56 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



rejoice with you in what you have achieved, in what you are 

 achieving, and in what you are destined to achieve. 



This vast multitude gathered here, these beautiful grounds 

 and buildings, these many hundreds of students, these distin- 

 guished alumni from every part of our country, all bear abundant 

 witness to the splendid work of fifty years. Of this much will 

 be said in these jubilee days. Let me rather therefore say a 

 word concerning the present and the future of your noble work. 



Certain orators are fond of telling us that we are living in 

 the days of agricultural renaissance. Not so. It is not a 

 rebirth that we are witnessing, but rather a new birth. We 

 are living in the six days of the Creation of Scientific Agriculture. 

 Science for the first time is moving onto the farm. That hopeless 

 picture of " The Man with a Hoe " may be true of the past. It 

 is not true of the life of today, thanks to the agricultural colleges 

 of the world. They have changed the hopeless, brainless " man 

 with a hoe " into a Robert Clark Kedzie, father of the beet- 

 sugar industry of Michigan into a Luther Burbank, creator 

 of a new world of flowers and plants and trees. 



They tell us, Sir, that the trend toward life in the city cannot 

 be arrested; that in 1800 less than 4 per cent, of our population 

 dwelt in cities, and that in 1900, 33 per cent, were to be found 

 there. They tell us that the application of machinery to agri- 

 culture has driven multitudes from the farm. In 1870 there 

 was one man engaged in farming to every seventeen acres of 

 cultivated land, in 1890 there was one to every twenty-six acres. 

 This machinery has driven four and one-half millions of farmers 

 together with their families from the soil to the city. And this 

 is bound to continue. If so it only means that the farmer 

 of the future will be a brain worker rather than a hand worker. 

 It means that the agricultural college will be a greater necessity 

 to the future than it has been to the past. That future, radiant 

 with the promise of abundant usefulness, beckons to you. In 

 the possibilities of that future let all men rejoice ! 



