the higher institution, he pursues processes too
severe for daily use; studies science in her developments
beyond any practical applications; acquires learning too recondite,
to find play in the collisions of affairs. He has
learned no maxim for making money, nor any device for getting
on in the world. He is no better fitted at his graduation
hence, than at his entrance here, to make a successful
farmer, merchant or banker. In fact his college education
seems to have unfitted him for life---its studies, so impractical,
seem to disqualify him for business. He who has gone
through the curriculum of the college, with a devoted, enthusiastic
love of its studies, at first finds the duties of common
AN ADDRESS. 15
life irksome, and its pursuits uncongenial. His entrance upon
active life give him a shock, like a plunge into a cold bath.
Higher instruction is that which is advanced, beyond the
elements of education to those departments of learning which
are not practical use in daily affairs.
The reason generally assigned, why the State should teach
every child in the land, the elements of learning, is that poverty
and crime are thus forestalled. The public safety justices
the support, at the public expense, of the school, and the
prison, on the same grounds. I have to assign reasons for the
State, in like manner, furnishing her children this higher and
impractical learning.
I might well mention technical and professional education
as branches of higher instruction, for it is only when the college
widens its appliances and means, so as to compass them
all, that it deserves the highest name of University. But
these subjects are so obviously and directly practical, that
their introduction into the argument, would not strengthen
it, but rather distract the attention from the matter which
we have, more immediately in hand.
So, too, a plea for this University, when science in her
loftiest moods is cultivated, might be supported in another
direction. How incredibly civilization has been advanced
by recent discoveries and inventions, the history of the revolutions,
which the steam engine and the electric telegraph, and
theories of social liberty, have marked in affairs bear witness.
And yet Watt, Morse, Mill and Spencer have wrought
out their achievements, by the most hidden processes of
physical and social nature and few could attain to the altitudes
of these savans and publicists. Exceptional characters
and exceptional services have been aided by schools like this,
16 AN ADDRESS.
and a plea on that ground is legitimate. But my claim is
not in behalf of science and her savans, but of every child of
the State, who will take advantage of educational facilities
open to all. My appeal is not to conspicuous services and
rewards, but to the general advantage to society, of average
men trained by what I have shown to be higher instruction.
The view is thus narrowed, and the objects to which it is
directed are not of the popular aspect. It is not exaggerated
by the brilliant discoveries by which modern civilization has
been illuminated. It is gratified only by the visions of practical
usefulness which a serviceable science has opened out.
In the first place, it is the duty of the State to provide the
higher instruction, because the student is unable to provide
it for himself.
It is true that the land is thickly strewn with Colleges and
Universities, which are not supported by the State. Founded
by private munificence, the splendid facilities which
they afford, are open to those only, who are able to pay for
them. Their doors are closed upon the poverty of the less
fortunate child. The number of this class is very large; and
for it, the State, in which all men are equal, in whose wise
policy is a parental tenderness for misfortune, must make
ample provision.
Sometimes, one appears from this class, upon whom nature
has bestowed such an affluence of gifts, that, without treading
the toilsome part of the schools, he can, unaided, attain to the
highest achievements. You have not forgotten the story of
him, born in the humblest station, who, a rail-splitter, a
raftsman, without early education, unaided by any adventitious
circumstances, became the counsel, whose advocacy cast
a spell upon jurors, and whose erudition and resistless logic
constrained the decisions of courts; a statesman of intuitive
AN ADDRESS. 17
wisdome, guide of his people in their trial, lost as their salvation
drew near, buried now forever in their hearts, the weird,
strange, matchless man, whose is the name of this capital city,
this University town.
But it is not for exceptional cases that rules are made, nor
for the genius that schools are established. Wise provision
is made for the average intellect. Whatever of training Lincoln
may forego, common men must travel the common road,
that, hard, dusty, toilsome, only leads to the grand goal.
That way the State must open, or, to almost all, it will be
closed forever.
And, thus, obviously, the first condition upon which State
aid may be granted to the individual, is fulfilled: it is aid to
that, which, alone he cannot attain; demanding, as it does,
years of seclusion, years of silent study of science and letters,
in developments too high for pecuniary rewards; demanding,
too, the teachings of the most learned professors,
the reading of the largest libraries, the illustrations of
the most expensive apparatus. Advanced instruction must,
to the mass of scholars, be not a commodity, purchased at a
price, but a gift of a magnificent benefactor. And to the recipients
of that gift, such a benefactor is the State.
And, secondly, such instruction contributes to the well
being of the scholar. I know that too many young men are
drawn from the country to the town, from the field and
ship to the office and the counter, from a livelihood earned
by the hand, to a livelihood gained by the wits. They think
the dainty dignity of good clothes and white hands, the essence
of gentle breeding, and yield themselves up to the
enervating amusements of an aimless life. The pretentious
worthlessness of commercial colleges, affords a fit nurture for
18 AN ADDRESS.
these poor souls. The instruction of schools like this, is too
earnest, severe, conscientious, for them. The weak man is
crushed out here; and this is an argument in favor of, and
not against, the higher instruction.
I go yet farther, and concede that many may be educated
here whose fit place is not in the professions; that these
boundless prairies have need of them in the great work of
redemption from nature, to the culture of the farm; and
that mechanism, in numberless applications to labor, claims
them for the labor of the shop. And yet, to such as these,
the higher instruction is not profitless. Let a young man
who has graduated from college, turn aside from the broad,
crowded, paved street, whose sign-board points the "short
road to wealth," to the narrow, rugged, obscure path which
runs out upon the virgin soil. Here let him make his homestead,
get of his sod corn and potatoes his first year's support,
build his cabin, with the increase of successive years
buy horses, cattle, machinery, go on, year by year, gaining
little by little, until his quarter section becomes a farm, and
the grain, the trees, the fruits, the flowers, memories, affections,
fruitions, bless it, a home; and all the work of his
hands, and his head, and his heart. Such a man's life, laborious,
contented, simple, is worth living. When crowned
with the sanctities of age, it will receive the homage of
success.
But it is unjust to the subject to stop here. Professional
men have especial need of the higher instruction. What I
have said of the numbers of young men leaving the country
for the town, is true of the rush into the professions. Young
men forget that it is not their occupation, but their faithfulness
to its duties, which is honorable; that success, service,
AN ADDRESS. 19
usefulness, in an humble business, is better than failure in
one to whose responsibilities they are unequal. It is better
to be a good stage driver than a poor lawyer; a good wood
sawyer than a quack doctor.
And yet there is wide room in any one of the professions
for strong, earnest, true men. Society has urgent need of
such at all time. I concede, again, that some men, by their
natural vigor, are able to acquire the higher education without
such aids. But that does not show that such training is
not needed. I will even go farther, and admit that there are
men in each of the professions of such aptitudes, that
they forgo such education altogether, and yet succeed.
These are the most admirable men. The slow progress
of the plodder, who must toil by day and by night,
through long years, to gain the heights to which such men
mount, is not attractive; but it is given to only a few, a very
few, to be any thing but plodders. As before said, it is not
for the exceptional character, but for the many, for these
plodders, that schools like this are to be provided.
But the necessity of this thorough, full, long, preparation for
a profession, appears upon a consideration of the unlimited
extent of the science on which it is founded. Look at the
Law. Whence is that science derived? Not from the legislature;
its statutes are contained in a single volume. The
vast body of the law is scarcely contained in the libraries of
thousands and thousands of volumes. The legislature has
barely touched a few points, generally modifying details, processes,
procedures; never transforming the great body of
rights and remedies. The whole scope and utmost pretension
of statutes is limited. The vast, the boundless jurisprudence
which govern affairs, is as varied as the objects of
20 AN ADDRESS.
human desire, as multiform as the interests of society. It
shelters the tenderest relation; it grasps the most heinous
crime. It protects the infant a day old; it embraces the
State. No legislature is powerful, or subtle, or good enough,
to conceive or define or adjust it. And no mind, endowed
with common gifts, and untrained by the highest culture,
can master it.
Nor is this science boundless and complex only. It is historical.
Wrought out, as I have already sown, in numberless
exigencies, some of its rules may be traced above
the pyramids, to the inspired wisdom of the primeval East;
many to the exact and equitable principles, which in the
heat and turmoil of Roman life, were evolved by judgments
of the Pretors; some to the teeming birth-time of modern
life and thought-- the Middle Age; others to the hot contests
of modern revolutions. It must be known to its professors
in the remote sources of its multiplied topics, the long progress
of its infinite developments. Severed from its origin,
and detached from its relations, any one of its rules is empirical.
Any man can learn it by rote, can apply it in simple
affairs, may sometimes apply it correctly, even in complex
affairs. But the science, nothing short of the mastery of
which will satisfy the true lawyer, demands, in order to its
entire comprehension, a mind, trained, stored, developed, as
only great schools like this can train, store, develope, make
minds, characters, men.
And what is true of the law is equally true of medicine and
theology: I need not stop to explain. Thus it appears that
the well-being of the scholar demands the higher instruction.
I adverted to the fact, testified to by every graduate's experience,
that the young man who has pursued the collegiate
AN ADDRESS. 21
collegiate course, with devotion, finds this work-a-day world
common place and uncongenial. It is hard to come
down to the substance of things. And yet, the same resolution
which mastered hard lessons in school, will master
the harder ones of the world. The unrealities of bookish
notions and scholastic ways of thinking, soon wear away in
the friction of affairs, and there will remain the cultured,
vigilant, many-sided mind, that the long, severe, impractical
curriculum of classics and mathematics alone can give. I
make no account of the temporary trial, severe though it be,
of the ingenuous young spirit, passing from the calm seclusion
of the college into the stir of business, not because he
has not my sympathy, but because it is only one of the series
of processes, by which is developed A MAN. He may never
use a single fact, a single process, a single word, learned
here. Very likely he will not; for, as already shown, the
studies pursued here are utterly unpractical; and yet, if he
go hence, such a character as it is the business of this College
to make, then, though he straightway forget all scholastic
learning, he will bless the State as his benefactor.
And, thirdly, the condition, that the aid rendered to the
individual shall profit the State, is also fulfilled. It may
be very advantageous to the youth, who cannot purchase
the higher education, to have others give it to him. But
it is not a father, bound by the ties of nature to help
him, it is not connections, who may draw profit in return
for their assistance, but strangers ignorant even of his
existence, who make the gift. You must justify the compulsion
by which it is exacted of one for another. The
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boy, living in Dakota, comes here to be taught-latin,
greek, and mathematics, and the tax-payer living in Otoe
or Richardson, pays the expense. If the advantage is his
alone, the University tax is only legalized embezzlement;
all the more demoralizing to the public conscience, because
perpetrated by the State. That the advantage is not his
alone, that he makes a full return for this education must be
show, or it is unjustified. Let me put a very simple example,
to show that such a return is made.
No questions occupy and perplex the Courts of this State,
more than those arising upon statutes. The numbers of acts
passed by any legislature is not large, nor their subjects or
provisions complex; and yet, their ambiguities are almost infinite
and insoluble. Placing the tablets on which his laws
were inscribed, so high that the people could not read them,
was deemed inhuman cruelty in the Roman King. But it
is a tyranny no less intolerable, to write them in words
not clear to those who owe them obedience. That they are
vernacular is no advantage, if they are obscure. They might
as well be beyond the vision of the people, as to be unintelligible.
The clear expression of a provision of law seems a
matter easy enough. In truth, it is both difficult and rare.
It is only that close, exact, accurate habit of thought and
expression, which the study of the latin and greek and
mathematics, of the College course give, that will enable
any man to frame a statute, consistent provisions, well in
moulded sections, correct sentences, and apt language. And
it is no money wasted by the State, in giving her children
the education which secures this ability, and renders it general
among her citizens. The citizen who seeks to inform
himself in respect of his rights, opens the volume of the statutes,
reads the provisions applicable thereto, and is hope-
AN ADDRESS. 23
[hope]lessly perplexed by the obscurity of their language; what
would he not give if those rights were there clearly defined,
so that he could know what they are? The taxes which he
pays, for the education of those who are to make the laws,
will purchase for him the legislation, by which his duties
as a citizen, and rights as a man, are perspicuously defined.
A very simple reference to the many instances of the application
of science to the pursuits of every-day life discloses
the same fact. Agriculture affords an illustration. The
farmer has learned certain emperical facts; as, that there
should be a succession of crops, that particular fertilizers are
suitable for particular plants, that certain kinds of food and
in certain mixtures, are best for animals; and, by judiciously
acting on them, his annual returns are increased. But let
the chemist be informed what are the peculiarities of a farm,
its soil, its water, its surface- with a strange prescience, he
will tell its owner what manures are adapted to it, and how
easiest to get or make them, and the farmer will have proof
in better crops of the vlaue of higher education. The physiologist
knows that the production of animal heat implies
waste of substance. From this he deduces the fact that
preventing a loss of heat saves extra food; and he explains
to the farmer, that, if he will keep his cattle warm he will
save fodder. So, an increased balance in the bank book of
this farmer, will testify to him that the University tax is a
good investment. These are but examples of an infinite
multitude of facts. They are so specific, that they seem to
more than prove the service of educated men generally to
society. But take a larger view, and an illustration drawn
from your own history.
Thomas Hare, an English scholar, gave himself to the
study of social problems. He heard the common boast, that
24 AN ADDRESS.
England has achieved perfect freedom. In the privacy of his
library, he subjected that boast to a critical analysis. He
conducted the inquiry, with the exhaustless patience of a
philosopher, and an uncompromising love of the truth.
He sets out in the process, with the maxim that true liberty
awards to each citizen his due share in the government.
From this maxim, he deduces the principle, that when there
is such number of citizens united together, as to form a fraction
of the whole body, it is entitled to the proportion of
influence in the government, that it bares to other parties;
that in the denial of this equality of all, in the exclusion from
public affairs of this fraction, however small it be, and conspicuously
when it falls but little below one half of the whole,
and in conferring upon another fraction, however large, the
entire conduct of the government, abstract, and inalienable
rights are most ruthlessly violated, and over the State is
swayed a sceptre as arrogant and despotic as that of a Tudor
King. And thus in the actual system of representation in free
England, he discovered a tyranny all the more odious, because
exercised by a multitude; all the more refined, because its
victims were unconscious of it. So far you have the work of
the philosopher. Had the history of this idea stopped here,
it would have been utterly barren of fruit. But statesmen
seized it. Mill in the British Parliament, Buckalew in the
United States Senate, and others in pamphlets and articles,
explained, amplified, applied it. In our Constitutional Convention,
a man, educated in advanced learning, adopted this
principle of liberty from the philosophers and publicists, who
had gone before him, devoted himself to its advocacy, and,
at last, secured its adoption into the Constitution. The organization
of the Supreme Court was based on it. Had the
instrument been adopted by the people, a Court would have
AN ADDRESS. 25
been provided of independence of character, of public esteem
far higher, worthier and more useful, than the usual method
secure. There is a service of an educated man to the State.
The idea of the philosopher, intangible, remote, unpractical,
becomes a fact, tangible, useful, beneficent, embodied in the
institutions of the people. There you see Popular Liberty
developed by an educated lawyer, teaching a philosophic
problem.
There are not solitary instances of the services, which
educated man render to the body of the citizens. Look at
any article of dress by which the person of one of you is
covered and adorned. The colors by which it is variegated
and adapted to please the eye: the texture, even more varied,
in which it is woven so as to retain or conduct the heat of
the body: the combinations of material, woolen, cotton, linen,
silk, so that grace and comfort are perfectly united: trace
any one of these elements -- color, texture, combination of
material -- to its origin, and you will arrive at the chemist,
the physiologist, inventor, discoverer, the scholar. The railroad
which to-day brought me from a distant city to your
town, its lines, its curves, its bridges, culverts, viaducts, its
cuttings and embankments and stations, the rail, engine and
service of men, forces, mechanism, from first to last, is the
work of mathematics: mathematics in involved processes, in
difficult applications, in the highest, most severe, recondite
calculations: mathematics taught here, and only applied
there. Look at that signal service, stretching up and down
the coasts and over the plains and mountains of the land;
marking the motions in the womb of the elements; following
the currents and counter currents of the trackless winds; advertising
the coming of the storm, the heat, the cold; so that,
26 AN ADDRESS.
the data being collected, the problem will some day be
worked out, by which the captain will sail his ship, and the
farmer will sow and reap and gather his harvests-- scholars
conduct that service, and are working out that problem, and
will one day give it to the world.
When, in the war of the rebellion, the army--fighting,
marching, guarding, digging and building, a machine of
hard, manual, daily work-- needed a new code of regulations,
the President entrusted its construction, not to the officers
in the field, but to FRANCIS LIEBUR; and that clear, concise,
beautiful work, which governed our armies in the war, added
a new chapter to international law, and has largely influenced
public opinion the world over, is the service of a professor
in Columbia College. Even more beneficial than this,
is that emancipation of all industries and trade from the monopolies,
subsidies and inhibitions of Elizabethan and anteelizabethean
times, which, in the closet, and the professor's
chair, and books of size, learning, depth, beyond the popular
capacity, has been wrought out by Say and Adam Smith and
Stuart Mill. Yes, and that other emancipation, whose consummation
has blessed our day, of a race, and of a nation,
from whose constitution has been erased the very word slavery,
and in its place written its first declaration, that all men
are created equal; this sublime work was inaugurated in a
little upper chamber in Boston, by a number of mere scholars,
among whom presided the genies of WM. LLOYD GARRISON,
and CHARLES SUMNER.
From the altitudes of such teachers, all the way down to
the level of mediocrity, advanced learning has served purely
material and every-day interests, in ways infinite in variety,
and in measures inestimable in value.
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And besides these services, capable of specifics mention,
there is another, more general, and not the less direct, because
intangible. I mean the impulse, which they give to the popular
life by communicating new truths; truths, which
because they are novel, stimulate and excite and vivify the
common mind. A great principle is wrought ought by the
philosopher in the solitudes of his studies: the law of gravitation
by Newton, the cogito ergo sum of Des Cartes. It
must be brought forth to the common gaze, by educated
men. Without their ministry, it is merely,
A motion telling in the gloom,
The spirit of the years to come,
Struggling to mix itself with life.
Here is their office. And what then happens? The new
thought may be of the class, that is no way helps men till
the earth, sail ships, or weave fabrics; it may be too high,
impalpable, unpractical for that. But, let the body of the
people apprehend it; there is a new awakening. At first,
the limbs stretch forth, along the nerves runs the tingle of a
new sensation, the mind thrills with a new aspiration, the
whole social organism stands forth, animate with the stimulus
of a new life. A new revelation let down from above,
it expands, excites, impels, vitalizes the whole being, in a
wondrous way. It is the educated man, standing between
the philosopher and the people, by whome this new idea is
communicated to the mass. It is by this process, ever going
on in progressing societies, that the popular life is fed.
Conceive a people, possessed of the elements of learning
ever so full, accurate and widely diffused; but its progress
suddenly arrested. Thereafter, it only repeats what it has
done before-- the same process, with the same degree of
28 AN ADDRESS.
skill. But work is no longer intelligent or exhilarating.
Repetition renders it mechanical. Routine paralizes invention.
Even the aspiration, desire, idea of improvement has
died out. This torpor, where did its slumber begin?
China is an example; China with her TA TSING LUE LEE,
and Confucious. But her civilization is so remote from ours,
that it is hard to apprehend it. France at one era furnishes
an illustration. During the administration of Richelieu and
Mazarin, an immense impulse was given to the highest
branches of knowledge. It was checked at the accession of
Louis XIV, and was spent by the middle of his reign.
Des Cartes, Pascal, Fermant, Gassendi and Mersenue were
dead. No successors sat in their seats. Racine and Corneille
no longer filled the imagination, with the awful pictures
of their tragedies. Painting with her Poussin, Architecture
with her Perrault, Sculpture with her Puget, Music with her
Lulli, ceased to fill the eye and ear with their great creations.
In other countries, during that era, vast progress was made
in science and the arts. Newton lived then. But France
was fallen so low, that the wonderful discoveries in other
lands, which changed the face of all knowledge, were utterly
neglected.
Turn now to another field-- that of affairs, and mark the
coincidence. With this decline of the higher knowledge,
mark the decline of practical utility and useful learning. All
mechanism, the least complicated, was without an inventor, or
even a contriver. Even tools of industry, not of the simplest
structure, were beyond the skill of the native workman. Improvements
in machinery were few and insignificant. And
in government all was disorder, rapacity and servility.
Abroad, there was nothing but disaster; at home, a discontented
AN ADDRESS. 29
tented people and a beggared exchequer. The spirit of that
fair land lay prostrate. The misery and degradation of the
country followed close upon the decline of the national intellect;
the decay of knowledge had its issue in the depression
of the country. These facts ran along together, and are
correlated; the one is the offspring of the other.
There, you see what a country is, without the culture for
which I plead.
Two generations live and suffered under this stupor. The
next shows the converse of the process. A wondrous race
of educated men sprang up, who, unable to draw sustenance
from the exhausted soil of their own land, sought nourishment
in England. Voltaire enamored of the philosophy of
Newton, transplanted it to France. Montesquieu learned
himself, and then taught to Frenchmen, the maxims and
institutions of English liberty. Bacon, Adam Smith, Hume,
Shaftesbury, Lock, all the great English Philosophers were
introduced into this exhausted land; and their new, wondrous,
stimulating discoveries, strangely excited the whole
national life. Filtering down through the several ranks of
intelligence, it reached, permeated, exhilarated, inspired, and
at last crazed the whole mass. At first, there went up to
heaven that cry of despair of the brave, heroic, Greek, in the
Homeric epic, contending under a cloud of darkness, against
adverse fate: "Give us but light, and Ajax asks nor more."
At last that cry was answered by the thunder, that cloud
riven by the lightning, of the Revolution.
Here you see the potency, almost the omni potency, of
Philosophy. You see, too, the place in the social organism
of the educated man. I submit to you, that he repays the
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State a hundred fold, all its expenses in providing the higher
instruction.
Himself a nobler man for the culture of a wide learning,
from him goes forth the aroma of a beneficent influence:
Himself inspired by the lofty sentiments of the savans of all
time, he inspires others with the spirit of their philosophy:
Himself enlightened by the brightness of their renovating
truths, he reflects their radiance upon the multitudes all
about him. Surely, surely, the State is blessed in such children.
Each year, the class of graduates will go from here; small
at first, but growing larger and larger, until, numbered by
hundreds, they shall scatter among the towns and villages,
making their homes in the fields and finding their work in
the shops, and shall impress upon the policies of the State,
and all the institutions of society, the characters which shall
here be moulded. Sending hence this stream of educated
young men, which shall flow ever and everywhere, and fertilize
all the land, this University will repay the State its
cost, beyond all account in dollars and cents, and enrich the
people with an infinitude of services.
Progress of Nebr. in material development.
We have a university at early period in our history-
The idea that in planting a new State material
interests are all that need development.
This caused many to think the University too
soon established.
But in England and New England the universities
were established early. We should imitate.
Congratulate faculty on success of first
year.
On this occasion it is proper to explain
why the state should establish a
university at public expense.
But first examine true function of
government
1st Paternal System.
2nd Policeman System.
Both false
Illustrations
1st Courts of justice are at
public expense. All admit
this to be proper function of government
2nd Liberty of Opinion - to regulate
opinion not a proper function
3rd Charity is partly proper and partly
improper
Harmonize the diversities of these
thru illustrations.
Take 1st illustrations. Action at law
carried on at public expense. this
is not for the benefit of individual
only; the public are benefited.
From an analysis of this illustration
it will be seen that three conditions
must coexist to justify the state in
expanding public money to wit
1st Individual must be moable to obtain the
benefit by his own efforts.
2nd the interference of the state must
benefit the individual
3rd he public must be sharers
in the benefits
In 2nd illustration Liberty of conscience
this 1st & 2nd conditions exist the 3rd seems
not to exist- Locke quote to show that is
does not exist- Locke is wrong and
the 3rd condition really exists here also.
In 3rd ilustration all three conditions exist
but 1st only partially
Insist that whenever public money is used
all three conditions must coexist, and
show why
What is higher education?
What are the elements of education?
The common schools teach these
elements.
The College goes beyond this.
The common schools fit for business only
The reasons why the state establishes Town Schools
Now why establish universities
Civilization is advanced by educated men, by
great men, but how [abt] average men.
1st condition exists - Show how
2nd Condition exists- Show how
benefit to professional men and
also to unprofessional
benefits to lawyers & e.
3rd Condition exists- show how the
public are benefitted- How
1- Enable legislators to draft statutes.
2- Benefit to agriculture by chemistry
physiology
3- Examples of men who have benefitted
[illegible] & how- [illegible] by minority representation.
Clothing - Railroads - Signal service.
Liebur - Say - Smith
Garnison - Summer - Newton
Des Corstes
Educated men prevent torpidity
of the people. China is torpidity,
and France was for a time.
Where this takes place practical knowledge
dies also.
In France 2 generations even torpid
then next generation lighted the torch in England
and again show light.
All this done by university education