built up Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Leland Stanford Universities, gifts amounting to $25,000,000. The University of California has recently received from a lady a gift of six millions of dollars for buildings, twenty-five thousand dollars being given just for architectural plans. Fifty years ago, Connecticut had a school fund of $2,000,000, and it was deemed magnificent. Today such a fund is small in comparison with the larger funds of many states, our own state already having a fund more than five times as large and likely to become ten times as large. There are today in the United States 472 Universities and Colleges of Liberal Arts, at which more than 150,000 students are in attendance. The total annual income of these institutions is nineteen millions of dollars. The bound volumes in their libraries number 6,700,000. The value of their scientific apparatus is more than $16,000,000. The value of their grounds, buildings, and productive funds, is $240,000,000. And the benefactions they receive, while varying from year to year, amount to several millions yearly. The United States, in its magnificent proportions of today, is not grander, in comparison with the infant republic of 1776, than are the educational forces of the country today as compared with those of fifty years ago. DONATIONS THIS YEAR FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION. In conclusion, I may say that the donations to educational institutions of the United States have not been as large in any previous year as in 1899. Already there have been received by these institutions, during the present year, nearly $30,000,000. The wealthy people of the country are beginning to understand that it is better to be their own administrators, and to give their wealth while they are alive, rather than to bequeath it at their death; and that there is no nobler use to which they can put their money than in endowing and making powerful universities for the education of the people. How general this disposition to promote education is becoming, will appear, I think, from the following list of the principal benefactions during this year 1899. It will be noticed that in this splendid list the University of Minnesota does not appear, as the recipient of any large private benefaction. Mrs. Leland Stanford, to Leland Stanford University...... $15,000,000 Estate of John Simmons, for the Female College, Boston.. Henry C. Warren, to Harvard College... G. W. Clayton, for a university at Denver. P. D. Armour, to Armour Institute... Maxwell Somerville, to the University of Pennsylvania. 2,000,000 1,000,000 1,000,000 750,000 600,000 Jacob Schift, to Harvard College...... 300,000 Marshall Field and J. D. Rockefeller, to the University of Chicago 300,000 Edward Tuck, to Dartmouth College. 300,000 J. D. Rockefeller, to Brown University. 200,000 Caroline L. May, to New York Teachers' College. 200,000 Edwin Austin, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 200,000 R. C. Billings, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 100,000 100,000 Andrew Carnegie, to the University of Pennsylvania. 100,000 100,000 George R. Berry, to Baltimore Female College. J. D. Rockefeller, to Denison University.. W. K. Vanderbilt, to Vanderbilt University. Besides these, there is a multitude of smaller gifts, the total of which rises to the millions. May the liberality thus manifested toward the highest institutions of learning continue to promote education in the years to come, and thus nobly supplement the grand work of the states in their provision for public and universal education. 100,000 100,000 100,000 100,000 100,000 PROGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES DURING THE HALF CENTURY. BY HON. CUSHMAN K. DAVIS, UNITED STATES SENATOR. The progress of the United States, during the half century now about to end, is a trite subject for discussion. I do not believe that the present generation can adequately estimate it. To us it is commonplace. The things that we ourselves have done always so appear. We become so familiar with them, so used and wonted to them by daily contact and elaboration, so versed in the small and myriad details in which any great achievement is necessarily involved, that the entire performance is, to us, like a stage play to its actors, the mere routine of daily life, however gorgeous and spectacular it may seem to the audience. It would be easy enough to treat this progress with sounding and general declamation; to say in elaborate phrase what everyone knows, and to gratify ourselves with self-praise. I am not sure that it would not be entirely proper to do so; for surely the men and women of any eventful epoch about to close have a right to look back proudly over its great results, and to say "all of this have we seen, and of it we have been a great part." But we need not fear that this will not be abundantly done on other occasions. It has therefore seemed to me that I shall perform a very pleasant duty most usefully by indicating some of the general lines along which this progress has been made. All National progress is valuable only so far as it benefits humanity. Any other progress is illusory, and does not deserve the name, although it has often received it. The development of the United States during the last fifty years has, in my opinion, this for its distinguishing trait, that it has benefited man more as an individual, given him more liberties, func tions, opportunities, comforts, enjoyments, luxuries even, than he has received in any other half century since time began. The social has been greater than the political progress, and one great excellence of this evolution will consist of the reaction of man as an individual upon political questions, which will be subjected to a higher intelligence than has ever before operated upon them. The principal progress of humanity had, for many generations, been toward the acquirement of political rights. The struggle was to emancipate man from political restrictions of many kinds, imperial, social, and commercial. Our fathers rebelled to secure political rights. They fought for the right to govern themselves, and they secured it. That the American people, as individuals, should be raised to a higher enjoyment of personal dignity, privilege, and comfort, was not the immediate object of our fathers. Their task was the proximate one to secure that political independence which is the condition precedent to every ultimate social and personal benefit. Thus, up to about fifty years ago, political debates, speculations, and divisions, were largely of a general character, and, to a certain extent, abstract, even in their connection with the most prac tical questions. But about the year 1850 a force, then recent, and which had been merely a weak and derided protest, became all at once a controlling power. It was generated by a great conception of the rights of man as an individual. This force manifested itself by an attack made by the intelligence and conscience of the Nation upon the institution of African slavery. The slave was liberated. It was a great achievement in itself, but it went far beyond its own consummation. Pause for a moment and look back. You cannot help seeing how many vast, perilous, and intricate questions, involving asserted personal rights, have most forcibly presented themselves since 1850, and how rarely they appeared in any form before that year. These have not usually been political. They have been social, industrial, and economic agitations of popu lar intelligence and sentiment, which have more often enforced themselves by usage and custom than by legislation. Perhaps the most universal and beneficent of these improvements in social conditions by which the individual has been benefited has been in regard to the status of woman. Her emancipation from an almost complete merger of her personality has been nearly accomplished. Fifty years ago her power in literature, art, and affairs, was small indeed. Today she owns and manages her own property; she is arrayed in nearly every rank of endeavor; she has become a function in all the concerns of life, beyond what was conceivable or dreamed of in former times. New fields of employment have been occupied by her. The doors of universities have been unbarred, and she walks, queenly and triumphant, in the cloistered halls of learning. She has ceased to be merely the satellite of man, shining with a reflected light, and, too often, eclipsed by his shadow, and has become another sphere of humanity shedding a milder and purer radiance upon all human concerns; and to her attractive power and beauty the tide of human welfare has risen to a greater height. The last fifty years have not been an imaginative period. They have been intensely practical. More useful inventions have been made since 1850 than for two hundred years before. They have lightened labor and utilized waste substances. They have doubled time and shortened the duration of the act of production. They have thus given rest and leisure for intellectual improvement. They have cheapened products and they have not reduced wages. They have not barred any of the opportunities for employment, but have, on the contrary, created and increased them. For it is a truth that every invention which has produced a machine which can do the work of many hands has wronged no toiler, but has, on the contrary, improved his condition. The benefits have been universal. An inventory of the utensils of any household will disclose many devices to lighten toil, to shorten hours of work, and to produce a better result, which were unknown fifty years ago. Education has become universal and its scope immensely greater. The school of whatever grade of that time was not the school of today. The difference is that the school now connects itself immediately with the practical life of after years, whereas it formerly did this in scarcely any degree. |