LD
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1898
ather / Bushienek atau 1898
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ARTES
LIBRARY
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Q
1837
CRITI
VERITAS
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PLURIBUS UMUM
TUEBOR
LOLOLONAUKŲ
SCIENTIA
OF THE
QUÆRIS PENINSULAM-AMŒNAM
CIRCUMSPICE
UUUUUD ORGA
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1

goa
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1
L'ETOILE DU NOND`
1851
|GALIBUSHANTILL
THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Reed Jul 26-09
Рес
Baccalaureate Address
BY
PRESIDENT CYRUS NORTHROP
Sunday, May 29, 1898
Armory Building
!
721
gjją bo orgy tel
"
as it relates to our treatment of personal
The Law of God, enemies, is clearly laid down in the clos-
ing verses of the Fifth Chapter of Matthew. No other part of
the law is so hard for men to obey and obedience to no other
part is more necessary in order to make men Christ-like. It is
in brief this: Ye have heard that it was said an eye for an
eve, and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you, “Resist not
him that is evil; but whosoever smiteth thee on the right
cheek, turn to him the other also. Love your enemies, and pray
for them that persecute you, that ye may be the sons of your
Father which is in heaven."
The Christian World recognizes this, theoretically at least,
as a divine command which is to be obeved; and whenever a
Christian admits malice and personal hatred into his heart, and
cherishes them and does not make any effort to expel them, he
knows perfectly well that he is no longer in a state of grace, but
is in rebellion against God. There is undoubtedly an immense
amount of this rebellion in the Christian Church; but that does
not change in the least the law of God respecting the treatment
of personal enemies. That law is well established and well
understood even if it is not well obeyed.
But a question of a different nature arises when we have to
deal-not with personal enemies-but, so to speak, with publis
enemies, with knaves and evil doers, who may be classed as the
enemies of all righteousness, through whom all sorts of corrup-
tion are brought into society or the Church or the State.
These may be frankly avowedly evil men, or they may be evil
while pretending to be good. What is to be our attitude to-
wards these? How are we to treat them as individuals?
According to the commonly accepted idea, the true and her-
oic soul must be ready at all times to defend all good and
attack all evil. It must be utterly unselfish and self-sacrificing.
It must be on the alert for the discovery of objects of attack and
objects of defense. It must be untrammeled by circumstances
and conditions. It must recognize no such thing as mere ex-
pediency. It must allow nothing but absolute right. In short,
the hero must be a man of war to whom peace must not be per-
mitted till every enemy of right and justice has been subdued.
That under this definition very few heroic souls can be found,
goes without saying. Recall your own experience in life and
you will not find it difficult to see that you have encountered a
good deal of wrong, which you have not only done nothing to
prevent, but against which you have not even borne any special-
2012493
testimony. It may not be humiliating to know that we are
not heroic souls, as certainly most of us know that we are not;
but it is humiliating to live in the midst of evil for the suppres-
sion of which we make no particular effort, and to feel all the
time that we are perhaps not only cowardly, but also guilty of
criminal neglect.
I should be very sorry to say anything which would excuse
a cowardly neglect of duty or let men feel comfortable while
they permit all manner of wrong to be done which they possibly
might prevent. But I am of the opinion that even the holiest
of wars ought not to be entered into without discretion and
that even for the individual in society, the highest morality per-
mits the free use of the tomahawk and scalping knife much less
frequently than is supposed. I wish to throw upon this most
interesting and perplexing subject of a Christian's proper atti-
tude towards wrong as embodied in bad men and bad measures,
the light reflected from the teachings of Jesus, the world's great-
est hero, whose precepts and examples alike it is our highest
honor to follow. I shall be much disappointed in the result if
it shall not appear that the divine Master, whose soul in the
presence of evil sometimes flashed with a Sinai-like righteous
indignation and at other times was as gentle as a mother with
her babe, has not left us some instruction that is not entirely in
accord with the Christian world's commonly received opinions
on this subject.
One of the favorite methods of Jesus for imparting truth
was the parable. Everybody must admit that His parables
present truth in a very vivid and impressive manner.
One may
easily lose the connection of thought and mistake the logic of
Paul's Epistles. But no one need ever miss the point in one of
Jesus' parables. The simplicity and clearness with which they
are expressed cannot easily be improved. They so perfectly re-
flect human experience in all ages that they are as instructive
today as they were when they were first uttered by Jesus. One
of these interesting parables is that of the tares and wheat. A
certain man sowed good seed in his field, but in the night an
enemy sowed tares. When the grain appeared, the tares also
appeared. The servants of the farmer were much disturbed at
the appearance of the tares and asked the master if he wished
them to go and gather the tares up. But he answered with great
wis-dom, "no, lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up the
wheat also. Let both grow together till the harvest. And in the
time of harvest I will say to the reapers, gather ye together first
the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them-but gather
the wheat into my barn."
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1
Now, as an abstract proposition, tares are bad and they are
especially bad among wheat. Under certain conditions nothing
wiser could be done than to gather up the tares as soon as they
are discovered; but, if they are so mixed with the wheat as to
be not easily separated, and the destruction of the one is to be
the destruction of the other, true wisdom says, wait awhile.
The simple statement of this parable in perfect accord as it
is with Jesus' practice, illuminates the subject we are consider-
ing. What is wanted is wheat. The question of tares or no
tares is of no consequence except in its relation to the wheat.
If to root up the tares is to root up the wheat it would be the
height of folly to disturb either; and if by possibility the wheat
can grow to a mature and profitable harvest in spite of the
tares, then it is the highest wisdom to let both grow together.
And this truth, so simply drawn from the ordinary operations
of the farmer's field, governments in the exercise of their exalted
powers, and churches in their disciplinary zeal and individuals
with more of the zeal of the servant than of the wisdom of the
master, all alike will do well to heed.
We may deduce from this teaching the general proposition
that we may not do even a right act, nor an act which under
other circumstances would be a positive duty, if the outcome is.
to be injurious to the Kingdom of God, or to express it more
secularly, if the outcome is to be destructive of the general
good. In other words, Jesus teaches what Paul taught. All
things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient. I may
do things or refuse to do things on the ground of expediency.
I am not required to hit every knave's head that I see, if as a
consequence a number of honest people, including myself, are
going to have their heads broken. Human society is a very
complex affair. The dependence and interdependence of the parts
are so complex as to baffle analysis. Perhaps there is nothing
more disturbing to the peaceful working of this organization
than a well-meaning moral lunatic who insists on his right to
run a muck-who rushes here and there and everywhere,
stabbing right and left at all whom he encounters, and
who insists also that everybody who does not run amuck with
him is a coward and a knave. His fanatic soul never pauses
for an instant to consider the possibility of destroying good as
well as evil.
It is unquestionable that we are obliged to endure, with
what patience we may, a great deal of evil simply because we
cannot get rid of it without bringing on others a great deal of
undeserved trouble and suffering and imperiling the genera
welfare. Jesus bore in silence the tyranny and injustice of Ro-
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man power as exercised in Judea, over his own people, although
the destruction of Roman power and the liberation of the Jews
was what the Jews expected of the promised Messiah; and the
silent patience of the Divine Master has been a power for good
in the world through the centuries far transcending all that
could have been accomplished by open denunciation of the Ro-
mans or incitement of his countrymen to rebellion. He was a
reformer-but not a destructive reformer. The evolution of
goodness was what he sought, and his silence respecting many
public evils, is suggestive alike of the most sublime patience and
of the highest wisdom.
Every thoughtful man, who looks at the world as it is to-
day, must be impressed by the strange blending of good and
evil, not merely in the world as a whole, but in its various or-
ganizations and even in the character of individuals. No mat-
ter how noble may be the purpose for which institutions exist,
none of them are found to be perfect in operation; and no mat-
ter how grand a man may be in his character, no one is to be
found who is not more or less like Nebuchadnezzar's image-
some part of him at least clay, and, therefore, easily broken.
In this mixed condition of human society and human char-
acter we are really none of us qualified to pass final judgment
upon our fellows and proceed to execution; nor are we called
upon to do so.
You remember that memorable scene recorded
in the eighth chapter of John, where the Scribes and Pharisees
brought to Jesus a woman deserving death under the law and
asked him what they should do to her, and he answered: He
that is without sin among you-without this sin-let him be
the first to cast a stone at her. There wasn't any such man in
the crowd. They, when they heard Jesus' answer, being con-
victed by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning
at the eldest, even unto the last. And Jesus was left alone and
the woman standing in the midst.
If we are not qualified to pass final judgment upon our fel-
low men, it is manifest that, while we cannot help having opin-
ions as to people's character, we are under no obligation to ex-
press our judgment of men, even bad men as we think, and to
vindicate our judgment by our own acts-except so far as jesus
did-and the exception, as will appear later in this address, is
a most important one.
In general, established governments are to be obeyed, but
there is such a thing as the right of revolution. But this is not
an unqualified right. It is not permitted to every dissatisfied
citizen to raise the standard of revolt even though the govern-
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ment be unjust and oppressive. There must be a reasonable
prospect of success.
Revolution means blood-shed and misery-an awful up-
rooting of wheat as well as of tares. No nation should be
plunged into this recklessly without any prospect of bettering
its condition after all its bloody struggles. So that even in
matters so large and dreadful as revolutions, the question of
expediency is a controlling one; and the would-be-revolution-
ists are bound to inquire whether, as a result of their plans,
more good or more evil is likely to be experienced. And if this
is true of conflicts with organized society or government, it is
not less true of conflicts with parties, churches, and individuals.
Conflicts may be entered into wisely only when great evils are
likely to be removed without greater evils being produced. A
church suffers from the presence of a disreputable member; but it
is a good deal better to let that tare grow till the harvest, than
to stir up a church quarrel, generally the fiercest of all quarrels,
and root up a great many stalks of wheat. Let both grow to-
gether till the harvest, says the Master, lest while ye root up
the tares ye root up the wheat also.
The entire history of persecutions ir connection with the
Christian church is a history of attempts to root up supposed
tares before the harvest. The line of persecution is almost un-
broken through the centuries-Saul verily thinking he ought to
do what he did against the Christians-Catholics persecuting
Protestants, and Protestants persecuting one another and
Catholics when they got the chance-down even to the early
days of New England when the Puritans-not the Pilgrims—
persecuted Quakers and Baptists; and the echoes still come to
us from ecclesiastical courcils which discipline or excommuni-
cate men for differing with their brethren in creed or worship-
the power of putting to death no longer existing-and as one
travels back over the ground on which these historic events
have occurred, it is painful to see that there is much more of
wheat wilted and shriveled in the sun than there is of tares up-
rooted.
No half way measures-says the fanatic. Perfection or
nothing. This is all nonsense. It is not Christ-like. Tearing
everything to pieces is not Christ's plan. Because Cæsar gets
more than he ought and God less than he ought, "Down with
Cæsar and give him nothing," says the fanatic. "Render unto
Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's and unto God the things
which are God's," says Jesus, even at the moment when Cæsar
is a tyrant lording it over Judea.
7
Charles A. Dana was once Horace Greeley's assistant on the
New York Tribune. He exhibited the same characteristics for
which he was noted many years as editor of the New York Sun.
Any public man whom he had reason, as he thought, to believe
to be a fraud or a knave, he attacked most mercilessly. His
victims of course writhed under his attacks and they and their
friends became enemies of the Tribune. Mr. Greeley stood it as
long as he could, but at last he called a halt, exclaiming, "Dana,
no paper on earth can stand it to attack all the scoundrels in
the world."
There are a great many people who are glad to see scoun-
drels exposed and attacked; but there are not very many who
wish to join in the attack. They look on with complacency be-
cause the attack seems proper enough and they are not in it
and therefore no odium attaches to them. It is for this reason
that political reform is for the most part spasmodic or a
failure. Some body discovers that reform is needed and he tries
to bring it about. The rest look on perfectly willing that he
should try and even hoping that he will succeed-but without
them. He does try-gets little sympathy and less help-soon
finds that the forces of evil are much more compact and better
organized than the forces of good-finds himself at last defeated
and alone-and retires from the contest with a firm determina-
tion that the next man who tries to do anything for public and
political reform, shall be somebody else than himself.
When we contemplate the condition of things even in our
own country, or shall I say especially in our own country, we
cannot fail to be impressed with the undesirable character of
much which goes on. Bribery and corruption are manifestly
dangerous to the republic. This is a representative government.
We cannot meet in mass conventions for legislative purposes
as New England has so long done in her town meetings. We
choose our representatives. They with the representatives of
all the rest of the people make laws, and elect United States
senators who help to make laws for the whole country. Now,
if the representative refuses to represent; if he is open to offers
of pecuniary benefit for his vote; if he will vote for the candi-
date for senator who will give him the most money or offer
him the best place; if he will vote for or against bills for public
acts for a bribe, he has betrayed his constituents and set an ex-
ample which if generally followed would make a farce of gov-
ernment and put all power into the hands of those who are
rich enough and corrupt enough to buy legislatures. Such
things are done and we know it. They are disgraceful, of
course, to the briber and the bribed. But what are you going
8
3
to do about it? The man who bought the votes has his seat
in the United States senate or whatever else he wanted, all safe
enough. The man who sold his vote has his money in his
pocket or in some other place where it cannot be traced-and
he does not feel a bit lonely, for there are so many others who
have had their pockets lined in the same way that he has no
lack of companionship. Nobody doubts what has been done.
Nobody can prove anything, and if anybody did prove any-
thing the matter would be whitewashed and he would have his
trouble for his pains. Such things go on in almost every state
in the union. They are disreputable, wrong, destructive of the
best interests of the country. You regret to have things so; but
you are busy and cannot look closely into these matters. If
your own representative is guilty you will see to it that he
does not get nominated again. You go to the next caucus, and
sure enough the unfaithful representative is not a candidate.
A new man is up for the nomination-apparently a clean man
-one who can be trusted. You are delighted and gladly vote
for him, and he is elected-but you learn later that he is the
twin brother of the last man. Of course I am not speaking of
this particular legislative district in which we are assembled.
I need not say that this district has not been represented re-
cently by that sort of men. I am speaking of what is true in
many more places and states than it ought to be; and I am
calling attention not to the fact that so much bribery and cor-
ruption and trading exist, as every body knows, but to the ap-
parent helplessness of the people who do not like it and yet do
not prevent it. They grumble and complain and call hard
names and then let things go till the next election, when they
generally go to the polls and help elect a brother-in law of the
twins.
Now the trouble with many reformers in politics is that
they are a great deal more bent on pulling up tares than they
are on raising wheat, and yet, wheat is the only good thing to
be got and if there is no wheat the tares do no special harm.
One saloon more or less in Sodom would make but little differ-
ence.
To illustrate-let me, without offence to any one, say a
few words respecting what so many people profess to have a
holy horror of the machine in politics. What is a machine?
It is "a combination of bodies so connected that their relative
motions are constrained, and by which, force and motion may
be transmitted and applied to the production of some desired
effect." In mechanics, nothing better than a machine can be
desired. This is the age of machines and a machine is always
more than a match for untrained hand-labor.
9
In almost every state and every city of any size, there is
what is commonly known in politics as the machine. It is an
organization of men who go into politics more or less as a
business. They give time, thought, energy to it. They all have
a common purpose and they work together with a harmony
which makes the name machine eminently appropriate. Some-
times they do no great harm-they simply win where the other
men fail. The reason that the other men fail is because they are
in politics only in a half-hearted way, and they act without
concert. When the time for the caucus comes, the machine is
ready. It has its candidates for delegates. It knows just whom
these delegates, if elected, will vote for.
It knows whom the men nominated by the delegates will
vote for. It has a complete list of candidates who can be de-
pended on from the local precinct to the United States senate.
The machine has been attending to this business all the time.
It is a compact organization, thoroughly disciplined, knowing
its own men, able to predict the result, and in most cases sure
to win. The dissatisfied element outside, good citizens, reform-
ers, grumblers, loud advocates of pure politics, have no perfect
organization, no plan that is worthy of the name, no candi-
dates who are more than half-hearted in the fight, and so to
the last everything is at sixes and sevens, a great deal of hon-
est purpose and virtuous patriotism is wasted- not for any-
thing very positive, but mainly to smash the machine-and the
machine wins. There is no help for it. The regular army
always beats the mob. It pays once in a great while to expose
a company of raw militia to the fire of a thousand regulars, as
it did on Lexington Green on the nineteenth of April, 1775; but
in the ordinary processes of war it is criminal waste of life.
And in politics it is hardly less a criminal waste of energy and
high sentiment to array against a compact political organiza-
tion having a definite purpose, an unorganized mass of citizens,
without discipline, without leaders, and without plans.
If men want pure politics and honest officials they must
give systematic attention to the matter, and not trust to a
little spirit of excitement just before election, when in all prob-
ability it is too late to do any good. Eternal vigilance is the
price of honest legislation as well as of liberty.
No one certainly can dislike the machine in its ordinary
sense as a combination for corrupt purposes, more heartily than
I do. But a machine is all right if it is properly used and used
for proper purposes. And the only way to fight a bad machine
is with a good one. If honesty is ever to win in politics, the
men who desire it, must take their first lesson in practical pol-
10
itics from the machine and organize to some purpose.
And
until people who believe in honest legislation can be so banded
together as to act with some of the efficiency of the machine,
there is very little use in the individual citizen's trying to pull
up tares in the field of politics, except it be for his own moral
exercise and growth.
If your idea of a proper caucus is one to which men shall go
without any forethought as to candidates, your idea will never
be realized. Somebody will have thought about it. If you
have not, the machine doubtless has. Organization, concert of
action among men of like minds is not only proper but desir-
able.
If the object to be secured is a good one, it is no worse be-
cause there has been an organized effort to secure it. Of course
if the object to be secured is bad and the machine works for it,
the machine is bad; but it is so because it is working for evil
and not at all because it is a machine. The lesson to be de-
rived from all this is just what Edmund Burke said more than
a hundred years ago. "When bad men combine the good must
associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in
a contemptible struggle." My point is this. Be carnestly ac-
tive for something good, and not merely active against some-
thing bad. Keep sowing wheat, and do not confine your ener-
gies to pulling up tares. It is all right to remove temptation
from the young by shutting up saloons and gambling dens if
you can; but it is better to fill the minds of the rising genera-
tion with high ideals of noble living than to spend all your en-
ergies in removing temptation. It is even better to have men
who can not be tempted than it is to have no temptation.
Organize then for the attainment of the best things, and
not merely for the temporary suppression of bad things. There
will be, in spite of all that you can do, a good many tares
growing with the wheat until the harvest; but it will be a poor
harvest indeed, even if you pull up all the tares, if at the end
there is no wheat.
There are those who say that civilization and even the Chris-
tian church are built upon injustice and robbery, and there is
nothing to be done but to let both go and return to the simplicity
of nature. That seems to me a wholesale rooting up of the
wheat in order to get rid of the tares. Learning, Science, Lit-
erature, Art and Religion have been doing their best for centur-
ies to make the world better; and they have succeeded in
evolving from the primeval savage the modern civilized man
and from the primitive bestial selfish degradation the modern
methodical and systematic care for self mixed with not a little
11
altruism or brotherly kindness-and now our modern prophets
want to destroy civilization and all that it implies, because,
torsooth, some people own property which they never earned,
and the members of the Christian church, unlike their Master,
have every night where to lay their heads. And yet these
prophets sleep regularly on just as soft pillows as the rest of
the church, and draw their salaries from the accumulations of
civilization with as much regularity and zest as if they liked it.
There is no question whatever as to what a man's attitude
towards all recognized wrong ought to be. If he is a true man,
it cannot be anything but an attitude of disapproval. But it is
a question and a momentous question what he shall do about
it. Here comes in the warning of Jesus-"Lest ye root up the
wheat also. Let both grow together till the harvest." Ah!
there is to be a harvest, is there? Be comforted, my brother,
you who have vexed your righteous soul with the unlawful
deeds of the wicked, like Lot in Sodom-be comforted. There
will be a harvest, and the harvest comes with great regularity,
sometimes to individuals and sometimes to nations. A good
many things will be revealed at the harvest. First, it will be
found that the tares are not wheat. Second, it will be found
that the Lord of the harvest does not value tares as he does
wheat, and next it will be found that he does not make the
same disposition of tares that he does of wheat. There comes
a time, you see, when tares are neither mistaken for wheat nor
treated as wheat. Suppose you do not dig up all the tares you
see. There is sure to come a time when the tares will be got rid
of. The harvest is a great discriminator.
The wheat will be gathered into the barn. It is valuable.
It will feed and sustain men and women and children. The
tares will be burned-not as fuel-they are worth nothing even
as fuel-they will be burned not to do good, but simply to get
rid of them. They are worthless-worse than worthless. They
must be destroyed, because they are noxious. Bind them in
bundles and burn them-and the rascality that you have longed
to fight goes out at last in the cleansing flames of an awakened
public conscience.
Does all this appear like lowering the standar of duty? Is
a true life substantially summed up in minding your own
business? Well-a good many lives would be better than they
are if they were so summed up. But that is not my meaning.
I have not yet said quite all that I have to say. There is one
further lesson to be learned from Jesus and it is the most im-
portant one.
Jesus was, indeed, wonderfully patient. Have not I chosen
12
you twelve, and one of you is a devil? Jesus let Judas stay
among the disciples as long as he would. He knew what Judas
was; yet, he did not turn him out, excommunicate him, nor do
anything else to him of a disciplinary nature. If he, with his
perfect character, could stand the presence of such a being, we
ought to be able to stand it till the harvest, if it is necessary.
But with all his tenderness towards all classes of men, Jesus
never left the wrongdoer in doubt as to his judgment of the
wrongdoer's character. Even Judas knew that the Master
understood him.
Jesus treated the woman of Samaria with great kindness.
No other Jew would have talked with her. His disciples were
astonished when they found him talking to her, for the Jews
had no dealings with the Samaritans. But the woman did not
go away with the impression that Jesus approved of her mode
of life. When he said to her, "He whom thou now hast is not
thy husband," she knew what he thought of her.
Do not so associate with evil men as to make them believe
that you think that they are all right. Jesus never did that.
To the woman condemned under the law, but at whom no
man was found innocent enough to cast the first stone, Jesus
said: "Neither do I condemn thee." I do not pass sentence
of punishment upon you. But 'go and sin no more,' told her
what he thought of her life and conduct. God forbid that any
one of us hould refuse to give a helping hand to man or woman
who, having been bad, repents and tries to be good. For them,
the message spoken in kindness must always be "Go and sin
no more."
P
"He receiveth sinners and eateth with them," said the
Pharisees. Only six days before the crucifixion they said of him
as he went to the house of Zaccheus, the chief tax gatherer of
Jericho, "He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sin-
ner." They would not have done so. But he did. Was he less
opposed to sin and crime than they were? But he did not go
to be "hail fellow well met" with sinners, whether publicans or
Pharisees. He associated with them only for their good, and
he never sought to curry favor with them by pretending that
he thought that they were on the whole ideal men. The Pharisee
who thought he was doing Jesus great honor to admit him to
his table and who was greatly disturbed because a woman who
was a sinner had been permitted by Jesus to anoint his feet with
ointment after she had washed them with her tears and wiped
them with her hair-receives the rebuke he deserves, high-toned
aristocrat though he was. "I entered into thine house, thou
gavest me no water for my feet. Thou gavest me no kiss. My
head with oil thou didst not anoint." I have received at your
hands no special kindness and hardly ordinary civility; but
this woman at whose presence you are sneering, has with mar-
velous tenderness, unselfishness and liberality, more than
supplied the defects of your self-complacent hospitality. Where-
fore I say unto thee, her sins which are many-no concealment
of that fact even in the presence of the woman—which are many,
are forgiven her-for she loved much.
Jesus was the friend of publicans and sinners, as the Phari-
sees said. He was a helpful friend, full of sympathy and kind-
ness and charity. But he never associated with them as per-
sons with whose life he was satisfied and whose character He
approved. He met them always as one trying to lift them out
of evil and induce them to seek a better life. In a word His
charity was no bestial indifference to the distinction between
good and evil, or between honest men and knaves.
There is a proper time for pulling up tares, and when that
time comes, they should be uprooted. First, in the development
of our own characters. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it
out and cast it from thee; and if thy right hand offend thee,
cut it off and cast it from thee. Second, in our relations to oth-
ers-whenever the results will not be injurious to the general
good. And third, with nations, whenever huma ity demands
that the organized power of Christian states shall be used for
the relief and protection of the oppressed and down-trodden.
Such a time came not long ago to Christian Europe, when
Turkey had filled up the measure of her iniquity by the murder
of tens of thousands of helpless Armenians-her own subjects.
But the Concert of Nations of Christian Europe, silent, selfish,
jealous of each other, afraid of each other, stood by and per-
mitted the Turk, already drenched to the shoulders in the blood
of Armenia, to proceed still further and cut the throats of their
brothers of Christian Greece in their heroic but useless struggle.
Then was the time for these nations to strike a blow that would
have avenged the wrongs of centuries. Then was the time for
rooting up tares without the slightest danger of rooting up
wheat-there being none in Turkey to uproot. But Christian
Europe, because the nations could not agree and a general
European war was deemed worse even than the murder of Ar-
menians, reserved its strength for the easier task of dismember-
ing and parceling out China in the East, and left the unspeak-
able Turk undisturbed and unpunished.
It has been reserved for the young republic of the West to
set for Christendom an example of a foreign policy inspired not
by selfishness, but by generosity and real nobility of spirit.
14
Our country is now engaged in a war with Spain, entered
into, so far as appears, with little or no prospect of material
gain to ourselves, but solely in the interest of humanity—to
protect the people of Cuba from cruelty and wrong heaped up-
on them for centuries by Spanish oppression. No war was ever
engaged in by any nation for more unselfish reasons; and if the
God of Battles shall give the victory to our arms on sea and
land, as I cannot doubt that He will, my earnest hope is that
my country may not forget the high mission of mercy in which
it is engaged, and may not, carried away by the lust of power
and glory, convert a great contest in the interest of humanity,
which ought to be an inspiring example to Christendom for all
time to come, into an ordinary struggle for wider dominion
and the gratification of unholy ambition. God save the
Republic.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS:
"When a man's ways please the Lord, He maketh even his
enemies to be at peace with him.” Peace is the desirable con-
dition of life. I can ask nothing better for you than that in the
earnest pursuit of the various occupations in which you may
engage, you may enjoy peace, and may steadily grow in wis-
dom and in favor with God and man.
As today you recall the efforts which you have made to
secure an education, you cannot but rejoice that your work is
done and that the reward is assured. But in the midst of your
rejoicing there must come thoughts of those who started with
you but have fallen out by the way, and especially of those two,
bright scholars and loyal friends, Carl Huhn and Edna May
Stock, who had already won honors and confidently expected
to stand here with you today, but who already have been pro-
moted to a higher service above. The memory of your dead
classmates cannot but chasten somewhat your expressions of
joy on this auspicious occasion; and it will come to you many
times in your future life as a solemn reminder of what we all at
some time or other must meet. But for you the past at least is
secure. You have found by your experience here, that wisdom's
ways are ways of pleasantness and that all her paths are peace.
So may you find it in the future. And now, as we part, I beg
you to accept my heartiest wishes for your happiness and use-
fulness in this life, and for an immortality of joy in the life here-
after. Farewell.
E
BOUND
APR 10 1919
UNIV. OF MICH.
LIBRARY

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 06598 5122


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VERBAAA rat
NORA SAN
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ܘ +ܫܟܬܐ ܕܟܠܕܫܩܐ -1 . ܢ ܢ