FOR THE WEST

PRESIDENT BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER

California sends greeting to Michigan. The orange makes obeisance to the yellow-tasseled corn. The valleys that mediate between the Sierras and the great ocean reach forth their hands to the prairies that hold the balance between the Lakes and the waters that seek the Gulf. The College of Agriculture at Berkeley salutes its elder brother who, as pioneer, opened for it the first paths and cut the brush. We learned both from your gropings and your findings, and we thank you for both. We know with you what it means to labor on the frontier, and we share with you the blessed western experience of trying and risking in a virgin field, whereby to irritate and teach the selfsatisfied composure of the East.

The life of the nation has been continually freshened and its progress largely determined by the reaction upon it of men's experience on the frontier. This has mostly meant trouble, but trouble is the sine qua non of growth, and without pain there is no birth. After the thirteen Atlantic Coast states had become tolerably used to each other, and had settled down into fair composure, the occupation of the next row of states to the west produced Jackson, the new democracy, and various troubles and fusses. The admission of California in 1850 undid the Missouri Compromise which for thirty years had formed the basis of a truce between North and South. The settlement of Kansas and Nebraska in the 50's brought on the Nebraska Bill, which made the Civil War inevitable. The advance of agriculture into Kansas and Nebraska gave a succession of dry years in the early 90's their power to rend and wreck the old party of Jefferson. And now the extension of the frontier into the Pacific has made

the question of labor unions in politics joined with that of oriental labor a rich promise and foreboding of trouble for the days to come. It is the reaching fingers that get the burns, but it is the folded arms that compose to sleep.

In 1857 Michigan was in things cultural still the frontier, and the establishment here of agricultural education handed back a firebrand into the complacent usage of the East. To speak of torches tied to foxes' tails and sent into the standing grain of the Philistines is only an agricultural figure of speech, and incompetent to express the trouble and germs of trouble thereby infused into the entire circulatory system of all American education. The agricultural colleges and the state universities which in many states have included the colleges and have been infected with their spirit are a distinctive product of the West, and have embodied a fresh and vitally new idea of education and what it is all about. Centuries of separation from the life-need that begat it had made the mechanism of education largely a formal instrument of discipline. The significance of the agricultural college for the whole trend of American education was its naïve effrontery in frankly seeing for life-training a new connection with real life-use, and this significance exceeds, in service to the nation, even the weight of the benefits wrought for the tilling and the tiller of the soil.

Within the fifty years that have followed upon the beginning of your Michigan experiment, and under the quickening influence of your venture and others that succeeded it, the whole nation of teachers has been assuming a new conception of the whole meaning of their task. It is coming to them, not through a priori reasoning, for of that they did enough before, but through observance and practice of your frontier venture. They now seem to be learning that education inheres not in what you put into a man, or what you hang onto a man, nor yet in sterilizing him, or shaving him down to a standard shape; but in giving him, such as he is, and such as his life-activities may be, the

opportunity, in and through those activities, of living his life fully and effectively and abundantly. Such education proceeds upon the recognition that no hypertrophy of mind or body is as good as plain health, that plain health is the best medicine for all disease, and that the normal exercise of plain life is the straight path to plain health. Such education will therefore address itself perforce to the real doings and exercises of real life, and its definition will be: The guided practice of life, to the end that men may live.

If now, in terms of the higher learning, all this should prove to mean that applied science is after all the true science, what does it matter? For the deeds and worth of men, the social test is and always will be the final test, and the uses and needs of man in society will in the long run form the safest guide to the truth we should seek, and for that matter presumably to the truth we can hope to find.

So much from the side of the individual, but more from the side of the community; for all this means that education, which once made teaching, preaching, healing, and litigating the sacred four, is now laying its hand upon one after another of the activities of daily human life to dignify and uplift them, to relate them to reason and truth, and rescue them from sordid slavery to superstition, ignorance, and the rule of thumb, to the end that we shall call nothing, which involves a human use, common or unclean.

Small matter indeed, this school for farmer boys at Lansing in 1857; a weird undertaking, though, and audacious, not prescribed in the books, unapproved of the elders; but behold, the stone which the builders rejected, it has become the head of the corner!

FOR THE MIDDLE WEST'

PRESIDENT EDMUND JANES JAMES

Members and friends of the Michigan Agricultural College:

In looking over the marvelous advance in agricultural education during the last fifty years you can utter the proud boast which Vergil put into the mouth of the great Aeneas: "Of all this I have been a great part."

And this is an era not of progress in agricultural education alone, but in all other departments as well. For he who fancies that this great movement for agricultural and industrial education has affected only colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts has greatly underestimated its real influence. It has touched and shaped, at more points than one, the training and equipment of even our oldest and best-known centers of learning. Even such strongholds of ancient tradition as Harvard and Yale are in many respects greatly different from what they would have been had it not been for the over-increasing strength of this tendency. It is in a large sense a part of a world-movement, bound up with the inevitable advance of the democratic spirit and increasing acceptance of democratic ideals.

Higher education for the farmer and the mechanic, if it ever becomes general, will mean a new era, not simply in education, not simply in agriculture and the mechanic arts, but in the world of politics and civilization. Despotism, tyranny, one-man power, absolutism, cannot long continue in a country in which the average man is in touch with the processes and ideals of higher education. The progress of democracy was bound to bring with it the demand for an ever-rising standard, not simply

port.

1 Read in the enforced absence of President James by Dean Eugene Daven

of technical, but of general education as well, for the farmer and mechanic, and the general spread of these ideals of higher education will inevitably advance the cause of democracy.

It is difficult, of course, to formulate a satisfactory philosophy of history. It never has been done, perhaps it can never be done until history is closed, when it would have but little interest for anybody. But certainly this great movement toward democracy which is characteristic of all countries, the enormous increase in wealth, the destruction of time and space involved in the general application of steam and electricity, the ever-widening scope of popular education, all these things have worked together, each upon the other, each supplementing and strengthening the other, to bring about that marvelous revolution which has made possible this development of agricultural and mechanical education on the one hand and which has itself been enormously furthered by this very education.

The demand for special, professional education, the training of the farmer and the mechanic, is one which few people trained in the old education ever comprehended or were ever able to estimate at its true value. It has not been very long, of course, in this country since there was little faith in the value of special education on anybody's part. It was the habit, even in the sphere of the so-called learned professions, to insist that the best way for a man to learn his business was to go into practical life as soon as possible, or at any rate get into touch with practical life as closely as possible from the very beginning. The ideal of the physician was to have the boy get into the doctor's office as soon as possible and clean his horses and wash his bottles as the only reasonable road to learning therapy or preparing oneself for the practice of medicine. Entrance into a lawyer's office and the copying of legal documents and sweeping out of the office and building fires in the winter time was recognized as the practical method of preparing for admission to the bar. For neither of these professions was college education considered any