BurfFntrafern Mnivvicmfy 
 
 Evanston, Illinois : June 19, 1901 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY of ILLINOIS. 
 
 ANNUAL ADDRESS 
 
 BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 
 OF THE COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM PEARSON, A. M. 
 
 OF THE CLASS OF 1871 
 
Alumni Association of Northwestern 
 University. 
 
 [College of Liberal Arts.] 
 
 PRESIDENT’S REPORT. 
 
 A By-Law of the Alumni Association requires the President 
 to make an annual report in writing, and in obedience to this 
 provision I herewith submit the following statement. 
 
 In accordance with a resolution passed at the last annual 
 business meeting, the Executive Committee appointed Dr. E. P. 
 Clapp and me a committee to ask the Trustees to bear the 
 expense of publishing an Alumni Quarterly. The Trustees 
 gave a courteous reply to our communication, but on discovering 
 that the terms of the resolution requested them to bear the 
 whole expense of the publication they deemed it inexpedient to 
 assent and discontinued the negotiation. 
 
 A Founders’ Day banquet was given on January 28, 1901. 
 The Alumni Association was invited by the Trustees to co- 
 operate with them in this, and our Executive Committee deemed 
 it best to do so, as we wished to avoid any apparent rivalry that 
 might interfere with the success of the semi-centennial cele- 
 bration. The attendance on the occasion was nearly 450. 
 
 I report with great pleasure that a portrait of Dr. Bonbright, 
 by Mr. Ralph Clarkson, is nearly completed and that it will be 
 presented to the Trustees to-morrow. The money for it has all 
 been contributed by Alumni, and the letters from older and more 
 recent Alumni alike in reply to our circular have been most 
 cordial and gratifying. As it was our purpose to make this a 
 general testimonial, we asked for only a small sum from each 
 subscriber. We expected to need about $300, and this sum was 
 
2 
 
 readily subscribed, many Alumni offering to increase their 
 subscriptions if the required amount was not otherwise obtained. 
 We have not found it necessary to appeal a second time to any 
 of these generous friends. The treasurer's report will give 
 further details as to the names of the subscribers and the amounts 
 contributed by each. Such is the brief history of the joint action 
 of your officers for the past year. 
 
 Let me add a few more personal words. It is very natural 
 that one appointed to the presidency of any organization should 
 be led to consider with special care the purposes for which the 
 society exists and the ambitions it may honorably cherish. That 
 certainly has been the effect upon my own mind. I have never 
 felt so keenly the great powers and great responsibilities of this 
 Association, and I wish to state, as it maybe my most appropriate 
 opportunity to do so, that this and the other Alumni Asso- 
 ciations of the University should make it their avowed, their 
 earnest, and their persistent purpose to exert a strong influence 
 upon the policy of the institution. 
 
 Children are the natural heirs of their parents, and this is as 
 true in the intellectual as in the physical world. In many of 
 the older universities, both European and American, the Alumni 
 are by charter and statute the sole governing body. In other 
 institutions, while not having exclusive control, they have a 
 legal right to representation. The statutes of Northwestern 
 University make no provision for Alumni representation on 
 the Board of Trustees, but they do not in any way forbid it, 
 and there is no reason why the Alumni should not, in course of 
 time, secure all the control they are fitted to exercise wisely, 
 and power they are not fitted to exercise wisely they ought not 
 to seek. 
 
 There are two very simple reasons for thinking that the 
 Alumni, next to the founders and benefactors of the University, 
 are its natural governors. They are these: The Alumni have 
 a larger knowledge of the condition and needs of the University 
 and a greater interest in it than any outsider. Next to integrity 
 and ability, special knowledge and personal affection are the 
 
iah w . —Lib. 
 
 3 
 
 most important qualifications of a University Trustee. There 
 are few Alumni who are without these qualifications, and there 
 are few outsiders who have them in anything like the same 
 degree. 
 
 There is an analogy between the relations of a citizen to the 
 country and an alumnus to his university, and as the citizen 
 at the age of 21 becomes a member of the body politic and is 
 expected to take an active and intelligent part in the govern- 
 ment of the country, so an alumnus ought to receive a similar 
 educational franchise and be expected to take an active and 
 intelligent part in the government of his Alma Mater. 
 
 In my judgment, this is not only theoretically right, but prac- 
 tically necessary. Our government is a democracy, or, in other 
 words, a government by public opinion, and in the formation 
 of public opinion the universities have and should have a very 
 large and important part. A very large percentage of the 
 teachers, preachers, lawyers, legislators and journalists are 
 educated in the universities and in turn they educate the nation. 
 
 Universities should be and commonly are among the foremost 
 - of the agencies by which knowledge, virtue, liberty and religion 
 are advanced. Wycliffe, Luther, Milton and Wesley were 
 educated in universities. But it is common to dwell unduly 
 upon a few very eminent names. I prefer to emphasize the 
 thought that the great body of steady intellectual workers, 
 cK L>y whose wisely directed and ceaseless energies civilization is 
 advanced and humanity uplifted “inch by painful inch,” are 
 university men. This is so obvious at present that it may seem 
 that we need only congratulate ourselves upon the prosperity 
 and increasing power of the higher institutions of learning in 
 America. 
 
 Yet history gives no warrant for this complacency. Eternal 
 vigilance is the price of intellectual and religious as well as of 
 political liberty. Universities in other countries and ages have 
 sunk into indolence and worldliness, into sloth and superstition, 
 or have become active propagators of error and instruments of 
 oppression. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were 
 
L 
 
 among the chief supporters of the abominable tyranny of the 
 Stuart kings. Their conduct was so ignoble and servile that it 
 is not without warrant that Pope sneers at them ‘in this couplet: 
 
 “ May you, my Cam and Isis, preach it long, 
 
 The right divine of kings to govern wrong.’ ’ 
 
 The case against the mediaeval University of Salerno is thus 
 expressed by Longfellow, though it should be borne in mind 
 that the poet speaks dramatically and that it is through the 
 mouth of Lucifer that the charges are made : 
 
 “ The buildings have an aspect lugubrious 
 That inspires a feeling of awe and terror 
 Into the heart of the beholder, 
 
 And befits such an ancient homestead of error, 
 
 Where the old falsehoods moulder and smoulder, 
 
 And yearly by many hundred hands 
 Are carried away in the zeal of youth, 
 
 And sown like tares in the field of truth, 
 
 To blossom and ripen in other lands.’ ’ 
 
 But we need not go to other countries and remote times and 
 to the poets for intimations that dangers beset University life, 
 as they beset every other human institution. President Hyde 
 of Bowdoin, a few days ago, delivered a very impressive address 
 upon “Academic Freedom.” He referred specially to Brown 
 University, Chicago University, Kansas State Agricultural 
 College and Leland Stanford University, and “sounded a note 
 of warning against the spread of what he termed ‘ Rockefeller- 
 ism’ in the American college of to-day.’ ’ President Hyde thus, 
 defines the new issue and danger: “The question of academic 
 freedom did not rise so long as colleges taught Latin, Greek 
 and mathematics, for the simple reason that people did not care 
 much one way or the other for what was taught about these things. 
 Interference with liberty comes only when subjects are taught 
 for which the people care. Now that economic and social 
 questions have come to the front, it is in connection with them 
 that nearly all our troubles have arisen. Theological persecu- 
 
5 
 
 tion we have wherever institutions are tied to creeds; political 
 persecution w~e have, spasmodically, in political campaigns; but 
 popular interest is coming more and more to center in social and 
 economic questions. Unless we can come to a clear understand- 
 ing as to the rights and duties of the several parties to university 
 instruction, professorships of economics and sociology will be as 
 perilous positions in a democracy as chairs of politics ever were 
 in an absolute monarchy or chairs of theology in the palmy 
 days of papal power. To define the rights and duties of the 
 parties to such university instruction, securing reasonable liberty 
 for all and a free course for the truth, is the most pressing edu- 
 cational problem the nineteenth century hands over to the 
 twentieth.’ ’ 
 
 I do not wish my words to be misunderstood. You are 
 probably all aware that some socialistic speakers and some 
 newspapers have charged interference of the sort deprecated 
 by President Hyde against the Trustees of Northwestern Uni- 
 versity. I do not wish in anything I have said or may say as 
 to the proper policy of the Alumni Association to give the 
 shadow of countenance to that suspicion. I sincerely believe 
 it to be untrue. Our trustees are men of high character and 
 great wisdom, and after a service under them of full thirty years 
 it is a pleasure to me to express the belief that in all their acts 
 they have been governed solely by a desire to promote the 
 highest and most enduring interests of the institution. Our 
 trustees have given unselfishly their time, their money, their 
 constant and anxious thought to the welfare of the University, 
 and every alumnus owes them a deep debt of gratitude. The 
 purpose of this discussion is not in any way to reflect upon them, 
 but only to show how the Alumni Association may co-operate 
 with them and help to make permanent the work they have so 
 nobly begun. 
 
 The University stands for Christian learning. It was founded 
 by deeply religious men, w T ho by the noble motto, Qucecumgue 
 sunt vera, they took for the institution, proclaimed their belief 
 
6 
 
 that truth is the only sure and eternal foundation for education,, 
 for morality and for religion. 
 
 The United States stands now for inventive genius, for manu- 
 facturing supremacy, for commercial enterprise, for popular 
 education, for philanthropic ideals, yet all the unique and many- 
 sided greatness of this, the foremost of modern nations, springs 
 from the one great foundation principle that the intellect must 
 always be loyal to all truth and the conscience must always be 
 obedient to all duty. Political and religious liberty, a free 
 church in a free state, is the short secret of America’s past 
 greatness. 
 
 But we are entering upon a new epoch, one of unparalleled ma- 
 terial wealth and of unparalleled temptation to worship the 
 money-god. We are morally enervated by luxury and dazzled 
 by splendor. It is easy to bear poverty when everybody is 
 poor. It is easy to live simply when everybody else lives 
 simply. But it is not easy to bear poverty amid wealthy neigh- 
 bors or to live plainly amid ostentatious ones. We are all in 
 danger of being swept along by the great social currents of 
 our time. 
 
 But the practical point from which I must not drift away is 
 this: A tremendous struggle is in progress between the masses 
 and the classes for the control of the wealth of the nation, and in 
 this great struggle the universities will all sooner or later be in- 
 volved. They must exert their influence for or against the 
 laws and policies which concentrate wealth in the hands of the 
 few. In a word, they must become champions of the people or 
 pensioners of the moneyed classes and supporters of their inter- 
 ests. President Hyde, from whose address at Boston University I 
 quoted a moment ago, has coined a new word, “ Rockefellerism,’ * 
 as a synonym of capitalistic control of a university. He may be 
 doing Mr. Rockefeller a gross injustice in suggesting that his 
 more than pripcely gifts to a neighboring institution have behind 
 them any secondary and sinister design. I prefer to think 
 that Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie and the other great 
 financial geniuses who are also great givers are living up to all the 
 
7 
 
 light they have. Their liberality is certainly as wonderful and 
 unparalleled as any of the great American achievements which 
 are astonishing the world in our day. 
 
 “’Tis from high life high characters are drawn; 
 
 A saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn.’ ’ 
 
 A generous rich man is often more worthy of praise than a 
 generous poor one, for he has a greater weight of resistance to 
 overcome. It is as true now as when Jesus uttered it: “ How 
 hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven.” I think we should all join with our sister university 
 in cordial recognition of Mr. Rockefeller’s great services to 
 the cause of education. Deprecating all evil imputations and 
 putting the most natural and best construction upon the bene- 
 factions of rich men, let us look at the question quite impersonally 
 as a matter of public policy upon which honest men are certain 
 soon to differ sharply. President Hyde speaks thus of the rights 
 of a donor to a college: “A donor has no more right to dictate 
 what views an institution shall teach than a stockholder of a 
 steamship company has a right to direct a pilot how he shall steer 
 the ship to which a thousand lives have been entrusted. * * * 
 Neither may he legitimately draw up a creed or statement of 
 opinion which the professors in the institution shall be bound 
 to teach. To do that would be like sending a boat to sea with 
 the tiller lashed in position, and with instructions to the sailors 
 on no account to touch it, even though the boat might be making 
 straight for the icebergs or the rocks. The attempt of a donor 
 to dictate the views which a professor shall teach is to arro^ 
 gate to himself the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and 
 immortality; an arrogance of which no mortal would care to 
 be guilty.’ ’ 
 
 The history of the past has certainly shown, that gifts in 
 support of the prevailing religious, political or social opinions 
 have often in a short time become mischievous obstructions to 
 necessary change, mere temptations to men to perpetuate an 
 outworn belief or useless routine because there was a sure and 
 
8 
 
 ea'sv livelihood to be gained by so doing. The courts of almost 
 every civilized country have been obliged to abrogate the con- 
 ditions attached to ecclesiastical endowments and to apply to 
 other purposes funds which were maintaining mistaken and 
 mischievous opinions and demoralizing the men who accepted 
 them. These endowments have sometimes become subtle forms 
 of bribery and made the faith and piety of ancestors the destruc- 
 tion of the virtues of their descendants. 
 
 All that T wish to do in touching upon this great subject is, if 
 possible, to impress the Alumni Association with a deeper sense 
 of its privileges and duties in connection with the University. 
 I have no revolutionary program or spirit. I advocate no 
 constitutional change, no agitation, no demands, not even any 
 requests to the Trustees, but this simple policy that every 
 member- of the Alumni Association should take a constant and 
 intelligent interest in the affairs of the University, so that his 
 influence will always be felt. 
 
 I think that the Trustees are heartily in accord with this view, 
 and desire our co-operation. It is interesting to note the fact 
 that, although the University is only half a century old, and its 
 graduates are still comparatively few in number, and very 
 many of them are still young men, they are already so largely 
 represented in the governing corporation. The Board of Trustees 
 consists of forty-four members, of whom nofew'er than eleven are 
 graduates of the College of Liberal Arts. 
 
 James Russell Lowell makes Hosea Biglow say of a little red 
 school house : 
 
 “ Wal, here it wuz I larned my ABC, 
 
 An’ it’s a kind o’ favorite spot with me.’ ’ 
 
 And Byron in sad retrospect declares : 
 
 “ Dear is the schoolboy spot 
 We ne’er forget though there we are forgot.’ ’ 
 
 Those who spend four years amid these scenes of beauty and 
 grandeur; those who gather knowledge and train their minds 
 in these halls, those who own Northwestern as a genuine Alma 
 
9 
 
 Mater, as the real mother of their intellectual faculties, their real 
 guide into the problems of life, will never forget or cease to love 
 her. 
 
 If this Association does its duty, in another half century the 
 majority of the governing Board will be Alma Mater’s own 
 beloved children. The University in all probability has hundreds 
 of years of life before it, and the best assurance that I can think 
 of that through all its coming centuries its far-reaching influence 
 shall be for good, that it shall respond to the changing needs of 
 men, and shall advance with the advance of knowledge is that 
 it shall always be governed by those who know it and love it. 
 
 Every member of every graduating class should become a 
 member of this Association, and I think that a few years of well- 
 directed effort under the new By-Law dispensing with an 
 initiation fee would secure this result. It would, I think, be a 
 great help to this end if every year one of the exercises on our 
 program should be an address of w-elcome to the graduating 
 class and a response by some one selected by the class to repre- 
 sent it. 
 
 I think that legislative and financial questions should not be 
 allowed to consume so much time at these gatherings. I should 
 like to have the business meeting in the forenoon and a lunch 
 at 12 :30 in a big tent on the campus, and after luncheon a free and 
 easy program of songs and speeches. 
 
 I have one other recommendation to make, and that is that 
 the name of this Association be changed from The Alumni Associa- 
 tion of N orthwestern University to The Alumni Association of the 
 College of Liberal Arts of N orthwestern University . Every other 
 department of the University has its own Alumni Association,, 
 and to ignore them seems a needless discourtesy and tends to 
 prevent the perfect union of feeling we all desire. Truth, 
 justice and kindness are principles that should govern in all 
 the relations of life. 
 
 It is a pleasure to thank all my colleagues for cordial support 
 in the various matters which have required our attention, and 
 
10 
 
 which consume so much of that time which is these busy days, 
 is hard to spare. 
 
 It is with great sorrow that 1 report the death during the year 
 of Mrs. Mary Hill Sheets, of the class of 1884. Mrs. Sheets at 
 the time of her death was a membr of the Board of Directors, and 
 in accordance with Article 2 of the By-Laws the Directors 
 elected Mr. William A. Burch, of the class of 1890, the Financial 
 Secretary of the University, to fill the vacant position. This 
 temporary election requires your confirmation to make it valid 
 for the full term of three years. 
 
 Respectfully submitted, 
 
 Charles William Pearson. 
 
 Note. — This report is published by order of the Alumni Association. Mr. 
 James H. Raymond, of the class of 1871, was appointed a committee to 
 publish it, and through his influence it is printed without charge to the Asso- 
 ciation by the Gunthorp- Warren Printing Company, of Chicago, Illinois.