Charles William Eliot

“ The general notion that a beneficent government should provide and control an elaborate organization for teaching, just as it maintains an army, a navy, or a post office, is of European origin, being a legitimate corollary to the theory of government by divine right. It is said that the state is a person having a conscience and a moral responsibility; that the government is the visible representative of a people's civilization, and the guardian of its honor and its morals, and should be the embodiment of all that is high and good in the people's character and aspirations. ”

“ There are an attractive comprehensiveness and a suggestion of public spirit and love of country in the term "national;" but, after all, the adjective only narrows and belittles the noble conception contained in the word "university." Letters, science, art, philosophy, medicine, law, and theology, are larger and more enduring than nations. There is something childish in this uneasy hankering for a big university in America, as there is also in that impatient longing for a distinctive American literature which we so often hear expressed. ”

“ The only adequate securities of public liberty are the national habits, traditions, and character, acquired and accumulated in the practice of liberty and selfcontrol. Interrupt these traditions, break up these habits or cultivate the opposite ones, or poison that national character, and public liberty will suddenly be found defenceless. ”

“ We believe not only that our people are more religious than many nations which have established churches, but also that they are far more religious under their own voluntary system than they would be under any government establishment of religion. ”

“ Religion is the supreme human interest, government is the supreme human organization; therefore, government ought to take care for religion, and a Christian government should maintain distinctively Christian religious institutions. ”

“ The conception of government upon which this argument is based is obsolescent everywhere. In a free community the government does not hold this parental, or patriarchal—I should better say godlike––position. Our government is a group of servants appointed to do certain difficult and important work. It is not the guardian of the nation's morals; it does not necessarily represent the best virtue of the republic, and is not responsible for the national character, being itself one of the products of that character. ”

“ In almost all the writings about a nation's university, and of course in the two Senate bills now under discussion, there will be found the implication, if not the express assertion, that it is somehow the duty of our government to maintain a magnificent university. ”

“ Americans, on the contrary, maintain precisely the opposite theory—namely, that government is to do nothing not expressly assigned it to do, that it is to perform no function which any private agency can perform as well, and that it is not to do a public good even, unless that good be otherwise unattainable. ”

“ We deceive ourselves dangerously when we think or speak as if education, whether primary or university, could guarantee republican institutions. Education can do no such thing. A republican people should, indeed, be educated and intelligent ”

“ Do I seem to conjure up imaginary evils to follow from this beneficent establishment of a superb national university? We teachers should be the last people to forget the sound advice—obsta principiis. ”

“ We, indeed, want to breed scholars, artists, poets, historians, novelists, engineers, physicians, jurists, theologians, and orators; but, first of all, we want to breed a race of independent, self-reliant freemen, capable of helping, guiding, and governing themselves. ”

“ The doctrine of state personality and conscience, and the whole argument of the dignity and moral elevation of a Christian nation's government as the basis of government duties, are natural enough under grace-of-God governments, but they find no ground of practical application to modern republican confederations; they have no bearing on governments considered as purely human agencies with defined powers and limited responsibilities. Moreover, for most Americans these arguments prove a great deal too much ”

“ So long as the people are really free they will maintain it in theory and in practice. During the war of the rebellion we got accustomed to seeing the government spend vast sums of money and put forth vast efforts, and we asked ourselves, Why should not some of these great resources and powers be applied to works of peace, to creation as well as to destruction? So we subsidized railroads and steamship companies, and agricultural colleges, and now it is proposed to subsidize a university. ”

“ Our ancestors well understood the principle that, to make a people free and self-reliant, it is necessary to let them take care of themselves, even if they do not take quite as good care of themselves as some superior power might.
And now, finally, let us ask what should make a university at the capital of the United States, established and supported by the General Government, more national than any other American university. It might be larger and richer than any other, and it might not be ”

“ The essential features of that system are local taxes for universal elementary education voted by the citizens themselves, local elective boards to spend the money raised by taxation and control the schools, and for the higher grades of instruction permanent endowments administered by incorporated bodies of trustees. ”