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118
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in its value for the youthful state and for the youth of the state which were its true baptismal spirit and which gave and give to the University its prime character. With a propriety for which all Nebraska's children must be thankful, the institution saw the light as a College of Liberal Arts, and it developed as such a college for a period of sufficient length to stamp indelibly upon her that reverence for liberal learning which is the inscrutable essence of all better culture. Nebraska possessed such a reverence from the first: it was avowed in the fresh curiosity of the first generations of students, outwardly a bit uncouth as memory pictures them, but all eager-eyed to the world of knowledge; and it was the actuation of the lives of the early professors, men of books and of traditions, but willing to devote their days to the untaught West that they might there show the way to readers of books and makers of tradition. With such a core of light Nebraska's star was kindled.
Afterwards came the technical schools. Civilization is never of simple design; and the growing needs of a growing state—farmstead after farmstead taking form on the rolling plains, and town and city rising yearly to make firm the social structure—steadily complexified the demands for training made upon the state's great central institution. There must be physicians, lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists, agriculturists, economists, artists,—all these and others with special preparation for the specialized needs of a civilized state; and year by year the University has been called upon to build housings and create colleges to meet the needs of expanding social life. Today the old college hall is but one unit in a maze of structures, and the old curriculum but a tracing in the rich variety announced by the annual catalogue. To not a few, who recall the fresher days, the change brings with it a pang of regret: for there was something eternally charming in that simple faith in learning, untempered by thought of vocation. Nevertheless, seen from the great vantage of a whole society, we all know that any institution of learning which
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