8 THE PORTRAIT GALLERY 



Many there be who can ride the flood of an energized idea, 

 stealing from its latencies powers for their own emolumence. 

 Such by the hundred receive popular acknowledgment, urban and 

 rural alike, but all too frequently the man who can originate such 

 an idea is little known and only locally recognized. He who 

 unseals the fount from which the flood springs, too often is 

 washed up on the shore, short yards from where he started, while 

 the public eye ignores the bruised battler to watch the crest of 

 his liberated wave. Or, if his sacrifice be seen, gives approbative 

 glance, and forgets, in seeking new sensations in the whirl of 

 modern progress. Today is only temporarily discriminative, its 

 heroes are short-lived and its memories shorter. He who does 

 and gives sooner finds obscurity than he who dazzles and takes. 

 This reconstructive period finds America taking too much for 

 granted. The stream of meats which has plenished the food table 

 of this country has been so long enjoyed that it is a matter of 

 commonplace, to be admired for its volume, but to be credited to 

 no one. Ill-advised agitators and shortsighted economists through 

 influencing executive and legislative powers have tinkered with 

 meat supplies to the permanent injury of the producers of this 

 generation. The achievements of men who look upon us from 

 these walls are ignored and unknown, and the labor for which 

 they stand, unrecognized. Their perpetuation furnishes the justi- 

 fication of this gallery; the broadening acquaintance with them, 

 its mission. To the petty jealousies and frictions of an agricul- 

 ture developed from so many provincial angles, it brings a court 

 of authority. Saddle and Sirloin emblematic of the field of 

 their jurisdiction, christens the club walls on which the portraits 

 hang, and the organization of active workers in husbandry and 

 industry who uphold them. 



The permanent housing of the International Livestock Expo- 

 sition at the Union Stock Yards in 1900 made Chicago as firmly 

 the pivot of the improved livestock industry as it had previously 



