$4Sfc* f^t UARTER CENTENNIAL %\Jt ADDRESSES X X X X lwj»£ BOSTON UNIVERSITY \JL-VO. ksr-VV M^riyt^j<~t/~u598). (See Appendix IV.) In the first days of higher education it was naturally believed that only the professional schools for law, medicine, and divinity needed a preparation in the college course. Now it is beginning to be seen that the most practical occupations, those for the procurement of food, clothing and shelter, as well as those for the direction of social and political life, need also the studies that lead to the B. A. degree as well as the specializing post-graduate studies that lead to original combin- ations in industry and politics. Post-graduate work as it was in 1872 had not fully seized the idea of original investigation. There was a dim idea that higher education should end as it had begun, namely, as a system of set lessons with text books and recitations. Post- graduate work should be a continuation of undergraduate work. The idea of the laboratory for experiment and research and of the seminary and library for original investigations in history, politics, archaeology, and sociology, has developed within that time for us. Other nations (one thinks especially of Germany) have had this for a longer period. The significance of this precious addition to our system of education will become clear if we go over for ourselves some of the grounds which make higher education more useful and productive than elementary and secondary. There is something specific in higher education, as it exists in the college, which gives an advantage to its graduates in the way of directive power over their fellow-citizens. Elementary education is a defective sort of education, not merely because it includes only a few years of school work, but because its Address of Hon. Wm. T. Harris. 5 methods of study and habits of thought are necessarily crude and inadequate. The elementary course of study is adapted to the first eight years of school life, say from the age of six to that of fourteen years. That course of study deals chiefly with giving the child a mastery over the symbols of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the technical words in which are expressed the distinctions of arithmetic, geography, grammar, and history. The child has not yet acquired much knowledge of human nature, nor of the world of facts and forces about him. He has a tolerably quick grasp of isolated things and events, but he has very small power of synthesis. He cannot combine in his little mind things and events so as to perceive whole processes. He cannot perceive the principles and laws underlying the things and events which are brought under his notice. He consequently is not able to get much insight into the trend of human affairs, or to draw logical conclusions from convictions or ideas. It is a necessary characteristic of primary or elementary instruction that it must take the world of human learning in fragments and fail to give its pupils an insight into the constitution of things. Let anyone who claims the most for the elementary methods of instruction say whether his pupils at ten years old are capable of such a comprehensive grasp of any subject as will become possible after four years more of good teaching. Let the ardent believer in scientific method say whether the child can learn at twelve years to make allowance for his personal equation and subtract the defects of his bodily senses from his inventory of facts of nature. Is it to be expected that a child can free himself from prejudices, not to say superstitions, at that age and that he can discriminate between what he actually sees and what he expects to see? It is somewhat better in the ages 14 to 18. The education of high schools, academies, and preparatory schools — what American writers call secondary schools — begins to correct this inadequacy of elementary education. 6 Boston University Quarter Centennial. The pupil begins to see things and events as parts of processes, and to understand their significance by tracing them back into their causes and forward into their re- sults. While elementary education fixes on isolated things, secondary education deals with the relations of things and events in groups. It studies forces and laws, and the mode and manner in which things are fashioned and events accomplished. To turn off from occupation with dead results and to come to the investigation of the living process of production is a great step. Where the pupil in the elementary school studies arithmetic and solves problems in particular numbers, the secondary pupil studies algebra and solves problems in general terms ; for each algebraic formula is a rule by which an indefinite number of arithmetical examples may be worked out. In geometry the secondary pupil learns the necessary relations which exist between spatial forms. In general history he studies the collisions of one nation with another. In natural science he discovers the cycles of nature's phenomena. In acquiring foreign languages he studies the variations of words to indicate relations of syntax; he becomes acquainted with the structure of language, in which is revealed the degree of consciousness of the people who made it and used it. Language reveals all this, but not to the youth of sixteen. He gets some glimpse, it is true, but it will take years for him to see as a consistent whole the character of a people as implied in its mode of speech. For to do this he must be able to subtract his personal equation again. He must be able to see how things would seem to him if he did not think them in the highly analytic English tongue, but in a language with inflections like Latin, Greek, or Sanscrit ; in a language like the Chinese where even the parts of speech are not clearly differentiated and no inflections have arisen. But the most serious defect of secondary education is that it does not find a unity deep enough to connect the intellect Address of Hon. Wm. T. Harris. and will. Hence it does not convert intellectual perceptions into rules of action. This is left for higher education. A principle of, action is always a summing up of a series. Things and events have been inventoried and relations have been canvassed : the results must now be summed up ; the conclusion must be reached before the will can act. If we act without summing up the results of inventory and reflection, our act will be a lame one; for the judgment will remain in suspense. We may contrast elementary education and secondary education with the education that comes to the illiterate from experience. He may as a locomotive engineer know all the safe and all the dangerous places on his road. He may know every tie and every rail, but in this he knows only one or two processes and their full trend. He is limited by his own individual observation. The man of books, on the other hand, has entered into the experience of others. Books have given him a knowledge of causes. He can explain his particular experience by carrying it back to its cause. In the cause he sees a common ground for the particular fact of his experience and also for the endless series of facts really present only in the experience of other men, present and past, and only possible for his experience in an endless time. Thus even elementary and secondary education, though inferior to higher education, lift up the boy or girl above the man or woman educated only in the school of experience. They have attained that which will grow into a much broader life. They will be able to interpret and assimilate vast fields of experience when once they encounter them in life ; while the illiterate is quickly at the end of his growth, and what he has learned will not assist him to learn more. This relation of illiterate experience to elementary-school education helps to understand the defect of elementary as compared with secondary, and secondary as compared with higher education. 8 Boston University Quarter Centennial. It is the glory of higher education that it lays chief stress on the comparative method of study ; that it makes philosophy its leading discipline ; that it gives an ethical bent to all of its branches of study. Higher education seeks as its first goal the unity of human learning. Then in its second stage it specializes. It first studies each branch in the light of all others. It studies each branch in its history. A good definition of science is that it unites facts in such a way that each fact throws light on all facts within a special province and all facts throw light on each fact. Nature is first inventoried and divided into provinces — minerals, plants, animals, etc., geology, botany, zoology. Thus secondary education deals with the organizing of facts into subordinate groups, while higher education undertakes to organize the groups into one group. The first part of higher education, that for the A. B. degree — as we have said already — teaches the unity of human learning. It shows how all branches form a connected whole, and what each contributes to the explanation of the others, This has well been called the course in philosophy. After the course in philosophy comes the selection of a specialty ; for there is no danger of distorted views when one has seen the vision of the whole system of human learning. Higher education cannot possibly be given to the person of immature age. For the youthful mind is immersed in a sea of particulars. A college that gave the degree of Bachelor of Arts to students of eighteen years would give only a secondary course of education after all. For it would find itself forced to use the methods of instruction that characterize the secondary school. It would deal with subordinate groups and not with the world view. The serious tone of mind, the earnest attitude which inquires for the significance of a study to the problem of life, cannot be formed in the normally developed student from fourteen to eighteen years of age. But at eighteen years of age the problems of practical life begin to press for solution. This in itself is a reason for the demand for philosophy, or for Address of Hon. Wm. T. Harris. a measure that may settle for him the relative value of each element of experience. The youth of proper age to enter on higher education must have already experienced much of human life, and have arrived at the point where he begins to feel the necessity for a regulative principle, or a principle that shall guide him in deciding the endless questions which press upon him for settlement. He must have begun to ask himself what career or vocation he will choose for life. Taking the youth at this epoch, when he begins to inquire for a first principle as a guide to his practical decisions, the college gives him a compend of human experience. It shows him the verdict of the earliest and latest great thinkers upon the meaning of the world. It gives him the net result of human opinion as to the trend of history. It gathers into one focus the results of the vast labors of specialists in natural science, in history, jurisprudence, philology, political science and moral philosophy. If the college graduate is not acquainted with more than the elements of these multifarious branches of human learning, yet he is all the more impressed by their bearing upon the conduct of life. He sees their function in the totality, although he may not be an expert in the methods of investiga- tion in any one of them. For the reason that higher education makes the ethical insight its first object, its graduates hold the place, in the community at large, of spiritual monitors. They exercise a directive power altogether disproportionate to their number. They lead in the three learned professions, and they lead in the management of education of all kinds. They correct the one-sided tendencies of elementary education, and they furnish the wholesome centripetal forces to hold in check the extravagances of the numerous self-educated people who have gone off in special directions after leaving the elementary school. Dr. Charles F. Thwing, President of Western Reserve University, a few years ago was at the pains to hit upon a 10 Boston University Quarter Centennial. novel method of comparing the college graduate with the rest of society. He took the six volumes of Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography and counted the college graduates in its list of over 15,000 names. A little more than one-third of all were discovered to be college men. A safe inference was one that one out of ten thousand of the population who have not had a college education training has become of sufficient note to be selected for mention in a biographical dictionary, while one out of each 40 of our college men finds his place there. The chance of the college man as compared with the non- college man is as 250 to 1, to become distinguished as a public man of some sort, — soldier, naval officer, lawyer, statesman, clergyman, teacher, author, physician, artist, scientist, inventor — in short, a man with directive power of some kind able to combine matter into a new and useful form, or to combine men in such a way as to reconcile their differences and produce a harmonious whole of endeavor. We have already explained that the person who has merely an elementary schooling has laid stress on the mechanical means of culture — on the arts of reading, writing, computing, and the like. He has trained his mind for the acquirement of isolated details. But he has not been disciplined in compara- tive studies. He has not learned how to compare each fact with other facts, and still less how to compare each science with other sciences. He has not inquired as to the trend of his science as a whole, nor has he asked as to its imperfections which need correction from the standpoint of other sciences. He has not yet entertained the question as to its bearing on the conduct of life. We would say of him that he has not yet learned the difference between knowledge and wisdom ; he has not learned the method of converting knowledge into wisdom ; for it is the best description of the college course of study to say that its aim is to convert knowledge into wisdom — to show how to discern the bearing of all departments of knowledge upon each. Address of Hon. Wm. T. Harris. II Again, considering the permanent effects on the intellectual character, it is evident that the individual who has received only an elementary education is at great disadvantage as compared with the person who has received a higher education in the college or university, making all allowances for the imperfections of existing institutions. The individual is prone to move on in the same direction and in the same channel which he has taken under the guidance of his teacher. Very few persons change their methods after they leave school. Hence the importance of reaching the influence of the method of higher education, the method of original investigation, before one closes his school career. It is easy to enumerate the influences of the university and see their great transforming power. Its distinguished professors, its venerable reputation, the organization of the students and teaching corps into an institutional whole, the isolation of the student from the strong ties of the home and the home community, all these, taken together, are able to effect this change in method when brought to bear upon a young man for four years. He acquires an attitude of mind which we have already described as critical and comparative. It is at the same time conservative. He has learned to expect that the existing institution may have deeper grounds for its being than appear at first sight ; while on the other hand, the mind trained in elementary and secondary methods is easily surprised and captivated by superficial considerations and has small power of resistance against shallow, critical views. It is easily swept away by a specious argument for reform, although we must admit that the duller, commonplace intellect that has received only an elementary education is apt to follow use and wont and not question the established order. It is the brighter class of minds that stop with the elementary school, which become agitators in the bad sense of the term. The restless and discontented class of people, those who mistake revolution for reform, are recruited from the elementary ranks. But the commonplace intellect has no adaptability, or at least 12 Boston University Quarter Centennial. small power of readjustment, in view of new circumstances. The disuse of hand labor and the adoption of machine labor, for instance, finds the common laborer unable to substitute brain labor for hand labor, and it keeps him in the path of poverty wending his way to the almshouse. Our numerous self-educated men, of whom we are so proud, are quite apt to be persons who have never advanced beyond elementary methods. Very often they are men of great accumulations in the way of isolated scraps of information. They have memory pouches unduly developed. They lay stress on some insignificant phase of human affairs. They advocate with great vigor the importance of some local center, some partial human interest, as the chief object of all life. Not unlike them is the astronomer who opposes the helio- centric theory, and favors the claim of some planet or some satellite as the true center. This is the crying evil with our dominance of elementary education and our swarms of "self-educated" men. They take the primary view of all things, and this is of necessity a distorted view. Their theory supposes, innocently enough, that the immediate view of things shows them as they truly are. It looks at the present object out of its historic con- nection and fancies that it knows it, without taking into consideration the process by which it has been generated and come to be what it is. All college or university work — even the poorest specimens of it — deals more or less with the genesis of things — with their process of becoming — and sets the student into a habit of mind which is dissatisfied with the immediate aspect of things and impels him to go at once behind them to casual processes and seek to find what states and conditions preceded, and how the changes were wrought, and exactly why we have things as they are. It gets to understand the trend of things and can tell, prophetically, what is likely to come next. This primary view of the world adopted by so many of our "self-educated " men — I admit them to be men of great merit, Address of Hon. Wm. T. Harris. 13 so far as good intentions and persistent industry are in question — explains why so many self-educated men are men of hobbies, or " fads " as they are called in the slang of the day. A hobby or fad is some fragmentary view of the world set up for the central principle of all things. It has been stated that a man with a hobby does not see his favorite subject in its just relations — does not comprehend its process of origination nor see how it implies the existence of other things. He does not understand the interdependence of all things. In contrast to him stands the old-time graduate of college, before the admission requirements had been raised. He received the first part of higher education, the culture side of it, as he does now. It gave him his view of the world. It is true that the family and the Church give to the child his view of the world, but they omit the logical connections. The child does not think out the results nor see their grounds, nor does he apply that view of the world as a measuring rod to the branches of knowledge. Let us conclude this address by a summary of the views presented. In the college the pupil has the thought of his civilization presented to him as a practical guiding principle. He meets it in every recitation room and in the general conduct of the institution. He finds himself in association with a large number of students all occupied upon this work of learning the regulative principles not only of human conduct but also of the world of knowledge. The lawyer, after working years and years over his cases, comes by and by to have what is called a " legal mind," so that he sees at a glance, almost as by intuition, what the law will be in a new case. So in the four years of college under- graduate life the student gets an insight which enables him to decide immediately a phase of the problem of life. He forms a habit of mind which inquires constantly of each thing and event : How does this look in the light of the whole of human learning? What is the "good form" which the consensus of the scholars of the world has fixed for this ? He 14 Boston University Quarter Centennial. learns at once to suspect what are called " isms " and universal panaceas as one-sided statements. The wisdom of the race begins to form a conscious element of his life. While the first part of higher education gives this general insight into what is good form in view of the unity of human learning, the second part — that which teaches methods of original investigation — should be made accessible to all students of colleges and universities. For this purpose endowments are needed, first in the form of fellowships which will enable the student to live comfort- ably while he is preparing himself for his doctor's degree. A second kind of an endowment may promote research and take the form of prizes for special investigations. The laboratories and seminaries of this post-graduate course may and do take up the practical problems of the life of the people. These are capable of immense benefit in sociology and politics, to say nothing of the industries of the people, rural and urban. The entire civil service of the United States should find employment for experts armed with methods of original investigation and with the readiness and daring to undertake the solution of problems which offer themselves perpetually in our civil life. The town council, the board of public works, the various directive powers which manage the affairs of the state and municipality are in constant need of light, and the student of the post-graduate department of the university is the person needed to furnish by his special studies the aggregate result of the experience of the world in answering these practical and theoretical wants. In a country studying ever new political questions and questions in sociology, the student who obtains his doctor's degree from the post-graduate course can apply his knowledge, and apply it rationally, without losing his self-possession. Since 1880 when our census showed a population of more than fifty millions we have ascended above the horizon of the great nations of Europe. Address of Hon. Wm. T.Harris. 15 Henceforth we have a new problem, namely, to adjust ourselves to the European unity of civilization. It is absurd to suppose that the problems of diplomacy which will arise in our relations to the states of the Old World can be solved by minds untrained in the university. For it is higher education which takes the student back to historic source and descends from national beginnings, tracing the stream of events to the various points at which modern nations have arrested their development. Successful diplomacy is not possible without thorough knowledge of national aspirations and their historic genesis. It is almost equally important that our home problems, social and political, shall be studied by our university specialists. Perpetual readjustment is before us. There is the new aristocracy of wealth struggling against the aristocracy of birth. To both is opposed the aristocracy of culture, the only one that is permanent. All may come into the aristocracy of culture, but it requires supreme endeavor on the part of the individuals. With the great inventions of the age we find ourselves all living on a border land. We are brought into contact with alien nationalities and alien forms of civilization. We are forever placed in antagonism with some environment, material or spiritual, and our endeavor must perforce be to effect a reconciliation — to unite the conflicting ideas in a deeper one that conserves what is good in each. There is no other recourse ; we must look to higher education to furnish the formulae for the solution of the problems of our national life. We accordingly rejoice in the fact of the increasing popularity of the University in both its functions — that of culture and that of specialization. 1 6 Boston University Quarter Centennial. Appendix I. Number of college students to each 1,000,000 persons in the United States (excluding professional and technical students, but including post-graduate students). 1872 590 1885-86 700 1873 74° 1886-87 7 IQ 1874 760 1887-88 710 1875 740 1888-89 75° 1876 720 1889-90 880 1877 710 1890-91 930 1878 ... 790 1891-92 1,020 1879 780 1892-93 1,080 1880 780 1893-94 1,140 1881 760 1894-95 1,190 1882-83 74° 1895-96 1,220 1883-84 750 1896-97 1,210 1884-85 760 Appendix II. Number of post-graduate students in the universities and colleges of the United States each year for twenty- five years. (These are included in Appendix I.) 1871-72 198 1885-86 935 1872-73 219 1886-87 1,237 1873-74 283 1887-88 1,290 1874-75 369 1888-89 M43 1875-76 399 1889-90 1,717 1876-77 389 1890-91 2,131 1877-78 414 1891-92 2,499 1878-79 465 1892-93 2,851 1879-80 411 1893-94 3,493 1880-81 460 1894-95 3,999 1882-83 5 22 1895-96 4,363 1883-84 778 1896-97 4,919 1884-85 869 Appendix III. Number of professional students to each 1,000,000 persons in the United States. 1872 280 1885-86 450 1876 380 1890-91 570 1 881 440 1895-96 740 Appendix IV. Students in scientific and technical courses in the United States. 1889-90 14,869 1893-94 23,254 1890-91 15,586 1894-95 24,055 1891-92 17,012 1895-96 23,598 1892-93 20,329 BOSTON UNIVERSITY QUARTER CENTENNIAL COMMENCEMENT DAY WEDNESDAY, JUNE I, 1898 AFTERNOON SESSION. President William F. Warren, Presiding. PRESIDENT WARREN. Ladies and Gentlemen : — In behalf of the Trustees of Boston University, I have the honor and pleasure to welcome you to this hall. The precise occasion of this quarter- centennial celebration has already been sufficiently stated in the programmes in your hands. We have invoked the blessing of heaven upon our institution, as it stands at the threshold of a new quarter century. It is surely fitting that we should next invoke the blessing of our Commonwealth. It is to the state that the University owes its corporate powers ; it is to the state that it owes its high commission to promote in the world learning and piety. Despite duties of the most exacting character, despite labors most exhausting, despite wearinesses and war-burdens which no man but himself can ever know, the honored Governor of Massachusetts has kindly consented to favor us with his presence, and to bring us the message of the state. Ladies and Gentlemen, His Excellency Governor Wolcott. GOVERNOR WOLCOTT. Mr. President, Students, Graduates and Friends of Boston University : — I have broken away for a few moments from duties at the State House that must summon me back shortly, to bring to you on this twenty fifth anniversary of the birth of your college the greetings and the God-speed of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It would be, under any circumstances, a personal pleasure to me to be brought face to face with this great audience of men and women called together to celebrate an anniversary like this, dedicated as it is to the higher education of the citizens of America. But it is on this occasion even more than a personal pleasure to hie, for in the constitution of the Commonwealth, I feel that, as 20 Boston University Quarter Ce?itennial. the official representative of the Commonwealth, I am bidden, as my duty, to be here today, and to bring whatever encouragement word of mine can bring on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When John Adams, as one of the great services which he rendered to the Commonwealth and the Nation, drafted the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1779, he wrote in it a section that at that time was unique in the history of organic law, and which has remained until the present day, laying its mandate upon legislatures and magistrates of this Commonwealth to bear in mind and to encourage the cause of education. I will read briefly from this section to you, because there are certain incidents con- nected with its genesis and origin that I think may be of interest to you. It is Section II. of Chapter V., Constitution of Massachusetts : — " Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties ; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legisla- tures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them." And then there are added other clauses that give an even wider scope to this broad duty of those who should succeed to the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, after he and the men of his generation had passed away. Now, John Adams, in describing how he came to write that clause in the constitution of the Commonwealth, states that during his journeys — which at that time were made in the saddle or in carriages — to the Provincial Congress, it was his custom to stop at Norwalk in Connecticut, and that there he had been hospitably entertained by a certain Mr. Arnold, who had an extensive collection of stuffed birds and preserved insects. And he states that from time to time, as he passed there, he became so interested in this collection — which, by Congratulatory Address by Governor Wolcott. 21 the way, passed later to England, and I believe is still pre- served there — that it lay so much upon his heart and mind that it was the duty of a republic to foster the cause of letters and of the sciences, that later when he went abroad, he made certain inquiries, and kept his active mind open to whatever bore upon the subject there; and finally, upon returning to this Commonwealth, and being deputed to write a draft of the constitution of Massachusetts — which was adopted three years after the Declaration of Independence was written, and nine years before the constitution of the United States — he deemed it his duty to write into that constitution, as a part of the fundamental and organic law of the Commonwealth, not subject to the caprice of subsequent legislatures, this fundamental duty of legislatures and magis- trates for all time to come, — to foster the cause of the higher education, learning, and of the sciences. He states that he presented that section with some misgivings, and it is perhaps interesting to know that a somewhat similar section presented in a draft of the constitution of another state was rejected by the legislature of that state. But in the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts this duty remains ; and I trust, my friends, that it may ever remain as a worthy testi- monial to the intelligence of our fathers, who themselves were sons of men who established a university and provided for a system of public schools in the very infancy and poverty of the first settlement of the state. (Applause.) It is therefore in obedience to a duty, as well as in gratifi- cation of a personal pleasure, that I stand here today and bring to you the greetings of the Commonwealth of Massa- chusetts. Personally, I have always felt, among many causes of pride in the history of my native state, that not the least of her claims upon our affection and loyalty has been the honorable record that the Commonwealth has always made for herself in the cause of education. In a great degree, Massachusetts may be said to be a great school-house for the United States of America. Her little academies, placed upon 22 Boston University Quarter Centennial. many hillsides throughout the state, her public schools and her great institutions of learning, call together men and women from all the states of this union, and from countries beyond the sea. One of the important institutions is the one which I have the honor of addressing today. Less remarkable in antiquity than some of the other institutions of the state, you have yet already, through your graduates, won for yourselves an honor- able place among the ranks of educated men and women. Would that my honored predecessor in the position which I have the honor to hold — he who had won the diploma of the Law School — had been permitted to bring to you today the greetings of the Commonwealth ! With what filial affection would he have spoken of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ! With what hearty sympathy would he have felt the interest that runs through your hearts today on this anniversary occasion ! (Applause.) Boston University already stands in numbers, and in its grade of education, among the foremost educational institu- tions of this country. I have read with interest the admirable address written by your distinguished president, which gives the history of this University. I observe with gratification that it is there stated that this is the first college or univer- sity that from its very first stage has thrown open all its departments on absolutely equal terms to men and women. (Applause.) There is another feature of this University which I regard also with especial interest. You have cast aside deliberately— undoubtedly with "malice aforethought" — the method of organization of the earlier colleges of this land. Your college boasts no college yard, with its accumulated buildings, iri picturesque groups. You do not boast dormitories which provide a possibly mitigated system of monastic life. (Laughter.) You lack absolutely that itnperiuni in irhperio which creates of a college yard, and what it contains, a sort of independent community in the cities or towns in which the Congratulatory Address by Governor Wolcott. 23 universities are placed. There are some of us, my friends, who look back upon that life within a college yard, set thus apart for the- uses of the college, with an affectionate and loving memory that is gilded with the light of hopeful youth. And yet I trust I am open-minded enough to see that there may be compensating advantages in placing the students at once in quick contact with the great floods and currents of municipal life. I can see that that, too, may have its advantages. And I trust, although it was my misfortune to receive my college education in an institution given over to the small function of educating men only (laughter), I can yet see that there may be advantages in bringing the eager minds of both sexes together in the recitation room ; and I can certainly say this : that so far as my opinion goes, whatever possible drawbacks might have been anticipated, they have not been realized. Therefore, I bring today the hearty greetings of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ; I bring her God-speed as you enter upon the second quarter-century of your progress. As a citizen of the Commonwealth, I bid you remember that it is not the mere accumulation of learning, that it is not constituting the mind a dead reservoir of accumulated facts, that makes education of value, and makes its claims paramount upon the Commonwealth. It is rather that these institutions of the higher learning have for their lofty purpose to train the human mind so that he who possesses it can go forth and do God's work in the world which clamors for such workers. Remember that unless learning makes of you good citizens, it fails of its high purpose ; remember that the great destiny of this country rests upon this apprehension of your responsibility ; remember that whether it be in times Of peace or in the ardent fires of war, this country places its mandate upon those to whom are given great opportunities, and in its turn says to them : " Freely ye have received, freely give." (Applause.) 24 Boston University Quarter Centennial. PRESIDENT WARREN. Before introducing the next speaker, I desire to remind you that the name of Governor Roger Wolcott was as familiar here in New England a hundred and fifty years ago as it is today. The bearer of that honored name was then the colonial governor of Connecticut. He held a great variety of civil offices and was judge of the superior court, and at the capture of Louisburg in 1745 his skill and valor won for him the title of a major-general. And his son in like manner was a judge, in like manner a major-general, and had the honor of being one of the signers of the immortal Declaration of Independence. Were we believers in transmigration, we might, on the basis of the doctrine of reincarnation, find a good reason for the eminence, for the versatility, for the bravery, for the trusted qualities of the Chief Magistrate of Massachusetts. (Applause.) The next name upon our program reminds us of another line of illustrious men. The first bearer of it to honor Boston lived more than a hunderd and fifty years ago. His son was not a signer of the Declaration of Independence, as I remember it, but he was so distinguished an advocate of American inde- pendence that his name is forever associated with that of James Otis and General Joseph Warren. His son, bearing the same name, was even more conspicuous as a statesman and as a scholar. He was the second mayor of our goodly city, and left a deep impress upon our municipal history. For sixteen years he was the president of Harvard University, leaving behind him there the record of an administration considered the most illustrious of the institution up to that time. It is very appropriate that the citizens of Boston recently have called the present bearer of that name to the chief magistracy of this city, and it is equally fitting that we give an enthusiastic welcome to Josiah Quincy, Mayor of Boston. Congratulatory Address by Mayor Quincy. 25 MAYOR QUINCY. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: — The city of Boston occupies a somewhat different relation to this University from that which the Commonwealth occupies. If it is under the authority of the Commonwealth that this University is establised and conducted, it is in the city of Boston, in the midst of its active life, and in close contact with its forces, that the University has established its seat and made its halls. His Excellency the Governor has happily touched upon the difference between the university that stands isolated in the smaller community, and the university like yours, which is planted in the midst of the life of a great city, and which leaves its students to make their homes as best they may among the homes of the people of that city. There is a place in our American life, with its lack of historical background and inheritance, for the university which has something of tradition and of history behind it. But there is certainly also, perhaps equally, a place for the university which springs into being as it were, which finds its life in the midst of a great community, and which starts upon its educational career untrammelled by the traditions of the past, in touch with the spirit of the present, and looking forward to the changes which the future brings into our lives. We would not spare Harvard and Yale, and the great universities which have this precious inheritance, from our American life, but neither would we spare such institutions as Boston University, which, founded nearer to our day, having only the comparatively short inheritance of twenty-five years behind, are free in a way in which the older institutions of learning can not be free, to bring themselves closely into contact with the life of the day, to plant themselves in the midst of a great municipal community, and to stand for all that is progressive, all that is advancing, all that is modern in education. That has been the privilege of Boston University. And it has certainly meant a great deal to the city of Boston that such an institution of higher education has been founded within its 26 Boston University Quarter Centennial. limits, and has been carried on in close contact with its life — affording an opportunity for the higher education to many of the sons and daughters of Boston who otherwise would have been unable to obtain it. It has meant, therefore, a great deal to Boston that this University has been established and carried on right in the heart of the city, in close contact with its life. His Excellency the Governor has touched upon that feature of the organization of your University which is, perhaps, its prominent characteristic, distinguishing it from the other great universities of our land. It seems to me personally to be a great thing that you have shown that it is possible to carry on successfully and with high educational standards, a great university, in a great city, upon a basis affording complete equality of opportunity for men and women. And there is no citizen of Boston who is more heartily in sympathy with that feature of Boston University, who regards it as a more honorable, distinguishing characteristic of Boston University than the speaker of the present moment. (Applause.) Perhaps the proudest distinction which the city of Boston enjoys today, perhaps its most valued reputation, is that of being an educational center. We are proud of the interest that is taken in Boston in all forms of education. We are proud of our public schools and of the opportunities which they afford to the humblest of our citizens for obtaining the benefit of education for their children. But it is certainly no small source of pride and gratification to the citizens of Boston that this educational reputation of our city is not con- fined to our public schools ; that the educational facilities which we afford extend upward to the top, and that our educational system is crowned by this Boston University whose twenty-fifth anniversary we are celebrating today. (Applause.) I can only express the interest which I know that the citizens of Boston in general feel in the continued growth and Co7igratulatory Address of Mayor Quincy. 27 prosperity of this University, and in the work which it is doing in the midst of the city, alike for the children of the citizens of Boston, and for those who come here from a dis- tance to avail themselves of the educational facilities which you offer. I can only express the hope, which I know all the citizens of Boston feel, that the future of this University may be even more successful than its past has been ; that it may go on increasing, not only in its numbers, — and the life and work of a great university are only partially measured by the number of its students, — but that it may go on increasing in the value, in the richness, in the fruitfulness, and in the comprehensiveness of the education which it is giving to the hundreds of young men and young women who are attending its various courses. May that education in the quarter of a century to come, extend in usefulness and in value, and may the noble work of this institution, in the hands of those who are now charged with its oversight, and in the hands of their successors, continue to grow and prosper, and may the reputation of the city of Boston, in coming time, be brighter and more glorious because it is the seat of this institution of higher learning. (Applause.) At this point, the relations of the City and State to the University having been represented, the President alluded to the national signifi- cance of the institution and in response to his invitation the vast assembly arose, and with great enthusiasm sang two verses of the national hymn : " My country, 'tis of thee." Then followed an address entitled, " The Historical Heritage of Boston University," by President Warren. THE HISTORICAL HERITAGE OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY. By President W. F. Warren. Members and Friends of Boston University : — Permit me to improve the present moment to make an important announcement. It is this — that the fourth Quarter Centennial of Boston University will be celebrated in the year 1969, the one hundredth anniversary of our Charter Day. You and your children are cordially invited to be present. Notice is given thus early for the sake of reminding you that today's festival, the first in the new order, is not even one generation's remove from our beginning, and that consequently this is not the time for the recital of an accomplished history. After a century's prosperous growth some survey of results will perhaps be more appropriate. At least a sanguine mind may hope that at the close of the rounded century, in the presence of students and alumni and guests representing possibly every state of the American Union and every great nationality on the face of the globe, some honored orator of the day may pronounce some few plans sufficiently executed to merit men's review and judgment. Such anticipation is supported by the fact that even today, without counting an alumnus, or a guest, six-and-thirty American states and four-and-twenty foreign countries are represented in this hall. Today your attention is invited to what may be styled the historical heritage of Boston University. I have chosen this theme for several reasons, chiefly because it relieves the present speaker of every obligation to deal with things accomplished in the past quarter-century, and permits him to undertake the more pleasing task of attempting to give due credit to those fathers and forefathers who lived before the institution was born, and by whom its founding was made possible. 30 Boston University Quarter Centennial. The heritage about to be outlined includes innumerable items. First of all, mention may be made of the name. Hallowed indeed are the associations which surround as with a halo of glory the name of this favored city. It has taken the elite of the English race, and of related races, more than two hundred and fifty years to create that halo and to charge it with its steady radiance. It has taken the wisdom of great magistrates, the learning of illustrious scholars, the valor of brave generals, the eloquence of famous orators, the sagacity of merchant princes, the organizing genius of industrial captains, the zeal of ardent reformers, the benefactions of princely philanthropists, the devotion of matchless mothers, the prayers of countless saints. To particularize is as unnecessary as it is impossible. Every competent judge admits that in all the modern world there is no other city which is so perfectly a synonym of ethical ideals, of disciplined intelligence, of lofty, all-sided, courageous culture. The moment the sovereign state of Massachusetts bestowed that name upon the new University, it conferred a precious endowment, an inheritance of inestimable value. Next in our inventory should doubtless stand the precious memories of our immediate founders. In the charter three were mentioned, and of these I must first recall to your remembrance the one who in the pleasure of Heaven was the first called to vacate his seat in the new corporation. I allude to Hon. Lee Claflin, a senator of Massachusetts. He was the father of Hon. William Claflin, who after thrice serving as Governor of the Commonwealth, and as a Representative in Congress, has now for more than a quarter-century presided over the supreme governing body of this University. Fortunate father, fortunate son ! A grateful multitude congratulates you both this day. To Lee Claflin belongs the honor of having been the first known proposer and advocate of the founding of this University. How modest, how wise, how genial a man he was ! None that ever knew him can forget the gentle Historical Address by President Warren. 3 1 strength of his benignant face. In business sagacity, in application, in self-restraint for noble purposes, he was eminent. He was one of the men whose intelligence and moral integrity have made Eastern Massachusetts the world's headquarters for the business in which he was engaged. For many years he was a liberal patron of learning, not only in his own commonwealth, but also in distant places. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, he planted the University which others gratefully named in his honor. His other charities were so varied and unremitting that the number of persons and organizations that were the beneficiaries of his fruitful life can never be determined by any calculus know to earth. A wise member of the governing board in several literary institutions, he saw the educational possibilities of such a metropolis as Boston. He counseled the utilization of them, and his word bore fruit. On his handsome monument in Pine Grove Cemetery, Milford, his sons might truthfully have placed the inscription : " First of the Founders of Boston University." The second of the three incorporators was Isaac Rich. He was the next to act, and also the next to cease from action. In physical stature he was not the equal of his older colleague, but a more symmetrical manly form, or a more beautiful and vivacious countenance, I have never known. His hand was molded with exquisite delicacy. It would have graced any of the earls or countesses of Warwick, from whose family line there is good reason to believe he was descended. He began life poor, but his known New England ancestry and kindred were eminently respectable. A kinswoman of his in the last century was the wife of Colonel Elisha Doane of Wellfleet, at the time of his death the richest man in Massachusetts. Another kinswoman was courted and married by no less a personage than Hon. Lemuel Shaw, who drafted the first charter of the city of Boston, and was for thirty years Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Robert Treat Paine, the honored signer of the Declaration of Independence, and John 32 Boston University Quarter Centennial. Rich, the contemporary forefather of Isaac Rich, married sisters, daughters of Rev. Samuel Treat of Eastham, who was the oldest son of His Excellency Robert Treat, Governor of Connecticut. Moreover, the grandfather of this John Rich, the ancestor of the whole Cape Cod division of the family, married the daughter of Thomas Roberts, the Royal Colonial Governor of New Hampshire. Of the same descent in more recent times was Mr. Obadiah Rich, one of the original incorporators of the Boston Athenaeum, who was in his day the greatest of American bibliographers, a special friend and helper of Irving and Ticknor, Prescott and Longfellow. Isaac Rich, the fisher-boy of Wellfleet, was the oldest of eleven children. He entered this city as penniless as Benjamin Franklin entered Philadelphia. By remarkable personal powers, by his diligence in business, by fidelity to moral and religious principle, he came to be recognized even by the Federal Government as standing at the head of all the mercantile houses in his line in the United States. Better than that, he became the most liberal patron of education that New England up to that time had ever known. To the Academy at Wilbraham, to the University at Middletown, and to the Theological Seminary in Boston, he gave with his own hand at least $400,000. Then he executed a will which bequeathed to Boston University a larger sum than at that date had ever been bequeathed or given by any American for the promotion of literary and scientific education. The memory of such a more than national benefactor is precious, and of that memory the University is the happy heir, the enduring custodian. The Hon. Jacob Sleeper was another of God's noblemen. He was born at Newcastle, Maine, then a part of Massachu- setts. From his father he should have inherited a modest fortune, but, orphaned at the age of fourteen, and having seen his property vanish before he was twenty-one, he began life with no resources outside himself. For some years after he came to Boston he was in partnership with Mr. Andrew Historical Address by President Warren. 33 Carney, the public-spirited founder of Carney Hospital. It was in London, in 1857, that I first met him, and I was immediately impressed with his native dignity and grace. Especially noticeable were his eyes, their glance being at once remarkably penetrating and remarkably sympathetic. Like a kindly search-light, they penetrated your inmost being, illuminating its content for you as fully as for himself. Mr. Sleeper had an uncommonly rich spiritual endowment and spiritual experience. For a time he entertained the thought of studying for the Christian ministry. As it was, he was life- long a class-leader, and thus the lay-pastor of a great multi- tude of souls. Without an interval he superintended a Boston Sunday-school more than fifty years. He had little taste for political life, yet in response to what seemed to him the call of duty, he served his fellow-citizens as an alderman, as a member of the Legislature, and twice as a member of the Governor's Council. Twice the Legislature elected him to a six-year term as an Overseer of Harvard University. Suave in manner, distinguished in appearance, tactful in action, exhaustless in kindly energies, he was at the close of his career the man whom multitudes would have named as all in all the noblest example of Christian citizenship known to them in any city. He gave or bequeathed to Boston University more than a quarter of a million of dollars, but the memory of his gracious character and beneficent life is a heritage even more sacred and precious. Of the earliest associates of these special founders, many have finished their course, and at this time might well receive individual commemoration.* But the grateful task would lead us too far afield. Suffice to say that the men who organized the University were by heredity and training exceptionally competent to represent all that was distinctive *Three of these must not remain unmentioned, Reverends David Patten, D. D., J. H. Twombly, D. D., and Gilbert Haven, D. D., afterwards Bishop. Without the in- fluence of any one of these the plan would have failed of realization. Their relation to the lay founders is carefully set forth in Zion's Herald for July 20, 1898. 34 Boston University Quarter Centennial. or cosmopolitan, all that was historic or prophetic, in New England culture. Of its first Senate four had worn the judicial robes of Massachusetts. Of the first three Deans elected two were graduates of Harvard University, one of them a valedictorian and a litterateur of excep- tional brilliancy. Of the fourteen members of the original Law Faculty nearly every one was an eminent graduate of the same ancient seat of learning. Of the original Medical Faculty, no less than seven were Harvard graduates, while eleven had received their professional training in part or in whole in Europe. As to the Faculty of Liberal Arts, it is believed to have been the first in this country of which it could be said that every member of it had enjoyed in addition to American graduation the advantages of European study. In the Corporation were represented many of the historic families of New England and of Old. The man who offered the opening prayer at the first meeting of the corporation came to Boston, ancestorially, in the year 1644. Next to him sat another whose forefather came in 1637. In the veins of the man who drafted the charter was the blood of the great Englishman who, before Governor Winthrop ever reached these shores, had earned the title afterward applied to him, "the acknowledged father of New England colonization." The known lineal ancestor of another of those early trustees trod Boston soil and surveyed its " hill-tops three " more than three months before the first settlement of the town. Two others, at the time unaware of their mutual relationship, are now found to have been collateral descendants of one of the earliest settlers of New Hampshire, who, himself, as is shown by authoritative documents in England, was a direct descen- dant in the twenty-first generation from a Saxon lord of the soil, who lived before the Norman conquest in the year 1066. Still another was a direct descendant from a high-born lady in our early colony who might well be made the patroness of all the Colonial Dame organizations of America, since she was descended in two different lines from William the Conqueror, Historical Address by President Warren. 35 and united in herself the lineage of ten of the sovereigns of Europe. To such facts as these I have never heard more than one of the original organizers and governors of the University make reference. They were men too modest and too democratic to boast of their lineage, however noble. But their blood and lineage abundantly explain why these state- commissioned builders of the new University for the furtherance and expression of the highest intellectual life in this metropolis felt themselves to be natural local custodians of whatever is best in Anglo-Saxon civilization, and considered the University itself a legitimate heir to all the inspiring and ennobling traditions of the American people. In passing now to more tangible assets received from our predecessors, it is interesting to note the wealth of historic association connected with several of the estates of the Uni- versity. For example, the first real estate ever owned by the Corporation consisted of two building lots on Oliver street. They were a part of the original homestead of Andrew Oliver, the last Royal Lieutenant Governor of the Colony of Massa- chusetts. In other respects the property was of interest to lovers of the past. It was on the lower slope of the military acropolis of the ancient town, Fort Hill. On the opposite side of this street was the house of Judge Oliver Wendell, grandfather of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. In 1776, on the same street, and but a few feet from the lots of the University, were the last headquarters of General Howe, British commander at the battle of Bunker Hill, and one whose fame is not likely to perish so long as Boston celebrates Evacuation Day. Another next neighbor was Harrison Gray, treasurer of the colony, and grandfather of Harrison Gray Otis, the distinguished third mayor of our city. Indeed, one of the lots was once, for a time, a part of the possessions of the latter. Here also lived Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons, and among other notables Colonel T. H. Perkins, chief patron of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. It is certainly pleasant to have in the first real estate possession of 2,6 Boston University Quarter Centennial. the University a memorial, not only of Lieutenant-Governor Oliver, but also of his great-grandfather, Thomas Oliver, an original elder in the First Church of Boston, and the next- door neighbor of Governor Winthrop in the days when what is now Spring Lane was the boundary betwixt their home- steads on the street now named for the father of our country. A few weeks ago, at an advanced age, the last of a family of four — one brother and three sisters — died in Cambridge. None of the four had ever married, and long sickness had reduced the family resources, so that at the end there was but a small remnant left for final testamentary disposition by Mary, the last of the sisters. She was the sole survivor of her branch of this ancient Royal Lieutenant Governor's line. It was a touching disclosure when the other day I received from the clerk of the probate court the announcement that with her dying hand this last of her line had bequeathed to the University the sum of fifty dollars for the benefit of some worthy student that might be in need. It was as if, in this quarter-centennial year, Elder Thomas Oliver of 1630, through the vanishing hand of a far-off descendant, had laid upon Boston University a precious obligation to perpetuate and to guard forever his fading memory. The Oliver name suggests another connection of the University with first things in American history. In the year 1633, in company with the redoubtable Governor Wouter VanTwiller, Reverend Everardus Bogardus came to New Amsterdam, on the island of Manhattan, and became the first pastor of that Dutch town. His marriage with Anneke Jans eventually brought to Trinity Church the landed property which became the basis of its enormous wealth and prestige. His lineal descendant, General Robert Bogardus, held a high military position in New York in the war of 18 12. A grand- daughter of this general, who was also a relative of Presi- dent Woolsey and Professsor Salisbury of Yale University and of other distinguished families — a woman of rare talent and spirituality — believed herself called to prepare for the Historical Address by President Warren. 37 Christian ministry. She had just been graduated from Rut- gers Female College, where she had carried away no less than five collegiate- honors. Her brother, a rector in a Protestant Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, like other members of the family, was opposed to her carrying out a conviction at that time so extraordinary, and to relieve them as far as possible of any unpleasant connection with what they felt would be an annoying notoriety, she dropped the family name and adopted Oliver, the name of an aunt. First she entered Oberlin College in the Theological Department, but finding there at that date some things that seemed to her to imply unreasonable discrimination against women as women, she wrote to the authorities of Boston University, and being satisfied with their reply, came to New England, and in 1873 — just twenty- five years ago, entered our School of Theology. She pursued her course with great interest and success, and in 1876 was honorably promoted to the baccalaureate degree in theology with her class. So far as known, this lady, Miss Anna Oliver, was the first woman in the history of the world to whom a university ever gave the privilege of studying the Bible and its themes as scholars study them, and to whom, in simple justice, without flourish of trumpet, it then gave the jura et privilegia of a theological graduate. It was fitting that this first illustration of consistent "university freedom" should have been given in Boston, and especially fitting that it should have been given in the first university ever organized, logically and from the start, on the principle of no discrimination in privilege on the ground of sex. Until her lamented death this modest but brave representative of Dominus Everardus Bogardus proved herself an effective minister of saving sweetness and light, an honor to her immediate family and to her notable ancestry. The first time Isaac Rich ever took the present speaker to his home, he was living at No. 4 Winthrop place. This was, perhaps, a hundred feet from Summer street, on what is now Devonshire. Next door to him at No. 3 lived Rufus Choate. 38 Boston University Quarter Centennial. Later Mr. Rich bought of Mr. Choate his home, and later still purchased of Daniel Webster his spacious house just around the corner on Summer street. Both of these historic estates — the homes of Choate and of Webster — were a part of the property subsequently bequeathed to Boston University, and thus there came to us from this source two more precious landmarks of the city, two more of the memorials of its famous men. At the date to which I have referred, by some ordering which I have never understood, I chanced to be the very juvenile pastor of both Isaac Rich and Jacob Sleeper. In those days Summer street was still adorned with rows of horse-chestnut trees, with fresh green lawns, and with the quiet mansions of many of the first families of the town. At No. 53, on the south side of the street, dwelt Mr. Sleeper. Next door stood the Ellis mansion, from which went forth into the world Dr. Rufus Ellis, the seventeenth pastor of the First Church, and his brother, Dr. George Ellis, historian, anti- quarian, divine. Exactly opposite Mr. Sleeper's was the house of Edward Everett ; close by were the homes of George Bancroft, Nathaniel Bowditch, Daniel Webster, and the house in which Ralph Waldo Emerson was born. About all these places there already lingered yet earlier memories. Many, if not all of them, stood upon portions of the once confiscated estate of Sir William Pepperell, grandson of the captor of Louisburg, or on the grounds of the Russell mansion in which in the days of the Revolution General Heath enter- tained D'Estaing, Pulaski, and Burgoyne. Those homes of elegance and of rich traditions in Summer street have long since vanished, but the granite store bequeathed to us by Mr. Sleeper covers the spot made sacred by his beautiful hospitalities and by these precious memories of more distant years. We do well to prize it, for, as Lowell sings, — " the place Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace Beyond mere earth ; some sweetness of their fames Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace." Historical Address by President Warren. 39 One church in the heart of Boston has among its founda- tion-stones a fragment of Plymouth Rock. I know of but one which enjoys this distinction. In this church, in the year 1839, on the 24th and 25th of April, there was held a convention of an unusual character. It consisted of delegates called from every New England state. Their business was to make arrangements for the establish- ment, in or near Boston, of a new educational institu- tion. The men there assembled were intense, indigenous New Englanders, but deeply dissatisfied with the dominant ideas and teaching of the New England of their time. Like the transcendentalists of this same period, they represented a world-view which was idealistic in essence and irrepressibly reformatory in expression. Point by point they would have agreed with Margaret Fuller in the criticisms she has left on record as to the pulpit teachings of that day, even in the churches that called themselves liberal. With Emerson and Alcott they craved and advocated a first-hand knowledge of spiritual realities. Mr. Frothingham, in his work on " Transcendentalism in New England," has summed up the secret of the force of that movement in these words : " A belief in the Living God in the Soul, faith in immediate inspiration, in boundless possibility and in unimaginable good." Like faith and like hope were the soul of that convention of 1839. The time was one of extraordinary intellectual and social effervescence. Only six years had passed since the immemorial union of church and state had been dissolved. The old types of teaching, both orthodox and heterodox, were rapidly disintegrating. The popular excitement over Mr. Garrison and his Liberator was at its height. The socialism of Robert Owen and Fanny Wright was in the air, and the Brook Farm experiment was soon to be made. Less than one year earlier Ralph Waldo Emerson had delivered his memorable Divinity School address, and closed his career as a clergyman. Theodore Parker had just been reading with Dr. Channing, Strauss' " Life of Jesus," but 40 Boston University Quarter Centennial. had not yet been disowned by the Unitarian brotherhood. The members of the Transcendental Club were already planning their famous organ, The Dial, and the first number was to appear the following year. The newspapers by their ridicule had but a short time before brought to an end the idyllic school conducted by Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. The Convention of which I spoke believed that the time had fully come for a new type of education in Boston — a type which should provide a new race of teachers not only for New England, but also for many lands. Accordingly, before the adjournment, the delegates organized a permanent association to promote the early establishment of a training- school of public religious teachers, one which should repre- sent what they considered a broader and profounder conception of humanity and of the divine purpose in the history of humanity. Seven or eight years after this a singular event occurred in the capital of New Hampshire. In the center of a green campus of about one and one-half acres, in the beautiful city of Concord, there then stood a building of uncommon interest in its historic associations. It was that in which in the year 1784 the constitution of the State of New Hampshire was discussed and adopted. This was the more historic from the fact that New Hampshire was the first of the thirteen emancipated colonies to adopt a written constitution incorpor- ating the results of the War of Independence. The building was also the one in which, on the 21st of June, 1788, another state convention ratified the Federal Constitution. The vote by which this was done was one of intense interest to each of the thirteen states. All were feverishly watching the out- come, for it had been provided that the proposed Federal Constitution should take effect and acquire force of law so soon as ratified by nine of the states. New Hampshire was the ninth. In the walls of this building, therefore, the vote was given which transformed an aggregation of separate and Historical Address by President Warren. 41 discordant states into a henceforth forever indissolubly united nation. Now the building in question was a house of worship of the traditional New England order. It belonged to the First Congregational Church of the city of Concord. In 1847 its owners were about to move into a new and more modern sanctuary. What should they do with the old — the most historic structure in the state ? They considered various suggestions. At length they heard of the School projected by that New England Convention in Boston in 1839; learned that after a struggling existence in Vermont it was now seeking an independent incorporation and home. With a rare catholicity of mind and generosity of heart, these good men tendered to that School, not only their building, but also a handsome sum of money to aid in adapting it to the new purpose. This noble offer was gratefully accepted, and thus it came to pass that the first home of the first Arminian Theological Seminary in America was the free and cordial gift of a church and parish of Calvinists. Twenty years later Lee Claflin, David Patten, Gilbert Haven and other far-sighted friends of the Seminary were convinced that it could never acquire its due strength and wield its proper influence unless brought back to its original birthplace, and given a home in Boston. The New Hampshire Legislature consented, and the Legislature of Massachusetts promptly prepared the way. Generous friends began a new and more adequate endowment. The removal was affected under circumstances honorable to Boston Christianity and profitable to the School. With characteristic generosity the corporation of Harvard University sent a committee to invite the Seminary to locate in Cambridge, promising important advantages in connection with the University, its libraries and other collections. In two or three places, a little outside the heart of the city, the gift of a free site was offered by other friends. Foremost representatives of American education cheerfully responded to invitations to become lecturers in 42 Boston University Quarter Centennial. connection with the reorganized faculty. President McCosh of Princeton, just called from Scotland, gave a course of lectures before the School and its friends, and with such success that in a single week three successively larger auditoriums had to be provided. President Woolsey of Yale gave a similar course ; so also did President Robinson of Brown University, President Harris of Bowdoin College, President Anderson of Rochester, Chancellor Haven of the University of Michigan, President Mark Hopkins of Williams. Such a catholicity of teaching in connection with a theological seminary had never before been seen. It was a noble fulfill- ment of the hopes and aspirations of 1839. When the School was thus brought back to Boston, the president, vice-president, and treasurer of its corporation were, respectively, Lee Claflin, Isaac Rich and Jacob Sleeper. It was only natural that when two years later they became the incorporators of Boston University, they should have desired to see their Seminary become the first department of the new and more comprehensive University organization. The authorities of the church consented, the Legislatures passed an enabling act, and thus in the year 1871 the hopeful child of 1839 became the happy mother of new collegiate and professional faculties. From the beginning she has recipro- cated the generous interest and service of other branches of the Christian Church, and finds today that she has educated ministers for no less than sixteen different denominations of Christians. In the heritage which she brought to the University treasury was included some thirty acres of land, which once belonged to the tenth signer of the first church covenant ever formed in Boston, Mr. Aspinwall — land which had remained in the possession of his descendants in Brook- line until it came into her possession. Here again the heritage of the University takes backward hold on Boston's first beginning. In the year 1869, our charter year, the Old State House at the head of State street was not the sacred historical museum Historical Address by President Warren. 43 which most fortunately it has since become. In those days it was occupied in all its stories for business purposes, and on the second floor, in rooms Nos. 36 and 37, was the office of the first secretary of the trustees of Boston University, Mr. Perry. It is pleasant to remember that in that historic building, not far from the balcony from which the accession of George the Fourth was proclaimed to his American subjects, the records of the first meetings of our corporation were engrossed and placed in custody for future generations of Bostonians. The location of the office of the first treasurer of the University, Mr. Sleeper, was hardly less appropriate. It was in the second story of the " Old Corner Book-store," the birth-house of James Freeman Clarke, and, according to the antiquarians, the oldest brick house now standing in Boston. The first meeting of the University corporation for organization was in a rear room in the second story of No. 11 Cornhill. Directly opposite the windows stood the old Brattle-square Church in which Washington worshipped in 1789, and Lafayette in 1824. It was the home church of General Joseph Warren, of Governor Hancock, Governor Bowdoin, and a long line of Boston notables. At the time of our gathering for that first meeting, the church still bore high up in its front wall, with fitting pride, the half-exposed British cannon-ball which struck the tower the night before the final evacuation of the town. It was pleasant to begin the organiza- tion of the new University within a few feet of pews which had belonged to such patriotic worshippers, and hard by a pulpit in which Buckminster, and Palfrey, and Edward Everett, had stood as pastors ; all the more, since the pastor at that very hour, the last of his illustrious line, was in warm and outspoken sympathy with every educational idea and principle for which the University was soon to stand. Speaking of churches and of the historic heritage of the University, one may further mention that Isaac Rich pur- chased the first Roman Catholic Cathedral of the city, situated at the corner of Devonshire and Franklin streets, and 44 Boston University Quarter Centennial. utilized the site as an investment for the benefit of the future University. He also bought the last of the three successive meeting-houses of the Friends in Boston, and on Milton place our property still covers its site. Two other church buildings came later into the hands of the University. One of them was that of the Baptist society on Somerset street, to whose final pastor, Dr. Neale, was given the credit of breaking the long dead-lock at the State House, and of thereby making Charles Sumner a Senator of the United States. The other was the Mount Vernon Congregational house of worship on Ashburton place, in which Evangelist Dwight L. Moody was converted and in which Mr. Durant, the founder of Wellesley College, began his Christian life. In it, also, were held, year after year and decade after decade, the farewell meetings of American Board missionaries departing to their far-off fields of labor. All these memories, sacredly cherished, are portions of the vast as yet uncatalogued historical collections of Boston University. Another thing there is which must not be forgotten in this enumeration of historic inheritances. In the year 1848, just fifty years ago, a movement that had been initiated some three years before reached the point of crystallization, and an application was made to the Legislature for a charter. The object of the petitioners was to provide for another new departure in education. The petition was duly referred to the legislative committee on education, and this committee returned a favorable report. It is curious to note that of that small committee of seven, one was the father of the present president of Harvard University, and a second the father of General Walker, late president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Supported by such men and their colleagues, it is not strange that the petitioners readily obtained the desired charter. The object of the thus created corporation was to provide for the medical education of suitably qualified women. As just intimated, it was decidely a new departure. At that date there was not a medically educated woman in Historical Address by President Warren. 45 America ; nowhere in the world was there a college for the training of such. Instruction was at once begun, but only with the narrowest resources. Indeed, for the next twenty- five years the best energies of the corporation and of its friends were taxed to provide the money needed for the barest main- tenance of the work undertaken. Only the most advanced minds seemed capable of appreciating the appeal. To the great mass of citizens, especially those of wealth, the idea of fitting women for medical practice seemed unutterably wild and fatuous. On this account the hundreds of names preserved to us as members, life-members, or patrons of the pioneer organization, or as trustees and annual supporters of the College, have in these day a unique interest. They give a kind of municipal and national peerage, representing the progressive spirits of fifty years ago, the intellectual aristocracy of the city and the nation. In this roll of honor stand the names of Horace Mann, Francis Wayland, Calvin E. Stowe, Wendell Phillips, James Freeman Clarke, Charles Francis Adams, Peleg W. Chandler, Theodore Parker, Lee Claflin, Josiah Quincy, Cyrus A. Bartol, William I. Bowditch, Isaac Rich, George W. Blagden, Ezra S. Gannett, Samuel E. Sewall, Rollin H. Neale, Robert G. Shaw, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jacob Sleeper, Alpheus Hardy, Augustus Hemenway, David Snow, William Claflin, Octavius B. Froth- ingham, Alexander H. Vinton, Amos A. Lawrence, and others of like character. Of the contributing women, hundreds in number, I will mention but a few : The poetess, Mrs. L. H. Sigourney of Hartford, Miss Sarah J. Hale of Philadelphia, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, Mrs. Dr. Charles Lowell, mother of James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Francis Wayland, Mrs. Mary B. Claflin, Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, Miss Katherine E. Beecher, Mrs. Henry W. Longfellow. Year after year with their modest contributions appeared these names, and others from various towns and cities of New England, and of states as distant as 46 Boston University Quarter Centennial. Missouri and Louisiana. The enlightening and liberalizing effect of the movement was of national and more than national significance. In 1854 the Massachusetts Legislature, recognizing the useful work of the institution, voted $1,000 a year for five years as a scholarship fund. The next year it voted a new appropriation of $10,000 to the College. Even in the Legis- lature of Maine the lower house voted an appropriation of $2,000. Governors or ex-governors of all the New England States served upon its board of trustees. With the aid of the city, which gave it land at one-half its value, and by the help of certain special bequests and gifts of friends, it completed, though greatly embarrassed by debt, a college building. The panic of 1857, and the soon following Civil War, and finally the death of the prime promoter of the whole move- ment, Samuel Gregory, A. M., M. D., at length brought the enterprise to the brink of bankruptcy. In the year 1873-74, in compliance with a new act of the Legislature, accepted by the respective governing boards, the brave but hopelessly burdened institution was made over to Boston University and merged in its newly organized and greatly enlarged co-educa- tional medical department. In this way, the oldest medical college for women in the history of civilization became a part of our goodly inheritance. Sacredly have we guarded the mural tablet which commemorates in the College the service of Samuel Gregory ; sacredly will we preserve the records of those modest gifts from many of the nation's noblest families. The gifts were modest, but they educated the country and the world. They made possible new and stronger colleges and schools in other states and nations. They made it possible for a Johns Hopkins University to receive, in the very next generation, the gift of $100,000 from the hand of one woman, to secure the opening of its department of medicine to women and men alike. The story of financial struggle just narrated easily intro- duces a needful statement that the historic inheritance of the Historical Address by President Warren. 47 University is not wholly of the strengthening and helpful sort. Its memories are not all golden. Dark have been many of our days, anxious our nights. Conflagrations of historic magnitude have devoured our substance, panics have ruined well-grounded hopes, death has come untimely. On one sad occasion, by formal vote of the trustees, the very life of the College of Liberal Arts was made to depend on one man's cablegram from Europe. Fortunately that man was the man for the hour, and so by the courageous faith and help flashed to us under the sea, the college was saved. The cablegram was from — William Claflin. It is instructive to remember that, at that very time of peril, a professor in the University, poor in this world's goods but rich in inventive power, was conducting in the night hours experiments which soon after resulted in adding untold millions to the wealth of the world. Would that the owners of this new wealth would remember the still existing necessities of the University in which their great fortunes were made possible, and give it the resources required for further experiments ! At the Exposition Universelle at Paris, in the year 1878, the professor to whom I have alluded was awarded the highest distinction there given by the International Board of Award, the Grand Prize of Honor. The name of the man thus honored in the presence of the whole civilized world was Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the Bell Telephone. There is a tradition that when, in 1844, The Dial suspended publication there remained in the hands of its editors, among other unpublished contributions, one calling for the early establishment of an educational institution for the propagation of the new Transcendental philosophy, a University in the city of Boston. From which of the Transcendentalists of that day this proposal came, I have never heard, but it is gratifying to know, and to pass the knowledge down to posterity, that Emerson welcomed the new University when it really came with genuine hospitality. He not only visited its halls 48 Boston University Quarter Centennial. repeatedly, but also lectured before its students. On his seventy-seventh birthday he received in his house at Concord a company of the Alumni of the University with a friendliness and cordiality which will never be forgotten. Mr. Alcott, too, manifested a hearty interest, and for ten years served as an official visitor, ending his service only with his life. Colonel Higginson, in articles in public journals, repeatedly, and without solicitation commended the new institution for the unprecedented justice of its principles and for the catholicity of its administration. The University can never be too thankful that its birth was sufficiently early to enable it to receive the benedictions of these great souled optimists of America's intellectual morning, and to share in the inspiring sociological tasks which they had set before them. It is equally gratifying that it came in time to hear in its halls the voices of Whittier and of Holmes. So far as known to me, the last public readings from his poems ever given by Mr. Holmes were in our chapel in Sleeper Hall. Mr. James T. Fields was a friend most generous, and freely gave to the institution some of the last work of his life. Hudson, the best American Shaksperean of his time, held for six years one of the chairs of instruction. The good-will of Aldrich and of Howells has been repeatedly shown in ways unmistakable. We were in time to announce in the original program of 1873 the first woman ever associated with a college faculty in New England — a distinguished friend of George Eliot, already almost as well known in Old England as in New, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. We were in time to hear at the opening of our Medical Department an original poem read by its author — an Athenian in the eyes of the Greeks, and an Athenian in the eyes of Americans — the author of the " Battle Hymn of the Republic." But our time is spent. I can only add that of all the incorporeal hereditamenta of our favored University, none are in reality so precious as those which it shares with every other. Historical Address by President Warren. 49 Faith in the truth, the spirit of absolute loyalty to all revelations of truth and duty, delight in the author and ground of all reality — these are the supreme treasures of all true scholars and teachers, the supreme treasures of the kingdom universal. From founders and legislators possessed of these we have received our commission. In their trustful, courageous, devout, expectant spirit the University has thus far labored. Its immediate founders believed in the Christian world-view, and desired to help forward the ideals of the Christian faith. They belonged to the Holy Catholic Church. Believing in that supreme estimate placed upon humanity by Him who left heaven to take on our human nature, they believed in the uttermost possibilities of redeemed souls, and in the uttermost perfectibility of the human race. They belonged to the great branch of the Christian Church which has never repudiated the name of Perfectionists, the great branch, which repudiating all ancient dogmas declaring hereditary guilt, has placed in the fore-front of its confession of faith the Saviour's explicit teaching respecting redeemed infancy in every age and among every people, " Of such is the kingdom of heaven." The pedagogical significance and scope of these peculiarities is beyond computation ; yet even in these will we not here glory. Enough that from this, or any other source, we draw such inspiration as from generation to generation shall entitle us to a place among the great world- schools in which distinctively Christian manliness is bred and fitted for ever-great ening tasks of Christian civilization. To this work we this day solemnly dedicate ourselves anew ; to this, earnestly invoking God's good help, we will be faithful so long as " Twice each day the flowing sea Takes Boston in its arms." EVENING SESSION. The Honorable Alden Speare, Vice-President of the Corporation, Presiding. THE CHAIRMAN. The divine blessing will now be invoked by the Rev. E. Winchester Donald, Rector of Trinity Church. DR. DONALD. Almighty and everlasting God, whose blessed Son came among us that He might destroy the power of darkness and make us the children of light, and who art alone the only true light that cometh into the world, lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, with the full and abiding knowledge of Thy dear Son, and of His gospel. Send Thy blessing upon all sincere effort to train the young in intelligence, virtue and piety. Bless all schools and colleges of sound learning and Christian education, and especially the university in whose name we gather here tonight, and make them instruments in Thy hand for training many for Thy service, and for the good of their fellowmen. Look with special favor upon all efforts to establish and main- tain schools of learning where the truths of the gospel shall be ever honored as supreme, the precepts and ordinances of Thy dear Son be counted the beginning of wisdom, and all their members be taught of God. Endue the officers and teachers with a high sense of their stewardship, and with wisdom, faith and zeal, patterned after Him who was the teacher come from God. Stir up the hearts of parents and friends to understand aright their responsibilities in reference to the Christian training of those entrusted to them, and lead them to wise and dutiful cooperation in the encouragement and enlargement of the institutions established for such train- ing and culture. Illuminate the minds, purify the hearts, and fashion the lives of the students so that they may go forth a noble host, 52 Boston University Quarter Centennial. made ready and consecrated for large and abiding service and power. Bless eyerywhere those who are striving for a Christian education amidst the hindrances of poverty and friendlessness, and raise up friends, and strengthen wise agencies to aid their noble endeavor. Pour out Thy spirit from on high, and sanctify all minds and hearts to faithful, acceptable service here and Thy blessed kingdom hereafter. And O, Almighty God, the Lord of heaven and earth, who in former times didst lead our fathers forth into a wealthy place, give Thy grace, we beseech Thee, to us their children, that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of Thy favor and glorying to do Thy will. Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning and pure manners. Defend our liberties, preserve our unity, save us from all violence, discord and confusion, from pride, arrogancy and every evil way. Fashion into one happy people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those whom we have intrusted in Thy name with the authority of governance, to the end that wars may cease and there be peace at home, and that we keep a place among the nations of the earth. In all time of our prosperity fill our hearts with devout thankfulness, and in the day of trouble suffer not our trust in Thee to fail. And O, Almighty God, who hast in all ages showed forth Thy power and mercy m the preservation of Thy Holy Catholic Church, and in the protection of all who put their trust in Thee, grant that the people of this land which Thou hast so blessed, may show forth their thanks and praise for all Thy mercies by loving obedience to all Thy laws. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. THE CHAIRMAN. Ladies and Gentlemen: — After the exhaustive and able address of the President of the University, no extended Telegram from the Hon. John D. Long. 53 remarks are required from the Trustees, which would only detain you from listening to the interesting addresses upon our programme. It is my privilege, on behalf of the Trustees, to extend to you, graduates, alumni and guests, our cordial and hearty greeting and welcome to this, our twenty-fifth annual reunion and quarter centennial of the founding of Boston University. I shall attempt no extended eulogies upon the several honored gentlemen who are to address you upon the topics of the programme. It would be needless to announce to this audi- ence the deep and abiding interest of President McKinley in all things that make for the uplifting of his countrymen ; and among the instrumentalities that contribute to this end, he deems the higher institutions of learning of the first importance. When I had the honor to invite him to be present on this occasion, he assured me that he would accept the invitation with much pleasure if public duties would permit. At a later interview, when it appeared that he could not be present, he expressed a desire that Secretary Long should take his place, which the latter very readily agreed to do, if public duties would permit. While they are not here tonight we hold them both in all the higher estimation ! (Applause.) {See foot-note below.) We esteem it a happy circumstance that Rev. Dr. Gordon, pastor of the New Old South Church, whose predecessor was a lecturer in our Theological School, and who is to speak in behalf of the clergy, is a native of Great Britain, as the two great Anglo-Saxon nations never were more closely drawn together than they are at this time. I present to you the Rev. Dr. Gordon. (Applause.) Mr. Long, very thoughtfully, and at a timely hour, sent the following telegram intended for the meeting, but unfortunately it reached the Chairman too late for presentation ; — Sincerely regretting that I cannot be with you in person tonight I send my -warmest congratulations to Boston University on the celebration of her Quarter Centennial and my best wishes for continued success and wide-spread usefulness. JOHN D. LONG. 54 Boston University Quarter Centennial. THE REV. GEORGE A. GORDON, S. T. D. Pastor of the Old South Church. Members of Boston University, Ladies and Gentlemen : — I am a citizen of Boston (applause), and I am to speak for Boston University in one aspect only, one relation, and that the relation which the university sustains to the profession which I have the honor to represent here this evening. The first duty of a minister, when he begins his work in a given community, is to take into account not only the forces which are opposed to him, but also the forces which are in alliance with him. In the undertaking in which the United States is at present engaged, the survey of the international environment was a first duty ; and the discovery that Great Britain was solidly with us has been a source of great strength and much satisfaction (applause), both to the government and the people of the United States. The ministers of Boston, in surveying their environment, and finding several things in it that are rather questionable — saloons and newspapers and things like that — (laughter) are glad to find in it Boston University (applause and laughter). Boston University stands for one universal interest of man- kind, and the ministers of Boston, of all denominations, stand for another equally universal interest. I have wondered how I could relate these two without offending either. I have thought of them as joining hands, as one might imagine Alexander and Caesar — both would be conquerors of the whole world — but I did not think that perhaps would do, because that would imply that they might have a question at issue between themselves. Then I thought of them as Alexander conquering the world by force of reason, as well as of arms, and the Greek culture following in the wake of the victorious armies. That did not seem to go very well either. Then I thought of them as the industry of the modern world covering the whole earth, and opening a path for civilization in the wake of the ships of the world. That seemed a little Address by the Rev. George A. Gordon. 55 better. Finally, I concluded that perhaps the best image of their relationship was supplied by English history, where the single crown of sovereignty was worn by William and Mary (applause), one crown worn by two, united in purpose, united in spirit, differing in capacity, differing in function, and whose united life could serve the empire and the world better than either separate from the other. That is an indorsement at the same time of co-education. (Applause and laughter.) Boston University is more and more deserving of her share of the crown. Let us hope that the ministers of Boston will equally well deserve their share. In the second place Boston University reminds the ministers of the city that knowledge is the best friend, not of religion, but of the Christian religion ; that the worst enemy of Christianity is ignorance. (Applause.) The great words in our religion are these: "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all." He is "the father of Lights," and the Master of the Christian world thus described Himself : "I am the light of the world ; he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." And the function of His disciples, according to His own description, is, " To let their light so shine " that men may be guided by beholding it to the source of all in God. Christianity is the religion of light, and every institution that stands for knowledge, for truth, for science, for the conquest of the world by reason, in so far as it is true to its ideal, is the best possible friend of Christianity. There have been heresies in consequence of universities, but they have been nothing to the heresies that have pro- ceeded from prejudice, from mental stagnation, and from sheer colossal ignorance. (Applause.) We are thankful, we ministers in the city, that we have an institution in the city that reminds us of the central feature of our religion, that reminds us that the torch of Knowlege easily blends with the torch of Christian faith, which calls upon us to raise all our professional standards and eliminate from our ranks, as 56 Boston University Qtiarter Centennial. incapacitated for service, men governed by prejudice, men in the swamps of intellectual stagnation, men who are too lazy to work. Finally, we are all anxious for as many people to preach to as we can possibly have, and if any institution adds a thousand or twelve hundred likely people to talk to, it is an amazing encouragement to us, and especially when they are young. There is very little use in preaching to old people, for they have become used to it, like the man who was afraid of thunder in youth, but it had thundered so long he had become accustomed to it. We are thus made in a way to share the privilege and responsibility of the university, and we rejoice that the young men who are here for the highest purposes of education are scattered through the city each Sunday, so that the ministers of the city may be in a true sense chaplains to the university ; and such I am sure they would wish me to represent them to be, in their spirit, in their sympathy, in their congratulations, in their desire for the largest, the broadest, and the best future of this noble institution. These then are the special points that I mention tonight for my brethren in the ministry. We love to recognize this institution as serving a universal interest of mankind, and we meet it with another, that together with it we may claim the sovereignty of the world. We rejoice to be reminded of our best friend and our worst enemy, — to be continually called upon to revise our standards, and to put forth our best efforts. And we rejoice again that we are invited to be partakers in its great office, to share in its mighty privilege, and to serve in the capacity of chaplains to the university. Artists tell us that from the remains of some splendid Grecian temple we may reconstruct the whole, and imagine what a glorious thing it must have been, from simply behold- ing one fundamental and exquisite aspect of it. And I ask you, through this single relation which I have mentioned tonight of the ministers of Boston to Boston University, to go Address by the Hon. Walbridge A. Field. 57 forth and think of all the relations, and what these twenty-five years have been in service to our city and to the whole country. I bring to the faculty, to the president, to the corporation, to all the graduates, and to all the friends of the institution, from my own profession, the heartiest congratulations and supreme good wishes. (Applause.) THE CHAIRMAN. Order is heaven's first law, but order cannot be maintained unless the acts be justly executed by law. We are very happy to present to you this evening to speak for the law profession the Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Massa- chusetts, — Justice Field. HON. WALBRIDGE A. FIELD, LL.D. It is remarkable that the colleges and universities in the United States until comparatively recent times have had so little to do with the professional education of lawyers. In England the universities originally were largely under the control of ecclesiastics who might have had some knowledge of the Canon law and of the civil or Roman law, but they had little knowledge of the common law, which was mainly of indigenous growth. The common lawyers were jealous guardians of their own system, and took into their hands the education of barristers and sergeants-at-law. The first law school in the United States is said to have been the Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut. Before that time, in 1779, a chair of law had been founded at William and Mary College, and in 1790 Judge Wilson gave law lectures in the University of Pennsylvania. In 1795 James Kent delivered a course of lectures in Columbia College, but they were not continued beyond the first year. In 1823 he was appointed a professor of law in Columbia College, and 58 Boston University Quarter Centennial. delivered a course of lectures which are the foundations of his famous commentaries. But the Law School connected with Columbia College was not established until 1858. The Harvard Law School was established in 18 17, and is said to have been the first law school in the United States connected with a college or university and authorized to confer degrees. From 1839 to 1870, the course of study was for two years or four terms, the degree of Bachelor of Laws being conferred upon all persons who were members of the school for eighteen months, or three terms. There were no examina- tions for the degree until 1871, and none for admission to the school until 1877. The present three years' course was established in 1877. In 1896 the rule was established that none but graduates of approved colleges and persons qualified to enter the senior class of Harvard College should be admitted as regular students. In 1895 there were about yy law schools in the United States, and more than three-fourths of them were connected with colleges or universities. At that time the number of students in the Boston University Law School stood eighth on the list. Of these law schools forty had a course of two years, and seventeen of three years. Of the remainder I have no information, but they were not law schools of distinction. The number of students in the law schools in 1889-90, so far as ascertained, was 4,518; in 1895-96, it was 9,607. The number had more than doubled in six years. There seems to have been a period in our history when in some of the states it was thought that almost anybody could be a lawyer — that a knowledge of law, like reading and writ- ing, came by nature — but the civil war gave a useful lesson of the advantages of thorough professional training, and after the termination of the war many attempts were made to secure better instruction for lawyers. The School of Law of Boston University was opened in October, 1872, with Mr. George S. Hillard as Dean. In 1874-5, Mr - N. St. John Address by the Hon. Walbridge A. Field. 59 Green was made Acting Dean, and upon his death, in 1876, Mr. Edmund H. Bennett was made Dean. He continued to hold this office until he died, in January, 1898. To Judge Bennett more than to any other person is due the successful history of the school. The school opened with a distinguished body of lecturers, among whom, to name only those who have died, were Mr. Bennett, Dwight Foster, N. St. John Green, George S. Hillard, Otis P. Lord, Henry W. Paine, Robert C. Pitman, Charles T. Russell, Benjamin F. Thomas and Francis Wharton. A three years' course of instruction was established, and an examination was required as a preliminary to a degree. Mr. Bennett was singularly well fitted to have the charge of such a school. He was a student in the law, an author and editor of law books, had been engaged in a large, varied and successful practice at the bar, and for many years had been a judge of probate and insol- vency in Massachusetts. It was impossible with him that in the teaching or the practice of law its ethical sources and obligations should not be fully considered. He had an extraordinary aptness and zeal in imparting his learning to pupils, and he had the faculty of interesting in the school as instructors some of the most prominent members of the Massachusetts bar. The school never has had a sufficient endowment in money to establish many permanent professor- ships, but it has had a large number of accomplished lawyers as lecturers upon topics with which they were especially familiar. The chronological lists of its graduates shows best the result. Its character as one of the best law schools in the country was soon established, and has ever since been maintained. Under the common law the decisions of the courts vary greatly in importance, not only by reason of the position the courts hold in the judicial system, but by reason of the learn- ing, experience and good sense of the judges, and of the scope of the jurisdiction which they exercise; and it is only by courts of last resort that the law is finally determined. It is 6o Boston University Quarter Centennial. inevitable that in trial courts the- decisions sometimes must be hurriedly made, and after little instructive argument from the bar. It has been said that the decisions or judgments of courts must be taken as the ultimate facts out of which the science of law is to be constructed by a method of induction and deduction, such as is used in the natural sciences, but this is true only in a modified sense. These decisions are sometimes inconsistent with one another — which cannot happen with the facts of nature — and the decisions some- times are reversed or overruled. The administration of the law in this country and in England usually has been entrusted to men who have had a large knowledge of affairs. The successful administration and development of it demands not only a knowledge of affairs and an acquaintance with existing conceptions of right and expediency, but with the conceptions of other times and other countries. The experience and judgment of learned and able men for nearly two thousand years, as recorded in the judg- ments of courts and in law treatises, make up the contribution of mankind to the determination of those rights and duties which should be declared and enforced by the courts. The record is so vast that there is no end to the study of it. The mass of material has become so great that many parts of it can best be learned in schools established for the purpose, with ample libraries and a corps of instructors selected for the purpose of arranging, classifying and explaining the history and growth of any particular system of law and the reasons on which the courts have proceeded in the administra- tion of it. It is true, however, that many men have become good lawyers without the aid of much instruction beyond that derived from their own studies and practice, — and a working knowledge of legal procedure must be learned from practice. It has been considered in this Commonwealth that absolute independence is necessary to insure the best judicial work. I think that a great degree of independence is necessary to the career of a lawyer — independence, I mean, not only in the Address by the Hon. Walbridge A. Field. 6 1 face of hostile public opinion or a hostile court, but indepen- dence toward clients. Almost the worst degradation of a lawyer is to become the mere servant of his clients. It is said that every man has the defect of his qualities, and every profession or pursuit has its characteristic virtues and vices. It is or should be a cardinal doctrine of the profession that lawyers should have no pecuniary interest in the suits which they prosecute or defend. Champerty in old times was particularly odious, and contingent fees and financial specula- tions in the futures of litigation, on the part of lawyers, ought everywhere to be discarded. Commercial habits in the administration of the law are the last thing that a lawyer should acquire. For many reasons the profession of law always has been overcrowded. It is not for the interest of the public that there be more lawyers than are needed for the transaction of legal business. What does concern the public is that the body of lawyers should be honest, learned, independent, wise efficient, and in every way trustworthy. The discipline exercised by the courts over the bar affords some security for this, but the public opinion of the bar is the best protection. Speaking only of Massachusetts, I think that in the last thirty years there has been a manifest improvement in the bar generally, in good manners, in morale, in fidelity to the court, and in the absence of sharp pactices as well as in professional learning. I believe that your Law School, in the twenty-five and more years of its existence, can fairly congratulate itself upon having distinctly done something to ensure these results. THE CHAIRMAN. "The Press, Secular and Religious," — few there be who would take such a theme and attempt to treat it, but we have one who reads all that one man can read, who remembers everything that is essential to be remembered, — the editor of The Christian Advocate, Rev. Dr. Buckley. 62 Boston University Quarter Centennial. REV. JAMES M. BUCKLEY, S. T. D., LL.D., Editor of The Christian Advocate. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: — A citizen of Chicago, a minister of the gospel, concluded to take charge of a paper, and at the same time carried on the ministerial function, when invitation and convenience made it possible. On a warm summer evening, after walking two miles, he entered a church a few moments in advance of the time of beginning, and before the congregation had arrived, and sat down behind a pillar to rest and compose his thoughts. After a little while he heard a sound as of conversation in an adjacent room. The tones grew louder, and he discerned the voice of prayer, and as he listened he heard these words : " Bless Thy servant who is to preach to us tonight. We hear that he is an editor, and probably rusty, but we beseech Thee to touch his lips with a coal from off thine altar." From the lips of the ministerial editor I heard this confession, that he never more devoutly responded "Amen" than on that occasion. The Psalmist prayed that his tongue might be " like the pen of a ready writer," and on this occasion, burdened with the secular and religious press, I need all that my friend needed and all that the Psalmist prayed for. (Laughter.) There is a striking analogy between the growth of the power of the press and that of the common people. Two hundred years ago neither had much consideration or power. The first paper ever printed in the United States, of course originated in Boston. (Applause.) It appeared on the 25th day of September, 1690, but as the Scotch say, " It died a-bornin'." There never was a second number, and it has always been spoken of as a pamphlet. But on the 24th of April, 1704, a paper that came to stay appeared here. It took a very humble name — The Boston News Letter. Seventy-two years after that, the year of the Declaration of Independence, there were but thirty-seven newspapers in the United States, or the territory covered by it. Benjamin Address by the Rev. James M. Buckley. 63 Franklin had gone from here to Philadelphia and established The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729. Pennsylvania then had nine newspapers ; Massachusetts seven ; New York and Con- necticut each four ; South Carolina three ; Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina each two ; and New Hampshire and Georgia each one. Very soon, however, after that period, the number and size of papers and their influence extended. Today the press competes with the pulpit as a teacher of morals ; with fashion as a regulator of manners ; with the courts of justice as a detector, exposer and punisher of crime ; and with seminaries, colleges and universities as an educator ; and it is through its advertising departments, the mainstay of commerce. It presumes to elect presidents, to declare war (applause and laughter), to command army and navy authorities and compel them to heed its dictum. (Laughter.) In a free government all things are united — literature, commerce, religion, politics, education, agriculture — everything that exists in a free government is related to everything else, and the press, therefore, has an unlimited sphere. And what an extraordinary thing it is ! One week after I took charge of a paper, I published some sentiments that I had often uttered without producing any particular impression, and they were received by some men as oracles. The editorial "we" is an "x" of unknown power in an equation that is never fully wrought out. The anonymousness of the writers delivers them from responsi- bility, and the united clamor for liberty of the press lifts them above the law of libel unless the person referred to was prior to the attack an object of general detestation. And then con- sider what a magic power there is in "these columns." "We have several times in these columns" stated something. (Laughter.) It is the equivalent of a modern throne of majesty ! When' we look at a paper — those who dare to do so — we discover that it consists of editorials, edited departments, contributions, current news, advertisements, and a marvellous 64 Boston University Quarter Centennial. collection that reminds one of the report of the first French Exposition upon the mince pie : " Two pieces of paste, the lower paste damp, and a heterogeneous mixture of doubtful digestibility between them." If we look at the press, we find the lowest stratum consists of the productions of men whom someone has described as "lost souls, dealing for money in everything that will inflame the worst passions of men." That stratum of the press is the friend, the advocate and defender of all who make a maintenance by some kind of villainy. That stratum of the press prefers to serve carrion rather than to set anything pure and sweet before the public. That stratum of the press rejoices in tearing to pieces a family previously respectable, and will gloat over the publi- cation of the names of collateral relatives, going backward to the tenth generation of any person who may be guilty or even accused of crime. Above this, far above it, is another stratum which unfortu- nately sometimes lapses into the lower, — a stratum that is a mixture of things that will not cleave, as Bacon said of the iron and clay in the toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image, — they may cleave in a certain sense, but they will not incorporate. There the editorials are perfect. A man might follow them and live well and die pure, but all the rest is suspicious. On the editorial page things are condemned in an uncompromising way; in other parts of the paper they are advertised in an ingratiating way, and all the advertising columns are in the interests of the things advertised. Above that is the only stratum worthy of permanent respect, where the effort is to make a philanthropic, intellectual, instructive and entertaining paper, not blind enough to fancy that the ideal can be presented, but always aiming to make the ideal palatable. Who can describe what the press does for the public from this higher point of view ? Even the second stratum does more good than harm, for "the words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools." Wise people will draw from those parts of the paper antidotes for the parts to be condemned. Address by the Rev. James M. Buckley. 65 The press includes magazines as well as papers. Magazines are of vast importance and benefit to the people of this country. Many of them are now of the highest possible grade. Their average style, intellectually and rhetorically considered, is far above the popular novel, and far above many of the books addressed to the higher nature. The biography, which is given in the best form to the public in the great magazines, is so vast, and as a rule so well selected, that it is in itself an education to read them. One of these maga- zines has today $160,000 worth of manuscripts, piled up, constantly accumulating, so high is its standard, and so determined is it to compete successfully with its contempo- raries. Within a comparatively short period, a class of magazines has risen up, proposing to make their profits by advertisements. They sell their magazines for ten cents or less, and I am bound to say that some of these magazines are worthy competitors of the larger ones, though it is not true of the majority. It is to be regretted that the larger and more important magazines, in competing with those which have such a large circulation, have "dipped" in not a few instances within the last few years. I maintain that it is disreputable for a magazine or a public speaker, in or out of the pulpit, to " dip," to say or to print what could not be said or read to young ladies without making them blush, or young men without making them indignant ; and it must be confessed that some of these larger and better magazines have within a few years published stories which could not be read under the circumstances indicated. As for the religious press, it was necessary after the secular press came into power, because men attacked the principles of particular denominations in the secular press, and because the controlling spirits of the secular press had their own prejudices religiously considered. Of course an editor may be impartial. We have heard within a few moments that even the decisions of a judge depend upon the character, disposition, experience and prejudices of the man. 66 Boston University Quarter Centennial. There was a trial in this country some years ago, where Judge Pickering of New Hampshire was impeached for intoxication, and it was set up in his defence that he never got drunk as a judge, but as a man. The practical result of the decision was that when the man was drunk the judge was intoxicated, and under these circumstances an editor may have the highest and purest motives, but yet his prejudices will affect him. The oldest religious paper of importance in this country was founded in Boston — The Boston Recorder, in 1815. It is the predecessor of The Congregationalist, which, I believe, undertakes to date from the origin of The Recorder. There is a difference between women and papers, — papers endeavor to make themselves as old as possible. (Laughter.) The New York Observer was founded in 1823 to support Presbyterianism, and it supported it so well, and particularly the Calvinistic part thereof, as to make it necessary to establish in the same city, three or four years later, The Christian Advocate, to defend the principles of that growing communion against the charge of heresy. And the very same year that The Recorder declared war upon Arminianism in this city, to wit, the year 1823, Zion's Herald was established. Now the fact of the case is that a man may love peace, he may rejoice in his favorite beatitude, "Blessed are the peace makers," but if he is attacked, what shall he do ? I followed John Brown, who spoke in the old Tremont Temple many years ago, to the United States Hotel where we both stayed, after a somewhat incendiary address, in which he made state- ments which afterwards placed him in an unpleasant predica- ment. It was supposed that he was raising money on this tour for the purpose which finally brought him to his end. A member of the society of Friends followed him to the hotel to expostulate with him on the warlike tone of his speeches, and he said, " Friend, if a man was to thrust his hand into thy pocket, what wouldst thou do ? " " I would not strike him," replied the Friend, " I would seize his hand and hold him till Address by the Rev. James M. Buckley. 67 the officers of the law came and took him into custody." "The only difference between us," said Ossawatomie Brown, " is the difference of the application of force." If a man is attacked he must defend himself. Consequently, the religious press was necessary, first, to protect the views of religious teachers against the secular press, and secondly against aggressive or unduly offensive sectarian discussion. It rapidly spread until today it is a very extraordinary factor in the country. It is not for me to "aggrandize my pro- fession," to make a quotation from Rasselas. Thurlow Weed said : " All I can say is that we can beat the religious press in any single issue, but in the long run they will undermine everything they unite against." That is all I have to say with reference to the religious press, except that it corrects the errors of the secular press with regard to religious creed and religious language. One of the secular papers once published the following : "The Rt. Rev. William H. Harris blessed the stone " at the laying of the foundation of a church in Newark. That is very good language, but not for us, and it behooves us, in the religious press, to correct the errors of the secular press with regard to religious terms. It is a duty that grows less and less strenuous, for almost every well conducted secular paper has what it calls the religious editor. It holds him responsible for accuracy as far as possible. And the relations which the secular and religious press sustain to each other with regard to giving and receiving information are such as some Christian denominations might emulate to their advantage. But I must not proceed further, or cease, without directing attention to the fact that New England has exerted a more powerful influence through the press in this country than it has exerted through seminaries, colleges, universities, or in any other possible way. Look at a few facts in proof of this assertion. A great many years ago, Jeremiah Evarts, the father of William M. Evarts, was editing a paper in Massachusetts. That fact caused William M. Evarts to exert a kind and amount of influence in the state of New 68 Boston University Quarter Centennial. York which upon his own word he never would have dreamed of exerting had it not been for his remembrance of the connection of his father with the press, — an influence that Horace Greeley was extremely thankful for to the day of his death. Note the fact that nearly every great paper out of New England was founded or conducted by New Englanders. The Tribune was founded by Horace Greeley of New Hamp- shire, a strange writer, but a strong one, the most powerful personality who ever wielded pen or pencil in this country. Robert Bonner at one time undertook to publish a collection of poems hitherto unpublished. Mr. Greeley heard that he intended to include in the publication a poem of his, and he wrote Bonner in the best style of the editor, a letter which Mr. Bonner afterwards published : " Mr. Bonner, I beg you, you must exclude me from your new 'Poetic Pantheon.' I have never wished or desired to be installed there. I never was a poet in expression, and never will be. I did in my callow days write verses, as I suppose nearly every person who can make intelligent pen marks has done, — but I never thought they were poetry. Within the last ten years I have been branded aristocrat, demigod, hypocrite, dissensionist, traitor, corruptionist, — but no man ever flung in my face my transgressions in rhyme. (Laughter.) Let the dead rest, and leave to me the reputation which I desire and am worthy of. I know poetry from prose, which the ruthless resurrection of my verses would seem to disprove, the reader blindly inferring that I supposed them poetry." Horace Greeley went out from New England. Let it not be forgotten also that The Journal of Commerce was founded by two New Englanders, — David Hale and Gerard Hallock. Charles A. Dana, the greatest editor except Greeley, who, as some one satirically has said, would have been perfect if not of such a sympathetic nature, was a New Hampshire man. Three of the four great editors, — Henry Ward Beecher, Richard S. Storrs and Joshua Leavitt, were all New Address by the Rev. James M. Buckley. 69 Englanders. The Evangelist was founded by Leavitt, and for forty years Henry M. Field has conducted it. Henry Ward Beecher founded The Outlook, and Lyman Beecher is now the editor. That paper is a semi-religious paper which competes largely with The Independent. The New Orleans Picayune was founded by a man from New Hampshire, and the first paper on the Pacific coast was founded by Walter Colton, from Rutland, Vermont, an alumnus of Dartmouth ; and George Prentiss, also a New Englander, was editor of The Louisville Courier-Journal. With these facts before you, you will not consider the statement extravagant, when it is affirmed that New England has done more for the country in the evolution of civilization in this way than in any other single way. And now, Mr. President, the press, besides doing so much good, has done a great deal of harm, and is likely to do consid- erable more. I clipped from four different papers within a week the following items : "The President looks worried and troubled." "The President looks cheerful and thinks things are likely to go on well." "The President is incensed at the slowness of the war department." " The President is on perfectly amicable terms with Secretary Alger, and believes he is doing right." And now if there is no news, they tell what the news might be if we had it (applause and laughter), and if so what would follow; and if everything else fails, the attitude of the foreign nations brings grist to every mill. The secular papers are nearly all political papers, and if anyone does what I have to do — read nine daily papers — he will discover that it is impossible even to get the truth about Mr. Gladstone, or about the last work that is suspected of heresy. You can not get the truth about doctrines or anything else unless you read all the papers, dissolve them, and then sterilize the final results. (Laughter and applause.) As respects religion, I will only say that the press, while often a friend, is sometimes a foe to religion. It dis-cusses until the first syllable of the word is superfluous and full of 70 Boston University Quarter Centennial. evil results, so that the minister in the West who wanted to preach against the press did not go far astray when he took for his text : "And he sought to see Jesus, but could not for the Press." (Applause.) I rely, Mr. President, upon the University to send out men who will elevate the press. I said to Charles A. Dana once, at a meeting of the press in New York, " Will educated men serve the interests of the press well ? " He said, " No man can publish a daily paper well today without at least half a dozen college-bred men upon its staff." I did not arrive in time today to get a list of the men from this institution who have served upon the press. Next time, twenty-five years from now, if I am representing the press, I will have a full list, to show what your institution has done along this line. THE CHAIRMAN. In behalf of the authors of Boston, Rev. Edward Everett Hale will now address you. (Applause.) EDWARD EVERETT HALE. It is certainly a great privilege to speak on this subject to this audience. It does not often happen to a man — it certainly never happened to me — to speak on literature to one, two or three thousand graduates of a university, men and women who have drunk at the well of English undefiled, and have been taught to drink carefully while they drank deeply of that well and of no other. I am going to bring before this jury — that is what it is — a question which has been proposed lately by the brilliant Pennsylvania historian, — who is not so well known in New England as he will be, and who is not, Dr. Buckley, known to the press at all, — I mean Mr. Sidney Fisher, one of our first historians. In his study of New England, and particularly of Massachusetts, he has put this rather curious question, which thus far the press of Boston has passed by wholly without Address by the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. 7 1 answering : " What has become of the literature of Massa- chusetts ? " There certainly was a literature in Massachusetts, he says, five and twenty years ago, and the names are circulated of the poets — Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow, — pretty good names for us to conjure with. They are all dead, he says, and who take their places? And the names are circulated of historians — Palfrey, Prescott, Hildreth, Bancroft, Sparks, — certainly pretty good names to build up a reputation in literature. And what has become of them, and where are your historians now ? he asks. I don't propose to answer these questions. Dr. Eliot is to speak after me, and he will answer some of them, and the gentlemen of this University will be answering them in the next half century. But there is such a pleasure — I knew I was to have it when I came here — in speaking to the younger generation of people who have graduated in the last twenty- five years, on what literature is today and on the literature of the future, that I am glad to throw down this bone, upon which there is a good deal of meat, for the younger generation to gnaw. (Applause.) There is in this house — I do not happen to know him by sight, I wish I did — the successful merchant who is at this moment determining in what place and on what conditions he will place the $50,000 which he is going to give this University before he is four and twenty hours older. (Laughter and applause.) My suggestion to him is that he shall establish the Warren Scholarship. (Applause.) And this scholarship is to give some one young gentleman or lady a thousand dollars a year, for five years, for purposes of study in this country and in Europe, after receiving the degree of Bachelor of Arts, or Maid of Arts, here in this University. And these prizes are to be given to the persons who shall write the best essay in the English language, not to exceed two columns in length of The Advocate, and be judged by an impartial committee. And the first of these essays is to be on the question which Mr. Fisher has laid down : " What has become 72 Boston University Quarter Centennial. of the literature of Massachusetts ? " I don't propose myself to compete for the prize, and I don't propose to answer the question. I am only going to address myself to that part of this company who have already addressed me. Many more of them have addressed me than would address Dr. Warren, Dr. Gordon, Judge Field and Mr. Eliot, and the other gentle- men around me. They write letters to me as they used to write to dear Dr. Holmes, to ask "if literature is a good career, and would you advise me to go into literature as a career, or into Grub Street brokerage, or into editing news- papers, or into the bar, or into the pulpit ? " That is the sort of letters they will write you. And I propose to give the answer to that question. I had it put to me, oh, more than thirty years ago. I had a magazine article sent me when I was the editor of a magazine, and I sent it back again, as I did nine hundred and ninety-nine others in the course of the next six months, and I had a beseeching note from the author, saying, "Why did you send back my story ? " to which I directed my clerk to say that it was our business to make a good magazine, and not our business to instruct young authors. Then I received another letter saying, " That is true, but I am sick, I am lying in bed, I have no pleasure but writing these stories, and I wish I knew why none of them are printed." There, you see, it touched me on the tender side, and I wrote this answer : " In the first place you call yourself a man, and you are a woman. If I were a woman I would write with a woman's name and my own name. In the second place, you write on a subject of which you know nothing. I have met," said I, " in Godey's Magazine and in Graham's Magazine, with a great many mothers who insist on marrying their daughters to foreign counts, but I have lived to the age of fifty years, and in fact I never saw it done. That is your condition exactly. You say that you are lying in bed all the time. I believe that you never saw a foolish man who wanted to marry a real American girl to a foreign count, and unless you have seen it you have no right to write about it." Address by the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. 73 These words I wrote, for my soul was all aflame. And it did good. It turned out the man was a man and he got well. The tonic of .my letter was as good for him as if it had been Moxie. It turned out that he went West. That is always a good thing to do, Mr. Buckley. I don't know what his business was, but he became and is a prominent man of letters in the valley of the Mississippi. I don't propose to tell you his name. What do you think was the secret of that man's success ? He never wrote on any subject after I wrote him that letter until he had informed himself on that subject as well as he could. He never wrote unless he had some- thing to say. He made an exception in that to all the writers for the daily press, and to almost every other writer in America, I may say, and thus he has attained the prominent position to which I have alluded. Now I know I am speaking in the presence of professors of the methods of literature, but those gentlemen will join me in the central statement : If you haven't anything to say you had better not learn how to say it. And the first step and the second step and the last step in the establishment of a literature in Massachusetts will be that the people who are to write are the people who have done something before they begin to write. The one author who is certain, and whose friends are certain, that his works will be read in the year 2198 is not the person generally named now among literary men. His name is Ulysses S. Grant. General Grant's English is well nigh matchless. His style in literature might be taken as a model, and the reason is that General Grant never wrote one word unless he had something to say. He did some great things and he had those great things to describe and he described them. I said I would not answer Mr. Fisher's question. I do not propose to do so. I do propose to say to the fathers and the mothers who are here, to the young men and the maidens who are here, to the people who are looking forward with a wish that they may succeed as Parkman has succeeded, as 74 Boston University Quarter Centennial. Higginson and Holmes succeeded, as Lowell succeeded — I will say that all those men, quite independent of the knack of writing, quite independent of the mastery of style, were men of knowledge, of conviction, of profound study, and of strong personal character. And if you ask me to compare the Massachusetts of the first half-century with the Massachusetts of the last half- century, I am apt to say that the leaders of Massachusetts, sixty, seventy, eighty years ago were the men who had done something. They had discovered the Columbia River, or traded for furs with Indians, or split ice off an iceberg in Labrador and sent it to Havana or Calcutta ; and the young men, — the Bryants, the Holmeses, the Palfreys, the Lowells — who grew up in a circle of men who could do something, are the men who made our literature. As I look round on leaders of society now, whose most prominent business is to unlock a safe in a safety deposit vault and cut off the coupons from their bonds and carry them to be cashed, those men do not compare in my mind favorably with the men who split the ice from the Labrador iceberg, or who discovered the Columbia river. And I am quite sure that just as fast and as far as Massachusetts and New England do anything that is worth doing, so fast and so far will Massachusetts and New England have a literature. (Applause.) THE CHAIRMAN. In behalf of the Church Universal, who is better prepared to speak than one who has held Conferences in every state and territory of the United States, and who has traversed the whole world, and seen religion in all forms ? I introduce to you Bishop Hurst, Chancellor of The American University. BISHOP HURST. Permit me to bring from the banks of the Potomac to the Boston University my hearty congratulations. It is not " all quiet" there at this time; on the contrary, it is very busy, Address by the Rev. Bishop J. F. Hurst. 75 very intense ! We are thinking there of the Philippine Islands, and the new and large field for American ideas at the Antipodes. To whatever land one goes, from whatever shore he sails into still farther lands, under every sky, he finds the fair and the strong who have graduated from the Boston University. They are always Americans, always true to their pledges. What is one worth unless you can trust him, as Vermont can trust Dewey, around the world? (Applause.) We never think of Christianity as a thing of yesterday or of tomorrow only. It is the one eternal force in the world. An American on the platform of a railway in Southern India met a Brahmin, also waiting for the train. " You are an American," the Brahmin said, " and I am an Asiatic. You belong to a conquering faith, — I belong to a dying faith." Every ethnic faith, save Christianity, is on the road to the graveyard. Not one has the power of expansion. That means that the chill of death is coming. The so-called ethnic faiths are dying faiths, sorrowing sisters, clad in black, for whom there is no tomorrow. Why are all these hoary faiths doomed ? Because Chris- tianity is ever young, and is ever looking toward the future for a wider horizon and a larger career. Christianity has its incarnation in the church. Often the church takes the intense color and morbid temperament of the time or the land — the fever of its environment. It often loses its temper and gets quite astray from the calm and judicial. But we must remember that the church is not the perfect thing. It is human and has the frailties of its time. But it has always the rare gift of a splendid reserve power. Its great endowment is the force and the genius to correct its own errors. In all history there is not a more daring thing, one for which our vocabulary has really no name, than the heroism of a few citizens of a despised province of the Roman Empire, without contact with any of the schools, without even a j6 Boston University Quarter Centennial. whisper from any great pagan teacher, daring to remodel the world's wisdom. So soon as the church was established these men looked out with complacency upon their own century and upon those to come, as if to say : " We have no fear of the future." The answer was thundered back to them, " Do, if you dare ! Look at our venerable universities. Behold our great schools of thought in Athens and North Africa. They have been growing there apace for four cen- turies." "Yes," replied the adventurous tramplers on the old proprieties, " those are very great schools, but they have served their day. The new world needs a new wisdom ! " Now, these men proceeded with the utmost deliberation to decide upon places for new schools, as if the old were antediluvian and deserved to be forgotten. They parcelled out their universe into four school districts, — Antioch on the farther east, Asia Minor westward, and in North Africa the two schools of Carthage and Alexandria. Then they and their successors sent, far and wide, their representatives to gather from the Christian folk students for their four great schools. And the schools grew. The old universities, no longer capable of retaining their hold upon mankind, passed away as the new developed. The blood of ten great persecu- tions nurtured all their roots. Nero knew how to slaughter Christians on the arena of the Colosseum. But that was his highest conquest. He never achieved a victory in the illimitable field of ideas. But what of the great leaders in those four schools of Christian thought ? Some were superstitious. Some were violent in temperament. Some were too fond of a theory to see the whole truth. Nevertheless, they were men who in great emergencies, and when the executioner was in sight, were as firm as God's very stars above them. They did not flinch. Some, like Athanasius, were sent up the Nile into exile. But often, like him, they came down again, to find the emperor dead who had ordered their banishment. Brave they were, and glowing incarnations of the beatitudes of Christ. Address by the Rev. Bishop J. F. Hurst. J 7 Then there came a second birth of Christian education. That was the beginning of the mediaeval period. The mission before the church was the conquest of the unconverted and unchristianized tribes of central and northern Europe. They stretched into the east as far as Parthia, almost on the line of India, and westward to the straits of Gibraltar. Now who could classify their languages, sing their legends, gather up the loose threads of their history ? Charlemagne was the first cosmopolitan of the age. He sent over to England for Alcuin, and made him the master of his great Palatine school, from which emanated Eginhard and other scholars of the time. Longfellow tells the story of the attachment of this unsophisticated scholar, Eginhard, to Emma, the daughter of the great chieftain : " The Emperor, when he heard this good report Of Eginhard much buzzed about the court, Said to himself, ' This stripling seems to be Purposely sent into the world for me ; He shall become my scribe, and shall be schooled In all the arts whereby the world is ruled.' Thus did the gentle Eginhard attain To honor in the court of Charlemagne ; Became the sovereign's favorite, his right hand, So that his fame was great in all the land, And all men loved him for his modest grace And comeliness of figure and of face. An inmate of the palace, yet recluse, A man of books, yet sacred from abuse Among the armed knights with spur on heel, The tramp of horses and the clang of steel ; And as the Emperor promised he was schooled In all the arts by which the world is ruled. But the one art supreme, whose law is fate, The Emperor never dreamed of till too late." Now universities began to arise. Charlemagne carried the university around with him. When there was no fighting to be done, there was an immense amount of learning in the. Schola Palatina, or the attachment to his palace. y8 Boston University Quarter Centennial. The establishment of the mediaeval schools of Paris, Padua and Ravenna followed, and by and by the great school of Prague was founded, which produced Jerome of Prague and the immortal Huss. The aspiration of the church for great schools was a controlling passion of the mediaeval period. By and by the breath of a new air was caught by the Germans. Then universities of a different grade sprang up, and from Byzantium on the east they spread to what is called the Pentapolis, on the eastern coast of Italy. Ravenna became a new Greece. Soon sprang up the humanism of the new morning, gleaning from the rich classic thought of all previous ages what was best and worthiest. Reuchlin, the first Humanist, appeared. Then came Schwarzerd, or Melanchthon (simply a translation of his own name into Greek). Martin Luther heard of him, and called him from editing little school-books, small editions from different authors, to Witten- berg, when he shared with Luther the throne of universal empire. All through the period from the beginning of the Reforma- tion down to the present time, the church, although with many errors, was the mother of universities, while on the other hand, the universities supplied the church with its strongest exponents and evangelists with tireless steps. It is quite the vogue with certain Don Quixotes to charge the church with being the protectress of ignorance. " Down with Science ; up with Darkness," is the cry they would put in the mouth of the church. On the contrary the church is not and never has been the opponent of science. I will admit the formidable appearance of the fine padding, called footnotes, in Buckle's " History of Civilization " and Draper's " Intellectual Development of Europe " and some other books, mainly made up of those two, where it is made to appear that in the time of Galileo the church took an opposite course. We forget that the persecutor of Galileo, and of others who ventured into new realms of thought, was only an adminis- trator. It was never the wish of the church. The clergy of Address by the Rev, Bishop J. F. Hurst. 79 Monte Cassino were the best astronomers of Europe. The church itself has in no case been on the side of ignorance, but has always been on the side of the highest and broadest knowledge. Look at the picture here in Boston and at Plymouth ! When the Mayflower came over to these shores it was hard to tell how many authors sat studying and working in the little ship's company. The heroes of that voyage planted large influence for a great future and for the education of a continent. One of the first dreams, before the oldest of the Mayflower colonists had died, was for a great university, and well was it for Harvard that the eldest of the Pilgrim colonists were projectors of great schemes of education. All the other schools for higher education which were built up in the American colonies began with theology. In those early days the subjects dealt with in the schools were theological, and when Cotton Mather graduated at Harvard, his magnificent oration was on " The Divinity of Hebrew Points." Imagine such a subject today ! Who would listen to it now ? It is true that theology was at the foundation of all our colleges. Look down at the little William and Mary College, on the banks of the James river, planted by the Virginia colonists. The entire course of study was theology. It was the feeling of the colonists after the light in the darkness and blindness of the times. The same ecclesiastical trend is observable in the history of the various American colleges. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Amherst were largely ecclesiastical and theological at the outset. Everywhere it was the love of the church for the university. That passion has been growing stronger and more intense from that time to the present. Hostility between the church and the university ! Never ! Nothing but an ever- lasting unity, a beautiful and sweet alliance ! In every great crisis, such as the Reformation in England, there has always been difficulty in enlisting the university. Hawthorne says that a woman is never so sweet and beautiful 8o Boston University Quarter Centennial. as when she has passed through a great trial. So it may be said of Holland, she was never so sweet and beautiful, as when, having overcome the Duke of Alva, and thrown off forevermore the Spanish yoke, her first thought of freedom, her first cry of deliverance, her first note of thanksgiving was, " Let us build a university," and out of the starving people there sprang the University of Leyden. So across the channel the struggle of the English families for the succession brought to pass their universities. I will admit that Oxford was very different from Cambridge. Oxford did bring from the continent Peter Martyr, Ochino, and the celebrated Erasmus, strong and noble man ! But Cambridge did not want any foreigners. Cambridge was getting ready for New England. It was the hotbed of Puritanism, Leyden-men, Pilgrims, — its scholars driven from England, settling in Leyden, then coming over in the May- flower. And when Harvard was first established, it was young Cambridge from old Cambridge. Nearly all of its professors had been students in Cambridge halls. Out of Cambridge and the church came the Cambridge of this country, — both of them great and wonderful outgrowths of the highest aspiration. So I suggest for the future a fair motto for Boston University, for its coming twenty-five years : " The broadest Christian scholarship for all the years to come : scholarship with the word of God for its basis, but the widest scholarship, embracing all fields and fearing no results." The church universal of today owes Boston University such a debt of gratitude as it can never pay, except by laying down on its altars such generous gifts as will assure the development and enrichment of its present noble beginning for a progressive and enduring scholarship. May these first twenty-five years multiply into magnificent centuries, and may the Boston University of the future carry into all those centuries the rare inheritance of the spirit and genius of its first President. Address by President Charles W. Eliot. PRESIDENT ELIOT. I have received no special mandate to express to you the sentiments with which other colleges and universities partici- pate in this auspicious festival ; but I think I know how the older American institutions of the higher learning now look upon the birth and fortunate youth of a kindred institution, and that I can interpret to you some of the grounds of these elders' good wishes. Many American colleges have been founded under circum- stances which made manifest at the start strong antagonisms in theological or social opinions and practices between the pre-existing and the newer institutions; but no such antag- onisms or oppositions have been encountered by Boston University. The educated community has learned that the cause of all institutions of higher education is in reality a common cause, to be promoted by the hospitable greeting of new comers to the field, and by cordial cooperation between the different institutions which partially occupy that field. It has learned that the common cause is weakened by public strife between different colleges and universities, and even by covert attacks on one another's methods and policy. Not more than twenty-five years ago the habitual attitude of the New England colleges towards each other could be correctly described as an armed watchfulness, which naturally and easily passed over at not infrequent intervals into a state of active hostility. The denominational quality of the colleges and the severity of denominational antagonisms led to bitter criticism each of the other, which was all the worse in its effects because conscientious and founded on serious convic- tions. Gradually this state of suppressed warfare between colleges has passed away with the denominational intensity which was its principal cause. It may be asked, however, Can existing colleges and univer- sities really welcome with sincerity a new college or university to the limited field of the higher education ? They can, and Boston University Quarter Centennial. they do; though of course the creation of new institutions might in a given community be carried too far. To determine beforehand this limit of fruitful creation requires, it must be confessed, a wisdom at once cautious and sanguine. In organ- izing education the bold experiment often succeeds, where a timid one would have failed. For example, one would not have supposed that three medical schools, each connected with a college or university, could be successfully carried on in Boston ; and yet three such schools are in full career, each renders a valuable service to the community, and because these diverse institutions exist here, Boston is a more influen- tial medical center than it would be if there were but one medical school instead of three. It often happens that institutions of education carried on by different bodies of trustees, and varying in regard to age, con- stitution, and methods, bring about in the community a greater diffusion of the higher education than would otherwise be accomplished. This kind of public service Boston University has illustrated during the first twenty-five years of its life, although established, or rather because established, in close proximity to Harvard, Tufts, and the Institute of Technology. The founding and development of Boston University is due in the first instance to the Methodist Episcopal Church — a great denomination in our country as regards numbers, wealth, and general effectiveness. The brief history of the Univer- sity demonstrates the extraordinary change which has taken place in the real management of institutions of denominational origin. For more than a century in the early history of Har- vard College every person connected with the institution as governor or teacher had to be connected with what was then the Established Church of Massachusetts. That a single Baptist should be a teacher in Harvard was an intolerable scandal. In the Roman Catholic colleges of today every governor and teacher must be a member of that communion ; but in the colleges of the large Protestant denominations denominational management no longer means necessarily this Address by President Charles W. Eliot. 83 invariable consignment of the students to teachers connected with one denomination. On the catalogues of Boston University are found the names of teachers and administrative officers belonging to a great variety of denominations ; and I need not say that students of every possible mode of religious thought have always been welcomed to its halls. A great gain in religious toleration is recorded in this striking change in the management of Protestant denominational institutions of the higher education. I must further felicitate Boston University on the reflex influence which an establishment of the higher learning, so conducted, has on the denomination which gave it birth. Although the founders of Methodism were men of thorough education, it came about in process of time that the denomi- nation attached less importance to learning in its ministers and teachers than to other qualifications. Nevertheless the foundations of this University were laid on a pre-existing theological school, where men were trained for the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church by inducting them into the various knowledges on which sociology, theology and sacred oratory depend. When out of this theological school there arose schools of all sciences and all professions, a great denomination, which had especially addressed itself to the humble and the uneducated, claimed a place among the promoters of the profoundest and loftiest learning. It put itself on a level with the other great Protestant denomina- tions, like the Congregational, Baptist, and Presbyterian, as advocate and promoter of sound knowledge as the firm basis of sound faith and practice. It is a touching and inspiring fact that many of the most important benefactors of Boston University have been men and women who themselves received but scanty education. To such men all our endowed institutions of learning have been indebted ; but in the older institutions it is natural that their grateful sons should claim the first place in contributing to their maintenance and enlargement. Thus at Harvard 84 Boston University Quarter Centennial. University during the past thirty years, which has been a period of considerable enlargement, the gifts of graduates of the University somewhat exceed in amount the gifts of non- graduates of the institution. But in a new institution like Boston University an analogous support from its own graduates cannot be expected until thirty or forty years have elapsed since its birth. It should always be remembered that in its earliest years it owed much to men who never knew by personal experience how a thorough training in youth may enlarge and enrich the whole life of the recipient. In the faith and hope of such men there is something pathetic as well as inspiring. All institutions of learning must sympa- thize with their beneficent generosity, and must desire to make it fruitful and lasting. As the older institutions for whom I speak contemplate the growth already attained by this young ally, they marvel at the contrast between their own slow and painful development and the rapid progress of this University. In two hundred years Harvard did not reach the stature which Boston University has reached in twenty-five. The contrast teaches that institutions of education, like individuals, in great part derive their resources, powers, and characters from the society to which they belong, and share the fortunes of that society. Therefore, in wishing increasing health, wealth, and influence to Boston University, we are also expressing the pious wish and expectation that Boston and New England continue to develop all the material and spiritual elements which make people robust, rich, and righteous. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 029 915 407 5 .•■"•'•■■■"■.'"•' l' HI • v . ■ JL