Leonidas Polk Family Papers

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of technical schools, whether military, medical, legal or theological, each by itself, tends to foster a narrow spirit of professional conceit which would be less likely to exist if the professors and students of the different faculties were in daily contact with each other. When he went abroad, he saw in the great English and Continental universities a fairly adequate approximation to the vague ideal he had already conceived. But he saw more than that; for he saw that great universities educate not merely individual men but nations; and that they inspire the noblest impulses of national activity, treasuring the riches of the past, stimulating and informing the energies of the present, and in the best sense laying the foundation of the future. Comparing one part of his country with another, he saw that, poor as the North was in literature and in institutions of learning, the South was poorer still. These considerations, not long after his return from Europe, began to inspire in him a passionate desire to devote his energies to the founding of a great American university somewhere in the southern States.