its behalf by so long a line of the foremost of patriots, should now be regarded as only less than sacred.

The

. In view of what is proposed and of the historic record referred to, the Senate would have been fully justified in chartering the University of the United States without the formal preliminary of providing a special committee. known views of the ablest scholars and statesmen of the past hundred and more years of the Republic, supported by no less than 11 of the Chief Magistrates, by the repeated declarations of the National Educational Association during a long period, and by official showings, full and unanswerable, after exhaustive studies in the field universal of the higher education-all these would seem to have furnished the amplest justification for prompt action upon the Edmunds bill of 1890.

And yet, as already shown, there have been no less than eight Congresses without the final requisite action-five of them marked by the Senate's cordial agreement upon affirmative reports, all but one unanimous, and the other three Congresses without so much as a meeting of the Senate's standing committee. Bearing in mind the readiness with which the several institutions known as universities in the District of Columbia have been chartered, rechartered, and otherwise remarkably favored, one can not but be struck by the contrast; and we are accordingly left to supply an explanation the best we can.

We can imagine how men with more of personal or local pride than love of country or of learning might prefer to maintain a fancied supremacy for the institutions with which they may have been or are connected, for we have seen this same spirit manifested by local and denominational colleges toward the rising State universities. Nevertheless, those universities have risen and are now rising, for the great body of the American people are intelligent enough to recognize the value of the amplest possible means of education, wholly free from the warping influence of any prejudice. Moreover, the opposing institutions have not only not been injured, but have greatly grown and prospered under the influence of an increasing general interest in education consequent on the new appreciation of it thus manifested by the State governments and on the growing demand for learning and intellectual discipline, both as qualifications for important trusts and as conditions of honorable standing and of greater happiness, whether in private or public life.

Just so will it be with the opposing universities in their relations with the national university when once established and in active operation. Besides this, we are bound to hold the general welfare superior to the demands of any mere sentiment of pride or ambition, whether personal or local-most emphatically superior, if such demands are clearly opposed to the common good, as is the case with the opposition above referred to in its relation to hundreds of colleges and univestities which are in full accord with the national university measure, as well as against the recorded judgment of the great body of American scholars, scientists, and statesmen during the entire life of the Nation.

We are still confident that the interests of the higher learning and of the country would be best promoted by a union of the university forces at Washington in one great institution, as but lately was so nearly agreed upon, and are yet ready for such union on terms altogether just and most liberal to all. But if the existing institutions here prefer a separate and wholly independent life, let them continue thus, with ever-increasing prosperity. The more they prosper in a useful and honorable career, the more we shall rejoice. For if, indeed, honorably and patriotically devoted to the advancement of learning and duly concerned for the honor and welfare of the country, they will not stand against the establishment of a university like the one proposed, with very special and important ends in view, both national and universal, but will rather cultivate a liberality of sentiment and seek to strengthen themselves yet more by friendly and even cooperative relations. For, in the first place, since such a university as we ask for is a thing of destiny, there can be no great profit in further delay; and, secondly, inasmuch as its characteristic features will, as we have seen, make it a real help to each of them, while at the same time fulfilling a vastly important mission peculiarly its own and otherwise impossible of fulfillment, it is evidently worse than folly to oppose.

Having thus with some fullness brought to the notice of your honorable body the facts and consideration which most clearly concern the establishment of the proposed University of the United States, because of our regard for the American Senate as of first rank among the legislative bodies of the world and of our abiding faith in its high purpose in this great matter, notwith

standing the delays from which the measure has so seriously suffered, we now come to you with confidence.

We come not only in the name of the National University Committee of Four Hundred, which body of competent Americans we more especially represent, but also supported by the emphatic declarations of the National Educational Association, many times repeated since the appointment of its committee of promotion in 1869, as well as by the advocacy of the American Association of State University Presidents-all added to the support given to the general proposition by the many illustrious citizens who have so ably championed the cause independently during the past 120 years.

We come, moreover, in the name of the numberless intelligent and patriotic Americans so well represented by a liberal public press, and in behalf of our beloved country itself, nay, of the cause universal of human advancement, and would respectfully present to you this our most earnest and urgent appeal, praying for the Senate's final affirmative action at the earliest possible day.

AND. D. WHITE.
J. B. HENDERSON.
EPPA HUNTON.
NELSON A. MILES.
GEORGE DEWEY.

HILARY A. HERBERT.

SIMON NEWCOMB.

JOHN LEE CARROLL.
MERRILL E. GATES.
JOHN W. HOYT.

Now, when I came to the Congress with this knowledge in my mind I of course was greatly interested in seeing this matter taken up in the House. It has never had a fair show in the House of Representatives that is, no such vital efforts as have marked the other end of the Capitol have been made here. It has always played a big part in the Senate. It has been unanimously reported in the Senate many times as the above special report shows, and now the Senate has taken it up again and it will probably be reported favorably within a short time. I hope this House of Congress will take the matter up and at least once show ourselves equal in appreciation of this great question to the upper Chamber. I was asked to address the Association of State University Presidents at their meeting here in Washington November last at which time I outlined to them the ability of this House as I viewed it to put the measure through, when I found to my great gratification that the State universities were back of the movement. I introduced a bill that has met with the State university presidents' ideas. Indeed, it was framed very largely by a committee of that association composed of Presidents James, of Illinois; Thompson, of Ohio; and Ayres, of Tennessee. Chairman James presented the case to the educators in convention assembled in Chicago in 1912. This statement was printed as a Senate docu

ment which I insert here:

[Senate Document No. 792, Sixty-second Congress, second session.]

THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY.

[Address by Edmund J. James, Ph. D., LL. D., president of the University of Illinois, delivered before the National Educational Association at Chicago, Ill., July 9, 1912.]

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked to make an address upon the relation of the National Association of State University Presidents to the movement for the establishment of a national university.

I desire to say in the first place that, apart from the facts which I shall give concerning the action of the association, I shall be presenting my own ideas. I believe they represent fairly well those of my colleagues in the asso

ciation, and yet, as they have not been presented to them for their criticism or indorsement, I wish it to be distinctly understood that I am speaking for nobody but myself in the argument which I shall present on this subject.

After the fullest and most careful discussion of all phases of the subject the National Association of State University Presidents has repeatedly indorsed the project for the establishment of a national university.

This means a university established by the Federal Government of the United States, deriving its support primarily from the Federal Treasury, subject to the ordinary control which a free government exercises over its organizations and their work.

I desire to lay down two or three propositions which seem to me fundamental in securing a proper position from which to judge this whole question. My first proposition is that in a free State education is fundamentally a national function. I do not mean by this that it is necessary for the federal government of a free State to regulate, control, or support education; though it may be desirable that it should do so. If the locality or the State or the two together, in a country like ours, will provide adequately for this national function, it may be properly enough left to them; but if they either do not or will not provide for it, then the Federal Government itself should undertake to see that provision is made. I mean, therefore, that education is a national function in the sense that it is of fundamental importance to the Nation as a whole; that it should be properly performed and if there is no other way to secure its proper performance except through the cooperation of the Federal Government, then we should have this cooperation.

I maintain that in a State like ours education is a national function, because to the permanent endurance of a republic popular education is an absolute necessity, and if it can not be obtained by one form of governmental organization, then it must be obtained by another, or the Nation will suffer the consequences. No free government can long exist which is based upon an illiterate people-nay, I believe we may properly paraphrase Lincoln's great expression on another subject, that this Government can not remain permanently free if it is based upon a population half literate and half illiterate. All the people must become educated to the necessary extent to secure the basis for democratic government, or all will become uneducated. i. e., will fail to secure that degree of education necessary for the preservation of a free State. Now, to my mind, that is a national function in its nature, the adequate performance of which is essential to the existence of a nation. From this point of view education, after the national defense, is the most distinctly national function of all the functions which our society has to perform.

But education is national in its nature from another point of view and should be recognized as such in the organization of our Government. The advantages given by elementary and secondary and higher schools are not limited to the communities which support them. A little red schoolhouse upon a lonely hillside of a New England State may train the man who will head a great movement for reform and progress in a distant State beyond the Rocky Mountains. The people of the latter State profit by the education which that man obtained at the expense of that New England district, and they should, by all standards of fairness, contribute their part toward the support of the school which produced him. In fact, I think it is not too much to say that, taken broadly, the history of this country during the last two generations will demonstrate that in many cases the chief advantage of the school system of a community has redounded to the benefit of other communities in which the particular boys and girls educated in these community schools have subsequently spent their lives and done their work as members of society. Now, if all sections of the country profit by the existence of educational advantages in any one community, then the country and the Nation as a whole should be expected to do its part in developing and supporting these local facilities for education.

There is another reason why education is in its nature a National and not a local or State function, and that is that the disadvantages of the lack of facilities and the lack of schools are not limited to the communities which suffer such lack of school facilities to exist. You hear a man say sometimes that it is up to the community to keep its school, and if it does not wish to keep one let it suffer the consequences. But the same thing is true here as in the case just mentioned, the evil results of inadequate school facilities do not accrue alone to the communities which neglect such matters, but are liable to be of the most serious consequence to other and distant communities, be

cause under our scheme of life the ebb and flow of our population is so continuous and so extensive that the boys and girls who have missed the opportunity for the highest development, owing to the lack of these local facilities, become members of other communities and go into them and into their work weighted down with all the ignorance and apathy and indifference to higher things which is characteristic of an ignorant population as a whole. So that alike by the distributions of its advantages and the distributions of its disadvantages, popular education is in its nature a National and not merely a State and local issue, a National function and not merely a State and local function, and consequently, unless the locality and the State can and will perform this function satisfactorily, the Nation must come in as a unit and through its organized representative, the Federal Government, contribute its share in this way to the support of this common institution.

We must not lose sight of the fact that it is after all the American people as a whole that pay the bills. It is not the Nation distinct from the State or the State distinct from the locality, but it is the locality and the State taken in their totality which make up the Nation; and it is therefore a mere question of expediency through what organ and to what extent the people will exercise their power for the purpose of promoting the public welfare.

Now, there is another important reason why the people of the United States should aid the cause of education through their Federal Government as well as through their State and local government, and that is that the people as a whole can do certain things through the cooperation of their Federal Government which they can not do through their State government or through their local government alone. The expense of an adequate educational system is enormous, and grows continually with the rising standard of the people as to what satisfactory education is. An adequate revenue system will draw upon national sources of revenue through the Federal Government, upon State sources of revenue through the State, upon local sources of revenue through the local government. Some sources of wealth may be more easily and efficiently tapped through the Federal Government than through the State or local government, and vice versa.

In our scheme of Federal Government in this country we handed over to the central authority a revenue power-I will not say more than adequate for the Federal purposes which we incorporated in our Constitution, but I will say more adequate to accomplish the national ends contemplated in the law than were given either to the State or the locality. The Federal Government can raise funds in many respects more easily than either the State or the locality. And a sound financial system demands that that element in our system shall raise the revenue which it can raise most easily, and then a reasonable distribution of the revenue so raised shall be made among the various Federal functions and among the State and local functions.

I think our history has demonstrated clearly enough already that education can never be properly cared for in this country unless we draw upon national sources of revenue as a means of assisting in its support.

Owing to history which I need not recount, the Southern States, for example, find themselves in the position of having two independent and complete systems of education, for the white and colored races, respectively. It is quite unreasonable to hope that in our day and generation the southern communities will be wealthy enough, or, what amounts to the same thing for our purpose, will think they are wealthy enough to care adequately for these great interests, and if the people will not utilize their other sources of revenue and their other organs of government to assist in providing a part of the means for the solution of this problem, we shall still continue to suffer as we have suffered for generations by this situation.

My next proposition is that this country can not solve its educational problems in the large until it recognizes that education is the business of the Nation and that pecuniary assistance for its support in a large way shall come through the organs of the Nation as a unit.

We can not in fact get the money in any other way. We refer, of course, by preference in our educational discussions to the unhappy educational conditions of certain portions of the South. But the conditions are just as really and just as truly inadequate over whole sections of the Northern States as they are in the South. We need not go out of the State of Illinois itself to find schools which do not deserve that name. We need not go outside of Illinois to find local communities which, after taxing themselves to the limit which the law allows, still have not sufficient money to maintain during the months in which

a child ought to be in school the kind of school which it is worth the child's while to attend.

There is another important matter which we ought not to lose sight of. Great national issues are pushed forward only when it is possible to secure national attention for them. Only when they have become national in a formal as well as an informal way. Only when the Nation is discussing them as great national issues. If we could get national attention concentrated upon our educational problems year after year as one of the fundamental issues, going to the very life of the Nation itself, we should make vastly greater progress than we do. And this attention we shall get when we recognize the essentially national character of education by making educational policy a part of national policy. When the Federal Congress discusses educational questions as fully, as completely as they discuss questions of defense and the tariff and internal improvements, we shall be in a way of securing for educational issues that attention which is necessary to their continuous and rapid solution.

Intimately connected with this fact, namely, the necessity of securing national attention for the consideration of national problems, if we wish to hasten their solution, is the further one that we could advance with far greater certainty and with far greater speed our national standards-i. e., the standards of the people taken as a whole and in their local organizations-if we can get before the Nation as a whole a proper standard of what education means and what education ought to mean.

The Nation, then, and not merely the local school district or community or State, must become an educational unit in all grades of education.

It has already become so to a certain extent. It is becoming so more and more with every passing day. Unequally, it is true, in spots only here and there, but steadily and persistently. The Federal Government has granted lands for the support of elementary education in nearly all the States of the Union within whose territory were to be found large stretches of Government-owned land. In fact, the Federal grants were the foundations of the school funds in the vast majority of the States of the Union. And out of these grants has proceeded the organization of a system or scheme of education in nearly three-fourths of the States of the Union. But the Federal Government has not been content with this. It began some 50 years ago the policy of developing within each State in the Union a higher institution of learning, supported in large part, first, by Federal grants of land; second, by the grants of money realized from the sale of land; and, finally, by grants of money raised by the general revenue system of the Government. And to-day we have 67 such institutions which owe a part or the whole of their income to the action of the Federal Government. The aggregate value of the permanent funds and equipment of these land-grant colleges themselves exceeds to-day $125,000,000. The total income of these institutions in 1910 was nearly $23,000,000. It would take an endowment fund of over $450,000,000 to produce this income.

We take pride here in Illinois in the fact that it was an Illinois farmer and professor who first formulated this plan, and that the Legislature of Illinois was the first American legislature to stand strongly behind this policy of Federal grants to higher education within the States. It has become the greatest scheme of an educational endowment which the world has ever seen. The Federal Government itself contributes only a small part of the total funds necessary for the support of these institutions, but it was the giving of that small part which made the rest of it possible, which stimulated local and State interest, which, by fixing national standards, stimulated the Nation to rise to these standards. I have very little doubt myself that if it had not been for the action of the Federal Government in making these appropriations for the development of agriculture and the mechanic arts within the States, we should be a whole generation behind what we are in the development of our educational system.

Incidentally I may say that the House of Representatives of the Illinois Legislature has again led the way in urging upon the Federal Government the necessity of large additional grants for educational purposes by sending to Congress a unanimous petition, as follows:

"Whereas the Legislature of Illinois, by the joint resolution of February eighth, eighteen hundred and fifty-three, was the first among the American legislatures to petition the Congress of the United States to make a grant of public land for each State in the Union for the liberal endowment of a system of industrial universities, one in each State, to promote the more liberal and practical education of our industrial classes and their teachers; and