Caption: Dedication - Transportation Building Dedication Addresses
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ADDRESS BY HON. W. L. ABBOTT President of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. The dedication of the Transportation and Mining Buildings marks a tardy recognition by the State of the importance of investigation and study of these two great industries. Involving as they do an investment of up- wards of seven billions of dollars, and doing a business of nearly one million dollars a day, they aggregate an industry of greater financial importance than the combined agricultural interests of this great farming state. The hundreds of thousands of transportation employees, with other hundreds of thousands depending upon them for support, who absorb in wages three-quarters of the gross receipts of the business, form no inconsiderable element of the brain and sinew of our population. When we consider our twenty-five thousand miles of railroad tracks, the hundreds of millions of passengers and the hundreds of millions of tons of freight carried annually, it is apparent that transportation in this state is the oorner-stone of our commercial system; and when we consider also our vast coal deposits underlying whole counties and amounting to tens of billions of tone of easily accessible ooal of fair quality, we realize that in this buried treasure Ilea
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