Qass Book Author Title Imprint i&~<»l»-l 9PO T/ie Higher Education and Progress Orrin Leslie Elliott ::5M THE HIGHER EDUCATION AND PROGRESS ADDRESS AT THE THIRTEENTH ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY, MAY l8TH, 1904 BY ORRIN LESLIE ELLIOTT REGISTRAR OF THE UNIVERSITY ^ STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS eirr WRS. WOODROW W1U0H WOV. 25. 1^39 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS THE HIGHER EDUCATION AND PROGRESS THE steady march of material progress is one of the most impressive phenom- ena in human history. There are some lost arts — arts practiced by peoples of a high degree of civilization whose names are all but forgotten. There has been great destruction of the handiwork of man — of his art, his lit- erature, his palaces, his monuments, his ac- cumulations everywhere. Yet how little of material advancement has been lost. Man has set himself resolutely to the task of mas- tering the world. He has studied its constitu- tion, experimented with its forces, uncovered its secrets. The results are so familiar, so a part of our every day environment, that we hardly grasp the marvelous unfolding to which the ages bear testimony. From the first rude grappling with wind and wave to the latest triumphs of wireless telegraphy and 3 The Higher Education and Progress the modern battleship there is comprehended an almost infinite advance. From Archimedes to Copernicus, from Galileo to Watt and Stephenson, from Gutenberg to Morse and Bell and the host of inventors and discover- ers who have made our later times illustrious, there is one continuous record of achievement. From a period long antedating the Christian era to the beginning of its twentieth century there has been no break in this progress. What one civilization accomplished another inherits. The position reached by one gener- ation becomes the starting-point for the next. It has been a progress that has ministered to the wants of man, making the conditions of life ever more agreeable, and leaping ahead to open wider and wider avenues of desire. It has made luxuries common, brought widely separated countries together, provided means of travel and rapid communication, im- proved dwellings, sanitation, clothing, and food. Through its wealth and leisure it has reacted upon science and philosophy, art and literature, promoting intelligence, refinement, and the endless quest for human welfare. Butchery and wars of conquest, cruel impris- onments, persecution for opinion's sake, op- pression of woman — these have waned, while the humane virtues in individuals and states, 4 The Higher Education and Progress the care for others and especially for the unfortunate, forbearance, toleration, sym- pathy, kindliness, have waxed and diffused themselves throughout the civilized world. The Brotherhood of Man and the Federation of the World are at last brought within the range of human vision. This picture is a perfectly real one of the world in which we live. Who can contem plate it without a thrill of pride and exulta- tion ? Surely it is a good world in which to be and to work. Yet this is not all of the picture. It is not the part which appeals to many ; and in that other part there is enough to make all of us pause. Civilization builds our cities, it gives us ventilated, electric-lighted, steam-heated houses ; but it cuts down our forests and turns us from outdoors and independence to shops and dependence. It gives us hospitals, skilled physicians and surgeons ; it also pro- vides the rasped nerves and weakened consti- tutions which need them. It brings leisure, aesthetic pleasures, wide knowledge, oppor- tunities of travel ; but it cute us off from the elemental forces. It gives us mental poise, nice discrimination, critical taste, but God and duty are less real. It gives us wealth and the power of wealth, but not always the ability 5 The Higher Education and Progress to escape from the artificial living, the im- moral idleness which wealth invites. Con- sider the crass display of riches, the corruption in government, the easy tolerance of vice, the sordidness of much living. How much has this unprecedented material advancement ac- complished for the permanent betterment of the world ? Have we progressed so far from the time of Plato and Socrates ? Is the ideal Republic so much nearer realization than it was two thousand years ago ? What glad- Bomeness there was in Greece ! How free the human spirit ! In what an empyrean of beauty, art, eloquence, philosophy the Hellen- ist exulted ! In Attica art, literature, philos- ophy soared to heights which have never been outreached. In Rome government was more resplendent than the modern world has boasted. Yet it is the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. One after another the best of ancient civilizations have passed away. Egypt, Babylon, Phoenicia, Greece, Carthage, Rome wrote their names and placed their monuments upon the splen- did heights, but they could not transmit their spirit or their genius. Instead of going on to greater and greater achievements in beauty, in sanity, in right living, — instead of real- izing the ideals of Socrates and Plato, the 6 The Higher Education and Progress Gracchi and Marcus Aurelius, there came arrest and decay, the races degenerated, forgot virtue and sobriety, lost the sense of beauty and holiness, and the sceptre passed away. It is such a survey as this which leads to the confident philosophy that neither mater- ial advancement, nor art, nor philosophy, nor culture has any necessary coincidence with lasting progress — rather that they arrest progress and finally accomplish its overthrow. Wealth, culture, refinement are the accompan- iments of maturity and matured powers. May there not be, for nations as for individ- uals, a maturity which is only a stage on the way to decay and death ? Other civil- izations have had their day ; our turn has come. The great Anglo-Saxon race passing now out of its virile youth is coming into its inheritance of wealth and culture. Even in America, latest come to maturity, busied still with exploitation, still the land of oppor- tunity, the burden of civilization is becoming heavy. Wealth and art and culture, the choicest products of civilization, center in the cities. The cities eat out the virility of the race. Continually they must be fed from the country, and to this Moloch our youth are sacrificed in larger and larger numbers. Physical vigor is declining. The power of 7 The Higher Education and Progress wealth and the mysteries of fortune-getting, the sense of dependence brought about by our complex industrial situation, the widening gulf between classes, the relative success of the grafter and the boodler and their comparative respectability, the feeling that the rich and powerful are not expected to obey inconven- ient laws — all tend to hopelessly confuse moral values. The reformer has spurts of enthusiastic activity and righteous wrath. At such times thieves and parasites fare badly. But evil is always alert. We mag: nanimously succor Cuba, sparing nor life nor treasure to set her free. But we find it diffi- cult to keep the generous spirit alive. We manage, at what cost of labor and effort, to keep faith with the Philippine people, serv- ing them gladly and ungrudgingly ; but we hardly dare hope that the speculator will not eventually get the upper hand. We form societies, make indefatigable collections, and dispatch missionaries to all the dark corners of the earth ; but do the best we can, the conscienceless trader, for whom no societies exist and no collections are made, is first on the ground. The White Man's Burden is the burden of being white, and nations which weep over old oppressions find it easier to take a city than to rule their own spirit. The 8 The Higher Education and Progress material achievements of civilization may be heaped up and passed on to succeeding gen- erations. Intellectual poise, courtesy, cour- age, self-control, virtue, are qualities that can not be transmitted. They must be won afresh by each individual. Every new generation must begin at the beginning ; and luxury and easy-going morality are heavy handicaps, im- pairing the elementary qualities upon which virtue and wisdom must be based, and break- ing down the stimulus of environment. Wealth we can transmit — perhaps ; but not the mental and moral mastery. The resolute millionaire may for himself successfully resist the corroding influences of overmuch money and power ; but how hard for the second gen- eration to escape Newport and nonentity ! Such a balancing, however, of the good and evil in our civilization helps very little toward a settlement of the old dispute between optimist and pessimist. But the attitude of our world toward these uncompromising facts is vastly significant. Men have labored, and prayed, and waited for a better civilization. Betterment has come ; but betterment coin- cident with and partly depending upon great complexity, a complexity which has led to moral confusion and threatens disaster. Our age has recognized this confusion, but it has 9 The Higher Education and Progress not despaired. The biologization of society and civilization it sees is purely fanciful. There is no necessary cycle from birth to de- cay and death. The analogy, in the case of nations which have passed away, is striking ; but it is only analogy. It is our privilege to trace the causes of decay, not in the nature of the organism, but in the laws which were violated. We are trying to study and under- stand the dangers which accompany our pros- perity and which threaten it. The disposition of the age — and this is its hopeful sign — is to measure well the difficulty and to under- take boldly. It is inquiring how physical vigor can be preserved, how virtue can be made to prevail in the state, how wealth can be put to noble uses, how the things which deepen and enrich a human life can be carried over to those who follow us. Some achievements are without alloy. Antiseptic surgery ministers only to human weal, and is the priceless possession of all who shall come after us. Human slavery, if it has not wholly come to an end, has lost forever its respecta- bility. We do not easily write new Iliads, but the old Iliad remains. And between the best of Greece and our own civilization are the Gospels and Magna Charta, Columbus, Wil- berforce, Livingstone, Darwin, Shakspere, 10 The Higher Education and Progress Dante, Raphael, Paul, and Jesus. True, what we are and become cannot be directly be- stowed, but DQistakes and achievements are both schoolmasters of the race. In the fresh page of childhood is the hope of the world. Youth is forever the great asset of civiliza- tion. And the instrument upon which the democratic state must stake its existence and its future, the instrument on which the prog- ress of society depends, is Education. It was nothing short of the inspiration of genius which planted the schoolhouse in every American community, which rested the foundations of the Republic upon the educa- tion of every citizen, which set up the Amer- ican college in every considerable community. This is not the place to speak of what the common school has accomplished and of its vital relation to the stability of the Republic. It has universalized intelligence. It has re- sponded to the deep thirst for knowledge char- acteristic of American democracy. But com- mon school and college and university, fall- ing short of adequate service to the state, have slowly yielded to new demands and new ideals, and are transforming themselves before our eyes. Education is of many kinds, and training in citizenship does not cease when school days are over. But the schools 11 The Higher Education and Progress have the inspiring advantage of dealing with youth and with the intellectual aspect of training. It is of these new demands and new ideals, particularly as affecting the higher education, that I am to speak. The college, and in time the university, while they kept pace with the march of settle- ment, were hardly counted as of or for the common man. Free to the aristocracy of in- tellect, they existed directly for the elect, only very indirectly for the mass. The chosen youth, prepared by a long course of mental discipline, with trained minds and a good con- science, arriving at the portals of the college, were to enter in to a favored land where they would be shielded from the distracting influ- ences of the business and profane world, with large leisure for thought and quiet, under the guidance of wise teachers, with four golden, protected years in which to train the reason, develop the taste and imagination, polish and perfect the intellectual powers. The Greek had conceived of knowledge as the highest good — not meaning by knowledge mere in- tellectual dexterity, nor acquaintance with facts, but the highest cultivation of the facul- ties, the knowledge which gave poise, sanity, judgment, wisdom, which refined the taste and cultivated the imagination. It was the pas- 12 The Higher Education and Progress sionate thesis of Greek philosophy that no one would willingly do wrong, that knowing the good one would not, could not, choose the evil. The American college adopted the Greek ideal of intellectual development, fol- lowing it somewhat haltingly, it is true, and endeavoring to add, for the transmutation of knowledge into virtue, the profession and practice of the Christian religion. College graduates, with the stamp of culture upon them, were then to proceed to the profes- sional schools, there to be fitted to become the doctors, preachers, and lawyers of the world, to occupy the chief positions of influ- ence and responsibility, to make the laws, to administer justice, to write the books, to interpret the ways of God to man. How far short of its own ideal the college fell, how the husks of grammar and the niceties of logic caricatured this culture and failed to fuse it with character, the college graduate of half a century ago can tell. But at its worst, as well as at its best, it claimed four years of youth, and in those four years there was time for much besides grammar and hair-splitting. The time apart, the association with one's fellows, the saturation, to some extent at least, with the best that had been known and thought in the world, the influence of 13 The Higher Education and Progress great-hearted men, redeemed the inadequacy of curriculum and teaching. All honor to the American college for what it did ! That the work-a-day world felt little or no dependence upon the college-trained man, that in the business world he was distanced by the ap- prentice, did not trouble the college. It was not supposed that the higher education was especially for the business man, or that it would fit him to do his particular work. In- deed it was the pride of the college, as distin- guished from the professional school, that it was divorced from utilitarian needs, that it had nothing to do with the merely useful. For the elect the goal must be culture, than which there is none higher. Culture is the necessary prerequisite to professional life, the sign and seal of the educated man ; but the mere business of the world must be done by the common man who gets his training, not in college, not in any school, but in his business. A new country, thinly populated, with vast unexplored and unexploited riches, and a thrifty and enterprising population, is pro- tected from most of the evils of a high state of civilization. Its strength is in the self- reliance, the sturdiness and independence of its citizens, its wealth of opportunity, which forbids the closing of the door upon any 14 The Higher Education and Progress citizen's independent living. With that age passing for America, with no more broad and fertile prairies to assimilate the surplus home population and the stream of immigration, with the balance of power passing from coun- try to city, with humanity congested, with great wealth and great poverty jostling each other, with class divisions becoming pro- nounced, with the proletariat beginning to arrive, with the strong grasp of Puritanism relaxed, the inadequacy of the old humanistic training to meet the needs of the state becomes evident. Democracy must seriously take stock of its resources and prepare to fight for its own preservation ; and of these resources its schools are first in importance. The first reconstruction came in an enlarge- ment of the avenues to culture. The human- ities, it was contended, did not exhaust the subjects of human interest, and through other studies the powers of the mind might be devel- oped, the taste and imagination refined. One by one as the modern languages, science, his- tory, economics, and the others made their demand for recognition in the college cur- riculum, they were challenged on the ground of lack of culture value. They accepted the challenge, and a furious controversy followed. In the end they were admitted to the sacred 15 The Higher Education and Progress curriculum, grudgingly at first, but their ad- mission justified on the ground that they had won their case, their culture value was dem- onstrated. How vastly the higher education gained by this infusion of new subjects and by the scientific method which accompanied them, and which was also applied to the old subjects, is now a matter of common agree- ment. But this movement, far-reaching and benefi- cent as it has been, was only a beginning. Democracy has been a long time in becoming democratic. It was the old idea even for a democracy that the masses were to spontan- eously choose wise leaders, or to be per- suaded, by whatever artifice was necessary, to accept those clearly pointed out by reason of their training and wisdom. The masses were to be rustic, ingenuous, deferential, look- ing up for direction to specially trained supe- riors. Almost with a savage suddenness we have seen this ideal rejected. Suddenly dem- ocracy has become all of us, choosing its own kind to be its instruments and leaders. Rank, crude, coarse, with its brawling journalism, its tawdry rhetoric, its brutal politics, its coarse amusements, its rag-time literature, it is still the majority become conscious that it is the majority. The mantle of authorita- 16 The Higher Education and Progress tive leadership has fallen from the old learned professions. The business world, on the one hand, with its enormous enterprises and its quickly gathered wealth, the workingman on the other, with his highly centralized or- ganization and newly achieved solidarity, both formerly quite without the pale of the higher education, have ceased to look up very much for direction to culture. There is very little holding the ear to the ground to catch what the aristocracy of learning has to say. It is no longer worth while to tender to this majority ready-made leaders of a superior brand. Only those will be received as lead- ers who are able to lead. College men have made their way under these new conditions by playing the demagogue and forgetting the ideals of the cloister, or through a rude awakening and painful readjustment, or else by virtue of a training which has fitted them to grasp effectively the problems of today and press them toward solution. Democracy must accept its majority, and there is hope for its future only as there is the possibility of effec- tive training and advancing ideals for all its citizens. How shall the training necessary to independence and wise citizenship be brought within the reach of all ? The idea of education as a direct training 17 The Higher Education and Progress and fitting for the work-a-day world is pretty foreign to all orthodox conception and seems to contrast sharply with the venerated culture ideal. The education which the common school gave — a knowledge of the three '*R's" with some acquaintance with grammar, geography, and the outline facts of history, was primarily ^ process of mental discipline. This elemen- tary mental training was for the majority of its citizens not only all that the State could afford to give, but all that its citizens could need or make use of. If intended for the ranks of unskilled labor, they went early to their tasks with the ability to read and write and cipher too, perhaps ; if ambitious to fill places requiring skill, they entered upon the necessary apprenticeship, or, in the day of easy opportunity, set up for themselves. For those of presumably larger mental develop- ment, whose ambitions were aroused, whose parents could afford it or whose resources could compass it, there followed the high school, which further developed the mental powers, broadened the outlook, and so made possible apprenticeship for larger undertak- ings. At the apex stood the college with its finer discipline and final arrival of the select few at the paradise of culture. Whether it was the observation that this 18 Tlie Higher Education and Progress mental training was making small impress upon a great mass of coming citizens, whether the conviction that this culture was too often a veneer in no way transmuted into virtue and character, whether its relative ineflBciency compared with the demands of a modern world was too glaring, whether for alarm for its own preservation and the progress of civilization, whatever the precipitating cause, triumphant democracy has emphatically re- jected this ideal, and rejected it, as it believes, in the interests of a larger and better civiliza- tion. Because the success of America has been so great, because there is such mastery of material conditions, such daring for the future, such possibilities in the midst of great ■dangers, the State has turned to education as the conserving, uplifting force in the progress of civilization. The schools must become a larger factor in the life of society, and furn- ish a larger equipment for the practical duties -of life. The school years are the years in which character and capacity are fixed. To- morrow is bound up with today ; it will be to a large extent what the schools make it. Every citizen of the republic is entitled, dur- ing his formative years, to all the preliminary training for citizenship he can acquire and assimilate. And the State, in its generous 19 The Higher Education and Progress proviBion for education, must have in mind the best preparation for, and the most direct connection which can be made with, the life he is to live. Character, power, efficiency — this three-fold purpose must run through all education. Two questions at once arise. Is the higher education, then, to be imposed upon every- body ? And is it, after all, only utilitarian training for the shop, the farm, and the counting-room ? Is the pure search for knowl- edge, the lofty idealism, the life of the Bpirit to be degraded to the base uses of trade and money-getting ? Are we to be a nation of engineers, shopkeepers only ? Granted that the old curriculum was not varied enough to meet the needs of everybody : we have en- larged it by the addition of other and varied subjects of human interest. Is the age utili- tarian, absorbed in money-getting ? Shall we not hold high the torch of culture ? Shall we not emphasize the things of the spirit ? Must not the university with its leisure and philosophic calm oppose the rush, the worry, the vulgarity of modern life? To open and en- large the mind, to saturate it with the classics of literature and philosophy, to withdraw contemplation from the practical, every-day aspect of the world, to imbed the student in 20 The Higher Education and Progress an atmosphere where not much that is useful is taught, to prepare a place apart, a kingdom of the mind to which the later man of affairs may retire for refreshment and renewal — ought not this to be the high aim of the col- lege and the university ? Shall we not say, First the time apart, the cloister, the develop- ment of the taste and imagination ; after that as much training for professional work as time and opportunity permit ? "We believe," says the president of Williams College in his last annual report, "that a college should not become simply a preparatory department for the professional schools, but should claim for the full course in Liberal Arts, and for its appropriate degree, an independent dignity and worth. . . . Science must be given its rightful place of honor, and the scientific method must be understood, welcomed, and adopted. The New Humanities, such as the modern languages, economics, and govern- ment must have their place, and the college must be kept in vital touch with living questions of patriotism and the great en- thusiasms of humanity. At the same time we all believe in the unique value of the full classical training. Certainly if we are to cultivate here the highest literary taste and form, if we are to secure precision and 21 The Higher Education and Progress elegance of style as a characteristic of Wil- liams men, we can not afford to neglect Greek. . . . If the trend under the new curriculum is too much away from the humanities, it, and not the humanities, must be set aside." It may be that in forming for itself a new ideal of education based upon social need, the State has seemed sometimes to emphasize un- duly its utilitarian character. It may be thai proportion and sequence have sometimes been lost sight of. But in saying that democracy has rejected the culture ideal as the end of education we are merely insisting that it has passed on to a larger conception of the value of human life and of the possibilities of its development. Indeed, if we accept Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as *^vital knowledge," we may dismiss at once all controversy which the term has engendered : only our conception of the function and field of the higher education is immensely enlarged* But here again we meet with contradiction. In spite of the large infusion of new subjects, in spite of the "vital touch with living ques- tions of patriotism and the great enthusiasms of humanity," it is becoming the fashion to doubt whether education is the panacea it is claimed to be, and to wonder if there are not already too many men and women seeking the 22 The Higher Education and Progress universities and unfitting thenaselves for plain tasks on their own particular levels. Valu- able as culture is held to be in and for itself, it somehow dissolves in contact with the street-car conductor's punch. The overcrowd- ing of the professions, the struggling law- yers and doctors, the unsuccessful teachers, the bewildered scholars, the misfits and fail- ures everywhere among college graduates seem to bear out the contention that not only the cultivation of the taste and imagination, but the practical training of science and gov- ernment, and even scholarship as well, has its limitations. It may be freely conceded that there are too many young men and young women press- ing into our colleges and universities. They have been sent by parents who did not un- derstand the university, or who, having means, followed the fashion, or who did not know what else to do with their children's time, or who regarded the university, alas, as a reformatory. These recruits come list- lessly, without any real preparation of the heart, not gripped by any great purpose, thinking merely of good times and college pranks, or, it may be, with the fair asset of youth already squandered. There are tests which weed out those who do not roughly 23 The Higher Education and Progress measure up to some prearranged intellectual standard. Alas that character tests are not more effective, that the unfit are not rigidly turned back before the corrosion of their pres- ence has wrought its untold mischief I The university is equipped for its special purpose. It is possible for it, by means of cumbrous machinery, by large expenditure of effort, by an occasional and almost accidental contact with the springs of action, to reclaim the wayward and convert the vicious. But it is too costly and wasteful a process — not only in the effort spent, but in the demoralization and lowering of standards which the tolera- tion of slovenliness, shamming, and dissipa- tion involves. There are reformatories with better adaptation for the kind of work here needed. Policemen are out of place in a university. But the university must deliver itself from the morally disintegrated and from the idler. The higher education must remain for the elect — but always the self- elected — those prepared in heart and mind and who come to it as to a joyful task. There cannot be too much eflSciency in the world, there cannot be too many of the elect coming up to the universities. The world guarantees no salaried positions, and is shy of its gifts to those whose conception of education does not 24 The Higher Education and Progress rise above place-hunting. But self-reliance and the mastery of some good tool will al- ways land their possessor on his feet, and if by some freak of a usually wise world he finds himself in a humble place, the place is dig- nified and not he degraded. It is a familiar commonplace that just the atmosphere of the cloister and the intimate associations of the four years are of more importance than all the formal instruction which the college can give. The stricter truth is that atmosphere and association condition all the college work. The impulse which turns the whole life, the touch which opens unseeing eyes, may and often does come from this stimulating air and these fortuitous asso- ciations. But if the college has taken any- thing like its rightful place, these are but portals leading into the treasure-house of learning. It is pardonable in after-dinner reminiscence of far-away times to dwell upon the externa], the chance situation, the bur- lesque. But the man who seriously looking back upon his four years of college life sees in it chiefly his fraternity, athletics, college pranks or dissipations confesses to having missed that which was chiefly worth the get- ting and which alone justifies the college's existence. There is much unconsidered talk 25 The Higher Education and Progress about treating college youth as men. The important point is how they treat themselves. College students who hold themselves stead- ily as men and women thereby become enti- tled to every consideration which obtains among men and women. The college inter- poses no hindrances. For them is the high privilege of undivided and unimpeded cooper- ation with the vital process of training. For the most part, however, the university is summoned to promote, at its most important and most difficult stage, the tremendous task of making men out of boys. The university cannot escape its responsibility by any fine theory of being concerned only with the presentation of subjects, which the student can take or leave as he chooses. Twenty and op- portunity is a far greater asset than sixty and millions. It is too much to expect youth to see this obvious bit of maturer wisdom, but it is none the less incumbent upon the univer- sity to do what it can to avert the incredible folly of throwing away this unrenewable inheritance. Fortunately the course of the university is simple. It does not look for the sustained gravity of mature manhood ; it no longer feels it necessary to suppress the rebellious mood natural to youth ; fun and exuberance are its good allies. But the uni- 26 The Higher Education and Progress versity can meet and catch the entering fresh- man with a gripping task, it can surround him with the fragrance of learning and with the freshening breath of high purpose in the accomplishment of definite things, and it can hold to unflinching standards. As helps in accelerating this passage over very thin ice — the transition from immatur- ity to self-control and mastery — there is no doubt that two of the great discoveries of modern higher education are athletics and co-education. Co-education, more than any other one thing, discovers to the hoodlum and the evil-minded that they have arrived at the wrong place. Frank comradeship is the sov- ereign antidote to boorishness, to sentimen- tality on the one side and disloyalty on the other. Athletics, in spite of the severe strain which is put upon the athletic hero, in spite of the mock heroics with which we surround intercollegiate sports, in spite of the all toa vicarious character of much athletic activity,. — athletics is still among the wholesome, clarifying, manly-making influences of the university. Does progress, then, mean more plows, more steamships, more trolleys, larger cities, greater enterprises and greater success in them ? Now it is not the purpose of the 27 The Higher Education and Progress higher education to frown upon enterprise. It will promote enterprise by equipping men with decision, with courage, with power. If the higher education prepares you to earn your living and your independence in straight- forward, honest, capable fashion, by doing a task which the world wants done and for which it is willing to pay, it has done well. *' In this world," writes Theodore Roosevelt, "*' the one thing supremely worth having is the opportunity, coupled with the capacity, to do well and worthily a piece of work the doing of which is of vital consequence to the welfare of mankind." But the promotion of enter- prise is not everything. The higher educa- tion does not dissipate its resources by at- tempting what belongs to the shop and the farm. Democracy has rejected a culture not based upon high seriousness and co-existing with vapidity of character and an inverte- brate will ; but it has no quarrel with a schol- arship that is real, nor with the humanities that really make the connection between knowledge and virtue. In our day, with its lack of reverence for dogmatics and its intolerance of cant, a layer of religion cannot be added on to culture to do this work. To be merely religious is to be merely useless, lor religion can work only in what is vital and 28 The Higher Education and Progress alive. Democracy can also believe in the " unique value of the full classical training " — because it believes in the unique value of many another training which brings youth and reality into intimate and loving touch. The essence of the higher education is not in its pursuit of precision and elegance of style, any more than in its pursuit of super- intendencies in the railway service : but the- one as legitimately as the other. Education must have in mind more than precision and elegance on the one hand and more than a salaried position on the other — by-products, as it were. Education proceeds on the plan of a more efficient man playing his part in the life of the community and of the state. The higher education exemplifies the fine right and duty, for every man and woman who can compass it, of prolonging the years of train- ing that the life may be worthier, the service better. Democracy asks the university to touch human activity everywhere with the university ideal — with mastery consecrated to service. The higher education is as much of engineering and agriculture, of music and the fine arts, as it is of the humanities, o! science, of history, of government. There is a stimulation, a gain in effectiveness, in hav- ing all these varied educational divisio ns 29 The Higher Education and Progress included in a single foundation. Poverty of resources usually forbids this. But in selec- ting different fields, let not one institution esteem itself better than another unless it more effectively trains men and women for wise and useful living. The future of the small college is undecided : it is secure so long as whatever it does is genuine and genu- inely responds to the needs of a higher civil- ization. Must we say that precision and elegance are to come first and agriculture and engineering afterward, lest there be no large vision ? With four of the choicest years of youth, in the companionship and under the instruction of men worthy of such tasks, gain- ing mastery of real problems and ascending to wider and wider outlooks, are we still afraid of arriving only in Philistia? America has learned pretty well how to do things ; the time has come when it needs to emphasize the things worth doing. The higher education must promote, not merely in the so-called learned professions, but throughout the world of enterprise, that large- ness of view which leads to a recognition of values and that courage which comes from seeing life steadily and whole. America stands squarely for the Open Door. Is our interest mere solicitude for the American 30 The Higher Education and Progress merchant and trader, or are the real interests of China and civilization a part of our con- cern ? In California we are very busy dis- playing our resources. What is it that our promotion committees are chiefly promoting ? Is it a million-peopled San Francisco that we should chiefly desire, or is it to make a city safer and sweeter to live in, less responsive to the yellow newspaper and the demagogue ? Mr. James Bryce, keenest of observers and most sympathetic of critics, seeing our cease- less rush, our grasping at the future, the pas- sion to bring about in a lifetime what the past took centuries to accomplish, was moved to exclaim : " Why in heaven's name this haste ? You have time enough. No enemy threatens you. No volcano will rise from be- neath you. Why sacrifice the present to the future, fancying you will be happier when your fields teem with wealth and your cities with people ? In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours, and we are not happy. Why do things rudely and ill which need to be done well, seeing that the welfare of your descendants may turn upon them ? Why in your hurry to sub- due and utilize Nature, squander her splen- did gifts ? Why allow the noxious weeds of Eastern politics to take root in your soil, 31 The Higher Education and Progress when by a little effort you might keep it pure ? Why hasten the advent of that threatening day when the vast spaces of the continent shall all have been filled, and the poverty or discontent of the older states shall find no outlet ? You have oppor- tunities such as mankind never had before, and may never have again. Your work is great and noble : it is done for a future larger and vaster than our conceptions can embrace. Why not make its outlines and be- ginnings worthy of these destinies, the thought of which gilds your hopes and elevates your purposes ? " Progress is a moral event ; and life is a joint undertaking. The interrelation of so- ciety is beyond recall : if one member suffer all the members suffer. We cannot undo the complexity, but in the common experience and the common service life may be in some real way unified. Not complexity, but artifi- ciality and consequent decay of moral fiber have been the undoing of nations. Life must be complex, but it need not be artificial. God's desire for us is possible for us — pos- sible in the masterful daring of youth full- armed and untainted. The cloister and the desert may clarify the vision, arm the under- standing, strengthen the purpose while yet it 32 The Higher Education and Progress is morning ; they may become a temporary refuge in the burning heat of the day. But the world we work in is not of the desert or the high mountains. We shall not be judged by our success in retired places and among cloudcapped peaks, but by how we make for manhood and sainthood in the world of men and things. The mistake of all our Utopias has been the trying to make life too easy. Life is up-hill work, and is not to be con- quered on other terms. To be sincere, to be courageous, to keep faith and fineness of temper, not to give in when life surprises us by becoming hard, and to keep going on — this is the only road to any Utopia worth the having. After all, the Greek was right. At the gate of manhood, with clean-lived youth behind, with the poise of mastery and the vision that comes from full-rounded knowledge, man will not willingly do wrong. This is the truth that makes free, the alchemy that trans- mutes knowledge into virtue. The whole structure of society is built upon this prin- ciple. All the race has accomplished in its long ascent, all its hope for the future, all the plan of God, is staked on this divine response of the human soul. The educated man's bur- den is that he is educated, that he holds his 33 The Higher Education and Progress own self-respect only on the rigid terms of absolute sincerity, that for him baseness and power are forever incompatible. If the twentieth century shows little interest in abstract Utopias, if tbe happy Republic, the government without problems, seems only a ^'far-off, divine event," too intangible for a present program, there is compensation in tha knighthood which our own fresh contact with reality, our genuine passion for sincerity and for usefulness, is surely developing. The modern Knight of the Order of Progress rides no foam-crested steed 'gainst windmill or castle moat. Armed with knowledge become virtue he does his piece of honest work in the world, and in the doing it helps to right the wrong everywhere. " Musical, Tremulous, impressional. Alive to gentle influence Of landscape and of sky, And tender to the spirit-touch Of man's or maiden's eye : But, to his native centre fast. Shall into Future fuse the Past, And the world's flowing fates in hi» own mould recast." 34 rm: