INSTITUTE TALKS. 499 



accomplish the most. It is said Napoleon would have gained Waterloo had 

 he not had an attack of dyspepsia. 



The old schools, our literature, our poetry, essays, homilies, etc., etc., 

 have taught that the body must be sacrificed to the mind. Paul was talking 

 of unbridled lust and passion — not of the controlled passions. G-od gave us 

 these as our agents and we are to control them and use them for what God 

 designed them. 



Starve yourself because you are a sinner? No. Take a good square meal 

 and go on and do all the good you can. 



Our boys in reading our literature get the false notion that there is no 

 dignity in anything physical. As a consequence very often they are anxious 

 to get away from physical labor, to get away from the earth and from sordid 

 things. They don't stop to think that most professions are more sordid than 

 the hardest farm work. 



You say you're going to be a lawyer and to be at the top like Wm. M. 

 Evarts. If you do that you'll do well. But if you seek to get away from 

 work you will find that you can't do it if you're an honest man. There is 

 hard drudgery everywhere. 



You think you'll escape this by going away from the farm, but three- 

 fourths of those who try it wish before they get through that they had never 

 left the farm. A farm doesn't rot nor burn up, nor run away. 



Industrial education is that which has coupied with it the use of the hand, 

 — of the physical powers, and those men are the best fitted for life who are 

 so educated. They are not one-sided. It is true there are certain advan- 

 tages even in being one-sided, in being a crank. Most inventors and poets 

 are cranks, but most of us will do better as whole men and whole women, so 

 that we can do whatever work God has set before us. 



The land grant says the purpose of our college shall be to give instruction 

 in agriculture and the mechanic arts, and for the last two years we have had 

 our Mechanical Department, and are succeeding, but the same question meets 

 us from the maehine shops that used to meet us from the farms : Will our 

 boys stick to their business? 



Yes ! they do. It is not a true criticism that our graduates leave the 

 farm ; fifty per cent of them make agriculture, in one form or another, 

 their after occupation, and a much larger per cent would do so if they had 

 any capital to begin with. 



It has even been said by ignorant enemies of the college that more gradu- 

 ates of the university become farmers, than of the college. The fact is that 

 of university graduates only 2 per cent become farmers, while the profes- 

 sional schools are rare indeed where so large a proportion as 50 per cent of 

 their graduates continue iu the practice of their profession. 



Well, I went to Detroit into the machine shops there and told them that 

 we were going to establish a school of mechanic arts and said to them : 



"Will you send us your boys?" 



"No, sir! You'll teach them to be above their business. 



"Our boys go to the high school and by the time they are Juniors they have 

 got such high heels you can't do anything with them." 



Then I hauled off for repairs and investigated the college and looked into 

 the matter of the students' work and found that all the boys were required to 

 work. So I went back again to the shops with a new idea. They admitted 

 their inability to make much of their boys. They are only taught to do 



