0»NI«Stt Bif ILLIHOIS 
 
 JUNIATA COLLEGE 
 BULLETIN 
 
 Vol. XII ' SEPTEMBER, 1915 No. 3 A 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 HONORABLE MARTIN G. BRUMBAUGH 
 
 GOVERNOR OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY JUNIATA COLLEGE 
 HUNTINGDON, PENN’A. 
 
 rKL.GUti\; S Ohr. 
 
I 
 
 
 ! 
 
 \ 
 
Juniata College Bulletin 
 
 Vol. Xll SEPTEMBER, 1915 No. 3 A 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 HONORABLE MARTIN G. BRUMBAUGH 
 GOVERNOR OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 JUNE 17, 1915 
 
 T is an unusual pleasure for me to be here today. 
 It is not the first Commencement which I have 
 attended at Juniata. I have had the privilege 
 in^the past of sitting with the undergraduates 
 and seeing the class graduate. Once I made a speech 
 when I was graduated that nobody knows anything about, 
 fortunately for them. I also had the privilege later on 
 of helping to prepare a graduating class for its part on 
 an occasion like this. And still later I had the privilege 
 of conferring the degrees and handing the diplomas to 
 some of those of you who sit here this morning, graduates 
 of Juniata. I have worked here, I have played; and 
 here in an institution founded in a large way by the 
 people of my own family and entirely by the people of 
 my own faith, you can understand with what deep feel¬ 
 ings I return to you this morning, for I love the old 
 school quite as much as I ever did in the past. 
 
 The problem facing us now is, what can we say to 
 these young men and women as they are about to sever 
 
their student life and go out to find their place and do 
 their work side by side with may others in life. You 
 have often heard it said, that one’s happiest days are his 
 school days, that never again, no matter how long you 
 live or what success may come to you, there never will 
 return to you, so they say, days so deep with joy as the 
 days you spent in school. It is a pleasing thought, and 
 many people regard it as true; and yet, if you may take 
 the word of experience and the testimony of those who 
 have lived, such, after all, is not the case. In fact it 
 ought not to be the case, because when you are a student 
 in a college or a child in a home you do not know the 
 depth of real joy in life because your life is ordered and 
 directed and controlled by others. It is not until you 
 have lived to take your own place in life, work out your 
 own problems and achieve your own success, that you 
 begin to taste at the fountains of real joy and abiding 
 happiness. 
 
 Up to now, this graduating class has been guided and 
 helped by others. Their parents in the home, their 
 neighbors in the communities where they have lived, 
 the faculty of the college where they have been educated, 
 these have thought, these have wrought for them. Now 
 as they are graduated, they must go out and begin to 
 work for others, and that is quite a different problem. 
 It is one thing to have the world work for you, it is an¬ 
 other thing to work for the world; and leaving your 
 school, you take on not only the responsibilities of nature 
 and earnest life, but you take on also the joys and the 
 satisfactions that come only to those who have the cour¬ 
 age to do the right, and who steadfastly through the 
 years pursue it in the performance of whatever duty may 
 fall to their lot. So I should like to impress upon you 
 that the real joy of this world is the joy that comes from 
 service rendered to others and not from receiving service 
 
 © 
 
from others; that you will never know what it really 
 means to live until you have learned how to live for 
 others and for the world at large. 
 
 When I was a boy a good many years ago in the little 
 school at Marklesburg, on the front page of my Geog¬ 
 raphy was a picture. To my boy eyes it was a wonder¬ 
 ful thing. There was a turtle, and on the turtle a man, 
 and on the man the world. It was Atlas, carrying on 
 his shoulders the whole world. It was emblematic of 
 the fact that the book which carried his portrait on its 
 title page was a book that gave to my mind and the mind 
 of anyone who looked at it, a knowledge of that world 
 held up by the strong, steady sinews of the great mythi¬ 
 cal Atlas. It was more, now that I look at the picture 
 again, than a mere advertisement of a Geography. It 
 was typical of life for you and for me; for all of us, in 
 one way or another, must carry our own world on our 
 own shoulders if we are to be worthy of the place that 
 we occupy in society, in the State, in the Nation. The 
 important thing is not that you should uphold the physi¬ 
 cal universe. You do not have to do that. Atlas never 
 did. He wasn’t called for that purpose. The universe, 
 this physical world which he was supposed to carry, 
 keeps itself. It long ago learned, when it swept out of 
 the thought of God, to obey His law and live, and so it 
 has lived. 
 
 But you have a world just as real as this physical 
 world upon which you sit, upon which these buildings 
 stand, upon which our roads stretch out to the horizon. 
 The important thing for the graduate, for the man or 
 the woman living today, is that we should pick first of all 
 a good world to uphold, and then with secure founda¬ 
 tions, more secure than the back of a tortoise, stand and 
 uphold our world through the days and the years of our 
 lives. I do not know, I doubt whether these capped 
 
and gowned potential units of society know, just what 
 world will nestle down and rest upon their shoulders; 
 but I know this, that they like you, in a large measure 
 can choose the quality of life they will uphold and the 
 kind of a world they will support. It is important that 
 you should lend your strength, your physical, your men¬ 
 tal, your spiritual strength to a great and splendid ser¬ 
 vice, and not to an unworthy one. 
 
 So many of us waste our chance, lose our opportu¬ 
 nities, destroy our effectiveness because we give our¬ 
 selves to things that are not worthy of us. We pay too 
 dear for many of the things that we buy in the markets 
 of the world. I have a dog at home, and one of his chief 
 occupations is to chase his tail in a circle. He doesn’t 
 get anywhere. It is a useless kind of thing, and we 
 wouldn’t permit it, excepting that because the dog is a 
 useless appendage of the family it is a part of him to do 
 that. Now what I want to impress particularly upon 
 this graduating class is the fact that it is important early 
 in life to choose a definite thing to do and then direct 
 the energies of your life to the accomplishment of that 
 thing. Stand under your world resolutely, steadfastly, 
 securely, so that when you have lived your life it may be 
 said of you, that you have lived it to a purpose and not 
 uselessly. We begin to understand that in God’s econ¬ 
 omy nothing is wasted, and that the things which we 
 throw aside as waste and which we discard as useless 
 become in the course of years and centuries the very 
 materials out of which society weaves its strength and 
 its life. Nothing is wasted, nothing is useless, nothing 
 is lost to the world. We begin to understand that some 
 of us inconsiderately throw away our lives in useless, 
 idle, purposeless, meaningless ways. 
 
 The other day I received the catalogue of the grad¬ 
 uates of this college, and because I knew my name would 
 
 @ 
 
appear somewhere in the list, I was naturally interested 
 in looking it over, and I found it. I found many others 
 there that I knew nearly as well as I knew my own. To 
 me the remarkable thing was to read the names and see 
 what these different boys and girls of my early years 
 were doing, what world they were shouldering, how they 
 were carrying themselves, the quality of service they 
 were rendering, the kind of life they were living, the 
 standards they had set and formed and fixed in their 
 souls and striven to achieve. Then I saw and read the 
 list, and saw on the whole what a fine record the gradu¬ 
 ates of this good little college have made in this world 
 of ours, and I saw in that record inspiration and help 
 and strength for you who are about to join the ranks. 
 
 I suppose if there is any one thing that we admire in 
 an individual more than another thing, it is the power 
 to do things, the power of achievement, the quality which 
 sums itself up in the phrase, “He gets there.” You have 
 heard it. You have taken your hat off to it. The farmer 
 who produces a satisfactory crop is the farmer whom 
 you respect. The teacher who trains his pupils in the 
 best way is the best teacher, and the training which he 
 gives is the result of his power as a teacher. Somehow 
 we are all reaching out for the power to do things. That 
 is why we go to school. That is why we study the math¬ 
 ematics and the languages and the sciences and history 
 and all the other things that fall within the scope of a 
 curriculum of training. It is through these that we may 
 take unto ourselves the power to do effective service in 
 the world. Now if you want that power, if you want it 
 really, if you want it more than you want any other 
 thing, you can get it if you are willing to pay the price 
 for it. It doesn’t come to you in your stocking on 
 Christmas night. It isn’t given to you by those who love 
 you, on your anniversary day. It is brought to you by 
 
new knowledge, given to you by new power. It is wrought 
 out in your own soul by your own efforts. It is the thing 
 that you make yourself to be that you are in the last 
 analysis, so that it is a truism that you actually carry 
 your own destiny in the hollow of your own hand. You 
 can do things if you want to do things. You will not do 
 things if you expect others to make it easy for you to get 
 things done. A lazy man, a really lazy man, a man who 
 is too lazy to move and who grunts when he must, is of 
 little account on earth. An intellectually lazy man or 
 woman who has not the enterprise or ambition or defi¬ 
 niteness of purpose or continuity of purpose, is just about 
 as useless in the world as a fifth wheel to a wagon. It is 
 your enterprise, it is your toil, it is your work, it is your 
 business that develops through the years the power that 
 you need if you are to work effectively in life. Now to 
 help you to that, there are a few things that could be 
 said on an occasion like this. 
 
 In the first place, there is a great power comes to an 
 individual when he makes up his mind to do one thing 
 and stick to that thing through life. There is power in 
 a great purpose set up before you and lived to every day 
 of your life. In the early 40’s of the last century a young 
 man aspired to a seat in the Legislature of the State of 
 Illinois. He knew few of his constituents and fellow 
 citizens, and in order to introduce himself to them, he 
 prepared a little broadside which I have seen. It is not 
 as large as this program of exercises that you hold in 
 your hand. Upon that he had printed what we now 
 call in political life his platform, the things he stood for, 
 the things he would work for, the things he believed in. 
 He distributed them among the voters, and by one of 
 those strange accidents of public life, people believed in 
 what he said and elected him to the Legislature. In 
 that little broadside he said, among other things: “I 
 
have been deprived through no fault of my own, the 
 blessings of a liberal education, but I have always re¬ 
 garded it as one of the choicest possessions of a man, 
 and if elected to the office to which I aspire and oppor¬ 
 tunity arises, I shall unhesitatingly and unalterably sup¬ 
 port everything that makes for the better education of 
 the people. ’ ’ Those were the words of Abraham Lincoln 
 when he first stepped into public life in Illinois. Twenty 
 years after that, in 1862, as President of the United 
 States, the chance came to fulfill that purpose of his 
 early youth when the Morrill Land Grant Act was passed, 
 establishing agricultural colleges throughout this nation. 
 And when Lincoln signed the Land Grant Act, next to 
 the Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote the largest 
 document of freedom that has ever been issued in Amer¬ 
 ica, for in these colleges that he thus created were liber¬ 
 ated the minds of our young men and women throughout 
 all the years and centuries that are to come ; and perhaps 
 when your grandchildren gather here, they will testify 
 to what I now prophesy, that in the last analysis and 
 in the wide reaches of national progress and power, 
 that act meant a larger advance to the human race even 
 than the Emancipation Proclamation. It was the power 
 of a purpose set aright in his young heart and achieved 
 in his mature years. 
 
 I have told you before, and I want to tell you again, 
 that over in the mountains of Switzerland, after the 
 bloody Spanish Wars and the ruthless invasions and 
 persecutions of Alva, when canton after canton was rob¬ 
 bed of its men, leaving armies of widows and orphan 
 children, a pious minister of the Gospel visiting among 
 his parishioners day after day was accompanied by his 
 little grandson Henry. One day when he had been in 
 a number of homes of unusual distress and suffering, they 
 started late in the evening back to the parsonage, and 
 
 @ 
 
the little boy holding the hand of his grandfather said, 
 “Grandfather, when I become a man I shall take the 
 side of the poor,” and when he became a man he took 
 the side of the poor. He was then at Neuhof, and later 
 on at Stanz, and later still at Yverdun and later still at 
 Burgdorf. Living with the orphans of grand children 
 that he had visited as a boy, he sat up at night and patched 
 their torn and tattered garments while they slept. He 
 cooked the simple meal that these orphans ate. It was 
 said of him that he lived like a beggar that he might 
 train beggars to live like men. And when you walk the 
 streets of Switzerland’s proudest city, its finest monument 
 is to the boy that took the side of the poor and carried 
 that purpose through his life, Heinrich Pestalozzi, the 
 great educator. 
 
 There is also power in your preparation for service 
 in life. There are some who go through school and 
 college with one thought in mind, “How can I put it 
 over the professor and skim through with the least 
 amount of effort to myself,” whose sole ambition seems 
 to be just to graduate to please somebody else, but who 
 never knew in all their college career one earnest day’s 
 solid application to the books and to the lessons of the 
 day. On the other hand, those who take their lessons 
 seriously and who day after day do the largest service 
 which the day presents to them to do, come at last 
 through the long preparation of years of earnestness to 
 the possession of a power that makes them leaders of 
 men. I want to commend to you the importance of 
 long, earnest, steady preparation before you get into 
 the work of life to fight its battles, to win its victories 
 and to receive its rewards. Do not think that because 
 you have lived in a boarding school for two or three or 
 four years and have studied a little Latin and less Greek 
 that you seem fair to win the successes of life. You 
 
have only been started in the preparation for that 
 service, and the wise student never forgets the old 
 Greek ideal, “A learner once, a learner always.” 
 Never lose sight of the fine discipline of the Greek 
 mind ideally portrayed in Plato’s Republic, where he 
 points out that it takes sixty years to study to be a sage, 
 and that the business of the State is to breed a sage. 
 For when once you have made a sage you have made a 
 leader and counsellor and guide for society. And he 
 was wise enough, pondering in the streets of Athens to 
 see that it took time, long time, earnest time, persever¬ 
 ing preparation, to put one’s self in the possession of 
 commanding influence and power. So I want to com¬ 
 mend to you the fact that when you close your class 
 books, you have not closed the books that you must 
 study if you are ever to win the great victories of life. 
 A student once, a student always. 
 
 Then there is a power in one’s personality. You 
 do not only get your power from having a purpose, and 
 preparation to achieve that purpose, but you get a 
 certain power from the way you yourself behave under 
 the circumstances. I need not recite to you the story 
 well known to every reader of our American literature, 
 the Stone Face in the valley in the White Mountains. 
 But I do want to say to you, and I want to say to you 
 earnestly, that the quality which you yourself bring to 
 your purpose and to your preparation for your work has 
 quite as much to do with your success as any other one 
 element entering into the problem. If you are grouchy 
 and sour and morose and sordid and mean, and if your 
 own spirit is selfish and narrow and bigoted, you will 
 never be large enough to fill the place of the great soul 
 of God and of the world. So I ask you who are going 
 out from the college, think about yourself and try to 
 learn this important lesson which I believe is the hard¬ 
 en 
 
est lesson that comes to any of us, that when we fail, the 
 fault is with ourselves and not with others. I know a 
 thousand men who would be President of the United 
 States today if it were not for somebody else interfering 
 with them. They blame it on the other fellow, and I 
 have even known some base enough to blame it upon 
 their own parents, and say they hadn’t a chance. “Dad 
 was against me, and mother didn’t care.” The fact of 
 the matter is, Shakespeare understood it quite as well as 
 you do : “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not within others 
 but in ourselves that we are underlings.” It was 
 Addison who said: “ ’Tis not in mortals to command 
 success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve 
 it.” And I find as I meander among other folks that 
 you get from others substantially what you give to others, 
 that if you want the large compensation of life to come, 
 you must put the personal element of grace and courtesy 
 into your life. Here is a test of a gentleman which is 
 simple enough for even the kindergartner to understand. 
 What do you mean by a gentleman? You say of a 
 certain man, “He is a gentleman.” What do you mean 
 by that? You mean the kind of coats he wears, the 
 sort of uniform he puts on, you mean the amount of 
 schooling he has had, the number of acres he owns? 
 Do you mean these extraneous and external things? 
 Not at all. A gentleman is one whom you are glad to 
 greet, and for whom you are the better when he goes, 
 who has brought forth to you gladness and given to you 
 gifts of help. If he cannot do that, he is not a gentle¬ 
 man ; so that Rosenkranz is right when in his analysis 
 of Hegelian morality he points out that the first quality 
 of a sincere moral life is courtesy, kindliness of heart, 
 warmth of feeling for others, the quality that shows itself 
 all through the centuries in the Rock of Ages from the 
 dawn of our new civilization, “Peace on earth, good 
 
will among men,” for good will is willing good to others. 
 It is only when your spirit is rich enough and fine 
 enough and strong enough to wish well to others, that 
 others will make your life rich and worth while. 
 
 There is another quality that I wish to commend to 
 you this morning, the quality of dependableness, relia¬ 
 bility, the quality that makes people say of you, “That 
 man will stay put.” That is but the “flowering out,” in 
 the phrase of the street, of the quality of power in pur¬ 
 pose in your own soul. Can you be trusted, relied upon, 
 are you worth a hundred per cent, in the market of the 
 human will? That is the question, dependableness; be 
 steady. It was said of the good old Dunker people who 
 lived down in Montgomery county, down in General 
 Stewarts’s home country, in colonial days, that their 
 word was as good as their bond. That is the kind of 
 men we want today all over this country, who when 
 they say a thing, mean that thing and not some other 
 thing instead of it, who are concerned not to form 
 phrases in which to deceive but to express in simple 
 language the earnest, complete, honest conviction of 
 their souls. You are neither morally nor intellectually 
 honest if you use the training of your college to deceive 
 your fellowmen. It is a power which is in your hands 
 to use as you will. 
 
 Finally, this thing. If you want to achieve the 
 crowning virtue of a good life, incorporate in your soul 
 the virtue of humility which in its last analysis is the 
 confession of your own conscience that you do not know 
 all, and that if you follow the guidance of your own 
 judgment you will err, that if you follow the guidance 
 and conscience of other men, they like you will err, and 
 you will walk in devious ways; that in the last analysis 
 you must come to understand that human judgment is 
 fallible, and therefore you must trust the leading of your 
 
life to a judgment that is infallible, which is the judg¬ 
 ment of Almighty God, our common Father; and when 
 we have sensed our own limitations and confess His own 
 omnipotence, then we add to our souls the virtue of 
 religion which is humility. You will never work with 
 great power if you are not humble, and you will never be 
 sincerely humble unless you are a devout believer in the 
 omnipotence of Almighty God. So I commend to you 
 in the last analysis this fact, that you cannot live to the 
 highest and best in society, you cannot do the large 
 things for your kind, you cannot touch in a big way the 
 work of your country if you are not an humble believer 
 in the religion of your fathers. Furthermore, in our 
 civilization, it lies inherent in the constitution of our 
 country, it is wrought in the very fabric of your Com¬ 
 monwealth, it lies in the hearts of all law abiding citizens, 
 —go to God. Never lose sight of that if you want to 
 live as you should live in this world. It reminds me of 
 that fine old legend carved deep in the granite over the 
 now ruined gates of Busyram: “In the midst of the 
 light is the beautiful, in the midst of the beautiful is the 
 good, in the midst of the good is God, the Eternal One.” 
 And through all your quest for beauty through art, and 
 light through science and goodness through ethics, re¬ 
 member that the heart of all true learning is God, the 
 Eternal One. 
 
 
\ 
 
2105802125 
 
 • V • 
 
 The Juniata College Bulletin is issued quarterly, and includes each 
 year the Annual Catalogue; the Annual Reports of the President and other 
 officers; and announcements of special departments and sessions. 
 
 Entered February 6, 1904 at Huntingdon, Pa., as second class matter under 
 Act of Congress of July 16, 1894. 
 
 J. o. BLAIR OO., HUNTINODON, PA.