SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 233 



Another way in which this great movement has influenced 

 education in a beneficial way is to be found not simply in the 

 underlying thought which I have already described, which seems 

 to me fundamental and vital, but in the liberality with which the 

 farmer has taken up this work. We are spending in the state 

 of Illinois today more upon the education of the farmer, using 

 that term in a large sense including the agricultural experiment 

 station, than upon the education of any other class. We have 

 foimd it easier to get money, and we pay higher average salaries 

 to the men in our College of Agriculture, of the same grade of 

 training and experience, than we do the men of any of the other 

 colleges, because the farmer has determined not simply to lay as 

 scientific and broad a foundation as I have described it, but he 

 is determined to have competent men to give this instruction, 

 and he recognizes that competent men cannot be had unless 

 adequate salaries be paid. Furthermore, he recognizes that 

 even the competent man in this modern world of education and 

 research cannot do the best work unless he has adequate equip- 

 ment. So our agricultural department is today the best-equipped 

 department in the University of Illinois. 



The immediate and direct effect of all this is very marked in 

 the wilUngness of the legislature to improve and enlarge the 

 other departments of the miiver'iity. I think it would have been 

 a long time before the people of Ilhnois, under existing conditions, 

 would have made reasonable appropriations for a law school, 

 for example, if they had not already made them for the farmers' 

 school. I am sure that we never should have obtained the 

 magnificent outfit for our engineering college, if it had not been 

 that the farmers' college had been adequately cared for on the 

 same liberal scale. There is not a single department of our 

 institution which has not benefited, in my opinion, indirectly, 

 nay, directly, by this marvelous movement toward higher educa- 

 tion and this youngest of all fields — a movement directed along 

 the soundest and^most^helpful lines, a movement organized in a 



