Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/517

Rh state, must first of all not merely consent to train men for the professions that serve the masses, but that it must demand this right. Of course we are assuming that the state is not a poverty-stricken one, and that it is not fighting for a bare existence. Secondly, the state's university must insist on giving its students a broad education. By this is meant that all students should not only be trained toward a professional career, but that they should also have the elements of a liberal education. They should by all means appreciate the value of scholarship in most lines of endeavor. President James says:

I understand that to mean that a graduate in electrical engineering should be prepared to carry on research work in physics.

And what is scholarship? It is the discovering of new knowledge and the proper dissemination of this knowledge. The discovery is the most important because it is the basis and the inspiration. There can be no permanent scholarship without research. I believe that it is more difficult to keep a semblance of scholarship alive without research, than it is to keep religion alive without spiritual leadership.

In how far is it wise to expect the state to foster research? To answer this question we may first inquire into the economic importance of investigation. A few years ago the members of the agricultural college of the University of Illinois went before the legislature and showed that they could make it possible to increase the yield of corn in Illinois by one bushel per acre, and that thereby they would repay all the money to run their college, if they did nothing else. This argument was so plain that the legislators could understand it and they gave practically all the money asked for. The money showed such good results in such a short time, that the engineering departments were then emboldened to lobby before the legislature, trying to show that money expended on research in engineering would be of great benefit to the state. They said that in ceramics they would investigate all the clays of the state to find building materials to replace the fast vanishing supplies of wood and iron. In mechanics they would investigate reinforced concrete so as to make it possible to construct buildings that would last for generations at a small cost. The legislature could understand this argument and so it gave bounteously to the engineering experiment station. The experiments in this station attracted attention over the whole world. The president then asked for an unheard-of lump sum of money for the graduate college in arts and sciences, merely to further knowledge in those subjects which were not of immediate value to the masses. This also was granted. The result of all this movement was that at the last legislature the University of Illinois was granted a sum of money in