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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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Introduction "We hail thee! Great fountain of learning and light; There's life in thy radiance, there's hope in thy might; We greet now thy dawning, but what singer's rhyme Shall follow thy course down the ages of time." XV Prophecies of the men who labored to secure the foundation of this institution were large and far reaching, but none of them equalled the reality, none of them appreciated what the possibilities of the next fifty years were to be, and they would all be greatly surprised at this institution now if they could return to view it. Our fate will doubtless be the same. We have seen great things come to pass in the last twenty-five years in the life of this university; we have dreamed large dreams and framed great plans, but our successors fifty years from now will bewail our lack of vision; they will moan and groan over the fact that the foundations which we have laid are too small and too weak to support the superstructure they will be raising; they will be compelled to tear down many of our fairest creations because they will seem so small and so weak; and they will wonder that the men of 1918 could be so short-sighted, so blind, so unimaginative, so ignorant,—and our only excuse can be that they will be living in a new world, the world after the great war, a world of which we, who have lived in the last generation, can have little conception. I wish to emphasize this point again even at the risk of some repetition both in thought and word. We are now in the throes of a gigantic struggle for human liberty. This struggle itself will change us all into new men. The University is looking forward with confidence to a glorious victory in which it shall have had no mean share, a victory of democracy over autocracy, of liberty over despotism, of light over darkness, of wisdom over ignorance. And when that peace shall come to a war-wearied world, I have no doubt myself, that a new and far greater era will open before this institution. The people of the United States in 1865 was an entirely different people from what it was in 1855 and the marvelous growth of our beloved country in the following fifty years depended largely upon the fact that we had become a different people after, and because of, the great struggle for liberty from '61 to '65 than we had been before. And so now I believe that the American people at the close of this war will be a new and
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