COMMENCEMENT, JUNE, 1898. 639 



I may be permitted, with a genial recognition of its possible bearing upon 

 your policy, to call your attention, Mr. President and members of the 

 Board, to the fact that Lord Bacon attributes prosperity to two parts 

 engineering and one part agriculture; but, however the real facts of the 

 case may be, his words might almost serve as a text from which I draw 

 the inspiration of what I shall say in the few minutes allotted to me. 



It is in this view that I venture to head my address with the title, "The 

 Economic Significance of Technical Education." It is because I wish to 

 bring home to you the vital relations between the material prosperity 

 and wealth of a district, or a State, or a nation, and the proper provisions 

 for the education of its youth in technical matters, or the application of 

 science to the avocations of our lives. It is in this view that I turn with 

 admiration and respect to those wise founders of your commonwealth, 

 who felt with an intuition which perhaps they could not have explained 

 or justified at that time, that the foundation of your College had much 

 to do with the prosperity and stability of the State into whose con- 

 stitution they inwrought it. 



It is in this view that I address you, young men and young women 

 graduates of today, because you are rightly to be regarded from this day 

 on as the trustees of your Alma Mater as respects her repute in the 

 community. You have it in your hands to make or to mar the opinion 

 in which she shall be held. This is apparent, first, when you consider 

 that by your future work will her usefulness be judged; but more than 

 that I want you to leave her halls with an enthusiasm for her and for her 

 work which shall be felt wherever you may be. I shall have secured my 

 purpose if I can implant in your minds a respectful and well grounded 

 affection which shall be different from that baseless feeling which makes 

 college men "root" for their college, right or wrong. You have perhaps 

 heard of the man who thought so well of himself that he lifted his hat 

 whenever he heard his own name mentioned. I covet for you the posses- 

 sion of a deeper and more premanent esteem. I would like to have you 

 carry away a memory from your commencement day, even if it must be 

 impersonal to myself; that you heard a possibly gifted, but surely prosy 

 person, who showed conclusive!} 7 that the M. A. C. had a good reason for 

 being. 



It is almost a platitude of the commencement platform to refer to the 

 necessity of education for the conduct of "A government of the people by 

 the people and for the people," as the great Lincoln put it, and to repeat 

 with sereme solemnity that "Knowledge is power." And yet it will be of 

 service I am sure if you will allow me to assume this accepted truth, and 

 carry your thoughts a few steps further in lines to which perhaps you are 

 not so well accustomed. 



I want to call your attention to the fact that when we consider as 

 settled and satisfactory the work of the primary and secondary schools, 

 in which department labor the great public schools of your State in 

 their grades of grammar and high school, we have settled the question as 

 to the boyhood and girlhood of our State, and have well treated the ques- 

 tion of fundamental education before the question of the life work of the 

 boy or girl is to be faced in his home. We have had our boy or girl at 

 school well into his teens — say till sixteen — but the high school is done 

 with him. and he must be entering into that shadow of future respons- 

 ibility which makes these years so full of interest and of promise if they 



