640 FRANCIS AMASA WALKER. 



and spitting along, with the clang of machinery and the smell of oil. 

 He was an electric current. It was conveyed by a slender and almost 

 invisible wire, exerting its force without heat or noise or odor, but it 

 never failed to do its work and to carry its load. 



Every one of these offices he administered with signal success. You 

 can not find an instance of any duty undertaken by him which was not 

 faithfully and thoroughly discharged. You can not find an instance of 

 bad or superficial intellectual work. He received more honorary 

 degrees in this country and abroad than any other American left alive 

 when he died. * * * 



Greneral Walker brought the result of this varied experience and 

 the fame of these achievements to the service of the Institute of Tech- 

 nology in the autumn of 1881. It was a time of great discouragement 

 here. There had been barely 200 graduates up to 1878. The number 

 of students had fallen within six years from 348 to 188 — almost one- 

 half. Professor Tyler says of the friends of fifteen years earlier: 

 "Some were disheartened and some were dead." The very existence 

 of the institute seemed for a time in peril. It had been seriously pro- 

 posed to merge its identity with one of the departments of Harvard 

 University. I should do injustice alike to an admirable and devoted 

 faculty and to the liberality of this community if I were to attribute 

 the change which these sixteen years have shown to any one man; 

 but surely he was born under a fortunate and auspicious star, of whom 

 it can be said that he touched nothing that did not spring into new 

 life and rejoice in new health when he touched it. Ml tetigit quod 

 non inspiravit. 



He was selected by President Eogers as the fittest person to be 

 found in the country to carry out his comprehensive plans. Leland 

 Stanford, as Mr. Stanford himself told me, tried afterwards with all his 

 might to get him to do the same thing for his university. I do not lay 

 great stress on the fact that in his time the roll of students increased 

 from 302 to 1,198, or that you had, when he began, 39 teachers, and 

 when he died, 153. That is the story of many of the schools and col- 

 leges of the country, certainly of the l^orth, during the same period. 

 General Walker's lot was cast at the time of the marvelous growth of 

 the country in wealth and power. He was here for fifteen years out of 

 thirty, in which the country gained thirty-eight million in population, 

 and in which its valuation grew from seventeen thousand million to 

 thirty thousand million, and in which it became the foremost manufac- 

 turing nation in the world, and the richest nation in the world. 



The endowment of institutions of learning has been going on all over 

 the North and West. Contributions to the cause of higher education 

 in this country, which have been published in the newspapers, and 

 were large enough to attract the notice of the statisticians of the 

 Bureau of Education, have amounted, in the last twenty-five years, to 

 nearly two hundred million dollars. 



