270 MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY 



have ever swept across our state. God has been good 

 to Iowa and she has always been generous of her wealth. 

 She has never yet passed the hat for contributions be- 

 cause of failure of crops, but has freely given to the 

 sufferers of other lands, as the grateful people of Kansas 

 can attest; and the name of Iowa becomes a household 

 word in far off Russia where our shipload of food car- 

 ried life to the starving people of that great empire be- 

 yond the sea. 



I am inclined, by nature and training, to take a cheer- 

 ful view of things. I do not believe our race is degen- 

 erating. The first exact date that we have of any fact 

 in human history is that Coroebus won the foot-race at 

 the Olympic games on a certain day 776 years before the 

 birth of Christ. That was 2672 years ago. The events 

 of other years are known but this is the first exact date 

 recorded in history. During all these years human in- 

 terest has continued to center in athletic sports, and our 

 countrymen are growing up stronger under the influence 

 of a bracing climate, good food, and physical training. 



The Olympic games were revived this year upon their 

 old site in classic Greece, and it was with pardonable 

 pride that during the summer we read the dispatches 

 from Athens which, owing to the difference of over five 

 hours in time, seemed to be printed before the events 

 actually happened. 



We rejoice that Robert Garrett, of Princeton, threw 

 the disc better than any of his competitors, and that E. 

 H. Clarke, of Harvard, won the prize with an American 

 hop, skip, and jump amid the dust of Attica. 



The public school was the invention of the Greeks and 

 manual training was one of their favorite avocations. 

 Among the blind the one-eyed are kings. It is pleasant 

 to know that our race is in fact improving and that the 

 limit of human life is extending. 



