Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 3.djvu/80

35 No traveller along this track, as a Persian, poet assures us, has ever missed his way. Security and success are guaranteed of Heaven. Stout of heart and firm of foot, keep, then, to this path. The warmest benedictions of your Alma Mater go with you.

Before conclusion, a word of special welcome is due to the Bachelors of Agricultural Science—the pioneers, as we trust, of a steadily increasing corps of trained and willing workers in a field of vast possibilities. A great world-classic widely honoured in South India, defines the cultivators as ‘the pivot of the world’; and upon the intelligence and the industry of the recipients of the new Degree will largely depend the sustaining power of that pivot. This Faculty, perhaps, more than any other, demands that devotion to duty which accepts hard labour as a privilege. It will be your good fortune 'to scatter plenty o’er a smiling land’. May yours be the joy of benevolent duties zealously discharged!—The Lady Graduates are entitled to the warmest felicitations of all friends of India. If men-graduates prove