Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 18]

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History University of Illinois

when all men will be studying to see how they can advance the general good in which all participate instead of the mere individual good which excludes most men from any share in it j and when all men will be willing to strive toward this end. Our five thousand students may have become ten or fifteen or twenty thousand. There is, in fact, no limit to the possible numbers of a university organized on sound democratic selfgoverning lines; and there is no limit to the contributions to human civilization and welfare which the students of such a university, properly trained for their work as students, properly inspired and led toward higher ideals, properly caring for themselves in a way to secure physical, intellectual and moral health, may be able to make. Let Illinois become one of the holy places in the history of the human spirit—great among all the universities which have been and great among those new institutions which will surpass those of the past as our material advance surpasses that of all the past of the race. Let it be counted one of the very greatest because it has ministered most to the welfare of mankind. I have been privileged to act as president of the University of Illinois for fourteen years, the longest term accorded to any such officer in the history of the institution. During this period I have been occasionally ill, have passed through the dark waters of family affliction, have been bitterly disappointed in the failure to realize many of my cherished plans, and now have lived to see most of them and the largest of them deferred by this great , war to a period when I shall have no personal part in them. But it has all heen worth while, and I thank God and the people of this commonwealth, who through the board of trustees of the University of Illinois have given me this opportunity for public service, and I thank the board of trustees and my colleagues on the faculty for their support and sympathy without which I could have done nothing. My only regret is for my mistakes and failures. I hope that the president of the university, who fifty years from now may write the introduction to the centennial history of the university, may be able to ascribe to my successors in tins high office the same large part in the development of the I I P ! P S p I S i H *« belongs to my predecessors laid andLwetl S P ^ * S ^ d a t i o n s so broadly