FOR THE MIDDLE WEST^ 



PRESIDENT EDMUND JANES JAMES 



Members and friends oj the Michigan Agricultural College: 



In looking over the marvelous advance in agricultural educa- 

 tion during the last fifty years you can utter the proud boast 

 which Vergil put into the mouth of the great Aeneas: "Of all 

 this I have been a great part." 



And this is an era not of progress in agricultural education 

 alone, but in all other departments as well. For he who fancies 

 that this great movement for agricultural and industrial educa- 

 tion has affected only colleges of agriculture and the mechanic 

 arts has greatly underestimated its real influence. It has touched 

 and shaped, at more points than one, the training and equipment 

 of even our oldest and best-known centers of learning. Even 

 such strongholds of ancient tradition as Harvard and Yale are 

 in many respects greatly different from what they would have 

 been had it not been for the over- increasing strength of this 

 tendency. It is in a large sense a part of a world-movement, 

 bound up with the inevitable advance of the democratic spirit 

 and increasing acceptance of democratic ideals. 



Higher education for the farmer and the mechanic, if it ever 

 becomes general, will mean a new era, not simply in education, 

 not simply in agriculture and the mechanic arts, but in the world 

 of politics and civihzation. Despotism, tyranny, one-man 

 power, absolutism, cannot long continue in a country in which 

 the average man is in touch with the processes and ideals of 

 higher education. The progress of democracy was bound to 

 bring with it the demand for an ever-rising standard, not simply 



I Read in the enforced absence of President James by Dean Eugene Daven- 

 port. 



227 



