Page:The Wisconsin idea (IA cu31924032449252).pdf/49

 While Germany, shattered by the Napoleonic wars, was striving to solve her problems through methodical development under the iron hand of Bismarck, Wisconsin, the great German state of this nation, was slowly forming, through the university and its teachers, certain ideals which in the future were to have a marked effect upon its legislation. In Germany the scholar was recognized and respected as a leader; in the German universities the lamp of liberty was ever kept burning brightly. It was to the German scholar that Bismarck invariably turned for aid in the development of the legislation which has characterized Germany for so many years past—the legislation which built it up from a country of poor peasants to a great nation, second to none in the prosperity and the happiness of its people. While this German movement, with its practical system of economics, was slowly growing and developing in its universities, other economic and political ideals had dominated England and were transplanted to America. Even before the time of Napoleon, there had dawned in England the philosophy of laissez faire. The history of its expansion through the school of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, every schoolboy knows. The idea in it of independence and personal and industrial liberty suited our American spirit. The concept that the state should have nothing to do with the affairs of men, that the state was a necessary evil, that men do best when