Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/405

 A THIRD PERIOD OF BUILDING 351 After the laying of the stone by President Roosevelt he made an address. The following excerpts will show its trend: It is of vast importance to our wellbeing as a nation that there should be a foundation deep and broad of material wellbeing. No nation can amount to anything great unless the individuals composing it have so worked with the head or with the hand for their own benefit as well as for the benefit of their fellows in material ways that the sum of the material prosperity is great. But that alone does not make true greatness. It is only the foundation for it, and it is the existence of institutions such as this, above all the existence of insti- tutions turning out citizens of the type which I know you turn out, that stands as one of the really great assets of which a nation can speak when it claims true greatness. From this institution you will send out scholars and it is a great and fine thing to send out scholars to add to the sum of productive scholarship. To do that is to take your part in doing one of the great duties of civilization, but you will do more than that, for greater than the school is the man, and you will send forth men: men of high ideals, who yet have the robust good sense necessary to allow for the achievement of the high ideal by practical methods. .... Mr. Judson said in his address today that the things we need are ele- mental. We need to produce, not genius, not brilliancy, but the homely, commonplace, elemental virtues Brilliancy and genius? Yes, if we can have them in addition to the other virtues You need honesty, you need courage, and you need common sense. Above all you need them in the work to be done in the building the cornerstone of which we have laid today, the Law School out of which are to come the men who at the bar and on the bench make and construe, and in construing make the laws of this country; the men who must teach by their actions to all our people that this is in fact essentially a government of orderly liberty under the law. The Law Building was finished and occupied at the opening of the Spring Quarter, 1904. Its cost was two hundred and forty- eight thousand, six hundred and fifty-three dollars. It was three stories high, one hundred and seventy-five feet long, and eighty feet wide, built like the other buildings of Bedford stone in the English Gothic style of architecture. It was designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge and suggests the stately proportions of the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. In the basement were the locker room, smoking-room, club room, and service hall. The main entrance was at the west side, through a vestibule up a short flight of steps into a lobby eighty-five feet long. At either end was a large lecture room seating one hundred and sixty-five students.