Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/594

552 great work that should "be done in the great State of New York. Surely, he said, in the greatest State there should be the greatest of universities; in central New York there should arise a university which, by the amplitude of its endowment and by the whole scope of its intended sphere, by the character of the studies in the whole scope of the curriculum, should satisfy the wants of the hour. More than that, said he, it should begin at the beginning. It should take hold of the chief interest of this country, which is agriculture; then it should rise—step by step, grade by grade—until it fulfilled the highest ideal of what a university could be. . . . Until the hour was late this young scholar dreamed aloud to me these dreams."

Now, in the year 1862 an act had passed Congress for the endowment of the higher education throughout the country, from the great landed domain of the nation. Every State was to receive for each of its representatives in Congress thirty thousand acres of the public land with which each should endow "at least one college," where, "without excluding other scientific and classical studies," such branches as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts should forever be taught. To New York, as the most populous State, came thus nearly a million of acres. This superb fund, provisionally bestowed by the State on a small existing institution, seemed likely in 1864 to fall back into its hands through a failure to comply with the conditions of the gift. Mr. White strenuously opposed all suggestions for the division of the fund, urging as the only worthy policy for the higher education the concentration of resources. It was in the struggle over this question that he was brought into close relations with his colleague from Tompkins County, Ezra Cornell—a stern, shrewd old man, of Quaker birth and breeding, who had migrated in his youth, a roving mechanic, into western New York, where, after making one fortune in milling and losing it in farming, he had built up a vaster one through his connection with the spread of the electric telegraph, and now, in his declining years, was casting about for a worthy public use for his wealth. The two men were strangely unlike, and as to the division of the land grant they had been sharply opposed; but each had learned to prize the other, and it was to his young fellow-Senator that the old Quaker now turned for advice. The result was the offer, by Ezra Cornell to the State of New York, of five hundred thousand dollars for the further endowment of a great university, if the State would transfer to it the public lands and would locate it in his own town of Ithaca.

It is needless here to recount further the tangled story of the establishment of Cornell University, or to describe the happy policy by which the nation's gift, frittered away for a song by