To his wise foresight is due the ample endowment of
Agricultural or Technical colleges in every State in the Union.
He came from a small State, thinly settled--from a frontier
State. His advantages of education were those only which
the public schools of the neighborhood afforded. All his
life, with a brief interval, was spent in the same town,
nine miles from any railroad, except when absent in the public
service. But there was no touch of provincialism in him.
Everything about him was broad, national, American. His intellect
and soul, his conceptions of statesmanship and of duty expanded
as the country grew and as the demands upon him increased.
He was in every respect as competent to legislate for fifty
States as for thirteen. He would have been as competent to
legislate for an entire continent so long as that legislation
were to be governed, restrained, inspired by the principles
in which our Union is founded and the maxims of the men who
builded it.
He was no dreamer, no idealist, no sentimentalist. He was
practical, wise, prudent. In whatever assembly he was found
he represented the solid sense of the meeting.
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