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205 As the Superintendant of Schools at St Louis, to whom I had a letter from Washington, was confined to his house by illness, I took a letter from General Sherman to the President of an Institution at St Louis that goes by the name of the "Washington University." It is not an university in our sense of the word, but an Institution for working connected by the different educational resources of the place, beginning with the elementary Schools, & progressing up through Grammar & High Schools, to a kind of Polytechnic Institution, in which arts rather than sciences are taught - the arts in truth being little more than the principles & practice of different trades & occupations. This seems to us a low view to take of education, & of an university. But it is what is first wanted in a new country, where every man has to work for his bread, & everything has to be done. Higher culture is not for the existing but for future generations. So think the people who manage this Institution. And so think the people for whose benefit the Institution has been established, except that they have little or no idea at all as yet of the "higher Culture". They are beginning to be intolerant ever? of the time & money spent in teaching Law & Medicine; & of the position assigned to Lawyers & Physicians. It was in this spirit that a gentleman said to me, on the Prairie between Chicago & Omaha, "What we want, Sir, in this great country is fewer graduates "of Law & Medicine, & more graduates of the Machine shop, & Agri-"cultural college."