“The one thing always out of the question is justice; the one thing forever

impertinent is truth. All effort toward justice is regarded, under the ban of public
sentiment, as inconvenient, inquisitorial, involving a temper meddlesome and
impractical in a mercantile community. A mercantile community! As if the one
liberty we prized above all forms of liberty were that of planning and perfecting
profitable sales; as if all things, fairness, honor and fellowship, must alike submit
themselves with us to the market.

Truly ours is an industrial age, but that industry is often the blind labor of the
bee that gathers honey it knows not how to guard. When we have not as yet
learned justice in taxes, we have not, of course, attained the higher principle of
proportion, the principal by which burdens are suited to powers. We allow military
service, the heaviest load the state ever lays on any shoulders, to rest with the
young and strong, because they are young and strong. We refuse to suffer taxes to
seek out the wealthy who can most readily bear them, and who are most indebted
to the state for its protection. A graduated income tax, the most just tax ever
imposed, is distasteful to us because it compels an inquiry into the proper persons
for public burdens, and boldly imposes them where they belong. We prefer to let
taxes fall on the simple and the feeble, because this is easy, and sets up no barriers
in that rapid and unruffled river of enterprise which constitutes the boast of this
great nation, and floats its purple sails.

This timid spirit trammels the state in every assertion of itself against its own
citizens, not only in laying burdens but in defining duties, and we have in place of a
bracing atmosphere of justice and protection, one of weak compromises and
contemptible make-shifts, which are collapsing from time to time with immense
financial embarrassments and social convulsions. Once over the shock, we go
fooling on again with a new set of concessions to the greedy spirit of gain.”

“The University of Wisconsin will be permanently great in the degree in which

it understands the conditions of the prosperity and peace of the people, and helps
to provide them; in the degree in which it enters into the revelation of truth, the
law of righteousness and the love of man, all gathered up and held firm in the
constitution of the human soul and the counsel of God concerning it”

“In leaving you, I do not feel as one who has gathered the last sheaves of
autumn, and abandoned the desolate field to the rigor of winter, but rather as one
who, in the spring time, has committed good seed to warm, fertile soil, whose fruits
his hands and other hands are sure to harvest. The swift years fly as a shadow, but
why regret it. They bear us with them, and also with them all the accumulated
treasures of spiritual life. What is a quick movement for our childish feet is but a
slow movement for the redemption of the race. You, in your youth, are facing the
future on tiptoe, and longing for its revelations. I, too, am with you, and the
blessings and pleasures of our work lie chiefly before us.

Standing in this open space of thought between the past and the future, in
full view of what has been done, in full view of what may be done, I bid you good-
bye, pledging you, one by one, with extended hand, to a faithful adhesion, within
your life and beyond it, to all the great issues discussed by us in common, and in
common held by us as our inheritance from our fathers – issues that give amplitude
and scope to our own love, and are the commitment of the divine hand to us in the
gracious and everlasting government of Christ.”

Excerpts from “A Christian State” – Baccalaureate sermon delivered by John Bascom

in 1887.