Government by influence, and other addresses

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I. Government Bt Influence 1

II. The Self-respect of Cities 25

II

An Address delivered at the Commencement Exercises of the University of Cincinnati, June 1, 1907. Published in the University of Cincinnati Record, June, 1907.

II

THERE is a noticeable difference in the way the men of different cities speak of the cities to which they belong. Each city, large or small, seems to be represented in a certain prevalent tone, of pride or disparagement, in which its citizens refer to their citizenship. And this tone comes in time to be so deep-seated and habitual that it can be altered only with the greatest difficulty.

It is good for any city and good for its people that it should be an object of their respect and pride. When Paul asked to be heard by the Chief Captain at Jerusalem, he said, *'I am a man which am a Jew of Tarsus, ... a citizen of no mean city." The words won for him his hearing, and they have reflected honor on the city of Tarsus through all the Christian centuries.

We Americans are ready to speak with familiar reproach of the things that lie nearest to us. On the whole, it is well that this disposition should take its course, for it guards us against a too easy complacency. There is something wanting in any society that cannot stand a fair amount of criticism and even ridicule from those who know it best. Let criticism, even of the gargoyle-cartoon variety, have its way. Let it tap along our social engineries till the cracks and hollow places are revealed. But if our patriotism comes near enough home to touch the immediate community in which we dwell, we shall make the main note of our speech concerning the place of our abode a note of confidence and hope and pride.

For the most part, we find our people ready enough to plume themselves on the bigness of their cities, and on anything, indeed, that can be expressed in the superlative degree. That is our "Hyperbole of praise comparative." But I think we may observe among men of positive strength a certain reticence in the use of adjectives of comparison. Things can be compared only by being thrown into the same class. And for the more important things in the world such classification is pretty sure to obscure some of the characters which thoughtful men regard as things of price. No, comparatives and superlatives are not generally the most veracious forms of speech. That self-respect of cities of which I wish to speak to-night does not rest mainly on comparisons.

Let us turn our attention, then, to the things concerning the higher life of cities in which citizens may be expected to take an honorable pride.

We do not forget that cities have their side of shame which must on occasion be exposed ; and we do not deny that the grosser triumphs of mere fatness and wealth in cities may have a glory of their own. But for to-night we will concern ourselves only with the things of higher worth and of good report. If there be any virtue and if there be any praise, let us think for a little time on these things. But in making some analysis of the things that confirm the self-respect of cities, you will not expect me to make immediate application to your own Cincinnati. The fame of your city is so broadly grounded and secure that all that I have to say might find notable illustration here. But it would not seem altogether felicitous that a stranger should undertake to assign praise before an audience who knows this community so much better than himself. Let the application be of your making. It can hardly be doubted that so it will be abundant and will be fairly distributed.

The higher life of the city is not an abstract notion, a thing apart from the city's material well-being. It is grounded in economic and commercial conditions. It is well that the citizen should take pride in the variety and extent of the city's commerce and manufactures, in the intelligence and integrity which mark its prevalent business methods, in the soundness of its banks, in the abundance of opportunity for labor, in the good understanding between employer and employee, and in the general well-being of its laboring people. Without such conditions as these the higher interests of the city will be cramped and dwarfed; and it is, moreover, exactly in the maintenance of economic soundness that the moral strain of its men of affairs finds some of its finest testing and manifestation.

Closely connected with these things is the natural pride in the city's government. Such pride may well be excited when the people of all sections and classes interest themselves in the affairs of the municipality and participate in its political life; when the government has long been free from scandal, or when the occasional misconduct of public officials is promptly discovered and punished; when the burdens of taxation are fairly distributed and cause no more than a normal amount of grumble ; when police and fire departments are conducted squarely and efficiently; when the health department shows results in a low and diminishing death rate, and epidemics are few and of brief duration; when water, light, and transportation may be had with no large percentage of exasperation over and above the ordinary cost of service.

Add to this a city's pride in its public parks, its children's play-grounds, its well-paved and shaded streets, in the architectural excellence of its public and private buildings, including sanitary regulation of the homes of the very poor — and we have a fair stock on which to grow those spiritual graces which are the finest flower of the city's life.

After all the rest is said, the crowning glory of any city is its men, who make every other excellence possible. Who are its eminent lawyers and judges ? Are they men of more than ordinary learning and insight and power to carry a convincing argument ? Rave they persuasiveness of speech backed by a mastery of large affairs and of legal and moral principles ? Are there among its physicians and surgeons men of unusual skill ? Are its ministers of religion men of great devotion and great eloquence, wise in the spiritual concerns of their age and foremost in good works ? Have its artists painted pictures and its authors written books that are a gain to the whole wide world ? Are there in it men and women of lar^re philanthropy who have skill to make their beneficence actually help toward self-help and self-respect, instead of breeding up new pauperism for others to relieve ? Are its social leaders women of that fine and kindly grace that strengthens and purifies while it delights and entertains ? And what of the public spirit of the city's men of affairs ? Have they large thought for the public good, beyond their private concerns ? We have had notable examples in our day of cities whose business men showed the power of pulling together in any great public concern, and the lack of that power and spirit has been to the discredit of other communities. It is bad for the self-respect of a city to look upon the ruins of any great public enterprise which has failed for lack of wide co-operation.

The public press of a city may be one chief source of the city's pride. We have seen examples in which a town of relatively small population has for long years influenced public opinion far and near through the daily issues of a newspaper edited with unusual ability. And in our more populous cities the influence of the newspaper press is a large element in municipal greatness. So, too, a city takes pride in the influence and general sagacity of its leaders in political life. Under our American system, every remotest district of the land shares in the government of the state and in the national government at Washington, in the persons of some of its chosen citizens. A city may well lift up its head, when from its people men are designated to bear the largest responsibility in state and national affairs and in representing this nation in its dealings with foreign powers. The glory of cities is their men of righteousness and strength, and it is good for a city to do them honor so long as their strength holds fast by righteousness. In some communities the position of ** leader of the bar," accorded by common consent, is held almost as definitely as the position of mayor of the city, and for a longer term. And there are communities, even cities of the larger class, that recognize in like manner their "foremost citizen," and claim him as a public good, however private his manner of life may be.

Finally, in this enumeration, we must mention among the grounds of a city's pride those longstanding organizations of men which may claim the dignified title of institution. There are its churches, each with a half -private history of its own, but each in its own way carrying the gleam of eternal aspiration through the fabric of the city's life. There are its hospitals, its benevolent and fraternal and industrial organizations, its libraries, its music and dramatic art. Shakespeare, a symphony orchestra, and a circulating library are pretty shrewd tests of the civilization of cities.

The most significant of institutional tests appears in the state of public education. Our people are generally ready to declare the praise of their public schools. It is well that this should be so, and the schools are generally worthy of their confidence. But unfortunately there are no readily applicable standards by which the public can discriminate between what is wholly worthy of praise in the schools and what is chiefly in need of improvement. One indication, certainly, of excellence in a system of public educa-

S4 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE

tion is its ability to hold the attendance of pupils beyond the earliest grades; and its provision of a succession of well-ordered and closely connected schools, one above the other, by which the way has been made clear and direct, for the poor as well as for the rich, up into the highest ranges of education which their natural abilities may fit them to reach. In this community we have the unusual example of a city system of schools carried forward till it culminates in a city university.

There are two influences which are working side by side throughout the land for the making of a higher civilization. They are the influence of cities and the influence of universities. The ideals of these two are not the same. Not infrequently they must antagonize each other. At other times each is supplemented or even reinforced by the other. The standard of the university represents the noblest things in our literary inheritance and our philosophy. It stands for the highest development, the continuous development, of pure science; and in our American educational system it has come almost equally to stand for the best attainments in the applied sciences. There is promise that in future it will join art to science, and so greatly enlarge its purpose and its influence. Already the beginning of this movement of the fine arts toward affiliation with the universities is seen, and we may confidently expect that the movement will go on without interruption. In literature, in philosophy, in natural science, the university stands for pure devotion to truth, without a thought of gain or of any extraneous advantage. Its moral purpose is expressed in sheer, unselfish devotion to the public good as furthered by an unswerving search for truth.

The life of the city, on the other hand, involves the employment of the most concrete and powerful forces, material and economic. It makes of wealth and man's ambition a kind of universal instrument of its activities. But its foremost characteristic is its concentration of human intercourse. It sharpens the faculties of men by insistent opposition of ideas ; but it also teaches men urbanity, an open-minded appreciation of the differing tastes and standards of many and diverse minds. It sets, moreover, a standard of its own in the meeting of men with men, a standard of social manner and common courtesy. Its moral purpose is seen in the effort to find the best ways of varied co-operation with one's fellow men, for the furtherance of the common good.

There is nothing more vital in our modern life than the interaction of these two ideals — the academic freedom of the university and the efficient cosmopolitanism of the city.

Wherever a great university is located in a great center of population the two types of influence meet and mingle in ways that are full of significance. But where the two are bound together so intimately as in this community, where the university is part of the public system of education and the crowning member of that system, there is opportunity for peculiarly fruitful relations between them. The university is at once an added mark of civic distinction and an agency deliberately erected by the city to influence and possibly to recast the ideals and purposes of the city's life. What, under these circumstances, have they a right to expect each from the other .^ And in the first place, what may the university expect from the city which it adorns ?

I can speak only as an inquirer into general educational movements and not as one having any intimate knowledge of the local situation here in Cincinnati. From this point of view, it would seem that the university may expect the city to understand its place and purpose, to hold it in the foremost rank among the objects of civic pride, and to give it the moral and financial support that it needs for the attainment of the highest academic ideals. The purpose to be a full modern university is a high ambition and more difliicult of attainment than can be readily appreciated. For the modern university reaches out over many fields of knowledge. In the most of those fields the best equipment, in books and apparatus, is costly and must be frequently renewed. A university, too, must have chiefly men: men of such eminence in their several fields that they are known in the great world of scholarship; men who are growing by research and becoming better known from year to year; men of such devotion to science and to the public good that they are an honor and an asset of great worth to any community to which they may belong. Such men are in demand in the university world. There are not enough of them to supply the need. The utmost care in the selection of such men and care to hold them when they have been attached to the university are among the first requisites in the management of such an institution. Every university rightly desires to have in its faculty at least one or two men, or more, who are the recognized leaders of the world in their several departments.

The relation of a city university to the city system of schools adds emphasis to considerations such as these. It is to be a drawing force which shall lure young people of promise up into those grades of study in which their talents may expand and reach their fit employment. It is to set high the standard of scholarship and of training for efficiency. The community should understand the greatness of this service and should turn the powerful forces that it has always at command to the support of the institution which renders such service.

What, in turn, may the city expect from the university? It may expect that every pupil in every one of its primary schools and higher schools will be better taught, and will receive more of stimulus to higher things, for what the university has to give. It may expect that the hard commercialism of city life will be relieved by association with pure devotion to science and things of the spirit. It may expect that its reputation will be enhanced and men shall find it a better place to live because the university is there. It may expect that the other things which make for its honor and the higher life, its libraries, its museums, its music and all of the arts, its institutions of religion and philanthropy, will all receive manifold reinforcement and betterment, direct and indirect, from those influences which the university shall in time send forth.

And this is not all. For the city and the university must each react upon the other. The industrial needs of the community will give stimulus and direction to activities of the university. Pure science will be brought home to the processes of daily life. Your factories will do better work and make profit from the saving of what now goes to waste, because of better machines and methods and better men that the schools will provide to meet the present need. The best commercial experience will be gathered up by the university and be organized into courses of training, and from those courses of training men and women will go forth to carry the better methods everywhere. Teachers trained in this university and in other universities will carry the higher culture and the spirit of scientific improvement into all of the elementary schools and so into all of the city's homes. Through such activities as these, the university will break through the isolation which has too often shrouded institutions of learning and will give itself frankly and freely to a real participation in the real life of the city. The outlook to such reciprocal relations between these two great, formative influences in modern civilization is encouraging and inspiring. The modern university is almost a city in itself. The modern city is responding to university influences. And when a great community assumes direction of a great institution of learning, it cannot fail to educate itself in the very endeavor to understand and to maintain the higher education.

One thing in particular I should like to say to the men of the University of Cincinnati, and one thing to the members of this graduating class. As a friend and brother, let me charge you, of the University, as I would charge the members of any university : Hold fast to the academic ideal of pure devotion to truth. You are seeking to bring the university into the closest touch with the city's varied needs. And that is well. It is clearly the work for universities in this day, and untold good is to come from that work. But while doing this work, leave not the other undone. Your most effective service, your most practical service, depends ultimately upon your steadfast devotion to pure scholarship and scientific ideals. Do not lower any scientific standard for the sake of popularity. Do not let zeal for immediate commercial applications diminish your zeal in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Your strength and influence and your ability to serve are all bound up with your essential loyalty to the abiding spirit of the true university. Such loyalty is a thing hard to achieve and desperately hard to maintain, but it is your very life.

I have no reason to believe that special exhortation is needed here; but is not the need a present need and the danger of defection a present danger everywhere, because of the very loftiness and severity of the ideal ?

And you, young men and women of this class, let me charge you that from the university you carry into the life of the city a lasting devotion to the things that make for the city's good name. The true ideals of the university and the higher ideals of the city are in harmony with each other, and the city can greatly extend and enlarge the education given you by the university. But there are lower ideals of city life with which the true university spirit must wage incessant warfare, and I hope you will wage that warfare by direct participation in the political and social affairs of the city. The great enemies are indifference and cynicism. When men try to persuade you that the improvement of the life of the city and the progressive wiping-out of evils is all an academic dream, be fully assured that you are tempted of the devil. The merit system in the public service, the attempt to improve the condition of the very poor, the striving after a better understanding between capital and labor, and all other urgent questions in the life of our municipalities — the true university spirit has something to offer toward the solution of these problems. But if the problems were easy there would be no need of the university spirit in dealing with them and no need of your giving them a thought. It is exactly because they are hard, and because men say that nothing can be done, and because university ideals are held to be quixotic and powerless in the face of such real difficulties, that you who have caught the university spirit should enter the struggle and stay with it to the end. If university graduates will fight it out along that line in all the cities of our land, it will appear that there is nothing better for the self-respect of cities than the things that universities have to give.

Ill

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICUI^ TURAL EDUCATION

An Address delivered at the Fiftieth Anniversary Exercises of the Michigan Agricultural College^ at Lansing, Michigan, as Part of the Proceedings of the Twentyfirst Annual Convention of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, May 30, 1907. Published in Bulletin 196 of the office of Experiment Stations, United States Department of Agriculture f December 10, 1907.

Ill

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION

THE pioneer farmers of America had a double interest in life. First and foremost, they were pioneers, with all of the dangers and excitements of that pioneer life. Secondarily, they were farmers. It was hard and rude and unskillful, the farming in which they were engaged, but it gave them the necessaries of life. When the first dull opposition of nature was overcome, when cabins had been built and woodlands cleared and the plow had in some way done its first work, the soil showed itself responsive and fertile enough. For a time, at least, life was easier. But the zest of pioneering was gone, and the more adventurous of our people soon moved on to the West, where they might feel the thin edge of civilization still cutting its earliest way through raw nature and barbarism, and know that that keen edge was their own life and endeavor. The farmers who remained behind were now farmers only and no longer pioneers. They saw the first rank fertility of the soil fall back into more moderate bounds. Their life became tame and binding. New wants arose with the rise of new social relations. A few in every community were able, by insight and energy, to keep still in the front of things in that new age, but for many the occupation which made up the greater part of their life had become an unpromising, uninspiring, unenlightened servitude. In this jubilee, to-day, we are to recall the ways in which new zest has been brought into the depressed life of the American farmer, the ways in which his farm has been made part of a new frontier and he has been made once more a pioneer.

At first the improvement of our husbandry was the work of a few men, and these were men whose interest in farming was, in large part, a public interest. George Washington was one of the earliest and one of the most influential of these. First in war and first in peace, he was also the first American farmer of his day. His outlook over the educational needs of the new nation included proposals for the establishment of boards of agriculture, a military academy, and a national university. Other statesmen with a care for agriculture and other farmers who were statesmen in their view, urged that practical provision be made for the collection and dissemination of agricultural information. In the opinion of these men it was information that was chiefly needed to insure the general improvement of the farming industry — information regarding the experience and experiments of those who were already most advanced in the practice of husbandry. The new awakening in European agriculture had great influence among the leaders of American agriculture at this time.

It was while we were still under the Articles of Confederation that a beginning was made in the formation of agricultural societies. Pennsylvania and South Carolina had established such societies before the adoption of the Constitution. New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut followed during Washington's administration. The publications of these societies had begun to appear before the close of the eighteenth century, and agricultural fairs came into being in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Various endeavors to secure the establishment of a national board of agriculture had led, before the day that we here celebrate, to the first seed distributions through the national Patent Office, and to the first separate agricultural appropriation, in 1854.

Through these several movements, supplemented by a comparatively early development of an agricultural periodical literature, and through many later developments of agricultural organization, the growth of interest in the improvement of rural conditions has long been actively fostered. But our attention to-day must be centered upon the development of organized agricultural education, and to that subject we will turn without any further delay.

Let us first note some bearings of agricultural education which have often been discussed, but must be considered here again in the interest of true educational perspective. Historically it has been found extremely difficult to bring the subject of agriculture into any manageable pedagogic form. The fact that everybody in the country knows something about it is at first a hindrance rather than a help. It is difficult to treat the subject in such manner as to avoid on the one hand an excess of platitude, a repetition of what every one knows, or thinks he knows, and on the other hand an excess of unutilized natural science, deeply interesting in itself but hard to apply on the farm. Certain other subjects, of which education itself is one, share in this handicap. It is a difficulty met with in European schools of agriculture, and it had not been overcome in Europe or America when the Michigan State Agricultural College came into being. The most effective training for manual occupations was still some form of apprenticeship, apart from schools, while the school had long held the foremost place in preparation for literary pursuits. How to combine, in one educative process.

the advantages of the school and the advantages of the apprentice system, was the problem of agricultural education. In one form or another it has been the problem of all our education for special occupations in the past half-century.

For the student of educational history, then, this problem of agricultural education appears as one phase, and a peculiarly difficult phase, of the larger problem of training for any particular vocation in life. You will not look to me to contribute anything to the special history of this institution, which others, here on the ground, may be expected to treat so much more effectively than I could treat it. But my theme deals rather with that broader movement of which the notable history of this institution forms a part.

It would be difficult to say just where and how systematic instruction in the principles of agriculture took its rise in this country. Such instruction was given in some sort in Moor's Indian School, out of which Dartmouth College arose, back even in colonial days. Benjamin Franklin proposed such instruction for the academy at Philadelphia, the forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania, but it does not appear that this part of his plan was realized. In the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century great interest was excited in the so-called manual labor schools. It was proposed that a farm be attached to the schools, and that those who were studying during a part of the day should engage in ordinary farm labor during another part of the day. The purpose, to be sure, was primarily to offer students an opportunity to "pay their way" through school. But there was a thought, too, of instruction in the better methods of farming, and at least a vague dream of something better yet, the vital union of thought and manual toil. Some of the old-line colleges showed at least good- will toward the scientific aspects of agriculture. Columbia even established a professorship under which agriculture was ranged alongside of other sciences. Then, just at the middle of the century, the state of Michigan provided in its constitution of 1850 for the establishment of an agricultural school, and seven years later this institution, the first of its kind and grade in the United States, was ready to enroll its first students. Pennsylvania had already incorporated its Farmers' High School, but it was preceded by two years in the actual opening by this State Agricultural College of Michigan. A little later in that same notable year, 1857, Justin S. Morrill of Vermont first introduced in Congress his measure for the endowment of agricultural and mechanical colleges in the several states by the national government.

What is especially worthy of note at this point is the fact that this movement, which was primarily a movement of the people or rather of the leaders of the people, found parallel embodiment in both state and national legislation. At first both the states and the nation moved but slowly and tentatively. But within a few years large beginnings had been made. In this as in other public interests, within the broad limitations of the national Constitution, working adjustments of state and national agencies to each other have been made from time to time, in view of practical needs rather than of academic theories.