52 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



truth about life; but of the three the last is by all odds the 

 best. It requires all the poise of the first and the enthusiasm 

 of the second, but it harmonizes them so that the former may 

 not rust itself away in inglorious ease, nor the latter waste itself 

 in tempestuous riot. This is what it seems to me this institution 

 typifies and stands for. Your classrooms and laboratories stand 

 for intelligence, knowledge, and culture; your broad acres and 

 your varied industries stand for practical use of those ideas 

 gained in classroom and laboratory. There is no place here 

 for intellectual conceptions or abstract philosophies dissociated 

 from throbbing and pulsating life. Nor is there any mere 

 place here for purposeless wear and tear of nerve and muscle 

 in undirected labor — no place for mere strenuosity undirected to 

 desirable ends — rather, the happy combination of culture and 

 effort which seeks first to find out nature's laws and then to 

 adapt them to the accomplishment of beneficent ends under 

 direction of quickened brain and cultured mind. 



But as a state institution this College stands as one of the 

 great forces which the commonwealth of Michigan maintains 

 for the purpose of sustaining its own life and defending itself 

 against unproductive people. In the end the agricultural col- 

 lege must justify itself on this ground — it must produce efficient 

 citizens, who shall be worth to the state all the state pays for 

 their education, with enough margin left to make it expedient to 

 organize and carry out the elaborate plans everywhere in evi- 

 dence about us. 



Undesirable citizenship may assume Protean forms and hide 

 itself under many disguises. But broadly considered we may 

 cluster the undesirable attributes under two great heads — 

 criminality and incompetence. The former includes the posi- 

 tively bad, and the latter the good, so long as they are good 

 for nothing. There is a widespread conception among a large 

 class of people that the ordinary forms of public education are 

 too abstract and formal in their character, and that in their 



