336 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION.
look forward to a life of his own choice and making, will desire culture,
learning, and accomplishments. The youth growing up in the home of
the workingman, without fortune or reasonable expectation of ever secur-
.ng even a competence, compelled to look forward to a life of constant
and perhaps arduous labor, subject to a competition from neighbors, or,
often, from workingmen thousands of miles away, needs, first of all, that
knowledge and training which will enable him to hold his own and make
sure of subsistence and freedom from privation for his family and himself.
The average citizen, with such capital as a generation or two of industry
and skill may have laid aside fer him, free to give time and money for
such education as can be given him before the approach of manhood
brings with it the cares and responsibilities of his later working life, seeks,
.f he be wise, first the insurance against failure in his vocation, next such
culture and such knowledge as he may gain therewith, as a part of or in
connection with his preparation for his life’s work. Finally, the well-to-
do citizen possessing competence, though not wealth, seeks for his son or
his daughter a scientific training for a profession, and a culture befitting
nis station in life ; the first the essential, the last the most desired.
Every citizen asks the privilege and claims the right to secure as much of
the necessary preparation for the future of his life, and as much of that
culture which ¢s life, as time, means; and natural capacity may permit
him to fairly demand.
It was long ago recognized by statesmen and men of mind that one of
she first duties of the state is to make sure of the fitting education of the
people of the state by providing elementary schools for all who choose to
avail themselves of them. It was also early admitted that a system of
useful elementary education presupposes higher institutions of learning
in which the teachers of those schools may be prepared for their work,
and in which all the learning of the time may be preserved and given full-
est opportunity for extension and expansion. It is now well understood
oy all intelligent men that the state must, to insure the highest prosperity
and enlightenment of its people, directly or indirectly, by legislation or
shrough the stimulated or spontaneous liberality of its wealthy men,
superpose secondary schools upon primary, colleges upon the schools, and
place universities at the apex of the structure. The great States of the
West have their State universities; the old States of the East have their
Harvard and Yale and Brown and Amherst and Williams, at once monu-
ments to great and statesmanlike citizens among the wealthy classes, and
capsheaves of their educational systems. No State so poor and sparsely
populated, no statesman so weak and narrow, as to refuse to build to the
very peak of the pyramid. In fact, it is often asserted that the true
statesman, like Washington and Jefferson, Madison and the Adamses,
makes the university the foundation, the secondary schools the body, and
the primary schools the supported apex of the system ; the whole resting