Professor Sanborn and his students, beginning with the county almshouse and jail, visited the reformatories, the prisons, the penitentiaries, and the asylums of various sorts in the State; made careful examinations of them; drew up reports upon them, these reports forming the subject of discussions in which professor and students took earnest part; and a number of young men who have since taken influential places in the State legislature were thus instructed as to the best actual and possible dealings with all these subjects. I still think that more should be done in all our universities to train men by this method for the public service in this most important and interesting field, and also in matters pertaining generally to State, county, and city administration.
Closely connected with this instruction was that in political economy and history. As to the first of these, Ihad, some years before, seen reason to believe that my strong, and perhaps bigoted free-trade ideas were at least not so universal in their application as I had supposed.
Down to the time of our Civil War I had been very intolerant on this subject, practically holding a protectionist to be either a Pharisee or an idiot. I had convinced myself not only that the principles of free trade are axiomatic, but that they afford the only means of binding nations together in permanent peace; that Great Britain was our best friend; that, in desiring us to adopt her own system, she was moved by broad, philosophic, and philanthropic considerations. But as the war drew on and Isaw the haughtiness and selfishness toward us shown by her ruling classes, there came in my mind a revulsion which led me to examine more closely the foundations of my economical belief. I began to attribute more importance to John Stuart Mill's famous ``exception,''
to the effect that the building up of certain industries may be necessary to the very existence of a nation, and that perhaps the best way of building them up is to adopt an adequate system of protective duties. Down to this time I had been a disciple of Adam Smith and Bastiat; but now appeared the published lectures of Roscher of Leipsic, upon what he called ``The Historical System'' of political economy. Its fundamental idea was that political economy is indeed a science, to be wrought out by scientific methods; but that the question how far its conclusions are adapted to the circumstances of any nation at any time is for statesmen to determine. This impressed me much. Moreover, I was forced to acknowledge that the Morrill protective tariff, adopted at the Civil War period, was a necessity for revenue; so that my old theory of a tariff for revenue easily developed into a belief in a tariff for revenue with incidental protection. This idea has been developed in my mind as time has gone on, until at present I am a believer in protection as the only road to ultimate free trade. My process of reasoning on the subject I have given in another chapter.
At the opening of the university there was but little instruction in political economy, that little being mainly given by our professor of moral philosophy, Dr. Wilson, a man broad in his views and strong in reasoning power, who had been greatly impressed by the ideas of Friedrich List, the German protectionist. But lectures were also given by free-traders, and I adopted the plan of having both sides as well represented as possible. This was, at first, complained of; sundry good people said it was like calling a professor of atheism into a theological seminary;but my answer was that our university was not, like a theological seminary, established to arrive at certain conclusions fixed beforehand, or to propagate an established creed; that, political economy not being an exact science, our best course was to call eminent lecturers to present both sides of the main questions in dispute. The result was good. It stimulated much thought, and doubtless did something to promote that charity to opposing economical opinions which in my own case had been, through my early manhood, so conspicuously lacking.
The second of these departments--history--was the one for which I cared most. I believed then, and later experience has strengthened my conviction, that the best of all methods in presenting every subject bearing on political and social life is the historical. My own studies had been mainly in this field, and I did what I could to establish historical courses in the university. The lectures which I had given at the University of Michigan were now developed more fully and again presented; but to these I constantly added new lectures and, indeed, new courses, though at a great disadvantage, since my administrative duties stood constantly in the way of my professorial work. At the same time I went on collecting my historical library until it became, in its way, probably the largest and most complete of its kind in the possession of any individual in the United States. Gradually strong men were drawn into the department, and finally there came one on whom I could lay a large portion of the work.
