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TECHNOLOGICAL SCHOOLS. 
537 
safely and firmly, if properly constructed, upon a solid and broad founda- 
tion of deepest wisdom and greatest learning. 
The state must build foundation as well as superstructure, and every 
part of each, if completeness and solidity and permanence are to be made 
sure. Only the state, as it seems to me, can maintain permanently, 
certainly, and in efficient, continuous, and steady operation, any single 
slement of this organism ; and only the state can construct and maintain 
it in symmetry and completeness, and build solidly and durably the whole 
great structure. Private contributions to this purpose and object are too 
ancertain, irregular in amount, and sporadic in time and distribution, to 
give that regularity of income, or that certainty of any income at all, which 
8 an essential element of steady and productive work. Regularity and 
sufficiency of income, assured by a fixed taxation, as illustrated in our 
Western States, in many instances, is probably the best insurance of life, 
of continuous growth, and of uninterrupted usefulness of the educational 
system. Private endowments are usually either unequal to their purpose 
at the start, or are promptly overburdened if the enterprise is successful, 
and almost never permanently reliable and regularly useful. At the 
present time, also, the continuously decreasing rate of interest on good 
securities, and the constantly increasing difficulty of finding safe invest- 
ments, make the duties of the committees on finance of our endowed insti- 
tutions continually more and more arduous and unproductive. The steady 
fall from the seven per cent. of a few years ago to the six per cent. of later 
years, and to the five per cent. and less of to-day, and the resulting anxieties 
and financial difficulties, simply indicate the beginning of a continuous 
reduction in value of invested funds, and the fact that the time must 
come—perhaps soon—when returns on invested capital will become so 
small as to make it hardly wise to rely on such sources of income, and such 
as to compel the usc of the principal in such cases, and reliance upon con- 
tinual additions of capital through the liberality of capitalists to whom the 
same cause makes it less and less desirable to hold a surplus. But every 
institution doing good work will very possibly find it necessary to its own 
>xistence and permanent usefulness to become in some way incorporated 
into the system of the state, and to secure safe support from the state 
treasury, or, as the only alternative, to rely mainly on tuition fees exacted 
from its own students, thus competing at a great disadvantage with the 
state-supported institutions charging little or nothing for the same grade 
of education.®* In fact, nearly every large and strong school, college, or 
* The following facts give some idea of the magnitude of the task to be assumed and of the imprac- 
ticability of securing its performance by private effort, even were it possible that private liberality and 
private activity could give the system form and coherent and symmetrical growth : 
The United States constitute a nation of about 65.000,000 of people. Of (hese, threc-fifths—about 40,000,- 
000—are minors, and a large fraction of them demand or need instruction in schools of higher and of lower 
degree. In their education, 300,000 teachers are engaged in 200,000 schools, and about $100,000,000 per 
annum paid for the work. The States usually expend about €25 per capita. and some of the cities above