Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1874 [PAGE 80]

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76

Report of the

prophecy of the coming time when you and I shall lay our heads under the sod, and leave to younger hands to clasp and bear onward down the march of time the banner upon which we have written that motto, till they plant it in the culmination of history over the crowned humanity of free, enlightened and regenerated man. The work which we have roughly outlined will be accomplished, and in the end God will not leave on this earth one single one of the necessary employments of mankind, or of womankind, unredeemed from that old, clinging curse which reduced labor to ignorant, sweating toil—will not leave a single avocation necessary to the maintenance or civilization of mankind, which shall not demand and receive its own share of all that guiding and glorifying light that He has written in the starry skies above, in the petals of flowers beneath, and on this whole framework of things—not a machine, but a book. And labor thus linked to learning become the mightiest education of the soul, working out the problems of truth in the laboratory of God, shall reinterpret this mighty divine volume of worlds, out of which shall come grander conceptions of the author than ever yet swept through the heart of the wildest dreamer, or penetrated the brain of the profoundest theologian. Some of those who are here to-day—the youngest of you, perhaps, that hear my words—shall come here on other anniversary occasions, and attend dedications of yet other halls that a great and liberal State, mindful of its own civilization, its own grand central, commanding position—the key-stone of the continent—shall consecrate to this great work. Gray-haired and sage, you will recall the memories of this day— you will look still in fancy on this meeting, and think on the predictions this day made in your hearing—that there lie in these two words. Learning and Labor, the clasped hands of the marriage tie, the sworn oaths of love and mutual service, between the Brain of man—God's Senate Chamber on the earth—and the Hand of man, God's vicegerent on the earth of noblest work and worship.

ADDKESS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, GOVERNOR BEVERIDGE.

The Illinois Industrial University is not Harvard nor Yale; is not Cambridge nor Oxford; it ante-dates not, with the former, beyond the birthday of the Nation; it goes not backward, with the latter, into the dim undefined ages of the past. Unlike them, it has no long line of professors, authors, divines, jurists, scientists, philosophers, historians, poets, statesmen, heroes, bishops and kings, for its alumnic. Unlike them, painting and sculpture have not graced its walls with the likenesses and forms of great and distinguished men, living and dead. Unlike them, it has not gathered power from the accumulated influences of ages and centuries. ' It wears not the gray hairs of years, but the flaxen hairs of childhood. I t has not the sombre face of age, but the sweet smile of youth. It has not the stillness of the evening, but the energies and activities of the morning. It has not the glow of sunset, but it is encircled with the radience of the rising God of day. And