of congress had done Minnesota so much injury. "Besides," he argued, "I greatly doubt whether the states receiving this grant will profit very much from the donation if it is made. Schemes will be set on foot by designing men to obtain the scrip, and the States themselves will realize but very little from it."'12 In addition he maintained that it would encourage fraud and corruption on the part of the men getting possession of this state scrip and that speculators would get the best land, to the detriment of the volunteers serving in the army at the time. The powerful combined effort of these two men at length succeeded in getting an amendment prohibiting the location of more than one million acres in any one state. The weight of influence of leading senators, such men as Wade of Ohio, Harlan of Iowa, and Trumbull of Illinois, was thrown in favor of this bill. They made no long speeches, probably realizing that they had a large majority and that speeches were unnecessary. Their remarks were brief and pointed. Senator Wade called attention to the fact that this bill, or one precisely like it, had been passed by both houses of congress, that it had been before the people and before congress for a long time and though vetoed it had, nevertheless, been very generally approved. He admitted he did not know what the situation was in Kansas in regard to her public lands. That she had been granted as much as, and even more than most of the new states, had been admitted. "I think," said he, "the General Government has a right to take all those lands wherever they may lie, and appropriate them to such purposes as in the judgment of Congress is thought best, and I do not think that the State has any right to complain of that. The Senator says it leads to a land monopoly. I cannot see that it does any more than the sale of the lands by the Government. The Government sells lands to individuals in any quantity without restriction, and that may lead to a monopoly just as much as this.''13 The discussions, occurring on May 21, 24, 28, 30, and June 10, were long and animated. On the latter day Senator Wade decided emphatically that he would give way to nothing, and "Congressional Globe, 37 congress, 2 session, 2395. forced a vote, which was 32 to 7 in favor of the bill as amended. Wade's great parliamentary ability and the value of his long experience was constantly displayed in the skillful manner in which he guided the bill through and over the snags placed in its way by a number of energetic opponents. It is a significant fact that Iowa and Ohio, with whom the Illinois men had had frequent correspondence on the subject of petitioning congress, both had instructed their senators to support the land grant bill. Other states, too, instructed their senators to support the bill but it was the powerful influence of the three leading senators mentioned above as favoring the bill that made success assured. Thus Mr. Morrill was given the opportunity to make a final effort for the measure in the house; on June 17 he called up senate bill 298, and, after a contest with Mr. Potter of Wisconsin and Mr. Holman of Indiana on the question of referring it to the committee on public lands, he finally forced it to a vote and it passed 90 to 25. The ballots in the senate and in the house show two things: the reduced membership of congress compared with that of 1859, on account of the civil war, and the greatly reduced proportional vote against the bill. This measure which was essentially from the people and for them was in no danger this time of perishing by means of the veto; it became a law without hesitation or constitutional quibble on July 2, 1862, by the hand of President Abraham Lincoln. This bill as finally passed was practically as it was when first introduced. The important changes were to insert thirty thousand acres of land for each member of congress instead of twenty thousand as first proposed; the exclusion of the benefits to states while in the act of rebellion; and the requirement to teach military tactics. This last clause was a birth-mark, that will serve forever to direct the attention of students to the perils of the republic at the time the law was passed. The very day President Lincoln affixed his signature the army of the Potomac began its retreat from the disastrous and bloody fields of Malvern Hill. Thus after a long hard struggle the land grant bill became a law. Certainly not one of the sixty-nine institutions that have 2 been created or greatly expanded because of this law, and probably not one of the states that have accepted grants under it, today regret its passage. Although there may have been some frauds in the handling of the scrip and although the states, as predicted by the opponents of the bill, did not in some instances get the full benefits of the grants made, yet the plan on the whole has proved a wonderful success. Of more value to education, however, than the actual appropriation of lands, great as it was, was the fact of the creation of a great system of industrial universities which the states themselves have learned to value and to foster. CHAPTER VI THE MEN WHO LED JONATHAN BALDWIN TURNER At the age of forty-three in the year 1848, Jonathan Baldwin Turner had proved himself eminently successful as a human being. He was broken in health; he had just resigned his position as professor of literature and belles-lettres in Illinois college because he could not keep his distasteful views to himself; he was poor, wretchedly, pinchingly poor with a wife and five small children dependent upon him. Yet in spite of these apparent evidences of failure, Turner had built for himself enduring foundations for his later success as a pioneer in educational reform. He was fearless, bold, free; and he knew the educational needs of his state as few men could know them. His path to financial safety was literally a thorny one: it was the path of the red raspberry and the osage orange. The Turner red raspberry is still the standard for this climate; the osage was his answer to the question which involved the success of the state: "What shall we do for fences?" Without fences Illinois was destined to be, not a region of home-farms, but of great plantations or estates. And Illinois could not buy fences in that day; she had to raise them and they must be "horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight." The problem demanded the man. Variety after variety of soilproduced fencing Turner made the subject of his experiment only to discard each and all. Finally he found a hardy thorny native of Arkansas and Texas, the osage orange. Exultantly he said of the osage, "One good gate, well locked, makes the whole farm secure against all intruders." Then came the civil war. The osage must be brought from Arkansas by a northerner as no southerner could be brought into business relations with the north. Turner was sure he had solved this problem when he induced an agent to venture into Arkansas for the seed. But when this agent beheld, hanging from trees, the |