THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 GIFT OF
 
 ADDRESSES: HISTORICAL AND 
 UNIVERSITY
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS 
 ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 DELIVERED DURING A RESIDENCE IN THE 
 
 UNITED STATES AS AMBASSADOR 
 
 OF GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 Nefo fforfc 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1913 
 
 All rights rtttrvtd
 
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 COPYRIGHT, 1913, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1913. 
 
 Nortnocti 
 
 J. 8. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 ELIHU ROOT 
 
 IN ADMIRATION AND FRIENDSHIP
 
 PREFACE 
 
 DURING six years spent in Washington it has 
 been my duty, and also my pleasure, to travel hither 
 and thither over the United States, responding, 
 so far as time and strength permitted, to requests 
 to address Universities, Bar Associations, Chambers 
 of Commerce, and many other public organizations 
 of diverse kinds. Out of the many addresses deliv- 
 ered either to these bodies or in commemoration 
 of some person or event, I have selected a few, 
 the subjects of which seemed to possess a more 
 than passing interest, and of which I had happened 
 to keep notes, enabling the substance to be re- 
 produced. In revising them for publication some 
 additions have been made, while matters of a local 
 or purely occasional character have been omitted. 
 The audiences to which the academic addresses 
 were delivered consisted chiefly of undergraduate 
 or graduating students. 
 
 The enjoyment which I had derived from my 
 earlier visits to the United States was renewed and 
 enhanced by the warmth with which I found myself 
 received and by the encouragement given me to 
 speak on all non-political topics as freely as if I had 
 been a citizen of the United States.
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 I desire to take this opportunity of returning my 
 sincere thanks to those who, in the places where 
 these addresses were delivered, and in scores of 
 other cities which I have visited for the like pur- 
 pose, gave me that encouragement, and extended to 
 me a welcome the heartiness of which I can never 
 forget. 
 
 WASHINGTON, 
 April 20, 1913.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA i 
 
 WHAT UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION MAY DO TO PROVIDE INTEL- 
 LECTUAL PLEASURES FOR LATER LIFE . . . 15 
 THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620 33 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER AND HISTORICAL 
 ENVIRONMENT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON 
 
 LAW 41 
 
 THE CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION ... 73 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON : THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 AND FOUNDER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA . .107 
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 125 
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 151 
 
 THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 171 
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 181 
 
 THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN . .197 
 
 THE SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND IN AMERICA . . 205 
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE .... 227 
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 247 
 
 THE TERCENTENARY OF THE DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 265 
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 281 
 
 SPECIAL AND GENERAL EDUCATION IN UNIVERSITIES . . 299 
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 317 
 
 ON THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY . . . 339 
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 365 
 
 NATIONAL PARKS THE NEED OF THE FUTURE . . . 389 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES .... 407
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT JAMESTOWN ISLAND, VIRGINIA, APRIL 17, 
 1907, ON THE TERCENTENARY OF THE FIRST ENGLISH SETTLE- 
 MENT IN VIRGINIA.
 
 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT JAMESTOWN ISLAND, VIRGINIA, APRIL 17, 
 1907, ON THE TERCENTENARY OF THE FIRST ENGLISH SETTLE- 
 MENT IN VIRGINIA. 
 
 ON this day three hundred years ago two small ships 
 and a pinnace coming from England by way of the 
 Canary Islands and the West Indies anchored here 
 and landed their passengers, being about one hundred 
 and twenty persons in number, upon this Island. 
 They came from London under a charter from the 
 King, James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, 
 by which there was claimed for the Crown of England 
 the whole of North America between the thirty-fourth 
 and forty-fifth degrees of latitude, being the territory 
 then called Virginia. In the London which these set- 
 tlers had just left, Shakespeare was then living. Some 
 of them may have seen him, perhaps with Ben Jonson 
 beside him, watching the first performance of Hamlet 
 four or five years before. Sir Francis Bacon the one 
 name naturally suggests the other was living, though 
 not yet Lord Chancellor. Some of the emigrants may 
 
 3
 
 4 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 have heard him arguing cases in the courts. John 
 Milton was born the next year; Sir Walter Raleigh 
 was a man of fifty-five and then a prisoner in the Tower 
 of London ; Sir Philip Sidney had been killed at Zutphen 
 in 1586 and Edmund Spenser had died in 1599; Pym 
 was a youth of seventeen; John Hampden a boy of 
 seven ; Oliver Cromwell a boy of eight. 
 
 The England of those famous men was the England 
 whence the emigrants came, a land fitted to give 
 birth to large and noble enterprises. Measured by 
 what it did for the world, it was a great England, 
 with great poets, great thinkers, and strong men who 
 did great deeds. Never before and never since has 
 such a constellation of brilliant and memorable names 
 glittered in the English sky. But measured by popu- 
 lation, England was a little nation, though her states- 
 men and sailors had not long before won immortal 
 fame by their defeat of the Invincible Armada. There 
 were only some five million inhabitants in the country. 
 Ireland was still but half conquered, and Scotland, 
 though her King had lately inherited the English throne, 
 was a distinct and not too friendly kingdom. And 
 the settlers were few indeed to venture on the task of 
 occupying the vast continent on which they were 
 landing. How feeble must their enterprise have seemed 
 to the men of Spain, which held not only Mexico and 
 the immense territories north of Mexico, but also the 
 whole of South America and all the Antilles ! But 
 God had chosen the weak things of the world to con-
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 5 
 
 found the things which were mighty, and the things 
 which were not to bring to nought the things that were. 
 The Empire of Spain was to decay and dissolve and 
 vanish away, while from this spot, this islet two miles 
 long, where now we see nothing but a few moulder- 
 ing walls, the power of another race was to spread 
 out to the Alleghanies and beyond them to the Missis- 
 sippi, and thence to the Rocky Mountains and the far- 
 off coasts of the Pacific. The oak of English dominion 
 on the continent of North America lay hidden hi the 
 acorn that was planted on this island in the James 
 River, just as the germ of English dominion in the 
 East was to be found in the charter that had been 
 granted by 'Queen Elizabeth to the East India Company 
 seven years before this settlement. 
 
 The landing of these few men was one of the great 
 events in the history of the world an event to be com- 
 pared for its momentous consequences with the over- 
 throw of the Persian Empire^ by Alexander; with the 
 destruction of Carthage by Rome ; with the conquest of 
 Gaul by Clovis ; with the taking of Constantinople by 
 the Turks one might almost say with the discovery of 
 America by Columbus. Did any idea of the magni- 
 tude of this event rise in the minds of the little band 
 of settlers when they read their Royal charter on board 
 ship before landing; or when they held their first 
 religious service and set to the building of their fort, 
 a rude stockade called after the King, "James Town," 
 and began to sow their fields with wheat, and build that
 
 6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 tiny church which the pious care of this generation is 
 restoring ? There is nothing to show that they had any 
 such presentiments. Many a settlement tried before 
 upon the American coasts had failed since the half- 
 mythic and by that time long-forgotten landing 
 of Erik the Red in the far Northeast ; and they had 
 other things than the distant future to think of, for the 
 Spanish power to the south of them, though then nomi- 
 nally at peace, was jealous of their intrusion, and the 
 Indians around them were suspicious and hostile. But 
 of them it may be said that they, and those who sent 
 them forth from England, had the true spirit of practi- 
 cal men who saw the opportunity which a new country 
 offered to a growing people. They were of the stuff 
 which makes good settlers, and they did that which the 
 needs of the time required. 
 
 All the dangers and difficulties that were seen or 
 foreseen they overcame. The power of the mother 
 country kept them safe against the jealous bitterness 
 of Spain. They soon proved themselves able to repel 
 any attacks from the native Indians, and presently 
 ceased to fear these enemies, though they had for many 
 years to stand on guard against them. They suffered 
 so severely from malarial fevers, for in those days the 
 value of quinine as a remedy had not yet become known, 
 that after ninety-three years the colonial legislature 
 decided to remove itself from James Town island to 
 Williamsburg, eight miles to the northeast, and at last, 
 in 1780, the capital of Virginia was planted on the higher
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 7 
 
 and healthier ground of Richmond. But one mis- 
 take was committed, destined to breed troubles far 
 worse than any which Indians or sickness threatened. 
 Twelve years after the first settlement, a Dutch ship 
 landed a cargo of African negroes, the first that ever 
 came into the dominions of the English Crown. This 
 step a step taken with no prevision of all that was 
 to issue from it, and one for which the colonists them- 
 selves were not to blame established the system of 
 agricultural slave labor in North America, a system 
 which we can now see to have been, apart from the 
 other objections to it, uneconomic and unnecessary ; for 
 those who have studied, in the light of modern science, 
 the physical conditions of Virginia and the country south 
 and southwest of it, tell us that nearly all the area of the 
 States in which slavery existed seventy years ago, all, in 
 fact, except the hottest and dampest regions along the 
 coast, could be cultivated by the labour of white men. 
 The country would, no doubt, have been developed more 
 slowly, but there would have been no Civil War and 
 no race problems such as now occupy your thoughts. 
 Let it not be forgotten, however, that Virginia was the 
 first community in the world to recognize the evils 
 which the slave trade brought with it. Not only did 
 she, in colonial days, seek in vain to check or abolish it, 
 but in 1778, in the first years of her independence, when 
 both in England and in the Northern States powerful 
 interests were still defending and supporting the slave 
 trade, she absolutely forbade the bringing of any slaves
 
 8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 into her territory. And you know how many of 
 the greatest Virginians, George Mason and Thomas 
 Jefferson among them, sought to rid their State of 
 slavery. 
 
 Let us, however, return to those first founders of 
 Virginia whom we are to-day commemorating. Of 
 the qualities that distinguished them, one, the spirit 
 of adventure, was common to them with many others 
 who had crossed the Western Sea. Think of Columbus 
 when he first showed the path that so many were to 
 follow ; of Magellan when he threaded his way through 
 the savage solitudes of the Strait that bears his name, 
 and traversed week after week and month after month, 
 with a crew part of which had lately been in mutiny 
 against him, hard-pressed by thirst and hunger and 
 scurvy, the seemingly boundless wastes of the unknown 
 Pacific. Think of Champlain and La Salle when they 
 found their way among fierce Indian tribes, through the 
 Northern forests or along the shores of the Great Lakes 
 as far as the Mississippi. For mere daring and self- 
 reliant hardihood no expedition has ever surpassed, if 
 indeed any has equalled, that of Hernando Cortez, 
 when after burning his ships he marched up far away 
 from the coast with a tiny band of cavaliers into the 
 heart of the vast and warlike dominion of the Aztecs. 
 But there was another quality in which our country- 
 men and your forefathers stood preeminent. They 
 came from a free country, though its freedom had not 
 yet been placed on a secure foundation, for that was
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 9 
 
 to be the work of the century that had just begun in 
 England; and the spirit of liberty and the love of 
 self-government glowed in their hearts. 
 
 Herein lay the great contrast between the English of 
 that day and the not less valiant adventurers who had 
 already gone forth from Spain. That the former went 
 to cultivate the soil and the latter primarily to win gold 
 and silver, whether by conquest or by the discovery 
 of mines, is a difference that has often been dwelt 
 upon. But the future fortunes of the two sets of emi- 
 grants were even more affected by the difference in 
 their political temper and ideas. The Englishmen, 
 though loyal to their sovereign at home, were not dis- 
 posed to acquiesce in the uncontrolled rule of his 
 deputies. They had a company to represent in Eng- 
 land their needs and wishes, and they soon set up in 
 the new land a system of local courts and assemblies, 
 modelled on the lines and principles of that which they 
 had left behind. They valued this inherited freedom, 
 and as the enjoyment of it had strengthened the charac- 
 ter and developed the independent and self-reliant spirit 
 of the individual citizen during three centuries in 
 England, so it began to do the same wholesome work 
 on these remote and silent shores. 
 
 Modern writers have speculated as to what was 
 the cargo that these three vessels carried. Of that we 
 know less than we could wish. Bibles and prayer- 
 books they certainly had, for they were God-fearing 
 men, and one of their prime objects was " the planting
 
 io UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 of Christianity amongst heathens." Whether they 
 had any law books does not appear. But they carried 
 in their breasts the principles and traditions of the 
 common law of England, which of all the legal systems 
 that have ever been framed is the one most fully per- 
 vaded with the spirit of liberty and the most favorable 
 to the development of personal self-reliance and indi- 
 vidual responsibility. That spirit showed itself from 
 the first among the colonists of Virginia. They soon 
 organized their Assembly and began to govern them- 
 selves so far as the King allowed them. They were 
 well supported by the Virginia Company in London. 
 Its debates and the liberal tendencies it evinced caused 
 disquiet to the Court party and to the King, whose 
 shrewd and suspicious mind already noted the rising 
 of the wind which was to swell thirty-three years later 
 into the tempest of the great Civil War. 
 
 How the spirit of freedom and that assertion of 
 individual rights which the doctrines of the Common 
 Law favoured went on working through the annals of 
 colonial Virginia as in those of the great sister and rival 
 colony of Massachusetts ; how the same spirit prompted 
 Virginia's action when an unwise English Ministry, 
 ignorant of the circumstances and feelings of the colo- 
 nists, blundered into a conflict which ended in their 
 severance from England; how the greatest of all 
 Virginians, clarum et venerabile nomen, led his colony 
 and its fellow colonies in that conflict ; how the states- 
 manship of Virginia, matured by the experience of
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA n 
 
 nearly two centuries, bore its part, and an eminently 
 useful part it was, in framing the Constitution of 1787, 
 and gave to the Union four out of its five first Presi- 
 dents; how one of Virginia's most illustrious sons, 
 Chief Justice Marshall, so expounded and developed the 
 Constitution as to become almost its second author, 
 - of all this I must not here and now attempt to 
 speak. Sixty years ago dark days descended upon 
 Virginia. The fatal error committed in early years, 
 from the consequences of which Virginia had vainly 
 sought to extricate herself, had now borne fatal fruit. 
 War came, with all the evils that war brings 
 in its train, and on Virginia those evils fell more 
 heavily than on any other State. Those were days of 
 unspeakable sadness and suffering, suffering borne 
 with the characteristic gallantry of Virginians, and 
 they produced in Robert E. Lee one of the finest 
 characters of that age, a man whose purity of heart 
 and loftiness of soul live in the revering memory not of 
 America only but of the world of English-speaking men. 
 But out of the storm there emerged a State delivered 
 from the blot of slavery, which has now regained its 
 old prosperity, and there emerged also a national 
 Republic more truly united than it ever was before. 
 The jealousies of States, the antagonism of North and 
 South, the rivalry of Virginia and Massachusetts, have 
 now happily vanished in a far vaster nation. The 
 Carolina of Calhoun and the Illinois of Lincoln can 
 both look back without bitterness on those Virginia
 
 12 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 battle-fields where Lee and Grant won undying fame. 
 The problems that occupy the thoughts of your people 
 and tax to the utmost the wisdom of your statesmen, 
 have, with one exception, that problem which slavery 
 bequeathed, nothing to do with geographical boundaries. 
 Never was there in this country so strong a sense that 
 whatever the future may have in store, the Federal 
 Union "an indestructible union of indestructible 
 States" must and will be preserved. It is guarded 
 not only by your national patriotism, but by nature 
 herself, who has made your land one from the Atlantic 
 to the Rocky Mountains, a land fit to be the home of 
 one undivided nation. 
 
 In this season of fair weather it is natural that your 
 eyes should look back across the sea to the ancient 
 Motherland, from whom you were for a time divided 
 by clouds of misunderstanding that have now melted 
 away into the blue. Between you and her there is 
 now an affection and a sympathy such as perhaps 
 there never was before in the days of your political 
 connection. To-day she rejoices with you in your 
 prosperity and your unity. She is proud of you, and 
 among her many achievements there is none of which 
 she is more proud than this, that she laid the foundation 
 of your vast and splendid Republic, giving you those 
 institutions under which, remodelled to suit your new 
 conditions and your extended area, your ninety millions 
 of people now live in peace in freedom. 
 
 You have asked me to say what England's message
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF VIRGINIA 13 
 
 to America would be on this three hundredth anniver- 
 sary of the birth of the American nation. 
 
 On the occasion of the opening of the Jamestown 
 Tercentenary Exposition a fortnight ago, I had the 
 honour of transmitting to the President of the United 
 States a greeting from the King and his Government 
 in the following words : 
 
 "On the occasion of the celebrations commemorating 
 the tercentenary of the foundation of the first English 
 settlement on the American continent at Jamestown 
 and the birth of the American nation, his Majesty's 
 Government wish to offer their warmest congratulations 
 to the United States Government on the magnificent 
 progress and development which have brought the 
 United States into the first rank among the greatest 
 nations of the world, not only in material prosperity, 
 but also in culture and peaceful civilization. The 
 connection which must ever exist in history between 
 the British and American nations will never be for- 
 gotten, and will contribute to increase and foster ties 
 of affection between the two peoples." 
 
 These words express the sentiment of the British 
 people, their sentiment of affection and of pride, of 
 pride in what you have done already, of hope for 
 what you may do in the future. 
 
 If any words were to be added in which Englishmen 
 who have reflected upon your history and their own 
 history would seek to convey their view of the teachings 
 of English and American experience, I would ask : Could
 
 14 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the ancient Motherland with her recollections of four- 
 teen centuries of national life and seven centuries of 
 slow but steady constitutional development send to her 
 mighty daughter a better message than this ? " Cherish 
 alike and cherish together Liberty and Law. They are 
 always inseparable. Without liberty, there is no true 
 law, because where law expresses the will not of the 
 whole community, but merely of an arbitrary ruler or 
 a selfish class, it has neither moral force nor guarantee 
 of permanence. Without order and law duly enforced 
 and equal for all, there is no true liberty, for anarchy 
 means that the rights of the gentle and the weak are 
 overridden by the violent. In the union of ordered 
 liberty with a law gradually remoulded from age to age 
 to suit the changing needs of the people, has lain and 
 will always lie the progress and peace both of Britain 
 and of America."
 
 WHAT UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION MAY DO 
 TO PROVIDE INTELLECTUAL PLEASURES 
 FOR LATER LIFE 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, JUNE u, 
 
 1907.
 
 WHAT UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION MAY DO 
 TO PROVIDE INTELLECTUAL PLEASURES 
 FOR LATER LIFE 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, JUNE n, 
 
 1907. 
 
 YOUR University is placed in a wonderful city. 
 In the rapidity of its growth, in the expansion of its 
 trade and population, it has no parallel in the modern 
 world, not even in this Western world which has shown 
 so many new and startling phenomena. It owes its 
 prosperity, and it will owe that marvellous future to 
 which it looks forward, to two things. One is the 
 eager, ardent, restless spirit, keenly perceptive and 
 unweariedly active, of your people. The other is 
 modern science, which has made you the business 
 centre of the great Northwest and has enabled vast 
 industrial enterprises to be started all round the com- 
 mercial heart of your city. James Watt and the other 
 famous inventors who have followed him are the men 
 who have made such a city as Chicago possible. Your 
 people have turned the possibility into a reality. Two 
 great departments of human activity, production and 
 transportation, have been all over the world transformed 
 by science, and the effect of the change is felt in every 
 other department. 
 
 c 17
 
 1 8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 It must needs be felt in education also. Seventy 
 years ago applied science was hardly taught at all in 
 schools and universities, and theoretic science, except, 
 of course, mathematics, not at all in schools and but 
 little in universities. Now science has come to domi- 
 nate the field of education, and in some countries is 
 avenging herself for the contumely with which the 
 old-fashioned curriculum used to treat her by now 
 herself trying to relegate the study of language and 
 literature to a secondary place. Nothing could have 
 been more foolish than the way in which some old- 
 fashioned classical scholars used to look down upon 
 chemistry and physiology as vulgar subjects. But 
 any men of science who wish to treat literature or 
 history with a like arrogance will make just as great 
 a mistake. 
 
 In England there are some signs of this arrogance, 
 and it is becoming necessary to insist upon the impor- 
 tance of the human as opposed to the natural or scien- 
 tific subjects. Whether this is the case here also 
 you know better than I do. It need excite no surprise 
 that there should be a general rush at present towards 
 those branches of study which have most to promise 
 in the way of success in life. But I am glad to 
 know that in the greatest universities of America 
 ample provision is made for, and all due encouragement 
 is given to, the humanistic and literary subjects. As- 
 suming this to be so, assuming that for the purposes 
 of a general liberal education and also for the purpose
 
 UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 19 
 
 of special preparation for the various professions and 
 occupations, all lines of study are here alike recognized 
 and efficiently taught, I pass to another aspect of 
 what university education may accomplish. 
 
 That which I ask you to join me in considering 
 is the value and helpfulness to the individual man of 
 scientific studies and of literary studies, respectively, 
 not for success in any occupation or profession, nor 
 for any other gainful purpose, but for what may be 
 called the enjoyment of h'fe after the days of univer- 
 sity education have ended. 
 
 All education has two sides. It is meant to impart 
 the knowledge, the skill, the habits of diligence and 
 concentration which are needed to secure practical 
 success. It is also meant to form character, to implant 
 taste, to cultivate the imagination and the emotions, 
 to prepare a man to enjoy those delights which be- 
 long to hours of leisure and to the inner life which 
 goes on, or ought to go on, all the time within his own 
 breast. 
 
 All study contains or implies the pleasure of putting 
 forth our powers, of mastering difficulties, of acquiring 
 new aptitudes, of making the mental faculties quick 
 and deft like the fingers. It is a pleasure to see the 
 intellect gleam and cut like a well-tempered and 
 keen-edged sword. This kind of pleasure can be 
 derived from all studies, though not from aU equally. 
 Some give a better intellectual training than others; 
 some are better fitted for one particular type of mind
 
 20 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 than for other types. But with these differences I do 
 not propose to deal to-day. I want you to think of the 
 training of the mind, not for work or display, but for 
 enjoyment. 
 
 Everyone of us ought to have a second or inner life 
 of the intellect over and above that life which he leads 
 among other men for the purposes of his avocation, be it 
 to gain money or power or fame, or be it to serve his 
 country or his neighbors. Considering himself as a 
 Mind made to reflect and to enjoy, he ought to have 
 some pursuit, some taste if you like, even some fad 
 or hobby to which he can turn from the daily routine 
 of his work for rest and for that change of occupation 
 which is the best kind of rest, something round which 
 his thoughts can play when he is alone and in which 
 he can realize his independence of outward calls, his 
 freedom from external demands and external restric- 
 tions. Whatever the taste or pursuit be, whether of a 
 higher or of a commoner type, to have it is a good thing 
 for him. But of course the more wholesome and stimu- 
 lating and elevating the taste or pursuit is, so much 
 the better. 
 
 Now the question I ask you to consider is this : 
 What can instruction in natural science do, and what 
 can instruction in the human or literary subjects do, 
 to instil such tastes, to suggest such pursuits ? What 
 sort of teaching and training can a university give to 
 its student fit for him to carry away from the uni- 
 versity as a permanent possession for his own private
 
 UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 21 
 
 use and pleasure, to be added to by his exertions as he 
 finds time and opportunity, not that he may be richer 
 or more famous, but that he may be, if possible, wiser, 
 and at any rate happier ? 
 
 The study of any branch of natural science has one 
 great charm in the fact that it opens possibilities of 
 discovering new truth. There is hardly a branch of 
 physics or chemistry, or of biology or natural history, 
 in which the patient enquirer may not hope to extend 
 the boundaries of knowledge. This is what makes 
 physical science, as a professional occupation, so attrac- 
 tive. The work is in itself interesting, perhaps even 
 exciting, quite apart from any profit to one's self. 
 One is occupied with what is permanent, one is in 
 quest of reality, one may at any moment taste the thrill- 
 ing pleasures of discovery. 
 
 But such work requires in most departments an 
 elaborate provision of laboratories and apparatus, and 
 (in nearly all departments of research) an amount of time 
 constantly devoted to observation and experiment which 
 practically restricts it to those who make it the business 
 of their life, and puts it out of the reach of persons 
 actually engaged in some other occupation. Dis- 
 coveries have been made by scientific amateurs. Ben- 
 jamin Franklin and his contemporaries, Cavendish 
 and Priestley, are cases in point. But this is increas- 
 ingly difficult. Few lawyers or merchants or engi- 
 neers or practising physicians can hope for time to 
 enjoy this pleasure. The best that a scientific educa-
 
 22 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 tion can do for them is to start them with enough 
 knowledge to enable them to follow intelligently the 
 onward march of scientific investigation. 
 
 There is also a pleasure in meditating upon the ulti- 
 mate problems of matter, force, and life, even if one 
 cannot do anything toward solving them. The un- 
 known appeals to our imagination, especially if we have 
 imagination enough to feel that the unknown is all 
 around us, and to realize the grandeur and solemnity 
 of nature. You all remember the majestic lines in 
 which the Roman poet declares his passionate 
 desire that the divine mistresses of knowledge should 
 explain to him the secrets of the universe : 
 
 Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, 
 Quarum sacra fero ingenti perculsus amore, 
 Accipiant, coelique vias et sidera monstrent; 
 Defectus soils varies, lunaeque labores; 
 Unde tremor terris; qua vi maria alta tumescant, 
 Objicibus ruptis, rursusque in se ipsa residant. 1 
 
 The mysteries which chiefly excited Virgil's curiosity 
 were the movements of the heavenly bodies, the eclipses 
 of the sun and moon, the cause of earthquakes, and 
 the theory of the tides. Of these the second and the 
 last have so long ago been explained that they no 
 longer greatly engage the thoughts of others than 
 astronomers, while the causes that produce earth- 
 quakes are at any rate partially known. Our curiosity 
 regarding the first, now concentrated upon the move- 
 
 1 Virgil in the second book of the Georgics.
 
 UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 23 
 
 ments of the so-called Fixed Stars, has of late years 
 become keener than ever as new vistas of enquiry are 
 opening themselves to view. Yet it is now that border- 
 land of physics, chemistry, and metaphysics in which 
 lie questions relating to the nature of matter itself 
 and the persistence of force under diverse forms, which 
 chiefly rouses our wonder, and makes us speculate as 
 to whether light may be thrown from that side upon 
 the relations of what is called Matter to what is 
 called Mind. Whoever possesses even a slight ac- 
 quaintance with chemistry and physics is more capable 
 of following the course of investigation in this direc- 
 tion than are persons altogether without scientific 
 training ; and these problems are no less fitted to touch 
 a susceptible imagination than were those which Virgil 
 vainly sought to comprehend. 
 
 In these ways natural science may appeal even to 
 those whose daily course of life debars them from 
 continuing to study it; and this is one of the reasons 
 which suggests that some knowledge at least of the 
 method and the fundamental conceptions of science, 
 mathematical and physical, is a necessary part of a 
 liberal education. 
 
 What we call natural history (i.e. geology, botany, 
 and zoology) stands on a somewhat different footing. 
 No pursuits give more pleasure, or a purer kind of 
 pleasure, than that given by these forms of enquiry. 
 They take us into open-air nature, they make us fa- 
 miliar with her, and they generally involve active exer-
 
 24 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 tion of body as well as mind. The only drawback is 
 that it is difficult for the dwellers in those vast cities, 
 which have unfortunately grown up during the last 
 hundred years, to enjoy these pursuits, except for a 
 few holiday weeks in summer. 
 
 If, however, we revert to the question of how much 
 science can do, in the case of those whose occupa- 
 tions forbid them to prosecute systematic scientific 
 study, for the enrichment and refinement of that inner 
 life whereof I have spoken, we shall find that the range 
 of its influence is limited. It is only in certain aspects 
 that it appeals to the imagination, nor does every man's 
 imagination respond. To the emotions, other than 
 those of wonder and admiration, it does not directly 
 appeal. It is remote from the hopes, the fears, the 
 needs, the aspirations of human beings. While you are 
 at work on the hydrocarbons in the college laboratory, 
 your curiosity and interest are roused by the remark- 
 able phenomena they present. But they do not help 
 you to order your life and conversation aright. Euclid's 
 geometry is interesting as a model of exact deductive 
 reasoning. One remembers it with pleasure. A man 
 who has some leisure and some talent in this direction 
 may all through his life enjoy the effort of solving mathe- 
 matical problems. But has any one at a supreme mo- 
 ment of some moral struggle ever been able to find help 
 and stimulus in the thought that the square described 
 upon the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal 
 to the squares described on the two other sides thereof ?
 
 UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 25 
 
 By far the larger part of the life of everyone of us 
 as a being who thinks and feels is that part which puts 
 him in contact with other human beings, either with the 
 lives of those whom he meets or with the thoughts and 
 deeds of those who in time past have done memorable 
 acts, or have left written words round which his own 
 mind can play. Man himself "the little God of the 
 world " as Mephistopheles calls him 1 is the principal 
 thing on this globe as we know it, and that which ex- 
 plains him has after all the deepest interest for us. 
 
 Whatever be anyone's occupation, he spends most 
 of his working hours in the company of his fellow-men. 
 They may not delight him, as they did not delight 
 Hamlet, or they may delight him, as they surely must 
 have delighted Shakespeare. But whether they delight 
 him or not, they are an inexhaustible field of study ; and 
 the study becomes more interesting when we compare the 
 persons whom we meet and observe with the figures that 
 stand out in the works of those masters of fiction who 
 have known how to make human nature as true in tale 
 or drama as it is in fact. So is it, too, with those whose 
 words and deeds have come down to us from the past. 
 When one has gazed upon the portraits of famous men 
 in the long and stately gallery of history, one can view 
 with a more sympathetic or more humorous eye the 
 endless picture-show that moves before his vision in the 
 present. 
 
 Accordingly, when we turn from thinking of our 
 1 In the Prologue to Goethe's Fattst.
 
 26 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 active life in the world to the inner or personal life, 
 it is the human subjects which are best fitted to nourish 
 it and illumine it. Under the human subjects I include 
 history, philosophy, and imaginative literature. His- 
 tory (of which biography is a part) covers all that 
 man has thought and felt and said and planned and 
 achieved. It is the best mirror of human nature, 
 for it describes things in the concrete, human nature 
 not as we fancy it but as it is. It reveals to us 
 not only what has been, but how that which is has 
 come to be what it is. It helps to explain to us our 
 own generation as well as those that have gone be- 
 fore. Rightly understood, it does this better than 
 all the dissertations and exhortations, plenius et 
 mdius Chrysippo et Crantore, perhaps better even 
 than the sermons. That there are many doubtful 
 questions in history does not materially reduce its 
 value. The trained historian smiles at those who 
 say that history is false because some things are and 
 some may even always remain uncertain ; though no 
 one will be and ought to be more severe toward those 
 who recklessly neglect or wilfully pervert the facts 
 so far as ascertainable. 
 
 Psychology and ethics, though they are more and 
 more seeking, like history, to follow scientific methods, 
 approach the study of human nature in a more abstract 
 and general way than history does. They have the 
 great interest, of appealing directly to individual 
 consciousness, and whoever has formed a taste for them
 
 UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 27 
 
 will find that he has an infinite field open for observ- 
 ing the phenomena which he himself and those around 
 him present. He may even experiment on them, but 
 such experiments, unless carefully conducted, may be 
 as dangerous as those which chemists euphemistically 
 describe as attended by a sudden and rapid evolution 
 of sound, light, and heat. 
 
 Of literature, as apart from history and philosophy, 
 there are many branches, but that branch which I seek 
 to dwell upon for our present purpose is poetry and the 
 imaginative treatment, whether in verse or hi prose, 
 of human themes. Epic and dramatic poems present 
 pictures of life as the highest constructive minds have 
 seen it. Reflective and lyric poems are the finest 
 expression that has been found for human emotion. 
 In their several ways they give voice to what in our 
 clearest moments of vision or at our highest moments 
 of exaltation, we ordinary mortals are able dimly 
 to feel but faintly or feebly to express. In this 
 way they both instruct us and stimulate us more than 
 anything else can do; and they also give a rare and 
 delicate pleasure by the perfection of their form. In 
 urging on you what universities may do to implant a 
 love of literature which shall last through life, let me 
 lay especial stress upon the literature of periods remote 
 from our own. The narratives and the poetry of prim- 
 itive peoples such as the ancient Hebrews, and the 
 ancient Greeks, and our own far-off Teutonic and Celtic 
 forefathers have the incomparable merit of presenting
 
 28 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 thought and passion in their simplest form. They do 
 us an immense service in illuminating the annals of 
 mankind as a whole, by making us feel our own identity 
 with and yet also our differences from the earlier phases 
 of human society. They give a sense of the growth 
 and development of the human spirit which carries us 
 out of our own narrow horizon, which makes all the 
 movements of the world seem to be part of one great 
 drama, which saves us from fancying ourselves to be 
 better or wiser than those who went before, which 
 ennobles life itself by the ample prospect which it 
 opens. 
 
 Most though not all of the literature I am 
 speaking of can be fully enjoyed and appreciated only 
 in the languages in which it was originally composed. 
 These are vulgarly called "dead languages." Let no 
 one be afraid of that name. No language is dead which 
 perfectly conveys thoughts that are alive and are as 
 full of energy now as they ever were. An idea or a 
 feeling grandly expressed lives forever, and gives im- 
 mortality to the words that enshrine it. 
 
 Let me add that it is in large measure through 
 literature that we have been able to enjoy the pleas- 
 ures of nature and those of art. Whoever possesses 
 a sense for form and color may appreciate a fine pict- 
 ure without any knowledge of the technique of paint- 
 ing. But he will see comparatively little in it if his 
 taste has not been formed and trained by the study of 
 masterpieces and if his mind has not received the cul-
 
 UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 29 
 
 tivation which letters and history give. So a man need 
 not have read the poets to be able to find delight in a 
 beautiful landscape. But he will enjoy it far more if he 
 knows what Thomson, Cowper, Burns, Scott, Shelley, 
 Ruskin, and above all, Wordsworth, have written. 
 How much have they done to increase a sense of 
 the charm of nature in all who use our tongue ! 
 
 What are the practical conclusions which I desire 
 to submit to you as the result of these suggestions? 
 They are two. 
 
 The ardour with which the study of the physical 
 sciences is now pursued for practical purposes must 
 not make us forget that education has to do a great 
 deal more than turn out a man fitted to succeed in 
 business. It must also endeavour to give him a power 
 of enjoying the best pleasures. The physical sciences 
 do open such pleasures, but these are not so easily 
 obtained, nor so well adapted to stimulate and polish 
 most minds, nor so calculated to strengthen and refine 
 the character, as those which can be drawn from the 
 human or literary subjects. 
 
 Secondly, in the study of such literary subjects as 
 languages and history, we must beware of giving 
 exclusive attention to the technicalities of grammar 
 and to purely critical enquiries. There is some risk 
 that in the eagerness to apply exact methods so as 
 to secure accuracy and a mastery of detail, the literary 
 quality of the books read and the dramatic and personal 
 aspect of the events and persons studied may be too
 
 30 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 little regarded. Exact methods and the whole ap- 
 paratus of grammatical lore have their use for the 
 purposes of college training, but in after years it 
 is the thoughts and style of the writers, the perma- 
 nent significance or the romantic quality of the events, 
 that ought to dwell in the mind. There is certainly 
 in England a tendency, perhaps due to German in- 
 fluences, to hold that history ought, hi order that 
 it may be thoroughly scientific, to welcome dulness 
 and dryness. It is said, I know not with what truth, 
 that the same tendency is felt here. The ethical side 
 and the romantic side may have been overdone in 
 time past, but it must never be forgotten that one of 
 the chief aims of history is to illustrate human nature. 
 We need throughout life to have all the light thrown 
 upon human nature that history and philosophy can 
 throw ; to have all the help and inspiration for our own 
 lives that poetry can give. Much of everyone's work 
 is dull and monotonous, perhaps even depressing, and 
 that escape from the dulness of many a business career 
 which the strain of fierce competition or bold specula- 
 tion promises is a dangerous resource. It is better to 
 nurture and cherish what I have ventured to call the 
 inner life. Not all can succeed ; none can escape sor- 
 rows and disapointments. He who under disappoint- 
 ments or sorrows has no resources within his own 
 command beyond his daily round of business duties, 
 nothing to which he can turn to cheer or refresh his mind, 
 wants a precious spring of strength and consolation.
 
 UNIVERSITIES AND INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE 31 
 
 Nowhere in the world is there so strong a desire 
 among the people for a university education as here 
 in America. The effects of this will no doubt be 
 felt in the coming generation. Let us hope they will 
 be felt not only in the completer equipment of your 
 citizens for public life and their warmer zeal for civic 
 progress, but also in a true perception of the essential 
 elements of happiness, an enlarged capacity for enjoy- 
 ing those simple pleasures which the cultivation of 
 taste and imagination opens to us all.
 
 THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620 
 
 ADDRESS AT PROVINCETOWN, CAPE COD, MASSACHUSETTS, JULY, 
 
 1907.
 
 THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620 
 
 ADDRESS AT PROVINCETOWN, CAPE COD, MASSACHUSETTS, JULY, 1907. 
 
 FIRST let me thank you, in behalf of the Sovereign and 
 the people whom I am honoured by being deputed to 
 represent in the United States, for your invitation to 
 join hi the celebration to-day of a great event. It is 
 fitting that Old England, whence came the settlers 
 whose anding at this spot you commemorate, should 
 be remembered here in this oldest part of New England 
 and should send you her greeting. 
 
 These colonists were men of the right stamp to settle 
 and develop a new country. England gave you of her 
 best, and she gave them in a great crisis of her own fate. 
 
 She has ever since watched the fortunes of their 
 descendants, marking their growing greatness, and 
 never with more pride, more sympathy, and more 
 affection than she does to-day. 
 
 Many of you may remember to have seen some- 
 where on the island-girt coasts of Massachusetts or 
 Maine a rainbow stretching from one isle to another, 
 and seeming to make a radiant bridge from land to land. 
 It is a beautiful sight, and still more beautiful when the 
 rainbow is a double one. 
 
 In this shape of a double rainbow, bridging the ocean 
 
 35
 
 36 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 from England to America, there presents itself to me 
 the double settlement of this continent by the men 
 who founded Virginia and the men who founded 
 Massachusetts. The rainbow is the symbol of hope, 
 and America has been and still is to Europe the Land 
 of Hope. Over this bridge of hope millions have passed 
 from the Old World hither, and it is in the spirit of hope 
 for the future of a land so blessed by Providence as 
 yours that we of England send our hearty greetings. 
 
 Much has been said indeed, little has been left 
 unsaid in praise of the Pilgrim Fathers, for this coun- 
 try is fertile in celebrations, and I cannot hope to say 
 anything new about them. But every man must 
 speak of a thing as it strikes him. 
 
 I ask myself, when I think of these exiles coming to 
 make their home on what was then a bleak and desert 
 shore : What was it that brought them thither ? Was 
 it the love of civil liberty? They loved civil liberty, 
 for they had suffered from the oppression of the royal 
 officers, but it was not mainly for the sake of that 
 liberty that they came, nor indeed had the great struggle 
 yet begun when they quitted England to spend those 
 years in friendly Holland which preceded their voyage 
 hither. Nor were these Pilgrims made of the same stern 
 fighting stuff as the Puritans who came to another 
 part of Massachusetts Bay a little later and became 
 the founders of Salem and Boston. 
 
 Was it for the love of religious liberty ? Not at any 
 rate for such a general freedom of conscience as we and
 
 THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620 37 
 
 you have now long enjoyed, not for the freedom that 
 means an unquestioned right to all men to speak and 
 write and teach as they would. The proclamation of 
 that general freedom and the rights of the individual 
 conscience might not have been altogether congenial to 
 either Pilgrims or Puritans. Certainly it had not yet 
 been made by its noble apostle, Roger Williams, the 
 founder of Rhode Island, the most original in his think- 
 ing and perhaps the most lovable hi his character of all 
 the founders of North American Colonies. 
 
 What these Pilgrims did desire and what brought them 
 here was the wish to worship God in the way they held to 
 be the right way. It was loyalty to truth and to duty as 
 they saw it that moved them to quit first their English 
 homes and friends, and then their refuge in Holland, and 
 face the terrors of the sea and the rigours of a winter far 
 harsher than their own, in an untrodden land, where 
 enemies lurked in trackless forests. 
 
 No one expected to find gold on the shores of Massachu- 
 setts Bay. No one hoped for that fountain of youth 
 which Ponce de Leon had sought in Florida a century 
 before. No one dreamed of the mighty State which 
 was to grow out of the tiny settlement. 
 
 Not in the thirst for gold ; not hi the passion for 
 adventure ; not for the sake of dominion, but in faith 
 and in duty were laid the foundations of the Colony 
 and State of Massachusetts. 
 
 Is not this what their settlement means to us now 
 after three hundred years? Faith and duty, when
 
 38 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 mated to courage (for without courage they avail little) 
 are the most solid basis on which the greatness of a 
 nation can rest. The strength of a State lies in the 
 characters of its citizens. 
 
 It is a far cry from Massachusetts to Italy, but when 
 I think of these forefathers of yours, and here I think 
 of the Puritans as well as the Pilgrims, and of the men 
 of Connecticut and Rhode Island as well as the men of 
 Massachusetts, men of plain, stern lives, of high pur- 
 poses and steadfast wills, I am reminded of the famous 
 line in which the great Roman poet says that it was on 
 the austere simplicity of her olden days and the strong 
 men she reared that the might of Rome was founded. 
 
 Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque. 
 
 Such men were your Puritan makers of New England. 
 They were hewn from the same rock as those soldiers 
 of Cromwell, some of whom were doubtless their kins- 
 folk, before whom every enemy went down, and to 
 whom was fitly applied that verse from the Hebrew 
 Psalm : "Let the praises of God be in their mouths and 
 a two-edged sword in their hands." 
 
 They were men of a bold and independent spirit, but 
 they knew the value of law, and these Pilgrims of A. D. 
 1620, coming into a region for which no government 
 had yet been provided, bound themselves to one another 
 by a solemn compact signed in the cabin of their ship ; 
 constituting themselves "a civill body politick" with 
 power to "enacte just and equall lawes," to which they
 
 THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620 39 
 
 promised all due submission and obedience, thereafter 
 choosing one of themselves to be their Governor for 
 the year ensuing. 
 
 Many generations have come and gone since the 
 November days when the little Mayflower lay rocking 
 in yonder bay, with the Pilgrim mothers and sisters look- 
 ing out wistfully over the cold, gray waters, in those days 
 silent and lonely, and with the children, cooped up for 
 many a weary week, asking when, at last, they would 
 be put on shore. 
 
 Many things have come to pass, both in England and 
 here, which those grave, grim ancestors of yours might 
 disapprove, good and necessary as you and we may 
 think them. But one thing remains as true now as it 
 was then. 
 
 The fearless man who loves truth and obeys duty 
 is the man who prevails and whose work endures. 
 The State which has such men, and to which such men 
 are glad to render devoted service in war as in peace, 
 grows to be the great State. Those men bequeathed 
 to you traditions and the memory of high thoughts 
 and brave deeds which have been helpful to you ever 
 since hi many an hour of need, and will be helpful to 
 you while your Republic stands. Many new elements 
 have entered into the American people, and much of the 
 blood of the New England of to-day comes from other 
 than old English sources. But there is an inheritance 
 of the spirit as well as of the blood, and the type 
 survives because it has become a part of the character
 
 40 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 which each generation transmits to those who come 
 after. So may the type of the resolute, God-fearing 
 men who laid the foundations of this Commonwealth 
 abide with you for ages to come. 
 
 You are setting the corner-stone of a Tower which, 
 looking far out over the waves of the Atlantic, shall com- 
 memorate those who laid the foundations of the Com- 
 monwealth of Massachusetts, an event worthy of ever- 
 lasting memory. Yet there is a sense in which we may 
 deem that no monument piled high in stone is needed. 
 
 It was said by a famous statesman of antiquity that 
 " the whole earth is the tomb of illustrious men." So the 
 wide land which the descendants of these settlers have 
 covered with flourishing cities and in which they them- 
 selves planted the first seeds of civil and ecclesiastical 
 government is itself their most enduring monument. 
 
 In their darkest days one wrote to them from Eng- 
 land : "Let it not be grievous unto you that you have 
 been instruments to break the ice for others. The 
 honour shall be yours to the world's end." That 
 honour has been theirs and will be theirs. 
 
 From Cape Cod here close beside you to Cape Flat- 
 tery on the far-off shores of the Pacific, corn-fields and 
 mines, railroads, and populous cities, State Houses 
 where legislatures meet, and courts where justice is 
 dispensed, all bear witness to the men who here began 
 the work of civilizing a continent and establishing in 
 it a government rooted from the first, and rooted deep, 
 in the principles of liberty.
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER 
 AND HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT ON THE 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AT ITS 
 ANNUAL MEETING IN PORTLAND, MAINE, AUGUST, 1907.
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER 
 AND HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT ON THE 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AT ITS 
 ANNUAL MEETING IN PORTLAND, MAINE, AUGUST, 1907. 
 
 NOT long. ago I had occasion to read an opinion ren- 
 dered on a point of law by an eminent legal practitioner 
 in a Spanish-American country. The point itself was 
 one which might have arisen equally well in the United 
 States or in England. But the way of approaching it 
 and dealing with it, the turn of thought and the forms 
 of expression, were curiously unlike those which one 
 would have found in anyone trained in the Common 
 Law whether in the United States or in England. This 
 unlikeness pointed to some inherent difference in the 
 way of looking at and handling legal questions. Many 
 of you have doubtless had a similar experience, and 
 have been similarly led to ask what is at the bottom of 
 this difference between the legal ideas and legal methods 
 of ourselves whose minds have been formed by the 
 study of the Common Law and the ideas and methods 
 of the lawyers who belong to the European continent 
 or to South and Central American States. French, 
 German, Italian, Spanish lawyers are all more like one 
 
 43
 
 44 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 another than any of these are to Englishmen or Ameri- 
 cans. 
 
 The causes of this difference lie far back in the 
 past. It would have been discernible in the 
 seventeenth century, and might indeed have 
 been even more marked then than it is now. Two 
 hundred years ago the law of England had already 
 acquired a distinctive quality, and that quality has 
 remained distinctive until now, both here and in Old 
 England, although the substantive provisions of the 
 law have been changed in many respects by the eco- 
 nomic and social progress which the two branches of the 
 race have made, and by the new conditions under 
 which those branches live. We may still with truth 
 speak of the Common Law as being the common posses- 
 sion of the United States and of England, because that 
 spirit, those tendencies, those mental habits which 
 belonged to the English stock when still undivided 
 have been preserved. The causes that produced them 
 belong to a period long anterior to 1776, when the an- 
 cestors of Marshall, Kent, Story, Taney, Webster, 
 Curtis, were living in English villages side by side with 
 those of Coke, Hale, Holt, Hardwicke, Blackstone, 
 Eldon, and the other sages who adorn the English roll 
 of legal fame. These causes were indeed at work far 
 back in the Middle Ages. Just as the character of an 
 individual man is in its essence formed before he 
 attains manhood, though the circumstances of his life 
 modify it, giving prominence to some parts of it and
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 45 
 
 leaving others undeveloped, so in those early centuries 
 were formed that set of ideas and that type of mind 
 which took shape in the provisions and the procedure 
 of the old law of England. The substance of these pro- 
 visions was partly general, that is, such as must exist in 
 every organized and civilized society, partly special, 
 such as the particular conditions of the country and 
 the time needed. The form was due to the lawyers, 
 whether judges, writers, or practitioners. Now the 
 form has greatly affected the substance, and has proved 
 hardly less permanent. When we study the growth of 
 the Common Law we must think not only of the rules 
 of inheritance, the doctrine of consideration for a 
 contract, the conception of felony, the definition of 
 manor; we must think also of the forms of actions, 
 of the jury, of the authority of decided cases. All 
 these were already well settled before the first English 
 colonist set foot on the American continent. They 
 had become part of the life and legal consciousness of 
 the nation. 
 
 What would an observer who had studied legal his- 
 tory in general select as the distinguishing qualities, the 
 peculiar and characteristic notes of the Common Law ? 
 
 First, its firm grasp of the rights of the individual 
 citizen. He is conceived of, he is dealt with, as a centre 
 of force, an active atom, whirling about among other 
 atoms, a person in whom there inhere certain powers 
 and capacities, which he is entitled to assert and make 
 effective, not only against other citizens, but against
 
 46 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 all other citizens taken together; that is, as against 
 the state itself and its visible embodiment or organ, the 
 executive government. 
 
 Secondly, its recognition of the state and the execu- 
 tive as clothed with the authority of the whole com- 
 munity, as being an effective power, entitled to require 
 and compel the obedience of the individual wherever 
 and whenever it does not trespass on the rights which 
 are legally secured to him. To be effective, law must 
 have not only physical force behind it, but also the 
 principle of legitimate authority, the sense in every 
 citizen that his individual free will has its limits, and 
 can be exerted only within the sphere allotted to it. 
 Liberty is, in a civilized community, the child of law. 
 It is not his own pleasure, but the fact that the com- 
 munity has recognized a certain sphere of unchecked 
 action as belonging to him, within which he can do 
 as he pleases, that secures the citizen in his rights. 
 Outside that sphere he must not only obey, but 
 cooperate with the executive. It is his duty to aid 
 in preventing a crime, in suppressing disorder, in 
 arresting an offender. A sheriff exercising his functions 
 can call on all persons present to support him, and 
 they are bound to support him, a wholesome and, if 
 you like, a truly democratic doctrine. The law 
 is the people's law, not only in its origin, but also for 
 the purpose of its enforcement. 
 
 These two principles go together. The one is a 
 safeguard against Tyranny, i.e. the absolute and capri-
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 47 
 
 cious will of the governing power, the other against 
 Anarchy, i.e. that unrestrained and unlimited exercise 
 of the will of each and every citizen which must result 
 in collision, disorder, and the triumph of mere force. 
 
 It may be suggested that these two principles are not 
 peculiar to the Common Law, because no law could grow 
 up, and no state could prosper, without both of them. 
 That is true. But there have been systems of law in 
 which sometimes the one, sometimes the other, prin- 
 ciple was imperfectly developed, and (so to speak) 
 overweighted by the other. The former principle es- 
 pecially (viz. the recognition of the rights of the citi- 
 zen) has often been quite too weak to secure due pro- 
 tectiorf to the individual man. It is the clearness 
 with which both have been recognized, the fulness with 
 which both have been developed, in the mediaeval and 
 post-mediaeval English law that constitute its highest 
 merit. 
 
 From the equal recognition of these two principles 
 there follows a third characteristic. If principles 
 apparently antagonistic are to be reconciled, there 
 must be a precise delimitation of their respective bounds 
 and limits. The law must be definite and exact. 
 Now precision, defmiteness, exactitude are features 
 of the Common Law so conspicuous that the unlearned 
 laity sometimes think they have been developed to an 
 inordinate degree. They have made the law not only 
 very minute, but very technical. But of this anon. 
 
 With the love of precision there naturally goes a love
 
 48 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 of certainty and fixity. The spirit of the Common Law 
 is a conservative spirit, which stands upon what exists, 
 distrusting change, and refusing change until change 
 has become inevitable. "Stare super antiquas mas:" 
 "Nolumus leges Anglice mutari" (the words of the 
 barons at the council of Merton in Henry the Third's 
 day) : "It is better that the law should be certain than 
 that the law should be just," these were favourite dicta 
 among the lawyers of the old school in England. 
 
 The respect for what has been settled, and the desire 
 that what has been settled should be definite hi its 
 terms, import a deference to precedent. No legal 
 system, not even the Mussulman law, grounded on 
 Koranic interpretation and traditions, has ever gone 
 so far in obedience to what was ruled in the past as the 
 Common Law does in basing itself on cases judicially 
 determined and recorded. 
 
 Judicial decisions are given, legal precedents are 
 made, as events bring them. There is no order among 
 them except the chronological. Thus a law constructed 
 out of them is necessarily wanting in symmetry. The 
 Common Law is admittedly unsymmetrical. Some 
 might call it, as a whole, confused, however exact may 
 be the propositions that compose it. There are general 
 principles running through it, but these are often hard 
 to follow, so numerous are the exceptions. There are 
 inconsistencies in it, where decisions apparently con- 
 flicting have been given by different authorities at dif- 
 ferent times. There are gaps in it, where no decision
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 49 
 
 has happened to cover a particular set of circumstances. 
 Thus there has been formed a tendency among lawyers 
 to rate principles, or, let us say, philosophical and logical 
 views of the law, very low compared with any positive 
 declaration made by a court. The maxim, "An ounce 
 of precedent is worth a pound of principle," still ex- 
 presses the attitude of the profession hi England, and 
 very possibly here also. 
 
 With the love of certainty and definiteness there 
 goes a respect for the forms of legal proceedings and 
 for the precise verbal expression given to rules. This 
 is a quality which belongs to most legal systems in their 
 earlier stages. It was very highly developed in the 
 early days of Rome and the early days of Iceland. In 
 the Common Law it held its ground with great per- 
 tinacity till quite recently, both in England and here ; 
 nor am I sure that it is not now strong in some of your 
 states, possibly stronger than in the England of to-day, 
 hi which, especially since the sweeping changes made 
 by the Judicature Act of 1873, the old distinctions 
 between forms of actions are being forgotten. 
 
 You may think that among the features that char- 
 acterize our Common Law I ought to name the love of 
 justice and also the fondness for subtle distinctions. I 
 do not, however, dwell on the latter of these, because it 
 belongs to all legal systems that reach a certain point of 
 development, and is even more evident in some others 
 than in our own. The robust common sense which 
 is inherent in the Common Law seldom encouraged
 
 50 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 fine distinctions to go beyond a certain point. As for 
 the love of justice, it belongs to mankind generally, 
 and to all systems of law. Such differences as may be 
 noted between different peoples consist not in the reality 
 of the wish to give every man his due, suum cuique 
 tribuere, but in the self-control which prevents emo- 
 tional impulses from overriding justice, in the practical 
 good sense which perceives that to allow the forms of 
 law to be neglected or unusually harsh treatment to 
 be inflicted where a cause or a person happens to be 
 unpopular, is really to injure the community by im- 
 pairing the respect for law itself and the confidence in 
 its administration. Englishmen and Americans may 
 claim that although, like others, they have sometimes 
 lapsed from the right path, they have, on the whole, 
 restrained their passions from trampling upon justice, 
 and upon the regular methods of securing justice, better 
 than most nations have done. 
 
 The foregoing characteristics of our Common Law 
 are submitted for your consideration, not as being the 
 only ones which belong to it, for others might be added, 
 but as being characteristics so broad and salient as to 
 make it comparatively easy to discuss them and to 
 endeavour to account for them. Some are found in all 
 systems that have reached a high level of scientific 
 development, being indeed qualities without which no 
 system could be deemed excellent. Only one other 
 system, the Roman, possesses them in so large a meas- 
 ure as to deserve comparison.
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 51 
 
 To what are we to ascribe these features distinctive 
 of the Common Law? The in-dwelling qualities of 
 the race of men who built it up must have been a prin- 
 cipal and indeed the primary cause. The mind and 
 character of a people are indeed more exactly and ade- 
 quately expressed in and through its law and institutions 
 than they are through its literature or its art. For 
 books and paintings are the work of individual men, 
 many of whom may have been greatly influenced by 
 foreign ideas or foreign models ; and some of whom, 
 powerful enough to influence their successors, may not 
 have been typical representatives of the national genius. 
 But laws are the work of the nation as a whole, framed 
 indeed by the ruling class, and shaped in their details 
 by a professional class, but to a large extent created 
 by other classes also, because (except in those few cases 
 where a conqueror imposes his own law on the van- 
 quished) the rules which govern the relations of the 
 ordinary citizen must be such as suit and express the 
 wishes of the ordinary citizen, being in harmony with 
 his feelings and fitted to meet the needs of his daily 
 life. They are the offspring of custom, and custom is 
 the child of the people. Thus not only the constructive 
 intellect of the educated and professional class but the 
 half-conscious thought and sentiment of the average 
 man go to the making and moulding of the law. It is 
 the outcome of what German philosophers call the 
 legal mind (Rechtsbewusstsein, or Legal Consciousness) 
 of a nation.
 
 52 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 But law is the product not of one or two generations, 
 but of many. National character is always insensibly 
 changing, and changing more rapidly the more ad- 
 vanced in civilization the nation becomes, the greater 
 the vicissitudes in its fortunes, and the more constant 
 or intimate its intercourse with other nations. Hence 
 institutions become the expression of historical in- 
 fluences as well as of those original gifts and 
 tendencies of a race or a people which we observe 
 when it emerges from prehistoric darkness. Time and 
 circumstances cooperate in the work. Law is the 
 result of the events which mould a nation as well as of 
 the mental and moral qualities with which the nation 
 started on its career. These two elements are so mixed 
 and blent in their working that it is hard to describe 
 them separately. Nevertheless let us try. Let us 
 begin by a glance at the inborn talents and temper of 
 the English people, and then see how the course of 
 history trained their powers and guided their action. 
 
 All the Teutons are strong, resolute, even wilful; 
 and the Low Germans and Northmen were the most 
 active and forceful branches of the Teutonic stock. 
 Every man knew his rights and was ready to assert 
 his rights by sword and axe. Not only so, he was 
 ready, where society had become advanced enough for 
 courts to grow up, to assert his rights by legal process 
 also. Read the Icelandic Sagas, in which records of 
 killings and of lawsuits are mingled in about equal 
 proportion, if you wish to realize how keen was the
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 53 
 
 sense each freeman had of his own claims, and how reso- 
 lute he was in enforcing them. Never was there a 
 people more fond of legal strife than were the Nor- 
 wegians and Danes, who spread themselves over East- 
 ern Britain in the ninth and tenth centuries, or than 
 their brethren, whom Rolf Ganger led to the conquest 
 of the northern coast of France in the ninth century. 
 The Norman peasant is proverbial to-day in France 
 for his litigiousness. 
 
 In this self-assertiveness, however, there is no dis- 
 regard of duly constituted authority. The primitive 
 Teuton had his Folk Mot in England, his Thing in Nor- 
 way and Iceland. He was loyal to his chief or king. 
 He felt his duty to the community wherein he lived. 
 He did not always obey the law, but he respected the 
 law, and felt the need of its enforcement. 
 
 It belongs to a strong race to have the power of self- 
 control. Our forefathers were fierce and passionate, 
 like other half-civilized peoples, but they had this power, 
 and they restrained themselves from overriding the 
 process of law and letting passion work injustice many 
 a time when men of other races, Greeks, or Slavs, or 
 Celts, would have yielded to their impulses. So too 
 they had a latent solidity and steadiness which indis- 
 posed them to frequent or fitful change. Compared 
 with their Slavonic neighbours to the east and their 
 Celtic neighbours to the west, races at least as intel- 
 lectually quick and intellectually fertile, the Teutons 
 have always been of a conservative temper. This may
 
 54 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 be so we like to think a mark of good sense and 
 patience, or it may be an attribute of dogged and slowly 
 moving minds. Anyhow, there it is, and (as already 
 remarked) it is, for the purposes of law-building, a 
 merit of the first magnitude. 
 
 Further, the mediaeval English mind was of a practi- 
 cal rather than of a speculative type. It had plenty 
 of acumen, plenty of logical vigour. But it did not run 
 to the spinning of theories or the trying of experiments. 
 This has been characteristic more or less of the English 
 and the American mind, and, I may add, of the Low 
 German or Dutch mind, ever since, as compared with 
 the Scotch mind and with that of our brethren the 
 High Germans of the European Continent. For those 
 who were destined to create a great and complex legal 
 system, it was an excellent quality. Speaking to an 
 American audience, no one would venture to disparage 
 ingenuity. The jurist needs it daily. But the jurist 
 who is making the law needs caution and practical 
 judgment even more ; and with all your ingenuity, it 
 has never been your way either to run ahead of actual 
 needs or to pull up the plant to see whether the roots 
 are sprouting. 
 
 Here, then, we have noted five characteristics of 
 those to whom we owe the Common Law. They were 
 strong men and pugnacious men; they respected au- 
 thority ; they could at need control their impulses ; 
 they were not given to change ; they were not fertile 
 in theory or invention. With these qualities they
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 55 
 
 started on the work of making law. How did the 
 conditions of England from the twelfth to the eigh- 
 teenth century affect them, and so guide their action 
 as to bring out in the fulness of tune the legal product 
 we have inherited, a fruit very different from that 
 which ripened under the sun of Germany or France ? 
 
 The English king in the Middle Ages was strong, 
 stronger than the kings of France or Castile or Aragon. 
 He was from the days of Henry II onwards effective 
 master (except for brief intervals) of the whole realm. 
 He was able to make his executive authority feared 
 even if it was sometimes disobeyed. His writ ran 
 everywhere. His judges travelling through the country 
 brought the law to the sight of all men. 
 
 His aim, and that of his judges, was during the thir- 
 teenth and fourteenth centuries to build up one law, 
 instead of the variety of the diverse customs such as 
 had grown up in Continental Europe. Thus he and 
 they must needs strive to make the law clear and cer- 
 tain. Such it became. Here and there, as in Kent and 
 in some old boroughs, local land customs survived, yet 
 not enough to mar the unity and definiteness of the 
 law as a whole. 
 
 From good motives as well as bad ones, the king was 
 tempted to stretch his authority, and make himself 
 almost a despot. He was so strong over against the 
 barons that they were obliged from time to time to ally 
 themselves with the church usually their antagonist 
 and with the middle class of small landholders and
 
 56 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 burghers. This alliance was in the interests of freedom 
 and of a limitation of royal power. To it we owe 
 Magna Charta, and the long line of restrictions there- 
 after imposed on arbitrary government. Now Magna 
 Charta is the declaration of one generally binding law. 
 It enounces and consecrates, and is itself, LEX TERRAE, 
 the law of the whole land, and of all persons therein. 
 It is for us of the English stock the parent of all in- 
 struments denning the relation of citizen and sovereign, 
 be the sovereign a king or the people. It is the an- 
 cestor of your own federal constitution, as well as of the 
 "Bill of Rights" provisions of all State constitutions. 
 Just as the barons and the people were obliged to 
 base themselves upon the solemnly made engagements 
 of the Crown as the evidence of their immunities, so 
 the Crown, acting through its judges, not being strong 
 enough to make its own policy or view of what was 
 right prevail as a mere exercise of the sovereign's own 
 will, and desiring to have some positive authority to 
 set against the texts quoted from imperial or papal 
 law by the civilians or the canonists, was forced to rely 
 upon acts previously done, and decisions previously 
 delivered, and to found the law upon them. Thus both 
 parties were led to appeal to and lay stress upon prece- 
 dents. The rights which the law enforced were, as 
 usually happens in early times, much involved with 
 the procedure for enforcing them; and the desire to 
 secure uniformity of procedure in the king's courts led 
 to the constant citation of judgments delivered on
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 57 
 
 previous occasions. Under these conditions, and 
 favoured by them, there grew up that habit of record- 
 ing and following decided cases which is so eminently 
 and indeed uniquely characteristic of the Common Law. 
 
 The balance of forces in English mediaeval society 
 appeared most clearly in the relations of lord and vassal. 
 Each had unquestionable rights, and these rights were 
 apt to come into conflict. The adjustment of conflict- 
 ing claims gave constant occupation to the lawyers and 
 the judges, and, while forming habits of exact thought 
 and precise statement, it created a great mass of techni- 
 cal learning. The older English land law was indeed 
 as intricate and elaborately artificial a body of rules 
 as the world has ever seen. Though modified in some 
 important points, it lasted with us until less than a cen- 
 tury ago, when it began to be so cut about by amending 
 statutes as to lose its ancient logical cohesion. For 
 some reason or in some way which is not clear to most 
 of us, many of its technical doctrines were held not 
 applicable to land in North America, so you have es- 
 caped most of the complications it handed down to us. 
 But the process which produced it left a deep impress 
 on the law generally. Some of the faults, some also 
 of the merits, of the Anglo-American way of handling 
 legal questions are due to the ancient land rights and 
 the procedure followed in trying the issues that arose 
 under them. 
 
 English freedom, in the particular legal form it took, 
 sprang out of feudal conditions. In reality, it was
 
 58 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 older than feudality, and had lost some of its simple 
 Teutonic breadth when overgrown by feudal notions. 
 But the structure of parliament and the right of parlia- 
 ment alone to impose taxes sprang out of the relation 
 of the king (as feudal lord) to his tenants, which is in 
 a certain sense a private relation as well as a political 
 one. It is hardly too much to say that what we call 
 the public or constitutional law of England is a part 
 of, as it has certainly grown out of, the private law. 
 Some of our fundamental constitutional principles 
 have been established by decisions given in private 
 suits. And although you in America can draw a 
 sharper line between public and private law than can 
 be drawn in England, because you have a written or 
 rigid constitution, and we have, strictly speaking, no 
 constitution at all, still the old character of the Common 
 Law remains plainly visible in the fact that many of 
 the most important questions that have arisen on the 
 construction of your federal and state constitutions 
 have arisen in suits between private parties, where 
 the primary issue before the court was one in which 
 the rights of those parties had to be determined. 
 
 I have referred to exactitude of thought and expres- 
 sion as one of the excellencies which we justly admire 
 in the sages of the Common Law and particularly in 
 the deliverances of the judges. That exactitude has 
 become a feature of all our legal thinking and legal 
 writing, and has in particular made us separate more 
 clearly than the lawyers of most other nations do,
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 59 
 
 considerations strictly legal from those which belong 
 to the sphere of morality or sentiment. We owe this in 
 no small measure to the old system of pleading which, 
 slowly matured and refined to an excessive point 
 of technicality, gave to the intellects of many genera- 
 tions of lawyers a very sharp edge. That system had 
 the great merit of impressing upon them the need for 
 distinguishing issues of law from issues of fact. The 
 first lesson a student learns is to consider in any given 
 case whether he ought to plead or to demur. It is a 
 lesson of value to all of us in our daily life. Half the 
 confusions of thought in the world, certainly not ex- 
 cepting the world of political discussion, arise because 
 men have not learnt to ask themselves whether the 
 issue is one of fact or of principle. "Do I deny the 
 facts or do I dispute the inference ? Ought I to plead 
 or to demur?" 
 
 It is a remarkable fact that although the Common 
 Law came into existence at a time when personal slav- 
 ery was not extinct in England, and had reached an 
 advanced state of development before praedial slavery 
 or villenage had died out, the existence of slavery in 
 the North American colonies had nothing to do with 
 either English institution, but arose quite independently 
 in colonial days. Though villenage existed at Common 
 Law, and is said to have lasted into the seventeenth 
 century, personal slavery does not, I think, stand re- 
 corded and recognized in any English Common Law book 
 of authority or in any decided case, and I suppose that
 
 60 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the incidents of negro slavery in the colonies, doubtless 
 practically assumed before anyone thought of specific 
 legal sanction, were either parts of the general Common 
 Law of personal property or else rested upon statutes 
 of those colonies in which slavery existed. It may be 
 observed in passing that although one might think 
 that the recognition of the rights of man as man (i.e. 
 as a human being) would be clearest and fullest in a 
 country where there were no slaves, this may not in 
 fact have been the case. Where some men are free 
 and others are slaves, the status of freedom may have 
 been conceived more sharply as a positive status, and 
 the rights belonging to the individual as a freeman 
 may have stood out more strongly, because he is le- 
 gally exempt from treatment to which the slave is 
 liable. As a freeman, he is prima facie the equal, as a 
 holder of private civil rights, of all other free men, even 
 though the latter may belong to a specially privileged 
 caste. The history of the Roman law of persons lends 
 colour to this view. 
 
 On no feature of the Common Law did your ancestors 
 lay more stress than on the jury, and the right of every 
 citizen to be tried by his peers. This right had been 
 a bulwark of English freedom, and was deemed in the 
 eighteenth century to be essential thereto. Yet it 
 deserves to be noticed that the jury was an institution 
 which, in the form familiar to us, arose almost by acci- 
 dent. The legal genius, or instinct, of the mediaeval 
 English may, however, be credited with the use they
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 61 
 
 made of this accident. Darwin has shown how a 
 variation from a type which in its origin is accidental, 
 that is to say, due to some cause operative in an in- 
 dividual organism which is beyond our power of en- 
 quiry (do we quite know what we mean when 
 we talk of chance?), may become the source of a new 
 type possessing advantages which enable it to survive 
 and prevail and reach a higher level of efficiency than 
 the original type possessed. So it may be not too 
 fanciful to suggest that where a political or legal germ 
 happens to fall in a fertile soil the virtue of the soil 
 enables it to spring up and become the parent of a 
 flourishing progeny. Our ancestors moulded the jury 
 into an instrument serviceable not only for discovering 
 the truth but for securing freedom and justice, freedom 
 because it was practically independent of royal power, 
 justice because, although it was sometimes intimi- 
 dated, and occasionally even corrupted, it was usually 
 less liable to be tampered with by those malign influences 
 which might poison the mind or pervert the action of a 
 judge in days when public opinion was ill-informed or 
 weak. We, in England, have no longer that confidence 
 in the wisdom of a jury in certain classes of civil ac- 
 tions which we once had, and the tendency of recent 
 years has been to narrow the sphere of its employment. 
 But the institution of the jury has had some notably 
 beneficent results. Along with those rules of pleading 
 to which I have already referred, it helped to form in 
 us a keener sense of the need for separating issues of
 
 62 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 law from issues of fact than exists anywhere outside 
 England and America, and it has trained us how to 
 draw this distinction in every case we have to advise 
 on or to argue. It has tended to keep judicial deliver- 
 ances of the law within due limits of brevity, because 
 when a judge finds himself tempted to wander off from 
 a determination of legal points into the general 
 merits of the case, he is reminded that the latter are 
 for the jury, and that his natural human tendency to do 
 what he thinks substantial justice must be restrained 
 by the sense that his business is to declare the law and 
 be content with advising the jury on the facts. It 
 formed the practice of using, at a criminal trial, evidence 
 almost exclusively oral, and thus incidentally it pre- 
 vented both those secret examinations of the accused 
 person and that recourse to torture which were com- 
 mon in Continental Europe. It confirmed the ancient 
 usage of requiring judicial proceedings to be conducted 
 in public, and thus kept subject to the watchful eye of 
 popular opinion. And it mitigated that harshness of 
 the penal law which belongs to all comparatively rude 
 societies and was not removed from the English statute 
 book till within the memory of persons still living. 
 When men were liable to be hanged for small thefts, 
 English juries refused to convict for such offences, and 
 their refusal hastened the march of legislative reform. 
 The mention of penal matters suggests a word as to 
 the extreme technicality of the older Common Law. 
 Frequently as that technicality frustrated the doing of
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 63 
 
 substantial justice in civil cases, it had its advantages 
 in criminal proceedings. Often a prisoner who did not 
 deserve a severe sentence and no doubt sometimes 
 also a prisoner who did escaped on some technical 
 ground. The Common Law, which had (as already 
 remarked) the great merit of forbidding the use of 
 torture, abominably frequent in Continental Europe 
 and practised even in the free cantons of Switzerland 
 till near the end of the eighteenth century, had also 
 the merit of forming in the legal profession the feeling 
 that an accused person ought to have a fair run for 
 life or freedom. A sportsmanlike instinct grew up, 
 like that which gives the hunted deer "law" or a 
 fair start, or that which forbids certain tricks by 
 which a game at cricket might be won. A judge who 
 bullied a prisoner was condemned by professional opin- 
 ion. A prosecuting counsel who overstated his case or 
 betrayed a personal eagerness to convict the prisoner, 
 incurred the displeasure of his brethren and was sure 
 to hear of it afterwards. I have often been struck in 
 our criminal courts by the self-restraint which experi- 
 enced counsel impose on themselves when conducting 
 a case, as well as by the care which the judge takes to 
 let the prisoner have the benefit of every circumstance 
 in his favour. Here one feels the tradition of the Com- 
 mon Law, which insisted on protecting the individual 
 against the state. How different things are in some 
 parts of the European continent is known to you all. 
 It is partly because this good tradition has been so well
 
 64 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 preserved that we have in England found that con- 
 victed prisoners need comparatively few opportunities 
 for raising points of law after the trial. The trial it- 
 self almost always secures for them whatever justice 
 requires, though of course there is a power of raising 
 for subsequent argument points reserved. 1 
 
 The mediaeval Common Law has been charged with 
 one serious defect, that of lacking elasticity and the 
 power of expansion. It halted at a certain point. It 
 refused to deal, or I should perhaps say, its machinery 
 proved incapable of dealing, with certain sets of cases, 
 and left them to be taken up by the crown acting 
 through the Lord Chancellor. I cannot stop to 
 enquire how far this was due to an excess of con- 
 servatism in our forefathers, how far to the circum- 
 stances of the time, which, while circumscribing the 
 action of the king through one set of machinery, left 
 him free to act through another. Anyhow, the result 
 was that the huge system which we call Equity grew 
 up side by side with the Common Law, remained dis- 
 tinct from it in England until the Judicature Act of 
 1873, and I believe remains, in some states and to some 
 extent, still distinct from it in the United States. In 
 a broad sense, however, although, speaking technically, 
 we distinguish Common Law from Equity, we may in- 
 clude Equity within the term Common Law, when we 
 
 1 In the present session of Parliament (1907) an Act has been 
 passed providing for an appeal, under certain circumstances, in crim- 
 inal cases.
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 65 
 
 use this latter term to distinguish the law of England 
 and America from the Roman law of the European 
 continent, or of Louisiana and Spanish America. 
 And it must not be forgotten that not only had 
 Equity become a thoroughly positive system and a 
 technical system by the time when the North 
 American colonies were founded, but also that it 
 had been largely influenced by the same historical 
 environment and had been moulded by the same 
 national tendencies as had governed the growth 
 of the law administered in the Common Law courts. 
 How much of its own precision and certainty the older 
 system had given to the younger system may be seen 
 by whoever will compare English Equity with the civil 
 law of most European countries in the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 I have kept to the last the most striking of all the 
 historical conditions which determined the character 
 of Anglo-American law. England (or rather Britain) 
 was an island. The influences which governed the 
 development of law in the European mainland reached 
 her in an attenuated form. The English people had 
 the chance of making a new start and of creating a 
 system of law for themselves, instead of merely adopting 
 or adapting the Roman jurisprudence, as did, at va- 
 rious times and in diverse ways, the French, the Span- 
 iards, the Germans, and (ultimately and indirectly) 
 nearly all modern peoples except those of English 
 stock. We must not indeed exaggerate the originality
 
 66 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 of our law. It is not as original as that of Iceland would 
 probably have been, had Iceland gone on developing 
 the legal customs she had formed by the middle of the 
 thirteenth century. It is not original in the sense of 
 owing little or nothing to foreign sources, for a great 
 deal of law flowed from Roman fountains into the 
 English stream. When (according to Gervase of 
 Tilbury) the Lombard Vacarius taught the Roman 
 law in the reign of King Stephen at Oxford 
 this is among the very first traces we have of that 
 famous university we cannot suppose that his hear- 
 ers were confined to those who wished to practise in 
 the ecclesiastical courts. In the next century we find 
 Bracton, one of our earliest legal writers, copying freely 
 from the Roman law books, though he frequently also 
 contradicts them when English usage differed. In the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the ecclesiastical 
 chancellors who built up the system of Equity were 
 much influenced by Roman legal doctrines, drawn 
 largely through canonist channels. Still the fact 
 remains that the law of England was a new creation, 
 not an adaptation of the law of the Empire. It has a 
 character and a quality which are all its own ; and its 
 free spirit and tendencies have always stood out in 
 marked contrast to the despotic spirit and tendencies 
 which France, Spain, and Germany inherited from the 
 imperial jurisprudence. To that jurisprudence it was, 
 during the Middle Ages and the centuries that followed, 
 as much superior in respect for freedom and in what
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 67 
 
 may be called a popular flavour as it was inferior in 
 respect of the philosophic breadth and elegance of the 
 ancient sources on which that imperial jurisprudence 
 was founded. The use of the jury, the far larger 
 place assigned to oral evidence, the sharper separation 
 of issues of law from issues of fact, are among the 
 most salient points in which its distinctive and indi- 
 vidual quality appears. 
 
 I had intended to have given you a brief sketch of 
 the earlier history of the ancient Roman law for the 
 sake of showing how the characteristics of that great 
 rival system sprang from features in the national char- 
 acter of the Romans in their Republican days, not un- 
 like those which marked our ancestors. The Romans 
 too had a genius for law. Less imaginative, less artistic, 
 less acute in speculation, altogether less intellectually 
 versatile and alert than were the Greeks, they had a 
 greater capacity for building up and bringing to an al- 
 most finished and certainly unsurpassed perfection a 
 body of legal principles and rules. They possessed this 
 capacity in respect of gifts like those of our ancestors. 
 They realized clearly the rights of the individual as 
 against the state. They were conservative. They had 
 the power of self-control. They were filled with practi- 
 cal good sense. But this great subject is too great 
 to be dealt with at the end of an address, and I must 
 be content with recommending it to the attention of 
 those who are interested in these studies as throwing 
 much light upon the general tendencies which have
 
 68 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 governed the growth of law. The best illustrations 
 of English legal history are to be found in Roman legal 
 history. 
 
 I have so far been speaking of the Common Law as 
 a product of the English intellect under certain pecul- 
 iar historical conditions. But if it was a result, it was 
 also a cause. It reacted powerfully upon the people 
 that made it. Just as the habit of physical or mental 
 exercise strengthens the body or the mind where na- 
 tive energy has made exercise enjoyable, so the Common 
 Law, once created, began to develop further and give 
 more definite form to those very qualities of the na- 
 tion whereto its own features were due. Under its in- 
 fluence the national mind became more and more per- 
 meated by the spirit of legality. It grew accustomed 
 to resist arbitrary power, but as it did this in defence 
 of prescriptive right, it did not lapse into revolutionary 
 ways. Thus there was formed the idea of a govern- 
 ment of limited powers, and the habit, when anyone 
 claimed obedience, of requiring him to show his title 
 to demand it. If it be asked why should not such a 
 conception of the legal character of all authority be- 
 long to, and arise in, every duly matured system of 
 law, the answer is that the case of England stood alone 
 in this respect, that the law came early to be recognized 
 as being something more than an expression of the will 
 of the monarch. It sprang partly out of the old cus- 
 toms, partly (and more as time went on) from an as- 
 sembly which was national, although not yet popular.
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 69 
 
 It did not descend, as in Continental Europe, from an 
 ancient and foreign wisdom or authority. It was 
 English. It came not from above, but from all around. 
 In England, moreover, there were among the men 
 who knew and practised the law not a few persons of 
 independent social standing. They were largely the 
 lesser landholders and the younger sons or nephews 
 of some of the larger landholders, and so they formed 
 a link between the nobles and the middle classes. Un- 
 like the lawyers of France, those of England did not 
 generally depend on the Crown, and they were ready on 
 occasion to oppose it. Thus, although the people at 
 large knew little of the details of the law, the spirit of 
 independent legality was diffused through the nation, 
 and legality was not the docile servant of power as it 
 became in countries where both physical force and the 
 function of making or declaring the law were in the 
 hands of the executive ruler. 
 
 How great a part the conception of the legal rights 
 of the subject or citizen against the Crown or the state 
 power played in English and American history, is known 
 to you all, nor need I dwell on the capital impor- 
 tance for the whole political system of the United 
 States of that doctrine of limited powers which has 
 been so admirably worked out in your constitutions, 
 nor of that respect for a defined legal right which sup- 
 ports their provisions. The life of every nation rests 
 mainly on what may be called its fixed ideas, those 
 ideas which have become axioms in the mind of every
 
 70 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 citizen. They are stronger than fundamental laws, 
 because it is they that give to fundamental laws their 
 strength. They are, as the poet says, " the hidden bases 
 of the hills." Now it was mainly by the Common Law 
 that these fixed and fundamental ideas were moulded, 
 whereon the constitutional freedom of America, as of 
 England, rests. 
 
 One hundred and thirty-one years have now passed 
 since the majestic current of the Common Law became 
 divided into two streams which have ever since flowed 
 in distinct channels. Water is naturally affected by 
 the rock over or the soil through which it flows, but 
 these two streams have hitherto preserved almost the 
 same tint and almost the same flavour. Many statutes 
 have been enacted in England since 1776, and many 
 more enacted here, but the character of the Common 
 Law remains essentially the same, and it forms the 
 same mental habits in those who study and practise it. 
 An American counsel in an English court, or an Eng- 
 lish counsel in an American court, feels himself in a 
 familiar atmosphere, and understands what is going 
 on, and why it is going on, because he is to the manner 
 born. You read and quote our law reports, though 
 they are nowadays too largely filled by decisions on 
 recent statutes; we read and quote yours, though 
 embarrassed by the enormous quantity of the food (not 
 all of it equally nutritious) which you annually present 
 to our appetite. In nothing, perhaps, does the sub- 
 stantial identity of the two branches of the old stock
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW 71 
 
 appear so much as in the doctrine and practice of the 
 law, for the fact that many new racial elements have 
 gone to the making of the American people causes in 
 this sphere very little difference. It is a bond of union 
 and of sympathy whose value can hardly be overrated. 
 An English visitor who has himself been trained to the 
 law can find few keener pleasures than that which my 
 friends, Lord Justice Kennedy, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir 
 Frederick Pollock (together with your other English 
 legal visitors), and I enjoy in being here to-day among 
 so many eminent members of our own profession and in 
 seeing how influential and how respected a place that 
 profession holds, and has always held, in the United 
 States. It is a bond of sympathy not least because it 
 is a source of common pride. There is nothing of 
 which you and we may be more justly proud than that 
 our common forefathers reared this majestic fabric 
 which has given shelter to so many generations of men 
 and from which there have gone forth principles of 
 liberty by which the whole world has profited. 
 
 The law of a nation is not only the expression of its 
 character, but a main factor in its greatness. What 
 the bony skeleton is to the body, what her steel ribs 
 are to a ship, that to a State is its Law, holding all 
 the parts fitly joined together so that each may retain 
 its proper place and- discharge its proper functions. 
 The Common Law has done this for you and for us 
 in such wise as to have helped to form the mind and 
 habits as well of the individual citizens as of the
 
 72 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 whole nation. Parts of it these private citizens 
 cannot understand; and when that is so they had 
 better not try, but be content to seek your professional 
 advice. But it is all their own. They can remould 
 it if they will. Where a system of law has been made 
 by the people and for the people, where it conforms to 
 their sentiments and breathes their spirit, it deserves 
 and receives the confidence of the people. So may it 
 ever be both in America and in England.
 
 THE CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF 
 LEGISLATION 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE NEW YORK STATE BAR ASSOCIATION, 
 JANUARY, 1908.
 
 THE CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF 
 LEGISLATION 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE NEW YORK STATE BAR ASSOCIATION, 
 JANUARY, 1908. 
 
 THE subject on which I have to address you is far re- 
 moved from any of those thoughts with which the polit- 
 ical and financial excitement of the moment fills the 
 thoughts of the legal practitioner either in the rural 
 parts of the State, or here in New York City, where 
 the financial barometer rises and falls so quickly, and 
 where the lawyer is often summoned to administer 
 spiritual consolation to some of his clients in the part 
 of the city where that barometer can best be watched. 
 But it may have some interest for an audience which 
 is not wholly absorbed in its professional practice, but 
 has also to watch and study the machinery of legisla- 
 tion as it is at work from year to year. 
 
 The immense increase in the volume of legislation 
 during the last half century is one of the salient fea- 
 tures of our time. Mr. Choate has told you that more 
 than five thousand statutes were passed in this country 
 during the last two years. But the phenomenon is 
 not confined to this country. Various causes may be 
 assigned for it. It may be due to the swift changes in 
 economic and social conditions which have called forth 
 
 75
 
 76 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 new laws to deal with those facts. Pessimists may per- 
 haps ascribe it to the spread of new evils or the increase 
 of old evils which the State is always attempting by 
 one expedient after another to repress. I suppose this 
 is what Tacitus meant when he wrote " Corruptissima 
 republica plurimce. leges" Or the optimist may tell 
 us that it is an evidence of that reforming zeal which is 
 resolved to use the power of the State and the law for 
 extirpating ancient faults and trying to make every- 
 one happier. Which of these or of other possible ex- 
 planations is the true one, I will not stop to consider. 
 But the fact that the output of legislation has of late 
 been incomparably greater than in any previous age 
 greater not only absolutely, but in proportion to the 
 population of the civilized nations suggests a con- 
 sideration of the forms and methods of law-making as 
 a timely topic. 
 
 In no country, moreover, is the output of statutes 
 so large as in the United States, where, besides Congress, 
 forty-six 1 State legislatures are busily at work turning 
 out laws on all imaginable subjects, with a faith in the 
 power of law to bless mankind which few historians 
 or philosophers, and still fewer experienced lawyers, 
 will be found to share. Nevertheless, such faith is a 
 testimony to the hopefulness of your people, and no 
 one can wish that any people should ever be less hopeful. 
 
 In modern free countries, where laws are enacted 
 by representative assemblies, where the economic and 
 J Now (1913) forty-eight.
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 77 
 
 social questions to be dealt with are generally similar, 
 and where the masses of the people are moved, broadly 
 speaking, by the same impulses, the problem of how 
 to make legislation satisfactory in substance and in 
 form is virtually the same problem everywhere. Ac- 
 cordingly, the light which the experience of one country 
 affords is pretty sure to be useful to other countries. 
 These we call private acts. I will try to indicate 
 some points in which the experience of methods tried 
 in Britain may deserve to be studied by you. 
 
 In the United States your enactments are all of one 
 kind, be they Federal laws or State laws : all emanate 
 directly from the legislature, and all are discussed and 
 passed in the same way. In Great Britain we have 
 found it desirable to divide enactments into three 
 classes: First we have public general statutes passed 
 by Parliament. Secondly, we have enactments of 
 local or personal application affecting the rights of par- 
 ticular areas or men, or particular business undertak- 
 ings. Thirdly, we have enactments intended to be of 
 temporary application, or at any rate such as to require 
 amendment from time to time in order to adjust them 
 to changing conditions, so that they are really rather 
 in the nature of executive orders than to be classified 
 among permanent laws. Orders of this executive kind 
 are now made not directly by Parliament, but either by 
 the Crown in the Privy Council, upon some few mat- 
 ters that are still left within the ancient prerogative 
 of the Crown, or else under statutory powers entrusted
 
 78 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 by Parliament either to the Crown in Council or to some 
 administrative department. (I believe that in France, 
 and in Germany also, such orders are not made by the 
 supreme legislature.) There is also a larger class of 
 rules or ordinances of a somewhat wider, though not 
 universal, application, which being of an administrative 
 nature require from time to time to be varied. Such 
 rules or ordinances are, in England, now usually made 
 by authorities to whom power in that behalf has been 
 specially delegated by Parliament. Some, including 
 those which affect the Crown colonies, are made by 
 the Crown in Council. These we call Orders in Council, 
 and they include a large number of ordinances made 
 for the government of the Crown Colonies which do 
 not possess self-government, being nearly all inhabited 
 by native populations not deemed qualified for its 
 exercise. Similar to these are the Rules or Regula- 
 tions dealing with administrative matters which are 
 issued by some of the administrative departments 
 for the guidance of officials and of local authorities, 
 under a power conferred in that behalf by Parliament. 
 These also require to be varied from time to time, 
 and are therefore not fitted to be dealt with by Par- 
 liament. With these one may class the rules relating to 
 legal procedure in the Courts, which are made by the 
 Rules Committee, consisting of Judges of the Supreme 
 Court of Judicature, and other representatives of the 
 legal profession, chosen for the purpose and acting 
 under a power given by statute. The advantage of
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 79 
 
 this plan is that it enables us from time to time to 
 modify our legal procedure without the necessity of re- 
 ferring the matter to Parliament. 
 
 In this way there has been built up a large body of 
 what may be called subsidiary law. It has statutory 
 effectiveness, because all of it has been made under 
 the powers of some statute, although made not 
 directly by Parliament itself, but under delegated par- 
 liamentary authority. These subsidiary enactments 
 are published in volumes called " Statutory Rules and 
 Orders." They form a large collection quite distinct 
 from that of the statutes. Thus the dimensions of 
 our statute book have been kept down while the dele- 
 gation of legislative power has materially reduced the 
 labour of Parliament. 
 
 Let me now return to the second class, viz., acts 
 passed directly by Parliament but not of general appli- 
 cation. This class includes enactments which, though 
 they apply only to particular places or persons, and 
 are thus not parts of the general law, such as railway 
 acts, canal, gas and water, and electric lighting acts, 
 acts giving specific powers to municipalities, and so 
 forth. They are sharply distinguished from General 
 Public acts in the method by which they are passed. 
 They are brought in and read a first time by motion of 
 a member in the House (either Lords or Commons) and 
 upon a petition by private persons. Notices have to 
 be publicly given of them some two months before the 
 usual beginning of a parliamentary session in order to
 
 8o UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 call the attention of all persons possibly interested. 
 They are advertised in the newspapers of such parts 
 of the country as they affect in order that every person 
 who desires to oppose them may have an opportunity 
 of entering a notice of opposition and being heard upon 
 it. When they are brought in they are examined by 
 officials called the Examiners of Standing Orders, who 
 see that they comply with the general rules which 
 Parliament has prescribed, and in particular that all 
 the regulations with regard to notices have been duly 
 observed. When they have passed the Examiners of 
 Standing Orders, being shown to have complied with all 
 the rules prescribed in that behalf, they are brought 
 up for second reading and usually pass that stage 
 without discussion or division. 
 
 If, however, a private bill raises some large question 
 of public interest, it may be opposed upon second 
 reading. For instance, if it proposes to take, for the 
 purpose of building a railroad, common land over 
 which a number of commoners have rights of pasture, 
 and to close paths which the public are entitled to use, 
 it is open to any member to give notice of opposition 
 and to propose its rejection on grounds of general pol- 
 icy. So again if it relates to electric power or light 
 and raises the question whether electricity shall be 
 supplied to a large area by a municipality or by a pri- 
 vate company, as happened recently when a large in- 
 dustrial corporation sought power from Parliament to 
 create an enormous power establishment to supply
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 81 
 
 electricity to every part of London, then again that 
 question would be fully debated on second reading as 
 being a question of public policy on which Parliament 
 ought to pronounce, laying down a precedent for simi- 
 lar cases likely to arise thereafter. Such cases are, 
 however, uncommon, and most private bills are sent 
 as a matter of course to what we call a private bill 
 committee. 
 
 This body usually consists of four members, but 
 may be and, in the case of very important bills, 
 often is larger. The Chairman is always a man of 
 some parliamentary experience and business capacity. 
 We have a panel of senior members, from which the 
 Chairmen are taken, and they become by practice 
 expert and skilful in dealing with these matters. 
 All the members of such a committee make a dec- 
 laration that they have no private interest in the 
 matter dealt with by the bill, and they are required 
 to deal with it in a purely judicial spirit, on the basis 
 of the evidence presented and the arguments used by 
 the lawyers who represent each side, just as in a 
 Court of Justice. Party politics never comes into the 
 matter. 
 
 No one is permitted to address private solicitations to 
 the members of the committee with a view to influence 
 their decision. Even a member of the House privately 
 approaching or trying to induce any member of the com- 
 mittee to vote in a particular way on the bill, would be 
 considered to have transgressed the rules, and be severely
 
 82 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 condemned by his fellow-members. In point of fact, 
 the thing does not happen. These private bill commit- 
 tees, whether they decide right or wrong, because they 
 sometimes err like other people, are always understood 
 to be impartial and honest. In that way the procedure 
 gives general satisfaction. Neither is there any class of 
 persons whose business it is to " lobby" and endeavour 
 to persuade members to vote for or against a measure. 
 The conduct of private bills is in the hands of a body 
 of regular practitioners who are called parliamentary 
 agents. They are often, but not always, attorneys 
 at law. They are an organized body who are subject 
 to discipline, bound by a code of rules, and obliged to 
 observe those rules just as strictly as any other kind 
 of legal practitioner. 
 
 Under this system all our railways, and such other 
 public undertakings as require statutory sanction, have 
 been constructed, and have had their legal powers from 
 time to time increased or varied. It has worked well 
 in every respect but one. It has been costly, for where 
 a private bill is hotly contested, the fees paid to agents 
 and counsel sometimes mount up to huge sums. But 
 it has been administered not only with honesty, but 
 with seldom even a suspicion ; and it has relieved the 
 two Houses of a vast mass of troublesome detail by 
 leaving this work to judicial committees acting in a 
 judicial way. It has, moreover, the advantage of giv- 
 ing every private bill the certainty of being examined 
 on its merits, and its merits only. Being outside the
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 83 
 
 struggle for life which goes on among public bills, sel- 
 dom encroaching on their time, and not having its 
 time encroached on by them, and being treated in a 
 different way, the pressure of public business does not 
 prevent a private bill (except in the rare cases where 
 a large public issue is raised) from being sent to and 
 considered by a committee, and, if it pass the committee, 
 being reported to the House and passed there in the 
 course of one session. The committee may reject a 
 bill, but cannot get rid of it quietly by omitting to 
 report. Finally, it relieves members of Parliament 
 from being obliged to spend time and toil in advocat- 
 ing or opposing bills affecting their constituencies, a 
 process in which more enmities may be incurred than 
 favour gained. Having, during twenty-seven years 
 spent in the House of Commons, represented two 
 great industrial communities, I can bear witness to 
 the enormous gain to a member in being free from 
 local interests and local pressure. I never had any 
 solicitation whatever to trouble me from any colleague 
 in regard to any private bill. It now and then, though 
 very rarely, happened that some constituent or group 
 of constituents wrote to me and said, " Such and such 
 a bill is pending in the House of Commons, or House 
 of Lords; we are very much interested in it and should 
 be glad if you could help." I had always an answer 
 which was easy, and which had the further merit of 
 being entirely correct and true; namely, that I was not 
 permitted by the rules of the House of Commons to
 
 84 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 endeavour to use any influence upon any member of 
 the committee which was considering that bill. The 
 most I could have done would have been to tell the 
 Chairman publicly, without any secrecy, that this was 
 a bill of great importance, in which some of my con- 
 stituents were interested, and to beg that it should 
 have the fullest and most careful attention from the 
 committee. But as for trying to exert any influence 
 either for or against its passing, I should have broken 
 our rules had I tried to do so. 
 
 No one who has not been a member of a legislative 
 body can know what a relief it is to be able to free one's 
 self from any solicitations of this kind. 
 
 I dwell upon this point in order to explain to you 
 how it is the British Parliament has been able to deal 
 with the great mass of local legislation imposed on it 
 by the principle that special statutory authority is 
 required for undertakings which involve the compul- 
 sory taking of land or the creation of what is practi- 
 cally a monopoly. But the relief given to Parlia- 
 ment, important as it is, has been the least among the 
 merits of the system used. Its great service has been 
 to provide a method in which matters involving im- 
 mense pecuniary interests have been for many years 
 past so dealt with as to raise no suspicions of corrup- 
 tion or unfair personal favour. And now, leaving 
 unnoticed other details regarding these private bills, 
 let me pass on to the larger question of public gen- 
 eral legislation, which has most interest for you as
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 85 
 
 lawyers though it suffers from the great amount of 
 time absorbed by local and personal bills. 
 
 The quality of statute law may be considered in 
 respect : first, of its Form ; secondly, of its Substance. 
 
 As respects Form, you, as lawyers, know that a 
 statute ought to be clear, concise, consistent. Its 
 meaning should be evident, should be expressed in the 
 fewest possible words, should contain no clause con- 
 tradicting another or anything repugnant to any other 
 provision of the statute law, except of course to such 
 provisions as it is expressly intended to repeal. 
 
 To secure these merits three things are needed ; viz., 
 
 (a) that a bill as introduced should be skilfully drafted, 
 
 (b) that pains should be taken to see that all 
 amendments made during its passage are also properly 
 drafted, and (c) that the wording is carefully revised 
 at the last stage and before the bill is enacted. Of 
 these objects the first is in Britain pretty well secured 
 by the modern practice of having all government bills 
 prepared by the official draftsman, who is called the 
 Parliamentary Counsel. Nearly all our important bills, 
 and indeed nearly all the bills of a controversial char- 
 acter that pass, are bills brought in by the government 
 of the day. A private member has now, owing to the 
 pressure of time, hardly any chance of passing legisla- 
 tion. Therefore, you may take it that all important 
 legislation is prepared, and pushed through, by the 
 government. The government has an official perma- 
 nent drafting staff, consisting of two or three able and
 
 86 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 highly trained lawyers, whose business it is to put its 
 bills into the best shape. If they are not always perfect 
 in form, that may not be the fault of the draftsman, be- 
 cause the best scientific shape is not necessarily the 
 shape in which it is most easy to pass a bill through 
 Parliament. The form which is given to a bill may 
 make some difference to the amount of opposition it 
 will excite, and a better drafted measure may either 
 rouse more antagonism or give greater opportunities for 
 attack than a less neatly or elegantly drafted one would 
 encounter, and also to afford the fewest opportunities for 
 taking divisions in committees. It is one of the rules 
 of our Parliament that every clause has to be separately 
 put to the vote in committee; therefore, the more 
 clauses, the more divisions, and the more divisions, 
 the more expenditure of time. Hence, if you put a 
 great deal of matter into one clause, subdividing it 
 into subsections, and parts of subsections, instead of 
 letting each part of the matter to be enacted have a 
 clause to itself, you have fewer debates on each clause 
 as a whole and fewer divisions. That may explain 
 peculiarities in the structure of recent British acts 
 which would otherwise excite surprise. It is hardly 
 possible that legislation, passed by a popular assembly, 
 should attain to that high standard of scientific per- 
 fection which could be obtained at Rome, where a 
 consul or a tribune put to the vote of the Assembly 
 a carefully prepared measure which could not be 
 amended, but had to be accepted or rejected as a
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 87 
 
 whole. Neither could the work be so neatly done as 
 it was under an absolute monarch like the Roman 
 Emperor. 
 
 Our statute law has been greatly improved in 
 form since the office of Parliamentary draftsman was 
 created. He has sometimes functions to discharge that 
 require high skill and judgment. It often happens 
 that the minister who is preparing a measure has 
 not completely thought out all its provisions, and 
 may not, even if he be himself a lawyer, have in 
 his mind all the relations which the bill he de- 
 sires to enact will bear to various branches of a vast 
 and complicated system of law. The business of the 
 Parliamentary draftsman is not only to take the ideas 
 and plans of the minister and put them into the clearest 
 and most concise form, but also to warn the minister 
 of all the consequences his proposals will have upon 
 every part of the system, and to help him to consider 
 what is the best way in which the amendment in the 
 law it is sought to effect can be secured and expressed. 
 The Parliamentary draftsman has, of course, nothing 
 to do with questions of governmental policy and stands 
 entirely apart from party politics. He must serve every 
 administration with equal zeal and loyalty. But if he 
 personally is a man of real ability, who understands 
 public questions, has mastered the particular subject 
 he is asked to deal with, perceives its difficulties and 
 sees how they can be met, he may give the most valu- 
 able assistance to the minister. All our ministers
 
 88 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 gladly acknowledged what they owed to the late Sir 
 Henry Jenkyns, who long filled the post with consum- 
 mate ability, though few persons outside the narrow 
 circle of the higher civil service had ever heard his 
 name. 
 
 As respects amendments in committee and final 
 revision, our English procedure is not satisfactory. 
 There ought to be some means of correcting, before a 
 measure finally passes, those inelegancies, redundancies, 
 and ambiguities which the process of amending in com- 
 mittee usually causes. But as Parliament has, so far, 
 refused to allow any authority outside itself to alter 
 the wording in the smallest point, all that can be 
 done is to use the last stage of the bill to cure such 
 blemishes as can be discovered. Doubtless the same 
 difficulties arise here. I am not fully informed as to 
 how they are dealt with, but have learnt with great 
 interest of the efforts recently made in Wisconsin, under 
 the zealous initiative of Mr. McCarthy, and in New 
 York State also, to supply by a bureau of legislation 
 assistance to members of the legislature in the prepara- 
 tion of their bills. The value of this plan seems to have 
 been fully recognized in both States, and the example 
 has told upon five other States, where similar arrange- 
 ments are now made by State authority for such help. 
 I venture hope that Congress will see its way to the 
 creation of some such office for drafting bills, so as to 
 provide ampler data for members and render to them 
 such legal help as they may require.
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 89 
 
 Now let us come to the Substance of legislation, and 
 start from two propositions which everyone will 
 admit. 
 
 1. There is in all free countries a great demand for 
 legislation on all sorts of subjects, mainly due to the 
 changes in economic conditions and to the impatience 
 of reformers to have all sorts of evils dealt with 
 by law. 
 
 2. The difficulty of framing good laws is enormous, 
 because most countries are now occupied not merely 
 in the comparatively easy task of repealing old laws 
 which hampered the action of the citizens, destruc- 
 tion is simple work, but in the far harder task of 
 creating a new set of laws which shall use the power of 
 the community to regulate society and secure the ends 
 which reformers and philanthropists desire. Eighty 
 years ago Europeans thought that the great thing was 
 to get freedom and abolish bad laws. When they had 
 got it they were dissatisfied, and instead of simply let- 
 ting everybody alone to work out his own weal or woe, 
 on individualist principles, they presently set to work 
 to forbid many things which had been previously 
 tolerated and to throw upon government all sorts of 
 new functions, more difficult and delicate than those 
 of which they had stripped it. 
 
 Whether the disposition to increase the range of 
 governmental action is right or wrong, I am not here 
 to discuss. The current is, at least for the moment, 
 irresistible, as appears from the fact that it prevails
 
 90 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 alike in Continental Europe, in England, in the British 
 colonies and in the United States. The demand for 
 a profusion of legislation is inevitable; and the dif- 
 ficulty of having it good is undeniable. In what does 
 the difficulty consist ? In three things. First, of 
 those who demand legislation, many do not under- 
 stand what is the precise evil they desire to cure, the 
 precise good they seek to attain. They suffer from 
 discontent but cannot diagnose its cause. Secondly, 
 when they can trace the evil to its source they seldom 
 know what is the proper remedy ; those who agree as 
 to the end differ as to the means. Thirdly, the num- 
 ber of measures, remedial and constructive, called for 
 is so large that it is hard to select those most urgently 
 needed. No legislature can deal with all at once. 
 Where many are being urged at the same time by 
 different persons, they jostle one another, and like peo- 
 ple jammed together in the narrow exits of a theatre, 
 they move more slowly than if they were made to pass 
 along in some regular order. 
 
 It would be easy to suggest, if we were drawing a 
 new constitution for a new community, an ideal method 
 of securing good legislation and securing it promptly. 
 But we have actual concrete constitutions and govern- 
 ments to deal with, so, instead of sketching ideals, 
 let me briefly describe the actual machinery pro- 
 vided in the United States and in Britain for passing 
 statutes. This machinery differs materially in the 
 two countries.
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 91 
 
 The American plan starts from the principle that 
 the Legislative Department must be kept apart from 
 the Executive. Accordingly, the administration in the 
 National and in the State governments has neither 
 the responsibility for preparing and proposing measures 
 nor any legally provided means at its disposal for carry- 
 ing them through Congress, though the President and 
 the State governors can recommend them, and may 
 sometimes by an adroit use of their influence, or by 
 a forcible appeal to the people, secure the passing of a 
 bill. You rely on the zeal and wisdom of the mem- 
 bers of Congress to think out, devise, and prepare such 
 measures as the country needs ; on the committees of 
 your assemblies to revise and amend these measures; 
 on the general sense of the assemblies and the judg- 
 ment of their presiding officers, or of a so-called "steer- 
 ing committee," to advance and pass those of most 
 consequence. But should there not happen to be any 
 member or group of members who does these things, 
 or who does them well, there will be nobody respon- 
 sible to the people for a failure to give them what 
 they need. 
 
 We, in England, have been led by degrees to an 
 opposite principle. The executive is with us primarily 
 responsible for legislation and, to use a colloquial ex- 
 pression, "runs the whole show," the selection of topics, 
 the gathering of information, the preparation of bills 
 and their piloting through Parliament. 
 
 I. The requisite information is collected by the de-
 
 92 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 partment of government to which the subject belongs, 
 and frequently the way is paved for legislation by 
 means of Royal Commissions or Departmental Com- 
 mittees appointed to take evidence and report upon 
 topics of importance which need legislation. 
 
 II. When it comes to the actual introduction of a 
 measure, the work of determining its substance is done 
 by an administrative department of the government 
 and the drafting by the government draftsman already 
 referred to. The department supplies the matter of 
 the bill, the latter puts it into shape. Thus both prac- 
 tical knowledge of the subject and professional skill 
 for giving legal form to the measure to be enacted, are 
 secured. All the more important measures of each 
 session are brought in by the Ministry on their re- 
 sponsibility as leaders of the majority in the House 
 of Commons. The most important, including those 
 likely to raise party controversy, are considered by 
 the Cabinet, sometimes also by a Cabinet committee, 
 and sometimes at great length. I remember one case 
 in which an important bill was altered and reprinted 
 in twenty-two successive drafts, and another case in 
 which a large and controversial bill occupied prac- 
 tically the whole time of the Cabinet during six long 
 sittings. 
 
 Bills brought in by private members are drafted 
 by themselves, or by some lawyer whom they employ 
 for the purpose. Should a private member ask a Minis- 
 ter or a department for assistance, it would usually be
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 93 
 
 given him, assuming that the department approved the 
 end in view. 
 
 III. Once the bill is launched, its fate depends on the 
 amount of intelligent care the Legislature is disposed to 
 give it and the amount of skill the Minister in charge 
 shows in steering the boat which carries its fortunes. 
 He has, of course, the assistance of the official drafts- 
 man and sometimes of one or more colleagues in pre- 
 paring his own amendments and considering those 
 proposed by others. He must try to get time enough 
 reserved for its passage, the disposal of time resting 
 with the government. 
 
 The practical result of our English system may be 
 summed up by saying that it secures four things : 
 
 (1) A careful study of the subject before a bill is 
 introduced. 
 
 (2) A decision by men of long political experience 
 which out of many subjects most need to be dealt with 
 by legislation. 
 
 (3) A careful preparation of measures, putting them 
 into the form in which they are most likely to pass. 
 That may not be always the best form, but there is no 
 use in offering to Parliament something too good for such 
 a world as the world of practical politics everywhere is. 
 
 (4) The fixing upon someone of responsibility for 
 dealing with every urgent question. Whenever an 
 evil has to be dealt with or a want supplied by the 
 action of the Legislature, there is never any doubt who 
 shall do it. The government has got not only to pro-
 
 94 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 pose something, but to put something through, the 
 Minister to whom it belongs having it in charge through 
 all its stages. A government which neglects to bring 
 in the measures urgently required, or fails through 
 weakness to pass them, suffers in credit ; and if the 
 matter excites exceptional popular interest possibly 
 may be turned out either by an adverse vote in the 
 House of Commons, or by the people at the next 
 general election. 
 
 There are some defects in the English system of 
 Parliamentary legislation, but I need not here refer to 
 them, for they do not affect the points I have been 
 stating, but arise from other features of our govern- 
 ment. The points to be specially emphasized for your 
 consideration are that we provide adequate machinery 
 for the preparation of measures, and that we make a 
 small group of persons, the Cabinet, responsible for 
 bringing them in and pushing them. This fixing of 
 definite responsibility is perhaps the chief merit of the 
 system. 
 
 The Cabinet is responsible because it is really a 
 working committee of the majority of the House of 
 Commons, which is itself directly chosen by the 
 people. The business of the majority is to support 
 the Administration, because it leads them, and enjoy- 
 ing their confidence, presumably enjoys that of the 
 majority of the nation. If the majority withdraw their 
 confidence, the Administration falls. 
 
 In France the method of legislation stands half-
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 95 
 
 way between the American and the English methods. 
 The Ministry studies a subject, prepares a bill dealing 
 with it, and launches the bill into the Chamber. 
 There, the bill passes into the hands of a committee 
 which amends and perhaps quite remoulds it, then 
 returning it to the Chamber with an elaborate report. 
 In the Chamber it is in charge, not of the Minister 
 who proposed it, but of the committee reporter, the 
 Ministry having no more power over its fortunes than 
 flows from the fact that they are the leaders of the 
 majority and can speak in its support. There are 
 also many bills brought in by private members ; and 
 these also go to the committees and have apparently 
 a better chance than the bills of private members 
 have in England. 
 
 Switzerland, like the United States, but unlike France, 
 has no Ministers as voting members of either Cham- 
 ber, but the members of the Administration, which con- 
 sists of seven persons elected by the Legislature, are 
 allowed to speak and defend their policy or to advo- 
 cate a measure in either the National Council or 
 the Senate. 
 
 Both these intermediate systems lose something of 
 the momentum which the responsibility of government 
 for legislation gives in England, but they also reduce 
 the merely party opposition which it has to encounter, 
 while they give to the preparation and passing of meas- 
 ures the advantage of the cooperation of those whose 
 administrative experience enables them to perceive
 
 96 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 what is really wanted and to judge how it had best be 
 attained. 
 
 Whether it is possible to establish in this country, 
 consistently with the provisions of the Federal and the 
 State Constitutions, any scheme by which the Execu- 
 tive can be rendered more helpful to the Legislature or 
 by which Legislatures can be organized with a more 
 authoritative leadership, and can more completely 
 supervise the Administration, this is a question which 
 well deserves your consideration. Scientific method, 
 which has been applied to everything else, needs 
 in our time to be applied more fully and sedulously 
 to the details of constitutional and political organi- 
 zation than has been anywhere yet done. How- 
 ever, if one may judge from the recent action of 
 your States, there are certain changes already in 
 progress. The sittings of Legislatures have been made 
 less frequent and shorter ; and as sessions grow shorter 
 State Constitutions grow longer. Not only many 
 subjects, but even many minor details of legislation, 
 have been withdrawn from the Legislature by being 
 placed in the State Constitution, which the Legislature 
 cannot change. Direct legislation by the people finds 
 increasing favour. Some reformers demand power for 
 Congress to deal with topics which formerly were left 
 entirely to the State. There is talk of amending the 
 Federal Constitution. 
 
 Now let me try to illustrate how scientific method 
 may be applied to the constructive part of legislation
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 97 
 
 and the arrangements of Legislatures. It may be 
 applied to the collection of data. The facts on which 
 laws ought to be based need to be gathered, sifted, 
 critically examined. When studying the experiments 
 made in other countries, not merely the text of the laws 
 but their practical working also needs to be studied. 
 
 Take such subjects as the tariff and the law of cor- 
 porations. Although in no other country have cor- 
 porations raised such large and difficult problems as 
 their growth has created here, other countries have, 
 like you, been obliged to keep them under some con- 
 trol, and to prevent them from establishing oppressive 
 monopolies. Everyone, except the monopolist, wishes 
 to check or expunge monopolies, but nobody wants to 
 substitute a meddling officialism. How to steer be- 
 tween these two evils is no easy problem, and needs 
 careful enquiry, with an examination of the laws of 
 other countries. 
 
 Wherever there exists a system of customs duties 
 meant to protect domestic industries, it becomes neces- 
 sary to ascertain how each duty, whether on raw 
 materials or on the manufactured article, operates 
 upon the manufacturer, the dealer, the consumer ; and 
 the more complex and all-embracing a tariff is, so 
 much the greater is this need. Both these subjects 
 are beyond the knowledge and the skill of the ordinary 
 legislator in any country. They need special study by 
 persons of exceptional knowledge. The same thing 
 holds true of railroads, of mines, of factories, of sanita-
 
 98 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 tion, of irrigation, of forest conservation, and many 
 other topics of current interest. All must be ap- 
 proached in a scientific way, using the results of the 
 experience of other countries. 
 
 Methods, too, have to be studied as well as facts. 
 To devise and apply sound methods of legislation is 
 equally a matter requiring careful study and a knowl- 
 edge of the systems which have succeeded elsewhere. 
 I have ventured to suggest to you that the British 
 system deserves your study in two points. One 
 touches the distinction to be drawn between the work 
 proper to a supreme legislative body, and that which 
 is better left to some administrative or judicial author- 
 ity, making rules under a power delegated by the Legis- 
 lature. Another relates to the still more important 
 distinction between bills relating to local and personal 
 matters and those which designed to affect the general 
 law of the land. The more these local matters in 
 which the pecuniary interests of persons or corpora- 
 tions are involved can be kept apart from politics, the 
 better. They are usually fitter for a sort of investiga- 
 tion, judicial in its form, though not necessarily con- 
 ducted by lawyers. To take them out of the ordinary 
 business of a legislature saves legislative time, while it 
 removes temptation. It sets the members of a legisla- 
 tive body free to deal with the really important general 
 issues affecting the welfare of the people which are 
 now crowding upon them. It helps them to appeal to 
 the people upon those general issues rather than in
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 99 
 
 respect of what each member may have done for the 
 locality he represents. Many of your statesmen have 
 told me that in those States where dissatisfaction with 
 the conduct of legislatures is expressed, that disap- 
 proval is chiefly due to their handling of local and 
 personal bills. 
 
 Let me sum up hi a few propositions, generally appli- 
 cable to modern free nations, the views which I have 
 sought to bring before you. . 
 
 I. The demand for legislation has increased and is 
 increasing both here and in all civilized countries. 
 
 II. The task of legislation becomes more and more 
 difficult, owing to the complexity of modern civiliza- 
 tion, the vast scale of modern industry and commerce, 
 the growth of new modes of production and distribution 
 that need to be regulated, yet so regulated as not to 
 interfere with the free play of individual enterprise. 
 
 III. Many of the problems which legislation now 
 presents are too hard for the average members of legis- 
 lative bodies, however high their personal ability, be- 
 cause they cannot be mastered without special knowl- 
 edge. (It may be added that in the United States a 
 further difficulty arises from the fact that legal skill is 
 often required to avoid transgressing some provision 
 of the Federal or a State Constitution.) 
 
 IV. The above conditions make it desirable to have 
 some organized system for the gathering and examina- 
 tion of materials for legislation, and especially for 
 collecting, digesting, and making available for easy
 
 ioo UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 reference the laws passed in other countries on subjects 
 of current importance and an account of the results 
 obtained thereby. 
 
 V. In order to secure the pushing forward of meas- 
 ures needed in the public interest, there should be in 
 every Legislature arrangements by which some definite 
 person or body of persons becomes responsible for the 
 conduct of legislation. 
 
 VI. Every Legislature has in our days more work 
 thrown on it than it can find time to handle properly. 
 In order, therefore, to secure sufficient time for the 
 consideration of measures of general and permanent 
 applicability, such matters as those relating to the de- 
 tails of administration or in the nature of executive 
 orders should be left to be dealt with by the adminis- 
 trative department of government, under delegated 
 powers, possibly with a right reserved to the Legisla- 
 ture to disapprove regulations or orders so made. 
 
 VII. Similarly, the more detailed rules of legal pro- 
 cedure ought to be left to the judicial department or 
 some body commissioned by it, instead of being regu- 
 lated by statute. 
 
 VIII. Bills of a local or personal nature ought to be 
 separated from bills of general application and dealt 
 with in a different and quasi-judicial way. 
 
 IX. Arrangements ought to be made, as, for in- 
 stance, by the creation of a drafting department con- 
 nected with a Legislature or its chief committees, for 
 the putting into proper legal form of all bills introduced.
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 101 
 
 X. Similarly, a method should be provided for recti- 
 fying in bills at the latest stage before they pass into 
 law such errors in drafting as may have crept into them 
 during their passage. 
 
 XI. When any bill of an experimental kind has been 
 passed, its workings should be carefully watched and 
 periodically reported on as respects both the extent 
 to which it is actually enforced (or found enforcible) 
 and the practical results of the enforcement. A de- 
 partment charged with the enforcement of any act 
 would naturally be the proper authority to report. 
 
 XII. In order to enable both the Legislature and 
 the people to learn what the statute law in force actually 
 is, and thereby to facilitate good legislation, the statute 
 law ought to be periodically revised, and as far as pos- 
 sible so consolidated as to be brought into a compact, 
 consistent, and intelligible shape. 
 
 I venture to submit these general observations be- 
 cause to-day there is everywhere an unusual ferment 
 over economic and social questions and a loud de- 
 mand for all sorts of remedies, some of them crude, 
 some useless, some few possibly pernicious. Here, in 
 the United States, this ferment takes a form conditioned 
 by your constitutional arrangements and your political 
 habits. There seems to be in many quarters a belief 
 that the State governments cannot deal with some of 
 the large questions that interest the whole country. 
 Yet there is also a fear to disturb the existing balance 
 of powers and functions between the State authorities 
 
 LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 102 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and the National government. There is a feeling that 
 evils exist which governments ought to deal with, and for 
 dealing with which the existing powers of governments 
 ought to be extended. Yet there is also a reluctance 
 to multiply officials and a dread of anything approach- 
 ing the bureaucratic paternalism of Continental Eu- 
 rope. We are hovering between discontent and doubt. 
 The reforming spirit runs so strong that it would sweep 
 off their feet any people which had not, as you have, 
 become attached to their old institutions. So, again, 
 there is a disposition to criticize State governments and 
 city governments, and to appeal to good citizens, as 
 voicing the best public opinion, to step in and do by 
 voluntary organizations whatever useful work those 
 governments are failing to do. But how is public opin- 
 ion to be organized, concentrated, focussed ? Who are 
 the persons to give it that definite and authoritative 
 expression, directed to concrete remedies, which will 
 enable it to prevail ? These are some of the problems 
 which appear to be occupying your minds, as, under 
 different forms, they occupy us in Europe. They will, 
 doubtless, like other problems in the past which were 
 even harder, be all solved in good time, solved all the 
 better because there is, here in America, little of that 
 passion which has at other times or in other countries 
 overborne the voice of reason. 
 
 Meantime, as there is evidently a good deal of legis- 
 lation before you, every improvement in the machinery 
 of legislation and the conditions of legislation that can
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 103 
 
 be made is worth making, every light that the ex- 
 perience of other countries can suggest is worth 
 receiving and using. 
 
 I once listened to an address on Improvements needed 
 in Modern Education, delivered by an eminent man of 
 science. He began by proving to us that those of his 
 scientific brethren who assigned to our earth a life of 
 only three or four million years were entirely mistaken, 
 for there was every reason to believe it would last 
 twice or thrice that length of time. From this he 
 drew the conclusion that it really was worth while, 
 with this long future before us, to attempt fundamental 
 reforms in our educational system. We who heard him 
 thought that even with only a few thousands of years to 
 look forward to, reforms would be worth making. So 
 to you I will say that without venturing to look even 
 thousands of years ahead, there is before us such a 
 prospect of an increasing demand for legislation that it 
 is well worth while to secure by every possible device 
 the efficiency of our legislative machinery. 
 
 The great profession to which you belong has a 
 special call to exert in this direction its influence, which 
 has often been exerted for the benefit of the nation. 
 You know such weak points as there may be in the 
 existing legislative machinery. You know them as 
 practical men who can apply practical remedies. If 
 you see a public benefit in separating different classes 
 of bills and treating the special, or local and personal, 
 bills in a different way from the public ones, you can
 
 104 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 best judge how this should be done. You have daily 
 experience of the trouble which arises from obscurities 
 or inconsistencies in the statutes passed, of the waste- 
 ful litigation due to the uncertainty of the law, with 
 all the expense and vexation which follow. You are, 
 I hear on all hands, not satisfied with the criminal pro- 
 cedure in many of your States. These are matters 
 within your professional knowledge. You can, with 
 the authority of experts, recommend measures you 
 deem good, and remonstrate against those that threaten 
 mischief; and I understand that remonstrances pro- 
 ceeding from the Bar are frequently effective. 
 
 Some cynical critics have suggested that the legal 
 profession regard with equanimity defects in the law 
 which may increase the volume of law suits. The tiger, 
 it is said, cannot be expected to join in clearing away 
 the jungle. This unappreciative view finds little sup- 
 port in facts. Allowing for the natural conservatism 
 which the habit of using technical rules induces in 
 lawyers, and which may sometimes make them over- 
 cautious in judging proposals of change, they have, 
 both here and in England, borne a creditable part in 
 the amendment of the law. It is a mistake to think 
 they profit by its defects. Where it is clear and definite, 
 where legal procedure is prompt and not too costly, 
 men are far more ready to resort to the Courts for the 
 settlement of their disputes. It is the prospect of un- 
 certainty, delay, and expense that leads them to pocket 
 up their wrongs and endure their losses. Even, there-
 
 CONDITIONS AND METHODS OF LEGISLATION 105 
 
 fore, on the lower ground of self-interest, the Bar 
 (except perhaps a few of its least desirable members) 
 does not gain by a defective state of the law. But 
 apart from this, every man who feels the dignity of his 
 profession, who pursues it as a science, who realizes 
 that those whose function it is thoroughly to under- 
 stand and honestly to apply the law, are, if one may 
 use the somewhat highflown phrase of a great Roman 
 jurist, the Priests of Justice, every such man will 
 wish to see the law made as perfect as it can be. So, 
 too, whoever realizes, as in the practice of your pro- 
 fession you must daily do, how greatly the welfare of 
 the people depends on the clearness, the precision, and 
 the substantial justice of the law, will gladly contribute 
 his knowledge and his influence to furthering so excel- 
 lent a work. There is no nobler calling than ours, 
 when it is pursued in a worthy spirit. 
 
 Your profession has had a great share in moulding 
 the institutions of the United States. Many of the 
 most famous Presidents and Ministers and leaders in 
 Congress have been lawyers. It must always hold a 
 leading place in such a government as yours. You 
 possess opportunities beyond any other section of the 
 community for forming and guiding and enlightening 
 the community in all that appertains to legislation. 
 Tocqueville said eighty years ago : " The profession of 
 the law serves as a counterpoise to democracy." We 
 should to-day be more inclined to say that after having 
 given to democracy its legal framework, it keeps that
 
 io6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 framework in working order by elucidating the prin- 
 ciples which the people have laid down in constitutions. 
 To you, therefore, as an organized body of lawyers, one 
 may fitly address these observations on legislative 
 methods drawn from the experience of Europe. We live 
 in critical times, when the best way of averting hasty 
 or possibly even revolutionary changes is to be found 
 in the speedy application of remedial measures. Both 
 here and in Europe improvements in the methods of 
 legislation will not only enable the will of the people 
 to be more adequately expressed, but will help that 
 will to express itself with temperance and wisdom. 
 
 What is legislation but an effort of the people to pro- 
 mote their common welfare ? What is a Legislature but 
 a body of men chosen to make and supervise the work- 
 ing of the rules framed for that purpose ? No country 
 has ever been able to fill its legislatures with its wisest 
 men, but every country may at least enable them to 
 apply the best methods, and provide them with the 
 amplest materials. 
 
 The omens are favourable. 
 
 Never, I think, since the close of the Civil War, has 
 there been among the best citizens of the United States 
 so active a public spirit, so warm and pervasive a de- 
 sire to make progress in removing all such evils as 
 legislation can touch. Never were the best men, both 
 in your legislatures and in the highest executive posts, 
 more sure of sympathy and support hi their labours 
 for the common weal.
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON: THIRD PRESIDENT 
 OF THE UNITED STATES AND FOUNDER 
 OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ON FOUNDER'S DAY, 
 APRIL 13, 1908.
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON: THIRD PRESIDENT 
 OF THE UNITED STATES AND FOUNDER 
 OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ON FOUNDER'S DAY, 
 APRIL 13, 1908. 
 
 No one can stand here without thinking much and 
 wishing to say much about Thomas Jefferson, the 
 founder of this famous University, and next to George 
 Washington one of the two or three most remarkable 
 men that Virginia has given to the United States and 
 to the world. Yet I must refrain from attempting 
 to describe his striking personality. Not that there is 
 anything to deter me personally or officially from 
 attempting the task. To-day nothing need prevent the 
 representative of the great grandson of King George the 
 Third from paying a tribute to the gifts and the achieve- 
 ments of the draftsman of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence. Nor ought I forget, in this connection, to 
 remind you that Jefferson was in his later days the dis- 
 interested advocate of the most friendly relations with 
 England, the policy of which he had so often opposed. 
 But hours, rather than the few minutes at my disposal, 
 would be needed to do justice to a character so varied 
 and so complex, to a career connected with so many 
 great events and entangled into the web of so many 
 
 109
 
 no UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 personal and political controversies. Moreover, in 
 painting the portrait it would not be right to give the 
 lights without giving also the shadows ; and this is not 
 the place in which one could bring oneself to speak any- 
 thing but praise of the illustrious founder of an illustri- 
 ous institution. 
 
 It is easy to pick holes in the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, and to decry, as one of your own distinguished 
 men did, its "glittering generalities." But under the 
 rhetoric and the overbold and overbroad assertions of 
 doctrine it contains, there is a condensed and concen- 
 trated force which few documents have equalled, and 
 which accounts for the immense power it has exerted. 
 There is, however, I may say, one matter on which all 
 are agreed whether or no they approve the principles and 
 the doings of Jefferson. He was a man of a wonderfully 
 vigorous and many-sided activity. Scarcely a subject 
 of enquiry lay outside of the range of his versatile in- 
 tellect. Whether you like him or not, you cannot help 
 being attracted by him. Whether you think his in- 
 fluence on American politics and thought to have been 
 in the mam wholesome or pernicious, you must admit 
 that influence to have been pervading and permanent. 
 How far it is still a really effective influence, now that 
 the conditions of the United States have become so dif- 
 ferent from those which surrounded him, I will not 
 attempt to determine. His writings are no longer 
 widely read; his name is more often on the lips than 
 are his ideas fresh in the recollection of those who pro-
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON in 
 
 fess themselves his disciples and seek to conjure with his 
 authority. But that men should still call themselves 
 his disciples and should, nearly a century after his 
 death, claim to be maintaining his traditions, is a re- 
 markable tribute to his gifts, and a remarkable evidence 
 of the power he exerted in his own time upon the great 
 party that still looks back to him as its founder. 
 
 He had a lively interest not only in human affairs 
 but also in all matters of natural history, an interest 
 which sometimes led him into odd hypotheses, as when 
 he conjectured that the bareness of the Western prairies 
 which were being explored in his day was due to the 
 action of the mastodons, the remains of those pri- 
 meval monsters had been recently discovered who 
 had devoured all the trees. But this sort of interest 
 strikes us as being all the more remarkable because he 
 was in a notable degree a-man of the eighteenth century. 
 His whole way of thinking is unlike our way of to-day, 
 and we might say that compared with such contempo- 
 raries as Bentham, Burke, Alexander Hamilton, and still 
 more if he be compared with such much younger con- 
 temporaries as Goethe and Coleridge, Jefferson is 
 almost archaic. Yet having a bright, keen, inventive 
 mind, which played freely round many subjects, he 
 was sometimes in advance of his time, and hit upon 
 ideas characteristically modern. 
 
 Of all Jefferson's ideas and projects none lay nearer 
 to his heart and none deserve such unqualified praise 
 as his faith in education and his efforts to diffuse it.
 
 112 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 He desired to establish in Virginia a scheme of general 
 elementary instruction and to create therewith a 
 system of upper secondary schools corresponding 
 broadly to the grammar schools of England, though 
 with a less purely classical curriculum, and then to 
 complete the fabric by a University whose aims should 
 be commensurate with all human knowledge and 
 which should recognize, both in the variety of its 
 studies and in the range of choice allowed among 
 those studies, as well as in the absence of ecclesiastical 
 control and even of coercive discipline, those prin- 
 ciples of liberty which he held so dear. 
 
 It was a fine and fertile conception. It does all the 
 more credit to Jefferson because nearly all the col- 
 leges of the United States were in those days classical 
 or mathematical academies attached to particular 
 denominations and with a narrow range of subjects, 
 drilling their pupils thoroughly, but drilling them on 
 old-fashioned methods. Ardently interested in all 
 sorts of studies, natural as well as civil or humanistic, 
 Jefferson desired a University which should take, as 
 Bacon said, all knowledge to be its province, and should 
 provide instruction hi every subject that men sought 
 to study. This view of a university the old true 
 view of those early Middle Ages when universities 
 first arose but when there were few subjects to study 
 had been almost forgotten. We are so familiar 
 with it now that we scarcely realize how novel it 
 was when propounded by Jefferson, and how much
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON 113 
 
 it transcended the common notions of his own times 
 when, in England, Oxford and Cambridge were just 
 beginning to awake from their long torpor, days during 
 which it had been left to the Universities of Scotland 
 to keep ablaze the sacred torch in Britain. Jefferson 
 lit the torch afresh in the South. In 1779 he tried to 
 secure a scheme for establishing popular education. In 
 1794 he sought to transfer bodily to Virginia the whole 
 faculty of the University of Geneva, threatened by the 
 progress of the Revolution in France, a really brilliant 
 idea, which ought to have been carried out, for the gam 
 to America would at that time have been greater than 
 the loss to Geneva. Never thereafter did he desist from 
 his efforts, till in 1819 the Legislature passed an act, 
 which, while providing primary schools, crowned the 
 edifice by making an appropriation for the University 
 of Virginia. You remember his own words, "Our 
 University, the last of my mortal cares and the last 
 service I can render to my country." 
 
 Jefferson carried further than any other man of equal 
 ability and equally large practical experience has done, 
 for we need not place in the category of practical men 
 the contemporary visionaries of France, a faith in the 
 politicial perfectibility of mankind. He believed, or at 
 least he frequently declared, because we cannot be sure 
 that all he said represented his permanent convictions, 
 that the greatest evil from which men suffered was the 
 control of other men. He liked to call that control 
 Tyranny, but the language he sometimes used was ap-
 
 U4 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 plicable not merely to a despotic and irresponsible power 
 but to many other kinds of authority. He would appear 
 to have thought that liberty was so much the best thing 
 in the world that with enough of it all human affairs 
 would go well, and he so heartily distrusted authority 
 as to conceive that insurrections were needed every now 
 and then to check the misdeeds of rulers. 
 
 When one reads Jefferson's writings and examines 
 his conduct, considering on the one hand his faith in 
 the people, the average uninstructed people, of his 
 day, and on the other hand his high sense of the value 
 of knowledge and his constant efforts to spread uni- 
 versity instruction, three questions present themselves 
 to our minds questions of permanent interest for 
 all students of politics. 
 
 The first of these questions is, How far is it true 
 that the people are sure to go right ? As you here would 
 express it in familiar terms, Is the average man 
 the farmer or the artisan "fit to run a democracy" ? 
 He is always being told so on public platforms. But is 
 he really so ? and do those who tell him so always believe 
 what they say ? If freedom alone is enough to enable a 
 people to govern themselves well, that is to say, if the 
 impulses of man are preponderatingly good, if the masses 
 may be trusted to know their own true interest, and 
 to select the proper means to secure it, the average man 
 ought to be able to do so. Yet Jefferson evidently had 
 his misgivings. Though he refrained from the condem- 
 nation which he ought to have passed on the excesses
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON 115 
 
 committed by some of his French Revolutionary friends, 
 he knew well enough that a great deal more than the 
 abolition of monarchy and "aristocracy" was needed to 
 secure good government; and his own experience in 
 office was amply sufficient to show him how many knots 
 there are that the "average man" cannot untie. 
 
 This question is so large that I must not attempt to 
 discuss it here. I am content to commend it to your 
 reflection as one of the most momentous and funda- 
 mental questions of politics that has ever occupied 
 men's minds. We are always getting fresh light upon 
 it every year, and from every part of the world where 
 power has been placed in the hands of the multitude. 
 It has appeared in a somewhat new form hi the exten- 
 sion which men seek to give to the principle of direct 
 legislation by the institutions of the Initiative and the 
 Referendum. The amount of truth contained in 
 Jefferson's sanguine view of human nature is really the 
 basic problem of all politics and of all government, 
 which men are continually trying to solve, and no 
 doubt we have advanced further towards a knowledge 
 of its conditions than had the founders of your republic 
 and of the French Republic of those days, for the world 
 has had a much ampler experience of popular govern- 
 ments, or at least of governments claiming to be popular. 
 That experience ranges downward from republics so 
 well governed as Switzerland and the Orange Free 
 State to republics of the class to which Nicaragua and 
 Hayti belong.
 
 Ii6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 A second question suggested by Jefferson's ideas and 
 efforts is this: What ought to be, and what has usually 
 been, the effect of education on the highly educated 
 man so far as politics are concerned ? Have knowledge 
 and training been found to give him a deeper sympathy 
 with the people and a greater fitness for leading the 
 people, or do they rather cut him off from the masses, 
 making him detached, perhaps supercilious, possibly 
 even scornful or cynical ? 
 
 The question I put to you is not that which is often 
 debated in Europe, though seldom here, whether the 
 masses of the people on the one hand, or the wealthier 
 and educated class on the other, are more generally 
 likely to be right that is, to be shewn by the result 
 to have been right in their attitude on political ques- 
 tions. It is rather this question : What is the effect 
 of the highest education, coupled with superior intel- 
 lectual gifts, on a man's political attitude and ten- 
 dencies ? Will it tend to increase or to reduce his faith 
 in popular government ? 
 
 You may say that this will depend upon his tempera- 
 ment, whether he is hopeful and buoyant, or timid and 
 despondent. No doubt temperament, which itself de- 
 pends largely on physical health, does make a difference. 
 But the average of cheerful and gloomy temperaments, 
 or of bad and good digestions, is pretty much the same in 
 the best educated and the least educated classes, so the 
 element of temperamental difference may be eliminated. 
 
 Instead of trying to discover a priori what sort of
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON 117 
 
 influence high intellectual capacity and a store of knowl- 
 edge might be expected to have on a man's political 
 tendencies, let us see what has in fact been the attitude 
 of such gifted men towards the politics of their own 
 countries. We shall find plenty of instances on both 
 sides. If you take those republics of antiquity which 
 the contemporaries of Jefferson were so fond of talking 
 about, you will find some great thinkers on the side 
 of democracy and some against it. This happened also 
 in modern Europe. In England, for instance, Milton, 
 Locke, Addison, Adam Smith, Bentham, Romilly, 
 Mackintosh, were in their days more or less on the popu- 
 lar or reforming side, while Hobbes, Swift, Bolingbroke, 
 David Hume, Samuel Johnson, were on the other. 
 Some great men, such as Burke, Coleridge, and Words- 
 worth began in the one camp and ended in the other, 
 altering their position as life went on under what people 
 call the teaching of events. 
 
 Is there then no general principle to be discovered 
 affecting the attitude or sympathies of leading thinkers, 
 and are they divided between Liberals and Conserva- 
 tives just like other men ? 
 
 Let me suggest to you such a principle, the hint of 
 which comes to me from what we have seen happen in 
 Europe during the last fifty years. 
 
 Fifty years ago there were in Continental Europe 
 no free governments except in some small States, 
 Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and the Scandinavian 
 countries. In some countries, such as Russia, Austria,
 
 n8 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the whole of Italy, except Piedmont, and to some ex- 
 tent in France under Louis Napoleon's sway, there ex- 
 isted not only arbitrary rule but an administration which 
 was oppressive and generally inefficient. In Prussia, 
 and some other German states, the administration 
 was good, but the people had little influence upon it. 
 Now, in all these countries at that tune the great 
 majority of superior minds were strongly liberal. 
 They saw the evils of the existing system more clearly 
 than did other men hi their own rank of life ; and 
 whether or no they suffered personally from misgovern- 
 ment, they were disgusted by it and anxious to over- 
 throw it. 
 
 To-day in Continental Europe the position is dif- 
 ferent. I will not attempt to decide to which side the 
 preponderance of men distinguished in literature and 
 science belongs. Many might be named as conspicu- 
 ous on each side. But such men, taken as a whole, 
 are more generally conservative in temper, and less 
 heartily democratic in opinion, than men of the 
 same type were in 1858. Why is this? Because 
 the facts are different. The liberty formerly sought 
 has, in most European countries, now been attained, 
 while the administrative evils which then excited 
 indignation have now been largely removed. Experi- 
 ence has, moreover, disclosed evils incident to some 
 forms of popular government which were not and 
 could not have been felt while arbitrary government 
 held the field, and because demands are now made
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON 119 
 
 in the name of liberty for further changes, political or 
 economical, which many deem to be dangerous. De- 
 mocracy has not brought with it all the benefits that 
 were expected, so there has been a certain revulsion of 
 feeling against democratic government. Many of the 
 most powerful minds are occupied in trying not to 
 broaden and deepen its channel, but to erect barriers that 
 may check or guide its flow. But if arbitrary govern- 
 ment were in any country to gam once more the upper 
 hand, a thing very improbable (so far as we can look 
 forward) either here or in western Europe, no doubt 
 there would, among the thinkers in such a country, be 
 as strong a tendency away from it back toward popular 
 government as there was fifty years ago. 
 
 History will supply you with many other instances 
 to illustrate this law of a reaction of great thinkers 
 against the tendencies of their own time. Plato's 
 criticism of the Athenian democracy is the most 
 familiar instance. The explanation is simple enough. 
 Penetrating minds see the causes of the evils that exist 
 around them more clearly than other men do, and ardent 
 minds have a stronger impulse to sweep away those evils. 
 Men of imagination have a finer vision of what the world 
 might be, and incline to condemn what exists because 
 they believe in the possibility of something better. 
 Whatever the actually existing institutions may be, they 
 see the faults of those institutions. They despise the 
 catchwords of a dominant party, they see the hollowness 
 of current prejudices and the weakness of many a cur-
 
 120 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 rent theory; they condemn the tendency to push a prin- 
 ciple to extremes, and the intoxication with its own power 
 which sometimes seizes upon the multitude. The same 
 tendency that makes the great thinker in an age of 
 despotism an advocate of popular government may make 
 him conservative in an age when popular government 
 seems to him to be in danger of going too fast or too far. 
 So we may say, speaking broadly, that the philosopher 
 and the idealist tend to be in opposition to the prevalent 
 tendencies of their own time, be those tendencies what 
 they may. Such men are apt to be hi the minority. 
 One might almost say that they belong rather to the 
 future (or perhaps, like Dante, to an idealized past) than 
 to the present ; because it is they who are most exempt 
 from the habit of blind obedience and the sway of 
 custom, and are least inclined to acquiesce in what 
 exists merely because it exists. 
 
 The moral of this is a moral fit to be stated and 
 reiterated and emphasized in a University that 
 no one must ever be afraid of being in a minority. 
 Where at any rate the question is not of immediate 
 action hi a matter lying within the competence of the 
 average man, for in such things the average man may 
 fairly claim to prevail, but a question requiring wide 
 knowledge or serious and independent thought, he 
 who is hi a minority is at least as likely to be right as 
 he who is in a majority. The majority must no doubt 
 prevail, for no means has been discovered of weighing 
 as well as counting votes. But to prevail and to be
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON 121 
 
 right are not the same thing; and in a democracy 
 men must never be dissuaded, because they have been 
 out-voted, from continuing to assert their convictions. 
 Obey the majority while they are the majority, but 
 do not for a moment suppose that because they are the 
 majority they are right. 
 
 Thus the finest kind of mind may be, according to 
 the circumstances of his time, either a liberal or a 
 conservative, a man who cries " Forward " or a man who 
 cries "Walk warily." But he will usually be one who 
 rises above the passions and prejudices of the moment, 
 who refuses to follow the crowd, who is not moved by 
 popular cries. It is well that this should be so, 
 provided always that the detachment of the indepen- 
 dent thinker does not go so far as to put him out of 
 touch with the sentiment of his country and so prevent 
 him from serving it. The great thinker who tries to 
 be also a good citizen will have enough sympathy with 
 his fellow-men to see that he must adapt his counsels 
 to their needs, and must, instead of soaring above 
 them, place himself on their level, and speak to them 
 in a language they can understand. He ought to be 
 independent ; he must not stand apart in isolation. 
 
 This brings me to the third question, which a reflec- 
 tion upon Jefferson and his faith in university education 
 suggests. What should a university do for its students 
 in the way of fitting them for a life of learning or a life 
 of public service ? That it should give them knowledge 
 is obvious enough. But it should also give them what
 
 122 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 is even better than knowledge; that is, Wisdom, by 
 which I mean the power to apply an intelligent criti- 
 cism to facts and ideas, to look at things all round, to 
 know how to get principles out of facts, and to test 
 the worth of ideas by their conformity to facts. 
 
 It should also teach them public spirit and the love 
 of truth. 
 
 Public spirit is often spoken of as a moral virtue. 
 That it is, but it is a virtue which intellectual 
 training may help to form. The function of Philosophy 
 and History is so to enlarge our minds that we may 
 see how each man's highest interest, conceived in its 
 true moral aspect, is bound up with the public weal, 
 and how nations and states prosper or decline just 
 in proportion as the public interest prevails in 
 their government or as that interest is allowed to 
 be overborne by the selfish interest of classes or of 
 individuals. 
 
 Still more evidently is it the duty of a university to 
 instil a devotion to truth. Knowledge and wisdom 
 and practical shrewdness, a sense of how to adapt 
 means to ends, are needed in all the walks of life any 
 one may have to tread. But in whatever work is 
 to be done for the permanent benefit of mankind, be 
 it for learning or science, be it for theology or poli- 
 tics; and also for all the higher kinds of practical 
 achievement that the service of the Church or the State 
 demands, the one vital and supreme requisite is a de- 
 sire to find the truth and a resolve to follow it when
 
 THOMAS JEFFERSON 123 
 
 found. The temptation that most easily besets us 
 all is to let personal interest, or vanity, or party spirit, 
 or friendship, or even the sense of beauty, distract us 
 from the pursuit of truth. Now the habit of seeking 
 truth, though it is rightly counted among the moral 
 virtues, is a habit which University training can help 
 us to acquire through the examples set by great scholars 
 and historians and investigators of nature, and by the 
 practice of critical methods applied with scrupulous 
 accuracy. It is the ever-present note of the real scholar, 
 the real philosopher, the real historian. 
 
 The bitterest critics of Thomas Jefferson have never 
 denied his patriotic devotion to the interests of Virginia 
 nor ever disparaged his zeal for the spread of knowl- 
 edge. It was the union in him of these two passions 
 that prompted his life-long labors for the establishment 
 of your University. There are no excellences which 
 he would have more desired that it should implant in 
 its students. Nor has its career belied his hopes. 
 The University of Virginia has always sent forth men 
 eminent both in learning and in the field of public life. 
 She has never condescended to the superficial or the 
 meretricious. Her standards of attainment have been 
 high and her scholars have maintained them. She 
 has been also a home of patriotism and civic virtue. 
 Many of her sons have done splendid service for the 
 nation, and have reflected glory upon this seat of learn- 
 ing and on the Commonwealth of Virginia. May this 
 oldest of all your States, the mother of Washington
 
 124 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and of so many other illustrious figures in American 
 history, ever hold high that banner of freedom and 
 enlightenment which her founders planted on the 
 shores of the New World three hundred and one 
 years ago.
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE LAYMEN'S MISSIONARY CONVENTION 
 AT CHATTANOOGA, MAY 21, 1907.
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE LAYMEN'S MISSIONARY CONVENTION 
 AT CHATTANOOGA, MAY 21, 1907. 
 
 THE history of Christian Missions combines the 
 interest which attaches to striking characters and 
 strange adventures with that of tracing a long world 
 movement which has passed through various phases, 
 and has in each of them affected, and been affected by, 
 events of the first moment. A comprehensive view of 
 that history, connecting it with the general progress 
 on the one hand of geographical discovery and on the 
 other of religious thought and practice, would be a 
 theme worthy of a philosophic historian. It is, how- 
 ever, only with the most recent phases of missionary 
 work that I can attempt to deal in this address. 
 
 In the ancient world there was, before Christianity 
 appeared, neither religious propaganda nor religious 
 persecution. Each tribe, each region, had its own 
 special or local gods, and each respected the local 
 gods of the others. If now and then some invad- 
 ing general pillaged a sanctuary of the deities of 
 another country, it was avarice alone that prompted 
 him. Opinion condemned him, and he was likely 
 so men believed to receive speedy punishment at the 
 
 127
 
 128 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 hands of the offended powers. Thus the worship of one 
 set of gods did not exclude the worship of another set, 
 for all deities were deemed entitled to respect, each in 
 his own jurisdiction. Similarly, since no faith claimed 
 to be exclusively true or of universal authority, its 
 votaries had no reason for trying to convert others to 
 it by persuasion, nor for persecuting those who adhered 
 to their local worships. Even when the people of Israel 
 denied the existence of any God but their own, they 
 did not seek to proselytize, because it was to Israel 
 alone that Jehovah had revealed himself. 
 
 With the advent of Christianity the scene changed. 
 It claimed to be the only true religion, and sought to 
 save a world lying in wickedness by denouncing and 
 expunging all the worships of the heathen. Devotion 
 to God and love for perishing men alike made the 
 propagation of the faith its first duty. Hence it 
 encountered a hostility never previously aroused by 
 any other religion. The first missions were immediately 
 followed by the first persecutions. After three cen- 
 turies of missionary progress, frequently interrupted 
 by relentless severities, Christianity triumphed. Two 
 centuries later, being then supported by the whole 
 power of the State, it began to repress first the linger- 
 ing devotees of paganism, then those who, differing 
 from the ruling orthodoxy, had been branded as here- 
 tics by Councils of the Church. So were ushered in 
 those ages of persecution which in Spain and Spanish 
 America lasted down to the days of our grandfathers.
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 129 
 
 There is a striking passage in Lucretius in which 
 he laments the evil wrought by superstition, referring 
 to the instances of human sacrifice, rare as these were 
 in Greece or Rome, though common enough at Car- 
 thage, and dwelling on the gloom cast upon life by 
 the fear of suffering after death. He wrote before 
 religious persecution had been dreamt of. How 
 much darker would have been the picture a poet 
 might have drawn in those later centuries when it 
 was deemed a duty to extirpate heresy by the sword 
 and the faggot ! 
 
 One may distinguish three chief phases among those 
 through which missions have passed. In the first, 
 which began with the Apostles, and was continued 
 through a long line of glorious saints, Christianity 
 went forth, trusting entirely to the power and the pur- 
 ity of its own teachings. It promised salvation through 
 Christ and through a life led in obedience to his pre- 
 cepts. St. Patrick preached to the Gael of Ireland, 
 St. Columba to the Picts of North Britain, St. Augus- 
 tine to the heathen of Kent, St. Boniface, St. Columban, 
 St. Gall, and many another missionary from the British 
 Isles to the heathen of Germany. Some of them died 
 a martyr's death. All of them went out like sheep 
 among wolves, trusting only to the help and blessing 
 of God. 
 
 In the eighth century a change came. The Prankish 
 Charles the Great carried his arms against the pagan 
 Saxons, and made conversion a part of conquest and
 
 130 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 a pledge of submission. From his time on other 
 Christian warriors, some of them from ambition, some 
 from what they believed to be piety, spread the king- 
 dom of the Cross by arms. Olaf Tryggyvason in Nor- 
 way and the Crusaders in Palestine, and after them the 
 Teutonic knights on the shores of the Baltic, gave the 
 choice between baptism and death. So did the Span- 
 iards when they burst into the New World. Wherever 
 these terrible conquerors went, the native worships were 
 blotted out and Christianity enforced at the sword's 
 point. They were continuing beyond the ocean the 
 crusade on behalf of the Faith which they had only 
 just completed in Spain against the Moors. 
 
 With them, however, the forcible propagation of Chris- 
 tianity practically ended. Neither the French mis- 
 sionaries on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, 
 nor the English missionaries like John Eliot in Massa- 
 chusetts sought the aid of carnal weapons. The earlier 
 and better stage in which the Gospel relied on its own 
 intrinsic virtue was now returning. In this third stage 
 missions have, with few exceptions, remained ever since ; 
 but it is still worth while to remember into what un- 
 Christian conduct misguided zeal drove men who 
 thought they were helping Christianity. 
 
 In our own time missions entered on what may be 
 called a fourth stage, in which their aim and purpose is 
 differently conceived. We have learnt to distinguish 
 more carefully between different kinds of non-Christian 
 religions and to recognize the good features that belong
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 131 
 
 to some of them, especially to Buddhism and to 
 Islam. Time was when the success of a mission was 
 measured by the number of congregations it was able 
 to form in a heathen country, and the number of con- 
 verts annually added to the fold. But this is now no 
 longer deemed the chief object of its work, and the 
 mere public profession of adherence to Christianity 
 is valued only when it is believed to indicate a real 
 and permanent change of life and mind. 
 
 The views now entertained as to the future in another 
 world of those who pass into it without ever having 
 heard the Gospel message, are less despondent than 
 those that prevailed among Christians eighty years 
 ago. There is an enlarged conception of what 
 is meant by bringing truth and light to the peo- 
 ple that sat in darkness, and it begins to be felt 
 that what is needed is to raise the whole conception 
 of life and transform the character by implanting 
 higher ideals which will cut off at the root the degrad- 
 ing customs of pagan life. When the missionary has 
 to deal with the religions of the more civilized non- 
 Christian peoples, he treats with respect whatever is 
 best in the moral teachings of Buddha or of Mohammed 
 and tries to meet the followers of Confucius on the 
 ethical ground he and they have in common, feeling 
 that even when few converts are made much good 
 may be done by the diffusion of elevating ideas and of 
 Christian morality. Even such usages and supersti- 
 tions as it may be desired to extirpate are treated more
 
 132 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 gently, not only because we have begun to feel a sort 
 of scientific interest in these survivals of primaeval 
 custom, but because it is seen that improvements 
 come best when they come from within, from a mind and 
 heart that has been awakened to a higher view of a 
 Divine Power, and of man's relation to it. 
 
 These changes in our views of what missions may 
 accomplish and what methods they may follow are 
 not the index of any lessened faith or slackening 
 earnestness. Preaching is not the only, nor always 
 the shortest, way to the end desired. I remember that 
 when Dr. Livingstone, after several short journeys, 
 finally quitted his mission station to enter upon that 
 great exploration of Africa and crusade against the 
 slave trade which have given him a place among the 
 benefactors of mankind, there were some well-mean- 
 ing but small-minded persons who censured him for 
 deserting his proper missionary work. But in a few 
 years no one doubted that he had rendered infinitely 
 greater services to the world and to Christianity by his 
 journeys and the light he threw on African problems 
 than he could have done by remaining with the little 
 Kaffir congregation to which he ministered. 
 
 Such gatherings as the Laymen's Missionary Move- 
 ment has been holding all over this country are an evi- 
 dence that there is no decline of zeal among American 
 Christians. So also the approaching International Con- 
 gress in Edinburgh shows that the denominational nar- 
 rowness and rivalry which used to distract the efforts
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 133 
 
 of missionary organizations has given place to a frater- 
 nal spirit which seeks to make all the religious bodies 
 work together, aiming not at uniformity in organi- 
 zation, but at friendly cooperation in a common 
 cause. It is well this should be so, for the cir- 
 cumstances of the time we live in make the claim of 
 missions an urgent and insistent call upon all these 
 bodies. It is of that urgency, of the movements 
 of change now passing on the world, and of the 
 need there is for prompt and united action before 
 change goes further that I desire to speak. I speak 
 as a traveller who has seen missions in many a 
 foreign country, and I am emboldened to speak to 
 you by remembering that nothing has done more to 
 keep the hearts of Americans and Englishmen close 
 together than the work they have sought to do in the 
 same spirit for the kingdom of God. In these latest 
 centuries we have been the two great missionary nations. 
 Spanish and Portuguese missionaries did an immense 
 work, especially in the sixteenth century : French mis- 
 sionaries an immense work, especially in the seven- 
 teenth. Germans and Swiss have labored effectually in 
 the nineteenth, but your and our peoples have perhaps 
 done the most, and have done it on the same lines, in 
 the same faith, following the same principles, always 
 trusting to the power of truth and not to force. So 
 the traveller, wherever he goes, finds American and 
 British missionaries always working side by side, 
 always ready to help one another.
 
 134 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 Missions must now be regarded as parts of a great 
 world movement, one out of the many influences which 
 are now exercised, more powerfully than ever before, 
 by the civilized upon the uncivilized or savage peoples. 
 
 The world has grown smaller ; steam and electric- 
 ity have brought its parts together; and as the 
 civilized races have spread out over its surface, there 
 is no place where their influence is not felt, so that, 
 with the exception of two ancient empires in the East, 
 nearly every part of the world has been brought under 
 the control of some of the civilized white races, and 
 even those empires are now in close relations with 
 white races. Now, that is a new phenomenon. In 
 the midst of these new phenomena missions to the un- 
 civilized races, are indispensable, for if Christianity is 
 not brought to bear upon them, the contact may make 
 their last state worse than their first. To that point I 
 shall presently return and shall try to convey to you 
 two features in the more recent history of missions on 
 which it seems proper to dwell, viz., the causes which 
 retard the progress of Christianity in uncivilized coun- 
 tries, and the special need which exists at this mo- 
 ment for diffusing it there. 
 
 Meantime, let me, as one who has seen many 
 missions in many parts of the world, bear testi- 
 mony to the splendid work which is being done in 
 our own time by Christian missionaries. There 
 have not been any nobler examples of devotion to 
 duty, of self-sacrifice, of the renunciation of the
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 135 
 
 ordinary pleasures and joys of the world for the 
 sake of a higher calling, than those which our mission- 
 aries have given during the last eighty years. Let me 
 pay especial tribute to the work which is being done 
 by the many missions of this country. I have seen 
 them in India, where their work is admirable, and 
 where some of your missionaries are men as wise as 
 can be found in that vast country, men who know as 
 much about India and are as much worthy to be lis- 
 tened to on that subject as any men to be met there. 
 No better evidence than theirs can be desired as to 
 the working of British rule there, for they can regard 
 its action impartially, yet with perfect comprehension; 
 I have seen them also in various parts of the Turkish 
 East, where they are placed among Mohammedans 
 and certain ancient non-Protestant churches. The 
 Christian peoples of the East have suffered terribly 
 in recent years, and they may have yet a great deal 
 to suffer. In 1895 an d 1896 more than one hundred 
 thousand Armenian Christians were massacred by the 
 orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid. Many of them were 
 women, many might have saved their lives if they 
 had spoken three words to renounce Christianity; 
 yet, like the martyrs of the apostolic age, they refused 
 to sacrifice their Christian faith, and went willingly to 
 death for the sake of their Lord and Master. Among 
 these peoples it has been the duty of your American 
 missionaries to labor, not proselytizing but befriending 
 them educationally and otherwise. And the best work
 
 136 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 that has ever been done among them has been done 
 by those missionaries. Whenever the English friends 
 of the Armenian Chirstians desired to know what was 
 happening in Asiatic Turkey, whenever we desired 
 to find some means of relieving the famine-stricken 
 and down-trodden people, whenever it became neces- 
 sary to ascertain what, if anything, could be done 
 by political action to alleviate the sufferings of these 
 oppressed and martyred races, I have always found 
 that the best thing to do was to turn to the American 
 missionaries. And I have often heard from members 
 of the ancient Armenian church the warmest acknowl- 
 edgment of the great services which your missionaries 
 have rendered to them. 
 
 Now, when you recall the splendid work which 
 missions have done, when we think also of how long 
 they have been at work, and of the advantages which 
 those who come forth from civilized nations ought to 
 possess, are you not sometimes surprised that Christian- 
 ity has not long ago overspread the whole world ? Why 
 is it that more progress has not been made ? Think 
 of the beginnings of Christianity, when St. Paul and 
 the other apostles went out to make those first mis- 
 sionary tours, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. 
 They went out few in number, through a pagan world, 
 a world which was dominated by ancient and powerful 
 religions, where all authority and all secular powers 
 were on the side of the old religions, and where before 
 long those powers, the emperors and their governors
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 137 
 
 and other officers, put forth their whole strength to 
 resist and extinguish Christianity ; and a series of cruel 
 persecutions took place, extending over nearly three 
 centuries, by which it was attempted to root out the 
 new religion from the earth. Those persecutions failed. 
 Christianity spread itself over the empire against all 
 the power the empire could put forth, and made its 
 way in the teeth of persecutions until at last it grew 
 so strong that the emperors were obliged to recognize 
 it ; and from that time forth it became the dominant 
 religion over all the world, except fire-worshipping 
 Persia, that the Romans knew. It did that work hi 
 three centuries. 
 
 Since that time sixteen hundred years have passed, 
 and Christianity has had most of the material forces 
 of the world on its side, nearly all the military power, 
 as well as nearly all the learning and'civilization, ex- 
 cept during a comparatively short period when there 
 was more literature and science in Musulman than in 
 European countries. Why, then, has not Christianity 
 succeeded in converting the whole earth ? 
 
 That is, indeed, a question worth asking. It is a 
 question you have doubtless often asked yourselves. 
 We shall do better to reflect on what we have not ac- 
 complished, and try to discover why it is that we have 
 failed, than to exult in what we have accomplished. It 
 may be that we shall discover some of the causes which 
 have weakened us and prevented us from obtaining, 
 with material advantages on our side, what the apostles
 
 138 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and their successors obtained with all the material 
 forces and civil powers against them. I am going to 
 give one reason ; it is only one of several reasons, but 
 it is a reason which is brought forcibly home to who- 
 ever travels in uncivilized countries and notes the 
 limited success attained by missions in places where 
 the zeal and devotion of the missionaries are evident. 
 
 The preaching of the gospel is but one among many 
 forces and influences which have been brought to bear 
 on the uncivilized races during the last four centuries, 
 and some of those other influences have largely neu- 
 tralized the effect of the gospel. What was the first 
 thing that happened when the Spaniards and the Por- 
 tuguese began to settle hi the American islands and 
 continents ? One of their main objects was to convert 
 the heathen. They were pious, according to their 
 lights, and quite sincere in their eagerness to spread the 
 faith. They took out a great many friars with them, 
 and set them to preaching. The cross was carried up 
 and down the islands, and the friars preached ; and the 
 natives, whether or not they understood and believed, 
 were at any rate baptized and compelled to attend 
 mass and say that they were Christians. The native 
 religions or superstitions had little hold on these poor, 
 simple savages of the Antilles, and of many parts of the 
 American continents also, so they yielded easily. 
 The Conquerors thought they were saving souls, 
 whether by persuasion or force ; and they would have 
 thought it absurd not to use force in that holy war-
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 139 
 
 fare. But the Conquerors did something more than 
 this. Though the friars came to preach, the adven- 
 turers who swarmed into tropical America came with 
 a fierce greed for gold. That was what they chiefly 
 sought in the New World. Finding gold ornaments 
 among the people, they asked where they came from ; 
 they searched for the gold mines, and put the natives 
 to work in them. They set them also to till the soil, 
 and those weak, simple-minded aborigines, accus- 
 tomed to raising just enough food to support them- 
 selves, were driven to work under the stern eye 
 and cruel scourge of a Spanish taskmaster, until in 
 the island of Hispaniola (now Hayti )and in the Ba- 
 hamas, the whole population died out under the severi- 
 ties of the Spanish rule within thirty or forty years 
 after the discovery of the islands. The same thing 
 happened in the other conquered territories. Wherever 
 the Spaniard went he seized the land of the people, 
 reduced them to what was virtually slavery, and 
 forced them to work in the mines or till the soil for 
 him. 
 
 That was probably the most harsh and terrible form 
 which the contact of a civilized race with an uncivilized 
 ever took. It ended with the extermination of many 
 a native tribe. And yet something of that kind, 
 though not so bad, has been going on ever since. 
 Something of the kind is going on in the South Ameri- 
 can forests now. Wherever the strong races who, like the 
 Spaniards, possessed horses and firearms, races with the
 
 140 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 appliances of civilization at their command, have come 
 into contact with weaker races, that sort of thing has 
 happened. Everywhere the native has gone to the 
 wall. Sometimes, where the native race was weak, it 
 has been extinguished ; it dies out either under harsh 
 treatment or under the diseases which the white 
 man brings with him, or through use of the liquor 
 which he has supplied to them. In one way or an- 
 other the native races, if not extinguished, have at 
 any rate become demoralized. They lose those native 
 customs which governed their life, and experience 
 shews that it is easier to acquire the vices of the white 
 man than to imitate his virtues. 
 
 I do not wish to overstate the case. I do not deny 
 that some of these evils were inevitable. The contact 
 of a superior civilized race with a barbarous race must 
 always bring some harm to the weaker. But the evils 
 need not have been so great if the civilized men who 
 went among the natives had behaved like Christians. 
 Unfortunately, that was just what few of them did. 
 There were always some good men among them who 
 tried to protect the natives, even some laymen among 
 the first Spanish conquerors and many among the 
 clergy. The noble Las Casas who spent his life in 
 trying to protect the American aborigines was only 
 one of many excellent Spanish churchmen. But the 
 forces of rapine and avarice and that sort of arrogant 
 contempt which the strong man feels for the weak 
 were more potent forces. Down to our own times
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 141 
 
 you will find that the natives suffered far more than 
 they gained. Their land was taken without giving 
 them anything for it, and they were driven away 
 or shot down. The trader who went among them 
 cheated them, and did what was even worse: he 
 sold them vile liquor that ruined them body and 
 soul. Despite all the efforts made in recent years, 
 those practices go on in some places still. It would 
 have been a good thing for the natives if the art of 
 distillation had never been discovered. It was only 
 the other day, after whole tribes had perished, that 
 we awakened to a sense of the tremendous evils 
 wrought among native peoples by the sale of drink. 
 It does harm enough among white people, but far 
 more among a savage or semi-civilized race, for they 
 are not seasoned to it, as in a certain way a number of 
 our own populations have become, and they have less 
 self-control than civilized men. It works like poison 
 upon them and destroys them. 
 
 These things could not but injure and retard the 
 work of Christianity. How was it possible for the 
 natives not to look at the practice of the white man as 
 well as at his preaching ? The missionary represented 
 a religion of justice, of peace, and of love. But with 
 the missionary came the man who tried to take away 
 the land of the native or sold him worthless goods or 
 intoxicated him with his liquor. How was it possible 
 for the natives, when they saw these men who called 
 themselves "Christians" just as did the missionaries,
 
 142 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 not to be struck by the divergence between the practice 
 and the doctrines of this new religion ? The saying is 
 attributed to some African prince that the process going 
 on in his country was : "First missionary, then trader, 
 then army." The missionary came first, and well it 
 would have been if he had been left to do his work 
 alone. But before the missionary had succeeded in 
 Christianizing the people, the trader came to undo the 
 missionary's work. 
 
 Even where the white man does not rob or injure the 
 natives there is something in his attitude when he finds 
 himself among an uncivilized people that is harsh 
 and unchristian. He acts toward them as if they 
 were persons to whom he can do whatever he likes. 
 Those who have travelled among savages or semi- 
 savages will know what I mean when I say that it 
 takes almost the temper of a saint to keep the white 
 man from treating with arrogance or scorn a people 
 who are very much weaker than himself and who fre- 
 quently provoke him by an astonishing slackness or 
 thoughtlessness or inconstancy of purpose. Nothing 
 but a sense of human duty, and Christian duty can 
 prevent a man from acting harshly or unfairly when 
 he is placed in such conditions. No doubt the natives 
 often give provocation. In parts of Australia and in 
 Tierra del Fuego they stole the sheep that had been 
 placed upon the lands that once were theirs. But this 
 does not excuse the settlers who went out in parties 
 to shoot them down.
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 143 
 
 This behaviour and this attitude of the stronger 
 white race have been among the chief obstacles to 
 the advance of Christianity. 
 
 There were times when the governments of so- 
 called Christian states themselves were little better 
 than the adventurers who disgraced the Christian 
 name. The long perpetuation, by the favour of 
 such governments, of the African slave trade, the 
 most hideous piece of cruelty and wrong ever per- 
 petrated by civilized upon uncivilized men, is a terri- 
 ble instance. It has been only in the last sixty or 
 seventy years that these governments have awakened 
 to a proper sense of their duties. Most of them have 
 latterly tried, and are now honestly trying, to protect 
 the natives. This is not yet the case in all parts of the 
 world. There are one or two lamentable exceptions. 
 But it is the case wherever either the United States or 
 Great Britain holds sway. Your government and the 
 British government are doing their best wherever their 
 flags fly to protect the native in every way they can. 
 In India it has been for a century past the sole and 
 whole-hearted object of the English government to 
 administer absolutely equal justice in India between 
 the European and the native and to give the native as 
 complete a protection and as good a government as 
 the circumstances of the country will permit. 
 
 But even where the government performs its duty 
 it is possible for the private adventurer, or the trading 
 corporation behind the private adventurer that sup-
 
 144 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 plies the funds and does not watch how the adventurer 
 behaves, to do a great deal of harm. They it is who 
 discredit Christianity. While the missionary is preach- 
 ing, the adventurer goes on cheating the native or oust- 
 ing him from his land, sometimes even forcing him into 
 a sort of slavery, and punishing him if he fails to 
 fulfil the allotted task, and the trading company at 
 home draws the profits. The temptations to abuse 
 strength have been great and have been yielded to. 
 No wonder that these things checked the advance 
 of Christianity. No wonder that it spread more 
 rapidly while adversity and persecution gave it 
 the opportunity to show the distinctively Christian 
 virtues of faith, constancy, humility, and love than it 
 did when all the powers of this earth were on its side, 
 that it advanced faster against the hostility of Roman 
 emperors like Nero, Decius, and Diocletian than it 
 has advanced with all the strength of civilization behind 
 it. It is not that any power has gone out of the gospel ; 
 it is not that the best men in Christian nations were 
 any less zealous ; but other men went on undoing the 
 missionary's work all the time he was preaching. 
 
 If this be true, what is the duty of Christian men 
 to-day? That duty certainly is not to ask govern- 
 ments to spread the gospel by force. No more action 
 like that of the Spaniards who carried the scourge and 
 the sword while the friars carried the crucifix. You 
 do not believe that the blessing of God will rest upon 
 such methods.
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 145 
 
 Neither do you desire that governments should 
 give any political support to missionaries. The more 
 that missions are kept apart from political authori- 
 ties and left to rely on themselves, the better. What 
 you do desire is to strengthen the hands of the civ- 
 ilized governments when they try to secure for the 
 native justice, considerate treatment, full protection 
 against the craft or violence of the adventurer. 
 
 It is in your power to do that. Public opinion can 
 strengthen the hands of the governments; it can 
 encourage each government to lay down and carry out 
 rules for the due protection of the native. We all know 
 that the United States government desired to carry 
 out honestly and hi the right spirit such a policy 
 even when the Red Indians were being defrauded of 
 their lands or of the supplies given them. Your 
 national government always meant to do right, though 
 it was not always able to supervise its agents. 
 
 We in Britain wish to do the same; and we are 
 always appealing to our government and assuring them 
 that they will have and do now have the spirit of the 
 British public behind them in endeavouring to protect 
 the native. And if there are still parts of the world 
 in which the natives are to-day ill treated, let us 
 trust that the public opinion of America and of Eng- 
 land will speak out and will demand that the native 
 races everywhere be duly cared for and delivered from 
 oppression. 
 
 Your duty does not end with subscribing to the mis-
 
 146 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 sionary societies. It requires you to watch wherever 
 over the world the advance of Christianity is being 
 hindered by the wicked practices of white men to see 
 that the adventurer and the trader are restrained if they 
 wrong the natives by force or fraud, and absolutely to 
 prohibit the sale of liquor to the natives. The natives 
 ought to be regarded as children, and have the measure 
 both of care and of tenderness which is given to chil- 
 dren, for under the conditions in which their life has 
 been passed, they cannot be expected to rise quickly 
 to the level of civilized man. 
 
 This brings me to the other point which I desire. 
 
 The position is now becoming critical. You are 
 often told and you are told with truth that this 
 is a critical time for civilized countries. It is a time 
 when there are all sorts of new ideas hi the air, a time 
 when many ancient landmarks have been removed, and 
 when efforts are being made to remove even those that 
 remain. In this country you are receiving vast new 
 masses of population. In the Old World new social 
 and political movements have begun to stir up even 
 the hitherto most stagnant countries. But if you 
 look beyond Europe and America, at what is pass- 
 ing among the savage or semi-civilized races of man- 
 kind, and note the changes which have come upon 
 them within the last fifty years and which are tell- 
 ing upon them now, you will perceive that this is 
 perhaps the most critical moment ever seen in the 
 history of the non-Christian nations and races, a mo-
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 147 
 
 ment most significant in its bearing on their future. 
 The races of European origin have now obtained con- 
 trol of the whole world (except two or three ancient 
 Asiatic states, and their influence, political and financial 
 is felt far more deeply than ever before even in those 
 parts of the world over which they do not exercise direct 
 political sway. 
 
 While our material civilization is permeating every 
 people, our ideas and the example of our institutions 
 are also telling as never before upon these more back- 
 ward races. In half a century or less that which we call 
 European civilization will have overspread the earth and 
 extinguished the organizations and customs of the 
 savage and semi-civilized tribes or nations. The native 
 tribes will have been broken up, native kingdoms will 
 have vanished, native customs will have gone ; every- 
 where the white man will have established his influence 
 and destroyed the old native ways of life. All is 
 trembling and crumbling away under the shock and 
 impact of the stronger, harder civilization which the 
 white foreigners, penetrating everywhere by our easier 
 methods of transportation by land and sea, have brought 
 with them. Things which have endured from the Stone 
 Age until now are at last coming to a perpetual end, 
 and will be no more. They will vanish from the face 
 of the earth. This is something that has never hap- 
 pened before and can never happen again. 
 
 When all these savage and semi-civilized peoples 
 have lost their ancient organizations, their ancient
 
 148 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 customs and their ancient beliefs, they will, along with 
 these things, lose also their ancient morality, such 
 as it was, which had its sanctions in those customs 
 and beliefs. If you destroy these, their morality falls 
 to the ground and is gone, and they are left with noth- 
 ing, adrift upon a wide and shoreless sea. You may 
 say that their customs were often bad, their morality 
 often immorality. That is true. Much of it ought 
 to disappear. Yet with all its tolerance of vice and 
 all its degrading practices, it had in some ways a 
 certain beneficial action upon their conduct. Its 
 sanctions exercised some control for good. It fur- 
 nished a basis for the conduct of life better than the 
 mere unrestrained impulse to the gratification of every 
 passion and desire. It prescribed some kinds of virtu- 
 ous actions, such as good faith (at least with one an- 
 other), mutual help in times of want, hospitality, and 
 compassion for the helpless. There are savage peo- 
 ples who have these virtues, and they were inter- 
 twined with supernatural sanctions which are now 
 perishing. 
 
 The process of destruction and disintegration which 
 I have described is inevi table, and it is advancing 
 swiftly. If we measure time by the lifetime of a man, 
 the end may seem still distant, but we can begin to 
 conjecture the date of its arrival. Already there are 
 hardly any heathen left in the two American con- 
 tinents (though there are millions of aborigines who 
 are not Christians in any effective sense), and hardly
 
 MISSIONS PAST AND PRESENT 149 
 
 any in the isles of the Pacific. Only in India and the 
 East Indian archipelago, and in South Central Africa 
 and parts of West Africa do there remain any large 
 masses of idolatrous or spirit- worshipping men. Within 
 less than two centuries the whole non-Christian 
 world may be practically divided between Buddhism 
 and Islam, and although the latter of those two 
 great faiths is still spreading in parts of Africa and 
 Asia, the hold of both upon their votaries may by 
 that time have been sensibly weakened. 
 
 That is why the present moment is so critical and 
 so precious. If these peoples are losing the old cus- 
 toms and beliefs which have ruled them thus far, the 
 time has come to give them something new and bet- 
 ter. Unless they receive some new moral basis of 
 life, some beliefs and motives and precepts which 
 can appeal to their hearts and rule their conduct, can 
 restrain bad impulses, and instil worthy conceptions 
 of life and duty and worship, their last 'state may 
 be worse than the first. Having overspread the world, 
 and taken these weaker races under our control, we 
 cannot evade the responsibility that lies upon us to 
 think and to care for them. It was at the prompt- 
 ing of our own interests that we of the white races 
 disturbed their ancient ways of life, for we went 
 among them, some few doubtless with a desire to do 
 good, but the great majority from a desire to make 
 money and to exploit the world's resources for profit 
 of the white man. Under the aegis of his govern-
 
 150 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 ment, he is taking the agricultural wealth from the soil, 
 the forests from the hills, and the minerals out of the 
 rocks, all for his own benefit. Of all this wealth noth- 
 ing, except perhaps a meagre wage for manual labour, 
 goes to the native. 
 
 The power of civilized man has too often come as 
 a crushing force in a destroying hand. Let the gospel 
 of Christ come to these races, the old foundations 
 of whose life are crumbling away beneath them, 
 not as the mere nominal profession of those who 
 are grasping their land and trying to profit by 
 their toil, but accompanied by justice and tender- 
 ness in action, and recommended by example as well 
 as by precept. Let it come as a beneficent power 
 which can fill their hearts with new thoughts and new 
 hopes, which may become a link between them and 
 ourselves, averting that strife and suffering which will 
 otherwise follow, and leading them gently forward into 
 the light. Let it be a bond between all races of man- 
 kind of whatever blood, or speech, or colour, a sacred 
 bond to make them feel and believe that they and we 
 are all the children of one Father in heaven.
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO THE UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN AT 
 MADISON, JUNE, 1908.
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO THE UNIVERSITY or WISCONSIN AT 
 MADISON, JUNE, 1908. 
 
 THIS University of Wisconsin in which we are met 
 stands by common consent in the front rank among the 
 State Universities of the United States. It is younger 
 than some of them, but inferior to none in the width 
 of its curriculum and the ability of its staff, and it is 
 perhaps more conspicuously identified then any other 
 with the political life of the State. This is therefore 
 a fitting place in which one who delivers a Commence- 
 ment Address may choose for his theme the various 
 origins from which universities have sprung, the 
 various forms in which they have organized themselves, 
 and the peculiar features and functions which belong 
 to the American State Universities, that "latest birth 
 of time." 
 
 A university is, in its simplest form, nothing more 
 than an aggregation of teachers and learners. It 
 was in that way that the earliest universities of modern 
 Europe began. Salerno, Bologna, Paris, were the 
 first cities in which crowds of learners gathered round 
 a few eminent teachers of medicine (in the first), of law 
 (in the second), of theology and dialectics (in the third). 
 Such too were the beginnings of Oxford and Cambridge. 
 
 153
 
 154 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 In each of those trading towns situated upon rivers, 
 then the chief avenues of commerce, a concourse of 
 students formed itself round a few learned men, and 
 presently grew to vast dimensions. These universities 
 were not founded by any public authority, but founded 
 themselves, springing up naturally out of the desire 
 for knowledge ; and hence we in England describe our 
 two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge as being 
 "corporations at common law," i.e. deriving their 
 legal quality as corporate bodies from ancient custom 
 which antedates the time of legal memory. The same 
 thing had happened in the Eastern World. Where Is- 
 lam reigned, schools sprang up in the great mosques like 
 that famous one of El Azhar in Cairo which still draws 
 thousands of students of all ages from all parts of the 
 Musulman world. Later on in the Middle Ages 
 sovereigns began to establish such places of learning. 
 The Emperor Frederick II set up one at Naples in 
 A.D. 1225, Pope Gregory IX another at Toulouse in 
 1233. The first in the Germanic Empire was that of 
 Prague, founded by Pope Clement VI and Emperor 
 Charles the Fourth in 1347-1348 ; and others followed, 
 such as that famous school at Heidelberg which the 
 Elector Palatine Rupert, and Pope Urban VI at his 
 request, set up hi 1386. 
 
 Popes had also assumed the right of founding uni- 
 versities, and with good right, because their ecclesias- 
 tical jurisdiction embraced all Europe, and they were 
 called upon to see that a due supply both of trained
 
 155 
 
 theologians and trained lawyers was always forth- 
 coming. In Scotland the Universities of Glasgow and 
 Aberdeen, for instance, were founded by papal bulls, 
 but when after the breach between England and 
 Rome Queen Elizabeth desired to create a university 
 in Ireland she did it herself by a royal charter. In 
 modern Europe, since the conception has grown up 
 that a university is an institution entitled to grant 
 degrees, and since degrees themselves have obtained 
 more or less legal recognition, it is now understood 
 that nothing less than some public authority, such as 
 either a royal grant or a statute, can create a univer- 
 sity. It is thus that the eight new universities re- 
 cently established, and the most recent of them per- 
 haps too hastily established, in England, viz., London, 
 Durham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham^ 
 Sheffield, and Bristol, have been constituted. 
 
 Here in the United States you have allowed the 
 widest freedom, so colleges and universities, great and 
 small, have sprung up all over the country in a crop 
 almost too abundant. Harvard and Yale were the 
 foundations of private benefactors, though their States 
 subsequently aided them. Many other colleges owe 
 their origin to religious denominations. But the most 
 interesting, and certainly the most peculiar and char- 
 acteristically American, type has been that of the uni- 
 versity founded and supported and governed by the 
 State. 
 
 Before proceeding to consider how this scheme of
 
 156 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 State support and control has worked, let me try to 
 give you a brief view of the universities of the three 
 countries whose conditions and ideas most resemble 
 yours in America. I mean Germany, England, and 
 Scotland, countries in each of which the university 
 has played a great part and has not only illustrated 
 the character of the nation but done much to form that 
 character. 
 
 The universities of Germany have, during the last 
 seventy years, led the world in the completeness of 
 their teaching organization, in the amplitude of the 
 provision of instruction in every branch of knowledge 
 which they make, and in the services they render to 
 the prosecution of research. In these respects they 
 have set an example to the world, an example whose 
 value is recognized in the United States, from which so 
 many students have gone to Germany. The level of 
 learning among the teachers, taken as a whole, is per- 
 haps higher than anywhere else : and it is to the en- 
 ergy of these teachers that we must largely ascribe that 
 completeness with which special training has been 
 brought to bear upon every department of practical 
 life hi Germany, upon private business in production 
 and distribution no less than upon all kinds of admin- 
 istrative work. A control is exercised over the univer- 
 sities by the government which you here and we hi 
 England might think excessive, but in practice it does 
 not seem to be harmful, for public opinion practically 
 secures freedom of teaching and relieves the professors
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 157 
 
 from undue interference. The tradition of respect for 
 the great seats of learning, strong in the minds of the 
 German bureaucracy, who have all been educated there, 
 is found to act as an efficient protection. Indeed, the 
 whole nation cares for the universities, is proud of the 
 universities, recognizes, as perhaps no other nation has 
 ever done, the value for practical life of full knowledge 
 and exact training, so that everything is done which 
 money and organizing skill can do to maintain the in- 
 stitutions of learning and teaching at the highest level 
 of efficiency. Nor must I forget to add that the uni- 
 versities have another claim on the affection of the 
 German people in the fact that when, after the battle 
 of Jena in 1806, North Germany lay for a tune pros- 
 trate at the feet of a foreign conqueror, it was in the 
 universities that the patriotic national spirit found its 
 surest home, and it was among their professors and 
 students that the movement began which culminated 
 in the liberation of the German fatherland. 
 
 The universities of England and here I speak 
 chiefly of Oxford and Cambridge, as the oldest and by 
 far the most characteristic educational product of 
 English soil belong to a different type. Although 
 the great scientific discoveries of the last centuries are 
 due to British more than to any other discoverers, 
 these universities have not in recent years contributed 
 so largely to original research either in natural science 
 or in the human subjects as have their sisters in Ger- 
 many. They are far less completely organized for the
 
 158 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 purposes of instruction. They do not educate so large 
 a proportion of the people. They have been, since the 
 Reformation, for the most part places of resort for the 
 upper and middle classes, and it is only within the last 
 thirty years that they began to be rendered easily ac- 
 cessible to the promising and diligent youth of the 
 poorer sections of society. But they have had several 
 conspicuous merits which are specially their own. 
 Their ideal has been to give not so much an education 
 qualifying a man to succeed in any particular walk of 
 life as that general education which will fit him to be a 
 worthy member of church and commonwealth. They 
 have sought to develop men as men, to shape and 
 polish a completely harmonious and well-rounded in- 
 tellect and character, a personality in whom all facul- 
 ties have been cultivated and brought as nearly as may 
 be to a symmetrical completeness. And in aiming at 
 this, they have thought not only of learning or of the 
 powers of the speculative intellect, but also of the apti- 
 tudes which find their scope in practical life, and which 
 enable a man to work usefully with other men and to 
 exercise a wholesome influence in his community. Ox- 
 ford and Cambridge have long been closely associated 
 with the public life of the nation. In the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth centuries nearly all of those who 
 reached high eminence as statesmen were their 
 alumni, and gratefully acknowledged how much they 
 owed to the Alma Mater. That which they did owe 
 was not always learning nor even the power of ready
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 159 
 
 and finished speech, a power which must always count 
 for much in the political life of a free country. It was 
 perhaps rather the knowledge of human nature, the tact 
 and judgment, the sense of honour and comradeship 
 which daily social intercourse in the colleges of these 
 universities tended to form. In these colleges there 
 are twenty-two in Oxford and nineteen in Cambridge 
 there is a sort of domestic life which brings the 
 students into close touch with one another. The 
 undergraduates dine together in the same college hall 
 along with the graduate members of the college who 
 are the teachers. They worship in the same college 
 chapel. They have their sports together, each col- 
 lege with its cricket team and its racing boats on the 
 river. The opportunities for forming friendships are 
 unrivalled, and thus it comes to pass that those who 
 remember Oxford and Cambridge say that they learnt 
 as much from one another as they did from their pro- 
 fessors and tutors. Moreover, the domestic arrange- 
 ments of our English college life create a more easy 
 and familiar intercourse between the teachers, espe- 
 cially the younger ones, and the undergraduates than 
 exists anywhere else. The undergraduate students 
 are the friends of their teachers, living with them on 
 an equality which is of course tempered by the respect 
 due to age and experience. It is a pleasant relation, 
 good for the older and the younger alike. Thus has 
 there been created in Oxford and Cambridge that 
 impalpable thing which we call an Atmosphere, an
 
 160 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 intellectual and social tone which forms manners and 
 refines taste, and strengthens characters by traditions 
 inherited from a long and splendid past. 
 
 The four universities of Scotland are very different 
 from the English, and rather resemble the universities 
 of Germany. Though far less completely equipped 
 than are the latter, for Scotland has been a com- 
 paratively poor country, they have always given a 
 high quality of instruction, and produced a large 
 number of remarkable men. There are no residential 
 colleges like those of England, so the undergraduates 
 live in lodgings, where they please, and thus there is 
 less of social student life. But the instruction is 
 stimulating; and the undergraduates, being mostly 
 poor men, and coming of a diligent and aspiring stock, 
 are more generally studious and hard-working and 
 self-reliant than are those of Oxford and Cambridge. 
 Within the last twenty years women have been ad- 
 mitted to the classes, and that which was deemed an 
 experiment is pronounced to be a success. 
 
 Last, I come to your own universities. Whereas the 
 universities of Germany have been popular but not 
 free, and those of England free but not popular, yours, 
 like those of Scotland, are both popular and free. 
 Their doors are open to every one, and every one 
 enters. They are untrammeled by any religious or 
 political prejudices, even when they are associated with 
 a particular denomination, and they have been, with 
 comparatively few exceptions, managed without any
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 161 
 
 intrusion of political influences. Many of them 
 allow the student a wider choice among subjects of 
 study and leave him in other ways more free to do as 
 he pleases than is the case in any other institutions in 
 the English-speaking world. 
 
 Nor is it only that your universities are accessible 
 to all classes. They have achieved what has never 
 been achieved before, they have led all classes of the 
 people to believe in the value of university education 
 and wish to attain it. They have made it seem a 
 necessary part of the equipment of every one who 
 can afford the time to take it. In England, and indeed 
 in Europe generally, such an education has been a 
 luxury for the ordinary man, though it may have been 
 reckoned almost a necessity for those who are entering 
 on one of the distinctively "learned professions." But 
 here it is deemed a natural preparation for a business 
 life also; and the proportion of business men who have 
 studied at some university is far larger in the United 
 States than in any other country. 
 
 However, it was of your State universities only that 
 I meant to speak, because they are the newest, the most 
 peculiar, and the most interesting product of American 
 educational zeal. They are a remarkable expression 
 of the spirit which has latterly come to pervade this 
 country, that the functions of government may be 
 usefully extended to all sorts of undertakings for the 
 public benefit which it was formerly thought better 
 to leave to private enterprise. The provision of ele-
 
 162 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 mentary education was indeed long ago assumed by 
 the State, because it was deemed necessary that those 
 who vote as citizens should possess the rudiments of 
 knowledge. But in going on to found and support 
 and manage institutions supplying the higher forms of 
 education at a low or merely nominal charge, you of 
 the American West went further than any other com- 
 munities in the English-speaking world. The same 
 principle has guided several of your States, and this 
 State in particular, in so enlarging the range of uni- 
 versity action as to bring it into direct contact with 
 the schools and the people through systems of lectures 
 and correspondence and through the multiform activ- 
 ities of the agricultural department. The greatest asset 
 of a community is the energy and intelligence of its 
 members. Your citizens have the energy and you feel 
 it to be " good business " to develop their native intel- 
 ligence by the completest education they can desire. 
 
 In committing yourselves to this principle you here 
 in the West seem to have returned to that conception 
 of the functions of the State which prevailed in the 
 Greek republics of antiquity, where it was denned as 
 "a partnership of men in the highest social life," and 
 you have abandoned that laissez-faire doctrine gen- 
 erally held seventy years ago which regarded the gov- 
 erning power in a community as established mainly 
 for the purpose of maintaining civil order within and 
 providing for defence against external foes, and held 
 that to go further than this was to weaken or to tram-
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 163 
 
 mel individual initiative and to interfere with the 
 generally beneficent working of the natural forces 
 that guide social progress. Whether this reversal of 
 policy was needed in order to give energy and inde- 
 pendence their fair chance, for, as J. S. Mill observed, 
 it is even more fatal to exertion to have no hope of 
 succeeding by it than to be assured of succeeding 
 without it, and whether the doctrine of Greece and 
 Wisconsin or the doctrine of the physiocrats and 
 Benthamites will prove in the long run to be the best 
 for the stimulation of inventive thought and enterprise 
 and for the general advance of the community, is a 
 question I will not stop to discuss. This at least may 
 be said, that this particular form of State intervention 
 which the new principle has taken in the West has the 
 merit of associating all the citizens in a direct and 
 personal way with the university, making them feel it 
 to be their creation, arousing the liberality of the leg- 
 islature to it, and giving the whole State an interest in 
 its prosperity and efficiency. 
 
 There are, however, two risks incident to popularly 
 managed governmental control of all institutions of 
 teaching and learning, against which it is well to be 
 forewarned. Although neither you nor your sister 
 State universities may have yet encountered them, 
 they may some day threaten you, for popular manage- 
 ment is no guarantee against their appearance. 
 
 One of these is the possibility that a legislature, or a 
 governing authority appointed by a legislature, may
 
 1 64 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 carry politics into academical affairs, as politics have 
 been sometimes carried into those affairs in parts of the 
 European Continent where the university is an organ 
 of the State. Freedom is the life-blood of university 
 teaching. Neither the political opinions of a professor, 
 nor the character of the economic doctrines which he 
 holds and propagates, ought to be a ground for appoint- 
 ing or dismissing him, nor ought he to be any less free 
 to speak and vote as he pleases than any other citizen. 
 And though it is right and fitting that the State 
 should be represented in the governing authority 
 of a university which it supports, experience seems to 
 have proved that both the educational policy and the 
 daily administration and discipline of a university 
 ought as far as possible to be either left in academic 
 hands or entrusted to an authority on which the 
 academic element predominates. 
 
 The other risk is one to which in our time most 
 universities are exposed, and State universities per- 
 haps even more than others. The progress of natural 
 science has been so rapid, the results obtained by the 
 application of science to all forms of industry and 
 to many forms of commercial exchange, have been 
 so wonderful, the eagerness of every man to amass 
 wealth and of every nation to outstrip its rivals in 
 commerce and material progress is so keen, that the 
 temptation to favour at the expense of other branches 
 of instruction those branches from which pecuniary 
 gain may be expected has become unusually strong.
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 165 
 
 It is a temptation felt everywhere, in Europe hardly 
 less than here. We constantly hear men who are ready 
 to spend money freely on the so-called practical 
 branches of study, such as mining, agriculture, and 
 electrical engineering, disparage the study of theo- 
 retical science as unprofitable, while they seek to 
 eliminate altogether the so-called "humanistic" sub- 
 jects, such as philology, history, and philosophy. 
 
 This is a grave error. In the physical sciences the 
 discoveries of most practical importance have sprung 
 out of investigations undertaken purely for the sake 
 of knowledge, without any notion of those applications 
 to the industries and arts which were to be their ulti- 
 mate results. These it would indeed have been im- 
 possible to foresee. All we know of electricity, of those 
 chemical effects of light which have led to photography, 
 of those properties of certain rays in the spectrum 
 which have proved capable of being turned to such 
 admirable account in surgery, was discovered in the 
 pursuit of abstract science by men who were not think- 
 ing of practice or gain and most of whom gained little 
 except fame from their discoveries. None of them 
 dreamed that the telegraph and the dynamo would 
 issue from their experiments any more than Napier 
 when he invented logarithms, or Newton and Leibnitz 
 when they gave us the differential calculus, were 
 thinking of how much these improved mathematical 
 methods would help the engineer in his calculations. 
 All sound practice must be rooted in sound theory, and
 
 1 66 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the scientific thinking that leads to discovery must 
 begin in the theoretic field. Whatever a nation 
 achieves, whatever a university achieves, is the result 
 of patient observation, close reasoning, and, let me 
 add, of the love of knowledge for its own sake ; for 
 the man who is bent only on finding what is pecuni- 
 arily profitable will miss many a path at the end of 
 which there stands the figure of Truth, with all the 
 rewards she has to bestow. Just as any nation which 
 should force its children to narrow their energies to 
 purely gainful aims would soon fall behind its com- 
 petitors, and see its intellectual life fade and wither, so 
 any university which sacrificed its teaching of the the- 
 ory of science to the teaching of the practical applica- 
 tions of science would be unworthy of its high calling 
 and would handle even the practical part of its work 
 less effectively. The loss of a high ideal means the 
 loss of aspiration, of faith, of vital force. 
 
 In no country are these things better understood 
 than in Germany, to which I refer because she has 
 achieved so much in the extension of her commerce 
 and her industry. No country has been more suc- 
 cessful in the application of science to the arts, and in 
 none has the need for a wide foundation of abstract 
 scientific teaching been more fully recognized. 
 
 The planting and the development of these State 
 Universities and the hold they have acquired upon the 
 people of the State, are among the most cheering evi- 
 dences of the wisdom and capacity for good work of
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 167 
 
 your new democracies. They have their defects, but 
 they are filled by the desire to help the common man 
 onward and upward, and to help him in the best way 
 by providing him with the amplest measure of knowl- 
 edge and mental training so that he may know how 
 to help himself. The peoples of the Western States, 
 most of whom have had no college teaching themselves, 
 show their sense of the worth of learning and culture 
 by the liberality with which they support these insti- 
 tutions and the pride they feel in their prosperity. 
 
 These States have made you, the professors and 
 students of their universities, their debtors. How can 
 you repay that debt, and what service can you, some of 
 you as professors remaining here, others as youthful 
 graduates going out into the world, render to your States 
 in return ? In order to answer this question, let me 
 first ask another. What is it that the graduate has 
 received ? What does he carry away with him as the 
 fruit of the days of study here ? What will he remem- 
 ber forty years hence as the best things his university 
 has done for him? If I may judge of what you will 
 then feel from what I and my own contemporaries 
 feel as we look back, through a vista of more than 
 fifty years, to our happy Oxford days, you will then 
 say that your university bestowed on you two gifts of 
 supereminent value. 
 
 One was Friendships. The opportunities for mak- 
 ing congenial friendships are ampler in college life than 
 ever afterwards. Besides the familiar intercourse of
 
 1 68 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the class room, and on the campus, and wherever stu- 
 dents meet together, the acquiring of knowledge hi 
 company is itself a foundation for sympathy. Joint 
 study becomes a bond. To have the same tastes, 
 to enjoy the same books, to work side by side in the 
 laboratory, to help one another hi difficulties, to argue 
 out one's differences of opinions, to be inspired by the 
 same ideals and confide them to one another, these are 
 the means by which young men best enter into one 
 another's hearts and hopes, and form ties, which, last- 
 ing as long as life itself, may be a source of joy until 
 the end. 
 
 The other gift was the delight in Knowledge, a 
 sense of how much there is to be known, of the vast 
 horizon that is ever widening as one goes on learning, 
 of how with each one of us the enlargement of per- 
 sonal knowledge seems only to enlarge the sense of the 
 regions of mystery beyond that horizon. With this 
 delight there goes also a perception of the invaluable 
 help which real knowledge, accurate, thorough, duly 
 arranged and systematized, can render to each man 
 and each community in dealing with the facts of every 
 situation. And with the joy hi knowledge there ought 
 to go, and in the minds of all who really enjoy knowl- 
 edge there will go, the love of Truth. Devotion to 
 truth, loyalty to truth under all temptations, is the in- 
 tellectual conscience of the man of learning and the 
 man of science; and to create it is the chief aim for 
 the sake of which universities exist. If your univer-
 
 THE MISSION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES 169 
 
 sity teaching and life have not taught you that, they 
 have left the main thing undone. 
 
 Is there then not a way in which you as university 
 men going out into the world can repay to your Alma 
 Mater and to your State the debt you owe them? 
 We live in an age when difficulties thicken upon us, 
 when, in spite of the dissatisfaction so frequently ex- 
 pressed with the existing methods of government, new 
 work is being constantly thrust upon governments, 
 when the strife of labor and capital and the social un- 
 rest that growls and mutters all around us make it at 
 once more necessary to determine what justice requires 
 and harder to persuade any section of the community 
 to recede from its claims. Never was there a more 
 urgent need either for applying every kind of knowl- 
 edge to the solution of these problems, or for trying 
 to seek the solution in a spirit free from all prejudice 
 or bias. Your university studies have taught you 
 both to realize the worth of thorough and systema- 
 tized knowledge and to moderate the vehemence of 
 partisanship by a disinterested devotion to truth. 
 Thus you can contribute to the community of which 
 you are citizens three things. One is the spirit of 
 progress, which is hopeful because it is always seeking 
 to better things by knowledge and skill. Another is 
 the spirit of moderation, cautious because it resists 
 the temptations of party passion, or the impulse, often 
 honest enough, to grasp at the first hasty expedient for 
 removing admitted evils without considering whether
 
 170 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 that may not involve other evils just as great. And 
 the third is the love of truth, which, when it is strong 
 enough, will help a man to overcome the promptings 
 of personal ambition or the baser lures which the 
 power of selfish wealth can offer. 
 
 It has sometimes been claimed for the University 
 that it is the mind of the State, or at least the organ 
 which the State may employ to examine and think 
 out the problems the State has to deal with. That 
 may be too large a claim. But I am speaking now 
 not so much of the university as a body of men 
 organized in an institution dedicated to teaching 
 and research but rather of those children of the uni- 
 versity who go forth from it into the world, preserving 
 the real academic spirit through the whole of their busi- 
 ness or professional careers, furnishing skilled leaders 
 in political and social movements, and forming the pub- 
 lic opinion of the whole community by which nation and 
 State, more truly here in America than anywhere else 
 in the world, are led and ruled. Upon these citizens 
 comes with special force the call to translate into real- 
 ity that noble ideal of an educated democracy, reason- 
 able and just because it is educated, which the people 
 of America have long ago set up for themselves, and 
 towards which, through many obstacles, they are stead- 
 ily and surely moving.
 
 THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS AT 
 WASHINGTON, DECEMBER ISTH, 1908.
 
 THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS AT 
 WASHINGTON, DECEMBER ISTH, 1908. 
 
 MY only justification for appearing here to say a 
 few words in honor of the illustrious artist you are 
 met to commemorate is the fact that Augustus Saint- 
 Gaudens was born hi Ireland and of an Irish mother. 
 I will not dispute with my friend and colleague the 
 Ambassador of France how much of his artistic genius 
 is due to Ireland, and whether it bears the stamp of the 
 Gallo-Roman branch or of the Gaelic branch of the 
 Celtic race. But all of it that can be deemed possibly 
 attributable to Ireland I am going to claim for Ireland, 
 and that for a special reason. Ireland has, as all the 
 world knows, given to the British Isles, and also to 
 this country, a great number of men famous in litera- 
 ture, famous in science, famous in war, famous in gov- 
 ernment. What would you have done in the United 
 States without Irishmen to manage your affairs of 
 State ? But in proportion to the genius her children 
 have shown in other directions, Ireland has given to 
 the Fine Arts, as even her admirers must admit, com- 
 paratively few men of first-rate eminence, and this is 
 the more remarkable because the ancient Celtic work 
 
 173
 
 174 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 of the churches and monumental crosses of Ireland is 
 full of richness and beauty. So desiring to secure for 
 my island all the artistic honours possible, I must claim 
 Saint-Gaudens for it. I had intended to have dwelt 
 upon the inspiration which he derived in his early 
 years in Dublin from the picturesque and romantic 
 scenery which surrounds that ancient city, but, unfor- 
 tunately, I committed the fault unpardonable in a 
 man with some experience in these matters, and a fault 
 which I hereby warn you against of trying to verify 
 my facts by reference to the original authorities, and I 
 found that Saint-Gaudens quitted Dublin at the age 
 of six months. So I must fall back upon that native 
 quality which he drew from his Irish mother. 
 
 I will not attempt, after what has been said by 
 previous speakers, and especially after that analysis of 
 his genius, at once vigorous and delicate, which was 
 given by the President of the United States, to fix the 
 place which Saint-Gaudens holds among those who 
 have adorned the splendid art of sculpture, an art 
 which has, ever since the great Italian masters died 
 out nearly four centuries ago, held in the field of mod- 
 ern achievement a place that seems small when we com- 
 pare it with that supremacy yielded to it hi the artistic 
 production of the ancient world, and which it almost 
 regained in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries. Among those men who stand preeminent 
 in sculpture since the death of Michael Angelo, the 
 highest renown seems to have fallen to the Italian
 
 THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 175 
 
 Canova and the Icelander Thorwaldson, and it came 
 to these two not so much through any new creative 
 quality they revealed in plastic work or any personal 
 originality that shone out in their own conceptions, as 
 by the fact that they reproduced the kind of beauty 
 and the type of artistic thought which inspired the 
 art of the Greeks. Thus admirable as is the genius of 
 both, they seem to us to be revivifying, so far as 
 moderns can, the manner of Greece rather than to 
 have renewed those traditions of the grand style of the 
 Renaissance whose latest expressions are to be found 
 in the marvellous figures of the Laurentian chapel at 
 Florence and in those which stand around the tomb 
 of the Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck. 
 
 Without venturing into the dangerous field of theoriz- 
 ing about art or attempting to indicate the elements 
 that go to the making of its highest forms, I suppose 
 we may all agree in thinking that there are in 
 sculpture three more or less distinctive kinds of excel- 
 lence. There is the excellence which consists in the 
 faithful reproduction of nature; there is the excel- 
 lence hi which we admire pure beauty of form and 
 line ; and there is the excellence which makes its 
 special appeal to the imagination of the beholder be- 
 cause it proceeds from the imagination of the artist 
 himself. When he has the power of speaking to our 
 intellect and emotions straight out of his own mind, 
 he enables us to realize not only how the subject 
 presented itself to his thought, but what was really
 
 176 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the deepest and most essential thing in his subject 
 itself. If the subject be a person, he reveals the in- 
 nermost nature of the man portrayed. If it is a scene , he 
 brings out the true and permanent meaning it will have 
 for the long Hereafter. To possess any one of these ex- 
 cellences in high measure is to be great. To possess 
 all three in such measure is to attain perfection. Au- 
 gustus Saint-Gaudens, we may probably agree, stood 
 preeminent in the third. His highest gift was his power 
 of imaginative conception. As all the great men 
 that have left their mark in the world of affairs have been 
 great by combining the power of thinking with energy, 
 promptitude, and courage in action, so all the men that 
 have been great in the fields of literature and art have 
 been great by combining the power of thinking with the 
 power of feeling, that is, the capacity of receiving and 
 giving out an emotional impression. Now what most 
 strikes us in Saint-Gaudens' works is that, whatever 
 else we find, we find an intense and profound power of 
 thinking combined with an equal power of feeling. 
 Look around upon these works in this room. Does he 
 not seem to you, whenever he approached a subject, 
 be it a man or an incident, to have sat down and medi- 
 tated, slowly and patiently, until he had discovered for 
 himself exactly what lay at the foundation of the man's 
 character or what it was that struck the deepest chord 
 of human nature in the incident ? Then, pervaded 
 by this thought, he set himself to represent and ex- 
 press that which belonged to the man or to the inci-
 
 THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 177 
 
 dent, and he did express it with an unerring accuracy 
 and a rarely equalled power. This accuracy was due 
 to his possessing, along with high ideals, a patience 
 that grudged no pains. He kept some of his works 
 for years in his studio after others had thought them 
 complete, touching and retouching them till they were 
 brought nearer to the standard of perfection he had 
 set up. One of his disciples remembers a day when 
 in modelling an arm for a figure he moulded and threw 
 away more than twenty attempts to get in the clay 
 exactly the shape and contour he desired. 
 
 Think of any one of his greatest works. Look at 
 that noble statue of President Lincoln in the park at 
 Chicago, in which the grandeur of the man transforms 
 and triumphs over all those difficulties and defects 
 which the figure and the clothing presented and which 
 might have appeared inconsistent with Hellenic ideas 
 of beauty and grace. 
 
 Think of that solemn and majestic figure of Sorrow 
 in the Rock Creek Cemetery here at Washington 
 which seems by mere form and posture to have suc- 
 ceeded in expressing what has seldom been expressed 
 by sculptor or painter, though the greatest masters of 
 music have been able to express it through sound. It 
 touches us like a requiem by Mozart or one of those 
 pieces of Chopin in which the very soul of sadness 
 seems to speak through the chords. 
 
 Think of that infinitely pathetic figure of the young 
 hero of New England, Robert Shaw, as you see him
 
 178 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 in the bas-relief on the border of Boston Common 
 the young hero of New England riding calmly to his 
 fate at the head of his soldiers, soldiers of another race 
 just delivered from slavery. The shadow of death 
 rests already upon him. 
 
 Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra. 1 
 
 When you think of works like those, in which the 
 loftiest imagination has been accompanied with the 
 most finished grace of execution, you feel how great 
 a genius it has been the privilege of your age to pos- 
 sess in the artist whose memory we have met to 
 honour. 
 
 The danger or the weakness which is sometimes 
 found to accompany this power of imaginative expres- 
 sion is that it is apt to lapse into something extrava- 
 gant or sensational. Nothing was farther from Saint- 
 Gaudens. In that respect he had the balance and 
 self-restraint, as well as the fine sense of beauty and 
 measure, which belonged to his Greek masters. It is by 
 that, we may believe, by the power of imaginative 
 conception and expression, combined with calmness and 
 self-restraint, that he will live in the admiring mem- 
 ory of all who love and prize art in every country. 
 Most of all will he live hi America, which did not, in- 
 deed, give him birth, but which received him as a 
 child, which helped him, which cherished him, which 
 recognized his gifts as though he had been one of her 
 
 1 Aeneid VI, of the young Marcdlus.
 
 THE ART OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 179 
 
 own children, which gave him those noble subjects from 
 her own history with which his name will always be 
 associated. He deserves to be remembered forever 
 among you as one of the artistic glories of your 
 country.
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 
 
 ADDRESS AT A BANQUET OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHI- 
 TECTS IN WASHINGTON, DECEMBER, 1908.
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 
 
 ADDRESS AT A BANQUET OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHI- 
 TECTS IN WASHINGTON, DECEMBER, 1908. 
 
 MY first duty is to thank you for the way in which 
 you have received the toast to which I am desired 
 to respond. I was touched by the simple manner 
 in which your President gave the toast, "The King." 
 He gave it in the same way in which it might have 
 been given in A.D. 1759 in the North American colonies, 
 when all patriotic hearts were swelling with pride at 
 the news of the victory won by Wolfe on the Plains of 
 Abraham and the winning of all North America for the 
 benefit of those colonies. A good deal of water has 
 flowed under the bridges of the Potomac since 1759; but 
 things have got back, so far as relates to spirit and sen- 
 timent, to what they were just one hundred and fifty 
 years ago, and I hope and believe that under this new 
 order of things, when this gigantic Republic has for 
 more than a century and a quarter managed its affairs 
 in this continent in its own way, and when for nearly 
 a century undisturbed peace has existed between Great 
 Britain and the United States, the ties of sentiment, 
 feeling, and affection which unite the two branches 
 of the ancient stock are, and will remain, as deep and 
 
 183
 
 1 84 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 as strong as ever they were in the days of political 
 union. 
 
 It is a pleasure to be the guest of the American 
 Institute of Architects. I have always, as a humble 
 layman, not understanding the principles and methods 
 of the splendid art which you practise, but admiring its 
 results, felt a very keen interest in your profession, 
 and have thought it must be one of the most agreeable 
 professions that a man could enter. There is, of course, 
 one drawback connected with it that vexation which 
 an architect must experience when his beautiful designs 
 for a building, grand in its lines and refined in its 
 ornament, are frustrated by the unresponsive taste- 
 lessness and tame ideas of the person for whom the 
 building is to be erected and who probably prefers 
 internal comfort to external beauty. That must be 
 often a source of sore disappointment to you. But 
 after all, every profession has its drawbacks. Quisque 
 suos patimur Manes. In my own profession, that of 
 the law, it does sometimes happen that the most elo- 
 quent speeches which are directed to secure the acquittal 
 of a guilty man are neglected by a stupid jury. It does 
 sometimes happen in the profession of medicine that a 
 person whose malady has been pronounced incurable by 
 a skilful practitioner subsequently recovers, and that 
 his recovery is attributed not to the skill of the physician 
 labouring against hope, but to the strength of the 
 patient's constitution. It sometimes happens in the 
 profession of the journalist that the efforts which the
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 185 
 
 reporter who interviews a criminal makes to obtain 
 absolute accuracy about the details of the crime are 
 not successful, and that he does not even get credit 
 for the strenuousness of those efforts. And I confess 
 it is a serious drawback to the profession of the poli- 
 tician and legislator that one-half of his tune and effort 
 is apt to be spent, not in securing the passing of good 
 laws, but in preventing the passing of those laws, be 
 they good or bad, which the opposite party seeks to 
 pass. 
 
 You, gentlemen (I am reminded of this by my 
 reference to the transitory character of a great deal of 
 the work politicians do), have one satisfaction which 
 belongs to you, as compared with some of those other 
 professions I have referred to. It is this: You do attain 
 a solid, visible, tangible result. You produce something. 
 There is the building. It stands there for the world 
 to look at, and for yourself to admire. It stands ; it 
 continues to serve some useful purposes ; it is there as 
 something definitely attained and effected; and if after 
 some fifty or sixty years faults in the construction 
 cause it perchance to totter and fall, by that tune it 
 will have been forgotten who was the architect; and 
 as for yourself, you will not suffer from any criticism, 
 because you will be elsewhere, and will no doubt be 
 enjoying a happiness sufficient to make you entirely 
 indifferent to criticism. 
 
 So I come back to the conclusion that you are, on 
 the whole, fortunate in your profession. And you have
 
 1 86 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 one other great advantage. You are following a pro- 
 fession, the study of which, pursued in an aesthetic as 
 well as scientific spirit all your life through, and con- 
 sisting largely in examining the masterpieces of archi- 
 tecture that have been erected before our own time, 
 and in our own time, is in itself altogether profitable 
 and delightful. 
 
 Now, I cannot honestly say that the whole of the 
 study of the law is enjoyable. In every system of 
 law there is much that is artificial. The system of pro- 
 cedure is full of dreary technicalities which sometimes 
 obstruct the march of justice. Statutes contain many 
 arbitrary rules. There are cases which establish prece- 
 dents that have to be followed because the decision was 
 so given, although we think them opposed to sound prin- 
 ciple. But you are not hampered in any such way. 
 You have to follow principles based on science, and 
 canons of taste which have been, for the most part, 
 settled by the practice of the greatest among your 
 predecessors, while nevertheless leaving ample scope for 
 your own sense of beauty in their application to the ob- 
 jects of the building and the conditions of the spot in 
 which it is to be placed. A large part of your training 
 consists in the study of the noblest works erected by 
 men of genius in earlier times. In the study of those 
 which remain from antiquity in Egypt, Greece, and 
 Italy, and in the study of the far greater number pro- 
 duced in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance 
 in many parts of Europe, you have an ever fresh
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 187 
 
 and undiluted source of pleasure. I can remember no 
 happier days than I have spent, and I am sure they 
 would have been still more happy had it been my good 
 fortune to possess a special and technical knowledge of 
 your art, in examining and sometimes trying to 
 sketch old churches and old castles and old city walls 
 and municipal buildings and palaces, especially in the 
 cities of Italy and Spain. One can hardly think of 
 any higher or keener enjoyment than lies in seeing 
 what man has done hi the effort to combine beauty 
 and convenience in buildings meant to endure, and in 
 following by the light of history the progress of archi- 
 tecture from Greek and Roman days down to the 
 eighteenth century, as one sees that progress in Italy, 
 France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Britain. To 
 this I may add that your art has a special claim upon 
 all who love the past, because it is, more than any 
 other art, the sister and interpreter of history. There 
 is nothing that helps so much to a comprehension of 
 history as the study of the buildings of a country. In 
 them you see how men faced the conditions of their 
 life ; you see exactly what they needed in the way of 
 defence and in the way of comfort ; you see what form 
 of structure and what internal arrangements the usages 
 of religion prescribed for houses of worship ; you see 
 by tracing the type of buildings in each particular prov- 
 ince or district of a country what were the racial, politi- 
 cal, and cultural influences that operated upon that 
 district at the time when the building you are studying
 
 1 88 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 was erected ; and you are able, in a word, to make the 
 buildings of a country illustrate its history and make 
 its history explain the buildings. Someone ought to 
 write a manual of travel for those who visit civilized 
 countries, such as the Manual Francis Galton, compiled 
 for explorers in wild countries thirty years ago; and 
 in such a manual there might well be allotted to the 
 elements of architectural history a chapter sufficiently 
 full to enable an intelligent observer to find pleasure 
 in the study of buildings as well as of Nature. It is a 
 pleasure which has this advantage, that one can hunt 
 up buildings both in city and in country, whereas in 
 the city one can pursue no branch of natural his- 
 tory other than the discovery of microbes. I doubt if 
 there is anything which could be better done for a stu- 
 dent of history than to send him on an architectural 
 tour through France, for instance ; make him learn to 
 comprehend the Northern, Eastern, and Southern types 
 of building, and to distinguish between the subdivisions 
 of these types, and to comprehend what were the influ- 
 ences that gave one character to the churches of Lorraine 
 or of Burgundy, let us say, and other characters to those 
 of Provence or Aquitaine. How interesting it is to com- 
 pare the Romanesque of Germany with the more gener- 
 ally graceful Romanesque of France and the perhaps 
 almost more perfect work of the same age in the 
 churches of such a Spanish city as Avila. Everywhere 
 the buildings interpret the age and the age interprets 
 the buildings.
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 189 
 
 When one thinks of all the exquisite monuments of 
 architectural genius which adorn such a country as 
 Italy or France, one has to remember that they repre- 
 sent the accumulated ingenuity and skill and labour 
 and taste of many generations of men. No one of 
 those generations of men ever had such opportunities 
 as architects both here and in England have during 
 the last sixty years enjoyed. It is true that artistic 
 designers of the last sixty years have not had quite so 
 free a field as we assume that your predecessors had in 
 the Renaissance, because they have been more ham- 
 pered by committees, boards of trustees, municipal 
 councils and other authorities who cannot realize, as 
 did Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence or King John 
 III of Portugal, or other equally large-minded princes, 
 that the great architect ought to have carte blanche 
 for the building he has planned. But, except as re- 
 spects that difficulty, you have enjoyed in this country, 
 and in western Europe also, extraordinary opportunities 
 during more than half a century of economic prosperity. 
 Never, I suppose, was there a time when so many 
 edifices, and so many large and important edifices, 
 were erected, when there was so general an interest in 
 building, and when so much money was lavishly 
 spent in bricks and mortar. In England we de- 
 veloped some seventy years ago a sudden access of 
 zeal in ecclesiastical matters which not only covered 
 the outskirts of our growing cities with new churches, 
 but set people to the repairing of old churches. And I
 
 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 grieve to have to confess that this zeal has in one way 
 worked for evil rather than good. We have committed 
 a crime which you here could not commit I hope 
 that even if the opportunity had presented itself, you 
 would not have committed it, but have resisted the 
 temptation. Anyhow, the opportunity did not come to 
 you ; and to us it did come, and we, purely from want 
 of thought, yielded to the temptation. We have been 
 restoring not only some of our cathedrals, but many of 
 our ancient parish churches, of which there were 
 more that had come down untouched from before 
 the Reformation of the sixteenth century than any 
 other country could boast, and having sometimes 
 restored them almost out of recognition, we have un- 
 fortunately obliterated a great deal of the history that 
 was written in those churches. The same thing has 
 happened in France, but not so widely, because not so 
 much interest has been taken there in the parish 
 churches. Some of the French cathedrals, however, 
 have suffered more seriously than any English cathe- 
 dral. The vast and splendid cathedral church of 
 Perigueux, probably the grandest building of Byzantine 
 character north of the Alps, has been so transformed 
 by restoration that it is practically impossible to 
 discover the features it had half a century ago. As 
 regards England, it was not till after much irreparable 
 harm had been done that between twenty and thirty 
 years ago an enlightened band of scholars and artists, 
 the most energetic and conspicuous of whom was
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 191 
 
 the poet William Morris, took the field and exerted 
 themselves to rouse the public and to stop, as far as 
 possible, the process of transmogrifying an old church 
 into something that was neither new nor old, but a hope- 
 less jumble. The work of ruin has now been checked, 
 but the harm already done is a calamity to weep over. 
 Here you have not had ancient buildings to injure, and 
 historical feeling has made you spare most of the build- 
 ings that possessed any sort of interest and dated 
 more than a century back. 
 
 This, however, is a digression. I return to the main 
 subject by observing that neither in England nor any- 
 where in western Europe has full use been made of 
 the opportunities for the display of original genius in 
 architecture which the expenditure of vast sums of 
 money on the erection of an immense number of build- 
 ings provided. We have not succeeded there, nor any 
 more do architects in Germany or France seem to have 
 succeeded, in evolving anything that can be called a 
 new style distinctive of our age. When we look back 
 upon every century from the end of the eighteenth to 
 the beginnings of the West European Romanesque type 
 of building in the tenth or eleventh century, we see that 
 the buildings of almost every age show something that 
 is characteristic of the time, some forms which at once 
 denote to us the date of the work. But if we look at 
 the work of our own and of the last century and the 
 same thing is as generally true in France and Germany 
 as in Britain we see a motley array of all sorts of
 
 I 9 2 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 different styles, from the eleventh century to the eigh- 
 teenth. I speak chiefly of ecclesiastical architecture, 
 for of course in private residences and municipal 
 buildings some styles are less convenient for practical 
 purposes than others. Efforts are sometimes made 
 to combine the features of different styles, but this 
 eclecticism is seldom successful, and the total result 
 in beautiful and impressive buildings is not worthy of 
 the amount of knowledge and pains that has been 
 devoted to the work as a whole and of the amount of 
 money that has been spent upon it. Some fine things 
 have been produced, but few in proportion to the 
 whole. 
 
 Neither have you here in the United States developed 
 any characteristically American style of building since 
 the so-called " colonial " type of pre-Revolutionary 
 days. There is no style distinctive of the different 
 sections of the country, except a few traces of Spanish 
 work in Santa Fe (in New Mexico), and here and 
 there in California, and a touch of French influence 
 in the older parts of New Orleans. Nowhere in the 
 western world does one find any parallel to the long 
 architectural history of Europe or of India. Even 
 in Spanish America, where people built from the first 
 in stone, whereas your ancestors built in wood, there 
 is little variety. Nearly all the churches and public 
 buildings vary but little from the prevalent sixteenth 
 century type which the Spaniards brought with them 
 from Europe. Will this be always so, or will you of
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 193 
 
 the New World, after two, three or four centuries, de- 
 velop one or more styles characteristic of America, 
 and offer to the historians of a still distant future a 
 field of study like that which the Old World presents 
 to us now ? 
 
 Here in the United States you seem to have made 
 one new departure in which you have gone ahead 
 of us Europeans. Your designs for houses in cities, 
 and perhaps even more for suburban houses and sea- 
 side cottages, have more variety, more freshness, more 
 charm than the designs of those descriptions have in 
 most parts of Europe. You have certainly made more 
 use in cities of some of the earlier mediaeval forms of 
 architecture than we have succeeded in doing in Eng- 
 land, and in that respect your recent work may 
 show more originality than ours does. But still, you 
 would probably agree that you have not yet succeeded 
 either in inventing a new style, which perhaps may 
 (for all we laymen know) be impossible, for, after 
 all, the possibilities of invention are limited, or 
 in so combining and harmonizing some of the features 
 of different styles as to make one which shall be dis- 
 tinctive of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Now 
 that is just what the students of history would be now 
 looking out for and longing for, if there were grounds 
 for expecting it. Three or four hundred years hence, 
 when the student follows the course of the develop- 
 ment of architecture from the tenth century to his 
 own time, he will find, as he descends the stream of
 
 194 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 time to the eighteenth, that there is a regular succes- 
 sion of forms of construction and decoration, and that 
 he can approximately fix the date of a building by its 
 general style and structure as well as by its mouldings 
 and its ornaments. But when he comes to the 
 nineteenth century he would be completely at a loss. 
 He will find that of three churches erected about the 
 same time, one was designed to reproduce the style of 
 the twelfth century, another that of the fifteenth, a 
 third that of the seventeenth. So the historically 
 minded layman feels, when he tries to project himself 
 into the position of an historian living in the twenty- 
 fourth century, that this latter would rejoice to be 
 able to realize what the twentieth century had been 
 doing through its buildings as we to-day realize what 
 the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries did. 
 
 There is, at any rate, a wide field still open in this 
 country for inventive genius. You have had several 
 architects of unquestioned genius, and will doubtless 
 have more. Your wealth, the growth of your popula- 
 tion, your noble contempt for expense, your bold- 
 ness and grandeur of conception are known to all men 
 on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 
 The new Central Station at Washington, with its 
 two long vaulted halls, is as fine as anything of the kind 
 in Europe. Still vaster and more majestic are the halls 
 of the station which the Pennsylvania railroad company 
 is erecting in New York. I have seen magnificent 
 plans for the decoration of Washington ; I have seen a
 
 ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY 195 
 
 still more wonderful plan for the building of a new 
 Chicago out in the lake, a plan which we in England, or 
 indeed people anywhere in Europe, would not be able to 
 consider on the score of cost. But expense has for you 
 no terrors. I will not say that there is nothing that 
 Congress will not do for Washington, because I am 
 told that you and other men of light and leading have 
 projects looking to the beautifying of Washington for 
 which Congress is still hesitating to vote the money 
 required ; but I know that there is nothing that Chicago 
 fears to do if it will increase the splendour of that great 
 city, and I dare say that is true of many other cities also. 
 He who marvels at the gigantic schemes that are being 
 attempted in New York and Chicago, is ready to believe 
 that there is no enterprise designed for the benefit of 
 such great communities from which its liberal and 
 large-minded citizens will recoil on the score of cost. 
 
 I congratulate you, therefore, not only on the attrac- 
 tions of the profession to which you belong, but on the 
 great opportunities which are open to you. We shall 
 watch you from our side of the Atlantic without any 
 jealousy of your superior wealth, but with admiration 
 of your energy and with high hopes of what you will 
 achieve for the adornment of those enormous cities 
 which have sprung up on the North American 
 Continent.
 
 THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE 
 BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, FEB- 
 RUARY 12, 1909.
 
 THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE 
 BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, FEB- 
 RUARY 12, 1909. 
 
 You are met to commemorate a great man, one of 
 your greatest, great in what he did, even greater in 
 what he was. One hundred years have passed since in 
 that lowly hut in the neighbouring state of Kentucky 
 this child of obscure and unlettered parents was born 
 into a country then still wild and thinly peopled. 
 Three other famous men were born in that same year 
 in England: Alfred Tennyson, the most gifted poet 
 who has used our language since Wordsworth died; 
 William Gladstone, the most powerful, versatile, and 
 high-minded statesman of the last two generations in 
 Britain; and Charles Darwin, the greatest naturalist 
 since Linnaeus, and chief among the famous scientific 
 discoverers of the nineteenth century. It was a won- 
 derful year, and one who knew these three illustrious 
 Englishmen whom I have named is tempted to speak 
 of them and compare and contrast each one of them 
 with that illustrious contemporary of theirs whose 
 memory we are met to honour. He quitted this 
 
 199
 
 200 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 world long before them, but with a record of great 
 work done to which a long life could scarcely have 
 added any further lustre. 
 
 Of the personal impression he made on those who 
 knew him, you will hear from some of the few yet 
 living who can recollect him. All I can contribute 
 is a reminiscence of what reached us in England. 
 I was an undergraduate student in the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford when the Civil War broke out. Well do 
 I remember the surprise we felt when the Republican 
 national convention nominated him as candidate for 
 the Presidency, for his name was hardly known on our 
 side of the Atlantic, and it had been expected that the 
 choice would fall upon William H. Seward. I recol- 
 lect how it slowly dawned upon Europeans in 1862 
 and 1863 that the President could be no ordinary man, 
 because he never seemed cast down by the reverses 
 which befell his armies; because he never let himself 
 be hurried into premature action, and because he did 
 not fear to take so bold a step as was the Emancipa- 
 tion Proclamation when he saw that the right moment 
 had arrived. And above all I remember the shock of 
 awe and grief which thrilled all Britain when the news 
 came that he had perished by the bullet of an assassin. 
 There have been not a few murders of the heads of 
 states in our time, but none smote us with such 
 horror and such pity as the death of this strong and 
 merciful man, just when his long and patient efforts 
 had been crowned with victory, and peace was begin-
 
 THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF LINCOLN 201 
 
 ning to shed her rays over a land laid waste by the 
 march of armies. 
 
 We in England then already felt that a great as 
 well as a good man had departed, though it remained 
 for later years to enable us all (both you here and us 
 in the other hemisphere) fully to appreciate his great- 
 ness. Both among you and with us his fame has con- 
 tinued to rise till he has now become one of the grand- 
 est figures whom America has given to World history, to 
 be a glory first of this country, then also of mankind. 
 
 A man may be great by intellect or by character 
 or by both. The highest men are great by both; 
 and of these was Abraham Lincoln. Endowed with 
 powers that were solid rather than shining, he was not 
 what is called a brilliant personality. Perhaps the 
 want of instruction and stimulation during his early 
 life prevented his naturally vigorous mind from learning 
 how to work nimbly. Yet the disadvantages of his 
 boyhood, the want of books and of teachers and of the 
 society of men with powers comparable to his own, 
 were all so met and overcome by his love of knowledge 
 and his strenuous will that he drew strength from them. 
 Thoughtfulness and intensity, the capacity to reflect 
 steadily and patiently on a problem till it has been 
 solved, is one of the two most distinct impressions 
 which one gets from that strong, rugged face with its 
 furrowed brow and deep-set eyes. 
 
 The other impression is that of unshaken and un- 
 shakable resolution. Slow in reaching a decision, he
 
 202 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 held fearlessly to it when he had reached it. He had 
 not merely physical courage, and that in ample meas- 
 ure, but the rarer quality of being willing to face 
 misconception and unpopularity. It was his un- 
 daunted firmness and his clear thinking that fitted 
 Lincoln to be the pilot who brought your ship through 
 the wildest tempest that ever broke upon her. 
 
 Three points should not be forgotten which, if they 
 do not add to Lincoln's greatness, make it more winning 
 and attractive. One is the fact that he rose all unaided 
 to the pinnacle of power and responsibility. Rarely in- 
 deed has it happened in history, hardly at all could it 
 have happened in the last century outside America, that 
 one born in poverty, with no help throughout his youth 
 from intercourse with educated people, with no friend 
 to back him except those whom the impression of his 
 own character drew around him, should so rise. A 
 second is the gentleness of his heart. He who has 
 to refuse every hour requests from those whom a pri- 
 vate person would have been glad to indulge, he who 
 has to punish those whom a private person would 
 pity and pardon, can seldom retain either tenderness 
 or patience. But Lincoln's tenderness and patience 
 were inexhaustible. 
 
 It is often said that every great man is unscrupulous, 
 and doubtless most of those to whom usage has attached 
 the title have been so. To preserve truthfulness and 
 conscientiousness appears scarcely possible in the stress 
 of life where immense issues seem to make it neces-
 
 THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF LINCOLN 203 
 
 sary, and therefore to make it right, to toss aside the 
 ordinary rules of conduct in order to secure the end de- 
 sired. To Abraham Lincoln, however, truthfulness 
 and conscientiousness remained the rule of life. He 
 felt and owned his responsibility not only to the peo- 
 ple, but to a higher power. Few rulers who have 
 wielded like power amid like temptations have so stain- 
 less a record. 
 
 To you, men of Illinois, Lincoln is the most famous 
 and worthy of all those who have adorned your Com- 
 monwealth. To you, citizens of the United States, he 
 is the President who carried you through a terrible 
 conflict and saved the Union. To us in England, he 
 is one of the heroes of the race whence you and we 
 spring. We honour his memory as you do, and it is 
 fitting that one who is privileged here to represent the 
 land from which his forefathers came should bring, 
 on behalf of England, a tribute of admiration for 
 him and of thankfulness to the Providence which 
 gave him to you in your hour of need. 
 
 Great men are the noblest possession of a nation 
 and are potent forces hi the moulding of national char- 
 acter. Their influence lives after them, and, if they 
 be good as well as great, they remain as beacons light- 
 ing the course of all who follow them. They set for 
 succeeding generations the standards of the youth 
 who seek to emulate their virtues in the service of the 
 country. Thus did the memory of George Washing- 
 ton stir and rouse Lincoln himself. Thus will the
 
 204 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 memory of Lincoln live and endure among you, gath- 
 ering reverence from age to age, the memory of one 
 who saved your republic by his wisdom, his con- 
 stancy, his faith in the people and in freedom; the 
 memory of a plain and simple man, yet crowned with 
 the knightly virtues of truthfulness, honour, and 
 courage.
 
 THE SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE SCOTCH-IRISH SOCIETY OF PENNSYL- 
 VANIA, FEBRUARY, 1909.
 
 THE SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE SCOTCH-IRISH SOCIETY OF PENNSYL- 
 VANIA, FEBRUARY, 1909. 
 
 WHOEVER wanders hither and thither over the United 
 States, as the occupant of the post I hold is expected to 
 do, finds no small pleasure in noting how the various 
 racial stocks that have planted themselves in the United 
 States, and now make up its population, love to com- 
 memorate each its own race and the land whence it 
 came. To remember Germany or Norway or Sweden or 
 Scotland or Ireland does not make a man any the less 
 a good American citizen, and it adds to the interest of 
 his life and to the width of his outlook over the world 
 that he should feel he has another land, another race, an- 
 other literature, other historical traditions, with which he 
 can associate his memories and his sympathies. The 
 man of German extraction has Goethe and Schiller to 
 be proud of, and is the more drawn to retain or to learn 
 their tongue; the Icelander or Norwegian may read the 
 ancient Sagas of his land and stir his soul by recalling 
 the exploits of the heroes of Viking days. So even for 
 a stock like the Scoto-Irish which has for centuries been 
 a part of the British race and speaks the English tongue 
 it is well that societies like yours should exist to recall 
 
 207
 
 208 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and emphasize the further and more special tie which 
 binds you to one part of the British Isles besides that 
 tie which all Americans, of whatever origin, have to 
 our island realm, in language and literature, in tradi- 
 tions and institutions. 
 
 Now, gentlemen, before I come to speak of this Scotch- 
 Irish, let me say in passing that it might very nearly 
 have been a Dutch-Irish Society. It is said that there 
 was a time near the end of the sixteenth century when 
 the Dutch of the United Provinces, being then very 
 hard pressed by Spain, received an offer from the 
 English government that if they would abandon Hol- 
 land and sail off in ships that were to be provided 
 for them, they should be settled in Ireland and there 
 receive plenty of land and every encouragement. The 
 Might Have Beens of history are always an interesting 
 topic of speculation. Had the British offer been ac- 
 cepted, the incoming Dutch would, as Protestants, 
 have in two generations blent with the English and 
 Scotch elements. Ireland might have been a half 
 Dutch country, and the whole subsequent history of 
 the island would have been different. Whether it 
 would have been a history of peaceful progress I will 
 not now enquire one always walks over hot ashes in 
 discussing Irish history but it might well have been 
 more happy than were the annals of Ireland during 
 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet what 
 Ireland might have gained by the addition to her 
 population, then far less than the island could support,
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 209 
 
 of a valuable and industrious element, Continental 
 Europe would have lost, and the East too would have 
 lost, for there might have been no Dutch Empire there. 
 
 Let those things be as they were, or as they might 
 have been, the historian cannot but rejoice to see that 
 you in the United States take so keen a pleasure in 
 recalling the different racial stocks from which you 
 come. This sort of connection with the Old World, 
 a connection which some of you are too apt to forget, 
 because it is a fault of our tune to ignore the past and 
 think that it does not matter, adds to the interest of 
 your life in the New. It adds to the richness of your 
 own thoughts and memories that you are able to go 
 back from the country in which fate and the wander- 
 ings of your parents have placed you, and connect 
 yourselves with some particular part of the Old World 
 and with its history and its associations. You look 
 backward to two very remarkable stocks. Your posi- 
 tion is exceptional because you look back not to one 
 stock but to two. As Scotch-Irish, you are the off- 
 spring of two races: one of them the Irish is 
 Celtic; the other, the Scottish, is half Celtic and half 
 Teutonic, for the people of Scotland are a blend of 
 two Teutonic elements, the Anglian and the Norse, 
 with two Celtic elements, the Gaelic and the Cymric. 
 (There are also the Picts, but you will not expect me 
 to venture to say who the Picts were.) 
 
 I do not suppose that there ever were two peoples 
 who, considering how small were their numbers, have
 
 210 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 made a greater noise in the world than the Irish and 
 Scotch, and you claim kinship with and descent from 
 both of those, the Scotch element probably contribut- 
 ing most of the blood. 
 
 Like other great and good things, both the Irish and 
 the Scotch peoples have had their detractors. Criti- 
 cisms have been passed upon them. It has been said of 
 the one race that it was reckless, dashing, bold, extrava- 
 gant, imprudent. It has been said of the other race that 
 it was dry, cautious, even parsimonious. I will not stop 
 to enquire whether these charges are justly brought 
 against either, for the sufficient reason that you are 
 neither pure Scotch nor pure Irish, but a blend of both, 
 and I never heard any charge whatever against the 
 blend, except that of having "an unco guid conceit" of 
 itself. On the contrary, it is well understood all 
 those historians whose tales of your settlement here 
 and achievements for America I have perused seem to 
 agree that the Scotch-Irish or Irish-Scotch, which- 
 ever way you like to have it, combine the characteristic 
 virtues of both the races, that they unite the tenacity, 
 perseverance, and shrewdness of the Scotsman of Alban 
 with the fire, dash, and geniality of the Celt of Erin, and 
 that these are the qualities which have made them 
 valued not only in the United Kingdom, as I shall 
 presently show you, but also in this land of their adop- 
 tion. So far as my own personal observation goes they 
 have really only two defects, and those defects may be 
 deemed to be rather the excess of good qualities. You,
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 211 
 
 Mr. President, referred to the experience I had when for 
 fourteen months it was my duty and function, not a 
 light one, to be virtually responsible for the government 
 of Ireland and for the maintenance of law and order 
 there. I found then that there were only two slight 
 defects that could be charged against the peo- 
 ple of Ireland, especially of the north of Ireland, 
 from which your ancestors came. One was that 
 they valued so highly the right of free speech that they 
 were hi the habit of expressing their views of politics, 
 church history, and theology, and especially their opin- 
 ions about one another, at regularly recurring mo- 
 ments, and they used to choose for those moments 
 anniversaries which long habit had associated with party 
 passions. The Protestants chose the i2th of July, the 
 anniversary of the battle of Aughrim, and the Roman 
 Catholics chose the i yth of March, a day which ought 
 not to have gathered to itself any partisan associations, 
 because it belongs to a saint, a Briton by birth, who 
 had a sweet and saintly character, and cherished no 
 animosity except to poisonous reptiles. On these oc- 
 casions historical sentiment, a good thing enough at 
 proper tunes, frequently gave rise to scenes that were 
 not altogether peaceful, because the other defect I have 
 referred to which might again be described as the ex- 
 cess of a virtue, their manly readiness to face danger 
 on behalf of their opinions, led them to be decidedly 
 more combative than was necessary or conducive to the 
 peace of the country.
 
 212 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 It was often my painful duty, since I recognized the 
 maintenance of order to be the first and most obvious 
 duty of my office, to warn each party that they must 
 not hold meetings in places where there was likely to 
 be an armed collision with the other party, and even 
 to direct a force of police to be present at spots where 
 it was probable that collisions would occur and that 
 combats would follow; nor was this duty the easier 
 because partisans on each side attacked the Govern- 
 ment whether it permitted or prohibited the meeting. 
 But it all meetings and prohibitions, and even colli- 
 sions went along with very little of real bitterness, 
 one might almost say with a certain measure of good 
 humour; and no one who does not know Ireland can 
 know with how much good humour its people can, as 
 soon as the actual fighting is over, look back upon 
 the conflicts of the factions. Strong language and 
 even a little fighting are understood to be part of the 
 game which the parties have been accustomed to play, 
 and there is much less of bad blood and ill feeling left 
 behind than people in England suppose. Ireland 
 is, after all, a very charming and winning country. 
 Factions in Ireland do not really hate one another as 
 outsiders are apt to fancy. They have been fighting, 
 more or less, for over two centuries, and have got ac- 
 customed to it, and take it less seriously than is sup- 
 posed by those who are not to the manner born. Some- 
 times I used to think that those who denounced a 
 Chief Secretary for prohibiting a meeting or procession
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 213 
 
 would have been disappointed, and would indeed have 
 thought poorly of him, if he had not issued the prohibi- 
 tion. To issue it was expected from him, and, as you 
 might say, was understood to be his part of the game. 
 Anyone who has to govern Ireland is likely to come hi 
 for plenty of criticism, and will receive most of it when 
 he tries to be absolutely just and impartial, for then 
 both sides fire into him. But at the same time he is cer- 
 tain to leave the country with sincere regret, feeling that 
 he has enjoyed his time there, and loving the people even 
 more than he did before. That was my experience. 
 
 Now this tendency to pugnacity for which your 
 ancestors in Ireland, especially in the north of Ireland, 
 were famous, was the same quality that led the Scoto- 
 Irish settlers when they came over here to press to the 
 front, and to. take up the borderland of Pennsylvania, 
 protecting the more peaceful Quakers and German 
 Moravians who lived between them and the sea, and 
 choosing for themselves the arduous task of subduing 
 the wilderness and defending the frontiers of civiliza- 
 tion against the Indian tribes. And a very fine record 
 they made. Many of the most stalwart and daring 
 men of whom this country holds memory were the 
 original settlers of northern and western Pennsylvania, 
 the fathers of the men who passed from Pennsylvania 
 across the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, and 
 southward into western Virginia and the Carolinas and 
 Georgia. A great deal of the best blood, and a great 
 deal of the finest intellect that has shown itself in the
 
 214 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 history of the southern United States is due to the men 
 who sprang from that stock. 
 
 They came hither for a reason which deserves to win 
 sympathy and respect for them. The earliest settlers of 
 New England left Old England in order to have liberty 
 to worship God in their own way, and the earliest 
 settlers who came to Pennsylvania from Ulster came 
 out because, having been brought over from Scot- 
 land on a promise of land and good treatment in the 
 north of Ireland, they found themselves ill treated and 
 almost persecuted by the Episcopalian government in 
 the Ireland of that day, a day of general religious 
 intolerance. They did not get such good conditions of 
 land tenure as they expected; and, what galled them 
 far more, they were not able to obtain that full freedom 
 and equality for the exercise of their religion and their 
 civil rights which they were entitled to count on. That 
 was one main cause why they emigrated to these colonies, 
 and one main cause also why they were foremost in 
 vindicating the claims of the colonists when trouble 
 arose between the latter and the mother country. It is, 
 moreover, an interesting historical fact that the system 
 of Presbyterian church government which these settlers 
 brought with them had much to do with the formation 
 of a republican spirit in this country and with the growth 
 of those habits which enabled your ancestors to work 
 republican institutions. The machinery of that system 
 is eminently republican, for it consists of representative 
 councils, leading up to a supreme representative body,
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 215 
 
 the General Assembly. The traditions and habits it 
 had formed proved useful when your forefathers began 
 here to organize the constitutional bases of your Com- 
 monwealths. One of the foremost champions of the 
 claims of the colonial insurgents was a Scotch Presby- 
 terian minister, John Witherspoon, president of Prince- 
 ton College and one of the signers of the Declaration 
 of Independence. 
 
 You have heard so often of the Scotch Irishmen who 
 have attained eminence in the United States that I need 
 say but few words regarding them. It is a long list, 
 even if you omit one alleged to have belonged to the 
 Scoto-American race, Captain Kidd, the famous, or 
 notorious, pirate. One may count four, five, or per- 
 haps even six, Presidents, and you have some claim 
 I am not sure of its strength to a man greater than 
 any of those Presidents, Chief Justice John Marshall, 
 as belonging to the stock. But the persons who have 
 figured most in American history have been the fiery 
 rhetorician Patrick Henry, the combative and some- 
 times headstrong Andrew Jackson, and the still more 
 remarkable John C. Calhoun, whose relentless logic 
 gave to South Carolina the impulse that made her 
 ultimately the leader in Secession. Calhoun applied to 
 politics a thoroughly Calvinistic line of thought, though 
 whether it was Calvinistic theology that formed the 
 logical precision and liking for a stringent symmetry 
 of doctrine that belong to the Scottish mind, or 
 whether the Scots took to Calvinistic theology be-
 
 216 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 cause it suited their natural taste and bent, might 
 be a subject of enquiry for the curious. In these 
 men the lineaments of the race from which you spring 
 were unmistakable. In its later ornaments they are 
 less evident. Take the race all in all, it has deserved 
 well of the United States. I will not dwell upon the 
 inventors, like Robert Fulton, nor upon the many 
 estimable clergymen, local leaders of opinion, who 
 edified their congregations at a length which com- 
 manded admiration in those days as much as it would 
 repel the weaklings of our own time. But let us not 
 forget to pay a respectful tribute to the men, clerical 
 and lay, who worked for education with the true Scot- 
 tish spirit, and also to the pioneers who went out, south- 
 ward and westward, from Pennsylvania, tough and 
 valiant men, prepared to face the hardships of a lonely 
 life and the perils of the wilderness, carrying with them 
 into it nothing but their axe and their gun and their 
 Bible, ready to spend their lives in winning for those 
 who came after, that security which you now enjoy. 
 
 It was a strong race, one of the strongest that has 
 gone to the making of this now composite nation, in 
 which it is beginning to be hard to trace the several 
 threads that have been woven on the loom of Time into 
 the tissue. Some students of history have wished that 
 each racial stock of settlers, Irish and Germans and 
 Scandinavians and Italians and Poles had each been 
 left to occupy a region by itself, where its old idiosyn- 
 crasy could have been developed under new conditions
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 217 
 
 into new forms which would yet have retained a touch 
 of the old quality. But perhaps the mingling of all to- 
 gether into one vast nation gives to that nation more 
 flexibility and versatility, and makes it fitter to meet 
 the varying calls of a civilization which grows always 
 more complex. 
 
 Now let me turn to the Scotch-Irish in their earlier 
 home. Having spent part of my boyhood in Ulster 
 and frequently revisited it, I may be able to tell you 
 something about your Ulster forefathers. When I first 
 knew the north of Ireland there were a large number of 
 people there who spoke broad Scotch, just the same 
 broad Scotch that you would have then heard in Ayrshire 
 or Galloway, and who considered themselves to be for 
 every purpose Scotch, so much so that in the years be- 
 tween 1845 an d 1850 I have heard many an old farmer 
 in the County of Down or the County of Antrim talk 
 of the Roman Catholic Irish who inhabited the moun- 
 tainous districts, such as the Glens of Antrim and the 
 Mourne Mountains, into which the Scottish immigrants 
 had rather unceremoniously driven them, as "Those 
 Irish," or (to be quite literal) in broad Scotch they said, 
 "Thae Eerish." In Down and Antrim they inter- 
 married but little with the native Celtic population, 
 because the latter were nearly all Roman Catholics, but 
 there was in those days a less pronounced antagonism 
 between the Scoto-Irish Presbyterian and the Roman 
 Catholic than has grown up in later days, though even 
 now that antagonism is not so sharp as most people
 
 218 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 outside Ireland suppose. In the days I speak of, the 
 Presbyterians had not forgotten the league of the United 
 Irishmen and the insurrection of 1798, in which many 
 of their strongest men took part, having been drawn 
 to common action with the Roman Catholics by the 
 misgovernment from which they both suffered. Some 
 of the Presbyterian Liberals of that generation used 
 to say that if the Roman Catholic insurgents of south- 
 ern Ireland had been as well organized and had fought 
 as well as the Protestant insurgents of the north, the 
 insurrection might have had a fair chance of success. 
 
 Otherwise the people of Antrim and Down had little 
 or nothing to do with Dublin, the capital of Ireland, or 
 indeed with any part of Ireland south of Carlingford 
 Lough. They considered themselves to be Scotch, and 
 all their social and commercial relations were with Scot- 
 land. Their trading was done with Glasgow or other 
 ports of the west of Scotland. Their sons who were 
 to be prepared for the ministry or any other learned 
 profession were sent to Glasgow University. In fact, 
 they were then a little colony of Scotch people planted 
 in the Counties of Down and Antrim and in parts 
 of Derry and Tyrone. I knew, sixty years ago, old 
 Presbyterian elders in County Down who were as 
 purely Scotch as if they had lived in Kirkintilloch 
 or Kilwinning, but such men would hardly be found 
 there to-day. 
 
 That, however, is compatible with our recognizing 
 that among those who migrated to America in the
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 219 
 
 eighteenth century, a good many purely Celtic names 
 may be found, and that in many a Celtic quality was 
 present. A certain number of the Scots who migrated 
 to Ulster intermarried with the Celtic Irish in Deny 
 and Tyrone, and a certain number of aboriginal Irish 
 became Protestants and as such joined the Scoto-Irish 
 Presbyterian body. There was, moreover, in those who 
 went from Scotland to Ulster and came from Ulster 
 hither a good deal of Gaelic blood. The West Highlands 
 sent Campbells and Macfarlanes and Macmillans and 
 Colquhouns, and there were plenty of Macs from Gal- 
 loway. That corner of Scotland was the original home 
 of most of those Macs who were at one time so numer- 
 ous in Pennsylvania that some one complained of the 
 "Macocracy" that was in control there. However, 
 whether it is Celtic blood, or whether the spirit of the 
 land itself breathes something new into them, certain it 
 is that the Scotch-Irish as you find them in Ulster now 
 are quite different from the Scotch. Nobody who knows 
 the Scotch people well could to-day mistake, when 
 he goes into Ulster, its people for Scotsmen, and when 
 you meet an Ulsterman in England or Scotland, you 
 at once recognize him not only by his accent, though 
 that is even more different from the brogue of southern 
 Ireland than it is from Lowland Scotch, but also by 
 something distinctive in his way of thinking and acting. 
 Even a man's face and manner will often indicate that 
 he is not the same sort of person as a man from the 
 Scottish lowlands.
 
 220 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 As you claim that the Scotch-Irish have given 
 many men of high distinction and usefulness to this 
 country, so they have given many men of great fame 
 and honour and service to the United Kingdom. It will 
 suffice to mention five who belonged to the last genera- 
 tion. One of them was the late Lord Chief Justice of 
 England, who was, when at the bar, one of the most 
 powerful advocates of our time, a strong, if not a very 
 learned judge, Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord 
 Russell of Killowen, whose name is no doubt known to 
 many of you who follow the profession of the law. He 
 was an Irish Roman Catholic. The other four were 
 Irish Protestants. One of them was Sir Henry 
 Lawrence, one of the most gallant of our soldiers and 
 the heroic defender of Lucknow in the terrible Indian 
 mutiny of 1857. There were three others even more 
 famous. One was Lord Lawrence, brother of Sir 
 Henry, who was, with the possible exception of the 
 Scottish Lord Dalhousie, the ablest of all our Indian 
 administrators and viceroys for the last eighty or one 
 hundred years. The second was Lord Cairns, one of the 
 most finished masters of legal science in England the 
 nineteenth century saw, a most powerful parliamentary 
 speaker, a great advocate and a still greater judge. 
 The third was the grandson of a Presbyterian farmer 
 near the village of Ballynahinch, in County Down, 
 whose son had become professor of mathematics in Glas- 
 gow. This was William Thomson, afterwards known 
 as Lord Kelvin, and one of the first scientific men of the
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 221 
 
 century. The last time I ever sat by him at dinner he 
 told me that his father had, when a boy, been forced by 
 the insurgents of 1798 to carry food to them just before 
 the battle of Ballynahinch. There were no three men 
 who stood higher, or who deserved to stand higher, in 
 the sight of England and Scotland during the second 
 half of the nineteenth century than Lord Lawrence, 
 Lord Cairns, and Lord Kelvin. Those three men came 
 from the counties of Deny, Antrim, and Down. So 
 you see that in England and Scotland also your people 
 can claim to have done great things. Your forefathers, 
 when they left Ulster, did not take away all the strength 
 and vigour of the old stock, which continues to show 
 its quality there just as it has done here. 
 
 You look back, as I have said, to two countries as 
 the sources of that mixed race from which you sprang. 
 How different has been the fortune of those two coun- 
 tries ! Scotland had her troubled times, and she passed 
 out of them, and since the union with England, with 
 the short and unimportant exceptions of the Jacobite 
 rebellions in 1715 and 1745, Scotland has enjoyed peace 
 and an ever growing prosperity, and although at one 
 time the Scotch excited a little criticism and even dis- 
 taste in England, as you may remember from the 
 growlings and girdings at them of that fine old typical 
 Englishman, Dr. Samuel Johnson, still the Scotch have 
 made good their footing in England. They have suc- 
 ceeded in getting a fair chance at anything there is to 
 win or enjoy. It is no disadvantage to any Scotchman
 
 222 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 who comes to England if he desires to rise to any Eng- 
 lish office or emolument. Four out of the last five prime 
 ministers of England were Scotchmen. The present 
 Archbishop of York and the present Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, primate of England, are both Scotchmen. 
 So you may see that the Scotchman has a free field open 
 to him in England. Scotland has been, in her union 
 with England, a happy and prosperous country. I 
 wish I could say the same for Ireland. Ireland, too, 
 has given many great and famous men to England be- 
 sides those Ulstermen whose names I mentioned to 
 you just now. There have been no orators more illus- 
 trious, few indeed so illustrious, in the long line of Eng- 
 lish oratory and statesmanship, as four Irishmen who 
 flourished at the end of the eighteenth century, Curran, 
 Plunkett, Grattan, and, above all, Edmund Burke, per- 
 haps the only person in modern times who was not only 
 a great statesman and orator but also one of the greatest 
 prose writers of his day. Any country that produced 
 four men like Curran, Plunkett, Grattan, and Burke, 
 and produced them all practically in the same genera- 
 tion, has rendered a service to England and to the glory 
 of the English tongue which Englishmen and Americans 
 ought never to forget. I might speak also of many 
 famous lights of literature, such as Swift, Sheridan, and 
 Goldsmith, to whom the Island of the Saints has given 
 birth; but everyone admits what Ireland has achieved 
 in those directions. No more against Irishmen than 
 against Scotsmen is there now any prejudice in England.
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 223 
 
 England is too great to be ungenerous ; she can afford 
 to give credit to all the smaller sister nationalities for 
 all the contributions they have made to the common 
 greatness of the nation. 
 
 And yet there are many painful pages in the history of 
 the relations of Ireland and England. I am glad, there- 
 fore, to tell you, as I am sure that your sympathy con- 
 tinues to extend itself to Ireland, and that your hearts 
 beat for Ireland as one of the two countries to which 
 your ancestors belonged, that I believe a better day 
 has dawned for that island, and especially for the rela- 
 tions between her and England. Within the last thirty 
 years there has come about an understanding and a 
 sympathy between the great mass and body of the 
 British people and the Irish people such as never ex- 
 isted before. Few people on this side the Atlantic 
 realize how much the British parliament has done of 
 late years to ameliorate by better legislation and by 
 liberal grants of money what was once the lamentable 
 condition of the Irish peasantry. No one who knew 
 Ireland fifty years ago can travel through it now without 
 being struck by the enormous improvements effected. 
 Dwellings have been erected for the labourers all over the 
 country. The people are better fed and better clothed. 
 They have money in the savings banks, and their children 
 are at school. At this moment nearly half the land of 
 Ireland has passed, and within the next twenty years I 
 believe practically the whole of the land of Ireland will 
 have passed, into the hands of the small farmers of Ireland
 
 224 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 who are cultivating it, and therewith that land hunger 
 and those land disputes which have been the most fruit- 
 ful source of trouble and discontent in Ireland will have 
 been assuaged and set at rest. 
 
 The British people are now genuinely anxious and 
 wishful to do all they can for the Irish people, and I 
 believe the Irish people have come to understand it. 
 In Ireland there is no longer that bitterness towards 
 the English which once existed, and it surprises me 
 to find how little some Irishmen and sons of Irishmen 
 here in the United States understand the change for 
 the better that has come to pass. It is true that those 
 who cherish the old rancour are now comparatively few, 
 but it is a pity that there should be any who retain 
 sentiments for which there was ground fifty years ago, 
 but for which there is none to-day. In Ireland itself, 
 as well as in England, there is assuredly a far better 
 and more kindly feeling than ever there was before, 
 and we confidently look forward to the time when, just 
 as the memory of ancient wars no longer impairs the 
 friendship of Englishmen and Scotchmen, so the dissen- 
 sions that in the past have divided Ireland and England 
 and produced recurrent strife in Ireland herself will have 
 been forgotten, and both will be contented and friendly 
 members of one and the same great Empire. Is it not 
 a great blessing for any country when it can feel itself 
 to be truly united, one in fact as well as in name ? 
 Happy and strong is that country which can remember 
 the struggles and conflicts of the past only as a record
 
 SCOTO-IRISH RACE IN ULSTER AND AMERICA 225 
 
 of deeds of valour and self-sacrifice, and can bring all 
 its children together to unite in honouring the heroes 
 of the past, to whichever side or party they belonged. 
 That happened long ago as between Scotland and 
 England; nations that strove fiercely against one an- 
 . other for three hundred years. That has been your 
 good fortune here in the United States. I was pro- 
 foundly struck by this last week, when I went to 
 Springfield to honour the memory of Abraham Lincoln 
 on the centenary of his birth. It was impressive to see 
 how, not only there in his own State of Illinois, and in 
 the city where he had made his home, but everywhere 
 over the country, there went up, from the banks of the 
 Delaware here in Philadelphia to the banks of the Colum- 
 bia in Oregon, one voice of admiration for that noble 
 character, and one offering of thankfulness to the Provi- 
 dence that had bestowed him on you. But what gave 
 the greatest pleasure of all to those who wish well to 
 your country was to perceive that no discordant note 
 came from the South, and that in many parts of the 
 South, and from many eminent spokesmen of the South, 
 there was reechoed praise and honour to the memory 
 of Abraham Lincoln. So may it ever be in this country, 
 and so may it be in my country, too, that England, 
 Ireland, and Scotland shall be able to honour not only 
 our common heroes, but the heroes of each particular 
 nation also, and that those who hereafter win the fame 
 of heroes may win it in the service of our common 
 country.
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN THE 
 GREEK THEATRE ON CHARTER DAY, MARCH 23, 1909.
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN THE 
 GREEK THEATRE ON CHARTER DAY, MARCH 23, 1909. 
 
 EACH time I come to California and this is the 
 third time I am struck more and more by the fact 
 that California is not only one of the greatest States 
 of the Union, but is also, unlike any other state of the 
 Union, a Country as well as a State. One reaches 
 California either over the vast and silent ocean, or 
 else across two lofty mountain ranges and through a 
 wilderness, much of which is likely to remain forever 
 unpeopled, a scorched and arid wilderness, almost 
 as silent as the sea. One feels that one is entering a 
 new land. There is a new dry gleam and a new clear 
 brilliance in the sunlight ; there are new wild flowers and 
 new trees. Everything is unlike the Mississippi Val- 
 ley, or the gently undulating plains that rise from it to 
 the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. California, 
 moreover, great as is the diversity of hill and valley 
 within it, is all one country, not cut up by nature into 
 different regions, but one in its structure and general 
 character. Guarded on the east by a snowy range, 
 it has its natural centre at this magnificent bay, 
 where we are standing, and where noble mountains 
 
 229
 
 230 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 look down upon waters blue as those that wash the 
 shores of Sicily. The bay of San Francisco always 
 reminds me of 
 
 the sea that parts 
 Trinacria from the hoarse Calabrian shore. 
 
 All this great region between the Sierras and the 
 Pacific was meant to be the home of one people under 
 one government. 
 
 Nature might, indeed, seem to have intended that 
 it should be not a part of the United States but a 
 separate country under a separate independent govern- 
 ment; and a separate independent country it would 
 no doubt have been but for two causes. One is to be 
 found in those peculiar political and social economic 
 conditions which brought on the war with Mexico and 
 led to the annexation of all this region by the United 
 States. The other is the fact that not long before 
 that war the steam-engine, invented some seventy 
 years before by James Watt, had begun to be applied 
 to transportation by water and land. Although some 
 of the early emigrants crossed the great plains and 
 threaded their painful way through the canons of the 
 Rocky Mountains and over the high Sierras in wagons, 
 it was steamships and railways that made California, 
 which Spain, and after her the Mexicans, had left unde- 
 veloped, really a part of the United States and attached 
 her indissolubly to the great Republic. But for the 
 two causes I have mentioned, one may well believe 
 that those who in the fulness of tune settled in Cali-
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 231 
 
 fornia would, whether they came from Europe or from 
 the United States, have set up here an independent 
 government. Closer and closer as your relations 
 have now become with the Mississippi and Atlan- 
 tic states, through the extension and improvements 
 of railway communication, closer still as they may 
 perhaps become when the Panama Canal has been 
 completed, California still wears in many points the 
 aspect of a distinct country; and this is one of the 
 things which makes her so exceptionally interesting to 
 the traveller, and not less to the historian, who en- 
 deavors to study not only the history of the past, but 
 through the past the probable history of the future. 
 
 On returning here after twenty-six years I am struck 
 by the enormous strides with which the material devel- 
 opment of the State has advanced. Some of its cities 
 are growing almost as fast as New York and Chicago. 
 Many parts of the country, which in 1883 were scarcely 
 inhabited, have now become rich agricultural dis- 
 tricts. The whole country is moving forward at a 
 steady pace, which makes the continuance of your 
 material wealth well assured ; and even when the mines 
 of precious metals have ceased to be so important a 
 factor as they were in early days, your agricultural 
 resources will continue to promise a stable prosperity. 
 Great advances have been made in irrigation, and 
 vast tracts have thus been made possible for cultiva- 
 tion. If you will take thought in time for the saving 
 of your forests, and will replant the areas where forests
 
 232 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 have existed and which are not needed for agriculture, 
 you will be able to conserve not only an important 
 source of wealth in the timber, but also the undi- 
 minished flow of your streams. With your grain, 
 your fruit, your cattle, and your sheep, you may 
 confidently rely on the maintenance of the chief sources 
 of natural wealth ; and if you desire overflowing riches 
 and a teeming population, you can, humanly speaking, 
 be sure of having both in as large a measure as you 
 wish. The process of development will go on till all has 
 been got out of nature that nature can render. Then at 
 last will come a day when all the gold and silver will 
 have been won from placers and reefs, and all the soil 
 capable of tillage will be under crops or laid out in gar- 
 dens or orchards ; when railways and electric lines will 
 have been constructed sufficient to meet the needs of 
 the population, and when that population itself will 
 have grown to figures which I hardly venture to 
 conjecture. 
 
 When all this has happened, what next ? There is a 
 story of an Eastern monarch who, in the midst of his 
 career of conquest, was recounting to one of his most 
 trusted councillors what he had done, and announc- 
 ing what further expeditions he proposed to make. 
 He described country after country and nation after 
 nation which it was his purpose to overrun and sub- 
 jugate, and, as each was mentioned, his councillor 
 asked him, "And after that, what?" until at last 
 he had enumerated so many that little was left of the
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 233 
 
 then known world over which his armies would not 
 have been triumphant. But the councillor at the end 
 of the list still repeated, "And then, what next?" 
 and the conqueror at last could only say, "Well I 
 suppose we shall then sit down and enjoy ourselves and 
 live happily for the rest of our lives," to which the 
 councillor answered : "If happiness is the goal, why not 
 begin to be happy now ? You have already got more 
 than any one has ever conquered before. When your 
 plans of conquests are completed you will be weary and 
 old. Let us take our enjoyment now ?" 
 
 Some question like this arises in one's mind when 
 one contemplates the victories over nature which 
 men are winning here in the United States. You, 
 indeed, will not be old nor weary when those victories 
 are completed, for the generations that follow may 
 well be as forceful as your own. But the time 
 must arrive when the American people will have prac- 
 tically finished with the work of conquering, and when, 
 having got out of nature all that nature can yield, and 
 applied the resources of science to industry and to 
 commerce on a scale so large and with such refined 
 efficiency that there will be little more motive for the 
 accumulation of wealth, they will have to ask them- 
 selves what remains to be done, and how best they 
 can enjoy all that they have accumulated. So let this 
 question be put : What will happen when California is 
 filled by twenty or thirty millions of people, and its 
 valuation is ten times what it is now, and the wealth
 
 234 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 will have grown so great that it will be hard to know 
 how to spend it ? The day will, after all, have then, as 
 now, only twenty-four hours. Each man will have 
 only one mouth, one pair of ears, and one pair of 
 eyes. There will be more people, as many perhaps as 
 the country can support, and the real question will be 
 not about amassing more wealth or having more 
 inhabitants, but whether the inhabitants will then be 
 happier or better than they have been hitherto or are 
 at this moment. Although that time may be still dis- 
 tant, you may already begin to ask yourselves what 
 the development of natural resources and the acquisi- 
 tion of wealth is doing for the lives of the people. 
 You have advanced so much farther along the path of 
 material comfort than your grandfathers dreamed of, 
 that it is not too soon to think of enjoyment ; and, 
 even if you do not slacken in your pace, you may well 
 reflect upon the ultimate amis for which you are 
 working. 
 
 How can the University help you to think out those 
 aims and to choose the best means for reaching them ? 
 Few of us reflect upon the ultimate purposes even of our 
 own individual lives, still fewer on the ideals towards 
 which national and State life should move. 
 
 What you all wish, what you, and all everywhere 
 who think of others as well as of themselves, set up 
 as an aim, is to secure for the people as a whole the 
 poorer as well as the richer the conditions and sur- 
 roundings that make for Happiness. The difficulty is
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 235 
 
 to determine which are the conditions that will be 
 helpful and towards which you will work. Let us 
 think for a moment of these as they affect rural life 
 and city life in your State. 
 
 One is told that in California as well as everywhere 
 else the tendency is for the dwellers in the country to 
 flock into the cities. Yet in California the conditions 
 for an enjoyable rural life are especially favorable. 
 The scenery is beautiful and the climate genial as 
 well as invigorating. Except in the high mountains 
 you have no such grim winter as that of the North 
 Atlantic states. Nobody who has enjoyed this climate 
 wishes to go back either to Europe or to eastern 
 America. In many parts of your State the yield of 
 the soil is so large that the cultivators dwell near 
 together, living under good conditions and in populous 
 communities. Here, therefore, if anywhere, country 
 life ought to be attractive. Yet even here, one is told, 
 the dislike for what is deemed the comparative solitude 
 and isolation of rural life, together with the restless 
 passion for amusement, produce a steady drain away 
 from the land into the city. In California two great 
 cities, San Francisco (including Oakland and Berkeley, 
 which for this purpose may be deemed parts of it) and 
 Los Angeles, have two-fifths of the whole population 
 of the State and are growing more rapidly than the 
 State grows. 
 
 This is unfortunate. It is far better for the health 
 and physical stamina of a people that the bulk of them
 
 236 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 should live in the country and work there with plenty of 
 fresh air around them. It is better for the national 
 mind and character that men should be in contact with 
 nature than that they should live cooped up in streets. 
 You remember the old line, "God made the country 
 and man made the Town." It is better for the polit- 
 ical stability of a government that the town dwellers 
 should not outnumber the country dwellers, and that 
 there should not be many vast aggregations of men 
 living packed tightly together and more liable to be 
 moved by sudden excitement than country folk are. 
 
 A large number of small farmers, each cultivating 
 his own land, constitute an element which gives 
 solidity and strength to a State. Such men are less 
 eager and volatile and hasty than the dwellers in cities; 
 they have a permanent interest in good order and the 
 regular working of public administration. I will not 
 venture to assert, as some have done, that the prepon- 
 derance of large cities is necessarily dangerous ; yet it 
 is undesirable, both politically and because it affects 
 the physical health and vigor of the nation. 
 
 How are you to check this growth of cities at the 
 expense of the rural areas ? One means is the im- 
 provement of rural schools, and especially of agricultu- 
 ral education, so as to teach the cultivator how to 
 apply science to his calling, and to find pleasure in 
 applying it. This, I know, your University has been 
 doing, and doing so earnestly as to endear itself more 
 and more to the people of the State. To make the
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 237 
 
 country children interested in the nature that lies 
 around them is to furnish them with a source of en- 
 joyment for the whole of their lives. Another means 
 is the introduction of cooperative methods among culti- 
 vators, methods by which immense progress has been 
 made in Denmark and other regions far less favoured 
 than this. The extension of electric railways and of 
 a cheap telephone service contributes to reduce that 
 loneliness of which many country dwellers complain, 
 while those of us who are tired of the crowds and 
 noise of cities long for rural quiet. My chief con- 
 cern, however, is to indicate the importance of the 
 object in view, and to observe that California has some 
 advantages enabling it to set an example. The irri- 
 gated districts of your State constitute a region ex- 
 ceptionally fitted to give country life all the attractions 
 that should induce men to prefer it to crowded cities. 
 The farms are small, averaging, I believe, not more 
 than twenty acres. Families live near enough to one 
 another to enjoy the pleasures of social life. It is 
 easier for people to organize for the purposes of agri- 
 cultural cooperation or for social ends. 
 
 When we turn to city life and its conditions we are 
 met by still larger questions. On the political side of 
 the matter let this one word only be said: that sound 
 political conditions in cities are the first and essential 
 condition of municipal progress. There is a great 
 deal of work needing to be done in Americans cities 
 which the municipal government ought to do, because
 
 238 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 no other agency can do it so efficiently and so com- 
 pletely. Yet in many cities much of this work is 
 withheld from municipal officers and councils because 
 officers and councils are not trusted by the people. 
 Once a city has succeeded in placing honest men and 
 capable men in control, how much there is which the 
 government may accomplish for the people, how 
 much for their health, for the proper supply of light 
 and water and means of locomotion, for the laying out 
 of handsome streets and their adornment by public 
 buildings, for the provision of parks and playgrounds 
 and museums and libraries and art galleries and 
 perhaps concert halls also, where the finest kinds of 
 music may be given to the people and their taste for 
 such music formed ! A great city ought in all these 
 matters to be not only the guardian of the material 
 well-being of her children, but also their guide and 
 instructress, elevating their tastes, displaying to 
 them visible shapes of beauty, helping them to knowl- 
 edge and enjoyment, making them feel their common 
 interest in intellectual and moral progress. A finely 
 ordered city might be, as European cities have before 
 now been, as Athens was in the ancient world and 
 Florence was in the Middle Ages, a source of inspira- 
 tion to those who dwell therein ; and a common pride 
 in it may be a bond to unite all classes. Some few 
 cities have already set an example in this direction; 
 and some rich men, who are enlightened as well as 
 rich, have turned their wealth to the best account
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 239 
 
 in providing beneficent sources of enjoyment for their 
 less favoured fellow-citizens. 
 
 You may ask why I speak of these things here to you 
 in this University. Because it is one of the chief 
 functions of a great university, a duty and a function 
 which no other organized body in the State is so well 
 fitted to discharge, to think about these things and 
 to impress their value upon the minds of the people. 
 You are celebrating to-day the anniversary of the 
 foundation by the State of this central seat of educa- 
 tion and learning and research, the mission of which is 
 to represent and embody the organized force and will of 
 this Californian community in promoting all that makes 
 for intellectual advancement and moral elevation. 
 Universities are lamps which cast forth their light on 
 everything around them. Besides their direct and 
 primary duty to train and inform the minds of the 
 youth of the State, supplying the knowledge and skill 
 needed for the work of life, it is for them to collect 
 and focus whatever science and learning can provide 
 for any form of State service. Not only ought they 
 to distribute information on scientific phenomena and 
 processes applicable to agriculture and other industries, 
 as some State universities have done with eminent 
 success, they ought also to place their knowledge of 
 economic history and of the economic conditions of 
 other countries, and of the experiments, whether made 
 in those countries by legislative or by voluntary 
 action, at the disposal of the administrative officials
 
 240 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and the legislature of their State. When any investi- 
 gation is needed, either of a scientific or historical or 
 economic kind, they can furnish from among their 
 teaching staff trained investigators whose wide range 
 of knowledge and mastery of method will make them 
 valuable colleagues of the practical men who also 
 may be charged with the conduct of such enquiries. 
 In short, the universities of a State and this applies 
 also to your great sister university (the Leland Stan- 
 ford) at Palo Alto and the other Californian seats of 
 learning should act as its organs for all such of its 
 efforts as need a broader sweep of view and a more 
 perfect mastery of exact and philosophical methods 
 than the ablest man, taken from the walks of daily 
 business or professional life, can be expected to 
 possess. 
 
 One danger that has recently begun to threaten 
 university life seems not yet to have attacked the State 
 universities of the West. I learn with pleasure that 
 you have here kept within reasonable limits that 
 passion for athletic sports and competitions which has 
 been pushed to excess in England and Australia, and 
 which in some American universities goes so far that 
 the only kind of distinction that students value is 
 that which attaches to proficiency in these competitions. 
 Intellectual excellence so one is told is in these 
 "seats of learning" but little regarded. It is the ath- 
 lete, the runner or baseball or football player, who is 
 the hero. The competitions and contests of football
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 241 
 
 or baseball teams excite such interest that not only 
 do many thousands gather to see the match, but a 
 vast deal of time is spent on reading about the perform- 
 ances and the prospects of the teams. Thus the 
 minds of the students are occupied by these trivial 
 matters to the exclusion of interest in things that are 
 really fitted to engage and delight intelligent minds. 
 This is a strange inversion of what might be expected 
 in a high civilization, and a strange perversion of the 
 true spirit of university life. It is not an encouraging 
 symptom. It reminds one of that inordinate passion 
 for the sports of the amphitheatre, and, especially for 
 chariot racing, which grew more and more intense with 
 the decadence of art and literature and national spirit 
 in the Roman Empire. What does civilization mean, 
 except that we realize more and more the superiority 
 of the mind to the body? 
 
 The muscular powers should by all means be kept 
 in perfect efficiency; and the pleasures of strenuous 
 bodily exercise are legitimate and valuable. Having 
 delighted in one of them all my life I am not likely to 
 disparage them. No one who knows how much the 
 sound body does for the sound mind will deprecate 
 the playing of games by students, and that by all 
 of the students, and not merely by an exceptionally 
 strong or skilful few. Of such play in hours of recre- 
 ation there is nothing but good to be said : what 
 one regrets is the encroachment of this passionate in- 
 terest in competitions upon the higher interests and
 
 242 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 enjoyments of academic life. After all, the mind is 
 better worth cultivating than the body. It is by the 
 mind that civilization advances and peoples are great. 
 And what is the purpose of a university except to 
 enable the youth of a nation to cultivate those mental 
 faculties which they have to exert and develop through 
 the rest of their lives, when the few years fit for 
 violent physical effort have passed ? 
 
 I have spoken of the teachers and the students : 
 let me say a word also as to the graduates. The 
 universities may, through their alumni, exercise a 
 powerful influence in forming the public opinion of 
 their State. In most parts of America the tie between 
 the university and its graduates is a close one, closer 
 perhaps than anywhere in Europe. They are inter- 
 ested in its welfare, and ready to come forward to sup- 
 port it when it has something to ask from the legis- 
 lature and ready also to raise funds themselves for 
 any purpose calculated to extend its usefulness. They 
 listen with respect to views proceeding from its Presi- 
 dent and its leading teachers. They form associations 
 of their own in the principal cities, and through these 
 often do much to raise the intellectual and civic tone 
 of the community. They are usually to the front 
 in all movements for administrative reform. 
 
 One class of graduates in particular has a very 
 important part to play. I mean the teachers, partic- 
 ularly those in the high schools. The intellectual 
 interest, the public spirit, the literary tastes and moral
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 243 
 
 tone of each generation as it comes to manhood very 
 largely depend on the quality of the instruction and 
 mental stimulus received in the upper schools; and 
 this will become all the more true of California as the 
 influx of settlers from abroad diminishes, and the bulk 
 of the population is home-born. Now, the quality 
 of the teachers and their capacity for inspiring fine 
 ideals in youthful minds, depends upon the spirit which 
 their university breathes into them, and on the high 
 conception it gives them of what intellectual energy 
 and intellectual enjoyment really mean. The uni- 
 versities are the natural centres and culminating 
 points of the educational system of a State, and their 
 influence ought to make itself felt all through that 
 system. 
 
 Lastly, a university, being the visible evidence and 
 symbol of the homage which the State pays to learn- 
 ing and science, has the function of reminding the 
 people by its constant activity how much there is in 
 life beyond material development and business suc- 
 cess. Philosophy, history, literature, art, scientific 
 discovery, the prosecution of all those studies and 
 enquiries the value of which cannot be measured by 
 dollars and cents, these things not only provide un- 
 failing sources of enjoyment, but are ultimately the 
 foundation of national prosperity and strength. We 
 are all only too apt to think solely about the Present. 
 The average man, be he educated or uneducated, is in 
 our day so busy that he seldom thinks of anything
 
 244 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 else. But the university is a place where those who 
 are entering on life learn to think also of the Past and 
 of the Future, where they are taught to rival the 
 great men who have gone before and to meditate how 
 they can carry on what such men began for the bene- 
 fit of those who will come after. True it is that all 
 we know of the Future is that it will never be what 
 the Past was. As the Athenian poet says this 
 beautiful Greek theatre of yours brings the lines to my 
 mind 
 
 "A-Travff 6 /Auxpos KavapiOfJuqros 
 Kal (ftavevra 
 
 The law of change is universal. Yet it is mainly 
 through understanding the past that we can conject- 
 ure what the future will be, can work for it, and can 
 secure, so far as we may, that to our State and Nation 
 it shall come fraught with blessing. 
 
 When I think of the future, my mind turns back to 
 California, and to all that your noble State may be- 
 come. You have made it a State, but nature made it 
 a Country. It is still in its first youth, with won- 
 derful possibilities before it, a country with an infinite 
 variety of beautiful mountain, valley, and sea-coast 
 scenery. One cannot but feel that it is destined, 
 more perhaps than any other part of the United States, 
 to develop a new and distinctive type of art, perhaps 
 
 1 Long and unreckoned time brings to life all things out of the un- 
 seen and hides them away again when they have been seen. From 
 the Ajax of Sophocles.
 
 WHAT A UNIVERSITY MAY DO FOR A STATE 245 
 
 of landscape painting, perhaps of literature. Your 
 people have already an individuality. They are 
 Calif ornians ; they have something all their own, 
 an aspect, a manner of speech, a softness so one is 
 told in the voice. May we not hope to see this 
 individuality blossom forth into products that are 
 distinctive hi thought and in poetry? Your scenery, 
 your social conditions in their earlier stage, inspired two 
 of the most striking pieces of literature that America 
 has given to the world in the last half century. More 
 will doubtless come when a larger part of your people 
 find leisure from those restless efforts to develop the 
 material resources of the land which have hitherto 
 occupied you. Through the centuries to come, in 
 which from the peak that stands up behind this spot 
 generation after generation of students will see the 
 sun mount from behind the mighty Sierras to the East 
 and sink into the waves of the Pacific in the West, 
 may this University, enriched by the liberality and 
 guided by the judicious care of your legislature, 
 ever play a worthy part in the building up of a Cali- 
 fornian character and in the expansion of a Californian 
 community that shall make the Golden State the home 
 of a happy and enlightened people.
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT LAKE MOHONK CONFERENCE ON PEACE 
 AND ARBITRATION, MAY 21, 1909.
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT LAKE MOHONK CONFERENCE ON PEACE 
 AND ARBITRATION, MAY 21, 
 
 ABOUT the blessings of peace, about the horrors of 
 war, about the value of arbitration as a means of pre- 
 venting war, surely everything that can be said has 
 been said. You who meet here to promote arbitra- 
 tion and peace have no enemy hi the field, or at least 
 none within the range of your artillery. There are 
 still persons who hanker after war, and therefore dis- 
 like arbitration, but I notice that they are now mostly 
 reduced to one argument, viz., that war is the mother 
 of courage, self-sacrifice, and other virtues. No doubt 
 these virtues may be displayed and have often been 
 displayed in warfare, as in many another department 
 of life. So courage and constancy have been displayed 
 in a still nobler form by martyrs who have died for 
 their faith. But we do not desire religious persecu- 
 tion for the sake of having martyrs. Courage and 
 loyalty are being daily displayed in many another 
 way : and opportunities for displaying these and 
 other virtues would remain if war were to vanish 
 
 1 In revising this address for publication some additions have been 
 made to render the line of argument more clear. 
 
 249
 
 250 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 as religious persecution has vanished. We need not, 
 however, attempt to argue with the people that delight 
 in war, because they are not here to-night to be con- 
 vinced. Those who dwell on the benefits of war do 
 not come to listen to us, their blessings give us no 
 chance of convincing them. The Hawks take no 
 interest in this congress of doves. Accordingly, 
 whoever addresses such a gathering as this finds 
 himself in the position of preaching to the converted. 
 It is an easy process ; but it is not stimulating to the 
 speaker and is apt to prove dull to the converted, 
 being also wholly unprofitable to the unconverted 
 who keep out of the range of fire. If the latter 
 were here, we should make one admission. There 
 have been some justifiable wars. Where a so-called 
 government plunders and massacres its subjects, in- 
 surrection against it may be a duty, and it may be 
 right for other nations to put an end by arms to op- 
 pressions that are as bad as war itself. Such cases 
 have happened in Europe and may happen again. 
 But what other wars in our time can be deemed to 
 have been necessary ? 
 
 Our discussions at all these peace conferences are 
 really discussions in the abstract, and we shall not 
 know whether the cause is making real progress until 
 the tune comes for translating abstract resolutions 
 into concrete practice. No doubt some progress has 
 been made. The work accomplished at the Hague 
 has been valuable. The creation of the Hague Court
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 251 
 
 and the reference to it of such controversies as that 
 which the United States had recently with Mexico 
 and that between the United States and Great Brit- 
 ain relating to the Newfoundland Fisheries mark a 
 real advance. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is felt that the risks of war have not 
 disappeared, and the strongest proof of this appears in 
 the fact that all the great countries continue to go on 
 increasing their military and naval armaments. You 
 have heard a good deal already here about armaments. 
 Let me add a few plain words about them, words 
 suggested by what I have seen of the relations of the 
 European States for the last fifty years. There are 
 three causes which have induced or may induce nations 
 to maintain large armies and powerful fleets. One is 
 the desire to aggress on another nation. As to this, 
 be well assured that none of the six great European 
 Powers has at present any desire or purpose to attack 
 any of the other five. Apart from any higher motives, 
 each has its internal troubles, each knows the tremen- 
 dous risks any attack would involve. Such wars of 
 conquest as belonged to the days of Frederick the 
 Great of Prussia and to those of Napoleon Bonaparte 
 are out of date. A second motive is the wish to have 
 that weight in the councils of nations which the posses- 
 sion of military and naval force undoubtedly gives in 
 such a world as the present. It is not necessarily a 
 motive making for war ; all depends on the spirit and 
 intentions of the nation, or its rulers, who desire to
 
 252 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 assert their influence. A third is the feeling that a 
 State must be prepared to resist aggression, or that 
 extreme form of aggression, invasion, by having the 
 strength needed to defend its frontiers. 
 
 As you all know, it is these two latter motives that 
 have led the six great European Powers to maintain 
 some of them large fleets and all but one of them large 
 armies. Each is apprehensive of the possible designs 
 of the other. Most of them would like to reduce their 
 armaments, but none of them likes to be the first to 
 do so. In such circumstances suggestions looking 
 towards reduction would come best from a great 
 nation which is not threatened with aggression or 
 invasion from any quarter. There is only one such 
 nation. It is the United States. You here have 
 no enemy in the world, that is to say, there is no 
 other great Power which has any ground for enmity 
 to you, and there is most assuredly none which has 
 anything to gain by attacking you. If you remark 
 that Great Britain maintains a large navy, let me 
 ask you to remember that she is obliged to maintain 
 such a navy because, having an army small in com- 
 parison with the armies of other European States and 
 being within sight of the European Continent, she feels 
 that fleets sufficient to guard her coast are an absolute 
 necessity, a costly necessity indeed, but one to which 
 she must bow. How different is your case ! Against 
 whose attacks is it that you stand on guard ? No one 
 dreams of invading the United States. You are three
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 253 
 
 thousand miles from Europe and six thousand miles 
 from Asia, and the offensive power of a hostile fleet 
 diminishes rapidly with every thousand miles from its 
 base. Your internal resources, your wealth, your pop- 
 ulation, the intelligence and energy of your people, 
 added to the advantages of your position, would make 
 you strong for defensive war even if your fleet was 
 much less than its present size. If you ever again 
 engage in war, it f is likely to be a war of your own 
 seeking, for nobody will aggress upon you. Is it not, 
 therefore, now, I will not say a duty, but an oppor- 
 tunity specially offered to you, to render a service to 
 the world by taking the initiative toward the reduction 
 of those armies and navies which consume so large a 
 part of the revenues of nations and increase the ap- 
 prehensions with which they watch one another ? As 
 you yourselves would say, in one of those concisely 
 expressive phrases which you teach your visitors to 
 use, is it not "up to you" to do this? 
 
 The existence of immense land and sea forces, kept 
 upon what is practically a war footing, increases the 
 risk of strife, for it diminishes the period that would 
 otherwise elapse before fighting could begin. It keeps 
 the minds of nations, and especially of the two 
 great fighting professions in each nation, fixed upon 
 possibilities of war, and brings those possibilities 
 nearer. 
 
 How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds 
 Makes ill deeds done.
 
 254 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 There is no certainty that if some dispute suddenly 
 arose inflaming the passions of two nations they would 
 refer it to arbitration. The recent arbitration treaties 
 which your government has concluded with other 
 nations expressly and, I venture to think, unfortu- 
 nately exclude from their scope certain kinds of dis- 
 pute, those which affect " honour and vital interests." 
 The making of this exception shows that governments 
 have not that full confidence in the application of 
 the principle which many of you may desire. Even 
 where the case is one that does fall within the 
 terms of an arbitration treaty, we cannot be sure 
 that two nations, each perhaps irritated "and excited, 
 may not prefer to resort to arms rather than use 
 the machinery for securing peace which they have 
 themselves in their more tranquil moments provided. 
 All the virtuous sentiments, all the good resolu- 
 tions, may be forgotten when anger and suspicion 
 suspend the reign of reason. There is no present sign 
 that this will happen in our time, nor does there now 
 exist any ground of difference between any two nations 
 which could justify hostilities. All the nations both 
 of this hemisphere and of the other have every pos- 
 sible reason for endeavoring to keep the peace. In- 
 terest to say nothing of conscience and duty pre- 
 scribes that course. Nevertheless, when we remember 
 how often in the past governments and nations that 
 had every interest to keep the peace allowed themselves 
 to be drawn into war, and how disproportionate the
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 255 
 
 alleged causes of strife were to the real interests in- 
 volved, we cannot be sure that the same thing may 
 not occur again, and we must ask once more, Why is it 
 that good resolutions are so often forgotten ? Why is 
 the practice of nations so much worse than the theory 
 which not only you here, but the leading statesmen in 
 nearly every nation, profess to hold ? 
 
 One of the answers most often given is that the ill- 
 feeling between nations which leads them up to war 
 is due to the press. When a dispute arises between 
 two peoples, the newspapers so it is charged 
 begin in each country to misrepresent the purposes 
 and the sentiments of the other people, to suppress 
 the case for the other country, and to overstate the 
 case for their own, they twist or embellish facts, and 
 go on so appealing to national vanity and inflaming 
 national passion, that at last they lead each people to 
 believe itself wholly in the right and the other wholly 
 in the wrong. To what extent these charges are 
 justified, your recollections of how the press, European 
 and American, has behaved before the outbreak of 
 the various wars in which great nations have been 
 involved in and since 1870 will enable you to judge. 
 As respects the American newspapers, my experience 
 of the last few years is that a large majority of them 
 are in favour of peace and arbitration and not at 
 all unfriendly to foreign countries. That has emphat- 
 ically been so as regards their attitude towards my own 
 country.
 
 256 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 However, I am not here either to censure or to 
 defend the newspapers. They can take care of 
 themselves. But hi the interests of truth and justice 
 it must be asked whether it is really the press that is 
 chiefly to blame. Public writers do not write to please 
 themselves, but to please and interest their readers. 
 If foreign countries are attacked, it is because they 
 think the public expect and relish such attacks. Men 
 are apparently so constituted as to listen more readily 
 to blame than to praise bestowed on their fellow-men, 
 and there is in many minds a notion that it is patriotic 
 to disparage other nations, and that the display of their 
 faults enhances our own virtues. Thus in each country 
 the newspapers try to meet and gratify what they take 
 to be the wishes of the people, playing down to their 
 faults rather than playing up to their virtues. 
 
 Every country has the newspapers it deserves for 
 the papers are what the people make them, and 
 reflect back the sentiments they believe the people to 
 hold. So if the people wish that the organs of opinion 
 should show a truly pacific spirit, friendly to other 
 nations, anxious to know whenever an international 
 dispute arises, what the case of the other nation is, 
 they will intimate their wish by ceasing to buy, or 
 by withdrawing their advertising from, the news- 
 papers which try to provoke strife. Thereupon most 
 of the newspapers will, in their desire to please their 
 public, change their own attitude, will abstain from 
 reckless or inflammatory language, and will supply to
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 257 
 
 their readers such facts and opinions as will not kindle 
 passion and will at any rate not tend to hinder peace. 
 
 Thus we come back, as in democratic countries we 
 always do come back, to the People ; that is, to 
 ourselves, the ordinary citizens who are the ultimate 
 masters both of the government and of the press. 
 Why do we, the ordinary citizens, practically en- 
 courage the newspapers to do the very things which 
 you, the friends of peace, blame the newspapers for 
 doing ? Why do we like to have other nations placed 
 in the worst light and their defects exaggerated? 
 Why is it thought patriotic to decry and assail 
 other nations, and unpatriotic to indicate any faults 
 in our own conduct, any weak points in our own 
 case ? Why does each people behave as if it alone 
 were virtuous and deserved the special favor of Provi- 
 dence, even as in past centuries each nation used to 
 celebrate a Te Deum for a victory its army had won, 
 as if the Almighty were its peculiar friend ? It knows 
 that every other people also thinks highly of itself and 
 meanly of others, and that each has about as much 
 ground and no more for so thinking. Yet it continues 
 to glorify itself, and enjoys hearing the other nation de- 
 nounced and vilified, just as the Iroquois and Algon- 
 quins who once roved these woods hi the midst of 
 which we are here meeting, used to hurl opprobrious 
 epithets at one another before they rushed forward 
 with the tomahawk. 
 
 At this moment all the governments in all the great
 
 258 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 military and naval States are (I venture to believe) 
 honestly desirous of peace. Not one of them has any 
 cause for war. Not one of them but would lose by 
 war far more than it could gain. It is a fatal error, 
 an error which has come down from the days when 
 barbarous tribes raided for plunder, and which ought 
 to be now obsolete, to believe that nations gain some- 
 thing by a successful war. Even when they levy an 
 indemnity upon a vanquished enemy, the conquerors 
 themselves lose in commerce and industry, and often 
 also in the weakened sense of security, far more than 
 the indemnity is worth. Civilized governments now 
 know this and wish to avoid war. Yet it is appar- 
 ently possible for those who desire, from whatever 
 motives, to stir up suspicion and enmity to succeed in 
 convincing each nation that the other has designs 
 upon it. Quite recently this was tried upon your- 
 selves. Much suspicion, much alarm was aroused, 
 without the slightest justification, between you and 
 another Power, though both your government and its 
 government were perfectly friendly, each desiring to 
 behave well by the other.. Any man of sense could 
 see that Japan had no possible interest in provoking 
 a conflict with the United States. Her greatest 
 interest was peace, a peace which would leave 
 her free to deal with the numerous grave problems 
 that confront her, in Korea, in Formosa, and else- 
 where, as well as to press forward her internal de- 
 velopment. She knew that, and we all knew that she
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 259 
 
 knew it. Yet this insensate attempt to represent Japan 
 as ready to spring upon the United States went on. 
 Why will not people do a little thinking before they 
 embark in such a campaign of exasperation? 
 
 Every nation is conscious of its own rectitude of 
 purpose ; each declares, and says that it believes, 
 that its armaments are maintained for its own safety 
 and will not be used unjustly or aggressively. But 
 each one is told that it must not credit with similar 
 good intentions the other nation which is for the mo- 
 ment the object of its jealousy. The ordinary man is 
 apparently more prone to believe evil than good ; and 
 hardly anybody takes up the cause of the other nation 
 and tries to make its case understood. That would 
 be called unpatriotic. 
 
 Is not the fault then not so much in the press which 
 ministers to our foibles, as in ourselves, that we are too 
 ignorant, perhaps wilfully ignorant, about other na- 
 tions, that we do not try to understand them and to 
 imagine what we should feel in their place ? Is not this 
 one chief cause of the atmosphere of suspicion which 
 pervades the relations of the Great Powers, and leads 
 them to go on creating the enormous armaments and 
 levying the enormous taxes under which their people 
 stagger ? Would not a better knowledge by each na- 
 tion of the other nations do something to dispel these 
 suspicions ? Every nation must of course be prepared 
 to repel any dangers at all likely to threaten it. But 
 it should also try to ascertain whether the dangers
 
 260 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 it is told to provide against are real or illusory, and it 
 should try to enter into and realize the position of 
 other nations and ask whether its own conduct may 
 not be exciting in their minds a mistaken impression 
 of its purposes. Suspicion breeds suspicion ; and na- 
 tions have sometimes come to fear and dislike one 
 another only because each was incessantly told that it 
 was disliked by the other, and that the other was plan- 
 ning to attack it. 
 
 Thirty or forty years ago there was a good deal of 
 this suspicion between Britain and the United States. 
 Better knowledge by each nation of the other has 
 extinguished that feeling and substituted for it a gen- 
 uine friendship which will, we may feel sure, at once 
 recur to arbitration for the settlement of any question 
 between them that may arise. Why should this not 
 be done as regards other Powers also ? Why when a 
 controversy arises with any other country should we 
 not, before sharpening our tempers and our swords, try 
 to recognize that there are two sides to the controversy 
 and keep cool till we have considered the other side 
 and made the other nation feel that we wish and mean 
 to be reasonable ? 
 
 Our country is not the only thing to which we owe 
 our allegiance. It is owed also to justice and to 
 humanity, owed to our fellow-men in other countries 
 as well as in our own. Doubtless we are called 
 upon to think first and feel first for those whom we 
 know best and for whom we are most directly respon-
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 261 
 
 sible, our own fellow-citizens. But we are not therefore 
 to forget that we have duties to the other peoples also, 
 and those duties are doubly urgent if in any case we 
 think that justice is as much on their side as on ours. 
 True patriotism consists not in waving a flag, not in 
 shouting " our country, right or wrong," but hi so 
 valuing our country and respecting its best traditions 
 as to desire and to strive that our country shall be 
 righteous as well as strong. A State is none the less 
 strong for being resolved to use its strength in a tem- 
 perate and pacific spirit and for putting justice and 
 honour above all its other interests. Ought not the 
 patriot to say to his country what the poet said to his 
 lady : 
 
 " I could not love thee, Dear, so much 
 Loved I not honour more." 
 
 It was well observed not long ago by Mr. Root that 
 there ought to be, and there was gradually coming to 
 be, a public opinion of nations which favored arbitration 
 and would condemn any government which plunged 
 into war when amicable means of settlement were 
 available. May we not go even farther and desire 
 and work for the creation of a public opinion of the 
 world which has regard to the general interests of the 
 world, raising its view above the special interests of 
 each people ? Sixty years ago the progress of human- 
 ity was held to be marked and measured by the 
 growth of a cosmopolitan spirit which extended its 
 benevolence and sympathy over the earth. The
 
 262 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 strengthening of the sentiment of nationality was then 
 welcomed as a means of helping oppressed or divided 
 nationalities to assert themselves and secure union. 
 No one then supposed that national feeling would 
 reach its present height. It is surely carried to excess 
 when men think only of the glory and the power of their 
 State and forget what they owe to mankind at large. 
 
 A very distinguished man, one of the keenest observers 
 in this country, observed to me lately that he found 
 there was to-day less of a kindly feeling towards mem- 
 bers of the non-European races who settle here, such 
 as Japanese, Chinese, and Hindoos, less indignation 
 when they are ill treated, less anxiety to secure fair 
 and just treatment for them, than used to be extended 
 to those races forty years ago. My own observations 
 have shown me that there has been during recent years 
 in Europe less sympathy with those who are struggling 
 against the tyranny or cruelty of their rulers in other 
 countries than was extended fifty years ago to the 
 patriots who then fought and suffered for freedom in 
 Italy, Poland, and Hungary. 
 
 Have we then gone back hi this generation? Has 
 the sentiment of race antagonism grown stronger and 
 the love of liberty where others are concerned grown 
 weaker with the growth of nationalism in each country 
 and with the absorption of our thoughts by the social 
 problems which we are trying to solve at home ? If 
 so, it is time that we reverted to the broader and 
 more kindly attitude of the generation of Lincoln and
 
 ALLEGIANCE TO HUMANITY 263 
 
 Mazzini and Gladstone, when the best minds did not 
 limit their good-will by colour, or by creed, or by 
 country, but sought to labour for the world as well as 
 for themselves. 
 
 All over the earth the fortunes of each people are to- 
 day more involved with those of other peoples than was 
 ever the case before. As the possibilities of strife are 
 increased by closer contact, so also the opportunities 
 for mutually helpful intercourse are also increased, and 
 the welfare of each is more clearly than ever before 
 the welfare of all. I do not mean to undervalue any 
 machinery that can be provided for settling disputes 
 and furthering the desire we all feel to attain our 
 common aim in a practical way. But something more 
 is needed. We need a spirit which will not merely 
 hate war because the realities of war are hideous and 
 hellish or because war means waste and destruction, 
 but will love and seek peace because it desires the 
 welfare of other peoples and finds the same sort of 
 happiness in seeing them happy which each of us en- 
 joys in the happiness of his own friends. Is it not 
 the mark of a truly philosophic as well as of a truly 
 pious mind to extend its sympathy and its hopes to all 
 mankind ? Would not the diffusion of such a feeling 
 and an appreciation of the truth that every nation 
 gains by the prosperity and happiness of other peoples 
 be a force working for peace and good-will among the 
 nations more powerfully and more steadily than the 
 best arbitration treaties statesmanship can frame?
 
 THE TERCENTENARY OF THE DISCOVERY 
 OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT BURLINGTON, VERMONT, JULY 8, 1909.
 
 THE TERCENTENARY OF THE DISCOVERY 
 OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT BURLINGTON, VERMONT, JULY 8, 1909. 
 
 MR. PRESIDENT, GOVERNORS or VERMONT AND NEW 
 
 YORK AND GENTLEMEN : 
 
 You are met to-day to commemorate in Vermont a 
 great event, which it is fitting that you should com- 
 memorate the discovery three centuries ago of that 
 noble lake which forms the western boundary of your 
 State, and is one of its greatest charms. When we 
 think of what this region was three hundred years 
 ago, one can hardly believe that such great changes 
 can have passed hi so short a time. Short it is, if one 
 compares three centuries with the long ages that it 
 took to effect similar changes in the countries of the 
 Old World. In 1609 the spot on which we are standing 
 in the centre of a flourishing city was in the midst of 
 a solemn and awe-inspiring wilderness. What daring 
 it must have needed to explore those vast and soli- 
 tary forests, solitary because the Indian tribes, al- 
 ways at war with one another, had desolated them 
 by continual strife, leaving hardly a man alive through 
 enormous tracts; and how venturesome a spirit that 
 have been of the men who traversing in frail canoes 
 
 267
 
 268 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 long stretches of rivers and lakes, shooting dangerous 
 rapids, following difficult trails through dense woods 
 with no guide except the savages, on whom they 
 could not always rely, woods filled with wild beasts 
 and with tribes more dangerous than any beasts; 
 what hearts of steel the men must have had who, 
 far away from all hope of succour, made those dis- 
 coveries the fruits of which you now enjoy! 
 
 When Champlain's Indian guides first paddled his 
 canoe over the shining waters of your lake, there was 
 no European settlement nearer this spot than the 
 little English colony planted two years before on the 
 James River in Virginia, and you may be sure that 
 Champlain did not wish that the English were any 
 nearer, for the settlers whom he had left on Mount 
 Desert Island fared ill at the hands of English enemies. 
 It was in this same year 1609 that Henry Hudson first 
 steered his Dutch ship up the waters of that Hudson 
 River with which your lake is now connected by a 
 canal. And if Hudson had travelled north through the 
 woods from Albany and Champlain had travelled south 
 through the woods from the southern end of this lake, 
 they might have met. Let us hope they would have 
 met in friendship, whatever were the jealousies of 
 their respective nations, because each was worthy of 
 the respect of the other, for in both there dwelt a 
 valiant and unconquerable spirit. 
 
 The men who discovered and explored the con- 
 tinents of North and South America make a wonderful
 
 DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 269 
 
 line of heroes. If you begin with Christopher Colum- 
 bus and go on to a man who was in some ways quite 
 as great, certainly as great both in nautical skill and 
 in courage, as Christopher Columbus himself, the 
 Portuguese Magellan, and if you include in that line 
 John and Sebastian Cabot, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, 
 the discoverer of the Pacific, and De Soto, who first 
 reached the Mississippi, and Cortes and Pizarro and 
 Pedro de Valdivia, and such great Frenchmen as 
 Cartier and La Salle and Pere Marquette and Cham- 
 plain himself, you have a line of daring and gallant 
 men to whom the history of the world forms no parallel. 
 And among all those Samuel de Champlain, a native 
 of the seafaring land of La Rochelle, first of the great 
 Frenchmen who explored in the north, was not only 
 one of the ablest but also one of the most upright. 
 He was equally skilful and resourceful on sea and 
 on shore. He knew not only how to discover, but also 
 how to govern, as his management of his colony of 
 Quebec showed. He was able to describe with wonder- 
 ful accuracy the places which he visited. The French 
 Ambassador has told you how well he narrated the 
 events of his voyage here, and described the features 
 of this lake ; and the people of Mount Desert Island 
 will tell you that the accounts he has left of their shores 
 are so accurate that you may still navigate the sea along 
 that coast by the description he gave of the bays and 
 promontories with their fringing isles. He was ready 
 to fight when the time came for fighting, but he had
 
 270 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 no wish to shed blood. He inspired confidence in 
 his followers, for he was not only brave but also gentle 
 and considerate much more considerate of his follow- 
 ers than was the not less daring La Salle. And he 
 thought first of France and of the faith which he came 
 to propagate, and last of himself. Samuel de Champlain 
 was, take him all round, what we call a fine fellow. 
 He was a man of whom his country does well to be 
 proud, and you do well to be glad that your lake 
 should bear his name. I like to picture him with his 
 Indians paddling up the long stretches of the river 
 and coming out upon a summer evening upon the glit- 
 tering waters of your lake, seeing it stretch farther to 
 the south than the eye could reach, and above, on each 
 side of these deep waters, the long ranges of steep blue 
 mountains, in which is framed, like some exquisite pic- 
 ture, the beauty of this inland sea. We are told that 
 the name of your lake in Indian is " Caniaderi-guar- 
 unte." Now " Caniaderi-guarunte " is said to mean, 
 in the Indian language, "the gate of the country"; i.e. 
 the opening by which men can pass northward and south- 
 ward through this rugged region. Everywhere else, to 
 East and to West, the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence 
 is divided from the basins of the Hudson and the Con- 
 necticut rivers by lofty mountains and forests which 
 were in the days of the discoverers all but impassable. 
 It is a natural highway for commerce ; and what hopes 
 for dominion and for trade must have thrilled the 
 heart of Champlain when he saw this splendid sheet
 
 DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 271 
 
 of water stretching away to some unknown extremity 
 between the lines of the mountains. 
 
 It was an age when the growth of the great Spanish 
 Empire in the southern parts of North America and 
 over most of South America had fired the imagination 
 of other nations to emulate what Spain had done, so 
 Holland and France and England all sought to create 
 for themselves dominions similar to that which Spain 
 had acquired so easily. So the example of Champlain, 
 who came to found an empire here for the King of 
 France, fired many another bold French pioneer after 
 him, until Du Luth reached the farthest corner of 
 Lake Superior at the spot where a great city now bears 
 his name, and until La Salle, passing up Lake Michi- 
 gan, and by the spot where now Chicago stands, 
 crossed over to the Illinois River, and then descended, 
 right down to its mouth, the mighty stream of the 
 Mississippi. 
 
 Of all that has happened since those days of Samuel 
 de Champlain, I have no time to speak. I cannot tell 
 you of the long process by which Vermont was built 
 up and filled with the stalwart race of the Green 
 Mountain boys. Those sturdy men of your moun- 
 tain land were in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury what the Western backwoodsmen were eighty 
 years later, the active and hardy men who had the 
 qualities which, in your later days, you associate with 
 the pioneers of the Far West. But in one respect they 
 were perhaps better company than the men of the Far
 
 272 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 West, for they were not so free and easy in their use 
 of shooting-irons. Perhaps, however, that is so only 
 because in those days the revolver had not yet been 
 invented. Neither must I attempt to describe the pro- 
 tracted strife that raged along the shores of your lake 
 between the Vermonters and the men of New York, a 
 strife so bitter that it is said to have driven Ethan 
 Allen, your local hero, to contemplate returning to the 
 allegiance of King George. Those contests gave an 
 occasion for the display of that admirable quality in 
 which the citizens of the United States, and particu- 
 larly of the northern part of the United States, stand 
 preeminent, a strong sense of justice and individual 
 right, and a pertinacious determination to assert 
 individual right by every method and device known to 
 the law. These long differences have now been happily 
 settled, so we see the Governors of Vermont and 
 New York meeting here in an amity not likely to be 
 again disturbed. You have no interstate controversy 
 now, and the only question that might have grown into 
 an international controversy, one regarding fishing 
 rights in the lake, has just been peacefully disposed of 
 by a treaty which Mr. Root (who was with us yester- 
 day) and I signed last year establishing a joint 
 American and Canadian Commission, with power to 
 adjust all fishery matters arising in boundary waters. 
 
 How different have been the fortunes of this lake 
 and its shores from what its discoverers or your fore- 
 fathers expected or foretold. How wonderfully does
 
 DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 273 
 
 Fortune make sport of the purposes of man; how 
 little can the explorer himself tell to what uses settlers 
 will put the lands to which he has cleared the path. 
 Champlain, besides seeking, like Henry Hudson, for 
 a Northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean, came to 
 establish the dominion of the royal House of France, 
 to spread the Gospel, to open up a profitable trade 
 in furs, and to make the river St. Lawrence and this 
 lake great highways of commerce. The monarchy of 
 France is gone, the Indians whom he sought to convert 
 are gone, the furs are gone; and except for a short 
 time when the trade in furs was active along Lake 
 Champlain, the lake has never yet been a thorough- 
 fare of trade. It promised to become one when, im- 
 mediately after the first steamboat of Fulton was 
 launched upon the Hudson, a second steamboat was 
 launched to ply here. But soon after came the rail- 
 road, and by the time that the lands to the north and 
 south had been so filled up that there were plenty of 
 passengers and freight to carry to and fro, the swifter 
 transportation by rail had superseded water carriage, 
 and it is now the railroads and not the steamers that 
 bear the crowd of passengers to and fro between New 
 York and Montreal. However, if the hopes entertained 
 by some enterprising Vermonters are realized and the 
 now projected deep water line of navigation is opened 
 up, it may be that the dream of Champlain will at 
 last be realized and that your lake will at last become 
 that highway of commerce he desired.
 
 274 "UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 But now it has become at last a dwelling of peace 
 and quiet. No more warships are seen upon your 
 waters, no more forts stand armed upon your shores, 
 no shouts from war canoes awaken the echoes of your 
 cliffs. We have been celebrating for the last two days 
 on the other side of the lake, first at Ticonderoga 
 where Frenchmen and Englishmen fought on land, and 
 then at Plattsburg where Colonial Americans and Eng- 
 lishmen fought on water, and you are to-day celebrat- 
 ing here in Vermont, a veritable festival of peace, to 
 which my dear friend and colleague, the representative 
 of France, has come to mingle his thoughts of peace with 
 ours, and hi which the soldiers of Canada have come to 
 parade beside your soldiers, to be reviewed by your 
 genial President, and to be welcomed, as they were 
 yesterday, with an enthusiasm which thrilled every 
 British and Canadian heart. One wonders what the 
 future has in store for a lake whose history has been 
 so strangely unlike what was predicted for it. 
 
 When one remembers the failures of prophets in 
 the past, one ought to be shy of making any prophecies 
 for the future ; yet a man may be tempted to prophesy 
 when he knows that the truth or falsity of his predic- 
 tion cannot be known until long after he and those 
 who hear him have all disappeared from this scene. 
 So I will venture to make one prophecy. It does not 
 seem likely that your shores either on this side or in 
 New York State on the other side of the lake will 
 ever be the scene of any startling or sudden develop-
 
 DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 275 
 
 ment of material wealth. You have indeed some 
 fertile lands in southern Vermont, and some mines and 
 marble quarries, but you have not here the coal that 
 many other parts of the country possess, and your soil 
 is not as fertile as are the regions along the Mississippi 
 and its great tributaries. It is indeed possible that 
 mineral wealth as yet unrevealed may lie hidden deep 
 in the recesses of your mountains. Science so startles 
 us nowadays with strange discoveries that we can 
 never tell what store of minerals possibly, though 
 so far as we know, not probably, of radium, far 
 more costly than gold may be discovered in the 
 bosom of some kind of rock not hitherto known to 
 contain it. But, as far as we can look into the future 
 at present, it would seem that the great assets of 
 these hills and valleys of Vermont are neither minerals 
 nor fertility of soil. But there are two other assets. 
 
 One is the race of men and women that inhabit it. 
 
 You men of northern Vermont and northern New 
 Hampshire and Maine, living among the Appalachian 
 rocks and mountains in a region which may be called 
 the Switzerland of America you are the people who 
 have had hearts full of the love of freedom which burns 
 with the brightest flame among mountain peoples, 
 and who have the restless energy and indomitable 
 spirit which we always associate with such lake and 
 mountain lands as those of Switzerland and Scotland. 
 This bold spirit and force of character have been evident 
 in the large number of distinguished men that you
 
 276 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 have given to the United States, and in the hardy 
 pioneers and settlers which you have sent forth from 
 northern New England to reclaim from the wilderness 
 and colonize and develop western New York and Ohio 
 and the rich prairies of the farther West. 
 
 The other asset is the beauty and variety of the 
 scenery with which Providence has blessed you. No 
 other part of eastern America can compare for the 
 varied charms of a wild and romantic nature with the 
 regions that lie around Lake Champlain and the White 
 Mountains. And as wealth increases in other parts 
 of the country, as the gigantic cities of the Eastern 
 States grow still vaster, as population thickens in the 
 agricultural and manufacturing parts of Ohio and Penn- 
 sylvania, of Indiana and Illinois, one may foresee a 
 time when the love of nature and the desire for health- 
 giving recreation will draw more and more of the popu- 
 lation of those cities and states, which will then be 
 overcrowded, to seek the delights of nature in these 
 spots where nature shows at her loveliest. It would 
 need the imagination of a poet, or rather perhaps the 
 glowing pen of a real estate agent, to figure out to what 
 heights the value of landed property, and especially 
 of villa sites on these shores, will have risen half a 
 century 'hence. But this can be confidently said: The 
 people of all eastern and north-central America will 
 come more and more to resort to this region of moun- 
 tains and lakes as the place in which relief will have 
 to be sought from the constantly growing strain and
 
 DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 277 
 
 stress of our modern life. And one who values nature 
 and loves nature, and who foresees such a future for 
 this part of North America, cannot refrain from taking 
 this and every opportunity of begging you to do all you 
 can to safeguard and preserve those beauties and 
 charms of nature which have here been lavished upon 
 you in such -abundant measure. Do not suffer any of 
 these charms to be lost by any want of foresight on 
 your part now. Save your woods, not only because 
 they are one of your great natural resources that 
 ought to be conserved, but also because they are a 
 source of beauty which can never be recovered if they 
 are lost. Do not permit any unsightly buildings to 
 deform a beautiful bit of scenery which can be a joy 
 to those who visit you. Just as cultivated fields and 
 meadows add to the variety of a landscape by giving 
 it a sense of human presence and useful labour, so also 
 does the modest farmhouse, and the village church, 
 and even the mansion looking out of its woods, if it be 
 tasteful in form and colour. But the big, square brick 
 factory and the tall chimney pouring forth a black 
 smoke cloud are enough to destroy the charm of the 
 sweetest landscape. In many another spot where they 
 can be set up they will do no harm, but these exquisite 
 shores are no place for them. So, too, preserve the 
 purity of your streams and your lakes, not merely for 
 the sake of the angler, but also for the sake of those 
 who live on the banks, and of those who come to seek 
 the freshness and delight of an unspoiled nature by
 
 278 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the river sides. Keep open the long grassy ridges 
 that lead up to the rocky summits of those picturesque 
 ranges which stretch themselves out before us. Let no 
 man debar you from free access to the tops of your 
 mountains and from the pleasure of wandering along 
 their sides and enjoying the wide prospects they afford. 
 I am sorry to say that in my own country there are 
 persons who, in the interests of what they call their 
 sporting rights, have endeavoured, and too often with 
 success, to prevent the pedestrian, and the artist, and 
 the geologist, and the botanist, and anyone who loves 
 nature and seeks her in her remote and least accessible 
 recesses, from climbing the mountains and enjoying the 
 views they afford. We, who on our side of the Atlantic 
 deplore the exclusion of the people from the hills of 
 Scotland, warn you here not to suffer any such en- 
 croachments to be made on the natural right of every 
 people to enjoy the scenery of their country. Men 
 may for the sake of the whole community be debarred 
 from trespassing on land dedicated to agriculture, 
 but the bare hillsides and moorlands which cannot be 
 used for tillage ought to remain free and open, 
 available for the pleasure of everyone who seeks 
 health and recreation there. I am glad to hear that 
 you have in Vermont a club of mountain climbers who 
 are making foot trails along the glens and ridges, and 
 placing shelters below the highest peaks where the 
 climber may find night quarters on his ascent through 
 uplands far from any house. Such a club will doubt-
 
 DISCOVERY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN 279 
 
 less help to watch over public rights. See to it, 
 therefore, that you keep open for the enjoyment of all 
 the people, for the humblest of the people, as well as 
 for those who can hire villas and sail about in yachts of 
 their own, the scenic beauties with which Providence 
 has blessed you. 
 
 Some means you will surely find by which this 
 noble lake, the most various in its beauty of all the many 
 lakes of this Appalachian region, can be preserved for 
 the enjoyment of your whole American people with 
 some of that wild simplicity and romantic charm which 
 it possessed when the canoe of Champlain the Dis- 
 coverer first clove its silent waters. 
 
 It was then a deep solitude girt in by primeval 
 forest. To-day its shores are studded by thriving 
 towns and villages and "the rich works of men," as 
 Homer calls them, give it a cheerful air. Beautiful it 
 always was and is, for the long ridges of the Green 
 Mountains look across to the bold Adirondack peaks, 
 and between them the wide expanse smiles under the 
 sun in myriad wavelets. 
 
 On one of the rocky headlands of Mount Desert 
 Island a tablet of iron let into a mass of granite 
 records the name of the man who first touched its 
 coast. Here no monument is needed. The lake itself 
 and its engirdling mountains are the best memorial 
 to the heroic explorer, one of the first and greatest of 
 those who won for France the glory of discovery, and 
 whose own fame has now gone out over all the western 
 world, Samuel de Champlain.
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, APRIL, 1910.
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, APRIL, 1910. 
 
 EIGHTY years ago Thomas Carlyle preached the gospel 
 of Silence and denounced the growing tendency to talk 
 in public. Since then the habit has increased, is increas- 
 ing, and seems most unlikely to decrease. It may be 
 true that everything worth saying has been said. 
 Nevertheless, orations will go on as long as men are 
 willing to listen. 
 
 You whom I see here present will join some of you 
 have already joined the great army of orators, so it is 
 natural that you should desire to have a few hints 
 given you on the subject, even if they claim no other 
 authority than that which fifty years of observation 
 here and in Europe may seem to confer. They shall 
 be put in the form of a few short maxims of a severely 
 practical character. Most, perhaps all, of these 
 maxims will appear obvious, but I give them not be- 
 cause they are novel, but because they are so con- 
 stantly neglected as to be worth repeating. 
 
 i. Always have something to say. The man who 
 has something to say and who is known never to speak 
 unless he has, is sure to be listened to, especially in a 
 deliberative assembly or wherever there is business to 
 
 283
 
 284 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 be done, while the man of mere words carries no sort of 
 weight. Try to have an idea, or if you cannot find 
 one ideas are none too common have two or three 
 relevant facts. You may tell me that sometimes a man 
 is forced to speak when there is nothing to be said. This 
 does not often happen, because if you think a little be- 
 fore you rise, you will almost always find something bear- 
 ing on the matter in hand, even if the occasion be a 
 purely ornamental one. There is a well-known speech of 
 Cicero's in which he had to present a legal case on behalf 
 of a poet. He evidently knew that the legal case was 
 weak, so he passed quickly and lightly over it, but made a 
 graceful and eloquent discourse upon poetry in general. 
 The theme was not very novel then, and is still less novel 
 now, but the discourse was so finished in its language 
 that it can still be read with pleasure. So when you 
 have to propose the health of some one of whose personal 
 merits you know nothing, you may say something 
 about the importance of his office if he is a state 
 governor or a mayor, or the services rendered by his 
 profession if he is a surgeon, or if he is a newspaper 
 reporter, Milton's Areopagitica with its stately argument 
 on behalf of the liberty of unlicensed printing may sug- 
 gest something appropriate. If you can find nothing 
 at all to say, don't say it. Your silence will not harm 
 you in the long run. 
 
 Lord Brougham, who was a power in his day, though 
 his eloquence does not suit our modern taste, advised 
 young speakers to begin by acquiring fluency as the
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 285 
 
 one indispensable thing, and William Pitt the younger 
 is said to have acquired his marvellous command of 
 words by having been trained by his father to trans- 
 late rapidly at sight from Latin authors. Nevertheless 
 there is such a thing as a fatal fluency. Whoever follows 
 Brougham's advice ought to beware the habit of think- 
 ing more of the words than of the sense. 
 
 2. Always know what you mean to say. If possible, 
 consider beforehand what you are going to say, and 
 make your own mind perfectly clear what is the argu- 
 ment which you want to put, or the facts you want to 
 convey. If your own mind is muddled, much more mud- 
 dled will your hearers be. Bring your thoughts to a 
 point, reject whatever is irrelevant, and be content if 
 you have one good point and can drive it home. It is 
 pitiable to see how often a man who really has some 
 knowledge of his subject goes groping or stumbling 
 about, trying to get somewhere, but not getting any- 
 where, not for want of words, but because he cannot 
 put his ideas into the form of definite propositions. 
 In trying to discover what it is that you mean, 
 you may discover that you mean nothing. If so, 
 the sooner you know it the better. Sometimes one 
 hears a speech in the course of which the speaker gets 
 his own mind clear, and comes at last to know what 
 he means, but when it is too late to get hold of the 
 audience. If he had thought the thing out beforehand, 
 all would have gone well. 
 
 3. Always arrange your remarks hi some sort of order.
 
 286 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 No matter how short they are to be, they will be the 
 better for having a beginning, a middle, and an end. 
 Nothing pleases an audience more than the sense 
 that they are being led along a path towards a definite 
 goal by a man who knows his way. It gives them 
 confidence that the speaker understands what he is 
 about and will bring them out all right somewhere. 
 Do not, however, let your arrangement be so obtru- 
 sively elaborate as to alarm them. It used to be the 
 fashion of Scottish preachers to divide their subject into 
 three or four "heads" with a "firstly," a "secondly," 
 a "thirdly," and so forth, under each head, so that 
 the listener knew what a long road he had to travel. I 
 remember one sermon in which a venerable minister 
 got as far as nineteen thly under the second head. The 
 process of classifying facts and arguments and placing 
 them in their right order in one's own mind helps 
 to clarify it, while it adds strength to the argument. 
 It might almost be said that a well-arranged speech is 
 seldom a bad speech, because in the process of arrange- 
 ment a man of any sense is sure to find out the 
 deficiencies in his facts . or the weak points in his 
 arguments in time to cure them. 
 
 4. At all hazards, Be Clear. Make your meaning, 
 whatever it is, plain to your audience. Though 
 obscure speech is usually due to obscure thought, this is 
 not always so. Some persons who think clearly have not 
 learned to express themselves clearly, because they are 
 nervous in public, or have an insufficient command of
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 287 
 
 words. In such cases it may be better to resort to 
 the expedient, otherwise to be deprecated, of reading a 
 speech from manuscript rather than confuse the audience. 
 You have, moreover, to think not of the form thoughts 
 take in your own mind, but of the form in which they 
 will be comprehensible by your audience. Do not imi- 
 tate the bishop who, preaching in a village church, 
 told Hampshire rustics that "Nature herself shall be 
 the palimpsest on which Omnipotence shall inscribe the 
 characters of a rejuvenated humanity." Let the con- 
 struction of your sentences be simple enough for the 
 hearers to follow, and the words such as they cannot fail 
 to understand. To find themselves puzzled over your 
 meaning, and while they are still puzzling over your 
 last sentence, to be unable to attend to the next one, 
 annoys your hearers and lessens the chance of pleasing 
 or persuading them. Though obscurity of expression 
 is mostly due to obscurity of thought, it sometimes 
 happens that people whose thought is clear enough 
 insist on wrapping it up in vague and cloudy rhetoric. 
 To the rule that lucidity is the first of merits, there 
 is one exception, viz., where a speaker feels himself 
 driven to the shelter of obscurity. I have seen astute 
 debaters, compelled by their position to speak, unwill- 
 ing to be untruthful, yet forbidden by considerations 
 of prudence to speak out frankly all they thought, de- 
 liberately involve themselves in a web of words where 
 each sentence seemed to have a meaning, but the hearers 
 were left to wonder what the whole speech meant.
 
 288 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 But such contingencies are rare ; you may go through 
 life without getting caught in one. 
 
 5. In controversial speaking, as, for example, in 
 conducting a lawsuit or arguing a proposal in a delibera- 
 tive body, think always of what your opponent will 
 say, and so frame your speech as to anticipate his 
 answers and give little opening for his criticism. 
 The grounds of this rule are too obvious to need 
 illustration. Add to it the old maxim that in replying 
 you ought to meet and counter your adversary's jest 
 by earnest, and his earnest by jest. Aristotle said it, 
 but mother wit has taught it to many a man who 
 never heard of Aristotle. 
 
 6. Always reflect beforehand upon the kind of 
 audience you are likely to have, for even in the 
 same country or in the same section of the country 
 audiences are by no means the same, and what 
 suits one may not suit another. I have known 
 practised speakers throw overboard the speech they 
 had intended to deliver and substitute something 
 different when they looked from the platform over the 
 faces beneath. If your hearers are mostly educated 
 men and women, you may assume much as already 
 known which it would be proper to explain to persons 
 of scantier knowledge. But it is safer to proceed on 
 the assumption of ignorance (so long as you do not let 
 the audience think you are talking down to them) than 
 to assume knowledge. We are all of us more ignorant 
 than other people know, or indeed than we know our-
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 289 
 
 selves. If the audience are disposed to be hostile, 
 you will begin by putting them in good humour 
 and trying to excite their curiosity as to the line you 
 will take. If they are already wearied by the ha- 
 rangues of your predecessors, you will go at them with 
 quick, sharp, bright, bold sentences, and will let them 
 feel that you do not mean to detain them long. And 
 you will watch them as you go along just as you would 
 watch your fly on the surface of the water you are 
 fishing. 
 
 7. Never despise those whom you address, whatever 
 you may think of their intellectual attainments. Give 
 them the best you have to give. You need not talk 
 over their heads, as I once heard an eminent English 
 historian, when he was candidate for a seat hi Parlia- 
 ment, discourse to agricultural labourers upon the 
 Landesgemeinde of the Forest Cantons of Switzerland. 
 But you will find it politic as well as polite to respect 
 them, and you must never think that your best thoughts, 
 expressed in the fittest words, are too good for them. 
 Though noisy and empty rhetoric will often draw cheers, 
 still the masses of the common people almost always 
 appreciate solid and relevant facts, sound and useful 
 thoughts, stated in language they can understand, 
 and there will probably be among them those who 
 would perceive and resent any indication that you 
 were talking down to their inferior capacity. 
 
 8. Be sparing of literary ornament, except in 
 speeches that are of a frankly decorative kind, such
 
 290 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 as those made after dinner, or panegyrics of some notable 
 person whom it is wished to honour. Just as an ornament 
 should seem when used in architecture, to be an orig- 
 inal and essential part of the whole design, so in oratory 
 the decorative parts should be connected with, and 
 naturally grow out of, the substance of the matter in 
 hand, and should help to make the speech more vivid 
 and telling, rather than seem stuck on in order to please 
 the ear without strengthening the sense. Abraham 
 Lincoln rendered a great service to American eloquence 
 when he renounced the florid or tawdry style that 
 prevailed in his day, and set an example of speaking 
 that was plain, direct, and terse. Be sparing with 
 superlatives; reserve them for occasions where they 
 will really tell. Take pains to choose the strong and 
 simple words, and the words that exactly fit the case. 
 Even an audience that is not itself very cultivated 
 feels the charm of choice and pointed diction, and of 
 words that have some touch of colour in them, such as 
 apt metaphors. A well chosen metaphor often clinches 
 an argument, or becomes an illustration of it in 
 miniature. 
 
 9. As respects humorous anecdotes, and jokes in 
 general, these are eminently matters of individual 
 taste, in which each man will please himself, and few 
 general counsels can be given. Though we all envy the 
 speaker who has plenty of merry jests, he needs to be- 
 ware of abusing his gift. There is a tendency to-day to 
 make after-dinner speaking a mere string of anecdotes,
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 291 
 
 most of which may have little to do with the subject 
 or with one another. Even the best stories lose their 
 charm when they are dragged in by the head and 
 shoulders, having no connection with the allotted theme. 
 Relevance as well as brevity is the soul of wit, for a 
 good speech is a work of art, in which every part 
 should have an organic relation to every other part. 
 And when you tell a story, take some pains with the 
 form of it. The late Mr. James Russell Lowell, whom 
 we in England admired as the best after-dinner speaker 
 of his day, was a master in that line. The classical 
 felicity of his diction set off and gave a charm to the 
 smallest anecdote he told. 
 
 10. Never, if you can help it, be dull. It is a fault to 
 have too many flowers or too many fireworks, but it is a 
 worse fault to be tedious. An eminent Oxford teacher 
 of my undergraduate days, who is now a learned and 
 distinguished English writer, coined for his pupils a 
 phrase which had a great vogue in the university: "It 
 is better to be flippant than to be dull." This audacious 
 advice, meant for young writers, is even more applica- 
 ble to young speakers, because, bad as dulness is in 
 print, it is still worse when you cannot escape from 
 it without quitting the dinner table. Many are the 
 causes of dreariness in a speech. One is lack of good 
 matter, for it often happens that the less a man has 
 to say, the more he spins it out. A still commoner 
 one is confused thinking, which makes the speaker 
 lose himself in vague and pointless phrases. Another
 
 292 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 is monotony in language, the frequent repetition of 
 the same words, because the speaker's vocabulary is 
 scanty and he can command no others. You may 
 ask how dulness can be avoided when the subject is 
 not a lively one. Well, some subjects are dry. The 
 treasurer of a city, or even of a baseball club, who is 
 presenting his accounts, cannot make them fascinating. 
 But dryness is not the same thing as dulness. The least 
 promising subject may be treated with a conciseness and 
 precision and lucidity which allow one the pleasure that 
 good workmanship gives. A speech with those merits 
 will not be dull. Though it may be dry, it will stand 
 out sharp and clear, like a bare mountain peak in the 
 desert of Arizona, and even to the driest topics you 
 can impart a little variety by a lively simile or an 
 apt illustration. Dulness is often the result merely of 
 monotony in voice and manner : and this brings me to 
 another maxim. 
 
 ii. Remember the importance of Delivery. De- 
 mosthenes, greatest of all orators, is reported to have 
 said when asked what was the chief quality in oratory, 
 Delivery; and when asked what was the second and 
 again what was the third, to have made the same reply. 
 It is related that his own elocution and manner were at 
 first poor, and were improved by incessant study 
 and practice. And though a rich or sweet or sonorous 
 and resonant voice is a gift of nature, care and training 
 can do much to get good results out of a mediocre organ. 
 Articulation, modulation, and expression may all be
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 293 
 
 cultivated. To listen to words clearly and finely spoken, 
 and to sentences in which the voice adapts itself to 
 the subject, adds greatly to whatever pleasure a speech 
 can give. However, the four suggestions I make to you 
 are applicable to all, be their voices good or bad. First, 
 Be sure you are heard. Better be silent than be in- 
 audible. Secondly, Do not shout. It is not necessary. 
 Take the measure of the room, look at the man in the 
 last row, throw your voice out so as to reach him, 
 watching his face to see if the words get there, and trust 
 not so much to loudness as to clearness of enunciation 
 and a measured delivery. Thirdly, Beware of exhaust- 
 ing your voice. Do not strain it, however large the 
 room, to its utmost power, at least until near the end 
 of your speech. Fourthly, Vary now and then the key 
 or pitch of your voice. It relieves the listener, and 
 to suddenly raise or lower the voice when there is any 
 change in the topic often helps the sense of the words. 
 A speech seems twice as long when it is delivered in a 
 monotone, and most speeches are too long already. 
 
 Were I addressing an English audience I should add a 
 fifth suggestion. Speak slowly. But the fault of going 
 too fast is far less common here than in Britain; in- 
 deed, some of your speakers tend to the opposite error 
 of going too slow. Dr. Phillips Brooks is the only 
 great American to whom I have ever listened who 
 spoke very rapidly. It may interest you to know that 
 John Bright, who was on the whole the greatest English 
 orator of the last half century, told me that when he
 
 294 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 first began to speak in public his utterance was so rapid 
 that on one occasion a newspaper reported an address 
 he had made at a political meeting in the following 
 words: "The next speech was made by our young 
 townsman, Mr. John Bright, but he spoke so fast that 
 our reporter was quite unable to follow him." When 
 and after Bright had reached his prime, the measured 
 deliberation with which he delivered his sentences made 
 them tell like the blows of a hammer. 
 
 12. Never read from manuscript if you can help 
 it, unless when the occasion is one of such exceptional 
 solemnity or dignity that a long and highly finished 
 piece of composition is expected. As for notes, the 
 fewer the better, but if you find that you cannot trust 
 your memory to supply the order of the topics and the 
 particular points you wish to make, or illustrations you 
 wish to intersperse, it is better to refer to your notes 
 for these than to miss the points altogether. There 
 are speakers whose habit it is to carry notes in their 
 pocket even when they hope not to use them. It gives 
 confidence, and saves them from such a fiasco as I have 
 seen befall even practised debaters in the House of Com- 
 mons, when, having suddenly lost the thread of their 
 discourse, they were obliged to sink sadly to their seats, 
 amid the crushing commiseration of their opponents. 
 
 13. Whether you use notes or not, always have ready 
 two or three sentences with which to sit down. You 
 need not be either flowery or sublime in your closing 
 words, but some sort of a peroration you ought to have
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 295 
 
 at command, so as not to bungle and hesitate when 
 the time for ending comes. How often do we see an 
 unhappy fellow-creature go maundering or floundering 
 helplessly along, amid the growing contempt of the 
 audience, having already said all he had got to say, 
 and yet unable to stop because he feels that a closing 
 sentence is needed and he cannot find one. 
 
 14. Lastly and this is a maxim which is of universal 
 application, Never weary your audience. If they are 
 tired before you rise to speak, cut your speech short, 
 unless you feel able to freshen them up and dispel their 
 weariness. Just as physicians say that a man ought to 
 leave off eating while he is still hungry enough to go 
 on eating, so let your hearers wish for more food from 
 you, rather than feel they have had too much already. 
 Consider the hour of the evening and human weakness. 
 One of the most successful speeches I remember to have 
 heard of was made by a famous engineer at a great 
 public dinner of the British Association for the Ad- 
 vancement of Science. He came last; and midnight 
 had arrived. His toast was Applied Science, and his 
 speech was as follows: "Ladies and Gentlemen, at this 
 late hour I advise you to illustrate the Applications 
 of Science by applying a lucifer match to the wick of 
 your bedroom candle. Let us all go to bed." 
 
 It might be rash to say that a short speech is never a 
 bad speech, for I have known a man grieve his friends 
 and rum his case in five minutes. But for ten speeches 
 that are too short there are a hundred that are too long.
 
 296 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 A lecture ought not to exceed fifty minutes, a sermon 
 twenty-five minutes, an after-dinner speech (unless of 
 course it is meant to be the chief address of the even- 
 ing) fifteen minutes. For speeches in law-courts or 
 legislatures, where a mass of facts may have to be ex- 
 pounded and commented on, limits cannot be fixed, 
 but all speeches, everywhere, gain by compression. 
 Mr. Bright, like Chatham and most of our great 
 orators, seldom spoke for more than an hour. Mr. 
 Gladstone, like Edmund Burke, did not so restrict him- 
 self, and both these illustrious men suffered from their 
 copiousness so far as the audience of the moment was 
 concerned, though no one could wish Burke's magnifi- 
 cent orations, as we now have them in print, to be 
 shorter by a sentence. Like Daniel Webster's, they 
 are good all through. 
 
 The maxim not to tire or bore your audience is 
 part of a wider precept; viz., to remember the main 
 purpose of a speech. Most speakers are beset, espe- 
 cially in their earlier days, by a temptation from which 
 even those of longer experience are not exempt, the 
 temptation to regard a speech as the opportunity for 
 displaying talent rather than as a means to an end. 
 
 The aims or ends of speaking are commonly classed 
 as two. One is to Persuade. The other is to Delight. 
 In order to persuade a court or a jury you must think 
 not of showing off your theoretical gifts, but of getting 
 the judgment or the verdict. The best speech is the 
 speech that convinces court or jury. In a legislative
 
 SOME HINTS ON PUBLIC SPEAKING 297 
 
 body, the best speech is that which draws votes, or, 
 if that be impossible, which puts heart into your own 
 party. When the speech is meant not to persuade, 
 but to give delight, there are three quarters in which 
 pleasure may be felt; the person in whose honour the 
 speech is made, the audience, and yourself. It is a 
 common error to think too much of the last and too 
 little of the second. So long as you are mindful to say 
 nothing unworthy of yourself, nothing untrue, nothing 
 vulgar, you had better forget yourself altogether and 
 think only of the audience, how to get them and how to 
 hold them. Keep your mind fixed upon your hearers 
 and upon the end in view, whether it be to please 
 or to convince. Appreciation will come if it is deserved, 
 and will come all the more if you do not too obviously 
 play for it. 
 
 You will sometimes make failures, for nobody is 
 always at his best. Do not be discouraged. The 
 fault may not be your own, for much depends on con- 
 ditions you cannot command. But when you feel you 
 have fallen below the best that you can do, ask your- 
 self why, and if the fault is in yourself, try to correct 
 it next time.
 
 SPECIAL AND GENERAL EDUCATION IN 
 UNIVERSITIES 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED ON COMMEMORATION DAY AT JOHNS HOPKINS 
 UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, FEBRUARY 220, 1911.
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED ON COMMEMORATION DAY AT JOHNS HOPKINS 
 UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, FEBRUARY 220, 1911. 
 
 YOUR University looks back to-day upon thirty-five 
 years of educational work which has been of permanent 
 significance for all the seats of learning and study in 
 the English-speaking countries of the world. The 
 conception of creating a University which should 
 provide in various branches of knowledge advanced 
 courses to be taken by men who had completed 
 their general liberal education, was then a compara- 
 tively novel one in those countries ; and it requires 
 an effort to carry oneself back to a time when the 
 now elaborate machinery of post-graduate courses, 
 which has been spreading itself through the leading 
 universities in the United States, did not exist. To the 
 Johns Hopkins University belongs the honour of having 
 first put into practice this fertile conception, and of 
 having carried it out with a thoroughness to which its 
 diffusion and its success are very largely due. The 
 name of your late admirable President will always be 
 associated in the educational history of North America 
 with this epoch-making " new departure," and the 
 
 301
 
 302 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 University has always since lived up to the standard 
 of thoroughness, and preference of real work to dis- 
 play, from which it started. Its adherence to that 
 standard, its continued embodiment of the ideal of 
 scientific perfection, have given it the position of in- 
 fluence and dignity which it now occupies in the 
 world. 
 
 A remarkable feature of the thirty-five years over 
 which you look back is the wonderful development of 
 many departments of human knowledge, and espe- 
 cially of those which are concerned with the sciences 
 of nature, into special branches, each of which has been 
 tending to become more distinct from the others. So 
 far from finding ourselves approaching the end of 
 knowledge, we find that the more we know the more 
 remains beyond to be known, and that the realm of 
 the unknown seems to be steadily increasing with 
 every addition to our knowledge. It is as though the 
 particular path which we are following was always di- 
 verging into a number of different paths which tend to 
 separate from one another, and each of which leads into 
 untrodden solitudes to which we see no end. Within 
 the recollection of most of us, new branches of science 
 have made good their place, and have become recog- 
 nized as separate fields of enquiry, and along with 
 this it has befallen that the great majority of scientific 
 enquirers now begin, as soon as their general scientific 
 education has been completed, to devote themselves 
 to one particular branch of investigation and throw
 
 SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 303 
 
 their whole energy into pushing it forward. A man 
 is now not a "natural philosopher" in the old sense 
 of the term, but belongs to some one of the specific 
 branches into which natural philosophy has become 
 divided. The mass of papers and articles upon all 
 the branches of science that fills the weekly and 
 monthly and quarterly and yearly magazines and 
 reports of proceedings of learned bodies in all civil- 
 ized countries, is now so vast that the most powerful 
 intellect cannot follow and keep pace with what is 
 being accomplished even in its own special branch. 
 Indices and books designed to be guides to the ever 
 accumulating pile increase in number, but do not 
 meet our needs. In chemistry, for instance, there is 
 published every year a body of facts greater than all that 
 stood recorded in the days of Black and Priestley. 
 The same thing has happened in those practical arts 
 which depend upon the application of science. They, 
 too, have multiplied by division, and thus new prac- 
 tical professions, each employing many thousands of 
 persons, such as photography and electrical engineer- 
 ing, have grown up, which were unknown seventy 
 years ago. 
 
 The same thing has, of necessity, happened in uni- 
 versity education. We have now in all duly organized 
 universities professors of a large number of distinct 
 branches of knowledge which were formerly lumped 
 together as being one branch under one professor. 
 When I was a student in the University of Glasgow,
 
 304 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and also in that of Oxford, I remember that there 
 was in each but one professor of physics. 
 
 So also among students the tendency is for those who 
 have advanced some way to begin to concentrate their 
 efforts upon one particular line of study and investi- 
 gation. Both the teacher and the student are naturally 
 fascinated by the prospect of discovery. The professor 
 likes best to lecture upon the subject in which he is 
 pushing forward his own investigations, and the stu- 
 dent is able to find in them the most attractive field 
 of experimental research. 
 
 This sort of specialization has become inevitable, 
 but there is a consequence attached to it which ap- 
 pears almost equally inevitable, yet in some aspects 
 regrettable. Part of the time which was previously 
 given to general study, i.e. to a knowledge both of nat- 
 ural science in general and of other non-scientific sub- 
 jects, must needs be now devoted to this special study. 
 
 The field of nature is unlimited. Human curiosity 
 is unlimited. But human life and the capacity for 
 using our time and our powers in the acquisition of 
 knowledge remain within very narrow bounds. It 
 would be rash to set limits to what scientific research, 
 such as that which members of the brilliant medical 
 faculty of this University carry on, may effect in 
 the way both of extending human life and of mak- 
 ing health more vigorous and thus improving the 
 working powers of the mind. Still, life is short, ter- 
 ribly short for all that we want to learn and do, and
 
 SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 305 
 
 there is no present prospect that it will be much pro- 
 longed. Has it not sometimes occurred to you what 
 a pity it is that the immense length of working years 
 which mankind is said to have enjoyed in the days 
 before the Flood, when scientific investigations, so far 
 as we know, were slender, and directed to purely prac- 
 tical ends, could not have been reserved for times like 
 our own, in which a long life is more needed for utiliz- 
 ing the accumulated knowledge and skill a great 
 scholar and student can bring to bear upon the ma- 
 terials that now lie before us ? What might not Dar- 
 win or Helmholtz or Kelvin or Mommsen or Ranke or 
 the distinguished historian whom America has lately 
 lost, Mr. Henry C. Lea, have accomplished with a 
 working life extended in some proportion to the vaster 
 fields of enquiry that attract us to-day ? 
 
 The problem which now confronts us in all univer- 
 sities is how to find time both for these specialized 
 studies, which are daily becoming more absorbing, and 
 also for the obtaining that kind of survey and com- 
 prehension of the general field of human knowledge 
 which is necessary hi order to make the university 
 graduate a truly educated and cultivated man, capable 
 of seeing the relation of his own particular study to 
 others and of appreciating the various methods by 
 which discovery is prosecuted. This problem of recon- 
 ciling special with general study, although most urgent 
 hi the sciences of nature, shows itself in what may be 
 called the human subjects also. In history, for instance,
 
 306 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 one now finds people who devote themselves entirely 
 to one period of history, and will complacently tell 
 you, when a question belonging to some other time is 
 raised, that they know nothing about it because it is 
 "not hi their period." So there are people who give 
 themselves up so entirely to the study of economic 
 history that they may know very little of civil or 
 ecclesiastical history in general. 
 
 However, it is chiefly in the sciences of nature that 
 the difficulty I am referring to arises. These are now 
 tending to overshadow all other studies, partly be- 
 cause the numerous practical applications to which 
 they are turned have acquired immense industrial 
 importance for men and nations, and partly also 
 because we are all fascinated by the progress of dis- 
 covery, and are so eager to attain certitude that we 
 are disposed to turn from those enquiries in which 
 complete certitude is unattainable to those in which 
 the laws of nature provide an absolutely firm basis. 
 And it is in the natural sciences that the subdivision 
 and specialization referred to have gone farthest. 
 
 The problem has accordingly two aspects. It 
 raises the question of a mastery of the principles 
 of the sciences of nature hi general as against a 
 highly specialized study of some one department in 
 those sciences. It also raises the question of the re- 
 spective claims of the study of physical science, or 
 some branch of it, as against the claims of what may 
 be called the human sciences, or, if you prefer it, hu-
 
 SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 307 
 
 manistic subjects. It is upon this latter aspect that 
 I have a few observations to submit. 
 
 What do we mean by general intellectual cultivation 
 as opposed to special knowledge ? Without attempt- 
 ing a complete definition nothing is more dangerous 
 than a definition I will suggest a description. We 
 mean such a knowledge of the main facts and distinc- 
 tive methods of various branches of human knowledge 
 as furnishes a general idea of the relations of each 
 branch to other branches; that is to say, a comprehen- 
 sion of what truth and certitude mean in different de- 
 partments of study, and of what are the various paths 
 by which truth may be reached or approached. Were 
 I asked to indicate what this would include, I should 
 make some such answer as this : In the sphere of 
 natural science, it would include a knowledge not 
 necessarily wide, but sound and exact so far as it went, 
 of a deductive science such as geometry, and of some 
 science of observation such as a branch of natural his- 
 tory, geology, for instance, or some department of 
 biology, or of such an experimental science as chemis- 
 try. On the human side, it would include a knowl- 
 edge of one at least among what may be called the 
 more abstract subjects, such as psychology (in the 
 older sense) or logic or ethics, and of one of the more 
 observational subjects such as economics or politics. 
 It would include a knowledge of the principles of 
 language, and of at least one foreign tongue, ancient 
 or modern, preferably an inflected tongue possess-
 
 308 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 ing a literature. And, finally, it must include the 
 record of human effort and development through 
 the ages, that is to say, history, which shows us how 
 man has grown from what he was in the past to be 
 what he is in the present, and holds out hopes of what 
 he may be hi the future. Without at least an elemen- 
 tary knowledge of these matters, no man is properly 
 equipped for a life of study and thought, or for those 
 branches of the practical work of life which require a 
 wide intellectual outlook. It is not necessary to-day, 
 as it would have been fifty years ago, to argue that 
 every educated man should have some knowledge of 
 deductive science and of the observational and experi- 
 mental sciences of nature. But it is beginning to be 
 necessary to vindicate for the other great department 
 of enquiry, that which relates to Man, its rightful 
 place in a general scheme of education. 
 
 Specialization is not only inevitable for the progress 
 of discovery, but in many minor ways excellent. It is 
 a splendid thing for a great university like this to have 
 among its professors men each of whom is abreast of 
 the highest development of some particular line of en- 
 quiry and knows how that line of enquiry ought to be 
 prosecuted, so that it holds within its own walls, so to 
 speak, an accumulated mass of various knowledge, rep- 
 resenting that to which the world has yet attained. The 
 scientific specialist makes interesting company when 
 I have a chance I always try to get beside him at 
 dinner because he is able to tell us what we seek to
 
 SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 309 
 
 know of the progress of discovery in the growing 
 sciences, and we have only to interrogate him to get 
 at once, without the labour of consulting books, the lat- 
 est results in the clearest form. The scientific investi- 
 gator, moreover, seems to have on the whole the happi- 
 est kind of life that is now possible. Does he know 
 how happy he is ? Engaged in the discovery of truth, he 
 has for his helpers all others engaged in the same pur- 
 suit, and feels that all his labours are working to- 
 wards a noble and useful end. He is free from the 
 vexations that beset the business man or the lawyer 
 or the politician. He depends on no man's favour. 
 He is not expected to say anything of whose truth he 
 entertains secret doubts. If he has not a happy life, 
 granted good health, it is probably his own fault, for 
 what more can one desire than to be, as Bacon says, 
 the interpreter as well as the servant of Nature ? 
 
 Admitting all this, and much more that might be 
 said about the interest and pleasure of enquiry con- 
 centrated on one department, it is nevertheless right 
 to present to you some dangers that seem to arise 
 from the immense extension of the specializing ten- 
 dency and from the predominance, in particular, of the 
 study of the natural sciences to the exclusion of other 
 topics. We are accustomed to divide the subjects of 
 enquiry into two great departments ; those, the human 
 subjects, in which we deal with probable matter, and 
 that field of Nature in which all is fixed, certain, posi- 
 tive, immutable. Some one may, to be sure, remark
 
 310 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 that the phenomena of nature may possibly be under- 
 going some slow process of change. We cannot be 
 sure that oxygen and hydrogen may not be different 
 now from what they once were, or that alterations 
 may not conceivably occur in the proportion of the 
 constituents present in compound chemical bodies. 
 However that is all speculation. For our present pur- 
 poses, we think of the sciences of nature as being occu- 
 pied with that which is permanent and unchangeable. 
 They deal with those laws which we believe, so far as 
 our knowledge goes, to be immutable, to have been 
 operative in the past and likely to be operative in the 
 future, even as they are operative now. Now he whose 
 whole time and thoughts are given to the study of 
 these unchanging laws does not learn thereby how to 
 deal with that which is mutable and transient. But 
 the mutable and the transient include not only most 
 of what concerns our daily life, but the whole immense 
 field of knowledge which covers the human subjects. 
 Here we deal not with the Certain but with the 
 Probable. The realm of ideas, beliefs, theories, 
 emotions, institutions, habits, in fact, the entire 
 realm of human thought, human society, human 
 conduct, belongs to the sphere of the transitory and 
 changeable. In investigating the phenomena of this 
 realm, we have to walk by methods which are not 
 only not the same as those which belong to the sci- 
 ences of nature, but differ from the latter by being 
 far more intricate. The investigation of probable
 
 SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 311 
 
 matter is more perplexing and less satisfying because 
 its results are less definite and positive than are those 
 enquiries at the end of which stands, like a statue 
 closing a vista between trees, the figure of certain and 
 immutable Truth. Those accordingly who try to ap- 
 ply to the human subjects the same formulae and 
 methods which they apply to nature are in danger of 
 failing when they enter the field which includes his- 
 tory and all political or social phenomena. Differences 
 in the subject matter imply differences in the proper 
 mode of treatment. As men erred five centuries ago 
 when they tried to explain nature by applying to her 
 their own crudely formed abstract notions, so now it 
 is an error to think that in probable matter the methods 
 applicable to natural phenomena can be so applied as to 
 attain equally certain and definite conclusions. Does it 
 not follow that an education in the methods proper to 
 these last-named historical and social fields is as needful 
 as is a knowledge of the methods of physical enquiry ? 
 Sixty years ago people complained, and complained 
 justly, of the narrowness of those persons, some of 
 them of the highest eminence, who had been trained 
 entirely on the old scheme of education, which largely 
 consisted in grammatical studies, and especially in a 
 knowledge of the ancient languages. Men so trained, 
 men highly gifted and instructed, often failed to appre- 
 ciate the interest and value of the study of nature, and 
 showed a strange incapacity to understand the processes 
 it employs. I remember some such among our leading
 
 312 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 English statesmen. A whole world of interests and 
 pleasures was closed to them by an ignorance that was 
 too often self-complacent. In travelling, for instance, 
 distinguished historians did not see, because they had 
 not been taught to observe, all sorts of natural features 
 in a country which might have helped them to under- 
 stand its history. Bacon has warned us against that ab- 
 sorption in a particular set of ideas, that prepossession 
 in favor of one particular view which he classes among 
 the Idola Specus, the phantasms of the Cave, which 
 surround the man who sits in the dark recesses of his 
 own remote and secluded thought unillummed by the 
 light of the broad sky. So now the devotion to any 
 special study, whether in the sphere of natural science 
 or in any other, tends to narrow the mind and prevents 
 its faculties from attaining their highest development. 
 Many of the greatest discoveries have arisen from 
 bringing together facts and ideas drawn from different 
 regions whose relations had not previously been dis- 
 cerned. The more you extend the range of knowledge, 
 the more you increase the chances of such discoveries. 
 Most of the great men to whom the progress of science 
 is due were in their early days trained not as specialists, 
 but had minds that ranged far and wide like keen- 
 eyed eagles over the vast field of knowledge. 
 
 The chief end of education is to stimulate curiosity, 
 to make a man ask about all things, be they familiar 
 or unfamiliar, the How and the Why, to discover 
 matter for enquiry in facts which other people have
 
 SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 313 
 
 passed over without thinking of the problems they 
 suggest, to retain that activity and versatility and 
 freshness which are the most characteristic marks of 
 a forceful and creative intellect. Is it not wonderful 
 how many things were overlooked in the past which 
 we now perceive to need investigation ? The ancients, 
 both hi the Greek and in the Italian lands, must, for 
 instance, have noticed how various are the aspects and 
 structure of different kinds of rock. The differences 
 between gneiss and limestone, between basalt and 
 slate, stared them in the face. They saw fossil shells 
 hi the strata. But though observant men like Herod- 
 otus sometimes noted facts which suggested the work- 
 ing of forces that had changed the earth's surface, it 
 did not occur to them to seek any general explana- 
 tion of these phenomena, and geological science is not 
 yet two centuries old. So ancient observers described 
 plants and were interested in their pharmaceutical 
 properties; they described tribes of men and some- 
 times raised questions as to their forms of speech, but 
 it did not occur to them to classify either the plants or 
 languages on any scientific principles. Hippocrates 
 was a great physician, scientific in his methods. Why 
 did his successors not carry them on with a persever- 
 ance and exactitude which would have produced great 
 results? Was it because they had given themselves 
 too much to the study of words and of rhetoric, and 
 because their brilliant dialectical gifts had drawn them 
 away from the observation of facts? One wonders
 
 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 how it happened that a race so wonderfully gifted as 
 were the Greeks, who seemed frequently on the very 
 edge of great discoveries in physical science, did 
 not find and pursue the paths which have led us 
 to the unveiling of the secrets of Nature. And one 
 wonders also whether there are any phenomena which 
 we now are passing by unexamined because it has 
 never struck us that they deserve enquiry. 
 
 The wider the range of a man's interests, the more 
 susceptible he is to ideas of many kinds, so much greater 
 is the pleasure which life can afford him, and so much 
 the better can he contribute to the progress of the 
 world both by stimulating others and by himself 
 pointing out the way in which advances can be made. 
 Different as are the phenomena in different parts of 
 the field of knowledge, and different in some re- 
 spects as are even the methods to be applied, the habit 
 of keen observation and steady reflection formed in any 
 department quickens a man's powers in every other; 
 and just as an historian will profit by knowing some- 
 thing of geology or botany, so a student of natural 
 history may profit by knowing how the human mind 
 used to approach nature before our modern methods 
 had come into being. A university has to think not 
 only of forming specialists, but of making these special- 
 ists better by giving them a wide range of knowledge, 
 and still more of sending out men who sustain the level 
 of taste and insight in the whole community and are 
 fit to be its intellectual leaders. '
 
 SPECIALISM IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 315 
 
 You may ask how time is to be found both for special 
 studies and for the sort of general cultivation that I 
 have tried to describe. Must the general studies pre- 
 cede specialization, or is it possible to carry them on 
 together, and to show young men, even in their last uni- 
 versity year, how to correlate their special scientific stud- 
 ies with a mastery of other fields ? These are practical 
 questions which I must leave to your superior com- 
 petence. The principle which we seem chiefly called 
 upon to uphold is the principle of breadth and catholic- 
 ity in education, the recognition not only of the duty of 
 a great university to provide teaching in all the main 
 subjects, but also of the truth that a one-sided educa- 
 tion is an imperfect education. The error of those 
 who a century ago deemed a grammatical and literary 
 curriculum sufficient was no greater than is that of 
 those who now dispute and seek to exclude the hu- 
 man subjects ; or who hold that any single branch 
 either of the human or of the natural subjects is 
 enough to inform the mind or to develop and polish 
 it to its highest efficiency.
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CHAPTER OF THE 
 <J>BK SOCIETY, APRIL, 1911.
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CHAPTER or THE 
 4>BK SOCIETY, APRIL, 1911. 
 
 NOT long ago I read in an American novel this 
 sentence : "The life of an American man is Business." 
 If this merely meant that Business is the dominant fea- 
 ture in the life of the United States, occupying most 
 of men's time and thoughts, it is true, and scarcely less 
 true of such countries as England and Germany. As it 
 is everybody's first need everywhere to make an income 
 sufficient to support himself and his family, so in a 
 country which is still hi the stage of swift material 
 development and where opportunities abound for the 
 exercise of practical talent and the amassing of large 
 fortunes, commerce and industry and such professions 
 as engineering and law must necessarily hold the fore- 
 most place. 
 
 But the sentence may also mean that the normal 
 American man thinks and cares for nothing but business ; 
 and that was probably the sense intended by the writer. 
 If this were true, you as University men would think 
 it ought not to be true, and would deem it disparag- 
 ing to your universities. Of all the countries of the 
 world, the United States is that in which the largest 
 
 319
 
 320 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 proportion of university graduates enter a business 
 career, or conversely, it is the country in which the 
 largest proportion of men engaged in business have 
 received a university education. Now one main use 
 of that education is to prevent business from being the 
 whole of an American man's life; in other words, its 
 aim is to give him intellectual interests and tastes 
 outside business. Whatever a man's active career, 
 be it commercial business or any other, he finds it hard 
 to maintain those other interests under the constant 
 pressure of the practical work of life. That is why 
 university teaching ought to try to root them so deeply 
 in the mind and give them such a hold on our affection 
 that they will resist the pressure. 
 
 Two generations ago the study of ancient literature 
 held a foremost place among those intellectual interests, 
 and not a few university men used to go on reading and 
 drawing pleasure from the Greek and Latin classics 
 through the whole of their lives. These writings 
 had become a part of their minds. Few men so read 
 now; few in Europe, still fewer here. The study of 
 Latin has shrunk to narrow dimensions, and that of 
 Greek is in many universities practically extinct. In the 
 West both languages are more studied by women 
 than by men. An association has, however, been 
 founded for defending, and if possible extending, 
 classical studies. As its headquarters are planted in 
 this great university, you may naturally wish to hear 
 some remarks upon the case to be made for those
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 321 
 
 studies, for they can no longer rely on tradition but 
 must support their claim by definite and positive argu- 
 ments which will appeal to a public that is now, both 
 in Europe and here, bent upon the practically useful, 
 and somewhat prejudiced against every habit which 
 the (now discredited) "wisdom of our ancestors" 
 favoured. 
 
 Let us begin by frankly admitting that the excessive 
 importance given a century ago to the languages of 
 Greece and Rome has prejudiced them in the modern 
 eye. The claims made for them were so extravagant as 
 to have disparaged their real merits. We may more- 
 over doubt whether some of the arguments used on 
 their behalf have much weight. Grammar is a useful 
 study if taught in a rational way, so as to induce 
 thought, and not by forcing wretched children to 
 repeat its rules by rote. It is also true that the 
 grammar of inflected and synthetic languages affords 
 better mental training than does that of French or 
 German, which it is proposed to substitute for Latin, 
 not to speak of English, the grammar of which is 
 perhaps better left untaught altogether. Nevertheless, 
 the advantages of learning Greek and Latin grammar 
 have been exaggerated, and it has absorbed an undue 
 share of the learner's time and toil. 
 
 It used also to be argued that a knowledge of Latin 
 was serviceable because it explained the etymology of 
 many English words, and because it was a gateway lead- 
 ing into the modern Romance languages. Both con-
 
 322 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 siderations have a certain weight, but in education there 
 are now so many subjects competing for the student's 
 time that a stronger case must be made for each sub- 
 ject than was thought necessary two centuries ago. 
 More importance may perhaps be allowed to the 
 argument that the learning of any language besides 
 one's own is of value to the mind, because the mere 
 process of turning thought expressed in one set of 
 words into another set of words is in itself a training in 
 thought, and tends to enlarge the range of a man's 
 ideas by suggesting different ways of expressing them. 
 But there again, though the argument is a sound one, 
 it has not proved sufficient to carry conviction to any 
 minds except those who have given serious thought to 
 educational subjects. Most people say that the result 
 is not adequate to the tune spent hi learning an ancient 
 language, and that if it is desirable to possess some 
 language besides one's own, why not learn French or 
 German or Spanish, in which there is a prospect of an 
 immediate return of profit upon the capital of the tune 
 invested by the learner. 
 
 You have got to face the fact that to the large major- 
 ity of men nowadays, whatever relates to the past 
 seems obsolete and useless "What difference can it 
 make to us now," they say, "what men did or wrote or 
 thought twenty centuries ago ? Their ideas may have 
 been good when first expressed, but we have got far 
 beyond them. They supposed that the sun went round 
 the earth. They did not use steam or electricity, and
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 323 
 
 did not even know the composition of air and of water. 
 Of what value can their writings be to us ? " 
 
 Even those of your antagonists who admit the value 
 and charm of good literature will tell you that there is 
 in our own language literature more than sufficient 
 to occupy all the time that the learner can spare for 
 that side of education. "If few persons know more 
 than three or four plays of Shakespeare, if few edu- 
 cated men of this generation have read through 
 Paradise Lost, why send us to Homer or ^Eschylus 
 when we can get what is just as good in our own 
 tongue and yet do not generally care to get it ? " 
 
 These are the views, this is the attitude of mind 
 which confronts you hi your efforts to advocate the 
 study of the ancient classics. Your difficulty is that 
 there is very little common ground between you and 
 them. Your conception of education differs from that 
 which is now popular, and your sense of the value of the 
 ancient classics is incommunicable, because it springs 
 from a personal knowledge which nowadays com- 
 paratively few possess. 
 
 Accordingly, in suggesting to you what seem to me 
 the strongest considerations by which your contention 
 can be supported, I must make two preliminary 
 remarks. 
 
 One is that I submit these considerations in no belief 
 that they will prove effective with those you seek to 
 convince. They are given only in the hope that they 
 may confirm you in your own convictions, and possi-
 
 324 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 bly make clearer to you the grounds of those convic- 
 tions. 
 
 The other remark is that it is too late to attempt to 
 restore to Greek and Latin the place they held in the 
 scheme of liberal education seventy years ago. It is 
 not to be desired that they should recover it, because 
 the percentage of pupils who derived substantial 
 and permanent profit was a small percentage. You 
 may say that this was largely due to the unintelligent 
 character of the old teaching, which dwelt upon gram- 
 mar and neglected literature. Still the fact remains 
 that under any system of teaching more than a half of 
 the boys in schools and undergraduates in colleges 
 who may be taught Latin, and five-sixths of those 
 who may be taught Greek, will not get far enough to 
 enjoy the literature and give it a permanent hold on 
 their minds. Your efforts must, therefore, be directed 
 towards securing that there shall always be a provision 
 of classical teaching sufficient to enable those who 
 show aptitude for these studies to pursue them, and 
 that the universities shall, by their degree regulations, 
 or otherwise, impress upon the student the high value 
 attaching to such a mastery of the two languages as 
 will open to him the enjoyment of the literatures they 
 contain. How many thousands of students annually 
 graduate in the faculty of arts from all the universities 
 of the United States I do not know doubtless more 
 than ten thousand. What you desire is, I assume, 
 that of these thousands of graduates there should always
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 325 
 
 be some hundreds (besides those who intend to be 
 clergymen or university teachers) who can read Herod- 
 otus and Plato with pleasure, and when they wish to 
 be sure of the meaning of a passage in the New Testa- 
 ment will go to the original Greek for help. 
 
 Now can we find grounds to show that it is in the 
 interest of the nation that there should always be, say, 
 this five per cent or upwards. You probably agree in the 
 view that it is in the literature of the ancient languages 
 that their real value lies, not in a knowledge of their 
 grammar, nor in the help they can afford to the lawyer 
 or physician or clergyman in his profession, consider- 
 able as that help may be. What then is the special 
 value of these ancient literatures? Do they give us 
 anything, and if so, what, that we cannot equally well 
 obtain from modern literature ? 
 
 There has never been an era in the history of the 
 civilized peoples when they were all so entirely and 
 almost exclusively occupied with the present as they are 
 to-day. The Romano-Hellenic world lived upon the 
 Greek literature of the times from Homer downwards 
 and based education upon it. In the Dark Ages and 
 Middle Ages men were constantly looking back to 
 the ancient world as a sort of golden age and were 
 cherishing every fragment that had come down to 
 them therefrom. The scholars and thinkers of the 
 Renaissance who obtained those Greek books for 
 which their predecessors had vainly sighed, drew from 
 those books their inspiration. It was they that lit
 
 326 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 up the fires of new literary effort in Italy, France, 
 Spain, Germany, Britain; and thereafter two cen- 
 turies were spent in commenting on and imitating the 
 classical authors. The Bible and the Fathers of the 
 Church had been the intellectual food of the clergy 
 down to the age of the Reformation, and from that 
 tune Protestants as well as Roman Catholics were 
 employed till the middle of the eighteenth century 
 in expounding and arguing about the doctrines of 
 Christianity. All through those centuries, past events 
 and past writings occupied the minds of men (though 
 history was not much taught as history) and were 
 a large part of the instruction given in schools and 
 universities. Many ancient books continued to be 
 treated as models of excellence long after some better 
 books on similar subjects had been produced in a 
 modern tongue. Even in this new country, the edu- 
 cated men of your Revolutionary period were brought 
 up on Greek and Latin authors and learnt a great 
 deal about the ancient world. You had not then made 
 history for yourselves. In our time, however, we see 
 phenomena altogether different. Theology engages 
 much less of the average man's thoughts, while persons 
 of a specially religious cast of mind are occupied far 
 more with good works and what are called social ques- 
 tions than with the Bible or Christian history. 
 
 Natural science has filled the void left by the dimin- 
 ished interest in the things of the past. It concerns 
 itself entirely with the present, or rather with a world
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 327 
 
 in which time does not exist and in which therefore 
 there is no past. Even among those who know little 
 or nothing about any branch of science the impression 
 prevails that science and its applications are the form 
 of knowledge that now counts for success in life. 
 
 The social and political changes in progress since 1789, 
 and most evidently during the last thirty years both 
 here and hi Europe, have raised in the social scale, and 
 have provided instruction for, classes which had been 
 previously illiterate, so that the standard in literature, 
 and especially in ephemeral literature, is no longer 
 fixed by a small, highly educated class, but is the result- 
 ant of the tastes and notions of various classes, some 
 of them on a low level of knowledge. Newspapers, in 
 particular, are written primarily with a view to circu- 
 lation, and to the income from advertisements which 
 circulation insures; that is, they are written for the 
 masses of the people. Now for the masses, the past, 
 with its heroes, its achievements, its literature, has 
 little meaning. Their education has not given them 
 the opportunity of knowing or caring about it. Their 
 rise has increased the already overmastering impulse 
 towards elements of practical utility in education. 
 
 There used to be one fountain whence the whole 
 body of the people drew ideas that carried them back 
 into the past and touched their imagination by pre- 
 senting figures and scenes very unlike their own daily 
 life. That was the Bible. It is now unhappily less 
 familiar than formerly to every class in the community.
 
 328 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 A smaller proportion of both the richer and the poorer 
 classes attend church than was the case a century ago, 
 and whoever has been in the habit, in public addresses, 
 of referring or alluding to Biblical incidents or of using 
 Biblical phrases, perceives that he cannot now assume, 
 as he could have done forty years ago, that a large pro- 
 portion of his audience would recognize the reference 
 or the phrase. 
 
 Thus in many ways and through divers influences, 
 men of to-day are now more purely children of the 
 present than was any previous generation. This is 
 even more true of North America than of Europe, for 
 here there are far fewer things to recall the past, fewer 
 links binding the present to it. Among the mass of 
 the people interest in the past goes back hardly farther 
 than to the Revolutionary War, and it is only the ex- 
 cellent society of Colonial Dames who exert themselves 
 to recall to the public events of earlier date. Only the 
 best educated men seem to duly realize the continuity 
 of American history with European history, and to feel 
 that all that happened in Europe before the middle of 
 the seventeenth century, as well as a good deal that has 
 happened since, is a part of your American history 
 and has gone to the making you what you are. 
 
 Now although the world may be weary of the past, as 
 Shelley said a hundred years ago, it cannot shake itself 
 clear of the past. You here and we in Europe may be 
 eagerly bent on the future, resolved to make it better for 
 the bulk of mankind than the past has been. But we
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 329 
 
 can conjecture the future only from what we know of 
 the past, that is to say, from what we know of human 
 nature and the processes by which it and human 
 institutions change. One who knows only his own 
 country and people does not really know them, because 
 it is only by knowing something of other countries 
 and their peoples that he can tell which characteristics 
 of his own people are normal, generally present in all 
 peoples, and which are peculiar to his own. So, likewise, 
 he who knows only his own time does not really know it, 
 for he cannot distinguish between the characteristics that 
 are transient and those that are permanent. This is the 
 main use of history, besides of course the pleasure which 
 all knowledge gives. To know what we are, we must 
 know how we came to be what we are, and must realize 
 that we shall before long pass into something different. 
 
 A profitable knowledge of history consists not so 
 much in remembering events, wars and treaties, and 
 the making of constitutions and the reigns and charac- 
 ters of kings or presidents, as in knowing what men 
 were like in the days that are gone. What were their 
 aims and hopes and pleasures and beliefs? How did 
 they think and feel ? 
 
 The best source of that knowledge is, for any period 
 of the past, to be found in the literature it produced, 
 for that was the natural expression of its life, given 
 forth through its more gifted spirits, and that is a record 
 which, being contemporary and spontaneous, cannot 
 have been perverted, as narratives of fact sometimes
 
 330 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 are, by those who come after. Thus the periods which 
 we can study with most profit are those which have left 
 us not only a record of events, but also a rich and 
 noble literature contemporaneous with the events 
 through which the soul of the people, its ideas and its 
 impulses, revealed itself hi action. History is the study 
 of human nature and is best studied when one has the 
 means of interpreting men's acts by their thoughts and 
 their thoughts by their acts. Literature gives a picture 
 which is in so far imperfect that it tells us less than we 
 desire to know about the ordinary man because it 
 proceeds from the more powerful minds who have the 
 faculty of expression. But it speaks with a compensat- 
 ing vividity. 
 
 Nobody can hope to comprehend many historical 
 periods through their literature as well as by familiarity 
 with their events. We must select a few for study. 
 Now there is one period which has three recommenda- 
 tions making it more instructive than any other. It is 
 the best general introduction to all historical study and 
 to all literary study. This is the classical age of Greece 
 and Rome, and the three things that recommend it 
 are the following: 
 
 I. It is the beginning of literature and practically 
 the beginning of history, its first great product, the 
 Homeric poems, antedating even the earliest prophets 
 of Israel whose utterances have come down to us in the 
 Old Testament. As the most beautiful hour of the 
 day is the Dawn, though city dwellers seldom see it,
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 331 
 
 and as the most winning time of the year is the Spring, 
 so there is a peculiar charm in the first efforts man 
 made in the supreme art of poetry. Simplicity and 
 directness, sometimes joined to exuberant imagination, 
 delight us in most of the earlier literature of all nations. 
 We find them in the old Celtic poetry and the old 
 Arabian poetry, in the Eddaic poems and the Sagas of 
 Iceland, in the Lay of the Nibelungs, in the Vedas, in 
 the ballads of our own race, from the song of the battle 
 of Brunanburh, down to the ballads of Chevy Chase 
 and Flodden. But in the early poetry of Greece these 
 qualities are united to a constructive power and an 
 artistic sense which can be found nowhere else. Even 
 in the Attic dramatists and the later Greek lyrists 
 something of the primal simplicity remains. 
 
 II. The literature and institutions and civilization of 
 Greece and Rome are for all the modern nations the 
 first fountain heads of that European civilization 
 which has swept down to us in a widened current. 
 Art, the drama, philosophy, geometry, speculations in 
 the field of politics as well as hi the fields of physical 
 enquiry, all begin with the Greeks : there is hardly a 
 branch of intellectual achievement that is not traceable 
 to them. So from Rome descend the institutions of 
 law and government under which the modern world 
 lives, though modified in Great Britain and America 
 by Teutonic ideas and traditions. In the history of 
 the ancients we see our own beginnings and compre- 
 hend them better. We see also the environment into
 
 332 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 which Christianity was born and the influences that 
 affected its growth, moulded its forms of worship, gave 
 it a dogmatic system and a hierarchy. No later period 
 has therefore the same importance for modern peoples as 
 that of Romano-Hellenic civilization, for out of it there 
 sprang that which is common to all the nations of the 
 modern world and which they possess as a joint heritage. 
 III. The literature of these two languages better 
 illustrates their history, and the history stands in closer 
 relation to the literature, than is the case with any 
 other of the more recent national literatures. It is, 
 moreover, all the fitter to be studied, because while it 
 is as a whole scanty, compared with modern literature, 
 it contains an unusually large proportion of work of ex- 
 traordinary merit. We are accustomed to deplore the 
 loss of many works of great ancient authors. Some 
 have specially mourned over the lost books of Livy and 
 Tacitus, some over Lucilius and Varro, some over what 
 has perished of ^schylus, but perhaps the greatest loss 
 has been that of nearly all the Greek lyric poetry except 
 the Odes of Pindar. Still we may console ourselves with 
 the reflection that so much that has reached us came 
 from the pens of the best writers, and that so much of 
 what has survived is first-rate. No people, not even 
 the Italian, has produced so large a body of poetry of 
 the highest order as the Greeks did, except our own 
 English or British stock. It is the union of the histor- 
 ical interest which the Greek republics inspire with the 
 splendour of the literature they produced that gives to
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 333 
 
 both of them their unique charm. Works quite as 
 great have been produced since. Modern literature is 
 not only far wider in its range but richer in the variety 
 of its content. It is dangerous to speak of ancient 
 literature as a whole, for great is the diversity be- 
 tween the earliest Greek poets and the later writers, 
 either Greek or Roman. But nearly all, as compared 
 with the modern, have that special flavour and charm, 
 and also that special value for this old and complex 
 civilization of ours which the efforts of a joyous, vigor- 
 ous, and sensitive race possess. 
 
 III. Just as the political ideas of Greece and the 
 political institutions of Rome were a point of departure 
 for the modern world, so Greek and Latin authors, and 
 especially the poets, have become the common stock of 
 the learned men, the thinkers and the writers, of all 
 modern countries. They formed the mind of Europe 
 from the fifteenth till the eighteenth century. Their 
 ideas, their literary forms, their canons of taste, are 
 the foundation of that general modern culture which 
 educated men are still assumed to possess. No other 
 literature, except the Bible and a very few of what may 
 be called the classic books of Christianity, is in the 
 same sense a link between different nations and has 
 become equally the property of all. 
 
 These are some of the reasons which give its incom- 
 parable value and stimulative power to the history, and 
 still more to the literature, of classical antiquity. It 
 can never grow old, for it has the vivacity and
 
 334 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 vitality of youth. Its ideas retain their charm, partly 
 because they are simple, partly because they are ex- 
 pressed with unrivalled felicity. They light up the 
 history of their times because the life and mind of the 
 people speak so directly through them. This undying 
 freshness gives them that strange quality of seeming at 
 once so far off and so near, just as our own earliest boy- 
 hood often seems nearer to us than do the years of middle 
 life because it has the vividness of first impressions. 
 Here, however, let me stop to answer an objection 
 that will be made to the arguments I have been trying 
 to present. "Assuming" so the objector will say 
 " the value of ancient literature for historical purposes 
 to be all that you represent, cannot that value be 
 secured by reading the books in translations? Why 
 take out of the few student years, already overcrowded 
 by the claims of other and more obviously necessary 
 studies, the time needed to master two languages 
 which are confessedly of little practical utility to-day. 
 Literature can be enjoyed in translations. The Ger- 
 mans who read Shakespeare in a translation appreciate 
 him quite as much as we do, in fact some of them think 
 he must have been a German. Goethe's criticisms 
 on his plays are the best that have ever been made. 
 We read and enjoy in English versions the Icelandic 
 Sagas, and Don Quixote, and many another great work. 
 The Bible itself formed the mind of mediaeval Europe 
 in a Latin version and thereafter formed the mind 
 of post-mediaeval Britain and America in an English
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 335 
 
 version, and that version is admittedly equal in beauty 
 to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and superior 
 to the Greek text of the New." 
 
 Our answer to this is that no translation gives, or 
 comes near giving, the effect which the ancient classics 
 produce when read hi the original. The charm of 
 that form is incommunicable, for the magic of words 
 rests largely in their associations, and in what may be 
 called the sympathy of sense and sound. The delicate 
 fragrance of the ideas in their native form evaporates 
 in the attempt to pour thought from the vessel of one 
 language into that of another. This is especially true 
 of poetry, and more true of philosophy, in which so 
 much turns upon the use of precise terms, than it is of 
 history or of oratory. In stating and arguing about 
 facts, less depends upon the suggestive quality of the 
 words and upon their rhythm than when feeling as well 
 as reason is addressed, either in verse or in imaginative 
 prose. To estimate exactly how much is lost in trans- 
 lation is not easy, because whoever having read a great 
 book first in its original language reads it thereafter in 
 a translation is so struck by the loss as to undervalue 
 the latter : and it rarely happens that anyone who reads 
 such a book first hi a translation afterwards reads it in 
 the original. Many of you may have had with Dante 
 the experience which was mine, that little pleasure 
 can be derived from any translation and less from 
 verse than from prose translations and that the 
 splendour and power of the poet are not realized till he
 
 336 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 is studied in the difficult Italian of his time. A trans- 
 lation, if fairly literal, is of course better than nothing. 
 But nobody can feel the true charm of the Greek 
 writers, nor of Virgil, nor perhaps even of Lucretius and 
 Catullus, except in the original. The original is the 
 only door through which we can enter into the life and 
 thought of the ancient world, near us because it is 
 simple, yet mysterious because it is remote. 
 
 The teachings of the ancients are precious, although 
 they come from afar, since we obtain from them a 
 picture of a sphere of thought and emotion unlike our 
 own, and therefore fitted to correct the narrowness 
 which rests content in its own modernity, and which 
 cannot feel after the future because it does not compre- 
 hend the variety of experiences that have moulded 
 man in the past. 
 
 It is in this sense of a long and rich past and in the 
 fuller and finer appreciation of poetic beauty which 
 ancient literature gives that its true worth lies, not in 
 grammar, not in quarries of etymological or philological 
 enquiry, not in any professional uses to which scholar- 
 ship can be turned. The practical use to be held out, 
 the fair guerdon to be won, is Enjoyment, a unique kind 
 of enjoyment. Sometimes one feels as if it were worth 
 while to learn Greek merely in order to appreciate the 
 melody and majesty of Homer. Think of such a 
 line as this, 
 
 Ovped re (TKLoevra OaXacrcra ri iJ 
 1 Iliad, I, 157.
 
 THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE 337 
 
 or of the infinite pathos of the words which tell the death 
 of the youthful hero, 
 
 apa fjnv eiTToira reXos Bavdroio 
 * IK peQcav TrrajaeifTj "AtSotrSe 
 A Ov Trorpov -yooolcra, XITTOVCT* avbpoTTJTa Kal 
 
 Or remember that other famous passage which ends 
 with words that have fired the hearts and nerved 
 the arms of a hundred generations of patriots, 
 
 'Ets oiaivbs a/Horos a^vvf.(j6a.i irepl irarpTj?. 2 
 
 Is it not worth while to have in the background of 
 one's mind the vision of a far-off romantic world to 
 which we can turn back in thought and feel refreshed 
 as it refreshes us to descry, beyond the busy streets of 
 a city, the blue peak of a distant mountain range. 
 
 You will not suppose me to be arguing that these 
 studies, high as one may rate their value, are indispen- 
 sable to one who would attain the best kind of culture 
 or produce the best kind of literature. To genius 
 nothing is indispensable. What others can absorb by 
 training and study, the most gifted minds can achieve 
 by their innate power : 
 
 Pauci, quos aequus amavit 
 lupiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus, 
 Dis geniti, potuere. 3 
 
 Some of our most brilliant writers, some of our 
 strongest thinkers, have had little in the way of literary 
 
 1 Hiad, XXII, 361. 2 Iliad, XH, 243. * jEneid, VI. 
 
 z
 
 338 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 education. Yet even they might have gained from it 
 something in fineness without losing anything in strength. 
 Neither do I venture to suggest that you can expect 
 any large number of young men to throw themselves 
 into studies that seem so remote from the pursuits of 
 practical life. Comparatively few will see any use in 
 what they call dead languages, or will feel any taste for 
 them. But some students you must have, and those 
 not professors only. You must see to it that business 
 is not the whole life of all American business men, 
 but that room is made in the lives of some few 
 of them for the enjoyments of ancient literature. 
 The few are worth regarding, for it is always by 
 the few best and most cultivated minds that tra- 
 ditions are preserved and taste is maintained at a high 
 level. They tend and keep alive the sacred flame. 
 
 May it not be expected that the strain and stress of 
 commercial and industrial life which now forces the 
 American youth to sacrifice everything else to fitting 
 himself for practical life, and leaves the American busi- 
 ness man scarce any leisure for intellectual pleasures, 
 will before long abate? A time will come when 
 the development of the country's resources will have 
 been completed and the opportunities for making huge 
 fortunes will have become less frequent. If you can 
 keep classical studies from further declining during the 
 next fifty years, your battle will have been won.
 
 ON THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF 
 HISTORY 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AS CHANCELLOR OF UNION COLLEGE, 
 SCHENECTADY, JUNE, IQII.
 
 ON THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF 
 HISTORY 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AS CHANCELLOR OF UNION COLLEGE, 
 SCHENECTADY, JUNE, IQII. 
 
 NOWHERE in the world is the study of history 
 pursued with more zeal and assiduity than in the 
 universities and colleges of the United States. There 
 must be many hundreds of professors and instructors 
 engaged in teaching it, and many others are occupied 
 in various branches of research work. It seems to be 
 that one among the so-called "humanistic" subjects 
 which attracts the largest number of students, a num- 
 ber probably much greater than that of those who are 
 occupied with Greek and Latin. The methods of 
 teaching it and writing it have, therefore, presented 
 themselves to me as a fitting topic on which to ad- 
 dress to you those remarks which you expect from one 
 whom you have honoured by choosing him to be your 
 Chancellor. 
 
 Eighty years ago there was no teaching of the subject 
 in American universities and practically none in 
 British. In Cambridge and in Oxford a professor was 
 allotted to it, but of these two one seldom lectured, 
 and the other not at all. In Scotland the universities 
 
 341
 
 342 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 of St. Andrew's, Glasgow, and Aberdeen provided no 
 historical teaching, while at Edinburgh there was a 
 chair entitled that of Natural and Civil History, 
 you may smile at the title, but there is a connection 
 between the two departments. Here hi North 
 America the old established college curriculum had no 
 room for modern history and scarcely touched upon 
 ancient. Now, both in British and in American univer- 
 sities, the study has laid a strong hold upon the interest 
 of those who in growing numbers resort thither. Next 
 to that educational revolution which has given to the 
 sciences of nature their now predominant position in 
 the University curriculum, no change has been more 
 noteworthy. I may therefore safely assume that 
 many of you have followed with interest the course of 
 recent discussions as to how history should be taught 
 and written. 
 
 Before I come to this topic, let me offer one remark. 
 While admiring the untiring energy and patient care 
 with which you teach American history and investi- 
 gate all its details, and while desiring to express the 
 gratitude of British scholars for what you have done 
 and are doing for the history of England, I venture to 
 submit that scarcely enough attention is given either 
 here or in Britain to the history of the European 
 Continent, and above all to ecclesiastical history, 
 which is in a certain sense the central stream of all 
 intellectual and social movement, from the early days 
 of Christianity down to the eighteenth century, and
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 343 
 
 which reveals to us the working of so many of the 
 chief forces that have not only affected politics, but 
 moulded character and conduct among Christian 
 nations. Asking you to consider at your leisure this 
 one suggestion, I pass on to a subject which has 
 doubtless already presented itself to your minds, for it 
 has been much discussed both here and in Europe. 
 It is this : What do we mean by the scientific treat- 
 ment of history ? And is history a science ? 
 
 In its most elementary forms, history began in some 
 countries, as in Egypt and among the Celtic peoples, 
 with genealogies of chiefs and kings; in others, as 
 among the Norsemen of Iceland, with tales of adven- 
 ture describing the feats of famous men; and again in 
 other countries, as in Europe during the Dark Ages, 
 with entries in the rolls of monasteries of any events 
 which appeared specially remarkable to the monk who 
 acted as scribe. The picture records of Mexico, and 
 the ballads in which the Pacific Islanders still recall 
 the exploits of warriors of former days, would have 
 been a basis for history had the art of writing been 
 known, just as the Song of Deborah was an historical 
 source for the early annals of Israel, and as the ballad 
 of Chevy Chase would have been a similar source 
 did we not possess more authentic records of the fight 
 at Otterburn. But historical composition, as a dis- 
 tinct branch of literature, begins with the Greeks, and 
 begins with two famous writers, contemporaries of the 
 great Athenian dramatists and of the greatest among
 
 344 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 Greek lyric poets. Herodotus and Thucydides were 
 the models for the Roman historians from the second 
 century B.C. onwards, and have been models for the 
 civilized world ever since. 
 
 Different as these two masters were, so different that 
 they have been taken as representing two dissimilar 
 types of historical writing, they were alike in possessing 
 literary gifts of a high order. In their hands History 
 is fascinating as well as instructive. That character, 
 as a branch of what used to be called "polite letters," 
 History recovered in the days of the Renaissance, and in 
 that character it was cultivated with special diligence in 
 the eighteenth century both on the European continent 
 and in Britain. It was written not so much for the 
 sake of presenting an accurate record of what had 
 happened, as with a view to the pleasure or the moral 
 edification of the reader. All possible pains were 
 taken to make it attractive in style. It was embel- 
 lished with rhetorical ornaments and, especially in the 
 hands of the less skilful artists, copiously interspersed 
 with moral reflections. For thirty years after the 
 outbreak of the French Revolution it was treated by 
 English writers in what might be called a homiletic 
 spirit, being used to warn men against the excesses of 
 democracy. Though we had in Britain no man who 
 could rank, in respect of learning and services he ren- 
 dered to learning, with the Italian Muratori, we had 
 great writers who added to the charms of a stately and 
 impressive style wide knowledge and vigorous thought.
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 345 
 
 Such were Gibbon and Robertson, such, a generation 
 later, was Henry Hallam. These men, while they 
 never forgot that they were literary artists, felt 
 themselves to be also bound to the utmost care 
 in the collection and statement of their facts, and 
 devoted one sees the growth of the tendency in 
 Hallam as compared with his predecessors more 
 and more care to the study of original authorities. 
 Nevertheless the popular view that literary skill rather 
 than special capacity or painstaking investigation was 
 the quality which the historian needed was illustrated 
 by the fact that so many of the most successful books 
 were written by men who were litterateurs rather than 
 historians. Hume, Smollet, and Goldsmith, a meta- 
 physician, a novelist, and a dramatist, were the popu- 
 lar historians of their day. When, in the next genera- 
 tion, a history of Ireland was wanted for Lardner's 
 Cabinet Cyclopaedia, it was committed to Tom Moore, 
 the Irish poet, who brought patriotism and imagi- 
 nation and style, but little else, to a singularly difficult 
 task. So even in Germany, Schiller, withdrawn from 
 the service of poetry, wrote the history of the Thirty 
 Years' War. The tradition that the historian must be 
 eloquent lasted on for another half century. George 
 Bancroft and even Motley marred the effect of their 
 books by needless rhetoric. The thoroughness and 
 ingenuity with which E. A. Freeman worked out the 
 details of his Norman Conquest and his History of Sicily 
 would have been more fully appreciated but for his
 
 346 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 tendency to grandiloquence. The case of J. A. Froude, 
 the last of the so-called literary historians, is not quite 
 the same. The others whom I have just named were 
 solid, hard-working, conscientious scholars; Froude 
 was a brilliant stylist, who had begun his career as a 
 writer of stories, and chose thereafter to display in the 
 field of history his gift of picturesque narration. His 
 ecclesiastical partisanship was usually evident enough 
 to enable a reader to discount it. A graver fault was 
 that superb indifference to truth which sometimes led 
 him to regard the facts he had to deal with chiefly as 
 so much material to be handled with a view to artistic 
 effect, putting on them such colouring as was needed 
 to secure the particular effect desired, and caring little 
 for accuracy in details which did not move his 
 curiosity. 
 
 A new spirit, however, had already been at work in 
 France and Germany, and in the first quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century it had begun to show itself in Great Brit- 
 ain also. The same intellectual movement which had 
 been producing discoveries in the field of physics and 
 chemistry, and was soon to produce discoveries in those 
 of geology and biology, revealed itself in the students of 
 philology, economics, and history. The half century 
 which covers Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley 
 and Saussure and Cuvier and Humboldt covers also 
 the publication of F. A. Wolf's famous Prolegomena to 
 Homer, a period in which new critical methods began 
 to be applied by other scholars, as by Michaelis, to the
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 347 
 
 primitive literature and early records of other peoples 
 also. Even earlier they had been applied by Beaufort 
 to Roman history. Niebuhr in Germany and Guizot 
 in France were in the nineteenth century among the 
 first leaders of a new school who showed that they cared 
 more for the substance than for the form of their his- 
 torical writing, though both of them had the force and 
 finish which belong to powerful minds, Niebuhr bold 
 and brilliant in his suggestions, Guizot, lucid, acute, 
 and delicate in his handling of details. The men of 
 this school flung themselves into the investigation 
 of the sources of history with an ardour and assiduity 
 which in earlier days had been sometimes displayed 
 by patient and leisurely workers like the Benedictines 
 in France or the Magdeburg Centuriators in Germany, 
 but seldom by persons in the front rank either of 
 teachers or of writers known to the world at large. 
 Strict critical methods now began to be generally 
 applied to the original contemporaneous authorities. 
 Public and private archives and collections of books 
 or documents were ransacked for new materials. 
 Manuscripts were collated, edited, published in 
 such a series as that of the Recueil des Historiens 
 in France or that of the Monumenta Histories 
 Germanica in Germany. All the old views were 
 reexamined; many old fables or misconceptions were 
 exploded. For the loose phrases and flowing periods 
 of the school of "literary historians" there was sub- 
 stituted an exact and precise setting forth of what
 
 348 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 could be ascertained from the sources, showing how 
 much was certain, how much doubtful, and how far 
 different sources agreed with or contradicted one 
 another. In the earlier stages of the movement the 
 more daring spirits attempted to reconstruct .the more 
 distant and darker periods of history from data which we 
 should now think too slender, and the tendency during 
 the last thirty years has been to discourage efforts to 
 rewrite the annals of a people in the light of any theory, 
 however plausible, and to be content with setting out 
 all that can be known, leaving the student to make the 
 best of it. Ranke and Mommsen are, in respect of 
 their immense productive power and massive learning, 
 the most illustrious representatives of this school, but 
 in our language, we may point to William Stubbs, to 
 E. A. Freeman, to Francis Parkman, to Samuel R. 
 Gardiner, and to F. W. Maitland as instances of the 
 way in which scholars writing in English have 
 absorbed and exemplified its methods. 
 
 It is sometimes said that this change in the way of 
 handling history is due to the influence of the sciences 
 of nature upon the minds of all classes of educated 
 men. Doubtless the rapid advance of those sciences 
 through the application of their exact experimental 
 methods has helped to strengthen among all kinds of 
 investigators a sense of the importance of precision, 
 accuracy, and caution in inference. Nevertheless it 
 will be seen, if the progress of the humanistic studies is 
 carefully examined, that the new tendencies which have
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 349 
 
 come to pervade the latter are not a result of the ad- 
 vance of the physical sciences, but rather part of a 
 parallel and independent though cognate change in the 
 intellectual tendencies and habits of mankind. The 
 beginning of a critical examination of ancient docu- 
 ments may be found in Spinoza, who was a con- 
 temporary of the group of Englishmen that founded 
 the Royal Society. The employment of exact methods 
 in historical investigation was visible in modern 
 Europe almost as soon as was the adoption of 
 experimental methods in physical science. Nor was 
 this critically exact spirit a wholly new thing. One 
 sees it emerging from time to time in superior minds 
 as far back as Thucydides and Aristotle. 
 
 Not only in Germany, France, and Italy, but also in 
 Britain and the United States the best men had been 
 writing history in a genuinely scientific way before 
 the term "scientific history" began to be used as a 
 technical expression somewhere about the year 1880. 
 If that term be taken to denote the systematic 
 application of strict tests to evidence and a single- 
 minded devotion to the ascertainment and the state- 
 ment of truth, and nothing but the truth, then all 
 will agree that it is an entirely laudable ideal, and that 
 whoever gives us a history which is scientific in this 
 sense, whatever else he gives or fails to give, renders a 
 real service. 
 
 The term seems, however, to be taken as connoting 
 some negative as well as some positive qualities. The
 
 350 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 "scientific" historian must, it seems to be supposed, 
 renounce all literary graces and aim at dryness. His 
 style is to be plain and bald. Not only ornament, 
 but anything which can rouse emotion or appeal to 
 imagination is to be eschewed, for that way danger lies. 
 Romantic incidents and dramatic scenes are to be 
 excluded, or told in a business-like or even prosaic 
 way, lest the reader be diverted from the succession of 
 more important events; nor are any moral judgments 
 to be pronounced. 
 
 Our distinguished English authority, the late Pro- 
 fessor Seeley, himself a writer of singular force, with 
 a power of making his points tell which the most 
 accomplished forensic advocate might have envied, went 
 so far as to declare that in order to be scientifically 
 valuable, history must be dull or dry. 
 
 .Considered as a reaction against the habit of treat- 
 ing history as a part of polite letters, against the 
 superabundant rhetoric of Bancroft and the pic- 
 turesque carelessness of Froude, this view was a legiti- 
 mate reaction. It suited the practical and business-like 
 spirit of our time, and has been generally accepted by 
 the present generation. The truth of the facts is no 
 doubt far more important than any of the embellish- 
 ments which literary skill can add to a narrative, and 
 if the embellishments begin to be seductive, cast them 
 away. Excellent opportunities for working on these 
 lines were afforded by such large cooperative under- 
 takings as the Dictionary of National Biography
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 351 
 
 and the Cambridge Modern History, for as in these 
 compression was of the first importance, ornament was 
 very properly discarded. I remember how at a public 
 dinner given to celebrate the completion of the former 
 book, one speaker, deservedly popular among the 
 literary figures of London, delighted the audience by 
 observing that the maxim of the editors of that 
 stupendous work had been, "No flowers, by request." 
 
 The precept that style need not be regarded has the 
 advantage of being easy to follow, easier than most of 
 the counsels of asceticism. If the road into the 
 gardens of historic truth leads through the realm of 
 dulness, all may traverse the first part of it. We can 
 all of us be heavy, or slipshod, or merely level and 
 monotonous. And doubtless it is better to be tedious 
 and monotonous and dreary almost up to the verge 
 of unreadability than that our facts should be wrong 
 or that such of them as are right should be smothered 
 under festoons of florid verbiage. A somewhat tedious 
 history like Guicciardini's, or a level and rather arid one 
 like Lingard's, is serviceable in spite of its tameness. 
 But aridity raises no presumption of accuracy. There 
 is no necessary or natural connection between the two 
 things, and accuracy may be just as well combined 
 with animation. The things that have actually hap- 
 pened are as interesting as the things that might have 
 happened, but did not, just as picturesque, just as well 
 fitted to touch imagination and appeal to sentiment. 
 That some writers have, in their desire to produce
 
 352 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 literary effect, forgotten that their first devotion was 
 due to truth, is a reason not for despising literary 
 effect, but for relegating it to the second place. 
 
 There are instances enough more recent than those 
 of Gibbon and Robertson, already noted, not to speak 
 of Thomas Carlyle, to show that there is no incom- 
 patibility between scientific and literary treatment. 
 Macaulay's amazing force and brilliance have drawn, 
 and continue to draw, thousands of people to his pages 
 who would have been attracted by no one with a 
 less fascinating style. But though his eminence and 
 pronounced political views exposed him in his lifetime 
 to a captiously minute and rather niggling criticism, 
 his work has, take it all in all, stood the test of 
 time as an authority. Lord Acton, one of the most 
 accurate as well as the most learned of recent English 
 historians, though sometimes obscure from the very- 
 pregnancy of his thought, lit up his narrative with 
 epigrammatic wisdom, and, more rarely, with descrip- 
 tions of concentrated glow. The style of Henry C. 
 Lea, the most learned as well as among the most 
 accurate of recent American historical writers, though 
 no doubt always plain and level, is always agreeable, 
 because he knew how to select from the vast material 
 at his command what was most illuminative. He has 
 always something interesting to tell, and he tells it 
 with lucid simplicity. Francis Parkman's laborious 
 researches did not wither the freshness of his mind. 
 John Richard Green, though sometimes heedless in
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 353 
 
 small things, was in essential matters a sound and 
 trustworthy writer, against whom few serious errors 
 have ever been proved, yet his Short History 
 of England is confessedly as fascinating as any 
 novel. 
 
 Thucydides himself, the greatest of them all, the 
 model of exactness and thoroughness hi his treatment 
 of the events of his time, Thucydides has given us 
 narrative passages like that describing the retreat of 
 the Athenian army from Syracuse, where every sentence 
 is charged with dramatic force, and reflective passages 
 which stir the depths of thought now as they did 
 twenty-four centuries ago. There is no ornament in 
 his writing, but there is not a dull page. 
 
 May not our friends of the neo-scientific school those 
 whom Walter Scott and after him Carlyle would have 
 called the Dryasdusts sometimes forget that history 
 has to be written not only for historical students who 
 bring their interest with them, so that the dry bones 
 are all they need, but also for those who bring no 
 such special interest, and who will be repelled by an 
 unattractive treatment of the theme ? That a knowl- 
 edge of the past should be more generally diffused 
 through the whole community, that the past should be 
 made to live as something real in their minds, that it 
 should help to form their tastes and enlarge their 
 horizons, is an object worth working for. Anything 
 can be made dull or lively by the way in which it is 
 told, and history more easily than most subjects, 
 
 2A
 
 354 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 because there are no difficulties of technical termi- 
 nology to overcome. 
 
 When we pronounce a book of history dull, why 
 do we find it so? Is it not because the leading 
 characters are not individualized, because the salient 
 facts are not brought into due relief, because the dra- 
 matic situations are missed, because the style does 
 not rise or fall in sympathy with the significance of the 
 events and their emotions they evoke ? The avoidance 
 of these defects, so far from injuring the truth and 
 precision of a record, will make it more vivid and more 
 readily remembered by the special student as well 
 as the lay reader. 
 
 Another school has arisen of late years which also 
 claims the name of Scientific, and its pretensions 
 have made so much noise both in Europe and here 
 as to require some consideration. This school seeks 
 to raise, or reduce, history to the level of an exact 
 science like those which deal with various departments 
 of physical enquiry. Conceiving that only through at- 
 taining an exactitude like theirs can history have any 
 real value, it ignores the individual, it regards the course 
 of human affairs as determined by general laws which 
 govern the action of men associated in communities, 
 much as the so-called "laws of nature" govern the in- 
 animate and animate external world. From a study of 
 racial characteristics, intellectual tendencies, and the 
 play of economic interests, this school believes itself able 
 to discover such laws, and it expounds them in elaborate
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 355 
 
 formulae, purporting to sum up the past, to explain the 
 present, to predict (perhaps less positively) the future. 
 The objection to this method and procedure as we 
 see it practised by the votaries of this school is that it 
 is not scientific. Nothing accords less with scientific 
 principles than to treat as similar things essentially 
 dissimilar. Now the phenomena of human society 
 which history deals with are altogether unlike the 
 phenomena of external nature, indeed, so unlike as to 
 suggest that the methods fit for the one can hardly be 
 fit for the other, or at any rate cannot promise like 
 results. Oxygen and hydrogen behave in the same 
 way in all countries. Their properties were, so far as 
 we know, the same ten thousand years ago as they are 
 now, and are apparently the same here on our earth 
 as they are in the sun and the other stars. But the 
 features of human society are wholly different in 
 different races and different countries. Even in the 
 same countries they were a thousand years ago unlike 
 what they are now. Their study is for this and other 
 reasons incomparably more difficult than is the study 
 of natural phenomena. No scrutiny we can apply to 
 them can possibly be exhaustive, nor can those 
 methods of counting, measuring and weighing by which 
 exactitude is secured in chemistry and physics be 
 employed. Most observers are prone, since they 
 cannot possibly exhaust the facts, to fix their atten- 
 tion on, and give prominence to, those facts which 
 happen to fit in with their preconceived notions, and
 
 356 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 use them to support the broad generalizations they 
 seek to draw. Many a man, when he has gone a 
 little way into a subject, thinks it easy to sum up in a 
 generalization the facts he sees. No habit is more 
 seductive. But it is a dangerous habit, because ample 
 knowledge and an experience that engenders caution 
 are needed to recognize the pitfalls that lie round the 
 enquirer's path. So one may say that the longer a 
 man studies either a given country or a given period, the 
 fewer, the more cautious, and the more carefully limited 
 and guarded in statement will his generalizations be. 
 Some fifty years ago the late Mr. H. T. Buckle 
 published a book entitled a History of Civilization. 
 Its vigorous style and bold generalizations gave it 
 popularity at the tune. But though Buckle had read 
 widely and done a good deal of thinking, his knowledge 
 was altogether insufficient to qualify him for the task 
 he was attempting, and he had not been trained to 
 apply adequate criticism to the authorities he 
 used. There were in the book some true things 
 forcibly stated and fitted to stimulate reflection, but 
 it made no really important contribution to knowl- 
 edge ; and some of his generalizations, as for instance 
 the well-known parallel between Scotland and Spain, 
 were ludicrous. Of most of the other writers who 
 have followed in the same path much the same may 
 be said. The foundations have been weak, so the 
 structures of ambitious theory raised upon them have 
 been flimsy and unstable. These writers have seldom
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 357 
 
 realized the extreme complexity of the data to be 
 dealt with, the number of the hidden forces at work, 
 the variability of human beings under different condi- 
 tions, the important part played by individual men 
 whose appearance has disturbed all calculations and 
 overthrown all predictions. 
 
 Suppose that a philosopher had hi the middle of the 
 second century of our era addressed himself to the task 
 of writing a history of civilization and moral progress. 
 He would have had nearly nine centuries of tolerably 
 authentic history behind him, a period as long as that 
 which separates us from Pope Gregory the Seventh 
 and William the Conqueror, and he might have pleased 
 himself by drawing out and dedicating to the Em- 
 peror Marcus Aurelius, as a monarch of philosophic 
 tastes, a generalized statement of the laws governing 
 human development which, being proved from an 
 observation of the past, would evidently continue to 
 determine human progress in the centuries to come. 
 The materials might have seemed abundant, and the 
 interpretation of the causes of progress a simple 
 matter. But our philosopher would have left out of 
 account the two factors which 'were destined to have 
 most influence on that progress, Christianity, which 
 the Emperor was trying to repress as a dangerous 
 secret society, and the barbarian foes of civilization 
 with whom he was warring on the Danube. 
 
 The more recent writers of this school its Cory- 
 phaeus was the late Mr. Herbert Spencer, but it has
 
 358 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 representatives in Continental Europe also have 
 not (so far as I know) contributed to history either 
 any sound theories, or any illuminative suggestions 
 which competent historians did not know already, 
 and did not know better, because they were known 
 as the result of a wide and critical mastery of 
 details. What the school has given is a mass of general 
 propositions couched in what sounds like scientific 
 language, but the contents and substance of which are 
 either threadbare truths so dressed up in solemn 
 phraseology as to appear to be novelties, or theories 
 too vague and abstract to be serviceable either as 
 interpretations or as summaries of the facts. Some- 
 tunes the propositions are not true as stated, i.e. they 
 contain a germ of truth, but are misleading unless 
 many qualifications be added. This faith in phrases 
 and formulae is an instance of that recurring pro- 
 pensity of the human mind to impose upon facts in 
 general its own notions drawn from a few facts 
 hastily gathered, notions which gain authority from 
 being clothed in elaborate pseudo-technical termi- 
 nology. It was a like propensity which in the Middle 
 Ages retarded the progress of the sciences of nature 
 by embodying crude conceptions of phenomena in 
 terms and theories to which there was nothing cor- 
 responding in reality, as when men talked about 
 "phlogiston" and "animal spirits" and thought they 
 had explained things by saying that "nature abhors
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 359 
 
 Mr. Spencer was a most painstaking and earnest 
 thinker, and the efforts of his school to impress 
 upon their contemporaries the value of an arrange- 
 ment and synthesis of knowledge deserve all recogni- 
 tion. Of what services the school has rendered to 
 subjects other than history I will not venture to 
 speak, but as respects the results attained in history 
 and subjects cognate thereto, the view I have tried to 
 convey to you is, I believe, that pretty generally held 
 by historical students both here and in England. 
 Perhaps the disappointment one feels in perusing 
 books where one seeks for bread and seems to receive 
 only stones may perhaps bias those of us who were 
 trained in another school. Judge therefore for your- 
 selves and see if you can extract new and profit- 
 able truths where we have not been able to discover 
 them. 
 
 Needless to say that every historical scholar 
 recognizes that there are certain general principles 
 to be applied to the investigation of human society 
 and to the elucidation of the forces by which the 
 institutions and arts of life have advanced, and 
 reognizes also that though the movement which 
 has made history more scientific had an independent 
 origin, the historian may profit by a knowledge of the 
 methods employed in the sciences of nature. In the 
 first place there is to be studied Human Nature itself, 
 which presents certain fundamental qualities and habits 
 present in all more or less civilized communities, quali-
 
 360 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 ties whose existence we may everywhere assume as social 
 factors. These factors are in their outlines familiar 
 to us all. They have been dwelt upon by philosophers 
 and historians from Plato downwards. They do 
 furnish a basis for what may be called a general treat- 
 ment of political and social institutions, but it is only 
 a basis, because the phenomena differ so much accord- 
 ing to race and environment that the general propo- 
 sitions we can lay down as positive and practically 
 certain are but few. 
 
 Secondly, there are certain general tendencies which 
 can be traced through the annals of mankind, certain 
 lines along which human progress has moved. To dis- 
 cover and trace and illustrate these is the province of 
 what is usually called the Philosophy of History, a 
 subject with which some famous writers have dealt, 
 beginning with the Arab Ibn Khaldun, and coming 
 down through the Italian Vico to the German Hegel. 
 There is no branch of historical enquiry that better 
 deserves your thoughts. But it is more modest in its 
 pretensions than is the school of Buckle and Spencer, 
 for it does not attempt to lay down general proposi- 
 tions about all men and all communities, but only to 
 explain the past by showing what were the most 
 potent forces and tendencies at work, and how the 
 growth of the human mind expressed itself in the 
 moulding and perfecting of institutions. 
 
 The facts which History presents chronologically 
 may also be treated as materials for a systematic
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 361 
 
 study of any special branch of human activity, just as 
 the events in the annals of the Greeks recorded by 
 Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and others may be 
 used for a treatise, like that of Aristotle, concerning 
 Greek politics. History may hand over the phenom- 
 ena she records to be made the basis of books on 
 political science, or economic science, or what is called 
 Sociology, in which the phenomena are arranged and 
 analyzed, and are so correlated and explained as to 
 enable us to draw from them general conclusions. 
 But the materials belong to History. It is she that 
 has gathered them. It is to her that he who would 
 handle them systematically must go in order to know 
 the authenticity and the value of each part of them. 
 
 Let me try to sum up as follows what I have sought 
 to convey to you. 
 
 There is no incompatibility between the scientific 
 treatment and the literary treatment of history. Un- 
 due attention to the latter will tend to make a writer 
 less accurate and thorough in investigation, just as 
 complete absorption in the investigation of facts will 
 tend to make his presentation of the facts less attrac- 
 tive. But there is nothing to-day, any more than in 
 bygone days, to prevent him from being both a careful 
 investigator and an agreeable writer. As between 
 Lingard and Froude, choose Lingard, but the combina- 
 tion of qualities which you have in Macaulay or 
 Green or Parkman or Lea is better than either. No 
 historians were more accurate and exact than Ranke
 
 362 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and Mommsen, but every page in the writings of both 
 has a literary quality. 
 
 There is no incompatibility between the use of 
 critical methods and a careful study of details on the 
 one hand and a grasp of broad general principles on 
 the other. Rather is it true that the man who knows 
 the details best is also the fittest to educe and explain 
 the general principles. Many a student can master the 
 details who cannot expound the principles, but the 
 man of wide grasp is always the better for knowing 
 the details also, for in them lies Reality. 
 
 That which is misleading and unfruitful is the ten- 
 dency to disjoin the mastery of details from the so- 
 called " sociological " study of general principles, i.e. to 
 think you can have the latter without the former. 
 To re-create any period of the Past for our own minds, 
 to understand it as it was, unlike what went before it, 
 unlike what came after it, this is the chief aim of 
 history, and for this purpose one must study not only 
 the masses of men but also individual men, their ideas 
 and beliefs, their enjoyments and aspirations. Espe- 
 cially important is it for any one who would explain 
 the course of events that he should understand those 
 individuals who by force of thought or will dominated 
 their own time and turned the course of events. Not 
 only has the study of striking figures the greatest 
 fascination for the ordinary reader as well as the 
 student, it has also an importance for the compre- 
 hension of events which the Buckle and Spencer
 
 THE WRITING AND TEACHING OF HISTORY 363 
 
 school do not seem to realize. The individual doubt- 
 less counts for less to-day in most countries than he 
 did in either the republics or the monarchies of the 
 past. But if you wish to realize how much he still 
 counts for, think of how different Europe would have 
 been to-day had there been no Napoleon Bonaparte, 
 no Mazzini, no Cavour, no Bismarck ; or what it 
 would have meant in your Revolutionary War if 
 Clive, who died in 1774, had lived to lead the troops of 
 George the Third and there had been no Washington 
 to oppose him, or how different the course of events 
 in the Civil War if Seward instead of Lincoln had been 
 nominated at Chicago for the Presidency. 
 
 The writer or teacher of history begins by a 
 critical investigation of the facts. This is science, and 
 one of the most difficult branches of science. When 
 you have ascertained the facts so far as ascertainable, 
 try to connect them and arrange them in the order 
 of their importance and educe general conclusions 
 from them. This also is science. Then set them forth 
 in the best order and the best words you can find. 
 This is literature. Literary skill crowns the work, and 
 makes it more useful because it makes the work 
 spread farther, and better accomplish its end. But it 
 is worthless if the two other processes have not gone 
 before. 
 
 For the highest kind of historical work four gifts 
 are needed; unwearied diligence in investigation, a 
 penetrating judgment which can fasten on the more
 
 364 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 essential points, an imagination which can vivify the 
 past, and that power over language which we call 
 Style. So the greatest historians have been those who 
 combined a wide sweep of vision with a thorough 
 mastery of details, and who have known how to set 
 forth both the details and the principles in a way 
 which makes them enrich the reader's thought, touch 
 his emotions, and live in his memory.
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS OF RUTGERS (FORMERLY QUEEN'S) 
 COLLEGE, NEW JERSEY, OCTOBER, 1911.
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 
 
 i 
 ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS OF RUTGERS (FORMERLY QUEEN'S) 
 
 COLLEGE, NEW JERSEY, OCTOBER, 1911. 
 
 IT has been often said that books do for us to-day 
 what universities did in earlier ages. The knowledge 
 that could five centuries ago have been obtained only 
 from the lips of a teacher, can now be gathered from the 
 printed page. Nevertheless, since it is only the most 
 active and most diligent and most discerning minds 
 that can dispense with the help and guidance of teachers 
 to show them what to read and how to read, univer- 
 sities and colleges are scarcely less useful if not quite 
 so indispensable to-day as they were before the inven- 
 tion of printing. It is, therefore, not unfitting that in 
 your college I should be asked to talk to you about 
 books, the way to choose them, and the way to draw 
 most profit from them. The very abundance of books 
 in our days a stupefying and terrifying abundance 
 has made it more important to know how to choose 
 promptly and judiciously among them if one is not to 
 spend as much time in the mere choice as in the use. 
 Here you have the help of your professors. But here 
 you are only beginning the process of education which 
 will go on during the rest of your life. By far the 
 
 367
 
 368 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 largest part of that process will, after you have left 
 college, consist in your independent reading, so the 
 sooner you form habits of choice and methods of use, 
 the better. 
 
 The first piece of advice I will venture to give you 
 is this : Read only , the best books. There are 
 plenty of them, far more than you will ever find time 
 to read, and when they are to be had it is a pity to 
 waste time on any others. 
 
 You may ask what I mean by the Best books. 
 Passing by for the moment those which in each of 
 the great world-languages we call its classics, for to 
 these we shall return presently, I mean by the Best 
 those from which you receive most, and can carry 
 most away, in the form either of knowledge or of 
 stimulation. When you want to learn something 
 about a subject, do not fall upon the first book 
 which you have heard named or which professes 
 by its title to deal with that subject. Consult your 
 teacher, or any well-read friend, or the librarian of 
 the nearest public library. (One of the greatest services 
 public libraries render is that they provide librarians 
 usually competent, and I believe always willing, to 
 advise those who apply to them.) Be content with 
 nothing less than the very best you can get. Time 
 will be saved in the end. 
 
 There is no waste more pitiable than that so often 
 seen when some zealous student has, for want of 
 guidance, spent weeks or months of toil in trying to
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 369 
 
 obtain from a second- or third-rate book what he 
 might have found sooner and better in a first-rate one. 
 So try to read only what is good. And by "good" 
 you will not suppose me to mean what used to be 
 called "improving books," books written hi a sort of 
 Sunday School spirit for the moral benefit of the 
 reader. A book may be excellent hi its ethical tone, 
 and full of solid information, and yet be unprofitable, 
 that is to say, dull, heavy, uninspiring, wearisome. 
 Contrariwise, a book is good when it is bright and 
 fresh, when it rouses and enlivens the mind, when 
 it provides materials on which the mind can pleasur- 
 ably work, when it leaves the reader not only knowing 
 more but better able to use the knowledge he has 
 received from it. 
 
 Seventy years ago people, or at least those who used 
 then to be called the preceptors of youth, talked as if there 
 lay a certain virtue in dry books, or at any rate a moral 
 merit in the process of plodding through them. It 
 was a dismal mistake, which inflicted upon youth many 
 a dreary hour. The dull book is not better than the 
 lively book. Other things being equal, it is worse, be- 
 cause it requires more expenditure of effort to master 
 such of its contents as are worth remembering. If the 
 edge of the tool is blunt, one must put forth more 
 strength, and as there is never too much strength, none 
 of it should be wasted. It may be asked, "But is not 
 the mental discipline wholesome ? " Yes, effort crowned 
 with victory is a fine thing, but since there is plenty of
 
 370 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 such discipline to be had from the better books why go 
 to the worse books for it ? 
 
 Sometimes it happens that what you want to learn can- 
 not be had except from dry or even from dull treatises. 
 Dryness and duhiess are not the same thing, for the 
 former quality may be due to the nature of the subject, 
 but the latter is the fault of the author. Well, if there 
 is no other book to be found, you must make the best 
 of the dry and even of the dull. But first make quite 
 sure that there are none better to be had, for though in 
 many a subject the really satisfactory book has not yet 
 been written, still in most subjects there is a large choice 
 between the better and the worse. 
 
 Every book ought to be so composed as to be capable 
 of being read with enjoyment by those who bring 
 interest and capacity to it. One cannot be playfully 
 various and graphically picturesque upon every kind 
 of subject. Once, in a distant British colony, a friend 
 of mine was asked by a person who knew that he came 
 from the University of Oxford, " What do you think of 
 Euclid?" My friend replied that Euclid's "Elements 
 of Geometry" if that was what the question referred 
 to was a valuable treatise, whose reputation had 
 been established for many centuries. "Yes," said the 
 questioner, "but what do you think of Euclid's style?" 
 My friend answered that he had always thought more 
 about the substance than about the style of Euclid, 
 but would be glad to know his questioner's opinion. 
 "Well," said the latter, "I consider it quite a good
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 371 
 
 style, but too systematic." Eloquence, variety, and wit 
 are not the particular merits we look for in a scientific 
 treatise, but however dry geometry or any other 
 subject may appear, there is all the difference between 
 a book which is well arranged and well expressed, a 
 book which takes a grip of the mind and affords the 
 pleasure of following out a line of logical thought, 
 and a book which tumbles out facts and ideas in a 
 confused and shapeless heap. 
 
 To you undergraduates life now seems a long vista 
 with infinite possibilities. But, if you love learning, 
 you will soon find that life is altogether too short for 
 reading half the good books from which you would 
 like to cull knowledge. Let not an hour of it be 
 wasted on third-rate or second-rate stuff if first-rate 
 stuff can be had. Goethe once said of some one he 
 knew, " He is a dull man. If he were a book, I 
 would not read him." When you find that a book is 
 poor, and does not give you even the bare facts you 
 are in search of, waste no more time upon it. 
 
 The immensity of the field of reading suggests 
 another question. Ought a man to read widely, trying 
 to keep abreast of the progress of knowledge and 
 thought in the world at large, or is it better that he 
 should confine himself to a very few subjects, and to 
 proceed not discursively but upon some regular 
 system ? 
 
 Each alternative has its advantages, but considering 
 how rapidly knowledge is extending itself in all direc-
 
 372 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 tions, and how every branch of it is becoming special- 
 ized, we must recognize that the range of attainment 
 possible three or even two centuries ago is now un- 
 attainable even by the most powerful and most 
 industrious minds. To-day the choice lies between su- 
 perficiality in a larger, and some approach to thorough- 
 ness in a smaller, number of topics. Between these 
 alternatives there can be no doubt as to your choice. 
 Every man ought to be thorough in at least one thing, 
 ought to know what exactness and accuracy mean, 
 ought to be capable by his mastery of some one topic 
 of having an opinion that is genuinely his own. So 
 my advice to you would be to direct your reading 
 chiefly to a few subjects, in one at least of which 
 you may hope to make yourself proficient, and as re- 
 gards other subjects, to be content with doing what 
 you can to follow the general march of knowledge. 
 You will find it hard indeed impossible to 
 follow that march in the physical sciences, unless you 
 start with some special knowledge of one or more of 
 them. Many of the branches into which they have 
 been diverging are now so specialized that the ordinary- 
 reader can hardly comprehend the technical terms which 
 modern treatises employ. But as respects travel and 
 history and biography, and similarly as respects econom- 
 ics, the so-called "sociological subjects," art, and lit- 
 erary criticism, it is possible for a man who husbands his 
 time and spends little of it on newspapers or magazines, 
 to find leisure for the really striking books that are
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 373 
 
 published on some of these topics which lie outside 
 his special tastes. Do not, however, attempt to cover 
 even the striking books on all of such topics. You 
 will only dissipate your forces. Now and then a book 
 appears which everybody ought to read, no matter 
 how far it lies out of his range of study. It may be 
 a brilliant poem. It may be a treatise throwing new 
 light on some current question of home or foreign 
 politics, about which every citizen, because he is a 
 citizen, ought to try to have an opinion. It may be 
 the record of some startling discovery in the realms of 
 archaeology, for instance, or in some branch of natural 
 science. But such books are rare ; and in particular 
 the epoch-making scientific discoveries are seldom 
 known at the time when the world first hears of them 
 to be really epoch-making. 
 
 Two questions may, however, have presented them- 
 selves to you. One is this : Are there not some indis- 
 pensable books which everyone is bound to read on 
 pain of being deemed to be not an educated man? 
 Certainly there are. Every language has its classics 
 which those who speak the language ought to have 
 read as part of a liberal education. In our own tongue 
 we have, say, a score of great authors it would be 
 easy to add another dozen, but I wish to be moderate 
 and put the number as low as possible of whose works 
 every one of us is bound to have read enough to enable 
 him to appreciate the author's peculiar quality. 
 These of course you must read, though not necessarily
 
 374 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 all or nearly all they have written. Spenser, for 
 instance, is an English classic, but even so voracious 
 a reader as Macaulay admitted that few could be 
 expected to persevere to the end of the "Faery 
 Queene." Even smaller is the percentage of Dryden's 
 works which a man may feel bound to read. Do not 
 look for an opinion as to the percentage in the case of 
 Robert Browning. The sooner you begin to read 
 those who belong to this score, the better, for most of 
 them are poets, and youth is the season in which to 
 learn to love poetry. If you do not care for it then, 
 you will hardly do so later. 
 
 The other question is, What about fiction? I can 
 just recall an austere time, more than sixty years ago, 
 when in Britain not a few moralists and educators 
 were disposed to ban novel-reading altogether to 
 young people and to treat it even among their elders 
 as an indulgence almost as dangerous as the use of 
 cards, dice, and tobacco. Exceptions, however, were 
 made even by the sternest of these authorities. 
 I recollect that one of them gave his imprimatur to 
 two stories by an estimable Scottish authoress now 
 long forgotten named Miss Brunton. These tales 
 were entitled " Discipline " and " Self-Control," and a 
 perusal of them was well fitted to discourage the 
 young reader from indulging any further his taste for 
 imaginative literature. Permitted fiction being scanty, 
 I did attack " Self-Control," and just got through it, 
 but " Discipline " was too much for me. Fiction is
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 375 
 
 far more read now; being abundant and cheaper, 
 since it comes in the form of magazines as well as 
 in books. But we have no Dickens, no Thackeray, no 
 Hawthorne, no George Eliot. 
 
 , Need anything more be said about fiction than that 
 we should deal with it just as we should with other 
 kinds of literature ? Read the best ; that is to say, 
 read that from which you can carry away something 
 that enlarges the range of your knowledge and sets 
 your mind working. A good story, be it a historical 
 romance or a picture of contemporary social condi- 
 tions, gives something that is worth remembering. It 
 may be a striking type of character, or a view of life 
 and the influences that mould life, presented in a 
 dramatic form. Or perhaps the tale portrays the 
 aspects of society and manners in some other country, 
 or is made a vehicle for an analysis of the heart and 
 for reflections that illuminate some of the dark corners 
 of human nature. Whichever of them it be that a 
 powerful piece of fiction gives, the result is something 
 more than mere transient amusement. Knowledge is 
 increased. Thought is set in motion. New images 
 rise before us. It is an enrichment of the mind to 
 have erected within it a gallery of characters, the 
 creation of imaginative minds, characters who be- 
 come as real to us as th'e famous characters of history, 
 to some of us possibly more real. In them we see the 
 universal traits of human nature and learn to know our- 
 selves and those around us better, we comprehend the
 
 376 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 common temptations and aspirations, the mixture of 
 motives, the way in which Fortune plays with men. 
 We share the possession of this gallery with other 
 educated men. It is a part of the common stock of 
 the world's wealth. 
 
 The danger of becoming so fond of fiction as to care 
 for no other sort of reading, a malady from which some 
 men and more women are said to suffer, will threaten 
 nobody who has formed the habit of reading the kind 
 of fiction I am trying to describe, because he will enjoy 
 no other kind. A boy or girl can usually read any 
 sort of tale be it better or worse written. The story 
 is enough for him. As he grows older and has read 
 more and more of the best writers, his taste becomes 
 more cultivated and exacting. While faults repel him 
 more, merits attract him more, because he has become 
 more capable of appreciation. At last a poor quality 
 of fiction which is merely commonplace, handling 
 threadbare themes in a hackneyed way, the sort of 
 fiction into which no inventive or reflective thought 
 has gone, comes to bore him. He can no longer read 
 it, because it is too dull or too vapid. 
 
 Prose fiction, in its higher forms, cultivates the 
 imagination almost as well as history does, but poetry 
 does this better than either. The pleasures of the 
 imagination are among the highest we can enjoy. 
 Unless, therefore, any one of you is so unlucky as to 
 find no delight in poetry, it will always form a part of 
 your reading. Not much of the highest order has
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 377 
 
 been appearing in these later days in any country, 
 but there is such an abundance from former days 
 that" you will never want for plenty to read and no 
 modern language possesses so much poetry of first- 
 rate merit as does our own. 
 
 It seems a pity that the old practice of learning a 
 good deal of poetry by heart should be now falling into 
 disuse, for it stored the mind hi the early years of life 
 with fine thoughts in fine words and helped to form a 
 taste for style, seeing that style can rise to greater 
 heights of perfection in poetry than hi any kind of 
 prose. As to what to read in poetry, there is no need 
 hi our day to warn any one against reading too much, 
 and there is little to say about choice, for you will 
 naturally be drawn first to the great and famous 
 classics in our own and other tongues, and they will so 
 form your taste that you will know how to choose 
 among other verse writers. In particular do not omit 
 those few great writers who have attained to a distinc- 
 tive way of looking at the world as a whole (what the 
 Germans call a Weltanschaung), those in whose minds 
 and works human nature in all its varieties, human 
 life in all its aspects, is mirrored. The author, or authors, 
 of the Homeric poems is the earliest example: Goethe 
 is one of the latest, and not all are poets, for Cervantes 
 is among them. 
 
 A man who does not care for those whom the judg- 
 ment of the world has approved, may conclude that 
 the fault is with himself. But it is not always the
 
 378 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 greatest writers that give the most pleasure. Most of 
 us have some two or three poets not classed in the 
 first rank, perhaps writers whose fame has always been 
 limited, to whom we frequently return because they 
 express thoughts in a way which makes a special appeal 
 to our own minds. Look out for these also, and 
 cherish them when you have found them. 
 
 Though divers wise and learned men have drawn 
 up lists of what they describe as the Best Hundred 
 Books, it may be doubted whether such lists have 
 any use beyond that of indicating the preferences 
 of their eminent compilers and the use also of re- 
 calling to the notice of the modern public some 
 remarkable works which it had nearly forgotten. The 
 truth is that the excellence of a book is not absolute, 
 i.e. the same for all readers alike, but rather is 
 relative to the knowledge and capacities and environ- 
 ment of the particular reader. Many a book of first- 
 rate value to a person prepared by education and spe- 
 cial talents to appreciate it is useless to others not 
 so prepared. A more really interesting enquiry is, 
 What are the books that have made most difference to 
 the progress of the world? Such books are a part, and a 
 significant part, of world-history, yet some of them 
 would interest comparatively few readers to-day. 
 
 The question of how much time should be devoted 
 to the classics of other countries than our own is too 
 large a one for me to enter on. Enough to say that 
 whoever knows Latin or Greek or Italian or French or
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 379 
 
 German or Spanish or Icelandic, will not need to be 
 told that he ought to be just as anxious to know the 
 masterpieces in those languages as those in his own. 
 The ancient classics in particular give something which 
 no modern literature supplies. 
 
 From considering What to read, let us go on to con- 
 sider How to read. Here my advice to you would be, 
 Read with a purpose. Bend your mind upon the book. 
 Read it so as to get out of it the best it has to give you. 
 You may accept this advice as applicable to what is 
 read for information, but may think it superfluous if 
 the book is a story or other work read for amusement, 
 because presumably no one will persevere with such a 
 book unless it interests him. Yet even where the aim 
 is amusement and the book a work of fiction one man 
 may, if he read it in the right way, extract more 
 benefit as well as more pleasure than another would 
 do. If the story is worth reading, it is so because it 
 not only appeals to our curiosity, but also because it 
 pleasurably stirs our thought. 
 
 With other kinds of literature, with science or 
 philosophy or history or economics, the worth of 
 the book is to be measured by what you can 
 carry away from it, and that depends mainly on 
 the spirit in which you read. The book, as already 
 observed, must have quality enough to stimulate 
 thought, to give you what is called a mental reaction. 
 But however good the quality, the reaction will not 
 follow unless you address your mind to the subject.
 
 380 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 The purpose must be either to get something whether 
 facts or ideas which you can add to your store of 
 knowledge or else to receive a stimulus which will 
 quicken your own powers of thinking and feeling. 
 These two benefits usually go together. It is not the 
 quantity of reading that counts, but the quantity and 
 the intensity of thought that are evoked. Nothing is 
 gained by skimming over hundreds or thousands of 
 pages of print unless something remains from the 
 process. So if after having honestly applied your 
 intellect to a book you do not find anything you care 
 to carry away, drop it. Either it is not worth further 
 effort, or it maybe outside the range of your appreciation. 
 
 You will not, however, fancy that all the books you 
 may have to consult deserve careful study. If 
 thoroughness is a virtue to be cultivated, still more is 
 time a thing to be saved. The old maxim, " Whatever 
 is worth doing is worth doing well," is less true than it 
 seems, and has led many people into a lamentable 
 waste of time. Many things are worth doing if you 
 can do them passably well with a little time and 
 effort, which are not worth doing thoroughly if so to 
 do them requires much time and effort. 
 
 Time is the measure of everything in life, and 
 every kind of work ought to be adjusted to it. One of 
 the commonest mistakes we all make is spending our- 
 selves on things whose value is below the value of the 
 time they require. Many a book may be worth read- 
 ing rapidly so as to extract from it the few important
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 381 
 
 facts it contains, and yet be by no means worth a 
 prolonged study. Economize time in reading as in 
 everything else. The adage that Time is Money falls 
 far short of the truth. Time is worth more than 
 money because by its judicious employment more 
 enjoyment can be secured than money can purchase. 
 
 One of the less fortunate results of the large amount 
 of matter which the printing-press turns out in our time 
 is the tendency it has bred to read everything hastily 
 and unthinkingly. The man who glances through 
 several newspapers in the morning and two or three 
 magazines in the evening forms the habit of inattention, 
 or, more correctly, half attention. He reads with no in- 
 tention of remembering anything except what directly 
 and urgently bears upon his own business, and when 
 hi the scanty leisure which business and the practice 
 of reading newspapers and magazines leave him, he 
 takes up a book, this habit of half attention prevents 
 him from applying his mind to what he reads. 
 Instead of stimulating thought, constant reading of 
 this kind deadens it, and the quantity of reading and 
 the quantity of thinking are apt to be in inverse ratio 
 to one another. To say, "Don't read without think- 
 ing," might be deemed to be that useless thing, a 
 Counsel of Perfection ; but I may say, "Beware of the 
 Reading Habit." It is one of the curses of our age. 
 What is wanted to-day is less printing and less reading, 
 but more thinking. Reading is easy, and thinking is 
 hard work, but the one is useless without the other.
 
 382 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 You may ask what is the best way of trying so to 
 read books as to be able to retain the best they give 
 us. If the book be one you wish to know with abso- 
 lute thoroughness, as students at Oxford University 
 were in my time expected to know Aristotle's Ethics 
 and the history of Thucydides for our degree examina- 
 tion, you will find it a good plan to read over every day 
 all that you read the day before. At first this is irksome, 
 but it fixes things in your mind and is a saving in the 
 long run. Everybody has his own devices for record- 
 ing what he deems best in what he reads, but I can rec- 
 ommend that of making very short notes, or references, 
 on the fly leaf (or leaves) at the end and beginning of a 
 volume of the most important facts or views it contains, 
 noting the page on which each occurs, so that one can 
 refer promptly to the things which struck one at the 
 time. Where a work is either of exceptional merit for 
 its fertility in suggestion, or is specially rich in out-of- 
 the-way facts, it may be worth while to bind in 
 additional fly leaves. Should the book be not one's 
 own but borrowed from a friend or a library, one 
 must of course make the notes or references in a Ms. 
 note-book, and in that case, since the treatise will not 
 be at hand to refer to, it becomes necessary to make 
 a somewhat fuller abstract of the facts it is desired to 
 remember. The advantage of either method is that 
 the process of compressing the fact or view into the 
 fewest possible words helps to fix it in the memory. I 
 remember cases in which eight or ten entries represented
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 383 
 
 the total results of reading a book of four hundred 
 octavo pages, yet those entries might serve to make 
 some dark things clear. 
 
 The late Lord Acton, the most learned man I ever 
 knew, was in the habit of copying out on slips 
 of paper passages or sentences which he thought 
 valuable from all the volumes he perused. He had 
 hundreds of cardboard boxes filled with these slips, the 
 boxes being labelled with the titles of their subjects; 
 and he seemed to know how to lay his hand upon any 
 extract he wanted. Few, however, could hope to bring 
 leisure and industry like his to the accumulation of 
 such a mass of knowledge ; and he spent so much time 
 in the process of gathering the opinions of others that 
 he had little left for using them or for giving the world 
 the fruit of his own thoughts, often far better worth 
 having than that which he had plucked from other 
 orchards. 
 
 There are those who keep note-books in which they 
 enter the most remarkable facts or aphorisms or 
 statements of doctrine and opinion which they en- 
 counter in the course of their reading. For persons 
 fortunate enough to have formed methodical habits 
 this may be a good plan. 
 
 Ought reading to be systematic ? Should a man lay 
 down a scheme and confine himself to one or more sub- 
 jects in which he can become proficient rather than 
 spread himself out in superficial sciolism over a large 
 number ?
 
 384 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 For many of us Life answers this question by requir- 
 ing attention to be devoted primarily to books which 
 bear upon our occupation or are connected with it. 
 For others again pronounced tastes point out certain 
 lines of reading as those in which they will find most 
 pleasure. Yet there is also a third class whom neither 
 their avocations nor any marked personal prefer- 
 ences guide in any particular direction. My advice to 
 these would be : If you have not got a definite taste, try 
 to acquire one. Find some pursuit or line of study which 
 you can relish, and give to it most of your spare time. 
 It will be a constant spring of pleasure, an occupation 
 in solitude, a distraction from worries, even a consola- 
 tion in misfortune, to have something unconnected 
 with one's daily work to which one can turn for change 
 and refreshment of spirit. Some branch of natural 
 history, or some one of the physical sciences, is perhaps 
 the best for this purpose, but any branch of history 
 or archaeology or art (including, as one of the very 
 best, music) will serve. When one has such a pursuit 
 or taste, it naturally becomes the central line which a 
 man's reading follows. In advising a concentration of 
 study upon some few topics, I do not suggest that you 
 should cease to interest yourselves in the general 
 movements of the world. Everyone ought to try to 
 keep abreast of his time, so far at least as not to be 
 ignorant of the great advances that are being made. 
 Of most of these you will not be able to know 
 much, but the more you can know, the better, so long
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 385 
 
 as you do not scatter and dissipate your efforts in such 
 wise as to become a mere smatterer. 
 
 There is a maxim which, like that other venerable 
 dictum already referred to, sounds good but has often 
 done harm. (A book might be written with the title 
 Moral Maxims and the Mischief they Do.} You all 
 remember the lines: 
 
 A little learning is a dangerous thing ; 
 Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring. 
 
 With all respect to the poet, this is by no means 
 true. A little learning is not dangerous so long as you 
 know that it is little. Danger begins with thinking you 
 know much more than you do. It is not knowledge, 
 be it great or small, but the conceit of knowledge, that 
 misleads men : and the best remedy against this is not 
 ignorance, but the knowing some one thing really well. 
 Thoroughness in one subject enables a man to recog- 
 nize his scantiness of attainment in other subjects, not 
 to add that to have learnt any one thing well helps 
 him in dealing with whatever else he touches, since 
 he learns to discern more quickly what is essential, 
 and to make sure that his knowledge, even if it 
 remains elementary, is not merely superficial. 
 
 Do not be surprised if after advising you to read 
 thoroughly I also advise you to learn to read swiftly. 
 There is no inconsistency, for thoroughness depends 
 not so much on the time spent on a piece of work as 
 upon the intensity wherewith the mind is concentrated 
 
 2C
 
 386 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 upon it. One man will read a book in half as many 
 hours as another, and yet know more of what is in 
 the book ; and this because of his superior power of 
 turning upon it the full stream of his mental energy. 
 Only exceptional minds possess this gift in high 
 measure, as did Macaulay, who read a book so swiftly 
 that he seemed to turn the pages almost without 
 pausing, taking in at one glance all that was in them, 
 and yet carrying away all that was worth remem- 
 bering. But you can cultivate the gift by practice, 
 and it deserves cultivating, for it means better results 
 with less time spent. 
 
 The counsel of swift reading is, of course, appli- 
 cable only to books which are read chiefly for their 
 facts or their views, not to those whose merit lies 
 largely in their style. It would be folly to gallop 
 through Virgil or Keats or Charles Lamb or Heinrich 
 Heine or Chateaubriand. Not in poetry only must 
 one move deliberately, but also in reading fine 'and 
 finished prose, where every word has its fitting place 
 in the sentence, and its due effect in calling up subtle 
 associations and in touching, however delicately, the 
 spring of emotion. 
 
 Finally, let me suggest that you read with inde- 
 pendence. There are various spirits in which a 
 book may be approached. One must not be captious, 
 hunting out mistakes or blemishes. But neither must 
 one submissively assume that the author is always 
 right. No author, however great, is exempt from
 
 SOME HINTS ON READING 387 
 
 error. True it is that modesty is always in order, 
 and deference due to writers of established credit. 
 We must take them as likely to be wiser than we are. 
 Nevertheless, if you wish to profit by your reading, 
 do not forget to scrutinize each argument as it is pre- 
 sented, each inference drawn, each maxim delivered, 
 to see if it be justified by the facts. Sound criticism 
 seeks rather to discover and appreciate merits than to 
 note faults ; but however ready we may be to admire, 
 we must test our author as we go along, and make 
 sure that the view we accept from him is formed not 
 because he has given it but because he has con- 
 vinced us that it is correct. As your forefathers said 
 that perpetual vigilance is the price of freedom, so 
 you may say that it is also the price of learning. In 
 a free country every citizen is responsible for the 
 formation of his opinions, and must take them neither 
 from newspapers nor from platform speeches. So in 
 the domain of knowledge a man will lose half the 
 benefit of his study if he reads in a passively receptive 
 way, neglecting to apply his own judgment. Often 
 he will not be able to test his author. Often when he 
 differs from his author the author will be right, and he 
 wrong in venturing to differ. Nevertheless, such error 
 is better than an indolent acquiescence which brings 
 to bear no independent thought. 
 
 To say this is to repeat in different words the remark 
 that the reading which counts is the reading which, 
 in making a man think, stirs and exercises and polishes
 
 388 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the edge of his mind. The end of study is not to pos- 
 sess knowledge as a man possesses the coins in his 
 purse, but to make knowledge a part of ourselves, that 
 is, to turn knowledge into thought, as the food we eat 
 is turned into the life-giving and nerve-nourishing 
 blood. It is to have a mind so stored and equipped 
 that it shall be to each man, as to the imprisoned sage, 
 his kingdom, of which no one can deprive him. When 
 you have begun by forming the habit of thinking as 
 you read, and exercising your own judgment freely, 
 though modestly, you will find your footing grow 
 firmer and surer as you advance, and will before long 
 know for yourselves what to read and how to read. 
 Life has few greater pleasures.
 
 NATIONAL PARKS THE NEED OF THE 
 FUTURE 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE EIGHTH ANNUAL CONVENTION 
 OF THE AMERICAN Crvic ASSOCIATION, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, 
 NOVEMBER 20, 1912, THE HON. WALTER L. FISHER, SECRE- 
 TARY OF THE INTERIOR, PRESIDING.
 
 NATIONAL PARKS THE NEED OF THE 
 FUTURE 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE EIGHTH ANNUAL CONVENTION 
 OF THE AMERICAN Crvic ASSOCIATION, BALTDJIORE, MARYLAND, 
 NOVEMBER 20, 1912, THE HON. WALTER L. FISHER, SECRE- 
 TARY OF THE INTERIOR, PRESIDING. 
 
 HAVING come here for the first time forty-two years 
 ago, I have known the United States long enough to 
 feel just as much interested in all those questions that 
 relate to your welfare, in city and in country, as if I 
 were one of your own citizens, and I hope you will allow 
 me to speak to you with that freedom which you would 
 allow to one of your citizens. In discussing a subject 
 so far removed from politics or any other controversial 
 field as is that which occupies you this evening, I need 
 not feel those limitations which an official position 
 would otherwise impose. 
 
 There is one thing better even than that City 
 Beautiful to which previous speakers have referred, 
 and that is the Country Beautiful. Before there 
 were cities there was a Country. It holds for us 
 greater and more varied beauties than a city can, and 
 it contains more that appeals to our imagination, and 
 is associated with the sweet recollections of childhood. 
 
 391
 
 392 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 Let me say something about the need for preserving 
 rural beauty. 
 
 I have had in England some experience in dealing 
 with the questions you are discussing, having been 
 for some years chairman of a society for preserving 
 commons and open spaces and public rights of way, 
 and having also served on the committee of another 
 society for securing to the public places of national 
 and historic interest. Thus I was led often to think 
 of what is our duty to the future, and of the benefits 
 which the preservation of places of natural beauty 
 may confer on the community. That is a problem 
 which presents itself, not only in Great Britain, but 
 all over Europe, and now you in America are tend- 
 ing to become what Europe already is. Europe is 
 now a populous, almost overcrowded, continent. You 
 will some day be a populous and ultimately, perhaps, 
 except in those regions which the want of rain con- 
 demns to sterility, a crowded continent, and it is 
 well to take thought at once, before the days of over- 
 crowding confront you, how you will deal with the 
 difficulties which have met us in Europe, so that you 
 may learn as much as possible from our experience, 
 and not find too late that the beauty and primitive 
 simplicity of nature have been snatched from you by 
 private individuals. 
 
 I need not descant upon that which the love of nature 
 is, or at least ought to be, to each and all of us. Of 
 all those pleasures, the power to enjoy which has been
 
 NATIONAL PARKS 393 
 
 implanted in us, the love of nature is the very 
 simplest and best. It is the most easily accessible, it 
 is one which can never be perverted, it is one of which 
 (as the old darky said about the watermelon) you can- 
 not have too much. It lasts from youth to age. We 
 cannot enjoy it in the form of strenuous physical 
 exercise with the same fulness in old age, because our 
 powers of walking, swimming, and climbing are not the 
 same, but we have an ampler and richer enjoyment in 
 some other ways, because, we have the memories and 
 associations of the past and especially of those in whose 
 company we have in bygone days visited beautiful 
 scenes. And there are also the literary associations 
 with which poetry clothes many a wild or lovely spot. 
 The farther a people recedes from barbarism, the more 
 refined are its tastes, the more gentle its manners, the 
 less sordid its aims, so much the greater is its suscepti- 
 bility to every form of beauty, so much the more do 
 the charms of nature appeal to it. Delight in them 
 is a test of civilization. 
 
 As the love of nature is happily increasing among us, 
 it becomes all the more important to find means for 
 safeguarding nature. Population is also increasing, 
 and thus the number of people who desire to enjoy 
 nature is growing larger both absolutely and in 
 proportion to the whole. But, unfortunately, the 
 opportunities for enjoyment, except as regards easier 
 locomotion, are not increasing. The world is circum- 
 scribed, and we feel the narrowness of it more and
 
 394 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 more as all its corners are explored and surveyed. The 
 surface of this little earth of ours is indeed sadly 
 limited, and we cannot add to it. When a man finds 
 his house too small, he builds more rooms on to it, but 
 we cannot add to our earth; we did not make it, it 
 was made for us, and we cannot by taking thought in- 
 crease its dimensions. All that can be done is turn it 
 to the best possible account. 
 
 Now, let us remember that the quantity of natural 
 beauty in the world, that is to say, the regions and 
 spots calculated to give enjoyment in the highest form, 
 are limited, and are being constantly encroached upon. 
 This encroachment takes four forms. There is the de- 
 sire of private persons to appropriate beautiful scenery 
 to themselves by enclosing it in private grounds and 
 debarring the public from access to it. We in England 
 and Scotland have lost some of the most beautiful scen- 
 ery we possess because it has been taken into private 
 estates. There is the habit of excluding people even 
 from land uncultivated and remote from houses for the 
 sake of "sport." A great deal of the finest scenery 
 in Scotland is now practically unapproachable by the 
 pedestrian or the artist or the naturalist because rich 
 people have appropriated it to their own self -regarding 
 purposes and insist on excluding the public. This is 
 especially the case where the motive for exclusion is 
 what is called sport. Sport is understood to mean 
 killing God's creatures for man's amusement, and for 
 the sake of this amusement the killing of deer and
 
 NATIONAL PARKS 395 
 
 birds, an amusement which gives pleasure only to a 
 handful of men very large areas in Britain (and 
 some few also hi other parts of Europe) have been 
 within the last sixty or seventy years closed against 
 all the rest of the nation. 
 
 The enjoyment of natural beauty is further threatened 
 by the operations of the lumberman. He is a force 
 we do not have to fear in Britain, because, timber 
 no longer exists there in sufficient quantity to be an 
 article of economic value to us, but it is a very serious 
 question here. You have prodigious and magnificent 
 forests; there are perhaps no others in the world 
 comparable for extent and splendor with those you 
 possess. These forests, especially those on the Cas- 
 cade range and the Sierra Nevada, are now being cut 
 down rapidly and ruthlessly. You cannot blame the 
 men who are cutting and selling the timber ; timber is 
 needed, and they want to drive their trade, but the 
 process goes on too fast, and much of the charm of 
 nature is lost, while the interests of the future are for- 
 gotten. Superb woods of the huge Sequoia gigantea, 
 the so-called Big Trees, were falling under the axe in 
 the southern part of the Sierra Nevada in 1909, and 
 it would take a thousand years to replace these giants. 
 The same thing is happening in the Appalachian ranges 
 in New England and in the Alleghanies southward 
 from Pennsylvania, a country of great sylvan beauty. 
 In many places, after the trees have been cut off, there 
 is left an inextricable tangle of small boughs and twigs,
 
 396 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 so that when a dry year comes any spark will start a 
 fire, and the fire rages among the dead boughs, and the 
 land is so scorched that for many long years no great 
 trees will rise to replace those that were destroyed. 
 
 Note also that in recent years water power has, 
 since scientific discoveries enabled it to be applied in 
 the form of electricity, become an asset of great com- 
 mercial value. You fortunately have an enormous 
 supply of water power. No one will deny that a great 
 deal of it, perhaps most of it, may be properly used 
 for industrial purposes, but neither can it be doubted 
 that it has been used in some places to the detriment, 
 and even to the ruin, of scenery. It has been used at 
 Niagara, for instance, to such an extent as to change 
 completely the character of what was once the most 
 beautiful waterfall landscape in the whole world. 
 Those of you who did not see that landscape, as I did, 
 forty-two years ago, with the long line of clear green 
 water plunging over the precipice, the foaming splen- 
 dour of the rapids above, and the tossing billows of the 
 Whirlpool Gorge below, and so cannot contrast what 
 is seen now with what was seen in those days, cannot 
 know what a wretched shadow of its former self it has 
 become not so much by the diminution of the flow 
 of the river as by the hideous erections which line the 
 shores and by the smoke from many a chimney that 
 pollutes the air. It is not too late to repair what has 
 been done, and I hope the day will come when the 
 pristine flow of its waters will be restored, and when
 
 NATIONAL PARKS 397 
 
 the devastating agencies will have been removed. That 
 we will leave for a future generation which will have 
 begun to appreciate scenery more highly than men did 
 thirty years ago, when the ruin of which I speak was just 
 beginning. One may say of the enterprising capitalists 
 who have made fortunes out of this national possession 
 what the Emperor Charles the Fifth said to the eccle- 
 siastics of Cordova who had turned the central part of 
 the great Mosque into a church. " You have destroyed 
 something that was absolutely unique in the world in 
 order to do something which could have been equally 
 well done anywhere else." 
 
 Taking all these causes together, you can see how 
 many encroachments there are upon the unique beauty 
 of your country ; and I beg you to consider that, al- 
 though the United States is vast and has mountain and 
 forest regions far more extensive than we can boast in 
 little countries like England or Scotland, even your 
 scenery is not inexhaustible, and, with your great popu- 
 lation and the growing desire to enjoy the beauties of 
 nature, you have not any more than you need. For- 
 tunately, you have made a good beginning hi the work of 
 conservation. You have led the world in the creation 
 of National Parks. I have seen three or four of these, 
 the Yosemite twice, the Yellowstone twice, and the 
 splendid forest region which you have around that 
 mountain which the people of Seattle now insist on 
 calling Mount Rainier, no doubt the name originally 
 given by Vancouver, but which used, when I wan-
 
 398 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 dered through its forests and traversed its glaciers, 
 thirty years ago, to be called by the more sonorous 
 Indian name, Tacoma. And there is also that superb 
 reserve on the north side of the Grand Canon of the 
 Colorado River, as well as Glacier Park in Mon- 
 tana and others of minor extent in other parts 
 of the country. The creation of such National Parks 
 has not only been good for you, but has had the ad- 
 mirable effect of setting other countries to emulate 
 your example. Australia and New Zealand have fol- 
 lowed that example. New Zealand, in the district of 
 its hot springs and geysers, has dedicated to the public 
 a scenic area something similar to your Yellowstone 
 Park geyser region, though not on so extensive a scale ; 
 the people of New South Wales have set off three 
 beautiful National Parks within forty miles of the 
 capital city of Sydney, taking mountain and forest 
 regions of exquisite beauty and keeping them for a 
 source of delight to the growing population of that city. 
 Thus your example is bearing good fruit. I only wish 
 it had come sooner to us in England and Scotland 
 before we had permitted the control of so much of our 
 own best scenery to pass into private ownership. 
 
 One of the things your Association has to care for 
 is not only the provision of more parks, but also the 
 methods to be followed for keeping the existing parks in 
 the best condition. I heard the other day that a ques- 
 tion has been raised as to whether automobiles should 
 be admitted in the Yosemite Valley. May a word be
 
 NATIONAL PARKS 399 
 
 permitted on that subject ? If Adam had known what 
 harm the serpent was going to work, he would have 
 tried to prevent him from finding lodgment in Eden; 
 and if you stop to realize what the result of the auto- 
 mobile will be in that wonderful, that incomparable 
 valley, you will keep it out. The one drawback to 
 enjoyment of the Yosemite Valley in the summer and 
 autumn is the dust. The granite rock becomes in the 
 roads fine sand; even under existing conditions the 
 feet of the horses and the wheels of the vehicles raise 
 a great deal of it, enough to interfere with enjoyment 
 as one drives or walks; but the conditions would 
 become grievously worse with the swift automobile. 
 And, further, the automobile would destroy what may 
 be called the sentimental charm of the landscape. It 
 is not merely that dust clouds would fill the air and coat 
 the foliage, but the whole feeling of the spontaneity 
 and freshness of primitive nature would be marred by 
 this modern invention, with its din and whir and 
 odious smell. Remember, moreover, that one cannot 
 really enjoy fine scenery when travelling at a rate of 
 fifteen to twenty or twenty-five miles an hour. If you 
 want to enjoy the beauty of such landscapes as the Yo- 
 semite presents, you must see them slowly. Fine scenery 
 is seen best of all in walking, when one can stop at any 
 moment and enjoy any special point of view, but 
 it is also agreeably seen in riding or driving, because 
 in moving at a pace of five or six miles an hour you 
 are not going too fast to take in the minor beauties of
 
 400 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the landscape. But travelling faster than that and 
 my experience is that chauffeurs so delight in speed 
 that it is hard to get them to slacken even when you 
 bid them you cannot enjoy the beauty. It was 
 often my duty in the British Parliament to oppose bills 
 conferring powers to build railways through some of the 
 beautiful lake and valley scenery, scenery on a much 
 smaller scale than that of this Continent, but quite as 
 beautiful, which we possess in Britain. The advocates of 
 the bills urged that passengers could look out at the land- 
 scape from the windows of the railroad car. But we 
 pointed out that it is impossible to get the full enjoy- 
 ment of a romantic landscape from a railway window, 
 especially where the beauties are delicate and the scale 
 small. It is different where scenery is on a vast scale, 
 so that the railway is insignificant in comparison, and 
 the objects, rocks or mountains or rivers, are huge. 
 There one may get some pleasure from the big views 
 even as seen from a train, though they are far better 
 seen in walking or driving, but you cannot enjoy the 
 small beauties either of form or of colour. The focus is 
 always changing, and it is impossible to give that kind 
 of enjoyment which a painter, or any devotee of 
 nature, seeks if you are hurrying past at a swift auto- 
 mobile pace. Whoever loves fine scenery has a sort of 
 feeling that he is wasting it when he passes through it 
 on a train instead of on foot or driving in an open 
 vehicle. 
 It will of course be said that the automobile might
 
 NATIONAL PARKS 401 
 
 be allowed to come up to the principal hotels and go 
 no farther. If it is allowed to go so far as that, it will 
 soon be allowed to go wherever else there is a road 
 to bear it. Do not let the serpent enter Eden at all. 
 Our friends who possess automobiles are numerous, 
 wealthy, and powerful, but as all the rest of the North 
 American Continent is open to them they are not 
 gravely injured when one valley, besides parts of 
 Mount Desert Island, is reserved for those who walk 
 or ride. It is no intolerable hardship to be required 
 to forgo in one spot a convenience which none of us 
 had twenty years ago and which the great majority of 
 our fellow-creatures cannot afford to pay for now. At 
 present the railway comes to an end some twelve miles 
 away from the entrance of the Yosemite Park, and 
 the drive up to it behind horses gives far more pleas- 
 ure than a journey by rail or motor car possibly could. 
 There are plenty of roads elsewhere for the lovers of 
 speed and noise, without intruding on these few places 
 where the wood nymphs and the water nymphs ought 
 to be allowed to remain in untroubled seclusion, and 
 their true worshippers to have the landscape to them- 
 selves. 
 
 Let me pay a tribute to the taste and judgment 
 with which, as it seemed to me when I visited the 
 valley in 1909, the park and the hotels in the Yo- 
 semite were being managed. There were no offensive 
 signs, no advertisements of medicines, no other external 
 disfigurements to excite horror, and the inns were all 
 
 3D
 
 402 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 of moderate size, plain but sufficiently comfortable and 
 not more than two stories high. I earnestly hope 
 that the administration will always be continued on 
 these lines, with this same regard for landscape beauty. 
 Now, a word about additional parks. Although you 
 have set a wholesome example in creating those I have 
 mentioned and some others, there are still other places 
 where National Parks are wanted. There is a splendid 
 region in the Alleghanies, a region of beautiful forests, 
 where the tulip trees lift their tall, smooth shafts 
 and graceful heads one hundred and fifty feet or more 
 into the air, a mountain land on the borders of 
 North Carolina and East Tennessee, with romantic 
 river valleys and hills clothed with luxuriant woods, 
 primitive forests standing as they stood before the 
 white man drove the Indians away, high lawns filled 
 with flowers and traversed by sparkling brooks, con- 
 taining everything to delight the heart of the lover 
 of nature. It would be a fine thing to have a tract 
 of three or four hundred thousand acres set apart 
 here for the benefit of the people of the South and 
 Middle Atlantic States, for whom it is a far cry 
 to the Rockies. Then you ought to have one or 
 two additional parks in Colorado and Montana 
 also. As regards the Northeast Atlantic States, what 
 seems to be most wanted is to preserve the forests of 
 the White and Green Mountains. Perhaps it is not 
 necessary to set apart in that country a National Park 
 in the same sense as that which might be thought
 
 NATIONAL PARKS 403 
 
 requisite in the Alleghanies, because the mountains are 
 so high and rocky, and so little ground is suitable for 
 cultivation on the steeper slopes, that it is not likely 
 they will be inclosed, and probably hardly necessary 
 that a public authority should step in to save them. 
 But in some parts of the White Mountains, for instance, 
 it would be an excellent thing to create large forest 
 reserves, where the trees should be under protection 
 of the National or State Government, being cut by 
 them as required, and the forests replanted as they are 
 cut. Recent legislation has already made a beginning 
 with this good work. The sale of the timber would 
 more than cover the costs of management and the in- 
 terest on the purchase money. In this way you would 
 keep a place where the beauty of the woodlands would 
 remain for all generations, and where they would be 
 so cared for that the present danger of forest fires 
 would be averted. 
 
 There is one question that comes very near to you 
 in Baltimore, and also to us in Washington, on which I 
 would like to speak a word. You know there is a great 
 deal of charming forest country between Baltimore 
 and Washington. A good deal of it is forest of the 
 second growth, some few small bits of it are of the first 
 growth ; but even that of the second contains a great 
 number of beautiful, fine-grown trees. The land is 
 of no considerable value, and I believe it could now 
 be purchased at a low price. I have heard it sug- 
 gested that thirty-six dollars an acre would be an aver-
 
 404 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 age price for the land, on which a great quantity of 
 timber remains. Having frequently taken walking 
 excursions from Washington into the country from 
 ten to fifteen or twenty miles around the city, I have 
 been struck with the beauty and profusion of the 
 wild flowers. The flora of that region, being a sort of 
 blend of the flora of the North Atlantic States with 
 some of the plants and flowers which belong to the 
 South Atlantic region, is of great interest to the scien- 
 tific botanist. Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washing- 
 ton are all swiftly growing cities. What could be done 
 better for the inhabitants of these three cities than to 
 secure for their enjoyment a large part of this forest 
 land and set it apart, forever free from private purposes 
 or use of agriculture, and keep it as a forest reserve, 
 to be managed scientifically, so that it should pay for 
 the expense of working it by the timber which could 
 be cut and sold on well-planned scientific lines, and 
 should afford a place where people could go and wan- 
 der about at their own sweet will, just as the old 
 settlers did when they first came here ? Here the auto- 
 mobile would do no harm on the main roads, because 
 there would be plenty of byways and forest footpaths. 
 If the automobilist wants to be whirled along the 
 roads, let him have his way, but keep wide sylvan 
 spaces where those who seek quiet and the sense of 
 communing with nature can go out in the early morn- 
 ing from the city and spend a whole day enjoying one 
 spot after another where nature has provided her
 
 NATIONAL PARKS 405 
 
 simple joys, mingled shade and sunlight falling on the 
 long vistas of the forest, the ripple and the murmur of 
 a streamlet, the rustling of the leaves, and the birds 
 singing among the branches. These gifts can here be 
 offered to the man condemned to spend most of his 
 life in cities, and when nature has provided them in 
 such bountiful measure ought not the opportunity to 
 be taken to secure them? 
 
 Shall we who make these plans be accused of treat- 
 ing this subject in a sentimental way? Well, I con- 
 fess these arguments are not addressed to those who 
 think that man lives by bread alone, or who recognize 
 no values except those measured by dollars and cents. 
 It is because the members of this Association are not 
 of that mind that such considerations are submitted. 
 A century hence there will be in North America, if 
 things go on as they are going on now, far more people, 
 far more lovers of nature, and also fewer places in 
 which nature can be enjoyed. 
 
 Now let me try to give some logical quality to 
 these rambling reflections by submitting a few propo- 
 sitions in order. 
 
 The world seems likely to last a long, long time, and 
 we ought to make provision for the future. 
 
 The population of the world is increasing rapidly, 
 and most rapidly in North America. 
 
 The taste for natural beauty is also increasing, and, 
 as we hope, will continue to increase. 
 
 The places of scenic beauty do not increase, but, on
 
 406 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 the contrary, are in danger of being reduced in num- 
 ber and diminished in quantity. This is due chiefly 
 to the accumulation of wealth. Forests are cut 
 down, water power is appropriated, rich men buy 
 up tracts of land and frequently seek to exclude the 
 public from them. Accordingly, no better service can be 
 rendered to the masses of the people than to preserve 
 for their delight wide spaces of fine scenery. 
 
 We must carefully guard what we have got, and 
 must extend the policy which you have wisely adopted 
 in creating your existing National Parks, by acquiring 
 and preserving further areas for the perpetual enjoy- 
 ment of the people. 
 
 Let us think of the future. We are trustees for the 
 future. We are not here for ourselves alone. All 
 these gifts were not given to us to be used by one gen- 
 eration, or with the thought of one generation only 
 before our minds. We are the heirs of those who have 
 gone before, and charged with the duty we owe to 
 those who come after, and there is no duty which seems 
 more clearly incumbent on us than that of handing on 
 to them undiminished opportunities and facilities for 
 the enjoyment of some of the best gifts that the 
 Creator has bestowed upon his children.
 
 ADDRESS TO THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY or NEW YORK, 
 DECEMBER 14, 1912.
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED 
 STATES 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY OF NEW YORK, 
 DECEMBER 14, 1912. 
 
 IT is a real pleasure to be the guest of The Penn- 
 sylvania Society. Every student of history must be 
 profoundly interested in the annals of the State of 
 Pennsylvania, not merely in respect of its famous 
 founder, one of the most remarkable Englishmen of 
 the seventeenth century, but also because it is in a 
 sense typical of this whole country. Your State 
 is remarkable for having been from very early days 
 the seat of three different elements of population 
 which have gradually become blent, yet not so blent 
 as to lose traces of their former diversity. Three sets of 
 colonists long ago entered and settled down in and made 
 the prosperity and greatness of Pennsylvania in its 
 formative years, just as in days far later many different 
 races came hither across the sea and added themselves 
 to the original Anglo-Saxon population who had been 
 the first settlers of this eastern coast of North America. 
 Here in Pennsylvania you had the English Quakers, 
 then the Germans, who came in a little later, many of 
 them also pious men belonging to various German 
 
 409
 
 410 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 sects, and, lastly, the Scotch-Irish, people very unlike 
 the other two, except in their being also pious, though 
 in a quite different way. The Quakers and the 
 Germans fulfilled the dictum that the meek shall 
 inherit the earth, because they took up and retained 
 all the best lands. The Scotch-Irish, who came last, 
 were obliged to content themselves with the moun- 
 tains and the Indians, and they braced themselves 
 to deal with both. They developed a manly, bold, pug- 
 nacious type of pioneer and frontiersman, and they 
 have retained the old character in your western hills 
 just like their relatives in the northeastern parts of 
 Ireland. Plenty of the old combative spirit in both 
 regions. They had a lively time in early Pennsylvania, 
 for these three sections were divided not only by politi- 
 cal feelings and by agricultural rivalries, but also by reli- 
 gious and ecclesiastical differences. In those days diver- 
 gences of doctrine cut pretty deep and roused far more 
 feeling than they would to-day, even in the pacific 
 breasts of members of the Society of Friends. An 
 occasion is recorded on which a Quaker went so far 
 that he was with difficulty restrained from discharging 
 a gun, which unluckily happened to be in his hands, 
 into the body of a Presbyterian, having apparently 
 been incensed by an intimation on the part of the 
 Calvinist that predestination was going to give that 
 particular Quaker no prospect of felicity in the world 
 to come. 
 I must, however, pass away from the State of Penn-
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 411 
 
 sylvania and its fortunes, to the subject allotted to me 
 the Constitution of the United States ; a small 
 subject indeed, is it not ? and easy to deal with in the 
 few minutes at my command. 
 
 Let me begin by one remark, about which there will 
 be no difference of opinion : It was a most extraordi- 
 nary body of men that gathered together one hun- 
 dred a ad twenty-five years ago to frame the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States. Never did such a group of 
 brilliant and powerful intellects, men trained by an 
 experience of affairs, assemble together .for so great an 
 undertaking as the framing of the Constitution for a 
 nation. And the best proof of the success which at- 
 tended their efforts is to be found in the fact that 
 the Constitution which they framed for a nation that 
 then only a little exceeded 3,000,000 people has been 
 found now to fit the needs of 93,000,000. It may not 
 fit those needs perfectly, but it is extraordinary that it 
 should fit them at all. 
 
 In that group there were three men, Washington, 
 Franklin, and Hamilton, whose fame belongs to the 
 history of the world, and one of those three, Benjamin 
 Franklin, came as a delegate from the State of Penn- 
 sylvania. Among the others, eminent men, even if 
 they did not attain unto those first three, one of the 
 most eminent came also as a delegate from the State 
 of Pennsylvania. I mean James Wilson ; a Scotsman 
 from Fife who had few equals and possibly no superior 
 in that Convention, as respects either the acuteness
 
 412 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 of his mind, or his penetration and sagacity ; a man to 
 whom some of the best features of the Constitution 
 were due, and who, by his speeches in your Pennsyl- 
 vania convention held to consider the draft prepared 
 by the Convention, added an illuminating commentary 
 upon many provisions of the Constitution, and no doubt 
 contributed materially to its adoption, both in your 
 State and in the other States of the Union. 
 
 Now, I am under certain restraints here. I re- 
 member a time in England when young Liberal orators 
 used to glorify the British Constitution as " the para- 
 gon of the world," "the perfection of human wisdom," 
 nor did the other party abound any less in praise, for 
 each party claimed that the Constitution embodied its 
 own distinctive principles. So here too both parties and 
 both sections of the country vied in their admiration 
 of your Constitution, for both insisted that the ven- 
 erable instrument, if correctly interpreted, supported 
 its own tenets. But in England those paeans of praise 
 are now seldom heard ; and here in America the Con- 
 stitution seems to be drifting down the stream of time 
 into the neighbourhood of the icebergs of controversy. 
 Accordingly I must not allow myself to approach any 
 questions which are becoming issues between parties. I 
 cannot leap over the wire fence which incloses the rep- 
 resentative of another country and, like my distin- 
 guished friend, the Attorney-General, prance and gallop 
 far and wide in the open plains of politics. From any 
 discussion of whether and how the Constitution ought
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 413 
 
 to be amended, I must refrain, but I am free to speak 
 of what it has been in the past, and may examine the 
 working of certain usages that have grown up under it 
 which neither party is concerned to defend or to attack 
 and which are now exposing it to unmerited censure. 
 
 The whole history of your country since 1789 has been 
 a commentary upon the services rendered by the Con- 
 stitution. The greatest of all the services it could ren- 
 der and did render, was the spirit which it implanted in 
 the hearts of your people. Perhaps I ought not to say 
 "implanted," for the spirit was already there, and the 
 function of the Constitution was to confirm and develop 
 it. Your ancestors brought from England the prin- 
 ciple of deference for law, and the sentiment which 
 desired to unite Liberty with Order, but that spirit 
 was immensely strengthened and its roots deepened by 
 the provisions of the Constitution, which combined, 
 as no instrument had ever done before, a respect for 
 the settled rule of law, with a recognition of the sov- 
 ereignty of the people. It showed how the popular 
 will can express itself through prescribed forms, with 
 such due regard for and observance of legal methods 
 as to avoid the dangers of sudden impulses and hasty 
 action, while also in such a way as ultimately to give 
 complete effect to the sober and deliberate purpose of 
 the people. 
 
 Some critics, both here and in Europe, have made it a 
 reproach against the Constitution that it did not 
 avert the War of Secession, and others have gone so
 
 414 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 far as to suggest that its failing to either recognize or 
 deny the right of a State or States to secede was itself 
 a proximate cause of the war by giving each party an 
 arguable legal case. To this criticism the answer is 
 that if such a provision had been placed in the Consti- 
 tution there might probably never have been any 
 Constitution at all. Whether any legal instrument 
 could have prevented a split and a conflict where eco- 
 nomic differences were so marked, where each section 
 of the nation misunderstood the other, and where pas- 
 sion had in one of them risen to white heat, may well 
 be doubted. Legal forms may do much, but cannot 
 do everything. So far as we can now judge, there was 
 only one thing would have enabled the South and the 
 North to hold together, and that thing was unattain- 
 able. It has probably struck some of you that had the 
 United States remained in political connection with the 
 mother country, there would have been no Civil War. 
 South and North fought because there was no one to 
 mediate between and try to reconcile them. Had they 
 been part of a British nation there might have been 
 indeed, would almost certainly have been mediation. 
 The question of slavery, if indeed slavery had been still 
 in existence, would no doubt have been a question for 
 themselves to settle, for long before 1861 they would 
 have been enjoying a self-government at least as large 
 as Canada and Australia now enjoy under the British 
 flag. But as members of one British people, both 
 North and South would have been kept in union as
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 415 
 
 parts of a larger whole, and the influence of the rest 
 of the British people at home would have been suffi- 
 cient to soften antagonisms and bring about a peaceable 
 solution. 
 
 The Constitution could not avert the Civil War, but 
 it maintained the ideal of national unity all through the 
 Civil War, and it enabled the wounds which the war had 
 made to be subsequently healed with a rapidity and 
 completeness which amazed the world. During and for 
 some time after the Civil War it rendered a service 
 such as no legal instrument had ever rendered to a peo- 
 ple before. You had enormous difficulties then. The 
 difficulties during the war, when it was all that the 
 President could do to avoid putting a strain on the 
 Constitution, were hardly more alarming than those 
 that came later in that sad and troublous period of 
 reconstruction through which your Southern brothers 
 passed. The situation would have been almost hope- 
 less but for the fact that the Constitution laid down 
 the lines upon which each Southern State should be 
 ultimately restored to self-government and again take 
 its place as a self-governing member of the Union. 
 When Reconstruction was over, and when, in and after 
 1877, more normal relations were reestablished in the 
 South, the Constitution again became a rallying point 
 for the patriotic sentiment of the whole people and 
 for their devotion to the principles which had originally 
 made it strong and your nation great. Your National 
 unity, never so conspicuous or so firmly entrenched as
 
 4i6 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 it is to-day, is largely due to the fact that you all have 
 revered and trusted and walked by your now venerable 
 Constitution. 
 
 True it is that all constitutions must needs be sus- 
 ceptible of such amendments or developments as are 
 needed to adapt them to the changing circumstances 
 which time brings with them. As Bacon says, " That 
 which man changeth not for the better Time changeth 
 for the worse." But you will also observe that all 
 constitutions, and all systems of free governments 
 everywhere, require something to steady them. Now, 
 we in England, who have no documentary consti- 
 tution placed above the other laws of the country, 
 where every arrangement of the government can 
 be at any moment changed by the power of the 
 people acting through their representatives in Parlia- 
 ment, we in England have steadying forces in the 
 existence of long traditions, and of powerful classes 
 who have held great influence throughout the whole 
 nation. In France there has been and is a steady- 
 ing influence in the existence of a large number of 
 small landed proprietors attached to the rights of 
 property. In Germany a similar influence may be 
 found, not only in the presence of a strong monarchy 
 and of a landholding class which has commanded the 
 deference of the people for centuries, but also in an 
 exceedingly able and highly trained civil service, 
 which administers public affairs. You in this country 
 have neither the social classes of Continental Europe
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 417 
 
 nor have you the power of a civil service like that of 
 Germany. But as you also need some steadying ele- 
 ment, you have found it in the respect for your Con- 
 stitution. It has made your traditions. It has been 
 revered as a sort of palladium of ordered liberty. 
 Whatever changes you now think fit to make in 
 your Constitution you will, I am sure, never forget 
 that ballast as well as sails are needed if a ship is to 
 pursue with safety her course over seas that are some- 
 times stormy. 
 
 There are, as you all know, two chief parts or 
 branches of the Federal Constitution that which 
 creates the system of National Government, with its 
 three departments, and that which defines the relation 
 of the National Government to the governments and 
 people of the States. Of these two the former part, 
 which establishes the frame of National Government, 
 has been criticized, and in some points unfavourably, 
 both by your own statesmen and by foreign observers, 
 much more than has the latter part, which determines 
 the relations between the National Government and the 
 States. Now let me ask you to note that these criti- 
 cisms upon the practical working of the frame of 
 national government are really in the main criticisms 
 not of the Constitution itself but of usages which have 
 grown up under it but are no part of it and could be 
 changed at any moment by Congress or by the action 
 of the people themselves. 
 
 One of the complaints most frequently heard is that 
 
 2E
 
 418 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 members of Congress have been tending to become too 
 much mere local delegates, rather than members of the 
 great council of the Nation, and that they are so active 
 in furthering the interest each of his own constituency 
 and his own State, that they think too little, and care 
 too little, for the general interests of the whole people, 
 though it is itself more than ever One People. If the 
 facts are as these censors assert, and you can judge 
 better than I whether the censors are right, what is 
 the cause ? Not any provision of the Constitution but 
 the habit which has prevailed and prevails to-day, of 
 confining the choice of a member of Congress to persons 
 resident in the particular Congressional district, and the 
 habit which the people of the district have formed of ex- 
 pecting Congress to appropriate money for local pur- 
 poses. Such usages are no parts of democracy, for there 
 are other democratic countries in which they do not 
 prevail. They inevitably tend to narrow a member's 
 views as well as his activities, and they prevent an 
 able man who by some turn of the political tide has 
 lost his seat in the place where he resides from obtaining 
 a seat elsewhere. Nearly all your own leading men, as 
 well as foreign observers, think that you lose immensely 
 by the exclusion from Congress of so many of your 
 strongest intellects, and they regret the persistence 
 of the habit. Take the case of such a statesman, 
 eminent both by his talents and by the purity and eleva- 
 tion of his character, as the late Mr. Carl Schurz, who 
 after he left Missouri to settle in New York City could
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 419 
 
 never find entrance to Congress. In Britain, more 
 democratic in most respects than this country, nearly 
 all the eminent statesmen of the last sixty years have 
 represented constituencies in which they did not re- 
 side, and represented them quite as efficiently as resi- 
 dents could have done. This is common in Australia 
 also, a country more democratic than either the United 
 States or Great Britain. 
 
 Another feature of the present working of your 
 National Government which I have heard constantly 
 criticized by thoughtful American statesmen is that 
 the separation of the legislative and executive depart- 
 ments has been carried too far by the custom which 
 does not allow the ministers of the President access 
 to the floor of Congress to speak and to be interro- 
 gated there. Now this custom has grown up inde- 
 pendently of the Constitution. It is not a part of the 
 Constitution, and Congress has therefore the power 
 at any time to alter if it should think fit. Foreign 
 observers who are accustomed to the methods of 
 the free countries of Europe think that you are sac- 
 rificing a valuable means of bringing your legislative 
 and your executive authorities into a natural and 
 easy and constant harmony by your forbidding them 
 to come together in the way I have mentioned. They 
 are allowed so to come together in Switzerland. Swit- 
 zerland has a federal constitution like yours. Switzer- 
 land, like you, does not permit the members of the 
 Administration, which there consists of a body of
 
 420 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 seven persons called the Federal Council, to be elected 
 to and sit in either House of its federal legislature ; but 
 it permits them and encourages them to be present in 
 either House, and when I have been attending the 
 debates of the federal legislature in Switzerland I have 
 seen the members of the Federal Council, sometimes 
 in the one House, sometimes in the other, interrogated 
 by members upon questions relating to the adminis- 
 tration of their departments, answering those questions, 
 giving the fullest information upon every executive 
 act done or perhaps even contemplated by them, and 
 at the same time addressing the members of the legis- 
 lature upon the measures that were pending there, 
 stating their views, telling them what was wanted, in 
 the way of money or otherwise, to increase the efficiency 
 of the several executive departments, and answering 
 any objections which the members of the legislature 
 could advance. No Swiss doubts that such a plan is 
 for the good of Switzerland. The Swiss Government, 
 take it all in all, seems to be the most successful and 
 one of the most stable among the democratic govern- 
 ments of the world, and could not possibly work as 
 smoothly and successfully as it does work but for this 
 practice and, as you know, the plan of admitting 
 Cabinet Ministers to speak in Congress has been rec- 
 ommended by many of your own statesmen, as, for 
 instance, by President Garfield. 
 
 Any proposal for the admission of Cabinet Ministers 
 to the floor of either House, to be questioned there
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 421 
 
 and to speak there, well deserves to be considered 
 as a possible improvement in the conduct of busi- 
 ness by Congress. To suggest that the Constitution 
 itself ought to be so altered as to permit ministers 
 to be elected to and vote in Congress would be quite 
 another matter, for it would raise different and far 
 wider issues. It would mean a change in your whole 
 scheme of government. Our English system what 
 we call our Cabinet and Parliamentary System is no 
 doubt a far more prompt and a far more effective way 
 of bringing the will of the people to bear upon the 
 government than your system is here. As I have 
 already observed, we in Great Britain are in reality far 
 more of a democracy "than you are. The will of the 
 people declared in an election of the members of the 
 House of Commons, is able to act more quickly, more 
 promptly, with a more tremendous and compelling 
 force, in Britain than it can here. We do not have 
 your checks and balances. But it may well be doubted 
 whether the British system, however it may work with 
 I us, would be a safe one for a country so vast and varied 
 in its parts as yours. There is, however, every reason 
 to think that Congress itself would find a great advan- 
 tage in having the Ministers of the President before it 
 on the floor, so that it could address questions to them, 
 as ministers are daily questioned in our Parliament. 
 British ministers are obliged to tell Parliament every- 
 thing that is being done in the course of our adminis- 
 tration which it is not inconsistent with the public
 
 422 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 service to disclose. They must answer all questions put 
 to them about what they are doing, and how they are 
 doing it, and why they are doing it. It is good for them. 
 Like other ministers, I have, when a member of the 
 British cabinet, sometimes found the process tiresome. 
 But I never doubted that it was a good thing for 
 everybody concerned. Ministers are all the better for 
 having to stand that ordeal. You here would soon 
 find the benefit of it. Every minister would feel it to 
 be an advantage and a help to him in his work if he 
 were able, when his departmental experience has shown 
 him that some measure is urgently needed, to come to 
 Congress and argue the matter out with either House 
 on its own floor and tell them, not by written words, 
 but by the spoken word, which is far more effective, 
 why he thinks the measure is needed and what are the 
 arguments by which he would support it. And you 
 can all see how much Congress would gain by the more 
 thorough knowledge of the workings and the needs of 
 the departments which it would gain. 
 
 Others conceive that the special functions of the 
 Senate or perhaps the machinery by which these 
 functions are exercised, require to be reconsidered in 
 view of the fact that when they were assigned to it 
 the Senate had only twenty-six members, whereas it 
 has now ninety-six. If anything of that kind needs 
 to be done, it could probably be done without altering 
 the Constitution, just as a usage which had come to be 
 recognized by common consent as being one of the
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 423 
 
 greatest evils in the working of the National Govern- 
 ment was dealt with. I refer to the Spoils System. 
 That system arose outside the Constitution. It has 
 been now much reduced and indeed seems likely to be 
 soon expunged by measures requiring no change in the 
 Constitution. So also that scheme of national nomi- 
 nating conventions, which now seems likely to be 
 superseded by a system of nominating primaries, arose 
 altogether outside the Constitution, and had never 
 even any statutory character. 
 
 As regards the other part of your Constitution, that 
 which concerns the relations of the States with the 
 National Government, you may rest happy in the 
 thought that it has received the almost unqualified 
 admiration of the whole world. I will not say that 
 there may not be minor points in which it is susceptible 
 of improvement. Probably there are some directions 
 in which the progress of time has made it desirable to 
 expand a little the legislative authority of Congress. 
 Many have argued, for instance, in favour of extending 
 that authority to the establishment of a uniform law 
 of marriage and divorce. Others would extend the 
 range of federal authority over railroads, and would 
 recognize in the National Government a much longer 
 power of creating and supervising corporations. Others 
 have indicated the need for some more prompt and 
 effective method than now exists of securing the due 
 observance by each and every State of treaty obliga- 
 tions undertaken by the National Government. There
 
 424 UNIVERSITY AND HISTORICAL ADDRESSES 
 
 may be points in which the State authorities them- 
 selves could be induced to desire that it should be 
 more easy to pass uniform legislation for the whole 
 country. 
 
 Still, looking at the general federal scheme in a 
 broad way, can anything be more clear, can anything 
 be more rational in theory or more convenient in appli- 
 cation to practice than the general principles by which 
 the relations of the States and the National Govern- 
 ment have been fixed and determined ? The prin- 
 ciples are as clear, as philosophically conceived, and as 
 precisely expressed as it is possible for the human in- 
 tellect to have conceived and expressed them, and they 
 have been worked out by your successive Administra- 
 tions, by Congress, and most of all by your Judicial 
 Bench, with an infinite and admirable delicacy in detail. 
 The best testimony to the excellence of your system is 
 to be found in the influence that it has had upon other 
 countries. It is an interesting fact that your Consti- 
 tution and ours have been, in their general lines, the 
 patterns of all modern free constitutions. The British 
 Constitution has been taken as being more or less a 
 model by all the free governments that have been 
 established in Europe and in the British Colonies 
 since 1815. Your Constitution has been taken as a 
 model imperfect as some of the reproductions have 
 been by the republican governments that have been 
 established in every part of the western world, that 
 is to say, in South America and in Central America,
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 425 
 
 and it has also had a profound influence not only on 
 the latest constitution of Switzerland, that of 1874, 
 but also upon the federal constitutions of Canada, of 
 Australia, and of South Africa. 
 
 It was the glory of our two countries to have held 
 the torch of liberty aloft in days when there were 
 hardly any other free governments in the world and 
 when the dumb populations lay prostrate at the feet 
 of arbitrary power. And it has been the glory of your 
 country in later days to render another great service 
 to humanity, by showing how it is possible to establish 
 and maintain national unity over the vast spaces of a 
 continent, and at the same time to secure the fullest 
 development of self-government in State, in county, 
 and in city over those vast spaces. That was a problem 
 which would have been deemed hopeless and insoluble 
 a century and a half ago, but the example of your suc- 
 cess has now set your system on high as a beacon for 
 the world to follow. Your Constitution, by the ex- 
 ample it has set of its working and by the halo of 
 fame which now surrounds it, has become one of the 
 vital and vitalizing forces of the modern world. Let us 
 honour the group of illustrious men who, meeting in 
 Philadelphia one hundred and twenty-five years ago, 
 rendered this incomparable and enduring service not 
 to you only, but also to all mankind.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acton, Lord, as a historical writer, 352; 
 method followed by, in reading, 
 382-383. 
 
 Alleghany Mountains, desirability of a 
 national park in the, 401402. 
 
 Allegiance to Humanity, address on, 
 247 ff. 
 
 Allen, Ethan, 272. 
 
 America, as the land of hope to Euro- 
 peans, 36. 
 
 American Civic Association, address 
 before the, 389 ff . 
 
 American Institute of Architects, ad- 
 dresses to the, 171 ff., 181 ff. 
 
 Anarchy, the enemy of true liberty, 14 ; 
 principle of the Common Law which 
 is a safeguard against, 46-47. 
 
 Ancient Literature, address on the Study 
 of, 317 ff. 
 
 Anecdotes, use of, in public speaking, 
 290291. 
 
 Antrim, Scotch-Irish in, 217-218. 
 
 Appeal in criminal cases in England, 64. 
 
 Architecture and History, address on, 
 iSiff. 
 
 Architecture, advantages and disad- 
 vantages of the profession of, 184- 
 186; comparison of, with the study 
 of law, 186-187; affiliation of, with 
 history, 187-188; European monu- 
 ments of, 189-190 ; present lack of 
 originality in, 191-194; examples 
 of, and magnificence of conception 
 of, in America, 194-195. 
 
 Aristotle, critically exact spirit found 
 in, 349. 
 
 Armaments, the increase in military 
 and naval, 251-253. 
 
 Art, appreciation of pleasures of, to be 
 derived from literary training, 28-29. 
 
 Athletics, excessive passion for, at uni- 
 versities, 240-242. 
 
 Augustine, St., 129. 
 
 Australia, national parks in, 398. 
 Automobiles in national parks, 398-401, 
 
 404. 
 Avila, architecture of churches of, 188. 
 
 B 
 
 Bacon, Sir Francis, 3. 
 
 Balboa, 269. 
 
 Bancroft, George, 345. 
 
 Bible, decreasing familiarity with the, 
 327-328. 
 
 Big Trees of the Sierra Nevada, preser- 
 vation of, 395. 
 
 Boniface, St., 129. 
 
 Books, the choice of, 367 ff. 
 
 Bracton, early legal writer, 66. 
 
 Brevity in speeches, 295-296. 
 
 Bright, John, as a speaker, 293-294; 
 
 Brooks, Phillips, rapidity of, in speak- 
 ing, 293. 
 
 Brougham, Lord, on fluency in public 
 speaking, 284. 
 
 Browning, Robert, the reading of works 
 of, 374- 
 
 Brunton, Miss, Scottish authoress, 374. 
 
 Buckle's "History of Civilization," 356. 
 
 Burke, Edmund, 222. 
 
 Business, devotion to, of the normal 
 American, 319-320; the study of 
 ancient literature as an offset to 
 absorption in, 338. 
 
 Cabinet, the, in English legislative 
 system, 94. 
 
 Cabinet members, admission of, to 
 floor of houses of Congress recom- 
 mended, 419-421. 
 
 Cabots, the, 269. 
 
 Cairns, Lord, a Scotch-Irishman, 220. 
 
 Cairo, seat of learning at, 154. 
 
 California, University of, address de- 
 livered at, 227 ff. 
 
 427
 
 428 
 
 INDEX 
 
 California, a country as well as a state, 
 229; progress of, in material develop- 
 ment, 231-232; growth of cities in, 
 at expense of the country, 235 ; great- 
 ness of the future possible for, 244- 
 
 245- 
 
 Calhoun, John C., 215. 
 
 Calvinism and the Scottish race, 215. 
 
 "Cambridge Modern History," lack 
 of superfluous literary ornament in 
 the, 351. 
 
 Cambridge University, beginnings of, 
 153-154; ideals and aims of, 157-160. 
 
 Canova, work of, in sculpture, 174-175 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, tendency to public 
 speaking deplored by, 283 ; mingled 
 scientific and literary treatment in 
 historical work of, 352. 
 
 Certainty, characteristic of, in the Com- 
 mon Law, 47-48. 
 
 Champlain, Lake, address on the Ter- 
 centenary of the Discovery of, 265 ff. 
 
 Champlain, Samuel de, 8; fine char- 
 acter of, 269270; aims of, in ex- 
 plorations, 273; Lake Champlain 
 a lasting memorial to, 279. 
 
 Charlemagne, character of mission 
 work of, 129. 
 
 Chattanooga, address before Missionary 
 Convention at, 125 ff. 
 
 Chicago, boldness of architectural plans 
 for, 195. 
 
 Chicago University Address, 15 ff. 
 
 Christianity, causes retarding world- 
 wide spread of, 137 ff. See Missions. 
 
 Cicero, discourse of, on poetry, 284. 
 
 Cities, life in, contrasted with life in 
 the country, 235-236; necessity of 
 sound political conditions in, 237- 
 238; opportunities open to, for work 
 for citizens, 238. 
 
 Citizens, dependence of strength of a 
 state on character of its, 37-38. 
 
 Civil War, effects of the American, as 
 felt by Virginia, n; the Constitution 
 and the, 413-416. 
 
 Classical studies, the purpose of, 319 ff. 
 
 Classics, time to be devoted to reading 
 of, 378. 
 
 Clearness in public speaking, 286-287. 
 
 Colonial type of architecture, 192. 
 
 Columba, St., 129. 
 
 Columbus, Christopher, the spirit which 
 actuated, 8, 269. 
 
 Common Law, address on the Influ- 
 ence of National Character and His- 
 torical Environment on Develop- 
 ment of the, 41 ff . ; distinguishing 
 qualities of the, 45 ff. ; conception 
 of rights of the individual citizen, 
 45-46; recognition of the state and 
 the executive as clothed with the 
 authority of the whole community, 
 46-47 ; the principles of precision, 
 definiteness, and exactitude in, 47- 
 49; respect for forms of legal pro- 
 ceedings, 49 ; love of justice and fond- 
 ness for subtle distinctions, 49-50; 
 influence on, of qualities of race of 
 men who built it up, 51 ff.; slavery 
 under the, 59-60 ; the jury as a feature 
 of, 60-62; technicality of the older, 
 62-64; causes leading to growth 
 of system of Equity, 64; effect of 
 England's insular position on char- 
 acter of, 65-67; features of, derived 
 from Roman law, 67; reaction of, 
 on character of people who created 
 it, 68-69; importance of, for the 
 political system of the United States, 
 69-70; essentially identical character 
 of, in England and America, 70-71 ; 
 a main factor in the greatness of the 
 nation, 7172. 
 
 Congress, customs of, open to discus- 
 sion, 417422. 
 
 Constitution, Virginia's part in fram- 
 ing of, lo-n ; address on the, 407 ff. ; 
 the men who framed the, 411-412; 
 decrease in unqualified admiration 
 for, 412; influence of, in the Civil 
 War, 413-415 ; as a steadying ele- 
 ment in the state, 416-417; criti- 
 cisms of, in the main criticisms of 
 usages grown up around, 417 ff. 
 
 Cooperative methods among farmers, 
 237- 
 
 Corporations, legislative difficulties 
 raised by, 97. 
 
 Cortez, Hernando, 8. 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 4. 
 
 D 
 
 Dante, loss from reading, in a trans- 
 lation, 335-336. 
 Darwin, Charles, 197. 
 Dead languages, the so-called, 28.
 
 INDEX 
 
 429 
 
 Declaration of Independence, the Ameri- 
 can, log, no. 
 
 Delivery, importance of, in public speak- 
 ing, 202-293. 
 
 De Soto, 269. 
 
 "Dictionary of National Biography," 
 style followed in, 350-351. 
 
 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 71. 
 
 Down, Scotch-Irish in, 217. 
 
 Dryden, amount of, necessary to read, 
 
 374- 
 
 Dulness, avoidance of, in public speak- 
 ing, 291-292. 
 
 E 
 
 Ecclesiastical history, importance of 
 study of, 342-343. 
 
 Education, effects of modern science 
 as felt by, 1718; comparison of 
 value of scientific and of literary, 19; 
 comparison of scientific and of literary, 
 as to intellectual enjoyment in later 
 life, 20 ff. ; effect of, on man in re- 
 gard to politics, 116-117; effect of, 
 on public spirit, 121-122; devotion 
 to truth to be instilled by, 122-123, 
 168 ; specialization in, 303 ff . ; stimu- 
 lation of curiosity the chief end of, 
 312; one main use of a university 
 education to arouse interests and tastes 
 outside of business, 320, 338. 
 
 England, in the i7th century, 34; 
 adventurers and explorers of, con- 
 trasted with those of Spain, 9 ; present- 
 day pride of, in American republic, 
 12-13; system of Parliamentary 
 legislation in, 76 ff. ; the universities 
 of, 157-160; restoration of ecclesi- 
 astical edifices in, 180-191 ; honour 
 paid to the memory of Lincoln in, 
 200, 203 ; steadying forces in the 
 political structure of, 416. 
 
 English land law, 57. 
 
 Equity, Common Law and the system of, 
 64-65. 
 
 Ethics, as a field for intellectual enjoy- 
 ment, 26-27. 
 
 Explorers, distinguishing qualities of 
 the early, 89, 268-269. 
 
 Fiction, the reading of, 374-377. 
 Fluency, advantages and dangers of, 
 in public speaking, 284-285. 
 
 Forests, preservation of American, 277, 
 395. 
 
 France, legislative method in, 95; 
 steadying forces in social and political 
 structure of, 416. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 346, 411. 
 
 Freedom, value placed on, by settlers 
 of Virginia, 9; relation of, to a peo- 
 ple's ability to govern themselves, 
 114115; necessity of, in university 
 teaching, 164. 
 
 Freeman, E. A., 345, 348. 
 
 Friendships, as one gam of college life, 
 167-168. 
 
 Froude, J. A., 346. 
 
 Fulton, Robert, a Scotch-Irishman, 216. 
 
 Gall, St., missionary to the Germans, 129. 
 
 Galloway, Scotch-Irish in, 219. 
 
 Gallon, Francis, manual compiled by, 
 188. 
 
 Gardiner, S. R., 348. 
 
 General education and special educa- 
 tion, 301-315. 
 
 Germany, universities of, 156-157; 
 settlers from, in Pennsylvania, 409- 
 410; influences which are steadying 
 elements in, 416. 
 
 Gibbon, Edward, 345. 
 
 Glacier Park, Montana, 398. 
 
 Gladstone, William, 197. 
 
 Grammar, use of, as a study, 321. 
 
 Grand Cafion of the Colorado, 397- 
 398. 
 
 Great Britain, classes of legal enactments 
 in, 77 ff. 
 
 Great men, value of, as national posses- 
 sions, 203-204. 
 
 Greek, the study of, 319, 320, 321, 
 323, 324 ff. 
 
 Green, J. R., historical style of, 352- 
 353- 
 
 Green Mountain Boys, the, 271-272. 
 
 Green Mountains, forest preserves in 
 the, 402. 
 
 Guicciardini, historical style of, 351. 
 
 Guizot, French historian, 347. 
 
 H 
 
 Hague Court, the, 250. 
 Hallam, Henry, 345. 
 Hamilton, Alexander, 411.
 
 430 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Hampden, John, 4. 
 
 Heidelberg University, founding of, 154. 
 
 Henry, Patrick, 215. 
 
 Herodotus, an originator of historical 
 composition, 343-344- 
 
 History, intellectual enjoyment from 
 study of, 26; risk of too close atten- 
 tion to dry details and exact methods 
 in, 30; address on Architecture and, 
 181 fi. ; architecture the interpreter 
 of, 187; specialization in study of, 
 305-306; wherein lies the profit of 
 knowledge of, 320; literature the 
 best source of knowledge of, 320-330; 
 the classical age of Greece and Rome 
 as an introduction to, 330331 ; ad- 
 dress on the Writing and Teaching 
 of, 339 ff. ; present zeal for, contrasted 
 with earlier lack of interest at uni- 
 versities, 341342 ; importance of 
 study of ecclesiastical, 342-343 ; the 
 scientific treatment of, 343 ff. ; He- 
 rodotus and Thucydides models for 
 writers of, 334; so-called literary 
 school of writers of, 344-346 ; scientific 
 school of writers represented by 
 Niebuhr, Guizot, Ranke, etc., 346- 
 349; causes leading to scientific 
 handling of, 348-349; dryness of the 
 modern scientific writers of, 349- 
 350; examples of mingled literary 
 and scientific treatment of, 352-353 ; 
 scientific school of, represented by 
 Buckle and Herbert Spencer, 354- 
 359; qualities demanded for the 
 highest kind of work in, 363-364. 
 
 Hudson, Henry, 268, 273. 
 
 Imagination, necessity of, in writing of 
 history, 364; cultivation of, by read- 
 ing fiction and poetry, 376-377. 
 
 Independence of mind in reading, 386- 
 387- 
 
 India, American missions in, 135. 
 
 Individual, rights of the, under the 
 Common Law, 45-46. 
 
 Initiative, the, 115. 
 
 Iowa, State University of, address to, 
 281 ff. 
 
 Ireland, tribute to great men originating 
 in, 173, 222-223; proposal to settle 
 Dutch in, 208; recent improvements 
 effected in, 223-224. 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, 215. 
 
 Jamestown Island, address delivered 
 
 at, i ff. 
 Japan, relations of, with United States, 
 
 258. 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 8 ; address on, 107 ff . 
 Jentryns, Sir Henry, 88. 
 Johns Hopkins University, address at, 
 
 299 ff. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 221. 
 Jokes in public speaking, 290-291. 
 Jonson, Ben, 3. 
 Judgment, freedom of, in reading, 386- 
 
 387. 
 Jury, the, as a feature of the Common 
 
 Law, 6062. 
 
 Kelvin, Lord, a Scotch-Irishman, 220- 
 
 221. 
 
 Kennedy, Lord Justice, 71. 
 Kidd, Captain, 215. 
 Knowledge, joy in, a gift of university 
 
 life, 1 68. 
 
 Lake Mohonk Conference address, 247 ff . 
 
 La Salle, 8, 269, 270, 271. 
 
 Latin, the study of classical, 319 ff. ; 
 loss from reading literature in trans- 
 lations, 334-337- 
 
 Law, interrelation of liberty and, 14; 
 appreciation of value of, by Pilgrim 
 Fathers, 38-39; drawbacks to the 
 study of, 1 86. See Common Law. 
 
 Lawrence, Sir Henry, 220. 
 
 Lea, Henry C., 305, 352, 361. 
 
 Lee, Robert E., n. 
 
 Legality, spirit of, in England, due to 
 influence of the Common Law, 68- 
 69. 
 
 Legislation, address on Conditions and 
 Methods of, 73 ff. 
 
 Liberty, inseparability of law and, 14. 
 
 Lincoln, Saint-Gaudens' statue of, 177; 
 address on the Character and Career 
 of, 195 ff. ; universal admiration and 
 honour of, in America, 224-225. 
 
 Lingard, John, 351, 361. 
 
 Liquor traffic, evils of, among barbarous 
 peoples, 141.
 
 INDEX 
 
 431 
 
 Literary historians, school of, 344-346. 
 
 Literary ornament in public speaking, 
 289-290. 
 
 Literature, instruction in, compared 
 with instruction in science as to results 
 in later life, 20 ff . ; the mental stimu- 
 lus and pleasure of poetry, 27-28; 
 effect of training in, on true appre- 
 ciation of art, 28-29; dangers of too 
 close attention to technicalities of, 
 29-30 ; the best source of a knowledge 
 of history, 320-330- 
 
 Livingstone, David, 132. 
 
 Lowell, J. R., as a public speaker, 291. 
 
 Lucretius cited, 129. 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, as a historical writer, 352; 
 rapidity as a reader, 385. 
 
 Magellan, spirit which actuated, in 
 explorations, 8, 269. 
 
 Magna Charta, 56. 
 
 Maitland, F. W., 348. 
 
 Marshall, Chief Justice, n; a Scotch- 
 Irishman, 215. 
 
 Mason, George, 8. 
 
 Mayflower compact, 38-39. 
 
 Michaelis, J. D., 347. 
 
 Milton, John, 4. 
 
 Missions, address on, 125 ff. ; work of, 
 begun by the Apostles, 129; as car- 
 ried on by Charlemagne and later 
 conquering forces, 129-130; later 
 propagation of Christianity by peace- 
 ful methods, 130; the fourth or pres- 
 ent-day stage of, 130132 ; work of 
 American and British, 134-136 ; causes 
 of comparatively slow progress of 
 modern, 136 ff . ; desirability of com- 
 plete separation from political sup- 
 port, 144-145; the present a critical 
 moment for, 146-150; objects to be 
 aimed at by, 150. 
 
 Mommsen, Theodor, 348, 362. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, as a historian, 345. 
 
 Morris, William, 191. 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop, 345. 
 
 Muratori, rank of, as a historical writer, 
 
 344- 
 
 N 
 
 National Parks, address on, 389 ff. 
 Natural history, enjoyment to be de- 
 rived from pursuit of, 23-24 
 
 Natural sciences, dangers of too great 
 specialization hi study of, 306 ff., 326; 
 influence of. on the writing of history, 
 348. 
 
 Nature, appreciation of pleasures of, 
 to be derived from literary training, 
 28. 
 
 Negroes, first African, imported into 
 America, 7. 
 
 New South Wales, national parks in, 
 398. 
 
 Newspapers, responsibility of, for ill- 
 feeling between nations, 255-256. 
 
 New York City, magnificence of archi- 
 tectural enterprises in, 194, 197. 
 
 New York State Bar Association address, 
 73 ff- 
 
 New Zealand, national park in, 398. 
 
 Niagara Falls, deterioration in scenery 
 of, 396. 
 
 Niebuhr, German historian, 347. 
 
 Notes, use of, in public speaking, 294. 
 
 Novel reading, 374-377. 
 
 Oral evidence, practice of using, under 
 English Common Law, 62, 67. 
 
 Orders in Council, English, 78. 
 
 Ornament, literary, in public speaking, 
 280-290. 
 
 Oxford University, early instruction 
 in Roman law at, 66; the beginnings 
 of, 153-154; chief aims and purposes 
 of, 157-160. 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 348, 352. 
 
 Parliamentary draftsman, office of, 
 87-88. 
 
 Parliamentary legislation, English sys- 
 tem of, 76 ff. 
 
 Patrick, St., 129. 
 
 Pennsylvania Society of New York, 
 address to the, 407 ff . 
 
 Pennsylvania Station, New York, archi- 
 tecture of, 194. 
 
 Perigueux, restoration of cathedral 
 church of, 100. 
 
 Philosophy, intellectual pleasures and 
 enjoyment from study of, 26. 
 
 Pilgrims, address on the Landing of 
 the, 33 ff. ; motive of, in settling in
 
 432 
 
 INDEX 
 
 America, 36-37; effect of character 
 of, on State they helped to found, 
 37-38 ; comparison of ancient Romans 
 and, 38; value of law recognized by, 
 3839; effect of traditions and mem- 
 ory of high thoughts bequeathed by, 
 30-40. 
 
 Pitt, William, 284. 
 
 Poetry, as a source of mental stimulus 
 and pleasure, 27-28; the reading of, 
 374; cultivation of the imagination 
 by, 376-377; choice of, for reading, 
 377- 
 
 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 71. 
 
 Portland, Me., address, 41 ff. 
 
 Prague, University of, founding of, 154. 
 
 Precedent, weight of, in judicial decisions 
 under the Common Law, 48-49. 
 
 Precision, principle of, in the Common 
 Law, 47-49. 
 
 Presbyterian system of church govern- 
 ment, formation of republican spirit 
 in America by, 214-215. 
 
 Priestley, Joseph, 346. 
 
 Private acts, British, 77, 81 ff. ; in 
 France, 95. 
 
 Provincetown, Mass., address, 33 ff. 
 
 Psychology as a field for intellectual 
 enjoyment, 26-27. 
 
 Public Speaking, Some Hints on, 281 ff. 
 
 Public spirit, effects of intellectual 
 training upon, 122. 
 
 Pym, John, 4. 
 
 Q 
 
 Quakers, among the early settlers of 
 Pennsylvania, 409-410. 
 
 R 
 
 Rainier, Mount, 397. 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 4. 
 
 Ranke, L. von, 348, 362. 
 
 Reading, address on Some Hints on, 
 365 ff. ; choosing the best in, 368- 
 369; dryness no sign of excellence in 
 books for, 360-370; question of ex- 
 tent of field to be covered in, 371 
 374; of fiction, 374-376; of poetry, 
 376-377 ; of classics of other countries, 
 
 378; purpose and concentration in, 
 378-380; methods to be followed in, 
 381-383; system in, 383-385; de- 
 sirability of swiftness in, 385-386 ; 
 independence of mind in, 386-387. 
 
 Referendum, the, 115. 
 
 Restoration of churches in England and 
 France, 189-191. 
 
 Robertson, J. C., historian, 345. 
 
 Roman law, characteristics of English 
 Common Law originating in, 67. 
 
 Romans, character of the ancient, com- 
 pared with that of Pilgrim Fathers, 
 38. 
 
 Root, Elihu, 261. 
 
 Russell, Sir Charles, a Scotch-Irishman, 
 220. 
 
 Rutgers College address, 365 ff. 
 
 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, address on 
 
 the Art of, 171 ff. 
 San Francisco Bay, praise of, 230. 
 Scenery, of Vermont, 276-279; conserva- 
 tion of American, by creating national 
 
 parks, 394 ff. 
 
 Schiller, as a historian, 345. 
 Science, far-reaching effects of modern, 
 
 17-18; comparison of instruction in, 
 
 and of instruction in literature as to 
 
 intellectual enjoyment in later life, 
 
 20 ff. 
 Sciences, specialization in study of, 
 
 306 ff. 
 
 Scotch-Irish, as settlers in Pennsyl- 
 vania, 410. 
 Scotland, universities of, 155, 160; 
 
 exclusion of the public from the best 
 
 scenery of, 394. 
 Scoto-Irish Race in Ulster and in 
 
 America, address on, 205 ff. 
 Sculpture, consideration of the art of, 
 
 174-176. 
 
 Seeley, Professor, 350. 
 Shakespeare, 3 ; enjoyment derived by, 
 
 from his fellow-men, 25. 
 Shaw Memorial, Boston, 177-178. 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 4. 
 Slavery, beginnings of negro, in America, 
 
 7 ; view taken of, by the Common 
 
 Law, 50-60. 
 Slave trade, as a retarding force to 
 
 progress of Christianity, 143. 
 Sorrow, Saint-Gaudens' statue of, 177. 
 Spanish adventurers contrasted with 
 
 English, 9. 
 Specialization in university education, 
 
 302 ff. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 358, 359.
 
 INDEX 
 
 433 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 4; the reading of, 
 374- 
 
 Spinoza, 340. 
 
 Spoils system in American national 
 government, 422423. 
 
 State Universities, address on the Mis- 
 sion of, 151 ff. See Universities. 
 
 Statute law, British, 85 ff . 
 
 Statutory Rules and Orders, English, 
 78, 79- 
 
 Stubbs, William, 348. 
 
 Switzerland, legislative method in, 95 ; 
 cooperation of legislative and execu- 
 tive branches of government in, 410- 
 420; influence of American Constitu- 
 tion on latest constitution of, 424. 
 
 Tacoma, Mount, 397. 
 
 Tariff legislation, 97. 
 
 Teachers in schools, importance of in- 
 fluence exercised by, 242243. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 197. 
 
 Thorwaldsen, the work of, 175. 
 
 Thucydides, a master of historical com- 
 position, 344; critically exact spirit 
 shown by, 349; historical style of, 
 353- 
 
 Tocqueville, quoted, 105. 
 
 Torture, use of, forbidden by the Com- 
 mon Law, 62, 63. 
 
 Translations, question of use of, in 
 studying ancient literature, 334-336. 
 
 Truth, devotion to, to be instilled by a 
 university education, 122-123, 168. 
 
 Tyranny, the Common Law a safe- 
 guard against, 46-47; Thomas Jef- 
 ferson's views of, 113-114. 
 
 U 
 
 Ulster, the Scotch-Irish of, 217-220. 
 
 Union College, address at, 339 ff. 
 
 Universities, address on the Mission 
 of State, 151 ff. ; origins of the earliest, 
 153-155; consideration of German, 
 English, and Scottish, 156-160; char- 
 acteristics of American, 160161 ; 
 founding and supporting of, by state 
 governments, 161-163; risks to state- 
 controlled, of curbing of freedom 
 and of favouring branches from which 
 pecuniary gain may be expected, 163- 
 166; the great benefits to be derived 
 from, 167-168; ways for graduates 
 
 to repay their debt to, 168-169; 
 address on " What a University may 
 Do for a State," 227 ff . ; opportunities 
 open to, for State service,, 239 ff . ; 
 promotion of athletics at expense of 
 intellectual excellence in, 240-242 ; 
 influence exercised by alumni of, 
 in forming public opinion, 242 ; 
 function of demonstrating the wealth 
 in life besides mere material things, 
 243 ; address on Special and General 
 Education in, 299 ff. ; specialization 
 in studies at, 303 ff . 
 
 University education, effects of, on men 
 as regards politics, public spirit, and 
 devotion to truth, 116-123. 
 
 University instruction and intellectual 
 pleasures, 15 ff. 
 
 Vacarius, Lombard instructor of law, 
 
 66. 
 Vermont, the founders of, 271-272; 
 
 resources of, in its people and its 
 
 scenery, 275-276. 
 Virgil, quoted, 22. 
 Virginia, address on the Beginnings of, 
 
 i ff. 
 Virginia, University of, address at, 107 
 
 ff. ; Jefferson's aims and motives hi 
 
 founding, HI. 
 Virginia Company in London, 9, 10. 
 
 W 
 
 Washington, George, 109, 203, 411. 
 
 Water power, utilization of, to detri- 
 ment of scenery, 396. 
 
 Watt, James, 17. 
 
 White Mountains, creation of forest 
 reserves in the, 402-403. 
 
 Williams, Roger, 37. 
 
 Wilson, James, 411-412. 
 
 Wisconsin, University of, Commence- 
 ment Address to, 151 ff. 
 
 Witherspoon, John, 214. 
 
 Wolf, F. A., Prolegomena to Homer of, 
 346. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 29, 197. 
 
 Yellowstone National Park, 397. 
 Yosemite Park, 397 ; exclusion of auto- 
 mobiles from, 398-399.
 
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