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. I]l-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 anp SirLorn 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 
