('iy .'• I Wi'i-dl /.-o/V»- *.* f-d* ^>€ ->'i'o- -*i^<^ ^°''^., \ V>u-V^ *" ilr 0^2 4^ * v^ V^*V \''^*V \3^v ^ o P< * V Vi o^ ''^^m^'^^'M^^-^^^M^ THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN "THE BEST POLITICAL ECONOMY IS THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN" — Emerson. BY David Starr Jordan President OF Leland Stanford Junior University FRONTISPIECE BY F. SouLE Campbell San Francisco Whitaker & Ray-Wiggin Co I 9 I o U5^ ■^^< Copyright, 1896 by David Starr Jordan Copyright, IQIO by David Starr Jordan ©CI,A2658S8 TO JANE LATHROP STANFORD PREFACE. This volume is made up of addresses relating to higher education, delivered at different times before assemblies of teachers and students. The writer is under obligation to the publishers of the Popular Sci- ence Monthly, the Forum, and the Occidental Medical Times for the permission to reprint articles which have appeared in these periodicals. Most of the articles have been freely retouched since their original pub- lication. Palo Alto, Cal. FOREWORD TO THE PRESENT EDITION The plates of the first edition of "The Care and Culture of Men" were destroyed by the fire that followed the earthquake of 1906. In re-publishing the book the Editor has taken the Hberty of adding some new material that seemed properly to belong in it, while certain essays that appeared in the former volume have been omitted. — Editor. CONTENTS. The Value of Higher Education -------1 The Nation's Need of Men - 27 The School and the State --------39 The Woman and the University - - ----- 71 The Scholar in the Community -------91 The Care and Culture of Men ------- HI The Practical Education --------- 121 The Procession of Life --------- 131 The Growth of Man - - - - - 137 The Saving of Time --------- 159 Knowing Real Men ----------185 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION. WHAT I have to say here is addressed to young men and young women. It is a plea, as strong as I know how to make it, for higher education, for more thorough preparation for the duties of life. I know those well to whom I wish to speak. And to such as these, with the life and duties in the busy world before you, the best advice I or any one can give is this : "Go to college." And you may say : "These four years are among the best of my life. The good the college does must be great, if I should spend this time and money in secur- ing it. What will the college do for me ?" It may do many things for you — if you are made of the right stuff ; for you cannot fasten a two-thousand- dollar education to a fifty-cent boy. The fool, the dude, and the shirk come out of college pretty much as they went in. They dive deep in the Pierian springs, as the duck dives in the pond — and they come up as dry as the duck does. The college will not do everything for you. It is simply one of the helps by which you can win your way to a noble manhood or womanhood. Whatever you are, you must make of *Address before the California State Teachers' Association at Fresno, 1892. THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION yourself; but a well-spent college life is one of the greatest helps to all good things. So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can do for you : It will bring you in contact with the great minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through the ages, have borne a mission to young men and young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer and Euripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought will be limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but the great men of all ages and all climes will become your brothers. You will learn to feel what the Greek called the "consolations of philosophy." To turn from the petty troubles of the day to the thoughts of the masters, is to go from the noise of the street through the door of a cathedral. If you learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. The whole of your life must be spent in your own company, and only the educated man is good company for himself. The uneducated man looks out on life through narrow windows, and thinks the world is small. The college can bring you face to face with the great problems of nature. You will learn from your study of nature's laws more than the books can tell you of the grandeur, the power, the omnipotence of God. You will learn to face great problems seriously. You will learn to work patiently at their solution, though you know that many generations must each add its mite to your work before any answer can be reached. THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Your college course will bring you in contact with men whose influence will strengthen and inspire. The ideal college professor should be the best man in the community. He should have about him nothing mean, or paltry, or cheap. He should be to the student as David Copperfield's Agnes, "always pointing the way upward." That we are all this, I shall not pretend. Most col- lege professors whom I know are extremely human. We have been soured, and starved, and dwarfed in many ways, and many of us are not the men we might have been if we had had your chances for early edu- cation. But unpractical, pedantic, fossilized though the college professor may be, his heart is in the right place ; he is not mercenary, and his ideals are those of culture and progress. We are keeping the torch burn- ing which you, young men of the twentieth century, may carry to the top of the mountain. But here and there among us is the ideal teacher, the teacher of the future, the teacher to have known whom is of itself a liberal education. I have met some such in my day^ — Louis Agassiz, Charles Fred- erick Hartt, Asa Gray, George William Curtis, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Dickson White, among others, and there are many more such in our land. It is worth ten years of your life to know well one such man as these. Garfield once said that a log with Mark Hopkins at one end of it and himself at the other, would be a university. In whatever college you go, poor and feeble though the institution may be, you will 3 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION find some man who, in some degree, will be to you what Mark Hopkins was to Garfield. To know him will repay you for all your sacrifices. It was said of Dr. Nott, of Union College, that he "took the sweep- ings of other colleges, and sent them back into society pure gold." Such was his influence on young men. Moreover, the training which comes from association with one's fellow students cannot be overestimated. Here and there, it is true, some young invertebrate, overburdened with money or spoiled by home-coddling, falls into bad company, and leaves college in worse condition than when he entered it. These are the windfalls of education. However much we may regret them, we cannot prevent their existence. But they are few among the great majority. Most of our apples are not worm-eaten at the core. The average student enters college for a purpose; and you will lose noth- ing, but may gain much, from association with him. Among our college students are the best young men of the times. They mold each other's character, and shape each other's work. Many a college man will tell you that, above all else which the college gave, he values the friendships which he formed in school. In the German universities, the "fellow feeling among free spirits" is held to be one of the most important elements in their grand system of higher education. Many a great genius has risen and developed in soli- tude, as the traiHng arbutus grows in the woods and scorns cultivation. Poets sing because their souls are full of music, not because they have learned the gamut 4 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION of passions in schools. But all great work, in science, in philosophy, in the humanities, has come from enter- ing into the work of others. There was once a Chinese emperor who decreed that he was to be the first; that all history was to begin with him, and that nothing should be before him. But we cannot enforce such decree. We are not emperors of China. The world's work, the world's experience does not begin with us. We must know what has been done before. We must know the paths our predeces- sors have trodden, if we would tread them farther. We must stand upon their shoulders — dwarfs upon the shoulders of the giants — if we would look farther into the future than they. Science, philosophy, statesman- ship cannot for a moment let go of the past. The college intensifies the individuality of a man. It takes his best abilities and raises him to the second, or third, or tenth power, as we say in algebra. It is true enough that colleges have tried, and some of them still try, to enforce uniformity in study — to cast all students in the same mold. Colleges have been con- servative, old-fogyish, if you please. Musty old men in the dust of libraries have tried to make young men dry and dreary like themselves. Colleges have placed readiness above thoroughness, memory above mastery, glibness above sincerity, uniformity above originality, and the dialectics of the dead past above the work of the living present. The scepter of the Roman emperor has crumbled into dust, but the "rod of the Roman schoolmaster is over us still." THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION But say what you will of old methods, they often attained great ends. Colleges have aimed at uniform- ity. They did not secure it. The individuality of the student bursts through the cast-iron curriculum. "The man's the man for a' that," and the man is so much more the man nature meant him to be, because his mind is trained. The educated man has the courage of his convic- tions, because only he has any real convictions. He knows how convictions should be formed. What he believes he takes on his own evidence — not because it is the creed of his church or the platform of his party. So he counts as a unit in his community — not as part of a dozen or a hundred whose opinions are formed by their town's place on the map, or who train under the party flag because their grandfathers did the same. "To see things as they really are," is one of the crown- ing privileges of the educated man, and to help others to see them so, is one of the greatest services he can render to the community. But you may say: "All this may be fine and true, but it does not apply to my case. I am no genius; I shall never be a scholar. I want simply to get along. Give me education enough to teach a district school, or to run an engine, or to keep account books, and I am satisfied. Any kind of a school will be good enough for that." "The youth gets together his materials," says Tho- reau, "to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the mid- 6 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION die-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them." Now, why not plan for a woodshed at first, and save this waste of time and materials ? But this is the very good of it. The gathering of these materials will strengthen the youth. It may be the means of saving him from idleness, from vice. So long as you are at work on your bridge to the moon, you will shun the saloon, and we shall not see you on the drygoods box in front of the corner grocery. I know many a man who in early life planned only to build a woodshed, but who found later that he had the strength to build a temple, if he only had the materials. Many a man the world calls successful would give all life has brought him could he make up for the disad- vantages of his lack of early training. It does not hurt a young man to be ambitious in some honorable direction. In the pure-minded youth, ambition is the sum of all the virtues. Lack of ambition means fail- ure from the start.. The young man who is aiming at nothing, and cares not to rise, is already dead. There is no hope for him. Only the sexton and the under- taker can serve his purposes:"^ The old traveler, Rafinesque, tells us that, when he was a boy, he read the voyages of Captain Cook, and Pallas, and Le Vaillant, and his soul was fired with the desire to be a great traveler like them. "And so I became such," he adds shortly. If you say to yourself, "I will be a naturalist, a traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar;" if you 7 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that direction, and take advantage of all those aids that help toward your ends, and reject all that dO' not, you will some time reach your goal. The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going. "Why should we call ourselves men," said Mira- beau, ''unless it be to succeed in everything, every- where ? Say of nothing, 'This is beneath me,' nor feel that anything is beyond your powers. Nothing is impossible to the man who can will." "But a college education costs money," you may say. "I have no money ; therefore, I cannot go to college." But this is nonsense. If you have health and strength, and no one dependent on you, you cannot be poor. There is, in this country, no greater good luck that a young man can have than to be thrown on his own resources. The cards are stacked against the rich man's son. Of the many college men who have risen to prominence in my day, very few did not lack for money in college. I remember a little boarding club of the students at Cornell, truthfully called the "Struggle for Existence," and named for short, "The Strug," which has graduated more bright minds than any other single organization in my alma mater. The young men who have fought their way, have earned their own money, and know what a dollar costs, have the advantage of the rich. They enter the world outside with no luxurious habits, with no taste for idleness. It is not worth while to be born with a 8 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION silver spoon in your mouth, when a Httle effort will secure you a gold one. The time, the money that the unambitious young man wastes in trifling pursuits or in absolute idleness will suffice to give the ambitious man his education. The rich man's son may enter college with better preparation than you. He may wear better clothes. He may graduate younger. But the poor man's son can make up for lost time by greater energy and by the greater clearness of his grit. He steps from the commencement stage into no unknown world. He has already measured swords with the great antagonist, and the first victory is his. It is the first struggle that counts. But it is not poverty that helps a man. There is no virtue in poor food or shabby clothing. It is the effort by which he throws off the yoke of poverty that enlarges the powers. It is not hard work, but work to a purpose, that frees the soul. If the poor man lie down in the furrow and say : 'T won't try. I shall never amount to anything. I am too poor; and if I wait to earn money, I shall be too old to go to school." If you do this, I say, you won't amount to anything, and later in life you will be glad to spade the rich man's garden and to shovel his coal at a dollar a day. I have heard of a poor man in Wisconsin who earns a half-dollar every day by driving a cow to pasture. He watches her all day as she eats, and then drives her home at night. This is all he does. Put here your half-dollar and there your man. The one balances the other, and the one enriches the world as much as the THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION other. If it were not for the cow, the world would not need that man at all ! A young man can have no nobler ancestry than one made up of men and women who have worked for a living and who have given honest work. The instinct of industry runs in the blood. Naturalists tell us that the habits of one generation may be inherited by the next, reappearing as instincts. Whether this be liter- ally true or not, this we know: It is easy to inherit laziness. No money or luck will place the lazy man on the level of his industrious neighbor. The industry engendered by the pioneer life of the last generation is still in your veins. Sons and daughters of the West- ern pioneers, yours is the best blood in the realm. You must make the most of yourselves. If you cannot get an education in four years, take ten years. It is worth your while. Your place in the world will wait for you till you are ready to fill it. Do not say that I am expecting too much of the effects of a firm resolution ; that I give you advice which will lead you to failure. For the man who will fail will never make a resolution. Those among you whom fate has cut out for nobodies are the ones who will never try ! I said just now that you cannot put a two-thousand- dollar education on a fifty-cent boy. This has been tried again and again. It is tried in every college. It fails almost every time. What of that? It does not hurt to try. A few hundred dollars is not much to spend on an experiment like that — the attempt to 10 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION make a man out of a boy whose life might otherwise be a waste of so much good oxygen. But what shall we say of a man who puts a fifty-cent education on a ten-thousand-dollar, a million-dollar boy, and narrows and cramps him throughout his after life? And just this is what ten thousand parents today in California are doing for their sons and daughters. Twenty years hence, ten thousand men and women of California will blame them for their shortness of sight and narrowness of judgment, in weighing a few paltry dollars, soon earned, soon lost, against the power which comes from mental training. "For a man to have died who might have been wise and was not — this," says Carlyle, "1 call a tragedy." Another thing which should never be forgotten is this : A college education is .not a scheme to enable a man to live without work. Its purpose is to help him to work to advantage — to make every stroke count. I have heard a father say sometimes: "I have worked hard all my life. I will give my boy an education, so that he will not have to drudge as I have had to do." And the boy going out in the world does not work as his father did. The result every time is disappoint- ment; for the manhood which the son attains depends directly on his own hard work. But if the father says : "My son shall be a worker, too; but I will give him an education, so that his work may count for more to himself and to the world than my work has done for me." Then, if the son be as persistent as his father, the results of his work may be far beyond the expec- 11 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION tations of either. The boys who are sent to college often do not amount to much. From the boys who go to college come the leaders of the future. Frederic Denison Maurice tells us that "All experi- ence is against the notion that the means to produce a supply of good, ordinary men is to attempt nothing higher. I know that nine-tenths of those the univer- sity sends out must be hewers of wood and drawers of water; but if I train the ten-tenths to be such, then the wood will be badly cut, and the water will be spilt. Aim at something noble. Make your system of edu- cation such that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be a manhood in your little men of which you did not dream!" "You will hear every day around you," says Emer- son, "the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that your first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask in derision. If, neverthe- less, God has called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true ! When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions. I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go until a more convenient season.' Then dies the man in you. Then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and sci- ence, as they have died already in a hundred thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your destiny." But you may ask me this question : "Will a college 12 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION education pay, considered solely as a financial invest- ment?" Again I must answer, "Yes." But the scholar is seldom disposed to look upon his power as a financial investment. He can do better than to get rich. The scholar will say, as Agassiz said to the Boston pub- lisher, "I have no time, sir, to make money." But in the rank and file it is true that the educated men get the best salaries. In every field, from football to statesmanship, it is always science that wins the game. Brain work is higher than hand work, and it is worth more on any market. The man with the mind is the boss, and the boss receives a larger salary than the hands whose work he directs. George William Curtis has said: "I have heard it said that liberal education does not promote success in life. A chimney-sweep might say so. Without edu- cation he could gain the chimney top — poor little blackamoor ! — brandish his brush and sing his song of escape from soot to sunshine. But the ideal of suc- cess measures the worth of the remark that it may be attained without liberal education. If the accumula- tion of money be the standard, we must admit that a man might make a fortune in a hundred ways without education. But he could make a fortune, also, without purity of life, or noble character, or lofty faith. A man can pay much too high a price for money, and not every man who buys it knows its relative value with other possessions. Undoubtedly, Ezra Cornell and Matthew Vassar did not go to college, and they suc- 13 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION ceeded in life. But their success — what was it ? Where do you see it now ? Surely not in their riches, but in the respect that tenderly cherishes their mem- ory, because, knowing its inestimable value, they gave to others the opportunity of education which had been denied to them." Some time ago. Chancellor Lippincott, of the State University of Kansas, wrote to each of the graduates of that institution, asking them to state briefly the advantages which their experience showed that they have derived from their college life and work. Among these answers, I may quote a few : One says : "My love for the State grew with every lesson I received through her care. I saved five years of my life by her training, and I am more loyal and a better citizen." Another says this : "I have a better standing in the community than I could have gained in any other way." Another says : "I would not exchange the advantages gained for a hundred times their cost, either to Kansas or to myself." Another declares: "It is financially the best invest- ment I ever made." To another it had given "strong friendship with the most intelligent young men of the State, those who are certain to largely influence its destiny." One said : "It has given me a place and an influence among a class of men whom I could not otherwise reach at all." 14 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Another said : "I am better company for myself, and a better citizen, with far more practical interest in the State." Thus it is in Kansas, and thus it is everywhere. To the young man or young woman of character, the col- lege education does pay, from whatever standpoint you may choose to regard it. When I was a boy on a farm in Western New York, some one urged my parents to send me to college. "But what willhe find to do when he gets through col- lege?" they asked. "Never mind that," a friend said; "he will always find plenty to do. There is always room at the top." There is always room at the top! All our professions are crowded in America, but the crowd is around the bottom of the ladder ! We are proud, and justly proud, of our common- school system. The free school stands on every North- ern cross-road, and it is rapidly finding its way into the great New South. Every effort is made for the educa- tion of the masses. There is no upper caste to reap the benefits of an education, for which the poor man has to pay. There is no class educated and ruling by right of birth — no hereditary House of Lords. Our scholars and our leaders are of the people, from the people. The American plan is making us an intelligent people, as compared with the masses of any other nation. The number of those indifferent or ignorant is less in our Northern States than in England, or Germany, or France. But our leadership is worse than theirs. We have, for our numbers, fewer educated men than they IS THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION have in any of these countries. Our statesmen are but children by the side of Gladstone or Bismarck. We are all too familiar with the American type of "statesman." The cross-ties of the railroads which lead in every direction out of Washington are every fourth year graven with the prints of his returning boot-heels. He is the butt of our national jokes, as well as the sign of our national shame ! We have been too busy chop- ping our trees and breaking our prairies to educate our sons. Thus it comes, that in literature, in science, in philosophy, in everything except mechanical invention, American work has been contented to bear the stamp of mediocrity. This is not so true as it was a few years ago; for Young America has made great strides toward the front in all these fields within the last twenty years. But it should not be true to any extent at all. Nowhere in the world, I believe, is the raw material out of which scholars and statesmen should be made so abundant as in America. Nowhere is native intelligence and energy so plentiful ; but far too often does it waste itself in unworthy achievement. The journalist Sala says that ''nowhere in the world is so much talent lying around loose as in America." In other words, in no other country are so many men of natural ability who fail in effectiveness in life for want of proper training. In the different training-schools of California, large and small, nearly two thousand young people are gathered together to prepare for the profession of teaching. Of these, not one in fifty remains in school 16 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION long enough to secure even the rudiments of a Hberal education. Fifteen minutes for dinner; fifty weeks for an education! For the lowest grades of schools, there are candidates by the hundred ; but when one of our really good schools wants a man for a man's work, it can make no use of these teachers. We must search far and wide for the man to whom a present offer of fifty dollars a month has not seemed more important than all the grand opportunities the scholar may receive. Many of our young teachers are making a mistake in this regard. Every year the demand for educated men and women in our profession is growing. Every year scores of half-educated teachers are crowded out of their places to make way for younger men who have the training which the coming years demand. What kind of a teacher do you mean to be? One who has a basis of culture, and will grow as the years go on, or one with nothing in him, who will hang on, a burden to the profession, until he is finally turned out to starve ? What is the use of preparing for certain failure ? The bird in the hand is not worth ten in the bush. You cannot afford to sell your future at so heavy a discount. The general purpose of public education, it is said, is the elevation of the masses. This is well ; but as the man is above the mass, there is a higher aim than this. Training of the individual is to break up the masses, to draw from the multitude the man. We see a regi- ment of soldiers on parade — a thousand men ; in dress and mein all are alike — ^the mass. To the sound of the 17 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION drum or the command of the officer, they move as one man. By and by, in the business of war, comes the cry for a man to lead some forlorn hope, to do some deed of bravery in the face of danger. From the mass steps the man. His training shows itself. On parade, no more, no less than the others; he stands above them all on the day of trial. So, too, in other things, in other places; for the need of men is not alone on the field of battle. Some fifty thousand boys are to-day at play on the fields of California. Which of these shall be the great, the good of California's next century? Which of these shall redeem our State from its vassalage to the saloon and the spoilsman? Which of these shall be a center of sweetness and light; so that the world shall say, "It is good to have lived in California." Good not alone for the climate, the mountains, the forest, and the sea, the thousand beauties of nature which make our State so lovable ; but good because life in California is life among the best and truest of men and women. This record California has yet to make; and there are some among you, I trust, who will live to help make it. These fifty thousand boys form a part of what will be the masses. Let us train them as well as we can. Let us feed them well. Let us send them to school. Let us make them wise, intelligent, clean, honest, thrifty. Among them here and there is the future leader of men. Let us raise him from the masses, or, rather, let us give him a chance to raise himself; for the pine-tree in the thicket needs no outside help to 18 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION place its head above the chaparral and sumac. To break up the masses, that they may be masses no more, but living men and women, is the mission of higher education. In medicine, America is still the paradise of quacks. In law, the land is full of shysters and pettifoggers, and doers of "fine work"; but of good lawyers, the supply never equals the demand. In education, no land is so full as America of frauds and shams. The cata- logues of our schools read like the advertisements of our patent medicines. They "cure all ills that flesh is heir to ; one bottle sufficient !" The name "Univer- sity in America is assumed by the cross-roads academy as well as by Harvard or Johns Hopkins. The name "Professor" is applied to the country schoolmaster, the barber, and the manager of the skating-rink. The bachelor's diploma in half our States is given by con- sent of law to those who could not pass the examina- tions of any decent high school. Such diplomas do not ennoble their holders, but they do serve to bring into contempt the very name of American graduate. One of the besetting sins of American life is its willingness to call very little things by very large names — its tolerance of imposition and fraud. It is the mission of the scholar in each profession to combat fraud; to show men "facts amid appearances"; to say that a pop-gun is a pop-gun, though every one else may be calling it a cannon! As our country grows older, perhaps the number of bladders will diminish. If not, let us have more pins ! 19 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION What does the college do for the moral, the religious training of the youth? Let us examine. If your col- lege assume to stand in loco parentis^ with rod in hand and spy-glasses on its nose, it will not do much in the way of moral training. The fear of punishment will not make young men moral and religious; still less a punishment so easily evaded as the discipline of the college. If your college claims to be a reform school, your professors detective officers, and your president a chief of police, the students will give them plenty to do. A college cannot take the place of the parent. To claim that it does so, is a mere pretense. It can cure the boy of petty vices and trickery only by making him a man, by giving him higher ideals, more serious views of life. You may win by inspiration, not by fear. Take those dozen students, of whom Agassiz tells us — his associates in the University of Munich. Do you suppose that Dr. DoUinger caught any of them cheating on examination? Did the three young men who knelt under the haystack at Williamstown, — the founders of our Foreign Missions, — choose the hay- stack rather than the billiard-hall, for fear of the col- lege faculty? "Free should the scholar be, free and brave." "The petty restraints that may aid in the control of college sneaks and college snobs are an insult to college men and women." And it is for the training of men and women that the college exists. So, too, in religious matters. The college can do much, but not by rules and regulations. The college 20 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION will not make young men religious by enforced attend- ance at church or prayer-meeting. It will not awaken the spiritual element in the student's nature by any sys- tem of demerit-marks. This the college can do for religious culture : It can strengthen the student in his search for truth. It can encourage manliness in him by the putting away of childish things. Let the thoughts of the student be as free as the air. Let him prove all things, and he will hold fast to that which is good. Give him a message to speak to other men, and when he leaves your care you need fear for him not the world, the flesh, nor the Devil ! This is a practical age, we say, and we look askance at dreams and ideals. We ask now : What is the value of education? What is the value of Christianity? What is the value of love, of God, of morality, of truth, of beauty? — as though all these things were for sale in our city markets, somewhat shop-worn and going at a sacrifice. ''My son," says Victor Cherbuliez, "my son, we ought to lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth, or else we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart; for we lose a great many of them by the way." It is the noblest mission of all higher education, I believe, to fill the mind of the youth with these enthusiasms, with noble ideas of manhood, of work, of life. It should teach him to feel that life is indeed worth living; and no one who leads a worthy life has ever for a moment doubted this. It should help him to 21 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION shape his own ambitions as to how a Hfe may be made worthy. It should help him to believe that love, and friendship, and faith, and devotion are things that really exist, and are embodied in men and women. He should learn to know these men and women, whether of the present or of the past, and his life will become insensibly fashioned after theirs. He should form plans of his own work for society, for science, for art, for religion. His life may fall far short of what he would make it; but a high ideal must precede any worthy achievement. A conviction or ideal in life must be a determina- tion to work and live toward some end. It must express itself in action. It is destructive of mind and soul if an ideal stands in the place of effort. No visions and dreams uncontrolled by the will can be treated as independent sources of knowledge or power. I once climbed a mountain slope in Utah, in mid- summer, when every blade of grass was burned to a yellow crisp. I look over the valley, and here and there I can trace a line of vivid green across the fields, running down to the lake. I cannot see the water, but I know that that brook is there; for the grass would not grow without help. Like this brook in the hot plains, may be the life of the scholar in the world of men. I look out over the struggling men and women. I see the weary soul, the lost ambitions, "The haggard face, the form that drooped and fainted In the fierce race for wealth." 22 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Here and there I trace some line in life along which I see springing up all things good and gracious. Here is the scholar's work. In his pathway are all things beautiful and true— the love of nature, the love of man, the love of God. For best of all the scholar's privileges is that of "lending a hand." The scholar travels the road of life well equipped in all which can be helpful to others. He may not travel that road again (you remember the words of the old Quaker), and what he does for his neighbor must be done where his neighbor is. The noblest lives have left their traces, not only in literature or in history, but in the hearts of men. "If the teacher is to train others, still more must he train himself. The teacher's influence depends not on what he says, nor on what he does, but on what he is. He cannot be greater or nobler than himself. He cannot teach nobly if he is not himself noble."* Not long ago. Professor William Lowe Bryan said : "Two summers since, in a Southern Indiana country neighborhood, I came upon the traces of a man. They were quite as distinct and satisfactory as a geologist could have wished for in the case of a vanished glacier. A good many years had passed away since the man was' there, but the impression of his mind and character was still unmistakable. Long ago, when a boy of eighteen, with no special training and no extended education, this man went to Jefferson County to teach. What he did, what he said, what methods of text- books he used, what books or journals he read, I do *Dr. Weldon, Head Master of Harrow. 23 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION not know. But if you will go there to-day, you will find in that community, among all classes and con- ditions of people, the most satisfactory evidence that that boy-teacher was a man, honest, sincere, energetic, inspiring." So have I found, as I have gone over this land of ours, traces here and there which show where a man has lived. In greater or less degree, as we come to know the inner history of some little town, we may find that from some past life its sons and daughters have drawn their inspiration; we may find that once within its borders there lived a man. One word more : You will go to college, for better or for worse. Where shall you go? The answer to this is simple. Get the best you can. You have but one chance for a college education, and you cannot afford to waste that chance on a third-rate or fourth- rate school. There is but one thing that can make a college strong and useful, and that is a strong and earnest faculty. All other matters without this are of less than no importance. Buildings, departments, museums, courses, libraries, catalogues, names, numbers, rules, and regulations do not make a university. It is the men who teach. Go where the masters are, in whatever department you wish to study. Look over this matter carefully ; for it is important. Go for your education to that school, in whatever State or country, under whatever name or control, that will serve your purposes best; that will give you 24 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION the best returns for the money you are able to spend. Do not stop with the middle-men. Go to the men who know; the men who can lead you beyond the primary details to the thoughts and researches which are the work of the scholar. Far more important than the question of what you shall study is the question of who shall be your teach- ers. The teacher should not be a self-registering phonograph to put black marks after the names of the lazy boys. He should be a source of inspiration, lead- ing the student in his department to the farthest limit of what is already known, inciting him to make excur- sions in the greater realms of the unknown. A great teacher never fails to leave a great mark on every youth with whom he comes in contact. Let the school do for you what it can; and when you have entered upon the serious duties of life, let your own work and your own influence in the com- munity be ever the strongest plea that can be urged in behalf of higher education. 25 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN* IF the experiment of government by the people is to be successful, it is you and such as you who must make it so. The future of the republic must lie in the hands of the men and women of culture and intelligence, of self-control and of self- resource, capable of taking care of themselves and of helping others. If it falls not into such hands, the republic will have no future. Wisdom and strength must go to the making of a nation. There is no virtue in democracy as such, nothing in Americanism as such, that will save us, if we are a nation of weaklings and fools, with an aristocracy of knaves as our masters. There are some who think that this is the condition of America today. There are some who think that this republic, which has weathered so nobly the storms of war and of peace, will go down on the shoals of hard times; that we, as a nation, cannot live through the nervous exhaustion induced by the financial sprees of ourselves and others. We are told that our civili- zation and our government are fit only for the days of cotton and corn prosperity. We are told that our whole industrial system, and the civilization of which it forms a part, must be torn up by the roots and cast away. We are told that the days of self-control and self-sufficiency are over, and that the people of this nation are really typified by the lawless bands rushing * Address to the class of 1894, Leland Stanford Junior University; published in the Popular Science Monthly, December, 1894. 27 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN blindly hither and thither, clamoring for laws by which those men may be made rich whom all previous laws of God and man have ordained to be poor. In these times it is well for us to remember that we come of hardy stock. The Anglo-Saxon race, with its strength and virtues, was born of hard times. It is not easily kept down; the victims of oppression must be of some other stock. We who live in America, and who constitute the heart of this republic, are the sons and daughters of "him that overcometh." Ours is a lineage untainted by luxury, uncoddled by charity, uncorroded by vice, uncrushed by oppression. If it were not so, we could not be here to-day. When this nation was born, the days of the govern- ment of royalty and aristocracy were fast drawing to a close. Hereditary idleness had steadily done its work, and the scepter was already falling from nerveless hands. God said: "I am tired of kings; I suffer them no more." And when the kings had slipped from their tottering thrones, as there was no one else to rule, the scepter fell into the hands of the common man. It fell into our hands, ours of this passing generation, and from us it will pass on into yours. You are here to make ready for your coronation, to learn those maxims of government, those laws of human nature, without which all administrations must fail ; ignorance of which is always punishable by death. If you are to hold this scepter, you must be wiser and stronger than the kings ; else you, too, shall lose the scepter as they have lost it, and your dynasty shall pass away. 28 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN For more than a century now the common man has ruled America. How has he used his power? What does history tell us of what the common man has done ? It is too soon to answer these questions. A hundred years is a time too short for the test of such gigantic experiments. Here in America we have made history already — some of it glorious, some of it ignoble ; much of it made up of the old stories told over again. We have learned some things that we did not expect to learn. We find that the social problems of Europe are not kept away from us by the quarantine of democracy. We find that the dead which the dead past cannot bury are thrown up on our shores. We find that weakness, misery, and crime are still with us, and that wherever weakness is there is tyranny also. The essence of tyranny, we have found, lies not in the strength of the strong, but in the weakness of the weak. We find that in the free air of America there are still millions who are not free — millions who can never be free under any government or under any laws, so long as they remain what they are. The remedy for oppression, then, is to bring in better men, men who cannot be oppressed. This is the remedy our fathers sought; we shall find no other. The problem of life is not to make life easier, but to make men stronger, so that no problem shall be beyond their solution. It will be a sad day for the republic when life is easy for ignorance, indolence, and apathy. It is growing easier than it was ; it is too easy already. There is no growth without its struggle. Nature asks 29 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN of man that he use his manhood. If a man puts no part of his brain and soul into his daily work — if he feels no pride in the part he is taking in life, — the sooner he leaves the world the better. His work is the work of a slave, and his life the waste of so much good oxygen. The misery he endures is nature's testimony to his worthlessness. We cannot save him from nature's penalties. Our duty toward him may be to temper justice with mercy. This is not the matter of import- ance. Our duty toward his children is to see that they do not follow his path. The grown-up men and women of today are, in a sense, past saving. The best work of the republic is to save the children. The one great duty of a free nation is education — education, wise, thorough, universal; the education, not of cramming, but of training; the education which no republic has ever given, and without which all republics must be in whole or in part failures. If this generation should leave as its legacy to the next the real education, train- ing in individual power and skill, breadth of outlook on the world and on life, the problems of the next cen- tury would take care of themselves. There can be no collective industrial problem where each man is capable of solving his own individual problem for himself. In this direction lies, I believe, the key to all indus- trial and social problems. Reforms in education are the greatest of all reforms. The ideal education must meet two demands : It must be personal, fitting a man or woman for success in life ; it must be broad, giving a man or woman such an outlook on the world as that 30 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN this success may be worthy. It should give to each man or woman that reserve strength without which no Hfe can be successful, because no life can be free. With this reserve the man can face difficulties, because the victor in any struggle is he who has the most staying power. With this reserve, he is on the side of law and order, because only he who has nothing to lose can favor disorder or misrule. He should have a reserve of property. Thrift is a virtue. No people can long be free who are not thrifty. It is true that thrift some- times passes beyond virtue, degenerating into a vice of greed. Because there are men who are greedy — drunk with the intoxication of wealth and power — we sometimes are told that wealth and power are criminal. There are some who hold that thrift is folly and personal ownership a crime. In the new Utopia all is to be for all, and no one can claim a monopoly, not even of himself. There may be worlds in which this shall be true. It is not true in the world into which you have been born. Nor can it be. In the world we know, the free man should have a reserve of power, and this power is represented by money. If thrift ever ceases to be a virtue, it will be at a time long in the future. Before that time comes, our Anglo- Saxon race will have passed away and our civilization will be forgotten. The dream of perfect slavery must find its realization in some other world than ours, or with a race of men cast in some other mold. A man should have a reserve of skill. If he can do well something which needs doing, his place in the 31 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN world will always be ready for him. He must have intelligence. If he knows enough to be good company for himself and others, he is a long way on the road toward happiness and usefulness. To meet this need our schools have been steadily broadening. The busi- ness of education is no longer to train gentlemen and clergymen, as it was in England; to fit men for the professions called learned, as it has been in America. It is to give wisdom and fitness to the common man. The great reforms in education have all lain in the removal of barriers. They have opened new lines of growth to the common man. This form of university extension is just beginning. The next century will see its continuance. It will see a change in educational ideas greater even than those of the revival of learning. Higher education will cease to be the badge of a caste, and no line of usefulness in life will be beyond its helping influence. The man must have a reserve of character and pur- pose. He must have a reserve of reputation. Let others think well of us; it will help us to think well of ourselves. No man is free who has not his own good opinion. A man will wear a clean conscience as he would a clean shirt, if he knows his neighbors expect it. He must have a reserve of love, and this is won by service to others. ''He that brings sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from himself." He must form the ties of family and friendship; that, having something at stake in the goodness of the world, he will do something toward making the world really good. 32 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN When an American citizen has reserves like these, he has no need to beg for special favors. All he asks of legislation is that it keep out of his way. He demands no form of special guardianship or protection. He can pay as he goes. The man who cannot has no right to go. Of all forms of greed, the greed for free lunches — the desire to get something for nothing — is the most demoralizing, and in the long run most dangerous. The flag of freedom can never float over a nation of deadheads. Then, again, education must take the form of real patriotism — of public interest and of civic virtue. If a republic be not wisely managed, it will fail as any other corporation would; it will only succeed as it deserves success. The problems of government are questions of right and wrong ; they can be settled only in one way. They must be settled right. Whatever is settled wrong comes up for settlement again, and this when we least expect it. It comes up under harder conditions, and com- pound interest is charged on every wrong decision. The slavery question, you remember, was settled over and over again by each generation of compromisers. When they led John Brown to the scaffold, his last words were: "You would better — all you people of the South — prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for a settlement again sooner than you are prepared for it. You may dispose of me now very easily," he said; "I am nearly disposed 33 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN of now; but this question is still to be settled — this negro question, I mean ; the end of that is not yet." This, John Brown said, and they settled the problem for the time by hanging him. But the question rose again. It was never settled until at last it was "blown hellward from the cannon's mouth." Then it was found that for every drop of negro blood drawn by the lash, a thousand drops of Saxon blood had been drawn by the sword. Thus it is with every national question, large or small. Thus it will be with the tariff, with finance, with the civil service. Each question must be settled right, and we must pay for its settlement. It is said that fifteen per cent of the laws on the statute books of the States of the Union stand there in defiance of acknowledged laws of social and economic science. Every such statute is blood poison in the body politic. Around every such law will gather a festering sore. Every attempt to heal this sore will be resisted by the full force of the time-servers. Such statutes are stead- ily increasing in number — concessions by short-sighted legislatures to the arrogant monopolist, the ignorant demagogue, or the reckless agitator. This must stop. "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin," or with ignorance, or with recklessness. "The gods," said Marcus Aurelius, "are at the head of the administration, and will have noth- ing but the best." "My will fulfilled shall be; In daylight or in dark, My thunderbolt has eyes to see Its way home to the mark!" 34 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN It was the dream of the founders of this Republic that each year the people should choose from their number ''their wisest men to make the public laws." This was actually done in the early days ; for our first leaders were natural leaders. The men who founded America were her educated men. None other could have done it. But this condition could not always last. As the country grew, ignorance came and greed developed; ignorance and greed must be represented, else ours would not be a representative government. So to our Congresses our people sent, not the wisest, but the men who thought as the people did. We have come to choose, in our law-makers, not rulers, but representatives; we ask not wisdom, but watchfulness for our personal interests. So we send those whose interests are ours; those who act as our attorneys. And just as the people do this, so do the great corpora- tions, who form a large part of the people and control a vastly larger part. And as the corporations com- mand the best service, they often send as their attor- neys abler men than the people can secure. And so it has come about that demagogues and special agents make up the body of lawmakers in this country, and this in both parties alike. They represent, not our wisdom, but our business. They are the reflex of the people they represent ; no better and certainly no worse. Those whose interest lies in the direction of good gov- ernment alone are too often unrepresented. In this degree republican government has failed. For this failure there is again but one remedy — educa- 35 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN tion. If the people are to rule us, the people must be wise. We must have in every community men trained in social and political science. We must have men with the courage of their convictions; only education can give real convictions. We must have men who know there is a right to every question as well as many wrongs. We must have men who know what this right is; or, if not knowing, who know how the right may be found. Very few men ever do that which they know and really believe to be wrong. Most wrongdoing comes from a belief that there is no right, or that right and wrong are only relative. Professor Powers has said: "We are no longer guided by wise men. We are guided by wise men's wisdom after we have reviewed it and decided that it is wisdom. An increasing proportion of our people are fairly independent in their thought, and vigorous in their assertion of their convictions. These men — common human men — without their knowledge or consent, come into the world charged with the awful responsibility of managing interests compared with which the tasks of the old gods of Olympus were but as children's play." If representative government is ever to bring for- ward wisdom and patriotism, it will be because wisdom and patriotism exist and demand representation. In this direction lies one of the most important duties of the American university. Every question of public policy is a question of right and wrong. To such ques- tions all matters of party ascendency, all matters of 36 THE NATION'S NEED OF MEN individual advancement must yield precedence. There is no virtue in the voice of majorities. The danger of ignorance or indifference is only intensified when rolled up in majorities. Truth is strong, and error is weak, and the majorities of error melt away under the influ- ence of a few men whose right acting is based on right thinking. Right thinking has been your privilege; right acting is now your duty; and at no time in the history of the world has duty been more imperative than now. 37 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE* THE very essence of republicanism is popu- lar education. There . is no virtue in the acts of ignorant majorities, unless by dint of repeated action the majority is no longer ignorant. The very work of ruling is in itself educa- tion. As Americans, we believe in government by the people. This is not that the people are the best of rulers, but because a growth in wisdom is sure to go with an increase in responsibility. The voice of the people is not the voice of God ; but if this voice be smothered, it becomes the voice of the demon. The red flag of the anarchist is woven where the people think in silence. In popular government, it has been said, ignorance has the same right to be represented as wisdom. This may be true, but the perpetuity of such government demands that this fact of representation should help to transform ignorance into wisdom. Majorities are generally wrong, but only through the experience of their mistakes is the way opened to the permanent establishment of right. The justification of the experiment of universal suffrage is the formation of a training-school in civics, which, in the long run, will bring about good government. Our fathers built for the future — a future even yet unrealized. America is not, has never been, the best governed of civilized nations. The iron-handed dicta- *Address given on Charter Day of the University of California, at Berkeley, March, 1893. 39 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE torship of Germany is, in its way, a better government than our people have ever given us. That is, it fol- lows a more definite and consistent policy. Its affairs of state are conducted with greater economy, greater intelligence, and higher dignity than ours. It is above the influence of the two arch-enemies of the American State — ^the corruptionist and the spoilsman. If this were all, we might welcome a Bismarck as our ruler, in place of our succession of weak-armed and short- lived Presidents. But this is not all. It is not true in a changing world that that government "which is best administered is best." This is the maxim of tyranny. Good govern- ment may be a matter of secondary importance even. Our government by the people is for the people's growth. It is the great training-school in governmen- tal methods, and in the progress which it insures lies the certain pledge of better government in the future. This pledge, I believe, enables us to look with confi- dence on the gravest of political problems, problems which other nations have never solved, and which can be faced by no statesmanship other than "The right divine of man, The million trained to be free." And, in spite of all reaction and discouragement, every true American feels that this trust in the future is no idle boast. But popular education has higher aims than those involved in intelligent citizenship. No country can be truly well governed in which any person is prevented, 40 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE either by interference or by neglect, from making the most of himself. "Of all state treasures," says Andrew D. White, "the genius and talent of citizens is the most precious. It is a duty of society to itself, a duty which it cannot throw off, to see that the stock of talent and genius in each generation may have a chance for devel- opment, that it may be added to the world's stock and aid in the world's work." This truth was recognized to its fullest degree by the founders of our Government, and so from the very first provision was made for popular education. The wisdom of this provision being recognized, our inquiry is this : How far should the State go in this regard ? Should popular education cease with the primary schools, or is it the duty of the State to maintain all parts of the educational system — primary schools, secondary schools, colleges, technical and professional schools, and the schools of instruction through investi- gation, to which belong the name of university? There have been from time immemorial two schools in political economy — two opposite tendencies in the administration of government; the one to magnify, the other to reduce the power and responsibility of the State. The one would regard the State as simply the board of police. Its chief function is the administra- tion of justice. In other matters it would stay its hands, leaving each man or institution to work out its own destiny in the struggle for existence. The weaker yield, the stronger move on. Progress must come from the inevitable survival of the fittest. "Lais- 41 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE sez-faire," (let it alone) is the motto, in all times and conditions. The opposite tendency is to make the State not just, but benevolent. In its extreme the State would be- come a sort of generous uncle to every man within it. It would feed the hungry, clothe the needy, furnish work for the idle, bounties for those engaged in losing business, and protection for those who feel too keenly the competition inherent in the struggle for existence. It would make of the State a gigantic trust, in which all citizens might take part, and by which all should be lifted from the reach of poverty by official tugging at the common boot-strap. Somewhere between these two extremes, I believe, lies the line of a just policy. Aristotle says that "it is the duty of the state to accomplish every worthy end which it can reach better than private enterprise can do." Accepting this view of the State's duty, let us see to what extent education comes within its function. Education is surely a worthy object. Mill says: "In the matter of education, the intervention of government is justifiable, because the case is not one in which the interest and judgment of the con- sumer are a sufficient security for the goodness of the commodity." In other words, unless the State take the matter in hand and make provision for something better, a cheap or poor article of education may be furnished, to the injury of the people. This authority of the State over the lower schools has been jealously guarded by the 42 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE American people, and the result of this care has been one of the chief objects of our national pride. On the other hand, the higher schools, and to a still greater degree the professional schools, of America, have been allowed to shift for themselves, in accordance with the doctrine of "laisses-faire!' What has been the result ? "The common school is the hope of our country." So we all agree, and this sentence stands on the letter- heads of half of the school officers in the West. It is the common-school education that elevates our masses above the dignity of a mob. Such slight knowledge at least is essential to the coherence of the State. "An illiterate mass of men, large or small," says President White, "is a mob. If such a mob had a hundred millions of heads — if it extends from ice to coral, it is none the less a mob: and the voice of a mob has been in all time evil ; for it has ever been the voice of a tyrant, conscious of power, unconscious of responsibility." "The great republics of antiquity and of the medie- val period failed," he continues, "for want of that en- lightenment which would enable their citizens to appre- ciate free institutions and maintain them. Most of the great efforts for republican institutions in modern times have been drowned in unreason, fanaticism, anarchy, and blood. No sense of responsibility can be brought to bear on a mob. It passes at one bound from extreme credulity toward demagogues to ex- treme skepticism toward statesmen; from mawkish 43 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE sympathy toward criminals to bloodthirsty ferocity against the innocent, from the wildest rashness to the most abject fear. To rely on a constitution to control such a mob would be like relying on a cathedral organ to still the fury of a tornado. Build your constitution as lordly as you may, let its ground-tone of justice be the most profound, let its utterances of human right be trumpet-tongued, let its combination of checks and balances be the most subtle, yet what statesman shall so play upon its mighty keys as to still the howling tem- pest of party spirit, or sectional prejudice, or race hatreds, sweeping through an illiterate mob crowding a continent?" The reformer Zwingli saw three hundred years ago that Protestantism meant popular education, and popu- lar education meant republicanism. It meant popular education because the recognition of the right of the individual to form his own opinions made it the duty of the state to give him the means of making these opinions intelligent. It meant republicanism, because the right of private interpretation in religion gave the people the right to opinions of their own in matters of politics. Where the people have a mind, they must, sooner or later, have a voice. Long ago, at the end of the war, Edmund Kirke told us, in the Atlantic Monthly, the story of the life of a brave but unlettered scout, who served in Gar- field's army in Southern Kentucky — John Jordan, "from the head of Bayne."* The story, which was a *The Bayne is a small tributary of Licking River, in Kentucky. 44 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE true one, was designed to furnish a sort of running parallel between the lives of two brave and God-fear- ing men, supposed to be equal in ability, and equally lowly in birth. The one wore the general's epaulets, and still later, as we know, he became President of the United States, known and honored of all men. The other wore the rough homespun garb of the scout, and now that the war is over, he lies in an unknown grave in the Cumberland Mountains. And this differ- ence, so the story tells us, lay in this: "The free schools which Ohio gave the one, and of which Ken- tucky robbed the other!" "Plant a free school on every Southern cross-road," says Edmund Kirke, "and every Southern Jordan will become a Garfield. Then, and not till then, will the Union be redeemed." And so this is no idle phrase, "The common school is the hope of our country," and its maintenance is a worthy object of which the statesmanship of the people must not neglect. It is something by which all citizens are helped ; for in the end all interests are touched by it. It is too late to ask in America whether this result could be reached in no other way. Private benevolence, private enterprise, the interest of religious bodies, — none of these has been trusted by the American peo- ple as a substitute for its own concerted action. In the early history of the West, Judge David D. Banta tells us, "There were two red rags that required but little shaking to inflame the populace. One of these was sectarianism ; the other, aristocracy." Our young 45 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE democracy was in constant fear lest one or the other of these evil influences should enter and dominate its schools. And even now, while the early prejudices have in great part passed away, our people are especially jeal- ous of any attempt on the part of any organization to turn the schools to its own ends. No church can touch them, and ultimately they are beyond the reach of any political party. Religion, morality, politics even, may be taught in them, but in the interest of religion, mor- ality, and politics alone — not to advance any political party or to increase the following of any religious sect or coalition of sects. In no matter is there greater unanimity of feeling among our people than in this, and he must be an ardent partisan, indeed, who does not feel it and respect it. From another quarter we hear this objection to popular education : The public schools render the poor discontented with poverty. The child of the common laborer is unwilling to remain common. The pride of Merrie England used to lie in this, that each peasant and workman was contented to be peasant and work- man. To those who inherited the good things of the realm, it was a constant pleasure to see the masses below them contented to remain there. But popular education breaks down the barriers of caste, and therefore increases the restlessness of those shut in by such barriers. The respect for hereditary rank and title is fast disappearing, even in conserva- tive England, to the great dismay of those who have 46 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE no claim to respect other than that which they had inherited. Nor has this spirit been wanting in America. My own great-grandfather, John Elderkin Waldo, said in Tolland, Connecticut, a century ago, that there would "never again be good times in New England till the laborer once more was willing to work all day for a sheep's head and pluck." That the good times were past was due, he thought, to the influence of "the little schoolhouses scattered over the hills, which were spreading the spirit of sedition and equality." But the progress of our country has been along the very lines which this good man so dreaded. The spirit of responsibility fostered by the little school- houses has become our surest safeguard against sedi- tion. The man who is intelligent and free has no impulse toward sedition, and for this reason, the people have the right to see that every child shall grow up intelligent and free. They must create their own schools, and they have the plain duty to them- selves in making education free to make it likewise compulsory. No child in America has the right to grow up ignorant. So, leaving the common schools to the State, shall the State's work stop there? Is further education different in its relations to the community? Does a special virtue attach to reading, writing, and arith- metic which is not found in Hterature, philosophy, his- tory, or science? And shall the State give only the first, and leave the others to shift for themselves ? 47 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE In Europe, education has progressed from above downward. From the first, higher education has been under public control, and the maintenance of universi- ties is a state duty which few have ever questioned. The struggle for public control in England has con- cerned only the lower schools, not the universities. The school problem in England to-day is the absurd one of how to make education compulsory without at the same time making it free. In America the same traditions were inherited, and the founding of the first colleges on a basis of public funds came as a matter of course. The State univer- sity, maintained by direct taxation, has been a promi- nent factor in the organization of each State of the Union outside of the original thirteen, and most of the latter form no exception to the rule. And, with vary- ing fortunes, the growth of each one of these schools has kept pace with the growth of the commonwealth, of which it forms a part. Eighty years ago, when ignorance and selfishness held less sway in our legislatures than today, because the influence of a few men of ideas was proportion- ately greater, the Constitution of the infant State of Indiana provided that: "Whereas, knowledge and learning generally diffused through a community being essential to the preservation of a free government, and spreading the opportunities and advantages of education through the various parts of the country being highly conducive to this end, it shall be the duty" of the General Assembly to "pass such laws as shall 48 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE be calculated to encourage intellectual, scientifical and agricultural improvement, by allowing rewards and immunities for the promotion and improvement of arts, sciences, commerce, manufactures, and natural history, and to countenance and encourage the prin- ciples of humanity, industry, and morality." To these ends the General Assembly was required "to provide, by law, for a general system of education, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a State university, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally free to all." And all this was guarded by a further provision "for absolute freedom of worship, and that no religious test should ever be required as a qualification to any office of trust or profit," in the State of Indiana. It is evident from this that the pioneers of the West regarded the colleges as essentially public schools — as much so as the township schools, — and that no idea of separate control and support of the higher institutions was present in their minds. But the judg- ment of the fathers is ever open to reconsideration. That the last generation thought it wise that the State should provide for higher education is in itself no argument. What shall be our answer in the light of facts to-day? Let us recall the words of Aristotle: "It is the duty of the state to accomplish every worthy end which it can reach better than private effort can do." I do not need to plead for the value of higher edu- cation. The man who doubts this is beyond the reach 49 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE of argument. The men who have made our country- are its educated men ; not alone its college graduates — for there is no special virtue in a college diploma — but men of broad views and high ideals, to give which is the end of higher education. Moses Coit Tyler, of Cornell University, has said that the men of the early American colleges made suc- cess in the Revolutionary War possible. Discussing the effect of the higher institutions of learning on colonial life, he observes : "Still another effect of the early colleges was on the political union and freedom of the colonies. To them we are indebted for Ameri- can liberty and independence. The colleges educated the people and hastened the advent of freedom by rearing the men who led the colonists in their upris- ing. It was a contest of brains ten years before the war. The colonies sent to their Congresses represen- tatives who began issuing state papers in which the King and Parliament expected to find crude argu- ments and railings. They were astonished to find in them, however, decency, firmness, and wisdom, solid- ity, reason, and sagacity. Chatham said: 'You will find nothing like it in the world. The histories of Greece and Rome give up nothing equal to it, and all attempts to force servitude on such a people will be useless.' And these men," continues Mr. Tyler, "were the 'boys' of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Colum- bia, and William and Mary." Dr. Angell has lately said that the history of Iowa is the history of her State university. The greatness 50 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE of the State has come through the growth of the men the State has trained. If this be true of Iowa, how much more is it true of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia, States which have shown more UberaHty toward higher education than Iowa has yet done. "The preliminary education which many of our strongest men have received," says President White, "leaves them simply beasts of prey. It has sharpened their claws and whetted their tusks. A higher educa- tion, whether in science, literature, or history, not only sharpens a man's faculties, but gives him new exem- plars and ideals. He is lifted to a plane from which he can look down upon success in corruption with the scorn it deserves. The letting-down in character of our National and State councils, has notoriously increased just as the predominance of men of ad- vanced education in those councils has decreased. President Barnard's admirable paper showing the relatively diminishing number of men of advanced education in our public stations, decade by decade, marks no less the rise, decade by decade, of material corruption. This is no mere coincidence. There is a relation here of cause and effect." The common school is the hope of our country. In like manner, the high school and college are the hope of the common school, and the university the hope of the college. Each part of the system depends on the next higher for its standards and for its inspiration. From those educated in the higher schools the teach- ers in the lower must come. Lop off the upper 51 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE branches of the tree, and the sap ceases to rise in its trunk. Cut off the higher schools from the educa- tional system, and its (growth and progress stop. Weakness at the head means paralysis of the members. In the early days, when, as Whittier tells us, ''the people sent their wisest men to make the public laws," the close relation of higher education to the public welfare was recognized by all. John Adams said: 'Tt is to American seminaries of learning that America is indebted for her glory and prosperity." The early colleges were sustained, as a matter of course, either from public funds or from voluntary gifts, in which every man and woman took part. "The strongest colleges," says Professor Tyler again, "were not created by foreign patrons, but by the mass of the people. They were the children of poverty, self-sacrifice, and toil. Harvard sprang from the popular heart. In its early days, the families of all the colonies were invited to set apart, each person, an annual donation for the college, a peck of corn or twelvepence in money. And to this invitation all responded willingly." This direct connection of college and people was one of constant mutual advantage. It intensified the pub- lic interest in higher education, while it constrained the college to shape its work for the people's good. The high esteem accorded to the colleges led wealthy men to give them their attention. So it became with time the fashion to leave money by bequest to the colleges. In the older States, such money was usually 52 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE given to the schools already established, and, through repeated bequests, some of these became comparatively wealthy and independent of the aid of the public funds. In the West and South, this generosity has shown itself rather in the founding of new institutions, in- stead of making the old ones strong. As the little towns of the forest and prairie grew into great cities, so it was supposed that, through some hidden force of vitality, the little colleges would grow into great uni- versities. This process of planting without watering has gone on until the whole country is dotted with schools, called by the name of college or university — on an average more than a dozen to each State. Some of these are well endowed, more ill endowed, and most not endowed at all. But rich or poor, weak or strong, each one serves in some way to perpetuate its founder's ideas and to preserve his name from oblivion. Many of these are honored names, the names of men who have loved learning and revered wisdom, and who have wished to help, in the only way possible to them, toward the discovery and dissemination of truth. Other names there are which can be honored only when the personality of their possessor is forgot- ten, men whose highest motive has been to secure a monument, more conspicuous, if not more enduring, than brass. The college founded by rich men, and obliged to depend on the gifts of rich men for its con- tinuance, is sometimes, though not always, forced into S3 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE degrading positions on account of favors received or favors expected. The officers of more than one of our colleges dare scarcely claim their souls as their own for fear of offending some wealthy patron. There is a college in New England of old and honored name, in which today the faculty go about with bated breath for fear of offending two wealthy spinsters in the town, whose money the college hopes to receive. This growing dependence on the large gifts of a few men tends to carry our colleges farther and far- ther from the people. A school supported wholly by the interest on endowments too often has little care for public opinion, and hence has little incentive to use its influence toward right opinions. Too often it ceases to respond to the spirit of the times. The Zeitgeist passes it by. It becomes the headquarters of conser- vatism, and within its walls ancient methods and obso- lete modes of thought are perpetuated. Such colleges need what Lincoln called a "bath of the people" — a contact with that humanity for whose improvement the college exists, and which it should be the mission of the college to elevate and inspire. Endowments, independent of popular influence, may become fatal to aggressiveness and to inspiration, however much they may give of material aid to the work of investigation. It is not a misfortune to a college that it should be dependent on the will of the people it serves. The pioneer school in the education of women (Mount Holyoke Seminary), has to this day neither patron nor great endowment. Its founder was a woman, rich 54 tHE SCHOOL And the state only in zeal, who gave all that she had — her life — to the cause of the education of girls. Mary Lyon's appeal was not to a few rich men to give a hundred thousand apiece, the proceeds of some successful deal in stocks or margins, but to the farmers, clergymen, mechanics, and shopkeepers of New England to give each the little he could spare. The prayers, and tears, and good wishes, and scanty dollars of thousands of good people gave to this school of faith and hope a most substantial foundation. Huber says of the University of Oxford, that when it had neither buildings nor land, "its intellectual importance was fully acknowledged." When it re- ceived vast privileges, and vast endowments, its intel- lectual prominence was obscured by the growth of forms, conventionalities, and sinecures. It became the stronghold of conservatism, of reaction against mod- ern civilization and modern science. Darwin speaks of the instruction in the English universities in his time as "incredibly dull," and in almost all of their departments an absolute waste of the student's time. "Half of the professors of Ox- ford," said a graduate of one of its colleges to me only a few days ago, "live on their stipends and simply soak." The struggle for existence is the basis of progress. Let all the professors in a university be placed beyond the reach of this struggle, and the influ- ence of the university rapidly deteriorates. It is a law of nature, from which nothing can escape. What- ever is alive must show a reason for living. 55 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE Not long ago Dr. Dollinger said in the University of Munich that there was not in all America a school which rose to the rank of a third-rate German univer- sity. This may be true, so far as privileges and en- dowments go, for the wolf is close to the door of even our richest colleges. But the usefulness of the col- lege is not gauged by its size, nor by its material equipment. Ernst Haeckel, professor in the third- class University of Jena, tells us that the amount of original investigation done in a university is usually in inverse ratio to the costliness of its equipments. In this paradox there is a basis of truth. We speak too often of the university and of its powers or needs, as though the school were a separate creature, existing for its own sake. The university exists only in the teachers which compose it and direct its activities. It exists for the benefit of its students, and through them for the benefit of the community, in the extension of culture and the increase in the sum of human knowledge. Its only gain is in making this benefit greater; its only loss is in the diminution or deterioration of its influence. All questions of wealth and equipment are wholly subsidiary to this. The value of the university, then, is not in proportion to its bigness, but to its inspiration. The Good Spirit cares not for the size of its buildings or the length of its list of professors or students. It only asks, in the words of the old reformer, Ulrich von Hiitten, if "die Luft der Freiheit weht?" — whether "the winds of freedom are blowing." 56 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE Doubtless, wealthy men would grade our roads, build our courthouses, conduct our courts— do any- thing for the public good,— if the State should neglect these matters, or turn them over to private hands. But this would not release the People from their duty in this matter. The people have safety only in inde- pendence. "There is," says President White, "no system more unrepublican than that by which a nation or a State, in consideration of a few hundreds or thousands of dollars, delivers over its system of ad- vanced instruction to be controlled and limited by the dogmas and whims of living donors or dead testators. In more than one Nation dead hands, stretching out from graves closed generations gone, have lain with a deadly chill upon institutions for advanced instruc- tion during centuries. More than one institution in our own country has felt its grip and chill. If we ought to govern ourselves in anything, it ought to be in this." We should trust the people to judge their own needs, and should have faith that eventually no real need will be left unsatisfied. But may we not depend upon the interests of some one or more of our religious organizations to furnish the means of higher education? One of our great religious bodies, at least, stands ready to relieve the State of all responsibility for education, higher or lower, if it may be allowed to educate in its own way. But the people are not willing that this should be so. They believe that the public school should be free from all sectarian influences of whatever sort. The 57 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE other religious bodies in our midst, for the most part, disclaim all desire, as well as all power, to provide for lower education, preferring to spend their strength on the higher. This is apparently not on account of the superior importance of collegiate education, nor because denominational influences are stronger on young men than on boys. It is simply because a col- lege is less expensive, and can be more definitely con- trolled than can a system of lower schools. I shall have little to say on the subject of denomi- national colleges, and nothing by way of criticism. If they do not stand in the way of schools of higher pur- pose and better equipment, they can do no harm. If again, like Yale and Harvard, they become trans- formed into schools of the broadest purpose, they cease to be, whether in name or not, denominational, but become, in fact, schools of the State. Very many of the denominational schools have been well equipped and well manned, and have fought a good fight for sound learning, as well as for the belief which their founders have deemed correct. But in too many of them the zeal of the founders has outrun their strength, and a pretense of doing on the part of a few half-starved professors has taken the place of real performance. It is certainly fair to say this of all the denomina- tional colleges of America: The higher education of youth, pure and simple, is not, cannot be, their chief object. Such schools are founded primarily to pro- mote the growth and preservation of certain religious 58 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE organizations. This is a worthy object, as all must admit; but this purpose we recognize as something other than simply education. I read not long ago an appeal from the president of one of our best denominational colleges. Its burden was this: "Unless you are willing to see our church disappear from the West, do not let our college die." This recognizes the ultimate function of the denomi- national college. The church depends upon it for its educated men. It should furnish the leaders for the church; and the better trained these leaders are, the better for all the people. But this phase of education is not the State's work ; and so no private school or church school can enter the State's scheme of education. To do the State's work, the denominational school must cease to do its own; for no organization can be allowed to color the water in the fountains of popular education. Our bill of rights, the State Constitution, recognizes the equal rights of all men, whatever their religious belief or preference. This could not be the fact, if the scheme for higher education included sectarian colleges only; and all schools are sectarian in which the ruling body belongs by necessity and by right to some particular religious denomination. If the State has any duty toward higher education, the existence of denominational colleges does not re- lease it from this duty, any more than the existence of Pinkerton's band of peacemakers absolves the State from its duty to maintain an efficient police system. 59 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE It is the free investigation and promulgation of truth which is the function of the university.. But the de- nominational school must also stand for the defense of certain doctrines as the ultimate truth. The highest work demands absolute singleness of purpose. The school cannot serve two masters ; and the school main- tained for the special work of the part cannot meet the needs of the whole. The most unfortunate feature of higher education in America lies in the universal scattering of its educa- tional resources. For this local pride and denomina- tional zeal are about equally responsible. If it be true, as Dr. DolHnger says, that among our four hundred American colleges and universities there is not one worthy to rank with the least of the eight maintained by the Kingdom of Prussia, whom have we to thank for this? Not our poverty, for New York, Pennsyl- vania, Ohio, and Illinois are not poor, even in com- parison with Prussia; not our parsimony, for no people give more freely than we; not our youth, for more than half these schools are older than the great University of Berlin. It has been this, and this alone : — the scattering of educational funds, public and pri- vate, at the demand of local ambition or local jealousy. It has been the creation in each State of a host of little colleges, each one ambitious to control the higher edu- cation of its vicinity, and each one more or less defi- nitely standing in the way of any other school which might rise to something better. Let us take an example : 60 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE It was not in response to the educational needs of Kansas that four universities were founded in a single year in one of its real estate towns, institutions without money and without credit, whose existence can be only one long wail for help from the rich men or rich denominations under whose patronage they are. There is a little college in the West, almost under the shadow of an excellent State University, which for years sent forth its appeals for help to denominational friends in the East, on the ground that it is the "sole educational oasis" in the great State in which it was located. We have not reached the end of this. The number of our colleges has doubled within the last thirty years, and the increase in number still goes on, far outrunning the rate of improvement in quality. "Within the last twenty years," said President White in 1874, "I have seen many of these institutions, and I freely confess that my observations have sad- dened me. Go from one great State to another, and you shall find that this unfortunate system has pro- duced the same miserable results— in the vast major- ity of our States not a single college or university worthy the name; only a multitude of little schools with pompous names and poor equipments, each doing its best to prevent the establishment of any institution broader and better. The traveler arriving in our great cities generally lands in a railway station costing more than all the university edifices of the State. He sleeps in a hotel in which there is embanked more capital than in the entire university endowment for millions 61 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE of people. He visits asylums for lunatics, idiots, deaf, dumb, blind, — nay, even for the pauper and crimi- nal, — and finds them palaces. He visits the college buildings for young men of sound mind and earnest purpose, the dearest treasures of the State, and he generally finds them rude barracks. "Many noble men stand in the faculties of these colleges — men who would do honor to any institution of advanced learning in the world. These men of ours would, under a better system, develop admirably the intellectual treasures of our people and the mate- rial resources of our country; but, cramped by want of books, want of apparatus, want of everything needed in advanced instruction, cramped above all by the spirit of this system, very many of them have been paralyzed." This picture is by no means so dark in the West today as it was twenty-five years ago. And the rea- son for this is to be found in the rise of the State universities. These schools have struggled along with many variations of fortune until within the last few years, when success has come to every one of them, and their development has become the most striking feature in our recent educational history. When the State universities cast off the self-imposed fetters of the conventional college and took their place with the public schools, supported by the public money and existing for the public good, their real growth began in friends, in numbers, in equipment, in useful- ness. What they have deserved they have received, 62 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE and they will receive in the future. It requires no prophet to foresee that before the middle of the next century these creatures of the public school system will be the centers of the chief educational forces on our continent. They will cost the people many hun- dred dollars, perhaps, for every one which is expended now; but every dollar given to higher education shall bring its full return. The greatness of the State is measured not by numbers nor by acres ; not by dollars on the tax-roll, but by the wisdom of its people, by the men and women of the State who have learned to take care of themselves. It is sometimes proposed to treat all higher educa- tion simply as a matter of business. Let wisdom be sold in the open market, and let its prices be ruled by the laws of supply and demand. The college profes- sor deals in mental wares, as the shopkeeper deals in material commodities. Let him fill his store with a stock which the people will buy, and advertise what he has, as the shopkeeper does. On this basis he will not carry a dead stock long. There is no room for conservatism in commerce. This is a commercial age, and professors should govern themselves accordingly. If the people want bookkeeping or dancing instead of Latin and Greek, they can have it. If the people retain the old prejudice in favor of classical training, they can have classical courses of the latest Chau- tauqua pattern, all in English, all the play left in and all the work left out. Busy people can then attend the universities without interruption of their daily 63 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE work, while the law of supply and demand will regu- late everything. Commerce can have no difficulty in modernizing the curriculum. The latest fashions might be quoted in education as well as in millinery. This could have no result except to cheapen and vulgarize the college. The highest need is not the need of the many; still less is it the multitude's de- mand. Investigations without immediate pecuniary result would find still less encouragement than now. Vulgarity is the condition of satisfaction with inferior things. A college dependent each day on the day's receipts must pander to vulgarity. And vulgarity, too, is said to be the besetting sin of democracy. If democracy leads to vulgarity, it defeats its own ends. The justification of popular suffrage is to make the multitude better, not to bring the better to the level of the multitude. The many are ready only for the rudiments. The teacher of advanced subjects would starve in open financial competition, while the teacher who could train the many to keep account-books or to get a six-months' license would be exalted. If, on the other hand, the fees of the higher teacher were propor- tionately increased, only the rich could make use of him, and the rich would find their purposes better served in the endowed schools of other countries. The demand for many students rather than good ones, already too strong in our colleges, would be in- tensified, if everything were left to business competi- tion. The whole category of advertising dodges known to the dealers in quack medicines or ready- 64 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE made clothing would become a permanent part of our higher education. A cheap article furnished at a low price meets with a wonderful sale. We do not need to trust to theory in this matter. In Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, are some two-score private schools called colleges. These schools are run with- out endowment or equipment on the plan of free com- petition, and for the purpose of making money. One has not to visit many of these to see clearly what would be the result of trusting higher education solely to business enterprise. Any form of educational char- ity, private gifts, public spirit, denominational zeal, anything leads to better results than this. For the essence of education is something that cannot be bought and sold. It is the inspiration of character, which cannot be rated in our stock exchanges. If quick sales and steady profits are to be the watch- word of educational progress, the student of the future will look toward Lebanon and Valparaiso, rather than toward Johns Hopkins or Harvard, and the great ex- penditures which New York, and Michigan, and Wis- consin, and California have made for higher educa- tion will be a needless waste. But it is said sometimes that the State cannot prop- erly manage its own institutions. Ignorance and venality are often dominant in public affairs, and it is claimed that work undertaken in the name of the people is sure to be marred by ignorance, affected by partisanship, or tainted by jobbery. The first profes- sor in the State University of Indiana, Baynard R. 65 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE Hall, said sixty-five years ago: "Nothing, we incline to believe, can ever make State schools and colleges very good ones; but nothing can make them so bad as for Uncle Sam to leave every point open to debate, especially among ignorant, prejudiced, and selfish folks, in a new purchase." This question touches the very foundation of popu- lar government. In the beginning, as a rule, the affairs of the State are not well administered. Many trials are made. Many blunders are committed before any given piece of work falls into the hands of com- petent men. But mistakes are a source of education. Sooner or later the right men will be found, and the right management of a public institution will justify itself. What is well done can never be wholly undone. In the long run, few institutions are less subject to partisan influence than a State school. When the foul grip of the spoilsman is once unloosed, it can never be restored. In the evil days which befell the politics of Virginia, when the fair name of the State was traded upon by spoilsmen of every party, of every degree, the one thing in the State never touched by them was the honor of the University of Virginia. And amid all the scandal and disorder which followed our Civil War, what finger of evil has been laid on the Smithsonian Institution or the Military Academy at West Point? On that which is intended for no venal end, the people will tolerate no venal domina- tion. In due time the management of every public institution will be abreast of the highest popular opin- THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE ion. Sooner or later the wise man leads ; for his ability to lead is at once the test and proof of his wisdom. Charities under public control result badly, not be- cause of the theory, but because of certain relations in practice. Their bad effects tend to increase and per- petuate themselves, because every organization tends to magnify its functions ; and the sole legitimate func- tion of public charity is to make public charity unnec- essary. State schools are not good at first, because under control of unstable forces. They tend to grow better and better; for they tend to draw these forces into a following. All schools tend to improve, be- cause they make their own following. In the same way all charities tend to degenerate, because goodness in this case consists in being needed just as little as possible. Neither schools nor charities are industrial investments, and they are not subject to the laws which govern enterprises for profit. Methods must be judged by their results. Co- operation in higher education is always legitimate, because those to be educated have not the money which great enterprises cost. Co-operation, on the one hand, and appreciation, on the other, are necessary to build up schools. In similar ways, we must test the best method of carrying out any enterprise. Dr. Amos G. Warner says that if it were found that better results and a better quality of air came from placing the at- mosphere in private hands, or using it as a municipal 67 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE monopoly, he would favor doing so. Matters of this kind cannot be settled by theory, but by experiment. I need say but a word on the subject of applied education. Shall the people provide for technical or professional training, as well as for general education? My an- swer is, Yes; for no other agency will do as well as the State the work that should be done. Already the General Government has recognized the need of industrial training, and has made liberal pro- vision for it. Special grants of land and money have been made to each State for the purpose of carrying on instruction and investigation in the line of me- chanics, engineering and agriculture. Each State has accepted this trust, and in each the work is being carried out with fidelity and with success. My conclusions may be summed up in a few words : In every demand the people make, the State must furnish the means for satisfaction. Whatever schools the State may need, the State must create and control. If the State fails to furnish the means of education, higher or lower these means will never be adequately furnished. The people must combine to do this work ; for in the long run no other agency can do it. More- over, any other means of support, sooner or later, forms the entering wedge between the schools and the people. The first constitution of several of our States con- tained the embodiment of educational wisdom, when it provided for a general system of education, ascending 68 THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE in regular gradation, from the township schools to the State university — free and equal, open to all, and equally open to all forms of religious belief. The State of California, following the lead of Michi- gan, did wisely when it added to this the provision for special training in all lines of technical and profes- sional work in which the skill or the wisdom of the individual tends toward the advantage of the commu- nity or the State. Its next duty in this regard is to make this provision adequate, that these professional schools may be capable of doing well what they at- tempt to accomplish. 69 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY THE subject of the higher training of young women may resolve itself into three ques- tions : I. Shall a girl receive a college edu- cation f 2. Shall she receive the same kind of college edu- cation as a hoy? J. Shall she he educated hi the same college? As to the first question: It must depend on the character of the girl. Precisely so with the boy. What we should do with either depends on his or her possi- bilities. No parent should let either boy or girl enter life with any less preparation than the best he can give. It is true that many college graduates, boys and girls alike, do not amount to much after the schools have done all they can. It is true, also, that higher edu- cation is not a question alone of preparing great men for great things. It must prepare even little men for greater things than they would otherwise have found possible. And so it is with the education of women. The needs of the time are imperative. The highest product of social evolution is the growth of the civil- ized home, the home that only a wise, cultivated and high-minded woman can make. To furnish such women is one of the worthiest functions of higher edu- cation. No young women capable of becoming such should be condemned to anything lower. Even with 71 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY those who are in appearance too dull or too vacil- lating to reach any high ideal of wisdom, this may be said — it does no harm to try. A few hundred dollars is not much to spend on an experiment of such mo- ment. Four of the best years of one's life spent in the company of noble thoughts and high ideals cannot fail to leave their impress. To be wise, and at the same time womanly, is to wield a tremendous influence, which may be felt for good in the lives of generations to come. It is not forms of government by which men are made and unmade. It is the character and influ- ence of their mothers and their wives. The higher education of women means more for the future than all conceivable legislative reforms. And its influence does not stop with the home. It means higher stand- ards of manhood, greater thoroughness of training, and the coming of better men. Therefore let us edu- cate our girls as well as our boys. A generous edu- cation should be the birthright of every daughter of the Republic as well as of every son. It is hardly necessary among intelligent men and women to argue that a good woman is a better one for having received a college education. Anything short of this is inadequate for the demands of modern life and modern culture. The college training should give some basis for critical judgment among the various lines of thought and effort which force themselves upon our attention. Untrained cleverness is said to be the most striking characteristic of the American woman. Trained cleverness, a very much more 72 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY charming thing, is characteristic of the American col- lege woman. And when cleverness stands in the right perspective, when it is so strengthened and organized that it becomes wisdom, then it is the most valuable dowry a bride can bring to her home. Even if the four K's, "Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen and Kleider," are to occupy woman's life, as Emperor William would have us believe, the college education is not too serious a preparation for the profession of directing them. A wise son is one who has had a wise mother, and to give alertness, intelligence and wisdom is the chief function of a college education. 2. Shall we give our Girls the Same Education as our Boys? Yes, and no. If we mean by the same, an equal degree of breadth and thoroughness, an equal fitness for high thinking and wise acting, yes, let it be the same. If we mean this: Shall we reach this end by exactly the same course of studies? then the answer must be. No. For the same course of study will not yield the same results with different persons. The ordinary "college course" which has been handed down from generation to generation is purely conventional. It is a result of a series of compromises in trying to fit the traditional education of clergymen and gentle- men to the needs of a different social era. The old college course met the needs of nobody, and therefore was adapted to all alike. The great educational awak- ening of the last twenty years in America has lain in breaking the bonds of this old system. The essence 73 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY of the new education is constructive individualism. Its purpose is to give to each young man that training which will make a man of him. Not the training which a century or two ago helped to civilize the mass of boys of that time, but that which will civilize this particular boy. The main reason why the college students of today are twenty times as many as twenty years ago is that the college training now given is valuable to twenty times as many men as could be helped by the narrow courses of twenty years ago. In the university of today the largest liberty of choice in study is given to the student. The pro- fessor advises, the student chooses, and the flexibility of the courses makes it possible for every form of tal- ent to receive proper culture. Because the college of today helps ten times as many men as that of yester- day could hope to reach, it is ten times as valuable. This difference lies in the development of special lines of work and in the growth of the elective system. The power of choice carries the duty of choosing rightly. The ability to choose has made a man out of the college boy, and has transferred college work from an alternation of tasks and play to its proper relation to the business of life. Meanwhile the old ideals have not risen in value. If our colleges were to go back to the cut-straw of medisevalism, to their work of twenty years ago, their professors would speak to empty benches. In those colleges which still cling to these traditions the benches are empty today, or filled with idlers. 74 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY I do not mean to condemn the study of the ancient classics and mathematics which made almost the whole of the older college course. These studies must always have their place, but no longer an exclusive place. The study of the language and literature of Greece still ranks with the noblest efforts of the human intelligence. For those who can master it, Greek gives a help not to be obtained in any other way. As Thoreau once observed, those who would speak of forgetting the Greek are those who never knew it. But without mastery there is no gain of strength. To compel all men and boys of whatever character or ability to study Greek is in itself a degradation of Greek, as it is a hardship to those forced to spend their strength where it is not effective. There are other forms of culture better fitted to other types of man, and the essential feature lies in the strength of mastery. The best education for a young woman is surely not that which has proved unfit for the young man. She is an individual as well as he, and her work gains as much as his by relating it to her life. But an insti- tution which meets the varied needs of varied men can also meet the varied needs of varied women. The intellectual needs of the two classes are not very differ- ent in many important respects. In so far as these are different the elective system gives full play for the ex- pression of such differences. It is true that most men in college look forward to professional training and that very few women do so. But the college training is not in itself a part of any profession, and it is broad 75 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY enough in its range of choice to point to men and women alike the way to any profession which may be chosen. Those who have to do with the higher edu- cation of women know that the severest demands can be met by them as well as by men. There is no de- mand for easy or "goody-goody" courses of study for women except as this demand has been encouraged by men. In this matter the supply has always pre- ceded the demand. There are, of course, certain average differences be- tween men and women as students. Women have often greater sympathy or greater readiness of memory or apprehension, greater fondness for technique. In the languages and literature, often in mathematics and history, they are found to excel. They lack, on the whole, originality. They are not attracted by un- solved problems, and in the inductive or "inexact" sciences they seldom take the lead. The "motor" side of their minds and natures is not strongly de- veloped. They do not work for results as much as for the pleasure of study. In the traditional courses of study ^ — traditional for men — they are often very successful. Not that these courses have a fitness for women, but that women are more docile and less criti- cal as to the purposes of education. And to all these statements there are many exceptions. In this, how- ever, those who have taught both men and women must agree; the training of women is just as serious and just as important as the training of men, and no training is adequate which falls short of the best. 1(^ THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY J. Shall Women he Taught in the Same Classes as Men? This is partly a matter of taste or personal prefer- ence. It does no harm whatever to either men or women to meet those of the other sex in the same classrooms. But if they prefer not to do so, let them do otherwise. No harm is done in either case, nor has the matter more than secondary importance. Much has been said for and against the union in one institu- tion of technical schools and schools of liberal arts. The technical quality is emphasized by its separation from general culture. But I believe that better men are made when the two are brought more closely together. The culture studies and their students gain from the feeling of reality and utility cultivated by technical work. The technical students gain from association with men and influences of which the aggregate tendency is toward greater breadth of sym- pathy and a higher point of view. A woman's college is more or less distinctly a technical school. In most cases, its purpose is dis- tinctly stated to be such. It is a school of training for the profession of womanhood. It encourages womanliness of thought as more or less different from the plain thinking which is called manly. The bright- est work in woman's colleges is often accompanied by a nervous strain, as though its doer were fearful of falling short of some outside standard. The best work of men is natural, is unconscious, the normal result of the contact of the mind with the problem in question. 77 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY In this direction, I think, lies the strongest argu- ment for co-education. This argument is especially cogent in institutions in which the individuality of the student is recognized and respected. In such schools each man, by his relation to action and realities, be- comes a teacher of women in these regards, as, in other ways, each cultivated woman is a teacher of men. In woman's education, as planned for women alone, the tendency is toward the study of beauty and order. Literature and language take precedence over science. Expression is valued more highly than action. In carrying this to an extreme the necessary relation of thought to action becomes obscured. The scholar- ship developed is not effective, because it is not related to success. The educated woman is likely to master technique, rather than art; method, rather than sub- stance. She may know a good deal, but she can do nothing. Often her views of life must undergo pain- ful changes before she can find her place in the world. In schools for men alone, the reverse condition often obtains. The sense of reality obscures the ele- ments of beauty and fitness. It is of great advantage to both men and women to meet on a plane of equality in education. Women are brought into contact with men who can do things — men in whom the sense of reality is strong, and who have definite views of life. This influence affects them for good. It turns them away from sentimentalism. It gives tone to their religious thoughts and impulses. Above all, it tends to encourage action as governed by ideals, as opposed 78 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY to that resting on caprice. It gives them better stand- ards of what is possible and impossible when the responsibility for action is thrown upon them. In like manner, the association with wise, sane and healthy women has its value for young men. This value has never been fully realized, even by the strongest advocates of co-education. It raises their ideal of womanhood, and the highest manhood must be associated with such an ideal. This fact shows itself in many ways; but to point out its existence must suffice for the present paper. At the present time the demand for the higher education of women is met in three different ways : 1. In separate colleges for women, with courses of study more or less parallel with those given in col- leges for men. In some of these the teachers are all women, in some mostly men, and in others a more or less equal division obtains. In nearly all these institutions, those old traditions of education and dis- cipline are more prevalent than in colleges for men, and nearly all retain some trace of religious or denom- inational control. In all, the Zeitgeist is producing more or less commotion, and the changes in their evo- lution are running parallel with those in colleges for men. 2. In annexes for women to colleges for men. In these, part of the instruction to the men is repeated for the women, though in different classes or rooms, and there is more or less opportunity to use the same libra- ries and museums. In some other institutions, the 79 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY relations are closer, the privileges of study being sim- ilar, the difference being mainly in the rules of con- duct by which the young women are hedged in, the young men making their own. It seems to me that the annex system cannot be a permanent one. The annex student does not get the best of the institution, and the best is none too good for her. Sooner or later she will demand it, or go where the best is to be had. The best students will cease to go to the annex. The institution must then admit women on equal terms, or not admit them at all. There is certainly no educational reason why a woman should prefer the annex of one institution when another equally good throws its doors wide open to her. 3. The third system is that of co-education. In this system young men and young women are ad- mitted to the same classes, subjected to the same requirements, and governed by the same rules. This system is now fully established in the State institutions of the North and West, and in most other colleges in the same region. Its effectiveness has long since passed beyond question among those familiar with its operation. Other things being equal, the young men are more earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized than under monastic conditions. The women do more work in a more natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than when isolated from the influence of the society of men. There is less of silliness and folly where a man is 80 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY not a novelty. In co-educational institutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any form are rarely known. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility. Many professors have en- tered Western colleges with strong prejudices against co-education. These prejudices have not often endured the test of experience with men who have made an honest effort to form just opinions. It is not true that the character of the college work has been in any way lowered by co-education. The reverse is decidedly the case. It is true that un- timely zeal of one sort or another has filled the West with a host of so-called colleges. It is true that most of these are weak and doing poor work in poor ways. It is true that most of these are co-educational. It is also true that the great majority of their students are not of college grade at all. In such schools low standards rule, both as to scholarship and as to man- ners. The student fresh from the country, with no preparatory training, will bring the manners of his home. These are not always good manners, as man- ners are judged. But none of these defects is derived from co-education; nor are any of these conditions made worse by it. Very lately it is urged against co-education that its social demands cause too much strain both on young men and young women. College men and college women, being mutually attractive, there are developed too many receptions, dances and other 81 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY functions in which they enjoy each other's company. But this is a matter easily regulated. Furthermore, at the most the average young woman in college spends in social matters less than one-tenth the time she would spend at home. With the young man the whole matter represents the difference between high- class and low-class associates and associations. When college men stand in normal relation with college women, meeting them in society as well as in the classroom, there is distinctly less of drunkenness, rowdyism and vice than obtains under other condi- tions. And no harm comes to the young woman through the good influence she exerts. To meet freely the best young men she will ever know, the wisest, cleanest and strongest, can surely do no harm to a young woman. Nor will the association with the brightest and sanest young women of the land work any harm to the young men. This we must always recognize. The best young men and the best young women, all things considered, are in our col- leges. And this has been and will always be the case. It is true that co-education is often attempted under very adverse conditions. Conditions are ad- verse when the little girls of preparatory schools and schools of music are mingled with the college students and given the same freedom. This is wrong, what- ever the kind of discipline offered, lax or strict; the two classes need a different sort of treatment. When young women have no residence devoted to their use, and are forced to rent parlors and garrets 82 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY in private houses of an unsympathetic village, evil results sometimes arise. Not very often, to be sure, but still once in a while. These are not to be charged to co-education, but to the unfit conditions that make the pursuit of personal culture difficult or impos- sible. Women are more readily affected by sur- roundings than men are, and squalid, ill-regulated, Bohemian conditions should not be part of their higher education. Another condition very common and very unde- sirable is that in which young women live at home and traverse a city twice each day on railway or street cars to meet their recitations in some college. The greatest instrument of culture in a college is the "col- lege atmosphere," the personal influence exerted by its professors and students. The college atmosphere develops feebly in the rush of a great city. The "spur-studenten" or railway-track students, as the Germans call them, the students who live far from the university, get very little of this atmosphere. The young woman who attends the university under these conditions contributes nothing to the university atmos- phere, and therefore receives very little from it. She may attend her recitations and pass her examinations, but she is in all essential respects "in absentia," and so far as the best influences of the university are con- cerned, she is neither "co-educated" nor "edu- cated." The "spur-student" system is bad enough for young men, virtually wasting half their time. With young women the condition of continuous rail- 83 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY reading, attempted study on the trains, the necessary frowsiness of railway travel and the laxness of man- ners it cultivates, are all elements very undesirable in higher education. If young women enter the col- leges, they should demand that suitable place be made for them. Failing to find this, they should look for it somewhere else. Associations which develop vulgarity cannot be used for the promotion of culture either for men or for women. That the influence of cultured women on the whole is opposed to vulgarity is a power- ful argument for education, and is the secret basis of much of the agitation against it. With all this it is necessary for us to recognize actual facts. There is no question that a reaction has set in against co-education. The number of those who proclaim their unquestioning faith is relatively fewer than would have been the case ten years ago. This change in sentiment is not universal. It will be nowhere revolutionary. Young women will not be excluded from any institution where they are now welcomed, nor will the almost universal rule of co- education in State institutions be in any way reversed. The reaction shows itself in a little less civility of boys toward their sisters and the sisters of other boys; in a little more hedging on the part of the pro- fessors ; in a little less pointing with pride on the part of college executive officials. There is nothing tan- gible in all this. Its existence may be denied or referred to ignorance or prejudice. But such as it is, we may for a moment inquire 84 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY into its causes. First as to those least worthy. Here we may place the dislike of the idle boy to have his failures witnessed by women who can do better. I have heard of such feelings, but I have no evidence that they play much actual part in the question at issue. Inferior wom^n do better work than inferior men because they are more docile and have much less to distract their minds. But there exists a strong feeling among rowdyish young men that the prefer- ence of women interferes with rowdyish practices. This interference is resented by them, and this resent- ment shows itself in the use of the offensive term "co-ed" and of more offensive words in vogue in more rowdyish places. I have not often heard the term "co-ed" used by gentlemen, at least without quotation marks. Where it is prevalent, it is a sign that true co-education — that is, education in terms of generous and welcome equality — does not exist. I have rarely found opposition to co-education on the part of really serious students. The majority are strongly in favor of it^, but the minority in this as in many other cases make the most noise. The rise of a student movement against co-education almost always accompanies a general recrudescence of aca- demic vulgarity. A little more worthy of respect as well as a little more potent is the influence of the athletic spirit. In athletic matters, the young women give very little assistance. They cannot play on the teams, they can- not yell, and they are rarely generous with their 85 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY money in helping those who can. A college of a thousand students, half women, counts for no more athletically than one of five hundred, all men. It is vainly imagined that colleges are ranked by their ath- letic prowess, and that every woman admitted keeps out a man, and this man a potential punter or sprinter. There is not much truth in all of this, and if there were, it is of no consequence. College athletics is in its essence by-play, most worthy and valuable for many reasons, but nevertheless only an adjunct to the real work of the college, which is education. If a phase of education otherwise desirable interferes with athletics, so much the worse for athletics. Of like grade is the feeling that men count for more than women, because they are more likely to be heard from in after-life. Therefore, their education is of more importance, and the presence of women impedes it. A certain adverse influence comes from the fact that the oldest and wealthiest of our institutions are for men alone or for women alone. These send out a body of alumni who know nothing of co-education, and who judge it with the positiveness of ignorance. Most men filled with the time-honored traditions of Harvard and Yale, of which the most permeating is that of Harvard's and Yale's infallibility, are against co-education on general principles. Similar influences in favor of the separate education of women go out from the sister institutions of the East. The methods THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY of the experimenting, irreverent, idol-breaking West find no favor in their eyes. The only serious new argument against co-educa- tion is that derived from the fear of the adoption by universities of woman's standards of art and science rather than those of man, the fear that amateurism would take the place of specialization in our higher education. Women take up higher education because they enjoy it; men because their careers depend upon it. Only men, broadly speaking, are capable of ob- jective studies. Only men can learn to face fact with- out flinching, unswayed by feeling or preference. The reality with woman is the way in which the fact affects her. Original investigation, creative art, the "reso- lute facing of the world as it is" — all belong to man's world, not at all to that of the average woman. That women in college do as good work as the men is be- yond question. In the university they do not, for this difference exists, the rare exceptions only proving the rule, that women excel in technique, men in actual achievement. If instruction through investigation is the real work of the real university, then in the real university the work of the most gifted women may be only by-play. It has been feared that the admission of women to the university would vitiate the masculinity of its standards, that neatness of technique would replace boldness of conception, and delicacy of taste replace soundness of results. It is claimed that the preponderance of high-school- 87 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY educated women in ordinary society is showing some such effects in matters of current opinion. For ex- ample, it is claimed that the university extension course is no longer of university nature. It is a lyceum course designed to please women who enjoy a little poetry, play and music, who read the novels of the day, dabble in theosophy. Christian science, or physic psychology, who cultivate their astral bodies and think there is something in palmistry, and are edified by a candy-coated ethics of self-realization. There is noth- ing ruggedly true, nothing masculine left in it. Cur- rent literature and history are affected by the same influences. Women pay clever actors to teach them — not Shakespeare or Goethe, but how one ought to feel on reading King Lear or Faust or Saul. If the women of society do not read a book it will scarcely "^ciy to publish it. Science is popularized in the same fashion by ceasing to be science and becoming mere sentiment or pleasing information. This is shown by the number of books on how to study a bird, a flower, a tree, or a star, through an opera-glass, and without knowing anything about it. Such studies may be good for the feelings or even for the moral nature, but they have no elements of that "fanaticism for veracity," which is the highest attribute of the edu- cated man. These results of the education of many women and a few men, by which the half-educated woman be- comes a controlling social factor, have been lately set in strong light by Dr. Miinsterberg. But they are THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY used by him, not as an argument against co-education, but for the purpose of urging the better education of more men. They form Hkewise an argument for the better education of more women. The remedy for feminine dilettantism is found in more severe training. Current Hterature as shown in profitable editions re- flects the taste of the leisure class. The women with leisure who read and discuss vapid books are not repre- sentative of woman's higher education. Most of them have never been educated at all. In any event this gives no argument against co-education. It is thor- ough training, not separate training, which is indicated as the need of the times. Where this training is taken is a secondary matter, though I believe, with the ful- ness of certainty that better results can be obtained, mental, moral and physical in co-education, than in any monastic form of instruction. A final question: Does not co-education lead to marriage? Most certainly it does; and this fact can- not be and need not be denied. The wonder is rather that there are not more of such marriages. It is a constant surprise that so many college men turn from their college associates and marry some earlier or later acquaintance of inferior ability, inferior training and often inferior personal charm. The marriages which result from college association are not often premature — college men and college women marry later than other men and women — and it is certainly true that no better marriages can be made than those 89 THE WOMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY founded on common interests and intellectual friend- ships. A college man who has known college women, as a rule, is not drawn to those of lower ideals and inferior training. His choice is likely to be led toward the best he has known. A college woman is not led by mere propinquinty to accept the attentions of inferior men. Where college men have chosen friends in all cases both men and women are thoroughly satisfied with the outcome of co-education. It is part of the legitimate function of higher education to prepare women, as well as men, for happy and successful lives. An Eastern professor, lately visiting a Western state university, asked one of the seniors what he thought of the question of co-education. "I beg your pardon," said the student, "what ques- tion do you mean?" "Why, co-education," said the professor, "the edu- cation of women in colleges for men." "Oh," said the student, "co-education is not a ques- tion here." And he was right. Co-education is never a question where it has been fairly tried. 90 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY.* ALL civilized countries live under a govern- ment by popular opinion. In proportion as public opinion is wise and enlightened, the government will be enlightened and wise. In other words, the people will always have as good a government as their intelligence and patriotism deserve, and no better. In the long run government can be made better only by the improvement of the public opinion on which it rests. This can be done only by the spread of knowledge and the development of the moral sense. It is one of the chief duties of the univer- sity to send out men who, by their personal influence, shall help in the making of good citizens. The manage- ment of a great republic in these days is not a simple thing. Our nation has within itself a host of evil forces, and these forces will destroy it if their influence is not met by still more potent forces working together for good. We must know these evil influences, their origin, their power, and their results, if we are to do effective work against them. In this need lies the reason for your education. The nation and the university have the right to expect of you, as educated men and women, to stand everywhere as forces on the side of good government. Not that you should be good citizens merely ; that you should observe the laws, deal justly with your neigh- *Address to the Class of 1893, Leland Stanford Jr. University. 91 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY bors, pay your debts, support your families, and keep out of jail. All this we expect of men in general; but as you have had opportunities not granted to the major- ity, the state has the right to expect more of you. It asks not only that you should break none of its laws, but that you should help to make and sustain wise laws ; that you should stand for good, for right living, right thinking, and right acting in the community. It expects you to do this, even at a sacrifice of your own personal interests. If you should not so stand, your education has been a losing bargain. It has simply "sharpened your claws and whetted your tusks" that you may the more easily prey upon your unenlightened neighbors. What then shall the State expect of you more than of the others ? Where shall you stand when the count is taken in politics, in morals, in religion ? If you are to help raise the standard of public opinion, you must address yourself to the work in earnest. You must not stand aloof from the people it is your duty to help. Yet, standing with the masses, you should never lose yourself in the mass. You must keep your own com- pass and know your own road. The mass will move to the left when your instincts and principles tell you to go to the right. You may find it a hard struggle, and may seem to fail at last; but a force once exerted can never be lost. It is not your duty to join yourself to organizations which can take away any part of your freedom. It is not your duty to vote the ticket of my party, nor of your party, nor that of any one of the time-honored 92 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY political organizations into which men naturally fall. For you and I know that the questions which divide the great parties of a free country are not, as a rule, ques- tions of morals or good citizenship. The sheep are never all on one side, nor the goats on the other. Party divisions are based, for the most part, on hereditary tendencies, on present expediencies, and hopes of tem- porary gain, and too often on the distribution of power and plunder, of power to plunder. When your party is led by bad men, or when its course is headed in the wrong direction, your State expects you as educated men to know it. Your State expects you to have the courage of your convictions. Your State expects you to have the power to stand alone — to bolt, if need be, when other modes of protest fail. You will not win friends by asserting your manhood against partisan pressure. You will not pave the way to a vote of thanks or a nomination to Congress, but you will keep your own self-respect, and some day, when the party recovers its senses, you will see it come in full run in your direction. One duty of the scholar in politics is to serve as an antidote to the thick-and-thin partisan — the rock-ribbed Bourbon of any party, who learns nothing, and scruples at nothing. A good citizen, as has been well said, can- not vote an unscratched ticket. The man who does so, in whatever party, leaves in the course of years few sorts of rascals, public or private, unsupported by his vote. The men whom your vote helps to elect are prop- erly regarded as your representatives, and the knave, 93 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY the trickster, the gambler, the drunkard, the briber, the boss, should not rightfully represent you. If such do represent you, it would be better for our country if you were left unrepresented, and the State has made a losing bargain in educating you. I do not plead for political isolation. That you stand aloof from the majority, is no proof that you are right and they are wrong. For the most part, we believe, the feeling of the majority is not far from right. The great heart of the republic beats true. To doubt this would be to despair of popular government. But whether right or wrong, the majority of the party are not the keepers of your conscience. Your conscience is your own. 'T went into this convention," said a brave man once, "a free man, with my own head under my own hat, and a free man I meant to come out of it." The opinions of the majority are molded by the few. That among these few who would mold opinion you should stand, is a reason for your training in the science of government. In all questions of public or private policy, be yourself, no matter who your grandfather was, no matter who your neighbor may be. If you are born and bred in any party, think of these things. A heredity yoke is ignoble; shake it off, and then, when once a free man, you may resume your place, if you choose. If there must be a heredity partisanship in your family, be you the man to start it. Be the first in your dynasty, and encourage your son to be the first in his. But your State expects more of you than mere inde- 94 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY pendence of heredity prejudices. Let it never be said of you : "It is for his interest to do so and so ; there- fore we can count on him. He Hves in the First Ward ; therefore he believes in prohibition. He lives in the Sixth Ward; therefore his vote is for free whisky. He will make by this thing; therefore he favors that course of action." It is much easier to be independent of political bosses than to be free from the dictation of your own selfish instincts. But the good citizen is superior to the prejudices of his locality, to the selfish interests of his trade. The good man is a citizen of the State, not of the Sixth Ward — not of the iron county, nor of the raisin county, nor of the State merely, nor of the United States. The good citizen is a citizen of the world; itself, as citizenship improves, becoming one vast community, the greatest of all repub- lics. For true patriotism is not a matter of waving flags and Fourth of July orations. It lies not in de- nouncing England nor in fighting Chile; not in cock- crowing nor in bull-baiting. It consists in first know- ing what is true about one's own community or coun- try, and then in the willingness to sink one's personal interest in the welfare of the whole. All patriotism which involves neither knowledge nor self-devotion is a worthless counterfeit. We have the right to expect the scholar to serve as an antidote to the demagogue. You have been trained to recognize the fetiches and bugaboos of the past; you should know those of the present. Notions as wild, if not as wicked, as the witchcraft that haunted 93 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY Salem two hundred years ago still vex our American life. The study of history is your defense against these. As "the running stream, they dare na' cross," kept off the witches of old, so will your studies in this field defend you from bugaboos, alive or dead. You hold the magic wand before which the demagogue is silent and harmless. It is your duty and privilege to use it for the people's good. It is true that America is not the best governed of the civilized nations. You know that this is so. You know that America's foreign policy is weak, vacillating, inefficient. You know that her internal policy is lavish, careless, unjust. You know that we no longer send, as in the old days, "our wisest men to make the public laws." You know that our legislative bodies, from the board of Aldermen to the United States Senate, are not always bodies of which we are proud. You know that their members often are not men in whom the people have confidence. Our civil service has been one of the worst "on the planet ;" our foreign service has been the laughing stock of Europe. Our courts of justice, on the whole the soundest part of our government, are not all that they should be. Too often they are neither swift nor sure. Too often the blindfold goddess who rules over them is quick to discern the pressure of the finger of gold on the "wrong side of the balances." Our currency fluctuates for the benefit of the gambler, who thrives at the laborers' cost. In all this our own California offers no exception. The history of her gov- ernment is a short one, but it is long with the records 96 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY of misrule and corruption. Her average of general intelligence is high. Her average of special knowledge is low, and equally low is her standard of patriotism. All these things we know, and worse, and they vex us and discourage us, and some there are among us who wish that we had a heaven-descended aristocracy, an aristocracy of brains at least, who could take these things out of the people's hands, out of your hands and mine, and make them and keep them right. I do not feel thus. It is better that the people should suffer, with the remedy in their own hands, than that they should be protected by som.e power not of themselves. Badly though the people may manage their own affairs, the growth of the race depends upon their doing it. We would rather the people would rule ill through choice than that they should be ruled well through force. The Reign of Terror gives more hope for the future than the reign of the good King Henry. The story of the decline and fall of empires is the story of the growth of man. It is not that the laws of England should be made better that Gladstone took into partnership, as law- makers, two millions of England's farmers and work- men who can barely read or write. The laws for a time, at least, will not be as good, but those for whom the laws are made will be better, and the good of the people is the object of law. It is not our confidence in Irish wisdom and prudence that leads every American to approve of Home Rule in Ireland. It is our sym- pathy with Irish manhood and our belief that Irish 97 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY manhood can manage its own affairs. It is not that our Southern States should be better governed that three millions of freedmen, little more intelligent in the mass than the dog or horse with which a few years before they had been bought and sold, were given the right to vote. No better for the State, perhaps ; for an igno- rant vote is a cowardly vote, and a vote which money will buy. No better for the State, but better for humanity, that her laws should recognize the image of God hidden in each dusky skin. For lawlessness, turbulence, misgovernment is better than prosperity with its heel on the neck of a silent race which cannot rise nor speak. But all government by the people is made better when the people come to know and feel its deficiencies. No abuse can survive long when the people have located it. When the masses know what hurts them, that particular wrong must cease. Its life depends upon its appearing in the disguise of a public blessing. Straight thinking, as you have learned, comes before straight acting, and both we expect of you. To you, as educated men and women, the people have a right to look. They have a right to expect your influence in the direction of the ideal government, the republic in which government by the people shall be good gov- ernment as well ; the government from which no man nor woman shall be excluded, and in which no man nor woman shall be ignorant, or venal, or corrupt. The influence of the university life is in the direction of high ideals. The trained mind is the best keeper of 98 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY the clear conscience. It is the duty of the university to fill the student's mind with high notions of how his personal, social, and political life ought to be conducted and to lead him toward discontent with that which is on a lower plane. You have all heard it said that cer- tain reforms in American life are advocated only by college professors and by boys just out of college. It is said that these notions of college boys would be admirable in Utopia, but are ridiculous in nineteenth- century America. We are told that self-seeking and corruption are essential elements in our American life. That in our political and social battles we must not be squeamish, but must fight our adversaries as devils are said to fight each other — with fire. Of course, this charge of Utopianism is in the main true, and I trust that it may remain so. The Utopian element is one which our life sorely needs. We have fought the devil with fire long enough. Too long have we attempted good results by evil means. Too long has the right been grandly victorious through bribery, falsehood, and fraud, till we are more afraid of the bad means of our friends than the bad ends of our adversaries. What though all reform seems Utopian, — does that absolve you? Unless your soul dwells in Utopia, life is not worth the keeping. Your windows should look toward heaven, not into the gutter. You should stand above the level of the world's baseness and filth. If our scholars do not so stand — if our training end in the production merely of sharper manipulators than those we had before (and we know there is an undercurrent : e-. 99 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY in our college life tending just in that direction), then the sooner we bar our windows and don our striped uniforms, the better for the country. But we need not take this dark view of the future. We know that, on the whole, training makes for virtue. There is a natural connection between "Sweetness and Light." We know that whatever leads the youth to look beyond the narrow circle in which he stands, is his best safeguard against temptation. We know that if the youth fall not, the man will stand. I shall not argue this question. I assume it as a fact of experi- ence, and it is this fact which gives our public-school system, of which my life and yours is in some degree a product, the right to exist. "A dollar in a university," says Emerson, "is worth more than a dollar in a jail. If you take out of this town the ten honestest merchants, and put in ten rogues, with the same amount of capital, the rates of insurance will soon indicate it, the sound- ness of the banks will show it, the highways will be less secure, the schools will feel it, the children will bring home their little dose of poison, the judge will sit less firmly on his bench, and his decisions will be less up- right; he has lost so much support and constraint, which we all need, and the pulpit will betray it in a laxer rule of life." If taking from the community ten good men and replacing them with bad men work this evil, what will come from doing the reverse? If we add ten good men — one good man — to any community, the banks, the courts, the churches, the schools will feel it as an impulse toward better things. 100 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY The statesmanship of every nation has regarded the development of higher education as a plain duty to itself. The great universities of the world have arisen, not from the overflow of riches, but from the nation's need of men. The University of Leyden was founded in the darkest days of Holland's history as the strongest barrier Holland could raise against Spanish oppres- sion — as the most effective weapon she could place in the hands of William the Silent. For the State — that is, every man in the State — is helped and strengthened by all that makes its members wiser, better, or more enlightened. That you are edu- cated, if educated aright, tends to raise the price of every foot of land around you. When Emerson, and Hawthorne, and Thoreau lived in Concord, this fact was felt in the price of every city lot in Concord. Men from other towns were willing to pay money in order to live near them. When a smart lawyer, a few years ago, was elected governor of Massachusetts, there were men who left that State rather than that he should be their governor. You and I are not so sensitive, perhaps; but however that may be, the election of a bad man as governor will be felt in the falling price of land and houses, in the falling price of honesty and truth in the markets of the nation. As in political, so in social life, should the student stand as a barrier against materialism. Not alone against the elaborate materialism of the erudite phil- osopher. Its virus, dry and dusty, attenuated by its transfer from Germany, can rarely do much harm. 101 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY But there is a subtler materialism which pervades our whole life: It sits in the cushioned pews of our churches, as well as in our marts of trade. It preaches the gospel of creature comforts and the starvation of the spirit. It preaches the gospel of selfhood, instead of the law of love. It asks of all the scholar should hold dear, — of truth, and beauty, and goodness, and sweetness, and light, — what are these things worth? If they will bring no money in this world, nor save our souls in the next, we want nothing of them. Wherever you go after you leave the college halls you will feel the chill of this materialism. You must keep your sympathies warm, and your soul open to all good influences, to keep it away. There is, too, a sort of skepticism about us against which the scholar should be proof. Once the skeptic was the man simply who had his eyes open; the man who questioned nature and life, and from such ques- tioning has all of our knowledge come. But question- ing with eyes open is not the same as doubting with eyes closed. There is a doubting which saps the foun- dation of all growth, which cuts the nerve of all prog- ress. It is the question of Pilate, who doubted — "What is truth?" Whether, indeed, any truth exists? And whether, after all, being is other than seeming? Every robust human life is a life of faith. Not faith in what other men have said and thought about life, or death, or fate ; but faith that there is something in the universe that transcends man and all man's conceptions of right and wrong, and which it is well to know. 102 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY Some forty years ago a president of the University of Indiana is reported to have said: "The people insist on being humbugged; so it is our duty to hum- bug them." Great is the power of Humbug, and many and mighty are his prophets! Do you never beHeve this. A pin-prick in the ribs will kill the charlatan, but the man who is genuine throughout is clad in triple armor. To him and to his teachings will the people turn long after the power of humbug is forgotten. The studies you have followed as a scholar should teach you to know and value truth. You have found some things which you should know as true, judged by any tests the world can offer. In his relations with others, the scholar must be tolerant. Culture comes from contact with many minds. To the uncultured mind, things unfamiliar seem uncouth, outlandish, abhorrent. A wider ac- quaintance with the affairs of our neighbor gives us more respect for his ideas and ways. He may be wrong-headed and perverse ; but there is surely some- thing we can learn from him. So with other nations and races. Each can teach us something. In civilized lands the foreigner is no longer an outcast, and object of fear or abhorrence. The degree of tolerence which is shown by any people toward those whose opinions differ from their own is one of the best tests of civiliza- tion. It is a recognition of individuality and the rights of the individual in themselves and in others. I need not dwell on this. The growth of tolerance is one of the most important phases in the history of 103 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY modern civilization. The right of freedom of the mind, the right of private interpretation, is a birth- right of humanity. As the scholar has taken a noble part in the struggle which has won for us this freedom, so should he guard it in the future as one of his highest possessions. It is each man's right to hew his own pathway toward the truth. If there be in this country a town, North, South, East, West, on the banks of the Yazoo, or the Hudson, or the Sacramento, where an honest man cannot speak his honest mind without risk of violence or of social ostracism, in that town our freedom is but slavery still, and our civilization but a barbarism thinly disguised. The man who speaks may be a sage or a fool; he may be wise as a serpent, or harmless as a calf; he may please us or not ; yet, whatever he be, his freedom of speech is his American birthright. To words, if you like, you can answer with words. The whole atmosphere is yours, from which to frame your replies. If you are right, and he is wrong, so much the stronger will your answer be. But the club, the brick, the shot- gun, or the dynamite bomb are not the answer of the free man or the brave. They convince nobody ; and of all oppressive laws, the law which is taken in the hands of the mob is the most despotic and most dangerous. The scholar should never allow himself to become a mere iconoclast. He has no strength to waste in con- troversy. Truth is non-resistant because its enemies cannot last. There is not much to be gained from 104 ^.£3^ THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY tearing down. Build something better, and the old will disappear of itself. When a righteous man attempts to reform society by attacking an unrighteous man, the public forms a ring around the two, to see that there is fair play, and that truth and falsehood are given alike a fair show. Soon the public ceases to be interested in the question of who is right, and becomes interested in who is the best fellow. The people have the right to expect of the scholar growth. One of the saddest products of the college is that which in science is called "arrested development." When the student is transplanted from the hotbed of the college to the cold soil of the world, his growth sometimes ceases, to the disappointment of his friends and the dismay of those who have faith in higher edu- cation. Without that perseverance which thrives under adversity, your attainments in college will avail you little. You have reached one port in the journey of life; and of this achievement you have the right to be proud. But the first port is not the end of the voyage. The great ocean is still beyond you, and the value of the voyage in the long run is proportionate to the distance of the port for which you are bound. It takes a longer preparation and a larger equipment for a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope than for a sail to the 'Tsle of Dogs." The value of a Hfe is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement. Loftiness of aim is essential 105 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY to loftiness of spirit. Nothing that is really high can be reached in a short time nor by any easy route. Most men, as men go, aim at low things, and they reach the object of their ambitions. They have only to move in straight lines to an end clearly visible. Not so with you. You are bound on a quest beyond the limit of your vision. There are mountains to climb, rivers to ford, deserts to cross on your search for the Holy Grail. The end is never in sight. You have always to trust and struggle on, parting company at every step with those who have chosen more accessible goals or are diverted from the great quest by chance attrac- tions. "Heaven is not reached by a single bound," nor by him who knows not whither he is going. That your aims in life are high, that you are pledged to a life of effort and growth, is shown by your pres- ence here. Were it not so, you would never have pressed thus far onward. You would be with the hundreds and thousands of your contemporaries who are satisfied with inferior aims reached in an inferior way. We all recognize this fact, even though we may not have put the thought into words. The banks recognize it. Without a dollar in your pocket, you can borrow money on the strength of your purpose. Many of you have already done this. You may have to do it again. It is right that you should. Strength of purpose is a legitimate capital. By your own desires and aspirations you are enriched. In a free country there can be but one poor man — the man without a purpose. 106 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY What you have done thus far is Httle in itself. You have reached but the threshold of learning. Your education is barely begun, and there is no one but you who can finish it. Your thoughts are but as the thoughts of children, your writings but trash from the world's wastepaper basket. Nothing that you know, or think, or do but has been better known or thought or done by others. The work of your lives is barely begun. You must continue to grow as you are now growing before you can serve the world in any im- portant way. But the promise of the future is with you. You have the power and will of growth. The sunshine and rain of the next century will fall upon you. You will be stimulated by its breezes, you will be inspired by its spirit. It is not an easy thing to grow. Decay and decline is easier than growth — so the trees will tell you. Growth is slow, and hard, and wearisome. The lob- ster suffers the pangs of death every time he outgrows and sheds his shell; but each succeeding coat of armor is thicker, and stronger, and more roomy. So with you. You will find it easier not to develop. It will be pleasanter to adjust yourself to old circum- stances and to let the moss grow on your back. The struggle for existence is hard; the struggle for im- provement is harder; and some there are among you who sooner or later will cease struggling. Such will be the cases of arrested development — ^those who prom- ised much and did little, those whose education did not bring effectiveness. Be never satisfied with what 107 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY you have accomplished, the deeds you can do, the thoughts you can think. Such satisfaction is the sting of old age, the feeling that the best is behind us, and that the noble quest is over forever. The scholar shall be a man of honor, one whom men may trust. Once a king wrote to his queen, after a disastrous battle: "Madam, all is lost — all but our honor." When honor is saved a battle can never be lost. But in many of the battles and sham fights of the world — in most of those, perhaps, in which you will be called to take part, — the honor on one side or the other is the first thing to be lost. Some men, in entering public life, lay aside their consciences as Cortez burned his ships, that they may not be tempted to retreat toward honor and decency. People say, as you have heard, that the sense of honor in our republic is wan- ing ; that sentiment in politics or business is a thing of the past. Certainly, from Franklin, and Hamilton, and Knox, and Jay to some public servants we have seen, the fall has been great, and the descent to Avernus seems easy. We hear sometimes of men who possess the old-fashioned ideas of honor, and we associate these men with the knee-breeches, and wigs, and ruf- fles of the same old-fashioned times. The moral law is growing flexible with use, and parts of it, like the Blue Laws of Connecticut, are already out of date. See to it that it is not so with you. In any contest fair play is better than victory. The essence of success is fair play. As honest men and women, you will often find your- 108 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY selves in opposition to those who regard themselves as leaders of reform.* A cause founded on sentiment, even though it be righteous sentiment, cannot succeed all at once, and never unless controlled by wisdom. Political expediency may be a wiser guide than feeling alone. There is some truth in the paradox that senti- mentality in politics is more dangerous than venality, and that the venal man is our safeguard against the idealist and enthusiast. Venality, with all its evils, is conservative, hence opposed to ill-considered action. ''Laissez-faire" is now a discredited principle. It is no longer possible to let things take their course when so many men try to find out what is right, and use every effort to bring it about. But we must remember that men can do only what is possible. All unscientific or sentimental tinkering with society, and law, and gov- ernment is still ''laissez-faire." The blind effort to do the impossible effects nothing. It is only the whirl of the water in the eddy of the stream, which in no way hastens or changes its flow. Man must first learn the direction of the currents. The efforts he puts forth *Professor H. H. Powers has said: "A knowledge of the magnitude and complexity of the causes of social phenomena tends to disparage panaceas and all hasty efforts for social improvement. However much we may believe in the control of social evolution by reason and human effort, a study of society cannot but convince us that changes must be slow to be either wholesome or permanent, and that effort spent on merely proximate causes is ineffectual. These conclusions are not agree- able to those who organize crusades. It is one of the painful incidents of science that the student is so often called upon to part company with the reformer. The fervid appeals and enthusiastic championship by which he seeks to enlist men into a grand reforming mob grate harshly on the ears of one who sees the difficulties of bettering society, while the other sees only its desirability. After a few vain attempts to inoculate a little science into these reformers while they are charging at double-quick, the student is apt to give up the attempt and to seem henceforth unfriendly to reform." 109 THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY must be in harmony with these currents, else his labors may hinder, and not help, real progress. The opposite of laissez-faire is not action simply, but action based on knowledge. To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some special idea, often prevents a man from learning or from growing. The apostle fears to confuse his mind with the results of the study of social forces. The scholar cannot ignore these forces, and must be pre- pared to reckon with each one, but this does not justify indifference or obstruction. Wisdom and sobriety arise from the efforts of wise and sober men. Wise and sober you should be, if you are rightly educated. Not all of you will leave your names as a legacy to your country's history. The alumni roll of your Alma Mater may be at last the only list that remembers you ; but if you have been a center of right living and right thinking, if the character of your neighbors is the better for your having lived, your life mission will have been fulfilled. No man or woman can do more than that. "True piety," as you have heard to-day, "con- sists in reverence for the gods and help to man.* Therefore help men. Seek that spiritual utilitarianism whose creed is social perfection, and foster that intel- ligent patriotism which chastens because it loves." *Professor George Elliott Howard. 110 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN* THE best political economy," Emerson tells us, "is the care and culture of men." Cul- ture is not coddling, but training,— not help from without, but growth from within. The harsh experience of centuries has shown that men are not made by easy processes. Character is a hardy plant. It thrives best where the north wind tempers the sunshine. The life of civilized man is no simple art,— no auto- matic process. To make life easy is to destroy its effectiveness. The civilization to which we are born makes heavy demands upon those who take part in it. Its rights are all duties; its privileges are all responsi- bilities. Its risks are terrible to those who do not make their responsibilities good. And these responsibilities are not individual alone. They fall upon all who are bound together in social or industrial alliance. If we are to bear one another's burdens, we must see that we lay upon ourselves no unnecessary burdens by our indifference or our ignorance. There is no safety for the republic, no safety for the individual man, for whom the republic exists, so long as he or his fellows are untrained or not trained aright. So there is no virtue in educational systems unless these systems meet the needs of the individual. It is not the ideal man or the average man who is to be tramed; it is the particular man as the forces of 111 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN heredity have made him. His own quaUties determine his needs. "A child is better unborn than untaught." A child, however educated, is still untaught if by his teaching we have not emphasized his individual char- acter, if we have not strengthened his will and its guide and guardian, the mind. The essence of manhood lies in the growth of the power of choice. In the varied relations of life the power to choose means the duty of choosing right. To choose the right, one must have the wit to know it and the will to demand it. In the long run, in small things as in large, wrong choice leads to death. It is not "punished by death," for nature knows nothing of rewards and punishments. Death is simply its inevi- table result. No republic can live — no man can live in a republic in which wrong is the repeated choice either of the people or of the State. All education must be individual — fitted to individual needs. That which is not so is unworthy of the name. A misfit education is no education at all. Every man that lives has a right to some form of higher educa- tion. For there is no man that would not be made bet- ter and stronger by continuous training. I do not mean, of course, that the conventional college educa- tion of to-day could be taken by every man to his advantage. Still less could the average man use the conventional college education of any past era. Higher education has seemed to be the need of the few because it has been so narrow. It was born in the days of feudal caste. It was made for the few. Its type was 112 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN fixed and pre-arranged, and those whose minds it did not fit were looked upon by the colleges as educational outcasts. The rewards of investigation, the pleasures of high thinking, the charms of harmony were not for the multitude. To the multitude they must be accessi- ble in the future; but not as gifts — nothing worth having was ever a gift — rather as rights to be taken by those who can hold them. To furnish the higher education that humanity needs, the college must be broad as humanity. No spark of talent man may possess should be outside its fostering care. To fit men into schemes of education has been the mistake of the past. To fit education to man is the work of the future. The traditions of higher education in America had their origin in social conditions very different from ours. In the Golden Age of Greece, each free man stood on the back of nine slaves. The freedom of the ten was the birthright of the one. To train the tenth man was the function of the early university. Only free men can be trained. A part of this training of the tenth in the early days was necessary in the arts by which the nine were kept in subjection. The universities of Paris, and Oxford, and Cam- bridge were founded to educate the lord and the priest. And to these schools and their successors, as time went on, fell the duty of training the gentleman and the clergyman. Only in our day has it been recognized that the common man had part or lot in higher educa- tion. For now he has come into his own, and he 113 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN demands that he, too, may be noble and gentle. His own lord and king is the common man already, and in the next century we shall see him installed as his own priest. And through higher education he must gain fitness for his work, if he gain it at all. And he must gain it; for the future of civilization is in his hands. The world cannot afford to let him fail. All the ages have looked forward to the common man as their 'heir apparent.' The whole past of humanity is staked on his success. The old traditions are not sufficient for him. The narrow processes by which gentlemen were trained in medieval Oxford are not adequate to the varied de- mands of the man of the twentieth century. He is more than a gentleman. Heir to all the ages he must be; and there are ages since, as there were ages before, the tasks set in these schools became stereotyped as culture. The need of choice has become a thousand- fold greater with the extension of human knowledge and human power. The need of choosing right is steadily growing more and more imperative. If the common man is to be his own lord and his own priest in these strenuous days, his strength must be as great, his consecration as intense as it was with those who were his rulers in ruder and less trying times. The osmosis of classes is still going on. By its silent force it has ''pulled down the mighty from their seats, and has exalted them of low degree." Again educate our rulers. We find that they need it. They have, in the aggregate, not yet the brains, nor the conscience, nor 114 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN the force of will that fits them for the task the fates have thrown upon them. If the civilization of the one is shared by the ten, it must increase tenfold in amount. If it does not, the Golden Age it seems to represent must pass away. To hold the civilization we enjoy today is the work of higher education. Every moment we feel it slipping from our hands. Hence, every moment we must strive for a fresh hold. "Eternal vigilance," it was said of old, "is the price of liberty." And this was what was meant. The perpetuation of free institutions rests with free men. The masses, the mobs of men, are never free. Hence the need of the hour is to break up the masses. They should be masses no longer, but individual men and women. The work of higher education is to put an end to the rule of the multitude. To tyranny confusion is succeeding, and the remedy for confusion is in the growth of men who cannot be confused. The university of today must recognize the need of the individual student as the reason for its existence. If we are to make men and women out of boys and girls, it will be as individuals, not as classes. The best field of corn is that in which the individual stalks are most strong and most fruitful. Class legislation has always proved pernicious and ineffective, whether in a university or in a state. The strongest nation is that in which the individual man is most helpful and most independent. The best school is that which exists for the individual student. A university is not an 115 ■JirvjrMj;;-5esx,;: ■■ m THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN aggregation of colleges, departments, or classes. It is built up of young men and women. The student is its unit. The basal idea of higher education is that each student should devote his time and strength to what is best for him; that no force of tradition, no rule of restraint, no bait of a degree should swerve any one from his own best educational path. As Melville Best Anderson has said, "The way to educate a man is to set him at work; the way to get him to work is to interest him, the way to interest him is to vitalize his task by relating it to some form of reality." No man was ever well trained whose own soul was not wrought into the process. No student was ever brought to any worthy work except by his own consent. So the university must not drive, but lead. Nor, in the long run, should it even lead; for the training of the will is effected by the exercise of self-guidance. The problem of human development is to bring men into the right path by their own realization that it is good to walk therein. The student must feel with every day's work that it has some place in the forma- tion of his character. His character he must form for himself; but higher education gives him the materials. His character gathers consecration as the work goes on, if he can see for himself the place of each element in his training. Its value he has tested, and he knows that it is good, and its results he learns to treasure accordingly. Individualism in education is no discovery of our times. It was by no means invented at Palo Alto; 116 iSi THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN neither was it born in Harvard nor in Michigan. The need of it is written in the heart of man. It has found recognition wherever the "care and culture" of man has been taken seriously. A Japanese writer, Uchimura, says this of education in old Japan: "We were not taught in classes then. The grouping of soul-bearing human beings into classes, as sheep upon Australian farms, was not known in our old schools. Our teachers believed, I think in- stinctively, that man (persona) is unclassifiable ; that he must be dealt with personally — i. e. face to face, and soul to soul. So they schooled us one by one — each according to his idiosyncracies, physical, mental, and spiritual. They knew each one of us by his name. And as asses were never harnessed with horses, there was little danger of the latter being beaten down into stupidity, or the former driven into valedictorians' graves. In this respect, therefore, our old-time teach- ers in Japan agreed with Socrates and Plato in their theory of education. So naturally the relation between teachers and students was the closest one possible. We never called our teachers by that unapproachable name, Professor. We called them Sensei, men born before, so named because of their prior birth, not only in respect of the time of their appearance in this world, which was not always the case, but also of their coming to the understanding of the truth. It was this, our idea of relationship between teacher and student, which made some of us to comprehend at once the intimate relation between the Master and the disciples which 117 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN we found in the Christian Bible. When we found written therein that the disciple is not above his mas- ter, nor the servant above his lord; or that the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep, and other similar sayings, we took them almost instinctively as things known to us long before." Thus it was in old Japan. Thus should it be in new America. In such manner do the oldest ideas forever renew their youth, when these ideas are based not on tradition or convention, but in the nature of man. The best care and culture of man is not that which restrains his weakness, but that which gives play to his strength. We should work for the positive side of life. We should build up ideals of effort. To get rid of vice and folly is to let strength grow in their place. The great danger in democracy is the seeming pre- dominance of the weak. The strong and the true seem to be never in the majority. The politician who knows the signs of the times understands the ways of majori- ties. He knows fully the weakness of the common man. Injustice, violence, fraud, and corruption are all expressions of this weakness. These do not spring from competition, but from futile efforts to stifle com- petition. Competition means fair play. Unfair play is the confession of weakness. The strength of the common man our leaders do not know. Ignorant, venal, and vacillating the common man is at his worst; but he is also earnest, intelligent, and determined. To know him at his best is the essence of statesmanship. His power for good may be used as 118 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN well as his power for evil. It was this trust of the common man that made the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln. And under such a leader the common man ceased to be common. To know strength is the secret of power. To work with the best in human nature is to have the fates on your side. "A flaw in a thought an inch long," says a Chinese poet, "leaves a trace of a thousand miles." If collect- ive action is to be safe, the best thought of the best men must control it. It is the ideal of statesmanship to bring these best thoughts into unison. The flaw in the thought of each one will be corrected by the clear vision of others. And this order and freedom, clear vision and clean acting, we have the right to expect from you. Knowledge is power, because thought is convertible into action. Ignorance is weakness, be- cause without clearness of purpose action can never be effective. The best political economy is the care and culture of men. The best-spent money of the present is that which is used for the future. The force which is used on the present is spent or wasted. That which is used on the future is repaid with compound interest. It is for you to show that effort for the future, of which you are the subjects, is not wasted effort. That you will do so we have no shadow of doubt. If its influence on you and you only were the whole of the life of the univer- sity we love, it would be worth all it has cost. The money and the effort, the faith and devotion these halls have seen would not be wasted. The university will 119 THE CARE AND CULTURE OF MEN live in you. You are her children — first-born, and it may be best-beloved — and in the ever-widening circle of your work she shall rejoice. For your influence will be positive, and therefore effective. It stands for the love of man and the love of truth. No one can love man aright who does not love truth better. And in the end these loves are alike in essence. The foundation of a university, as Professor Howard has told us, may be an event greater in the history of the world than the foundation of a state. By its life is it justified. The state at the best exists for the men and women that compose it. Its needs can never be the noblest, its aims never the highest, because it can never rise above the present. Its limit of action is that which now is. The university stands for the future. It deals with the possibilities of men, with the strength and virtue of men which is not yet realized. Its found- ation is the co-operation of the strong, its function to convert weakness into strength. The universities of Europe have shaped the civilization of the world. The universities of the world will shape the growth of man so long as civilization shall abide. 120 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION. A PRACTICAL education is one which can be made effective in Hfe. We often abuse the word practical by ^making it synonymous with temporary or superficial. It should mean just the opposite. An education which takes but little time and less effort, and leads at once to a paying situation, is not practical. It is not good, because it will never lead to anything better. An education which does not disclose the secret of power is un- worthy the name. Nothing is really practical which does not provide for growth in effectiveness. There is nothing more practical than knowledge, nothing more unpractical than ignorance; nothing more prac- tical than sunshine, nothing less so than darkness. The chief essentials of education should be thorough- ness and fitness. The most thorough training is the most practical, provided only that it is fitted to the end in view. The essential fault of educational sys- tems of the past is that, in search for breadth and thoroughness, the element of fitness was forgotten. We have tried, as we used to say, to make well- rounded men, "men who stand four-square to every wind that blows." This is a training better fitted for hitching-posts or windmills than for men. This is the day of special knowledge. Only by doing some one thing better than any one else, can a man find a worthy 121 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION place in our complex social fabric. The ability to do a hundred things in an inferior way will not help him. This is a fact our schools must recognize. No man is great by chance in these days. If one is to do any- thing of importance he must first understand what he is to do, and then set about it with all his might. Men of affairs often sneer at college men and col- lege methods. Some of their criticisms are justified, others not. Such justification as they may have had is found in the lack of fitness in college training. Among conditions of life infinitely varied the college has decreed that all boys should take the same studies, in the same way, and at the same time, and that these studies should be the routine of the English boy of a century ago. In thus repeating the thoughts and learning of nations half forgotten, the minds of some "Greek-minded" and "Roman-minded" men were stimulated to their highest activity, and for them such training was good and adequate. But there were some, "American-minded" perhaps, whose powers were not awakened by such influences, These came forth from the college walls into the life of the world, as Rip Van Winkle from the Catskills, dazed by the new experiences to which their studies had given no clue. I do not wish to depreciate the value of classical training. There is a higher point of view than that of mere utility, and the beautiful forms and noble thoughts of ancient literature have been a lifelong source of inspiration to thousands who have made no direct use 122 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION of their college studies in the affairs of life. But there are other sources of inspiration which, in their way, may effect many to whom Latin or Greek would be a meaningless grind. For such as these a different train- ing is necessary, if our education is to be practical. The schools of the future will avoid not only bad train- ing, but also "misfit" training ; for the time of the stu- dent is so precious that no part of it should be wrongly used. The remedy for the evils of misfit training is not to discard the high standards or the thorough drill of the old college, but to apply it to a wider range of studies. No two students are ever quite alike, and no two will ever follow exactly the same career. If we work to the best advantage, no two will ever follow the same course of study. And thus recognizing in our efforts the infinite variations of human nature, the work of higher education acquires an effectiveness which it could never have under the cast-iron systems of the traditional col- lege. Misfit training is good only as compared with no training at all. Any sort of activity is better than stagnation. The purpose of right training is to prepare for work which is to last. There is enough already of poor and careless work. Whatever is done needs to be done well. Let it be done honestly — not as to-day's make- shift, but as done for all time. High under the roof of the Cathedral of Cologne there is many an image carved in stone and wrought with the most exquisite care, but which human eye has 123 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION never seen since it was first placed in the niche in which it stands. This work of the Gothic sculptors was done for the sight of God, and not for the worship of man. The Cathedral of Cologne was almost a thousand years in building. I saw, the other day, a cathedral in one of our Eastern cities, built in barely as many weeks as the other in centuries. The marble sculptures on its lofty towers are made of sheet-iron, zinc-lined, and painted to represent stone. Such is the work of mod- ern cathedral builders. But the slow-moving centuries will show the difference. A Swiss watchmaker said the other day: "Your American manufacturers cannot establish themselves in Europe. The first sample you send is all right, the second lot begins to drop off, the third destroys your reputation, and the fourth puts an end to your trade. All you seem to care for is to make money. What you want is some pride in your work." If this has been true of American watchmakers, it should be true no longer. The work that lasts must be not the quickest, but the best. Let it be done, not to require each year a fresh coat of paint, but done as if to last forever, and some of it will endure. This world is crowded on its lower floor, but higher up for centuries to come there will still remain a niche for each piece of honest work. "Profligacy," says Emerson, "consists not in spend- ing, but in spending off the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts men and States is job work, declining from your main design to serve a turn here or there. Nothing is beneath you, if in the direction of 124 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION your life ; nothing, to you, is great or desirable, if it be off from that." The test of civilization is the saving of labor. The great economic waste of the world is that involved in unskilled labor. The gain of the nineteenth century over the eighteenth is the gain of skill in workmanship. But with all our progress in labor-saving, we have yet far to go before our use of labor shall balance our waste of it. The work which goes to waste in Europe, even now, through lack of training and lack of proper tools, is greater than all the losses through wars and standing armies and the follies of hereditary caste. It is second only to the waste due to idleness itself. For idleness there is no remedy so effective as training. To know how to do is to have a pride and pleasure in doing. In the long run, there is no force making for virtue and sobriety so strong as the influence of skill. If a man knows how to do and how to act, he is assured against half the dangers which beset life. Training of the hand, training of the mind, training of any kind, which gives the man the power to do something which he knows to be genuine, gives him self-respect, makes a man of him, not a tool, or a force, or a thing. An unskilled laborer is a relic of past ages and con- ditions. He is a slave in a time when enforced slavery is past. The waste which comes from doing poor things in poor ways keeps half of humanity forever poor. What the unskilled man can do, a bucket of coal and a bucket of water, guided by "a thimbleful of 125 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION brains," will do more effectively. It is the mission of industrial training to put an end to unskilled labor ; to make each workman a free man. When the time shall come when each workman can use his powers to the best advantage we shall have an end to the labor prob- lem. The final answer of the labor problem is that each should solve it for himself. I have spoken of the training of the hand; but all training belongs to the brain, and all kinds of training are of like nature. The hand is the servant of the brain, and can receive nothing of itself. There is no such thing as manual training as distinguished from train- ing of the intellect. There is brain behind every act of the hand. The muscles are the mind's only servants. Whether we speak of training an orator, a statesman, or a merchant, or a mechanic, the same language must be used. The essential is that the means should lead toward the end to be reached. An ignorant man is a man who has fallen behind our civilization and cannot avail himself of his light. He finds himself in darkness, in an unknown land. He stumbles over trifling obstacles because he does not understand them. He cannot direct his course. The real dangers are all hidden, while the most innocent rock or bush seems a menacing giant. He is not master of the situation. We have but one life to live ; let that be an effective one, not one that wastes at every turn through the loss of knowledge or lack of skill. What sunlight is to the eye education is to the intellect, and the most thorough education is always the most 126 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION practical. No traveler is contented to go about with a lantern when he could as well have the sun. If he can have a compass and a map also, so much the better. But let his equipment be fitting. Let him not take an ax if there be no trees to chop, nor a boat unless he is to cross a river, nor a Latin grammar if he is to deal with bridge-building, unless the skill obtained by mastering the one gives him insight into the other. I often meet parents who wish to give their sons a practical education. They think of practical as some- thing cheap and easy. A little drawing, a little tinker- ing with machinery, a little bookkeeping of imaginary accounts, and their sons are "ready for business." ''Ready for business," as though the complex problems of finance were to be solved by a knowledge of book- keeping by double-entry! Life is more serious than that. It takes a thorough education to make a suc- cessful business man. Not the education of the schools, we say,— and it may be so; but if so, it is the fault of the schools. They ought to make' good busmess men as well as to make good men in any other profession. They ought to fit men for life. Why do the great majority of merchants fail? Is it not be- cause they do not know how to succeed? Is it not because they have not the brains and the skill to com- pete with those who had both brains and training? Is it not because they do not realize that there are laws of finance and commerce as inexorable as the law of gravitation? A man will stand erect because he stands in accord with the law of gravitation. A man or a 127 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION nation will grow rich by working in accord with the laws which govern the accumulation of health. If there are such laws, men should know them. What men must know the schools can teach. The schools will indeed do a great work if they teach the existence of law. Half the people of America be- lieve this is a world of chance. Half of them believe they are victims of bad luck when they receive the re- wards of their own stupidity. Half of them believe that they are favorites of fortune, and will be helped out somehow, regardless of what they may do. Now and then some man catches a falling apple, picks up a penny from the dust, or a nugget from the gulch. Then his neighbors set to looking into the sky for apples, or into the dust for pennies, as though pennies and apples come in that way. Waiting for chances never made anybody rich. The Golden Age of Cali- fornia began when gold no longer came by chance. There is more gold in the black adobe of the Santa Clara Valley than existed in the whole great range of the Sierras until men sought for it, not by luck or chance, but by system and science. Whatever is worth having comes because we have earned it. There is but one way to earn anything — that is to find out the laws which govern production, and to shape our actions in accordance with these laws. Good luck never comes to the capable man as a surprise. He is prepared for it, because it was the very thing he has a right to expect. Sooner or later, and after many hard raps, every man who lives long enough will find this out. When he 128 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION does so, he has the key to success, though it may be too late to use it. It is the work of the school to give these laws reality in the mind of the student. The school can bring the student face to face with these laws, and even teach him to make them do his bidding. If we work with them, these laws are as tractable as the placid flow of a mighty river. If we struggle against them, they make the terrible havoc of an uncontrolled flood. To ignore them is to defy them. From our knowledge of the laws of nature arise the achieve- ments of civilization. These are our knowledge wrought into action. The thing we understand be- comes our servant. Whatever we know we can have. But whatever we conquer, our victory is a triumph of knowledge. We speak of this age as the age of inventions, the age of man's conquest of the forces of nature. But the man who invents or constructs machinery is not the conqueror. It is easy for one to harness the lightning when another has shown him the lightning's nature and ways. It is easier still to repeat what others have done. The applications of science are only an incident in the growth of science. The electric light and the locomo- tive follow sooner or later, as a matter of course, when we have found the laws which govern electric currents and the expansive power of steam. It is this knowl- edge which gives control over the forces of nature. It is by investigation, not through application or repetition, that man's power advances. It is the inves- 129 THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION tigator who comes in contact with the unveiled ways of God. The appHcations of electricity to com- mon purposes have been for the most part made in our day, but the knowledge on which they are based goes back to the earliest investigators of physical laws. These men forced their way into the infinite darkness, regardless of the multitude that would crowd into their path. An investigator is the cause of a thousand inven- tors. A Faraday or a Helmholtz is the parent of a thousand Edisons. Without the help of the university Edisons are possible. Only the highest training can make a Helmholtz ; for no man can reach the highest rank who has not entered into all the work of all his predecessors. And this brings me to say that the great work of a university is to be the center of investigation. It should be the source of new truths — of new conquests in every field. To it will come for the brief course of training and guidance many who, in the maturity of their lives, will accomplish much good for their fellow- men. In the ever-increasing circle of human knowl- edge new fields are being constantly opened. The whole knowledge of the last generation must be taken for granted as the basis of advancement for the next. Not till the circle of human knowledge has widened to infinity, shall we comprehend the infinite goodness of God. 130 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. * I ONCE walked one Saturday afternoon out from the city of Canterbury across the fields of Kent. The hops were ripe on the chalk hills; for the growing of hops is the chief industry in that part of England. The hop pickers had finished their week's work and were returning to their homes in Canterbury for their Sunday rest. I walked out on the Gadshill road and met them on the way — a long, long procession of modern pilgrims. They came by hundreds and hundreds. There may have been five thousand of them in all. In the lead were the young and vigorous, the stalwart young man, the spirited young woman, those who thought nothing of a ten- mile walk when the day's work was over. Next came the older ones, equally strong, but more serious, who went on their way with an even step; while behind these, in the main body of the procession, were the old and the young, those whose strength was passing and those to whom strength had not yet come. Then, behind the middle, came those who had more than themselves to carry; men leading boys or girls, women with baskets, or with children who clung to their skirts. Still behind these were women carrying babies and men limping on crutches. And, last of all, were men who had taken the burden of a load of gin * Address to graduating class, University of Indiana, 1890. 131 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE from some wayside tavern; for the heaviest load a man can carry is the weight of a glass of liquor. And the thought came to me, as I watched them, that this modern procession of pilgrims to Canterbury was but a fragment of a greater procession which moves before our eyes all our lives — the endless pro- _ cession in which you who go from us today step forth to form a part. The thought of a Pilgrim's Progress, as it came to John Bunyan in the Bedford jail, is one which rises naturally as we look over the course of human life. What loads have we to carry, and how shall we come to our journey's end? We start with our burdens of hereditary weaknesses and hereditary sins, and to these we add many new ones which we take up along the road. What prospect have we of reaching Canterbury before the sun goes down ? And of what avail are our efforts on the road if we never reach Canterbury? Or, laying aside the metaphor, which may prove cumbersome, we meet the old question which comes afresh to every man, though countless generations have attempted its solution; what for us constitutes success in life? Certainly not the gaining of wealth, though many of our fellow-pilgrims seem to think so. If it were wealth alone, we have surely missed the way. You are not on the right road. There is a shorter way to wealth than the way you have taken, though the road may not lead to Canterbury. If you spend your day searching for gold, you will find it. A man finds whatever he goes forth to seek; but gold has no 132 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE value except the value your fellow-pilgrims agree to set upon it — the worth of the time, we may say, they waste when they stop to look for it. When a man is alone with gold, he is alone with — nothing. Not fame alone can constitute success. The gods care little for what men say of one another. Not the acquisition of power alone. The force of man can change nothing which is not already bound to change. A lever can move the world only when applied to a world which is moving. The force of man counts for nothing when placed in opposition to the laws of hu- man development. We are encompassed about by the forces that make for righteousness. All power we possess, or seem to possess, comes from our accord with these forces. There is no lasting force, except the power of God. All else in the world is speedily passing away. Is there no success for the individual? Are all lives alike in- effective? Not so. Measured by the standard of the Infinite, all life is short, and weak, and impotent; yet we know that, gauged by the measure of a man, there are many lives which are successful. We have all come in contact with such, and our own lives have been the richer for the contact. But we know, too, that there are broken lives. We pass them on the road. They stagger against us from the tavern steps. They are carried on for a time by the procession; but having no impulse of their own, they drop farther and farther behind — sometimes alone, sometimes dragging others with them. 133 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE These are not successful lives. What lessons do they teach? What have these broken lives in common? And what is this common element which we who hope for success can avoid ? Is it poverty ? Is life a failure if we gain not wealth, we who now live in the wealth- iest of all times, here among the richest of all peoples ? There are many who think this. Povetty is pictured as the yawning and relentless gulf beneath our whole civilization. If we avoid poverty, are we assured against all forms of spiritual failure? We know that this is not true. Broken lives are as common among the rich as among the poor. In the palace and the hovel we may look for them alike. Chronic poverty may be a sign of a withered spirit, but it is not the cause. The real disease lies far be- hind this, as those know well who have tried to heal the sores of poverty by filling them with gold. Poverty, in itself, is not even a cause for discourage- ment. Poverty has been through the ages the heritage of the student, and in the procession of life the student has never walked in the rear. You who stand before me, the flower of our student body, do not stand with well-filled purses. Your money and lands, to take the average, would not keep you for a single year. The inmates of many poorhouses could make a better actual showing than you could make today. Yet you are not paupers. No one dreams of thinking you such. You have something, not money, which helps you to face the future. And it is something real — something which has a quotable value. No ; the 134 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE element of likeness in broken lives is not their poverty. Is it sickness or weakness which makes failure of life ? We know that it is not. Stalwart frames stand all about us from which the spirit seems to have fled, while there are other souls whom no pain or disease can tame. The great name of the nineteenth century cannot be that of an unsuccessful man; yet for forty years of his earnest and beautiful life Darwin knew not a single day of health such as other men enjoy — not a single day such as comes unasked and unappre- ciated to you and to me. Health is much, but it is not everything. A withered arm does not mean a broken spirit. What then can we ask as our surety against failure ? That which we seek, does it not lie in the very heart of man, the presence of a reason for living? Is not this the one touchstone which through the ages has sepa- rated success from failure in life? If a man live for worthy ends, his life is made worthy. With a lifelong purpose, and a purpose worthy of a life, there can be no failure. How can there be ? Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for. Stand for something — something worthy to build a life around. As your aim, so your life is. Your pur- pose, like an amulet, will guard you from failure. While it remains intact, your life cannot be broken. Poverty cannot hold you down, disease cannot weaken, adversity cannot crush. Your life remains, and you alone can break it. It takes a strong impulse to live a 135 THE PROCESSION OF LIFE life out to the end. If you live to no true purpose, your life is a burden on the atmosphere, and death will come to you long before you even suspect it. All around you are those who have died already — perhaps never have lived at all. More terrible than ghosts or disembodied spirits is the spectacle we see every day of spiritless bodies — the forms of those who move and breathe when we know them to be dead. And so, when as year by year your paths diverge over the earth, let us hope and pray that you may live your lives out to the end ; that at every roll-call in this world, when you answer to your names, it will be in the full certainty that you are still alive. 136 THE GROWTH OF MAN* A WISE man once said, "The Bible was writ- ten by outdoor men; if we would under- stand it, we must read it out of doors." They were shepherds and fishermen who wrote the Bible; men who, night after night, lay under the stars, and to whom the grass on the Judaean hills had been the softest of pillows. Even kings and prophets were out-of-door men in the days of Samuel and David. Out-of-door men speak of out-of-door things, and each man who speaks with authority must speak of things which he knows. In this fact, if you will let me compare small things to great, you will find my apology for speaking my message today in my own way. I wish to draw certain lessons in morals from certain facts, or laws, in the sciences of which I know something. For we study what we call Nature, not for the objects them- selves, but because the study brings us nearer to the heart of things, nearer to the final answer to all the problems of death and of life. There is a stage in the development of the human embryo when it is not yet human, when it cannot be distinguished from the embryo of other mammals, as of a dog or a sheep. There may be, at the same time, two embryos apparently alike, the one destined to be a dog, because of its canine ancestry; the other, in * Commencement Address, University of Indiana, 1889. 137 THE GROWTH OF MAN like manner, to become human. These two, we may assume, may be absolutely alike to all the tests we can offer. They differ neither in structure, nor in form, nor in chemical composition. The lines along which they develop seem parallel for a time, but at last di- vergence becomes evident, and their courses separate forever. The one seems to lose, little by little, its human possibilities, while the other goes too far in its way ever to turn aside to doghood. The one moves toward its end as man; the other toward its destiny as dog. But the difference must exist, even when the identity of the two seems most perfect — a difference intangi- ble, immaterial, but none the less potent in its cer- tainty to lead to results. The one embryo holds within it the possibiHty of humanity which the other has not. No conditions of which we can conceive will bring the dog embryo to manhood, because the possi- bility of manhood is not in it. There is something which transcends chemistry, which tends to bring each embryo through many changes to a predetermined end. This is essentially true if the development be com- plete and normal. If its growth goes on irl the wonted fashion, it becomes what it can become. Its enclosed potentiality, or hidden powers, give form to its life. But not all development is normal. Growth may cease prematurely, or it may be cut short by death, and that which might have been a man becomes as nothing; or arrested development may leave a state of perpetual 138 THE GROWTH OF MAN immaturity. This happens among men sometimes. There are dwarfs in body and dwarfs in mind — those who reach the age of manhood while retaining the stature or the intellect of children. Again, decay and decline come sooner or later to all living things. If decline begins prematurely, we have degeneration in- stead of development. What is true of man in these regards is true of all life in its degree ; for there is no law of human development which does not, in corre- sponding measure, apply to animals and plants. On the other hand, progress begets progress. Nat- uralists tell us of cases of development beyond ances- tral lines, of perfection beyond previous completeness. In such growth, the conditions which mark full ma- turity in the ancestor become phases of youth in the ambitious progeny. The maturity of the latter in one or more ways overleaps ancestral lines. Such ad- vanced development here and there through the organic world is one of the causes of the progress of the mass. By the side of the philosopher the common man seems like a child. The development of great souls has gone on in accordance with a higher poten- tiaHty than ours. Or, rather, it may be in accordance with a potentiality which we possess, but which has lain dormant within us. For great men need great occasions. Circumstances affect all development. They may draw us out, or they may hem us in. They may raise us, as it were, above ourselves, or they may close around us, so that only in our dreams are we the man we ought to have been. And if the environ- 139 THE GROWTH OF MAN ment be too exacting, even these dreams cease at last. The lower animals and plants offer analogies to this. Each individual develops along the line of the resultant between the force of its own potentiality and the resistance of its environment. Thus, all degrees of fitness are produced, and from these varying degrees comes our perception of the law of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. One of the primal causes of difference in organic life lies in the condi- tions of advanced or retarded developrnent. A higher : — that is, a more definitely developed — organism is one that has taken a step in its growth beyond those taken by its ancestors. It has omitted non-essential phases and has leaped at once to a higher range of its possi- bilities. It has come so much nearer the fulfillment of the potentialities within it. Another organism may stop short of ancestral acquirements. It is degenerate ; for less of its potentiality has become actuality than in its ancestors. Florists save the seed of their fairest flowers, that from these the species may reach still higher perfec- tion. Stock-breeders recognize that individual gains are inherited, and they choose their stock accordingly. So we have, year by year, swifter race-horses, better milk cows, sheep with heavier fleece, more sagacious dogs, and pigeons of more fantastic forms. Along certain lines of development anything is possible with time and patience. Because this is so, with each gen- eration our domestic animals and plants become better and better adapted to satisfy man's needs or man's 140 i^^^S^S^a, THE GROWTH OF MAN fancy. But the potentiality of the race-horse was in the old nag, its far-off ancestor, who may have trotted his leisurely mile in ten minutes. The potentiality of the trained dog, "who can do anything but talk," lay in the gaunt and cowardly wolf, from which the races of dogs are descended. More perfect development comes from within, and is assisted, not caused, by favorable surroundings. This is shown in the very terms we use. We educate — that is, we "lead out." We develop— thsit is, we "un- wrap what was hidden in the original package. We evolve— ihdX is, we "unroll," as the ball of the fern-bud unrolls into the great fern leaf. And so we xmroll, unwrap, lead out whatever is already within. We can help to actualize latent possibilities. But whatever is finally brought forth existed in potentiality in the embryo, no matter how inert and impotent this may have been. But not alone in the embryo; for what- ever is in the embryo must have been a possibility with the parent. No great thing comes from nothingness. There must have been strength behind it. There must have been a potential Lincoln in Lincoln's humble ancestry, else a Lincoln could not have been. We can trust that studies in genealogy will some time show this. In each life there must exist a potentiality of some- thing not yet attained. Were it not so, the bounds of progress would be already reached, and swifter horses, brighter flowers, sweeter songs, nobler thoughts, and purer lives than have already been 141 THE GROWTH OF MAN there could never be. Potentiality may be conceived as a series of direct lines leading from the past into the future, outward into space. The highest poten- tiality is that one of these lines which most favors fullness of life. For any organism to grow along this highest line is for it to make the most of itself — and the most of its descendants, too ; for the will to do the best may fall into the grasp of heredity. The gain of the individual becomes the birthright of the race. The man of yesterday is a child beside the man of to- morrow. Our ancestors of centuries ago dwelt beside the Swiss lakes in children's playhouses. Whatever one generation has tried persistently to do, the next may accomplish easily. If by effort we have, as it were, excelled ourselves, our children may also without effort excel us in the same line. The man we dream of will be above the weaknesses of past humanity. The perfect man will be the master of the world, be- cause the perfect master of himself. As in the physical world there are many departures from the normal type, there may be partial, distorted, or degraded development. In the moral world the same conditions exist; and such departures from the ideal type we call sin. Sin is man's failure to realize his highest possibilities. Its measure is the discrep- ancy between the actual and the possible man. It is the spiritual analogue of retrograde or distorted de- velopment. Personal degeneration is sin. Misery, in general, is nature's protest against personal degenera- tion. 142 THE GROWTH OF MAN Total depravity is not the state of nature. It is the good man who is natural; it is the weak and vicious who are least human. "Great men are the true men," says Amiel, "the men in whom nature has succeeded." They are not extraordinary. They are in the true order. It is the other kinds of men that are not what they ought to be. If we wish to respect men, we must forget what they are and think of the ideal they have hidden in them — of the just man and the noble, the man of intelligence and goodness, inspiration and creative force, who is loyal and true, — of higher man and that divine thing we call soul. The only men who deserve the name are the heroes, the geniuses, the saints, the harmonious, powerful, and perfect examples of the race." If, then, sin is retarded or distorted development, righteousness is further development along the line of our ethical possibilities. Righteousness is thus achieved only by constant effort in the direction of self-control and self-devotion. As Aristotle says, "Nature does not make us either good or bad; she only gives us the opportunity to become good or bad — that is, of shaping our own characters." "Emphasize as you will," says Dr. Schurmann, "the bulk of the inheritance I have received from my ancestors, it still remains that in moral character I am what I make myself." This is the higher heredity, the aggregate of all our own past actions or conditions ; our deeds in the "vanished yesterdays that rule us absolutely." "On stepping-stones of their dead selves do men rise to 143 THE GROWTH OF MAN higher things." And in a similar way, on stepping- stones of their ancestry, do races of men rise to higher civilization. But without effort, conscious or uncon- scious, in the direction of a higher life, each succeed- ing generation will fail to rise above the level of those before it. Then, as nothing is stable in the world of life, where there is no advance there will be retrogres- sion. And thus have fallen all races, and nations, and communities whose guiding principle has not been the fulfillment of duty. If there be any truth at the basis of these analogies, they are susceptible of wide application to the affairs of human life. The central thought of modern biology is that all life Is bound together by heredity, the ancestry of all beings going back with gradual changes through countless ages to simpler and simpler forms. Connected with this is the fact that the various stages in the develop- ment of an embryo correspond essentially with the conditions of full development in the creatures which, one before another, have preceded its appearance in geological history. "The physical life of the Individual is an epitome of the history of the group to which It belongs." The embryonic life of the child corresponds in a general way to the history of the group which culminates in man. The stages In the mental development of the child of this century represent roughly the stages passed through in the infancy of our race. In this sense each life Is a condensation of the history of all 144 THE GROWTH OF MAN life. "In every grave," says the German proverb, "lies a world's history." From our study of evolution arises the new science of ethics, which teaches what 'ought to be from the knowledge of what has been. "Time was, unlocks the riddle of Time is." The central question in this study cannot be, as some have said, "what in the past man has thought ought to be," but what in the past has justified itself by leading man on to higher things. We can discover traces of the path which humanity shall tread, by looking backward over the road humanity has trodden, not alone over the early history of man; for only the smaller portion of this is within our reach. Our history of man is only a history of civilization; for barbarism writes no history. We can look be- yond the clouded period of human barbarism to the still older history which we share with the brute. If we find the line of direction of past development from animalism to civilization, we may in a way project this line into the future as the direction of human progress. What is this line of direction ? How does man differ from the brute? The intellect of man "is certainly a distinctive posses- sion. It is not necessary, as has been said, "to deny intelligence to the lower animals when we assert that the human mind is the most colossal and revolutionarv of all the modifications any species has undergone." It is not necessary to deny the elements of conscience to a dog or a horse in recognizing the fact that con- 145 THE GROWTH OF MAN science is one of the essential attributes of manhood. The feeling of individual responsibility, the knowl- edge of good and evil — this is man's burden and his glory. Intellect and conscience — these are the acqui- sitions won by humanity, and by virtue of which it is humanity. This thought need not prevent our recognition of the natural origin of these powers ; for all phenomena are alike natural. The simple automatic reflex action in which the psychic force of the lower animals ex- presses itself is unquestionably the prototype of all nervous processes. Sensations — thought — action : this is the only order in which these phenomena can arise. The senses are the only source of action. All thought tends to pass over into deeds, and no mental process is complete until it has wrought itself into action. The brain has no teacher save the sensory nerves, which bring it knowledge. Its only servant is the muscles, for by their agency alone can it reach the outside world. In its essence, the intellect is the ability to choose among many possible responses in action. Simple reflex action, or "instinct," has no choice. It acts automatically, and in its one unchang- ing way. To choose one act rather than another is an intellectual process. This power of choice brings its responsibilities. Whoever chooses must choose aright. Wrong choice carries its own destruction. The con- science is the recognition, more or less automatic, that some lines of choice are better than others, and must be followed. By "better," in this connection, we must 146 THE GROWTH OF MAN mean favoring life. That is best that "brings Hfe more abundantly." That is best which brings self- realization to the individual and to his fellows. In social life, self-seeking is not "right," even for the in- dividual. For the welfare of the one is bound up in the welfare of all. Here arises the ever-present prob- lem of the conciliation of the claims of oneself and the claims of others. To solve this problem is part of the work of the rational Hfe. All right must be relative. It may be compared to a line of direction rather than a position in space. There can be no absolute right- eousness. If there were, it would mark the limit of spiritual growth. To show the origin of conscience by the natural processes of development and competition in life is not to deny its existence or to lower its importance. All things we know are natural alike — the creation of man, or the formation of a snow-bank. All are alike supernatural ; for the nature we know is not the whole of nature. Any fact or process becomes exalted when we see it in its true relation, as inherent in the nature of things. Right conduct, so Emerson tells us, is "conformity in action to the nature of things, and the nature of- things makes it prevalent." The automatic or rational recognition of the fact that one response is better than another is an attribute of man. The stronger the conscience of man or race, the higher its place in the scale of spiritual development. The con- science is the real essence of that "something not ourselves that makes for righteousness." For that 147 THE GROWTH OF MAN "something," though "not ourselves," has its seat in the nature of man. The fulfillment of the noblest possibilities of the individual — that is right. What falls short of this is arrest of development, imperfec- tion, sin. The conscience no more than any other group of mental processes can claim infallibility. It may be distorted, dormant, ineffective. A "clear" conscience is of itself the result of normal development. Ar- rested development is none the less a fault that its subject is not aware of it. Nature absolves no sinner on the plea of ignorance of her laws. The bent twig is none the less bent that outside influences have done the bending. The tree should have grown upright, and in this it has failed. It is often said that conscience is only relative ; that what is right today will be wrong tomorrow, and there can be no absolute good but the pleasure or the utility of the individual. What is the truth of this? Let us take for illustration the customs and laws of marriage. The patriarchs of old did wrong, so the chronicles tell us ; but neither the patriarchs nor their prophets, scathing moralists though these were, counted the possession of many wives as even the least of their wrong-doings. The sin of David lay not in taking another wife, but in the murder which gave him possession of her. Our civilization now condemns polygamy, and our statutes and beliefs tend to exalt the sanctity and the unity of the home. Is marriage for life but a fashion of the time, to pass away as 148 THE GROWTH OF MAN polygamy has done, when opposite tendencies have sway? Is the one really right, and the other really wrong? What tests can we apply to this question? It can be shown, I think, that the richest human life is dependent upon the development of the home. The elevation of woman has been the keystone in modern social development. The ennobling of the wife and mother means the elevation of the race. And the elevation of women is impossible in polygamy. If this be true, the highest potentiality of the race can be brought about only through the marriage of the equal man with the equal woman. It may be literally true that polygamy, wife-beating, wife-selling, and similar practices were right in the infancy of the race. They may be right among races still in their infancy. "It is their condemnation that light has come into the world." They may be part of a stage of growth through which humanity must pass before higher things are possible. In like manner, we have gone through a slow process of development in our regard for the rights of others. To the lower animals, each other animal is an alien and an enemy. A little higher in the scale we observe the rudiments of family, or social, life; yet, in a gen- eral way, to the brute all other brutes are objects of suspicion and hatred. The earlier tribes of men killed the stranger, and doubtless ate him, too, with perfect serenity of conscience. Even the most enlightened nation of ancient times murdered and robbed all alien to their race, as a high and sacred duty toward the Lord. Their God was a god of battles. 149 THE GROWTH OF MAN Every foot of soil in Europe bears the stain of blood wantonly shed. There is not a moment in its history but has been marked by some cry of anguish. The history of the Old World has been one long story of needless suffering and needless waste. Yet the wave of brutality has been an ever-receding tide. With each century it rises never so high again. We have seen the last St. Bartholomew, the last Bloody Assizes, and perhaps the last Waterloo and the last Sedan. The old house "in Duizend Vreezen," the house of the "thousand terrors," on the market place of Rotterdam, stands as a memorial of what can never happen again. Human life is growing sacred. The history of civilization is a story of the growth of kind- ness and tolerance among men. The history of slavery teaches us the same lesson. Once to enslave a conquered enemy was to treat him with comparative kindness. Slavery is positive ad- vance from cannibalism, or from massacre. We find no condemnation of slavery in the early history of the Jews. We find none in the early history of Eu- rope. Slaves have been bought and sold in our coun- try by strong, pure men, who felt no rebuke of con- science. The heroes of the Revolutionary history were not abolitionists. Yet it is true, "for the Lord hath said it," * that the man of the future will not be a slave-holder. There can be no free men in a land where some are slaves, because whatever oppression comes to my neighbor in some sort comes to me. "He hath made of one blood 150 THE GROWTH OF MAN all the nations of the earth," and "Whatsoever ye do to one of the least of these my brethren, ye do it unto me." We know that humanity is growing toward the recognition of the need of equal opportunity for all men and women. The cardinal doctrine of democ- racy is "Equal rights for all, exclusive privileges to none." This is the tendency of human institutions. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," said our fathers a century ago, "that all men are created free and equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." And these rights cannot be denied, even though the image of God shine faintly through a dusky skin. The feeling of brotherhood is extending to the brute creation. A society for "the prevention of cruelty to animals" would have been inconceivable in the days of Front-de-Boeuf or of Coeur-de-Lion. It is inconceivable now in those countries which are a cen- * This metaphor may find its justification in the lines of Maurice Thompson : — "I am a Southerner. I love the South. I dared for her To fight from Lookout to the Sea With her proud banner over me. But from my lips thanksgiving broke When God in battle thunder spoke, And that black idol, breeding drouth And dearth of human sympathy. Throughout the sweet and sensuous South, Was, with its chains and human yoke Blown hellward from the cannon's mouth While Freedom cheered behind the smoke." 151 THE GROWTH OF MAN tury or two behind our race in the march of civiHza- tion. In the city of Havana, in the early morning, long lines of mules laden with pigs and sheep come in from the country. These animals' legs are bound, and they are slung head downward, in pairs, saddle- wise, over the back of a mule. Thus they come down from the mountains in long processions, the pigs lustily squealing, the sheep helpless and dumb. No one notes their suffering ; for in Cuba no one seems to care for an animal's pain. On Sunday afternoons in the same city of Havana, fair ladies and gay cavaliers repair to the brightest of their festivals, the bull-fight. A bull-fight is not a fight; it is simply a butchery; a fair battle has some justification. The bull, maddened by pricks and stabs, is permitted to rip up and kill some two or three feeble or blind horses, to be after- ward stabbed to death himself by a skillful butcher. A civilization which delights in scenes like this is to us simply barbarism. The growth of the race is away from such things. Cruelty to animals may not have been wrong when the race was undeveloped, and no conscience enlightened enough to condemn it. Cruelty in all its forms is a badge of immaturity, and toward neither man nor beast will the ideal man of the future be cruel. With time the feeling of brotherhood will extend to all living things, so far as community of sensation makes them akin to us. We cannot tell how far this feeling of brotherhood must go. This is certain, that our present relation toward animals, right as they may be now, will some 152 THE GROWTH OF MAN day be barbarous. It may be that the time will come when the civilized man will feel that the rights of every living creature on the earth are as sacred as his own. This end may be far away, too far for us even to dream of it ; but anything short of this cannot be perfect civilization. 'If man were what he should be," says Amiel, "he would be adored by the lower animals, toward whom he is too often the capricious and sanguinary tyrant. A day will come when our standard will be higher, our humanity more exacting. 'Homo homini lupus' said Hobbes, 'man toward men is a wolf.' The time will come when man will be humane, even toward the wolf — 'homo lupo homo! " No fact in Jewish history stands out more clearly than that of the gradual growth of the law of love. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" — even this marks a great advance over the ethics of the Ammon- ites and the children of Heth. Yet between this and the Sermon on the Mount lies the whole difference between barbarism and the highest civilization. "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy ; but I say unto you, Love your enemies ; bless them that curse you ; do good to them that hate you." "But dig down, the old unbury, thou shalt find on every stone That each age has carved the symbol of that God to them was known. Ugly shapes and brutish sometimes; but the fairest that they knew; If their sight were dim and earthward, yet their hope and aim were true. 153 ^c=^ THE GROWTH OF MAN As the gods were, so their laws were, Thor the strong might rave and steal. So through many a peaceful inlet tore the Norseman's eager keel. But a new law came when Christ came, and not blameless as before, Can we, paying Him our lip-tithes, give our lives and faiths to Thor." This question, then, is ours — Are we doing our part in the growth of the race? In the current of life are we moving forward? Do our years mark milestones in humanity's struggle toward perfection? Is the god within us so much the more unrolled, when our de- velopment- has reached its highest point? Can we transmit to our children a better heritage of brain and soul than our fathers left to us? Has the race through us gained some little in the direction of the law of love? If we have done our part in this strug- gle, our lives have not been in vain. If we have shirked and hung back, then ours is a line of retro- grade descent, and our lineage is a withered branch on the tree of humanity. To live aright is to guide our lives in the direction in which humanity is going — not all humanity, not average humanity, but that saving remnant from whose loins shall spring the better man of the future. The purpose of life is to be as near the man of the future as the man of the present can be. But we must be patient, with all our striving. The end of life is not yet. Humanity is still in its infancy, and this old world is old only in comparison with the years of 154 THE GROWTH OF MAN human life. Only through centuries on centuries of struggle and aspiration can humanity approach divinity and the law of love be supreme. Books have been written on the seven or eight "de- cisive battles" in the history of civilization. Great battles there have been ; but the stake in any battle is less than it appears. There can have been no decisive battles. The growth in humanity goes on whether battles be lost or won. The leaven of Christianity would have wrought its work in Europe if Charles Martel had been overpowered by the Moors at Poitiers. A battle may decide the fate of a man or a nation, but not the fate of humanity. Kings cannot check its growth. Priests cannot smother it. It is never buried in the dust of defeat. Slavery died not because the battle of Gettysburg was lost. It was doomed from the beginning, and its death was only a question of time. Nothing could have saved it, and the success of its defenders on the field of battle would only have postponed the end. The forces of nature are fatal to it. Even the law of gravitation and the multiplication - table would have conquered it at last. That which endures is that which brings out the higher potentialities of manhood. All else must pass away. Not long ago, in a gallery in Brussels, I saw that striking painting of Wiertz, "The Man of the Future and the Things of the Past." The man of the future has in his open right hand a handful of marshals, guns, swords, and battle-flags, the paraphernalia of 155 THE GROWTH OF MAN Napoleon's campaigns. These he is carefully exam- ining with a magnifying-glass which he holds above them in his left hand. At the same time a child be- side him looks on in open-eyed wonder that a man should care so much for such little things as these. For these banners and arms, so potent in their day, dwindle to the proportions of children's toys when seen in the long perspective of human development. The decline and fall of empires is not decline or decay. It is the breaking of the clods above the growing man. Kings and nations recede as man moves on. The love of country must merge into the higher patriotism, the love of man. Viewed as steps in the growth of ascending humanity, the changes in history have a deeper meaning to us. Our studies be- come ennobled. What have been the conditions of growth in the past? What conditions have led to de- cline and degradation? What tends to keep the in- dividual retarded and immature, and what tends to bring him farther toward the ultimate humanity? Now, as we look back over the annals of slowly advancing humanity, and behold the gradual develop- ment in wisdom, skill, self-control, and kindness, can we not also look forward along the same line to a future of ideal manhood? If Christ be the perfect man. He is perfect in this, that the potentiality of the race finds its fulfillment in Him. Seen in contrast with the perfect humanity, all else that we know is but infantile. Decay and death overtake us long before 156 THE GROWTH OF MAN we begin to realize any appreciable nearness to the sublime ideal of the Christian faith. "De Imitatione Christi" is one of the grand books of the middle ages. "Imitation of Christ," so far as the imitation is real — not in speech, not in dress, not in ceremonies, but in the inner life, — this alone can place us in close harmony with nature, and closer with our fellow-men. The expression, "love of God," is the love of good, the love of that which is abiding, in distinction from that which is merely temporal. It may reduce itself into love of the higher life, in which the progress of the race consists. For, in the words of the good Thomas a Kempis, "It is vanity to love that which is speedily passing away." In the despairing words of Guinevere may be heard the keynote of the conditions of growth: *Tt was my duty to have loved the highest 1 " "This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- self. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." What I have tried to say, T may sum up in a few words. There is an ideal manhood to which our human race must come. Every step toward this end which the individual man may take is a step won for humanity. The end rests with us. It is our part in life to work with all our strength toward the realiza- tion of ideal humanity, to add one more link to the chain which joins the man-brute of the pa.st through the man of the present to the man of the future — the man who is likest liim we have chosen for our ideal. 157 THE SAVING OF TIME * THE gods for labor give us all good things." This was part of the philosophy of the an- cient Greeks. They learned it as a fact of experience long before Epicharnus first put it into words. Over and over again each genera- tion of men tries its own experiments, and comes back to the same unvarying conclusion. In a thousand forms, in all languages, this idea has found its way into the wisdom of men. And it is a part of the same experience that the gods never give anything worth having for any other price. In their dealings with men they receive no other coinage. They know no other measure of value. Temporary loans they some- times grant, but when the day of payment comes, they do not fail to charge their due rate of interest. They never change their valuations, and they never forget. "By their long memories the gods are know." This proverb, like the other, has its source in a universal experience. Taken from the forms of classic poetry and cast into the language of today, it indicates simply the universality of law. When they spoke of the gods in phrases like these, the Greeks meant what we, in a different way, personify as the "Forces of Nature." These are the powers about us which act unceasingly, * Commencement Address, University of Indiana, 1891. 159 THE SAVING OF TIME and in ways which never change. These are the reaHties of the universe. All else is inert matter. Human knowledge consists in the recognition of these ways and forces. We learn to know them from our contact with them. Human power depends on acting in accord with such knowledge. In this lie the possi- bilities of man. He who knows the truth can trust all and fear nothing. There is no treachery in Na- ture's laws. He who strikes as the gods strike has the force of infinity in his blows. He who defies them wields a club of air. These laws are real and universal, and no man nor nation has ever accomplished anything in opposition to them. The existence of the simplest of these laws, those which, like the law of gravitation, can be ex- actly determined, men now readily admit. The man who leaps from a precipice expects to be hurt when he reaches the earth. The law of falling bodies is too obvious to leave room for doubt as to its results. But the laws of organic life are less simple than these. The laws we but half understand we hope in some way to defeat. Most complex of all laws are those of ethics and economics. Because these are not well un- derstood, and the relations of cause and effect are not easily traced, the average man believes that he is shrewd enough to break them and to escape the penalty. One of these laws of life which men are prone to disregard is that which decrees failure to him who 160 THE SAVING OF TIME seeks something for nothing, and well-being to him who pays as he goes. It is one of the truths of modern biology that progress in organic life comes through self-activity. In the last analysis most forms of advance in power or in specialization of structure among organisms re- duces itself to the saving of time. Time must be measured in terms of effort, and the essence df progress is that none should slip by without effort or change. In the embryonic stages of the various animal forms there is a period when any two, higher or lower, are alike; in this, at least, that no tests we may apply can show a difference. One element of divergence comes through the varying rates of developments. Time is saved in the one organism ; it is lost in the other. As growth goes on, the forms we call lower pass slowly through the various stages of life; their growth is altogether finished before any high degree of special- ization is reached. The embryo of the higher form passes through the same course, but with a swiftness in some degree proportioned to its future possibility. Less time is spent on non-essentials, and we may say that, through the saving of time and force, it is en- abled to push on to higher development. The gill structuje of the fish, its apparatus for purifying the blood by contact with the air dissolved in water, lasts for its whole lifetime. In most fishes there is no hint that any other mode of respiration could exist, or could be effective. The frog, a higher 161 THE SAVING OF TIME animal than the fish, sustains for part of its life a similar apparatus, but a further development sets in, and at last the inherited structure of the gills gives place to organs which insure the contact of the blood with atmospheric air. Gill structures are likewise in- herited by the bird, and mammal, and man, as well as by the frog and fish; for by the law of heredity no creature can ever wholly let go of its past. The fact that its ancestors once breathed in water can never be entirely forgotten. The same stages of growth are passed through in birds or mammals as in frogs or fishes, but long before the bird is hatched or the mammal is born, the gill structures have disappeared, or have suffered total modification. The true life of the new animal is begun at a point far beyond the highest attainment of the frog or the fish. The law of acceleration hurries the embryo along through these temporary stages, and in this fact of acceleration comes the possibility of progress. On the other hand, with animal or plant, degenera- tion and degradation result from the loss of time. Retarded development is incomplete development. Whatever narrows the activity of the individual, whatever tends to make of life — be it of animal or man — simply a matter of eating and sleeping and a continuance of the species, leads to degradation and loss of effectiveness. The creatures which rule the world are the children of struggle and storm. The sheltered life leads to inability to live without shelter. The loss of self-activity makes parasites and paupers, 162 THE SAVING OF TIME whether among animals, or plants, or men. It is one of those universal laws which act through all ages and all organisms, through the long memories of all the gods, that the creature which does not translate time into growth shall drop out of existence. And now, leaving the lower orders of life aside, I wish to consider some relations of these laws of self- activity to our own lives and the lives of our neigh- bors. "A nation," it has been wisely said, "is an as- semblage of men and women who can take care of themselves." Whatever influence strengthens this power in the individual makes the nation strong; and, conversely, the presence of every man or woman who does not, or cannot, take care of himself, casts an additional burden on the rest. This power of self- support goes with the saving of the individual time. Franklin calculated that if every man and woman should spend three or four hours each day in useful occupation, poverty would disappear, and the after- noon of each day and the whole afternoon of our lives could be reserved for physical, mental, or spiritual im- provement. That we cannot thus have the afternoon to ourselves is due to the fact that we are paying our neighbor's debts. Our neighbor has taken our time. We are doing more than our share of the drudgery that hinders growth, and this because others in the same community are doing too little for their own development. The end of the social organism is fullness of life for the individual. The forms of society avail nothing if 163 THE SAVING OF TIME they do not bring larger life to the individual units. Whatever is not good for the individual man, cannot be good for humanity. We hear every day allusions to the wrongs of labor, to the justice which never comes to the poor man, and to the favor which always follows the rich. We hear of the industrial crimes by which the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. We see every day the ad- vertisements of the poor man's friend, paid for out of the poor man's money, and all of them seem to tell the same story. It is the desire of the poor man's friend to handle the poor man's money, and his chief quali- fication is the fact that he has never yet shown any skill in handling his own. We know very well that these wrongs of labor are not imaginary. It happens too often that those who are within may bar the doors against those who are without. We know, too, that under human laws it too often occurs that those the world calls fortunate have the luck of foxes and wolves, and can show no moral claim to the game they are devouring. Much that we call money-making is not the addition of wealth. It is money-transferring, not money-gain- ing. It is the process of making slaves of others, by turning into the pocket of the one that which is right- fully earned by the brains or the hands of others. Some day this manner of "making money," whether practiced by the "predatory rich," or the equally "predatory poor," will become impossible. It will pass under the ban as blackmail and highway robbery 164 THE SAVING OF TIME have passed. When it is condemned by public opinion the law will condemn it, too ; for our statutes are only- attempts at the formal expression of such opinion. Industrial warfare is not competition. It is the strug- gle of devices to stifle competition. Competition is rivalry, to be sure, but rivalry under conditions of fair play. Its function is to secure the best service — to put the right man in the right place. That one man should devour another is not competition. It is war. The abolition of private warfare within a nation has been one of the most important steps in human civili- zation. The abolition of private war in industrial relations will be another step scarcely lower in im- portance. But this must come with the growth of human wisdom, by which destructive and dishonest practices may be condemned. It cannot be brought about by the application of force. It cannot follow any form of arbitrary legislation. All statutes must be of equal application; for in taking away from the barons, of whatever kind — feudal or industrial, — the right of private war, the people are bound to guaran- tee that private war shall not be waged against them. With all that may be said of the injustice of our social order, there are not many whose place in it is not fixed by their own character and training. In America today most men find that the position awarded them is the only one possible. Accident and misfortune aside, not many are poor who could ever have been otherwise. To Robinson Crusoe alone on his desert island, as Dr. Warner has shown, most 165 THE SAVING OF TIME forms of misery we know could have come if he had developed their causes. Weakness and poverty are not wholly caused by social conditions. Even with no social system at all, folly, vice, or crime will always bring weakness, misery, poverty. Misery, in general, is nature's protest against personal degradation. No man needs the help of others in order to degrade himself. To be poor in worldly goods is not all of poverty. Such poverty may be in itself no evil. Wealth is a costly thing. Many a man is poor because he has intelligently refused to pay the price of wealth. He has turned his time and effort into channels which brought him spiritual or mental rather than economic gain. But such as these are satisfied with their bar- gain, and not one of them is aware that any wrong has been done to him. He has what he has paid for, and asks for nothing else; and we who know him as our neighbor never think of him as poor. He could only wish for wealth as a means of securing a more perfect poverty. "The gods for labor give us all good things," but not all to the same man. Each must choose for him- self, and it is a happy condition that each one who has earned the right to choose is satisfied with his choice. Those who have not earned this right must, from the nature of things, be discontented. The man who has wasted his time must take the last choice. He comes in for the little that is left. With the leisure of life all 166 THE SAVING OF TIME spent in advance, the interest on borrowed time must be paid under the hardest of creditors. A great problem of our day, which engages the best thoughts of the strongest minds, is this : How can the power of self-support be restored to those who have lost it? How are those who swim on the crest of the wave to lend a hand to the submerged tenth who struggle ineffectively in waters which only grow deeper as our civilization moves on? What can the strong do for the weak? "The rich man," it is often said, "must know how the poor man lives," for in keeping together is the safety of humanity. But even more pertinent than this is the other saying, that, in his turn, "the poor man must learn to know how the rich man works." It is true enough that there are among us some rich men who never work, some few supported splendidly in idleness, at public cost, the reward of the good for- tune, or the hard work, or the successful trickery of some ancestor. These gilded paupers are not many in America, after all, — some "four hundred," are there not, in each of our great cities? And the number is not increasing; for their hold on inherited power grows constantly weaker. They are but froth on the waves of humanity, and the burden of carrying them is not one of the heaviest the American citizen has to bear. Their life in our country is an anachronism, as they themselves are not slow to recognize. Their place, and their time, is in feudal Europe, and not in the America of to-day. 167 THE SAVING OF TIME In the old times the poor man worked, and the rich man was idle ; the poor man paid the taxes which supported the gentleman in pauperism. "The rich," indeed, "grew richer, and the poor poorer." The poor man worked on with an ever-decreasing vitality, because work absorbed his strength, and he could not direct his own forces. Work without self-consent is not growth, but slavery. In like manner, the rich man slipped into degeneracy, because his existence was purposeless, and he was conscious of no need of self-support. The man of leisure, whether rich or poor, is in the body politic like carbonic acid in the air — it supports neither combustion nor respiration. His presence is poisonous, though in himself he may be productive of neither harm nor good. There are some rich men, however, who have the right to be rich. They have paid the price, and they are entitled to enjoy their bargain. He who saves the toil of a thousand men has a right to some share of their earnings. Sooner or later, we may be sure, this share will be no more and no less than has been fairly earned. The forces of nature are hemmed in by no patent. No man can have a perpetual monopoly; and, sooner or later, the knowledge of the one becomes the property of all. The power of capital does not lie in its own force, but in the force of the brains which must, sooner or later, take possession of it, and to which labor un- directed by mind must ever stand in the relation of a slave. Money alone has no power. "The fool and his 168 THE SAVING OF TIME money are soon parted." Capital is only an instru- ment. It is effective only when it represents a single will in action. The decision of one man has greater force than the feeble or clashing desires of thousands. It is not true that wealth is the result of "labor applied to the forces of nature." The gaining of wealth is the result of wise direction or of skillful manipulation. In the long run, the majority of em- ployers of labor are eaten out of house and home by employees who have no stake in the result, and, there- fore, nothing to lose from failure. The little boy in the child's story* says : "My feet, they haul me round the house; They hoist me up the stairs; I only have to steer them, and They ride me everywheres." The average man's view of capital is of the same kind. He underestimates the importance of the steer- ing part of the work, without which no labor yields wealth, and without which capital is ineffective. If he understood the value of wise direction of effort he would cease to be an average man. The industrial dangers which threaten our country come not primarily from the power of the rich, but from the weakness of the poor. Too often the poor are taking to themselves a leisure which they have never earned. The price they have paid in life is the price of poverty. If part of it goes for whisky and tobacco, the rest must go for rags and dirt. Even ♦From "The Lark," San Francisco. 169 THE SAVING OF TIME the lowest reward of labor well spent will buy a happy home. But, without frugality and temperance, no rate of wages and no division of profits can avail to save a man from poverty; and the waste of one man injures not only himself, but carries harm to all his neighbors, joined to him in disastrous industrial alliance. We are told that "poverty is the relentless hell" that yawns beneath civil society. So it is ; and a simi- lar comparison may be made in the case of the penalty which follows the violation of any other law of ethics and economics. "By their long memories the gods are known." Under their laws we live, and beneath us forever yawn their penalties. But we may change this metaphor a little. May it not be that this yawning, "relentless hell," is due in part to the presence among us of the yawning, relentless horde of men who would gain something for nothing? In whatever form of industry this influence is felt, it must come as indus- trial depression. The essential cause of poverty is the failure to adapt means to ends. A woman in the Tennessee mountains explained once the condition of the "poor whites" in these words: "Poor folks have poor ways." That their ways are poor is the cause of their economic weakness. And again it is written : "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." Without skill to bring about favorable results, the poor are constantly vic- tims of circumstances. These conditions of their lives lead to reduced vitality, lowered morality, and loss of self-respect. Effective life demands, as Huxley tells 170 THE SAVING OF TIME us, "absolute veracity of thought and action." Those who lack this will always be poor, whatever our social or industrial conditions, unless they become slaves to the will of others, or unless their weakness be placed as a burden on collective effort. It is certainly true that, even though each man in America were indus- trious to the full measure of his powers, the poor would still "be with us." There will always be im- practicable and incapable men, those who put forth effort enough, but who can do nothing for others that others are likely to value. There will still be the sick and the broken, the weak and the unfortunate. But if these were our only poor, all men would be their neighbors. Statistics have shown that, of ten persons in distress in our great cities, the condition of six is due to intemperance, idleness, or vice, three to old age and weakness following a thriftless or improvident youth, and one to sickness, accident, or loss of work. The unfortunate poor are but a small fraction of the great pauperism. Were there no pretenders, all who travel on the road to Jericho should be Good Samari- tans. Why not? The impulse to charity is the com- mon instinct of humanity ; but the priest and Levite of our day have been so many times imposed upon that all distress is viewed with suspicion. The semblance of misfortune is put on for the sake of the oil, and the wine, and the pieces of silver. We "pass by on the other side" because in our times we have learned that even common charity may become a crime. We have seen the man who has "fallen by the wayside" put vitriol 171 THE SAVING OF TIME in his children's eyes that their distress may appeal to us yet more strongly. We have learned that to give food to starving children thereby helps to condemn them to a life of misery and crime. To give some- thing for nothing is to help destroy the possibility of self-activity. And money gained without effort is ill-gotten gain. A blind man, to whom some one of- fered money, once said: "We should never give money to a blind man; for he needs all the strength he can have to help him compete with men who can see." Ill-timed help destroys the rationality of life. If the laws of life were changed so that the fool and his money were less easily parted, money would be wasted still more foolishly than now. Money given outright is as dangerous as a gift of opium, and its results are not altogether different. Only the very strong can receive it with safety. Only the very earnest can repay with interest the loans of the gods. Unearned rewards cut the nerve of future effort. The man who receives a windfall forever after watches the wind. There is but one good fortune to the earnest man. This is opportunity; and sooner or later opportunity will come to him who can make use of it. Undeserved help brings the germs of idleness. Even nature is too generous for perfect justice. She gives to vagabonds enough to perpetuate vagabondage. The strength of New England lay in this — that on her rocky hills only the industrious man could make a living, and with the years the habit of industry became ingrained in the New England character. This 172 THE SAVING OF TIME strength today is seen wherever New England influ- ences have gone. The great West was built with the savings of New England. Go to the prairies of Iowa, where the earth gives her choicest bounty for the least effort, over and over again you will find that these rich farms bear mortgages given to some farmer on the Massachusetts hills. The poor land of the mountains, worked by a man who gave his time and his work, yields enough to pay for the rich land, too. The Iowa farmer must work with equal diligence if he is to hold his own against the competition of Massachusetts. Not long ago, I crossed the State of Indiana on the railway train. It makes no difference where or in what direction. It was a bright day in April, when the sun shone on the damp earth, and when one could almost hear the growing of the grass. There are days and days like this, which every farm boy can remember — days which brought to him the delight of living; but to the thrifty farmer these days brought also their duties of plowing, and planting, and sowing. The hope of the spring was in all this work, and no one thought of it as drudgery. The days were all too short for the duties which crowded, and the right to rest could only come when the grain was in the ground, where the forces of nature might wake it into life. An hour in the growing spring is worth a week in the hot midsummer ; and he must be a poor farmer, indeed, who does not realize this. And I thought that day of the freedom of the farmer. He trades with nature through no middle- 173 THE SAVING OF TIME man. Nowhere is forethought and intelligence better paid than in dealing with Mother Nature. She is as honest as eternity, and she never fails to meet the just dues of all who have claims upon her. She returns some fifty-fold, some hundred-fold, for all that is intrusted to her ; never fifty- fold to him who deserves a hundred. Just then the train stopped for a moment at a flag- station — a village called Cloverdale, a name suggestive of sweet blossoms and agricultural prosperity. A commercial traveler, dealing in groceries and tobacco, got off; a crate of live chickens was put on, and the cars started again. The stopping of a train was no rare event in that village ; for it happens two or three times every day. The people had no welcome for the commercial traveler, no tears were shed over the de- parture of the chickens; yet on the station steps I counted forty men and boys who were there when the train came in. Farm boys, who ought to have been at work in the fields; village boys, who might have been doing something somewhere — every interest of economics and aesthetics alike calling them away from the station and off to the farms. Two men attended to the business of the station. The solitary traveler went his own way. The rest were there because they had not the moral strength to go anywhere else. They were there on the station steps, dead to all life and hope, with only force enough to stand around and "gape." At my destination I left the train, and going to the 174 THE SAVING OF TIME hotel, I passed on a street corner the noisy vender of a rheumatism cure. Sixty men and boys who had no need for cures of any kind — for they were already dead — were standing around with mouths open and brains shut, engaged in killing time. I was sorry to see that many of these were farmers. All this time their neglected farms lay bathed in the sunlight, the earth ready to rejoice at the touch of a hoe. Not long ago I had occasion to cross a village square. I saw many busy men upon it, men who had a right to be there, because they were there on their own business. Each one takes a part in the great task of caring for the world when he is able and willing to care for himself. On the corner of the square a wan- dering vagrant, with a cracked accordion, set forth strains of doleful music. The people stood around him, like flies around a drop of molasses. An hour later I returned. The accordion and its victims were still there, as if chained to the spot. The birdlime of habitual idleness was on their feet, and they could not get away. They will never get away. The mark of doom is on them. They will stay there forever. In these days, the farmer and the workingman have many grievances of which they did not know a gen- eration ago. The newspapers and the stump-speakers tell us of these wrongs, and, from time to time, huge unions and alliances are formed to set them right. I go back to the old farm in Western New York on which I was born — the farm my father won from the forest, and on which he lived in freedom and inde- 175 THE SAVING OF TIME f pendence, knowing no master, dreading no oppression. I find on that farm today tenants who barely make a living. I go over the farm ; I see unpruned fruit trees, wasted forest trees, farm implements rusting in the rain and sun, falling gates, broken wagons, evidences of wasted time and unthrifty labor. When one sees such things, he must ask how much of the oppression of the farmer is the fault of the times and how much is the fault of the man. It may be in part the poorness of his ways, rather than the aggression of his neighbors, which has plunged him into poverty. In very truth, it is both; but the one may be the cause of the other. It is only the born slave that can be kept in slavery. If a farmer spend a day in the harvest-time in efforts to send a fool to the Legislature, or a knave to Congress, should he complain if the laws the fools and knaves make add to his own taxes? If he stand all day in the public square spellbound by a tramp with an accordion; or, still worse, if he lounge about on the sawdust floor of a saloon, talking the stuff we agree to call politics, never reading a book, never thinking a thought above the level of the sawdust floor, need he be surprised if his opinions do not meet with respect? I can well remember the time when the farmer was a busy man. There is many a farm today on which he is still busy. It does not take a close observer to recognize these farms. You can tell them as far as you can see. Their owners are in alliance with the forces of nature. The gods are on their side, and they only 176 THE SAVING OF TIME ask from politicians that they keep out of their sun- Hght. Their butter sells for money; their oats are clean; their horses are in demand; whatever they touch is genuine and prosperous. The cattle call the farmer up at dawn ; the clover needs him in the morn- ing ; the apples and potatoes in the afternoon ; the corn must be husked at night. A busy man the successful farmer is. Being busy, he finds time for everything. He reads "bound books"; he enjoys the pleasures of travel; he educates his family; he keeps intelligent watch on the affairs of the day. He does not find time to stand on the station steps in the middle of the afternoon to watch a thousand trains go by on a thousand consecutive days. He carries no handicap load of tobacco and whisky. He goes to the county- seat when he has business there. He goes with clean clothes, and comes back with a clean conscience. He has not time to spend each seventh day on the court- house square talking the dregs of scandal and politics with men whose highest civic conception is balanced by a two-dollar bill ; nor has he time to waste om nos- trum-venders or vagrants with accordions. I hear the farmers complaining — and most justly complaining — of high taxes; but no duty on iron was ever so great as the tax he pays who leaves his mow- ing-machine unsheltered in the storm. The tax on land is high; but he pays a higher tax who leaves his meadows to grow up to whiteweed and thistles. The tax for good roads is high; but a higher toll is paid by the farmer who goes each week to town in mud 177 THE SAVING OF TIME knee-deep to his horses. There is a high tax on personal property; but it is not so high as the tax on time which is paid by the man who spends his Satur- days loitering about the village streets, or playing games of chance in some "dead-fall" saloon, j Mowing-machines, thrashers, harvesters, and all the array of labor-saving contrivances of an altruistic age serve nothing if they are not rightly used. They are burdens, not helps, if the time they save be not taken in further production. Labor-saving machinery be- comes the costliest of luxuries if the time it saves be turned into idleness or dissipation. I know a hundred farmers in Southern Indiana who lose regularly one-sixth of their time by needless visits to the county seat, and in making these visits need- lessly long. The farmer's time is his capital; its use is his income. One-sixth of his time means one-sixth of his income, or else his whole time is not worth saving. It is this sixth which represents the difference between poverty and prosperity. If this wasted sixth were saved by every farmer in Indiana, the State would be an industrial paradise. To have lived in Indiana would be an education in itself. People would come from the ends of the earth to see the land which has solved the labor question. But it may be that their own valuation is a just one. Perhaps there are some farmers whose time has no economic value. There are other such in every com- munity and in every line of life. The idiot, the in- sane, the broken, the dilettante, the criminal. For 178 THE SAVING OF TIME some of these great hospitals are maintained, because they can be more cheaply supported in public lodgings at the common cost. Shall we add the weary farmer to this list? Why not have a great State hospital for all men whose time is worthless — a great square court- yard, covered with sawdust, with comfortable dry- goods boxes, where they might sit for the whole day, and the whole year, talking politics or "playing pedro" to the music of the hand-organ, watching the trains go by? The rest of the world could then go on with the world's work, with some addition, no doubt, to the taxes, but with corresponding gain in having the streets open, the saloons closed, the demagogue silenced, and the pastures free from weeds and thistles. The frost is a great economic agent as a spur to human activity. There are lands where the frost never comes, and where not one-sixth, but six-sixths, of the time of almost every man is devoted to any pur- pose rather than that of attending to his own affairs. It is nature's great hospital for the incurably lazy. The motto of the tropics is summed up in one word, "Manana," "tomorrow." Tomorrow let us do it; we must eat and sleep today. "Mariana por la maiiana," one hears over and over again at every suggestion in- volving the slightest effort. It is too warm today; the sunshine is too bright; the shade too pleasant; — "Maiiana" let it be. This is the land where nothing is ever done. "Why should we do things when to rest and not to do is so much pleasanter? There is the endless succession of tomorrows. They have come on 179 THE SAVING OF TIME to us since eternity, and surely they will continue to come. Let us rest in the shade, and wait for the next tomorrow." I have not meant that one word of this should be a special criticism of the American farmer. It is still broadly true that the farmers as a class are the sanest of our people, the least infected by follies and with most faith in the natural relations of cause and effect. The farmers have not yet come to feel that their ad- vancement must be assured through the repression of others. They have not yet turned from nature to legis- lation in their search for wealth. The farmer deals with the earth directly. It is the earth, not society, that owes him a living. Of all callings, his is least related to the conventionalities of man. That he has scorned these conventionalities, that he has "hated the narrow town and all its fashions," has been the source of some of his misfortunes. For the town is nearer the center of legislation, and it has not been slow to cast burdens upon others for its own purposes. But if the farmer is the victim of unequal taxation or of unjust discriminations, as he certainly is, it is his duty and his privilege to make matters right. Even though sometimes he acts blindly — with the discrimination of the "bull in a china shop," — as when he votes for bad roads, cheap men, cheap money, and crippled public schools, it is not a source of discouragement. Men in cities do even worse than this. The farmer will know better when he has looked more deeply into the matter. 180 THE SAVING OF TIME But whatever the repeal of bad legislation may do, the primal necessity remains. "He who by the plow would thrive, Himself must either hold or drive." Whoever will prosper in any line of life must save his own time and do his own thinking. He must spend neither time nor money which he has not earned. He must not do in a poor way what others do in a better. The change of worse men for better is always painful — it is often cruel. But it must come. The remedy is to make men bettter, so that there need be no change. The rise of the common man which has been going on all these centuries demands that the common man must rise. This is the ^'change from status to con- tract," to use the words of Sir Henry Mayne, which is the essential fact in modern progress. But this rise has its sorrows as well as its joys. Man cannot use the powers and privileges of civiHzation without shar- ing its responsibilities. In the progress of civilization every form of labor must tend to become a profession. The brain must control the hand. The advance of civilization means the dominance of brain. It means the elimination of unskilled work. The man who does not know, nor care to know, how farming is carried on, cannot re- main a farmer. Whatever human laws may do, the laws of the gods will not leave him long in possession of the ground. If he does not know his business, he must let go of the earth, which will be taken by some 181 THE SAVING OF TIME one who does. In the words of a successful farmer whom I know, "Let other people's affairs alone, mind your own business, and you will have prosperity." If not in the fullest measure, it will still be all that you have paid for, and thus all that you deserve. I have wished to teach a single lesson, true alike to all men — ^the lesson of the saving of time. To you, as students, I may say: The pathway of your lives lies along the borders of the Land of Mariana. It is easy to turn into it and to lose your- selves among its palms and bananas. That thus far in your lives you are still on the right way is shown by your presence here today. Were it not so, you would be here tomorrow. You would wait for your educa- tion till the day that never comes. Different men have different powers. To come to the full measure of these powers, constitutes success in life. But power is only relative. It depends on the factor of time. With time enough, we could, any of us, do anything. With this great multiplier, it matters little what the other factor is. Any man would be all men, could he have time enough. With time enough, all things would be possible. With eternity, man be- comes as the gods. But our time on earth is not eternity. We can do but little at the most. And the grim humorist reminds us "we shall be a long time dead." So every hour we waste carries away its life, as the drop of falling water carries away the rock. Every lost day takes away its cubit from our stature. So let us work while yet it is day, and when the J82 THE SAVING OF TIME evening falls we may rest under the shade of the palm- trees. He who has been active has earned the right to sleep; and when we have finished our appointed work, "the rest is silence." The toilsome, busy earth on which the strength of our lives has been spent shall be taken away from us. It shall be "rolled away like a scroll," giving place to that eternity which has no limit, nor environment, and whose glory is past all understanding. 183 KNOWING REAL MEN* IN a recent address, Professor William James has told us that the best result of a college edu- cation should be that you should "know a good man when you see him." In other words, it should teach something of the relative value of aims in life; to know good work from bad, and to ensure for ourselves, in some one direction at least, a grasp on a worthy ideal. Our next question is this: Has your college educa- tion given this power to you? A recent writer in the American Magazine maintains that his college course never gave it to him. He did not know good when he saw it. Many others would admit the same thing if the question ever occurred to them. The writer just mentioned claims that from his college course he gained no perspective. Near things bank larger than distant ones; accidents of the day outrank the great things of the past and the future. This he finds true from every point of view. For example, as a college graduate, Mark Hanna seemed to him a bigger man than Charlemagne. Later in life when the perspective became clearer he saw the difference and wished that he had made Charlemagne's acquaintance earlier. In his geography he says the map of Indiana and that of Montana covered each a page, and the one was as large *Graduating Address to the Class of 1908, Stanford University. 185 KNOWING REAL MEN as the other. New Jersey was as big as California and Maine as large as Australia. Later, when he crossed the Rocky Mountains, he found that the map did not do Montana justice. Its territory would make six states the size of Indiana. This didn't matter much in this particular case, but the same distortion of values appeared in everything he thought he knew. From this he concluded that his own college education was largely a failure. It did not meet Professor James' definition. He did not learn to know a good man when he saw him. He did not know things as they really are in their relations, one thing to another. When a wise man says a true thing, we can all say it after him. We wonder why we had not said it before ourselves. We see at once how hard it is to know a good man anyhow. If you as students take this matter to heart you will see the faults in your own education ; you cannot tell the best that lies about you. The graduates of other colleges have the same defect of vision, and our whole system of higher edu- cation is perverted in the same way. There was once a banker in the days of wildcat cur- rency who had a wonderful skill in detecting counter- feits. He acquired this skill not by studying counter- feits; he studied good money. Whatever was not good money to him was not money at all to him. It was mere waste paper, not worth even the name of counterfeit. So to detect error one must study truth ; the rest is waste and rubbish. To know a good man when you see him, you must study good men. All 186 KNOWING REAL MEN short of this is bad. To know good work you must study good work. The rest is frivoHty and common- place. This is a time to search our hearts, to size up our own promise of the future. Do you know a good man when you see him? Do you, after four years at Stanford, know what is really worth while? For ex- ample, some of you know, I presume, the best record for a quarter mile dash, for a race over hurdles, the record distance of a broad jump or a hammer throw. Some of you know a winning hand at poker, some how to tune up a rollicking song, some the manipula- tion of a skirt dance, some the framing of a sonnet, some the ideals of a Greek philosopher, some the art of inventing dynamos^ some the theory of ions and electrons, some the measurement of electric charges, some the secret of knowing equities, some the investi- gation of the energies of life. Some are prepared for the next ball, some for entrance into a profession; some to break into politics, some, perhaps, to adorn the front of a tobacco store. Can you tell which of these is worth while? There is an abundance of good work done at Stan- ford all the time. How many of us know the best thing, the best ten things, or any of the best ten things done by any Stanford man in the last ten years ? How many of you know the best things done here at Stan- ford in the year just past? Can you tell which of your number is best worth while; which one will be wise, sound, clean and efficient, after the struggles 187 KNOWING REAL MEN and roundups of twenty or thirty years? Which one will then be leader of your class, not by the ballot, which is an emotional test, when it is not a selfish one, but by virtue of his crystallized character, of his own innate strength, of his being through and through a good man and a man who makes good? Sooner or later you should know a good man when you see him, do you know this same man now? If you do, it is well and good ; this homily is wasted. If you do not, whose fault is it? Is it yours or ours? Or shall we modestly and justly divide the blame between our stu- dents and our teachers? Surely all share in the re- sponsibility, as we all suffer in the failure in result. There are many factors which tend to destroy the perspective in college life. These two bulk largest: The intrusion of the outside world — and the exaltation of side issues, the minor incidents, the byplay of boy- hood, to the injury of the real business of the college. The outside world intrudes through its vulgar stand- ards of morality, its eagerness for money getting, its instinct for sensationalism, its chase for vulgar pleas- ures and unearned and unreal joys. We cannot claim in fact that the standard of the average college man is continuously higher than that of other men ; that he bears a price so high that the politician and the bribe- giver cannot reach him. We cannot claim that the average college man bears a loftier standard of ideals than other men of equal native ability. Here and there is one in whom our best ambitions are made real. Such a one stands out above other college men and in 188 KNOWING REAL MEN him is our hope and our justification. But he must have been a rare man to begin with, and only the rare man can grow to be a better man after he leaves the college. A man can go through college and receive nothing of University ideals. There are many men who perform our college tasks, who meet our require- ments, who pass our examinations, who receive our degrees, and yet who never know at all what it is all about. The finest poetry, the noblest philosophy, the loftiest enthusiasm, finds them dumb and cold. Their heart is in the market place, or worse, in the vaudeville theatre, not in the Academe. The outside world, through its worst phase, the call for pleasure, holds them in its grasp. Perhaps we cannot help this. The very usefulness of the college, its popularity, its re- spectability, all growing by leaps and bounds, are sources of danger. They appeal to the unfit as well as to the fit ; they all extend invitations to the degener- ate as well as to the genius. And too often the college itself is deceived in this matter. It mistakes wealth and popularity and populousness for success. Why should we care for numbers, we University men? Why should we rejoice in popularity? Why should we welcome advertising? Surely none of these helps the college, none of them strengthens the hold of the college on the lives of men. In another way, less dangerous but still often disas- trous, the outside world infringes. This is through the spirit of money getting. What will the college do for me? It must raise my salary or I will have noth- 189 KNOWING REAL MEN ing of it. Trai-ning for live work does increase a man's salary. Thus it often becomes a means to this alone. Standing all alone, this is a petty end. To be sure, some source of income is the scholar's necessity. Every man worth while should earn his own living and enough more to pay his taxes and to do his part in the life of the community. The world owes no man a living so far as I know, and those who think it does and depend on collecting it, as a rule, have a deservedly hard time. But for the rest, money does not mean success. Stanford has stood from the first for prepara- tion for success in life, but of this success a financial surplus is only an incident — a minor factor^ — ^the small- est part of the whole. Again, the world, as we all see it, with its traditional associates, the flesh and the devil, makes its encroach- ments on the academic life in other guises, some more dangerous than the hope for financial gain. College spirit, like the mantle of charity, covers its multitude of sins. Much that passes as college spirit is the poor- est kind of vulgarity, the inspiration of the street, the bleachers, the saloon. Test your college spirit by this definition given by a Stanford alumnus, three years ago, and you may know whether it is genuine or not : "In loyalty to Stanford — to the whole university — by word and deed, always, by silence, even, when speech were disloyal; in honoring Stanford people to the measure of their loyalty and no more; in building with the builders through faith in the Stanford plan; in making every best effort spell Stanford before an- 190 KNOWING REAL MEN other name; in planting no seed in Stanford ground without hope of flower somewhere; and for the sake of these things reverencing the sentiment that gave the Stanford opportunity— therein Hes the beginning, but not the end, of the Stanford Spirit." If your college spirit is not the real thing, if it is counterfeit, it is no spirit at all. It is nothing at all but a bit of noisy shamming. There is no counterfeit money; what is not good money is not money at all. So with college spirit, what is not genuine is nothing. So with one's efforts in life ; what is not honest, what is not real, has no existence. The real Stanford— the Stanford you should know- is known by its ideals and its results. It is not the Stanford of the man on the street, of the bartender in a Cardinal saloon, nor even of the rooter on the bleachers at the great football game. The fate of Stanford depends on the moral victory of the clean mind and the stout heart. For part of your shortcomings, if you have any, the college teachers are to blame. We have been too worldly, too little serious. We have let in too much of the outside world and introduced you too often to its agents. We have let Mark Hanna displace Char- lemagne. We have made a science a railroad map in which our own line shows straight and large among feeble and meandering rivals. The other great source of loss of perspective is in the exaltation of what we call student activities. By this we mean not the activities of the student, nor even 191 KNOWING REAL MEN the student's natural and normal by-play, but profes- sionalism, with students as performers. Twenty years ago all of us welcomed football, track meets, and all other forms of intercollegiate athletics because it seemed to lay stress on physical betterments. We believe in sound minds and sound bodies, and the encouragement of all out-of-door sports seemed to tend in that direction. But the outcome has been very different from the anticipation. In each college two or three dozen of racers and gladiators trained out of all proportion, professionals in every sense, save that they are paid in gratitude and notoriety instead of money, practically monopolize our athletics. The rest of us as scrubs and weaklings worship from afar with noisy resonance. Our heroes of the day in the fierce light of publicity are exposed to praise or blame out of all proportion to their faults, their merits, or their achievements. Their duty is to win games, ours to show loyalty, and that by talk and yelling. And the tumult and the shouting has been organized into a concerted system as foolish as it is futile. I have never heard of a game ever won by the rooters, and it would not be honest sport if such were the case. I believe in athletics, in sturdy, virile athletics, even in intercollegiate athletics, as means to an end — the great end of making one's brain and body work in unison. There is no training much more essential than training in physical manliness, but no part of our present system contributes much to this end, while manifold evils appear on every hand, and most notably 192 KNOWING REAL MEN in the distortion of ideals in college life. As the red- coat bully in his boots kept Thackeray from seeing the Queen of England, so does the figure of the stalwart, athlete keep us from recognizing the real college men. We don't know a good man when we see him because we don't see him. Figures of exaggerated mediocrity fill the center of the stage. It is no answer to this to say that the same condi- tions exist in all our colleges, that your higher educa- tion is all in the same boat, and these evils are less in the California Universities than in any other of our great colleges. If this is true, but the more is the pity, the greater the need of a new revival of learning, a new revival of religion in the true meaning of the word, in the very heart of wisdom's chosen centers. The great Eastern colleges are feeling this. They are trying their best to exalt the real college men. They print names of honor students in larger and larger letters. It is the dig and the grind, after all, the man who does his work when the work is due, who stands for the college of the future. The athlete counts only as brains and courage are counted. For- tunately brains and courage often go with athletic skill and strength — but not always. The alumnus who does things worth while, who lives a gentle and a sturdy life, is the man who gives joy to his alma mater. Only the force of tradition, the inertia of institutions can excuse a college for granting its degrees to any inferior kind. A man is either a man or else he is not much of anything. There is nothing worth notice 193 KNOWING REAL MEN in a counterfeit. No institution can live, none deserves to live, unless from time to time it can be born again ; Stanford is ready today for a new birth and a new dedication. It is for you to help give it. It is for all of us to agonize toward it and when our young Uni- versity, already too old, is reborn, you will know and I shall know, and every true Stanford man and woman will know a good man when he sees him. 194