Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: smaller number have organized 'schools' of accounting, commerce and the like. The proposition that the public schools and universities should 'take over' the work of private commercial schools and colleges is not here considered. Last of all, a large body moving slowly, but with irresistible momentum, come the industrial classes, the toiling millions who wring from the earth and her products the subsistence of the race,—demanding a schoolmaster. It is true that the cry of these classes for more light was heard long ago in America; but without eloquent tongues and facile pens to multiply and re-echo it, it was lost in the air,—vox et prae- tcrea nihil. It might yet be sounding unheeded, had there not come a time when we all saw, by the light of war's devouring flames how the salvation of our nation lay in the keeping of these hard-handed working-men. It was in the supreme hour of the nation's peril, when its very name had been mentioned by a foreign prime minister as out of date, when the ranks of the army, lately filled from the flower and bloom of our farmers and artisans, had been cut down and shortened by bloody campaigns; when the call for volunteers was beating in every village of the land; it was then that the American Congress hastened to bestow upon the industrial classes of the country that magnificent endowment conveyed by the Agricultural College Bill. By thepassage of that act, the demand I am speaking of was recognized and recorded. Since that time no one has held it in supposition, but as one to be met and answered. Never has a more troublesome problem been thrust upon educators. We know very well how to take young men and train them in schools to be clergymen, physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, chemists and miners, but we cannot yet so deftly produce... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.