"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."

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

different people with a wider outlook, with higher ideals than ever before. As in many other fields, so in this of education; as in many other institutions, so here in Illinois, all that we have accomplished will seem small compared with that for which we shall be reaching out, all that we have done mere preparation for that which we shall do. Our successors, because of their larger outlook and alas! because of our own short-sighted vision will possibly find in our work little inspiration. They will only wonder that our outlook was so limited, our views so narrow, our plans so incomplete and unsatisfactory, our foundations, in the laying of which we take so much pride, so inadequate to the superstructure which they will wish to raise.

It will be a new world into which human society will advance when victory comes and peace is assured; old standards will be displaced by new and higher ones set up in each department of individual and national life. We shall be thinking in terms of billions of dollars instead of millions, in terms of opportunity for all instead of for a few, in terms of freedom and liberty and democracy instead of privilege and caste, in terms of the development of the ability of all our people instead of that of a few limited classes, in terms of spiritual life instead of material life.

As to what concrete forms this new spirit shall clothe itself in, we have, I think, now little notion, and even our dreams are not large enough to take in the reality, but I venture to mention a few points in which the University of Illinois in 1968 will be different from the university of today.

We think now of a university with low fees for instruction; then we shall see a university with no fees. Now a university in which boys and girls with little money can come and make their way; then we shall see a university in which every boy and girl, who is able and willing to profit by a university education, will be able to get it, no matter how poor their parents, no matter how difficult the conditions under which they have lived. We think now of a university with half a million books; then we shall see one with five millions. Now of a university with few laboratories, with very inadequate equipment; then we shall see an institution made up of numerous laboratories and furnished with all the equipment which can be of use in making the laboratory turn out the largest and best output of scientific truth. We see a university now in which only a few of the subjects which have stimulated the human intellect and stirred the human

heart are made the object of scientific study; then we shall see an immensely larger number of subjects, made the object of strictly scientific study and development, so that in every line of human life the largest possible enrichment will be secured. We see now an institution in which a large part of the work done is elementary in character; that will all be relegated to the high schools and junior colleges. Young men and women will come up to the University primarily for the purpose of preparing themselves for some distinct profession or calling, for the practice of which a study of the sciences underlying the art will be useful or necessary. The number of professions for which the university will prepare will steadily tend to increase, because the human race will be basing everything more and more upon science; and when the business of a profession rests upon the solid formulations and accumulations of human science it becomes a proper subject for university cultivation.

The university will in the next fifty years become still more a great center of light and life and leadership for the whole community in an ever-increasing number of directions. We shall press forward to new achievements in science and art. We shall become free in a new and different sense from what we are now; for the truth, the pursuit of which is one of the great primary ends of the university, will make us free. We shall not be afraid to speak our minds; we shall win that academic freedom which now exists nowhere in the world; for as yet men are not willing to accept its full consequences. The dangers of Bolshevikism in our undeveloped human society are still too great in our imagination at any rate to permit the largest degree of liberty; but that time will be brought perceptibly nearer by the results of this great war, and our universities should help in this development, and Illinois should lead the way.

We shall be much more willing to accord to strength and power full leadership because they will be exerted in the interests of all and not in the interests of a few. The university will be an entirely different institution in that great society which we are gradually weaving on the great loom of time, in which no man or woman, willing to work, shall suffer because work can not be found; when no one will be compelled to work for a wage which will not sustain a decent human life; when to industry and thrift will come the opportunity to share in all the blessings of an advanced civilization instead of in only a few;

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; 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 been 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 this high office the same large part in the development of the university in the next fifty years as belongs to my predecessors in the last fifty years, who laid its foundations so broadly and so well.

This semi-centennial history will show in its progress that the really valuable work in the development of the university has been done after all not by its presidents, but by its faculties. The names of Burrill and Forbes and Noyes and Ward and the like of them will persist in the annals of human science long after those of Gregory and Peabody and Draper and James and the like of them will have perished from the earth. The function of the legislatures, the board of trustees and the presidents of the university is really nothing but to create the most favorable conditions possible for the higher training of the youth of the state and for the development of human science, and for developing leaders in every department of the multiform life of the commonwealth.

One of these favorable conditions is the presence of a good faculty, i. e., a competent and inspiring body of first-rate scientific investigators and teachers with ideas and ideals suited to lead their students up to the very heights of human effort and vision. In that faculty of 1968, which will preside over this new institution, there will be no professor who does not have from his salary alone an income sufficient to enable him to do his work as teacher and investigator and to live a worthy life as a citizen and to raise a family in decency and with some degree of comfort. Nor will there be any professor, who, having this income sufficient to put him above the ordinary financial worriments of life, will be so unworthy of his high position as to fail to give in an unstinted way his thought and time and strength to the performance in the most faithful way possible of the duties of his position. There will be no professor who is not an efficient teacher interested in his pupils and in his teaching with an earnest desire and determination to make it really successful and inspiring; nor any professor who does not make his university work the chief,-one will be tempted to say the sole object of interest, subordinating every other element in his life to this one, except of course that he should first of all be a good man, and a good citizen. There will be no professor in the faculty of this institution who does not earnestly desire to add to our available stock of scientific knowledge in his department, and nobody will remain on the faculty for any great length of time who does not as a matter of fact prove by his accomplishments that he has done so. A university professor who does not write his name in the list of men who have made

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