Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/536

 470 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO symbol and the shell of the life they contain, we who know or can divine what it has cost to do the work of a century in seventeen years, we who have shared the travail of creation, borne the shocks of collision and the strains of adjust- ment in the effort to find ourselves, and awaken at last to the perception that we are not a mere fortuitous concurrence of infinitely repellant particles, but a living organism and a collective soul, we can acquiesce in no soulless name for the process that has brought this thing to pass. We ask for words charged with human and moral meanings generosity, faith, self-sacrifice, courage, devotion, and work. The munificence and modest self-effacement of our Founder, the generosity of the citizens of Chicago whose names our successors will delight to honor, the prophetic faith, the unsparing self-sacrifice, the undaunted courage of President Harper, who gave us not only the consecration of his tireless life, but the example of his death, the devoted sagacity of our Trustees who have borrowed from business or stolen from well-earned leisure the countless hours they have bestowed on the administration of our affairs, the work but we have all worked. "This is the only witchcraft we have used." .... The University of Chicago, .... there are those who love her love her largeness and liberality, her sanity and common sense, her equalization of opportunity, her humane hospitality to men and ideas, her practical idealism, her flexible yet indomitable spirit love her for her breadth of charity, her faith in truth, and her faith that truth will make men free. This history of the first twenty-five years of the University of Chicago and this chapter on "The Developing University," may properly conclude with a review of those developments which can be put into figures. The original site of three blocks had increased to about seventeen, or from seventeen acres to not quite one hun- dred, including the north and south sides of the Midway Plaisance from Washington Park on the west to Dorchester Avenue on the east, a distance of about three-quarters of a mile. The fifty acres of Plaisance which thus bisected the campus were, to all intents and purposes, a part of it, and, being park lands, added as much to the beauty as to the commodiousness of the site. Adding the seventy or more acres of the Observatory site at Lake Geneva it is found that the seventeen acres of the original site in Chicago had increased to about one hundred and sixty-four, and the value from two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to four million, six hundred and fifty thousand. The four buildings of 1892 had increased to above forty, and the value of the buildings from four hundred thousand to more than six million, seven hundred thousand dollars. The furniture for these buildings had cost nearly half a million