ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT WILLITS. " 31 



THE INDUSTRIAL IMPULSE. 



The country is full to repletion of lawyers, doctors, clerks, agents and brok- 

 ers; a percentage, honest, worthy, able, laborious gentleinen, ornaments to their 

 profession, but a large proportion living by their wits, jugglers in the strict 

 sense of the term, making a precarious living, seeking, some of them, to wear 

 clean clothes at tlie expense of a clean character, all of them desiring to live 

 without work. We have enough of such. As a rule they have a hard time, 

 and did they but know it, a little hard manual labor would be a tonic to their 

 manhood. But in the first place they are shirks naturally, and in the second 

 place tliey have had associations that have led them to believe that manual 

 labor is degrading. Mere drudgery, we grant you, in any line of business is 

 never an ennobling pursuit, but to say or believe that intelligent manual labor 

 is degrading is a rejection on the Divine mind that created hands as well as 

 brain. They go together. Drudgery without intelligence is slavery; manual 

 labor with intelligence is freedom. Whatever interests a man has growth in it. 

 Greek roots have made some very small men, the other kind many large ones. 

 There is health and vigor in knowing how to do something; there is better 

 health and more manly vigor in doing it. A man with a trade has a moral 

 capability; it is a fence around his energies to keep off trespassers. The Jews 

 used to say: " He that teacheth not his son a trade, doeth the same as if he 

 taught him to be a thief." You give a man something for his hands to do and 

 you have taken hostage for good citizenship. The habit of daily toil is a better 

 conservative of the peace than a paid constable. Our prisons are filled with 

 loafers, our poorhouses with beggars and our polities with demagogues, gravit- 

 ated there for the want of the little moral purpose lying behind a good day's 

 work. 



So we believe that the best legacy one can leave to a son is a willingness to 

 work. We believe that that institution is the best that not only teaches the 

 law, but teaches a trade; that not only teaches a science but what to do with it; 

 that teaches tlie application with mind and heart and hand; that teaches that 

 all labor is honorable; that trains the hand as well as the intellect. There is a 

 mural influence around institutions as well as surrounding men; they have char- 

 acter as well — no two alike. The air is full of the predominating purpose. A 

 true normal school is full of the teachers' work; instructors talk about it, stu- 

 dents write and orate about it. So with a law or medical school; each is tilled 

 with a pervading strength — a predominating sentiment which gives character 

 to the institution and to the students. To a like degree is it true that an insti- 

 tution where at stated times all work with their hands, will turn out students 

 that believe that manual labor is not dishonorable, that take pleasure in 

 robust work directed by intelligence. Such an institution has such morah in it 

 and about it that young men will leave its halls and enter the shop or go to the 

 farm with no sense of humiliation or disgrace, capable of managing affairs of 

 state, and of putting their hands to work at anything worth doing. Now, it 

 stands to reason that a man so edifcated is a better man, a more symmetrical 

 man, a more capable man, than if he went out into the world with false no- 

 tions, of life's duties and life's labors. It is the little rudder that guides the 

 large ship that without it would go upon the rocks; so it is this moral purpose 

 that 1 es behind a man's forceful energies, to use them well and honestly that 

 saves many a strong nature from shipwreck. 



We believe this college has the power to make just such men and we proclaim 

 to all the world, that we do not want a young man that is ashamed to work 



