Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/927

Rh in the thought that diplomas are but sheepskins, and all great original thought has come from outside the university walls.

To prove that mind itself is not created in colleges, we have only to recall such names as Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Newton, Watts, Stephenson, Franklin, Faraday, Edison, Westinghouse, Darwin, Pasteur, Washington, Lincoln, Walt Whitman. The worship of the diploma helps us to respect brainless men who can spell correctly, and to accept fools who know the reign of Queen Anne, or the periods of Homeric poems.

The tendency of our time is to undervalue that most precious thing, individuality. Universities and dictionaries are the enemies to originality. There is a university fashion in thought as well as in dress—and most men never change the costume.

My voice is for the universities as storehouses of valuable knowledge and places o mental training; but as they are admittedly not a necessity in education, so I would like to see them more the home of workers on individual and original lines; and I would like the young man with his diploma to look inside his own head and reflect: Although you dress a monkey in silk, he will still be a monkey.

It is a blind people which fixes its eyes on the railroad and considers it the sum of all tranportation [sic]. Only second to it are the wagon roads, and intelligent farming communities ought to appreciate the tremendous yearly loss to the whole community in bad roads. Not only that smaller loads must be hauled, more trips made, more time taken on a trip, and greater wear and tear and breakage. Not only this, but the community with good solid roads the year round will outstrip its rivals in settlement and increased values. The Romans, for military purposes, built through sparsely settled districts roads which endure today, and the ever-accompanying result was the rapid settlement of those districts. The railroad is not the whole thing. Get together, my countrymen, and mend your ways. Be Romans; make your roads everlastingly good.

I need not say I have no excuse for any man who, knowing better, has defeated the law and defrauded the people, especially of so valuable and limited a property as land. But I think it has not been enough noticed that the Government itself has encouraged the frauds. I do not refer to collusion with corrupt officials. What I mean is that the rulings of the Department have been such as to encourage the idea of acquiring land by sleeping one night in six months on an alleged homestead. The Department and the Supreme Court of the United States have said that an entryman may borrow the money for his entry, give the land and its use for security, and sell to the mortgagee when the entryman gets his patent, but that he must not contract in advance to do this last. This allows every overt act of fraud, and the rest can be done by a wink or a nod.

Better wipe out all land laws but one,—actual settlement on the land and continuous use; and when that is abandoned with no intention of returning, let the title be gone and the land open to the first comer.