Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Ag Building [PAGE 25]

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23 strongest opponent to overcome. You who are entering life as lawyers need only look at the papers today to find that the average lawyer does not earn his salt. Those who will become physicians will find that their only companion for a few years to come will be the wolf at the door; while those who go forth to teach, need only to witness the struggles of the school teachers in this city. The school board is beset with howls and wails for an increase of salaries."

This in that great and rich and growing metropolis, Chicago, a city affording" as great or greater and more opportunities for men and women trained for the learned professions than any other city ; yet even there the prospect held out to those graduates by the president was years of starvation* If some other fellows had not the strength to fast as long as these graduates, then they might eventually get the other fellows places* The first duty of an educated able bodied man is to make his own living* The man who is not in some way, at some point doing an amount of the world's necessary work equal to that required for the support of one man, is a burden on society* Do any of you fear that President Draper or Dean Davenport will ever say to a class graduating from this agricultural college: Gentlemen: You are going out to the farms. You have not mastered the whole of agricultural science, that will not be done by any living or yet to live, but you have done your work well in the college and you are well equipped for your business; however, I feel obliged to say to you that poverty will be the strongest opponent you will have to overcome* The average farmer is not earning his salt—that is, for his personal consumption mind you, let alone the cattle and horse critters* The only companion you will have for some years to come will be the wolf at the door. I just as much expect to read of such a speech having been made here, to a class graduating from this agricultural college, as I expect to find myself tomorrow morning, sitting on some distant star reading that last night the cables of gravitation parted down here and the whole planetary outfit fell to everlasting smash-up. Thirty-four years ago there was organized here an Industrial University. Not a university of the general sort but of another sort, a new kind of university. A university differing in its organization—differing in its leading studies and in its