186 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 



appropriate designs for the farmstead and its plantings and for the 

 treatment of our rapidly improving highways, and then in arousing 

 public interest in outdoor art. Illinois must be something besides an 

 endless stretch of fields bare and brown for a third or a half of the 

 year; it must develop into an harmonious landscape busy in produc- 

 tion but restful to the eye and inspiring to the soul. Her highways 

 must be something more than stone speedways; they can be, indeed 

 must be, avenues of beauty connecting counties and leading to great 

 population centers by parks of pleasantness. 



Yes, we are to have a new agriculture in the Mississippi Valley. 

 Shall it be better or worse than the one our pioneer fathers ham- 

 mered out from the wilderness and slowly evolved from the prairie 

 and the slough ? That is for us to say, for what this new agriculture 

 shall be like and what shall be the character of the civilization of 

 which it will be a part will depend very much indeed upon the vision 

 possessed by our farmers now and in the immediate future. It will 

 depend also upon the degree of understanding and of cooperation 

 which can be maintained between thinking citizens, who must take 

 the lead, and the University, which is the public agent for investigat- 

 ing the knotty problems continually arising in a rapidly developing 

 civilization. 



The great question is: Shall a state like Illinois drift into its 

 new development, accepting what the accidental fates deal out, or 

 shall we, by taking thought, control and direct this development to 

 some definite ends ? By taking thought early and constantly, the citi- 

 zens can make this development almost what they will. What we 

 shall be later on will be the result, not of revolution, but of evolution 

 from what we now are to what we then shall be. The future of 

 Illinois is in her own hands and there is no limit to what may be 

 achieved, provided only that she will support, as she has begun to 

 support, generously the agencies for progress, and provided the Uni- 

 versity will remember, as it always has remembered, that in all real 

 development it is the thinking citizen and not his institutions that 

 must take the lead. 



