i L' V 150 STATE COLLEGE OF KENTUCKY.
to American colleges), in which, as nowhere else, the foundation is laid for
classical knowledge and culture and for a knowledge of all the branches of
· science; 21 universities of world-wide fame, attracting 1* students from all
the lands of civilized men (more than 5500 foreign students in 1902), univer-
sities in which knowledge is diffused by teaching and increased by research;
457 normal schools; many agricultural and forestry schools; 9 great polytech-
nic schools of the highest order, attended by thousands of foreign students
(bv more than 4,000 in 1902); and Enally, as the consummation of German
effort for the application and the extension of science, the Imperial Testing
Office. in new and magniiicent buildings near Berlin, with many labora-
tories and experts, for testing, at small expense to manufacturers and
inyentors, materials. machinery and processes in all the branches of indus-
triai art. In that Testing Odice German thoroughness has provided all
facilities and appliances for every kind of scientific experimentation and
research. —Amazing results for a small country of meager resources, results
which one word explains, and that word is—EDUcAT10N.
"T0·day in industrial production Germany stands in the front rank of the
nations, and in the applications of science clearly leads them all "—H. S.
Pritchett, President of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A
*At Brockhaus’s, Leipsig, in 1868, I was told that they printed books in
33 languages
T'I`he University of Berlin had, in 1904, 13,782 students.
\
un. Ksurucxv AND EDUCATION.
In 1900, Kentucky had 12.8 illiterates in each 1000 white persons of 10
years or more, a percentage greater than that of any other State except Ten-
nessee, the Carolinas, Alabama and Louisiana, and 18 times as great as that
of the German Empire. But our inferiority to Germany in education is im- ·
measurably greater than this difference of mere illiteracy implies, for even
the best educated portions of the American people have relatively few men
of great learning or knowledge, while the Germans have many, far more in
fact than any other people ever had.
‘ De l’andace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!" cried
Danton at a crisis in the French Revolution. "Schools, and again schools,
and always schools" should, in our crisis, be the incessant demand of every
Kentuckian, man or woman, who desires the supreme welfare of the State;
who is ashamed that Kentucky continues to be disgraced by ignorance, and
by its concomitants, poverty, lawlessness, vice and crime; and who would
have the State to stand in knowledge not. as now, sixth from the bottom of
the roll of States, but near the top, as the peer of the prouclest and most en-
lightened of her sister commonwealths.
Kentucky needs 2000 first—rate common schools, 200 first-rate high
schools, and, to crown all. a university as good as Virginia’s or Missouri’s,
as good as Michigan’s or Wisconsin’s, and she cannot have the lowest of
these classes of schools without both the others, for the State that neglects
higher education necessarily makes poor provision for lower. And these
sorely needed schools will be the result, not of occasional and spasmodic ef- ;_
fort but of slow and steady evolution. All the conferences and conventions, {
all the speeches and resolutions from now till the crack of doom will avail '
little unless they are followed up with persistent appeals to the people, by ,
tongue and pen, county by county, and man by man, till Kentuckians learn
the lesson taught by Germans, and that lesson is that the path to true na- V
tional grandeur lies through great knowledge faithfully applied, and more- I
over that the income from education vastly exceeds the outlay for it. N. ;