The Courier-Review.
15
I have a very tender feeling for all the state universities in our country. I love everybody. We are required to, you know. In some cases we do it because we must, but there is no compulsion about this matter of state universities, because we all represent a common idea. We represent the idea that the state will provide for her sons and daughters the best education it is possible to offer. We have no jealousy one for another. I do not feel a bit jealous today, nor does our brother from the University of Iowa, because Kansas has completed this library building, for it is not possible for one of these state universities to get a lift from outside, and go up higher and get more influential without all the others feeling it directly or indirectly. Example is powerful; state pride is powerful. Because Kansas has been successful in building up her university, Minnesota and Iowa are going to do something soon, or if they had been the first to take the step upward, Kansas would not have been long in following.
I want to call attention to another thing. The old institutions like Yale, Harvard, and I may say Ann Arbor, take pride in showing how wide their institution is, and how the students come from all over the country and from all over the world. I remember when I was an under-graduate I used to feel that Yale was a national institution, because we had students from the North, South and West. But when I find that the most of the students in our University come from the state of Minnesota, I am glad, not that there are not many students from the outside, but that there are so many from inside; glad that the University is doing what it is wanted to do: paying back every dollar invested. Paying it back not with five or six percent interest, but in the unlimited capabilities, in the increased power and intellectual advancement of the sons and daughters of the state trained in the University. I am glad to see in this University that so many of the students are from the state which it represents.
Now education is very different from what it used to be. The Yale college library was in the third story of the chapel. It was opened
only upon certain days and certain hours, for those few inquiring minds who wanted something not provided by the curriculum. Whoever got a book, drew it out and took it home to read it. A friend of mine told of his experience in one of the colleges in the state of New York. The library was only opened two days in the week for the purpose of giving out books. But all that has passed away. The library is the heart of the university. The library is to the student in history, science, philosophy, to say nothing of the other branches of learning, what the laboratory is to the student of chemistry. One great change in the education of today is that we do not put a man up on the platform to tell the student how to do a thing, but we pull the boy up and make him tell how to do it. The difference between the new system and the old is that now the boy knows something and in the old he thought he knew something. Now I am too old a man to speak lightly of the old education. It seems to me that the real difference between the new and the old education is that the new gives more knowledge and the old more power. I am inclined to think that I am right. But the question arises, What is power? If power means that capacity which was expressed by Daniel Webster in his reply to Hayne, I have no doubt that the old training was more conducive to its production than the new. The boy with a microscope to his eye looking at bugs and insects, to see how they grow and how they are likely to stop growing, and what the effect on the community at large would be if they were all let loose, is in a fair way to know something of value to the world, and be an active man, but you do not expect him to get upon the platform and speak like a Webster.
Is Webster greater than Edison? Is the contribution of Webster to the human race greater than that of Thomas Edison? What of the wonderous mechanism which, allied to the electricity which Edison generates for the propulsion of the human body to places where it wants to go? I think I shall come to the conclusion that in this age of wonders, when everybody is uncertain whether things are going to last after