Williams College Centennial Anniversary 793-^^93 tSHdUam^ Colleee* CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY. 1 793 -1 893. C o Q 1793- WILLIAMS COLLEGE. 1893. RECORD OF THE COMMEMORATION, October Eighth to Tenth, 1893, ON %\)t Ceutemual annitjersarp OF THE FOUNDING OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE. CAMBRIDGE, N.E.: JOHN WILSON AND SON. Sanibersttg Pass, 1894. LDGOTJ JdJ3 PREFATORY NOTE. THE Trustees of Williams College, in prepar- ing for its Centennial Celebration, appointed a Committee of Publication, to whom was assigned the duty of editing and publishing an account of the Proceedings, the Addresses, and Commemorations of the Celebration. This account the Committee was directed to embody in a suitable volume, for distribution to the Alumni of Williams College, and to other collegiate institu- tions, libraries, and individuals. In fulfilment of the duty assigned to them by the Trustees, the Com- mittee has printed the official action appointing the Centennial Celebration, the lists of the various com- mittees and speakers, and all the public addresses during the days of the Commemoration. Brief de- scriptions have also been given of the social features of the occasion, the names of guests, and incidents that naturally add to the interest of such a book. A few engravings have been introduced, which illustrate the foundation of the College and the exter- nal changes which have taken place during its history. In order to facilitate reference to the various matters ivil074:80 iv PREFATORY NOTE. contained in the volume, a careful index has been added. The Committee submit the result of their labors to the Trustees and Alumni of Williams College, in the hope that this record of a memorable occasion may honor the institution, and be a worthy addition to its history. CHARLES AUGUSTUS STODDARD, LEVERETT W. SPRING, HAMILTON W. MABIE, SOLOMON BULKLEY GRIFFIN, FRANCIS E. LEUPP, Committee. WiLLiAMSTOWN, May 25, 1894. CONTENTS. PAGE Sketch of the Anniversary ., 9 Executive Committee of Trustees 9 Sub-Committees 11 Circular of the Committee on Hospitality 12 List of Invited Guests 13 Centennial Building 15 Anniversary Chorus 15 ^unua^, W. E. RiCHMOXD, '97. ) , '95. > L. C. NoRRis, '97. I a, '94. > E. Edwards, '94. 7 , '94. > W. M. Reed, '94. > :;h, '94. > , '94. > C. W. Fitch W. E. Beckwith, '94. \ E. Edwards, '94 F. F. Harward, P. M. Goodrich, '94. G. H. Wright 5. 220 Yards Dash, 15 Yards Limit. H. S. Patterson, '96, scratch. P. M. Goodrich, '94, 10 yds. J. R. Allen, '95, 5 yds. E. Putney, '96, 10 yds. G. W. AsHTON, '97, 15 yds. C. F. Clay, '97, 15 yds. W. S. Deyo, '97, 7 yds. C. H. Upton, '97, 9 yds. 6. Potato Race. E. H. HuTTON, '94. W. S. Deyo, '97. E. D. Wheeler, '94. C. A. Wright, '97. 7. 220 Yards Hurdle, 10 Yards Limit. N. S. Deyo, '97, scratch. G. Perkins, '95, 10 yds. W. S. Elder, '95, 10 yds. 8. 440 Yards Run, 25 Yards Limit. P. M. Goodrich, '94, scratch. J. R. Allen, '95, 18 yds. W. S. Elder, '95, 10 yds. G. W. Ashton, '97, 20 yds. C. F. Clay, '97, 25 yds. A. F. Brewer, '97, 23 yds. P. P. Ingham, '97, 25 yds. F. D. Goodwin, '95, 25 yds. 9. Running High Jump. T. Gilman, '96. E. C. Durfee, '96. C. Holmes, '96. 10. Sack Race. D. E. Wheeler, '94. E. H. Hctton, '94. G. H. Wright, '94. E. Edwards, '94. G. W. Ashton, '97. C. A. Perkins, '97, W. S. Elder, '95. 22 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. 11. Half-Mile Run, 50 Yards Limit. D. E. Wheeler, '94, scratch. F. W. Rawle, '95, 40 yds. W. S. Elder, '95, scratch. G. W. Ashton, '97, 40 yds. P. P. Ingham, '97, 50 yds. E. M. Walker, '97, 40 yds. C. H. DuRFEE, '95, 50 yds. W. M. Reed, '94, 40 yds. G. W. Carteledge, '97, 40 yds. D. E. Griswold, '97, 30 yds. 12. Obstacle Race. B. C. Heald, Jr., '95. J. Taylor, Jr., '95. C. M. Slocum, '95. W. S. Elder, '95. G. F. Perkins, '95. J. H. Peck, '95. R. H. Jeffrey, '95. A. L. Jones, '95. W. H. Babbitt, '95. F. D. Goodwin, '95. James Ogilvie, '95. F. DeP. Townsend, '95. G. W. Hunter, '95. The field sports drew to Weston Field a great throng of people, who packed the grand stand, and at times crowded upon the track in such numbers as to interfere with the suc- cess of some of the " events." At the afternoon tea in Hopkins Hall, the hosts were Madame Hopkins, Mrs. Denison, Mrs. Archibald Hopkins, Mrs. Lawrence Hopkins, and Miss Hopkins ; in the Library, Mrs. Hewett, Mrs. Allinson, and Mrs. Sabin ; at the Thomp- son Biological Library, Mrs. Mears, Mrs. Safford, Mrs. Rice, Mrs. Spring, and Mrs. Wahl. The Germania Band gave a concert upon the Campus at three o'clock. In the evening there was a general reception at the Gym- nasium to the Alumni and invited guests, — the large hall being handsomely adorned for the occasion. A web of stream- ers extended from the roof to the galleries, and the banners won in athletic contests were conspicuously displayed. Presi- dent and Mrs. Carter performed the duties of host. As the exercises were purely social, nothing occurred during the evening that requires mention. Music was furnished by the Germania Band, and refreshments were served. The fol- lowing gentlemen were appointed ushers : — A SKETCH OF THE ANNIVERSARY. 23 Justin Kellogg . . . A. V. W. Van Vechten A. Lawrence Hopkins Edward L. Perkins Joseph W. Burden George B. Abbott . 1865 Fisher Howe, Jr. . . . 1872 . 1847 Richard B. Leake . . . 1877 . 1862 Edwin A. King . . . . 1878 . 1863 John Tatlock, Jr. . . . 1882 . 1872 WoLcoTT H. Johnson . . 1883 . 1872 I. McD. Garfield . . . 1893 Other events of the day and evening were numerous class and society reunions. Also Mr. A. V. W. Van Vechten, who founded a prize for extemporaneous speaking in 1876, gave a dinner at the Greylock to the winners of this prize. Five of them were present, — Clarence B. Roote, 1876, Herbert H. Fletcher, 1879, Herbert D. Bailey, 1885, George W. Anderson, 1886, John F. Fitchen, Jr., 1889. After dinner there was a discussion of the subject of extemporary speaking. The following is the programme for the last day of the celebration : — 10. A. M. The Trustees, Officers, and Alumni of the College will form in procession on the Campus in front of the Library. Invited guests will assemble in the Library. 10.30 A. M. Public Exercises in the Congregational Church. Hon. Martin I. Townsend, LL.D., '33, Troy, N. Y., will preside. Chancellor James H. Canfield, M.A., '68, University of Nebraska, will deliver an Historical Address. Conferring of Degrees by the President. Luncheon will be served in the Centennial Building at the close of the exercises. President Franklin Carter, LL.D., '62, will preside. Brief Addresses by invited guests. Evening. Promenade Concert in the Centennial Building, under management of the Class of 1895. Tuesday morning the invited guests, the Trustees, and the Faculty met in the Library, while the Alumni gathered on the Campus and filled the air with college songs and class yells. The procession was organized as follows : the band, the Chief Marshal and his aids, the Chairman of the Committee of Trus- tees and the presiding officer of the day, the orator and chaplain, invited guests, the Selectmen of Williamstown, the Trustees, 24 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. the Faculty, the Alumni in the order of their classes, and undergraduates. The line of march lay along the south side of Main Street, past old West College, which was greeted with a round of cheers, as far as the Park ; then it crossed the street and proceeded up the west side of it to the Congregational Church, halting a moment at the President's house, where President Carter and the Governor of the Commonwealth with his staff joined the procession, which it is estimated con- tained not less than a thousand people. When the rear of it was leaving the Campus, the front had nearly reached the Taconic Inn. The President, the Trustees, and invited guests occupied the platform. After music by the orchestra, Mr. Davison, Chairman of the Committee of Trustees, called upon the Rev. Dr. William W, Adams to offer prayer. The Troy Vocal Society sang Mendelssohn's " To the Sons of Art." Then Mr. Davison introduced Martin I. Townsend as presiding officer, who, in a brief address, presented the Orator of the day, Chancellor Canfield, of the University of Nebraska. At the conclusion of the oration the orchestra played the Intro- duction to Act V. of " Manfred," by Reinecke, after which President Carter rose and said : — By virtue of authority committed to me by the President and Trustees of Williams College, on this the one hundredth anniversary of the opening of the College, in the presence of the leaders of education in New England and other distin- guished men, and of this great body of the Alumni of the College, I am about to confer the highest honors which the College can bestow upon men eminent in learning and service. James Hulme Canfield, Centennial Orator, and Chancellor of the University of Nebraska, Merrill Edwards Gates, teacher, administrator, President of Amherst College. A SKETCH OF THE ANNIVERSARY. 25 William Jewett Tucker, founder of tlie Andover House, recently Professor of Sacred Rhetoric in Andover Seminary, now President of Dartmouth College. George Williamson Smith, administrator, President of Trinity College. Justin Winsor, scholar and author in American history, and Librarian of Harvard College. William Keith Brooks, discoverer and author in biological science, and Professor in the Johns Hopkins University. JosiAH WiLLARD GiBBS, mathematician and physicist, and Professor in Yale University. Frederick John Kingsbury, Corporator of Yale University, student of political economy, and President of the American Association of Social Science. Henry Cabot Lodge, historical writer, orator, and Senator from Massachusetts. William Everett, teacher and scholar in the humanities, a lover of his country no less than a lover of learning, Edward Patterson, jurist, and Justice of the Supreme Court of New York. Henry Augustine Childs, jurist, and Justice of the Supreme Court of New York. Edward Swift Isham, lawyer and publicist. All these I create Doctors of Laws, and bid them enjoy all the rights, privileges, and honors pertaining to this degree, and direct that their names be enrolled as Honorary Graduates of Williams College. Charles David Hartranft, theologian. President of Hart- ford Theological Seminary. Thomas Harwood Pattison, preacher, and Professor of Sacred Rhetoric in Rochester Theological Seminary. Charles Augustus Briggs, scholar in Christian doctrine, and Professor in Union Theological Seminary. John Patterson Coyle, preacher, pastor, friend of the laborer. Arthur Lawrence, preacher, rector, inheritor and exponent of devotion to Christian learning. 26 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. All these I create Doctors of Divinity, and bid them enjoy all the rights, privileges, and honors pertaining to that degree, and direct that their names be enrolled as Honorary Graduates of Williams College. When Representative Everett, and Dr. Briggs rose to receive their degrees, the audience greeted them with great applause. Music followed the conferring of degrees, — Bruch's " A Roman Song of Triumph," by the Troy Vocal Society ; and the finale from Wagner's " Lohen- grin," by the orchestra. The Rev. Dr. Adams pronounced the benediction. The audience then went, no attempt being made to re-form the procession, to the temporary building where the lunch was to be served. The interior of this building presented a gay appearance, with its festoons of bunting and with its red, white, and blue streamers. A large purple banner, on which was inscribed the motto " 1793 Williams 1893," adorned the front of the ladies' gallery. The table for invited guests was placed on a dais which extended across the east side of the room. President Carter presided. On his right sat Governor Russell ; on his left, and in full uniform, Captain Ephraim Williams, of the United States Army, grand-nephew of the founder of the College. The Rev. Dr. Adams said grace, after which the lunch proceeded. Meanwhile the gallery re- served for ladies filled up, and the band played at intervals. At the conclusion of the lunch President Carter called the assembly to order. The Secretary of the Corporation, Rev. C. H. Burr, read letters from President Cleveland, ex-Pres- ident Harrison, David Dudley Field, Stephen J. Field, Senator Hoar, and Rev. Dr. A. Y. V. Raymond, President of the Alumni of Union College. Greetings and congratulations were received from Mrs. Mills, of Mills College, from the President and Faculty of Holy Cross College, and from many others. Before passing to more formal matters. President Carter, in A SKETCH OF THE ANNIVERSARY. 27 behalf of the Governing Board, thanked the Committees who had carried forward the work of preparation for the anniver- sary. Then, after welcoming the Alumni and invited guests, and speaking of the significance of the celebration, he intro- duced Governor Russell. The next speaker was Captain Ephraim Williams, who represented the Williams family, and gave an account of the founder of the College. Speeches fol- lowed by President Dwight, of Yale University, and Bishop Lawrence, after which the audience rose and sang the Cen- tennial Hymn, written by the Rev. Dr. Washington Gladden. The remaining speakers were President Tucker, of Dartmouth ; President Eliot, of Harvard University ; Senator Lodge ; Pres- ident Andrews, of Brown University ; Mr. Andrew Carnegie ; President Taylor, of Vassar College ; President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins University ; Professor Briggs, of Union Theo- logical Seminary. The exercises closed with a benediction by Bishop Lawrence. At the conclusion of the speaking the Senior Class formed in line, and proceeded to the Thompson Laboratories, in front of which Mr. Thompson had built a substantial fence, which is designed to serve as a place of resort for students. After music by the band, Mr. Thompson made a short speech and broke a bottle of champagne on the rail. Mr. H. G. Rowe, 1894, responded, and accepted the gift in behalf of the College. The class then mounted upon the fence, sang " The Moun- tains," and concluded the ceremonies by giving the class and the college yell. The Alpha Delta Phi Society held a public reception at their club-house from four to seven o'clock. Tuesday evening, " Zuleykeh, or Second Sight," a play written by Miss Carter, was presented in Goodrich Hall, with artistic stage-setting and musical accompaniment. The dramatis personce were Miss Carter, Miss Stoddard, Sanborn Tenney, 1886, Yanderpoel Adriance, 1890, Fred- erick C. Ferry, 1891, and Louis M. Starr, 1893. 28 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. The last of the Centennial festivities was the Promenade Concert, under the management of the following Committee of the Junior Class : — F. P. Kimball. H. D. Riley. Maclay Hoyxe. J. S. Russell. H. P. Moseley. C. C. Miller. G. M. Alden. W. B. Frear. Ewing Taylor. S. B. Da VOL. H. G. Sanford. F. W. Rawle. James Ogilvie. R. T. Furman. The patronesses were : — Mrs. William E. Russell. Mrs. Franklin Carter. Mrs. Justin Kellogg. Mrs. Eugene M. Jerome. Mrs. John B. Gale. Mrs. Harry M. Alden. Mrs. Lawrence Hopkins. Mrs. Edward T. Hun. Mrs. John L. Russell. Mrs. J. M. Ide. Mrs. Mark MacCay. Mrs. Charles T. Cook. Mrs. Francis L. Stetson. Mrs. Samuel P. Blag den. Three representatives of the family of Colonel Williams attended the Anniversary, -^ Captain Ephraim Williams, 1863, and Henry WilUams, 1858 (Harvard), grand-nephews, and Henry Williams D wight, whose great-graudmother was Colonel Williams's half-sister. The following telegram was sent to David Dudley Field : — Williams College, at her Hundredth Anniversary, sends greet- ings to her oldest and honored son, who, like his younger brother, has bound two continents together by the deep-sea cable of inter- national law. Franklin Carter. The oldest Alumnus of the College present was Joseph Lyman Partridge, of the Class of 1828, aged ninety-two. Various articles of historic interest were on exhibition in the Library during the Centennial, — a facsimile of the will of Colonel Williams, the original report of the battle of Lake George by the officer in command, a photograph of the monu- ment at Lake George, a picture of the spot where Colonel A SKETCH OF THE ANNIVERSARY. 29 Williams was buried after the battle, two diagrams of the battle, broadside catalogues of the College from 1800 to 1821, College laws from 1793 to 1893, family relics loaned by Cap- tain Ephraim Williams and Henry Williams. Some of these articles, and others which have not been mentioned, were loaned by Fisher Howe, 1872. On the day when the celebra- tion in Williamstown began, and in accordance with the in- structions of the College authorities, a handsome wreath of ivy was placed upon the monument of Colonel Williams at Lake George by James A. Holden, 1885. The addresses of President Hopkins and the Rev. Dr. Thomas Bobbins at the Semi-centennial of the College, August 16, 1843, were re-printed, together with an introduction giv- ing some account of that anniversary, and distributed among the Alumni who were present. July 28, the Committee on Hospitality made a report on the state of the weather from October 8th to the 10th during the preceding twenty years. It was found that in this period there had been snow on the mountains five years, a frost seven years, and one day or more of rain ten years. But in 1893 neither snow nor frost nor rain appeared. The grass in the streets was still green, the mountains were never arrayed in more magnificent colors, and glorious autumnal sunshine continued with scarcely an interruption during the three days of the Anniversary. SUNDAY, OCTOBER EIGHTH. Services on Sunday were in the Congregational Church. The Rev. Henry Hopkins preached in the morning, and in the afternoon there was a conference on the Relation of the College to Christianity. o o O H Til SERMON. BY THE REV. HENRY HOPKINS, Pastor of the First Congregational Church, Kansas Cily, Mo. That I may know Mm. — Philippians iii. 10, Vy ILLIAMS COLLEGE is a hundred years old, and there is not a Avrinkle on her brow. Tln'ough the constant growth of a centiir}^, she has stood a steadfast type of a distinctive educational idea. In constantly increasing- numbers, occupying ever wider areas, there have been other institutions having substantially the same origin, aims, and methods. The American college is the generic name of the class. This designation has had in the past, and, notwith- standing the rapid changes of the present, still has, a definite meaning. It is descriptive of an educa- tional organization conformable to no other type. These colleges stand here and there on the high places, through all the great land, from the Aroostook to the Golden Gate, from Canada to the Gulf; and offshoots, not a few, flourish at the antipodes. They are an honorable and an excellent sisterhood, dyna- mic, dignified, gracious, beneficent. They are to-day adorning and blessing the vast commonwealths that make up the glory and strength of our Republic. Their history is a large and noble part of the history of the 34 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. letters, tlie science, the patriotism, and the religion of our country ; while in foreign lands the transplanted American college, as represented by such institutions as Robert College at Constantinople, and the Doshisha in Japan, is training the men who are bringing in popular enlightenment, constitutional liberty, and the kingdom of God. If you search for a common characteristic, you will come very near to the heart of our topic, which is the connection between education and religion. We are concerned especially with the higher education as illustrated in the American college, and religion as related to it. At the outset, a brief historical statement. In the little community on Massachusetts Bay, wdiere the American college first saw the light, the Church was the dominating and moulding power. There was not a union of Church and State, for the Church and State were really one. The State was only the Church acting in its civil capacity, and the college and school were tlie Church training the young for service in the State and Church. The fathers of 'New England certainly did not make the mistake of separating religion from life. Religion was more to them than dogma, more than sentiment, more than ecclesiasticism. Religion meant to them obedience to God ; and that is what it means to-day to their broadest-minded descendant who inveighs against the distinction between the sa- cred and the secular. They brought ever}^ depart- ment of the personal and social life under this sway. Every human activity they taught to bow to this con- SERMON". 35 trol, — politics as well as morals, education as really as family life. In their earnestness, wliich was most brave and beautiful, to set up on these shores the religious com- monwealth wliich they had gone aside by themselves into the wilderness that they might establish, the Puri- tans were hard, arbitrary, narrow. In metliod, yes ; but they were fundamentally right in principle. It remains for us to be right in both principle and method ; for while they, in identifying religion and life, attempted to put tlie forms of the Church into all secu- lar life, it remains for us to put the life of the Church into all secular forms. There were three institutions which expressed the imited life of the early English settlers, — the Church, the State, and their organized educational system ; and these three were originally one. These together formed tlie tripartite embodiment of the one interior vital principle common to that singularly homoge- neous people. Their educational system, of which the college was the highest expression, deserves to be ranked with the State and the Church as an es- sential and characteristic part of their organic life. The logical development of their principles into existing institutions in the line of civil government and church organization, has been the subject of study, admiration, and large record ; but the third line of development has been no less noteworth}^, and, as expressed in the common school, has been adequately recorded. But the American college — its rise and progress, its character, work, and influence — is a 36 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. neglected topic in American history, and will make a noble chapter, never yet written, in any record of the national life. It was the combination in organic unity, but with ever increasing liberty of action, of these three institutions, — the Church, the State, and a free education, culminating in the college, — that made the little settlements on the shores of Massa- chusetts in the beginnings of New England a unique and altogether original commonwealth ; and it is this which accounts for the moulding power which that commonwealth has had in all the history of the nation. A church without a bishop ; a State without a king; and a college, separate from both Church and State, open on equal terms to all men, English and Indian, with a compulsory training in the common school for all the children of the people, — such was their bold beginning. It was, however, rudimentary and imperfect, the magnificent inauguration upon tlie new continent of the new democratic Christian age. These three institutions were all in germ purely demo- cratic, and were all profoundly religious; and the sub- stance of the contention of the nineteenth-century Puritan and Pilgrim, standing on the threshold of the twentieth century, is tliat these three institutions, the Church, the State, and the College, shall continue, under changed conditions, expanded and ennobled, in the independence of their separate functions, but in the unity of their common life, purely democratic and profoundly religious. Harvard was the first in the succession on this SERMON. 37 continent ; but we must not fail to note the fact that this noble strain, so distinguished and so j^ersistent, comes from farther back. John Harvard was one of a hundred University men who between 1630 and 1649 came out into the wilderness. Of those one hun- dred, seventy were from Old Cambridge ; and twenty of these, including John Harvard, were from the new Puritan College of Emmanuel. This Emmanuel Col- lege, that was destined to influence so largely through Harvard the early New England settlers, and down through Yale and the rest our whole national history, was founded by Sir John Mildmay. He it was who replied to Queen Elizabeth questioning him: ''Madam, far be it from me to do aught against the laws of your realm ; but I have planted an acorn which, when it becomes an oak, God only knoweth what it will amount to." The mention of Old Cambridge compels us, in pass- ing, to turn our thoughts to the ancient universities. We are at once reminded that, from the beginning of the organized Christian life after the destruction of the Roman Empire, the connection between religion and education, if not always harmonious, was always close. It is very significant that the oldest universi- ties were voluntary foundations. Salerno in the ninth century, and Bologna in the twelfth, were not called into existence by the king or the Pope. " About ten universities appear to have been at work before papal action began." The great University of Paris, the glory of the Middle Ages, rose without the decree of the Church or the State. Of both Oxford and Cam- 38 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. bridge tlie same is true. Mr. Gladstone, who is my authority here, in the Romanes lecture at Oxford a year ago, speaks of the early university as the com- plement, also as the rival, of the church, — ''the first great systematic effort," he says, " at what I have termed the lay mind to achieve self-assertion and emancipation." But he compares the two powers to two rowers in a boat, — "one on the right hand and the other on the left, portions of whose force neutral- ized one another, but which united nevertheless to propel the boat." It would seem, however, as if through a long course of generations, the Church had in hand the tiller rather than an oar ; and while the obedient crew smote the " sounding furrows," she guided as she would. That she was no Ulysses bidding them seek new lands and sail "beyond the baths of all the western stars," we must confess. That the religious power has been overbearing; that it has sought too often to repress the spirit of free inquiry, to suppress general learning, to oppress those who sought to think for themselves, is a sad truth of history in all lands. The administration of religion in the past certainly has not been always hospitable to new truth. The man of sentiment in religion, un- instructed, becomes a source of pity or amusement ; but the man of conscience with narrow vision is an element of discord, impracticable, retroactive, and when in power, unscrupulous and persecuting. The universities of England were, in the eye of the law, lay and not ecclesiastical foundations ; and, in the words of Mr. Gladstone, " they stood as a guarantee SERMON. 39 against the unchecked predominance of the ecclesi- astical power." In this new land we have had something of this old strife between a timid and well-meanincr but un- wise religious conservatism and the spirit of intellec- tual progress, but here there has been an open and fair field. There has been no hierarchy with vested privileges to be preserved, naturally interested to maintain the existing order through love of place, of power, and of gain ; and more than this, society at the beginning contained in itself, in the very threefold unity of that free constitution of which I have spoken, the forces and conditions which must work the cure of its own narrowness and severity, which guaranteed the evolution from its own best elements of something better than itself. Tliat something in education was the American college as we now have it, which, in the language of our President Bradley, ''untrammelled by Church or State, yet fostered by both, is the most comprehensive illustration which this free land affords of freedom of thought and action." I call special attention to the fact that the order of institutions of which we are speaking has been formed — Harvard being the only exception, and that tech- nically and for a short time — by the voluntary as- sociation of individuals, and that they are so governed. No ecclesiastical body or State officer can exercise any official control in any of them. There can be no compelling hand from the place of power. No decree of synod or bishop or council can determine any- thing. The churches most interested in them have no 40 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. organic connection with tliem. The governing body- is self-perpetuating, and free under its own charter, while it still keeps in vital connection with the whole body of the Alumni ; and the connection with religion must be through them. Thus the college has also what has been happily called " organic capacity for change." This is peculiar, seemingly irresponsible and unguarded; but for religion as well as letters, judging from the history of two hundred and fifty years, we conclude that it works well. We are not speaking of the State university, where there is often a positive and salutary religious life, on the one hand ; nor of the sectarian college, which exists primarily to serve a denomination, on the other ; but of the lineal descendants of the original American college, — the Mildmay Oaks, — Yale, Dartmouth, Williams, Bow- doin, Amherst, and all the rest of like kind, in the East and in the West, and of the newer sort, Welles- ley, Vassar, Smith, and others. AYliat has been the relation between religion and education in these institutions 1 It has not been strife nor rivalry. It has been from the beginning substan- tial agreement and mutual helpfulness. The simile of the oars applies here. The religious influence existing in these institutions has been almost uniformly of the positive type, and it has been, nevertheless, unsectarian. Tliis has been a remarkable fact, but fact it is, that Christianity in these colleges has been so administered as to trans- form and mould character, and to send forth an unfail- ing army of Christian men, as teachers, as leaders in SERMOX. 41 professional life and in business, and so as not to fos- ter sectarian zeal, or directly serve denominational ends. This has been my observation at the East and at the West. Upon the particular history of our own college, I am not permitted to enter. Let us consider noAV the conditions of the profitable continuance of this alliance. First, keep clear of the elements that in the past have repressed and op- pressed. Keep clear of ecclesiasticism. There are cer- tain of our Christian brethren who still believe that only through ecclesiasticism can education be admin- istered. In Chicago the other day I heard the elo- quent rector of the new Roman Catholic University at Wasliington arguing down opposition on the ground that the university was the work of the Hierarchy and of the great Leo. He quoted the Pope as saying to one of the professors, " I am its founder ; it is my work ; I will protect it." To a believer in the Amer- ican college sprung from the soil, and responsible only to God and the American people, an institution so begun and so controlled seems out of time in this century and out of place in this Republic, an un- American anachronism. To us it seems that our Roman Catholic fellow-citizens are fully competent to manage their own educational interests without the aid of a foreign ruler. If they need direction from Rome in affairs of education as affecting religion, why not in affairs of civil government also! I mention the above fact as a background of contrast to the method in which we believe. If, however, we differ 42 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. radically in method, as to the need of Christian edu- cation we cordially agree. You would vote with ac- clamation for two of the resolutions passed at the late Roman Catholic Congress : " Resolved, that in Chris- tian education we recognize the indispensable safe- guard of the Christian future of our country and of the world ; " " Resolved, that in the elevating and di- rectins: influence of the Christian hig-her education in particular, we recognize the most potent agency for the wise solution of the great social problems now facing mankind." Nor do we want any authoritative dogmatism from any source, nor any sectarianism of science or reli- gion. Let us preserve this supreme felicity of our educational situation, its Christian liberty. Let us keep clear also of the critical spirit. To free criticism as an instrument of progress, education owes hospital- ity. But the spirit of negation and no faith is the enemy of progress. Mr. Martineau gave the diag- nosis of our age in a single sentence, when he said, "We have the critic everywhere, the lover nowhere." Williams College honors the memory of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Suppose for a mo- ment that he had fallen in here with that evil spirit of repression, with associations where moral earnestness was bad form ; it may be that the great latent, divine enthusiasms that were in him might have been smoth- ered, and Hampton Listitute have never been. The most pressing need of our education is not training, but impulse. He is a great teacher who makes men think, but he is a greater who makes them feel. SERMON^. 43 Phillips Brooks might have spoken for other institu- tions than his own beloved university when he said : '' Our Harvard way is as a whole to treat life on its negative side, more than on its positive. We dwell more on the exposure of error than the discovery of truth, in spiritual things. We are more afraid of be- lieving something that we ought not to believe than of not believing something that we ought to believe.'' On the positive side preserve that which has been the essential characteristic of the Christian college. The fundamental conception I apprehend to be a su- preme regard for the worth of the individual human being. This is the root idea of our religious and civil liberty. It has been fruitful only when intensified by the reHgious conviction that every man is made in the image of God, and has been redeemed by the Son of God. The humblest and weakest may not, therefore, be despised or neglected or harmed. Each has the riglit of the opportunity to be all that is in him to be. This logically carries with it the right of free discus- sion and of free thought. This carries with it the democratic programme. That Rousseau came out from Calvinistic Geneva was not an accident of his- tory. This is the mighty force that has wrought miglitily for human liberty, enlightenment, and help in the past. Preserve it, and preserve the religious basis which gives it power. This has brought it to pass that Christian education has sought first to edu- cate man as man, and after that to give him skill and tools. It carries with it the distinct choice of what is technically known as a liberal education. With a 44 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. technical scliool on the one hand and with the univer- sity on the other, the liberal education is an alliance, but the ends it seeks are different from either. This implies large space for "the humanities," — '^itterae humaniores," as the Scots phrase it. History, phi- losophy, poetry, art, literature, — through these there is contact with the supersensible, with the central and indestructible interests of the interior life of man, with the spiritual realm ; for inside the soul of man lies a world outside the field of science. These are in alli- ance with and a preparation for the true religious spirit. In the exclusive study of science there is the neglect and consequent weakening of the aesthetic, the moral, and the spiritual faculties. I should say that the farther condition of the pre- servation of this connection in our time would be an emphatic recognition that everything ennobling is Christian, and a stringent denial of the impression that college prayers and the other various devotional meetings of the college constitute the religious life of the institution. Demonstrate also that Christianity is not so much an acceptance of the traditional s^^stem of belief as the realization of a divine principle of liv- ing and a participation in the world's noblest work. Let it be seen that to be a Christian is to be a gentleman. Exhibit the identity of Christianity and manhood. There should be the clear acceptance of Dr. Arnold's distinction, whose absorbing ambition is said to have been ''to compass an education which was not based upon religion, but was itself religious." If I were to saj further that a true connection of SERMOK 45 religion and education is conditioned upon the rejec- tion of the materialistic philosophy and the teaching of tlieism, I should have your assent. If beyond this I declare that it is desirable to promote, not only the consciousness of God, but the belief in immortality, in order to give sanctions, impulse, and nobleness to stu- dent life, most would answer yes; and many would agree that in addition to this the preservation of the Christian ideal as pictured in the Gospels and evolved in Christian literature would be secured. But when I pass still higher, as I now do, and claim the need in education of the acknowledgment and exaltation of the living Christ as the centre of all knowledge, be- cause he is the centre of humanity, and because in humanity all knowledge centres, and as the Lord of Life and the rightful teacher and master of men, I fear I part company with not a few. "That I may know him," — this is not the higher, but the highest education. There is the reign of law in the spiritual realm also. Is Christ God's method of giving life and light to men ? Is there through him " the life of God in the soul of man " ? So he himself declares. " I am the way, the truth, and the life." " I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." This is the truth which lies at the heart of the Christian's credo. He asserts Christ's living presence in the world, min- istered by the Holy Spirit, — a dynamic fact, real as the sunlight. The perplexed student of theology, fresh from theory and criticism, says: "I make out Jesus a great religious genius." Royal souls to whom reli- 46 WILLI AJVIS COLLEGE. gion is not a science but an experience wliicli kindles in the depths of being, declare that they behold " the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ ; " and they tell us that that face can never be blotted out from the world's sky any more than can the sun from the heavens. They speak also of Christ in them the hope of glory. For them his "name is above every name." They lack words to tell of the riches of light and freedom and joy that are in him; like Rutherford, who said : " As little of the sea as a child can take in his hand, so little of my great and overflowing Jesus Christ can I carry away in my poor and riven out dish." They count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of him. Had the great ones of earth known him, they would have found peace. The peradventure of the mighty Plato concerning the one eternal, and the life that shall be, would have become a glorious certainty; the half-despairing cry of Goethe for light would have been turned into an exulting song of praise. No philosophy is too lofty to sit at his feet, no scholarship too exalted to learn of him, no culture so line that it may not receive an added grace from his touch. We need this Master. Plato has domi- nated centuries of Christian thought; Aristotle was the ruler of the mediaeval schools ; the inductive philosophy of Lord Verulam has been the secret of modern scientific advance: it remains for the spirit, the truth, and the method of life of the great Teacher to subordinate, unify, and energize them all. At last let the education of Christendom own the headship of SERMON. 47 Christ. To know him is to be like him, for he is the truth which a man may become. To be like him. is to know both God and man ; to know him is, there- fore, to know and possess all things. The via crucis is the via lucis. When at last the world of letters, of art, and of music shall own his sway; when the physical forces shall run only on his errands ; then also, with science and commerce and government, the world's great university guild shall join to crown him King of kings and Lord of lords. This is the sum and crown of the highest education, — to ''know him;" for "in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." What, now, are the reasons why the close connection between religion and education should be continued 1 The fundamental reason, fellow-men and brethren Alumni, is that God is. Plainly we confront the ques- tion whether in our education we are to assume the attitude of denial, which is atheism, — the helpless agnostic position, — or whether we are to affirm that there is one God over all, blessed forever, whose off- spring we are, under whose government we live, whose spirit dwells in human souls, and towards the consummations of whose purposes the ages move. If we do this affirm, we stultify our education if we ignore so stupendous a truth. To affirm that God is, is the acknowledgment not only of God transcendent, but of God immanent, "who," as Cardinal Newman has written, " has with adorable, never ceasing energy implicated himself in all the history of creation, the constitution of nature, the course of the world, 48 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. the origin of society, the fortunes of nations, and the action of the human mind ; " who cannot, there- fore, be ignored in any true teaching of philosophy and science, any more than his will can be set aside in the training which is for the conduct of life. As sure as God is, this outward and visible is only the framework and scaffolding ; the sj^iritual is the real. Say so then ; recognize the truth and honor it. Do not apologize for it, and minimize it, and put the knowledge of the Eternal into your education as if it could be a separated topic in your curriculum, an elective along with the Italian language and Sanscrit; but give it full and practical recognition, — make it an ever ^^I'esent thought, in the light and warmth of which all study and all training shall go on. If God is, then should all the departments of the college sing, as they move, ''Oh, come let us exalt the Eternal together." Corresponding to this is the fact that man has af- finity for God, has a religious nature, is essentially a religious being. Here, again, we must choose whether we will stand squarely upon the materialistic phi- losophy, amid the agnostic nullities, or assume sub- stantially the Christian position. The secularist admits that religion still remains the greatest among the forces that move the world of man; and Herbert Spencer assures us that "no one need expect that the religious consciousness will die away, or will change the line of its evolution." We do not argue these positions, we assert these postulates, — that God is, and that man has a spiritual SERMOX. 49 nature which allies him to God. Surely it is no time in the history of the world to deny these facts. How impressive and how significant was the spectacle when in Chicago, at the inauguration of the Parliament of Religions, there stood up together on one platform men differing in race, in color, and in costume, the representatives of diverse nationalities and variant creeds, — Brahmin and Jew, Confucian and Christian, Eoman Catholic and Protestant, — and with one voice repeated together the Lord's Prayer. It is no time to-day to deny man his spiritual birthright, wlien we are already beholding the rise of a great human brotherhood, wide as the world that is conscious of it, tliat is reaching out after the eternal God who is the eternal goodness, and praying and laboring to bring in the kingdom of God among men. There is the presence in the world, as never before, of the eternal life made conscious in the universal aspirations and longings of humanity after truth and goodness and beauty, after perfection, after God. If there are these susceptibilities and powers, they are the highest of all. They especially differentiate us from the creatures below us. Shall we call that train- inof liberal which ig-nores them? One of the watch- words of the new education is, '' Educate the whole man." In the name of the spiritual nature, we join in that demand. It is a most significant and instructive fact con- nected with the training of the human mind, that that epoch-making man, that great benefactor of all lovers of truth, Charles Darwin, should have put on record 4 50 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. the well-known confession of the atrophy, through disuse, of his aesthetic and poetic faculties. Surely the ideal is symmetrical development. Under the unreligious training men dwindle as they grow. We want no organized educational system for "the ex- tirpation of the religious faculty through disuse." We acknowledge that at certain times in the past and at certain places in our own times " man's religious nature, as trained by ecclesiastical practitioners and professors of religion, has been cultivated at the ex- pense of the diapason of his being ; " but we protest against that reaction which would place among his neglected powers and susceptibilities those that are noblest and highest, which, bidding him forget his divine sonship and his immortality, must end in the dwarfing of his imagination, the narrowing and en- feebling of his plans, and the chilling of his aspiring, immortal love. We want religion in college because we want lead- ers of men. The need of the Republic is men and women intelligent enough, broad enough, strong enough, and with sufficient self-forgetfulness to do their whole duty to the State, — men and women fitted to inspire and control their fellows for right living. The need in the wider citizenship of the world is leadership wise and firm ; leadership with moral conviction in it, with patriotism, and an ardent love of humanity at the heart of it ; leadership inspired by the lofty enthusiasms and the great ennobling pas- sions of our nature. God wants leaders more than he wants laws ; men whom their fellows can trust, more SERMOK 51 than lie wants model tenements or co-operative indus- tries or quick transportation. We believe that, as in the past, such leaders will come forth, unexpected, unheralded, from the cabin, from the 23lough, from the college ; mighty men, set free from doubt and fear, and flung into the hand of Almighty God to be used at his pleasure. There is no power in this lower world so mighty as a soul thus given; and the higher education has no loftier calling than to help provide such leaders. What, as a matter of fact, do our colleges and uni- versities too often turn out? Men dilettante, critical, cynical, out of sympathy with their fellow-men ; cul- tivated, it may be, but self-centred; intellectually furnished and trained perhaps, but with all the moral fire and fibre gone out of them. This is largely the result either of an irreligious or an unreligious education. I will venture to state two propositions which I shall not attempt to prove, or even illustrate, but which challenge denial. First, the prevalent mate- rialistic scepticism and agnosticism of our time logi- cally, inevitably, and actually ends in pessimism. Second, an inherent, essential, and invincible element in our Christianity is its hopefulness. As a matter of fact, unbelief and no religion cut the nerve of the life of love in sacrifice, which is the peculiar inher- itance and treasure of this latest Christian century ; while, as a matter of fact, wherever j^ou find a brave, patient, large, wise efi'ort, costing time, treasure, and life, whether it is in the heart of Chicago or Lon- 52 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. don or Yokohama, to lift up and save men, debased, despised, alien human beings, and to make this world a better place to live in, you will find that it is inspired by the words and life of our Lord Jesus Christ, and owes its effectiveness and persistence to his disciples. This buoyant, radiant spirit we need. We glory in the reasons for it and in the manifes- tations of it. At the heart of it is faith in God, and that love which is born of God, "which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, en- dureth all things." In every era of Christian history it has shone forth; in every forward movement it has led the way. This spirit is wrought into the form and fibre of all Christian expression. It is written into its literature, it informs its architecture, it irradiates its art, and determines its symbols. It gives form to all Christian worship, and modulates the rhythm of all ritual. It voices itself in the hym- nology of the churches, and soars and triumphs in the anthems and oratorios, the Te Deums and Jubilates of the Lord's house ; but above all, it is seen in the great Christian, philanthropic, and missionary enterprises that have marked the history of the Church, and have distinguished and glorified om- era. These en- terprises and their outgrowths are more noteworthy and more full of promise for humanity than scientific discovery or mechanical invention. They are the mighty, majestic, multiform expression of the unfold- in s: life of Jesus Christ in the lives of men. To know about and be a part of these movements is a liberal education. SERMON. 53 We do not want the spirit of negation and no faith in our colleges. We do want this joyful and trium- phant spirit of Christ's followers. Whatsoever of urgency there is in our need that the nation be christianized, that the tremendous social problems in front of us be solved in a Christian way, intensifies the demand for Christian influences in the institutions for higher Christian learning; for from these, in increasing ratio, come those who, for good or evil, through the puljiit and the press, in the forum or the legislature, mould the principles and make the laws of the people. Suffer me also to make a distinct plea for Chris- tian influence in connection with education, for the sake of raising up a worthy Christian ministry. This was at first the over-topping motive, and the studies were originally arranged with special reference to the clerical profession. Was its importance exaggerated *? Comparatively, yes. Absolutely, no. If religion is still to exist as an organized force, if there are to be churches, then there must be religious teachers and leaders fit to teach and to lead nineteenth-century men and women. If we are to multiply in number and increase in power the lines of force, so as to permeate and possess all the departments of our com- plex life with a Christian spirit, we must enlarge and strengthen the dynamos at the centre. These are the churches ; and in every dynamic church there must be a dynamic man. The future of organized religion in this country depends, more than on any other one thing, upon the impression concerning the gospel min- 54 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. istry which shall obtain in our colleges. Mr. Glad- stone has said, pleading for the science of theology : " It seems no violent paradox to say that if there be a Creator of this universe, the knowledge which rev- erently deals with our relation to him can hardly be other than the crown of human knowledge. It can hardly fail to offer the richest reward, as well as to advance the most commanding claim to the service and devotion, not of stunted or enfeebled intellects, but of the very flower of the youth." Whatever we may say of the science of theology, the commanding claim of the advancing kingdom of God for the ser- vice of the flower of youth in the ranks of the Chris- tian ministry must somehow get itself heard in our colleges. Fathers and mothers believe that we want religion in colleges for the sake of the young man himself; his opinions unformed, his habits unfixed, the lower impulses strong, and the will wavering. Young men in good colleges are morally more safe than out of them, but nevertheless they are imperilled in their highest interests. It was the testimony of President Porter that "the first essay of a student's independence is often an act of prostrate subserviency to the opinion of the college community." He needs a standard. There is a vast inertia even in the heyday of youth. Writing in 1869, President Porter quotes Matthew Arnold as saying, "that in the German universities there were only a third of the students who really worked," and Mark Pattison as asserting that, of the students of Oxford, *^ seventy per cent are idle, — SERMOX. 55 incorrigibly idle." The student needs impulse. In the American college there has never been so bad a record possible. But our older colleges are filled with young men who have no felt want of training or of any other special thing. They are there for four years of pleasant association ; and among these are groups of gilded youths, easy-going, self-indulgent, and sen- suous, if not sensual, who are living their useless lives in this generation which calls for the best that is in every man, with no thought of personal obligation to God, and no intention of generous devotion to any good thing. The truth and the spirit of God are needed to arouse them from their ignoble dream. Self-indulgence sometimes becomes low vice ; intem- perance and sensuality at times creep in. The most characteristic contribution of Christianity to modern life, next to its vital principle of love in sacrifice, is its inflexible teaching of personal purity. The body the pure temple of the Holy Spirit of God, — this is the Christian ideal and demand. Soiled, debased, enfeebled, ruined lives even, among young men tes- tify that if this teaching was needed in Corinth, it is also needed now. We want religion in our colleges for the sake of morality in our colleges. If you would see education without religion, recall the scenes of the recent riots of the students in the Latin quar- ter in Paris, — an indecent revolt of animalism. '' The youth of France,'' says a distinguished French writer, " are sufi'ering from a variety of diseases, all of which have their root in atheism." Victor Hugo liked to say *' that he who opens a school closes a 56 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. prison." But Proal says : '^' Many schools have been opened, but no prisons closed. Criminality has not diminished, while education has increased." "Moral- ity," says this same authority, "is not an attribute of thought, but of will; spiritual beliefs and respect of God are necessary." (I quote from Circular No. 4 of the National Bureau of Education.) Of the recent thirteen hundred and eighty-three inmates of Sing Sing Prison, — and there were six college men among them, — only one hundred and twenty were entirely without education. Ever since that accomplished classical scholar, that fine artist and musician, the Emperor Nero, lived, it has been abundantly evident, and never so clearly as to-day, that high intellectual training is no guarantee of exalted moral character. This theory is flatly con- tradicted by the facts, and by the philosophers also. Herbert Spencer goes so far as to say that "a mere culture of intellect is hardly at all operative upon conduct." " Intellect is not a power, but an instru- ment." It is, therefore, the feelings that cause action which need to be cultivated in moral training. In closing, suffer a few thoughts bearing upon prac- tical administration. The college student needs help, and has a right to it, in the forming of religious opin- ions. This is an age of transition in religious beliefs. College years are, for earnest men, a period of eager questioning ; and the truths of the evolutionary phi- losophy necessitate a readjustment on every hand of methods of thought and forms of statement. It will be chiefly, perhaps, the office of the teacher of phi- SERMON. 57 losophy to make the truths wliich science cannot co-ordinate — the truths of God, freedom, and immor- tality — the most vitahzing sources of intellectual culture, and to show that the forces and method with which science deals are not contradictory to spiritual life and truth. Beyond this there is need of appeal to heart and conscience, and of a training of both through Chris- tian truth. This calls for the office of the preacher of righteousness. He must, to accomplish his end in character building, speak clearly definite, essential Christian truth, and he must bring to bear upon con- duct the great motives of the gospel. To do this he must keep the minds of the students in vital contact with Holy Scripture. It is essential that there be in the college an envi- ronment favorable to the development and training of the spiritual nature, a religious atmosphere in which the life shall flourish. This atmosphere is a palpable, real thing, as real as climate. It is the spirit of an institution, as of a teacher, that determines character and influence, rather than the curriculum of the one or the method of the other. '' The secret of good or evil is hidden," says the late President Tanner, '' in the undertone which pervades the institution, — that mysterious something which speaks day after day through X and Y, and Alpha and Omega, and classi- cal story and chemical formula, and Barbara and Celerant." This atmosphere is an emanation of j^er- sonality, and will exist where strong natures, filled with sweetness and light, are in contact in natural and con- 58 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. stant ways with those about them. You surely lose much if you are without common worship, in which all statedly join. "Devotion," says Liddon, "is the common sense of faith. The soul rises up at the sight of God, as birds greet with their songs the morning sun ; " and certainly, if the song swell in chorus, there is a contagion of gladness in both impression and ex- pression. I do not see how we can spare music, and the uplifting of all hearts with all voices on the strong waves of masterful harmony, blending and ennobling the common life. Certainly the social feelings should be enlisted so as to make them the true support and stimulus of every noble aim in every realm of beauty and blessing, of thought and of life. The great en- thusiasms of young men are glorious. They are great on the football field or at the boat-race ; why should they not be evoked in other than physical contests ? Volunteer religious organizations, transcending class lines and society limits, should be encouraged to the utmost. Aiding all these, there must be a constant and sym- pathetic knowledge by the student of the great muni- ficent movements in the world's life. So far as possible there should be also, and I believe much more than now, an active participation in approved enterprises for enlightenment, philanthropy, and religion. Seclu- sion is good for scholarship, but fellowship in sacrifice is good for manhood, and our young men are kept too long aloof from the best work of the world. The college, and our whole higher education in every de- partment, needs nothing more to-day than the practical SERMON. 59 adoption of the kindergarten principle, — that we learn by doing. There will be little need of argumentation for Christianity if you can enlist enthusiasm and love in the task of saving men. We at Williams are the rightful inheritors of the men of the haystack, and the times of the haystack. Antedating the famous foreign missionary league, there was here proposed a society, the members of which were to furnish them- selves with knapsacks and guns to kill game, and were to march westward into the wilderness to set up the Kingdom of God. In a letter to Gordon Hall, Samuel J. Mills flashed out his inward fire with, " I wish that we could break out upon the heathen like tlie Irish rebellion, forty thousand strong." Thank God that spirit still lives, and lives here ; but this has a strange sound in the ears of many a kid-glove and rose-water Christian student of to-day. As counteracting, or if you please supplementing, the tendency of men to draw off into groups and cliques, cultivate, in every way possible, common in- terest. In no way can this be done so well as through the religious sentiment, and by common undertakings for humanity through an applied Christianity. And if, peradventure, sometimes there should fall upon the student world a pervasive thoughtfulness concerning personal character, responsibility, and des- tiny, and concerning the highest welfare of one an- other, — if the time should come when all consciences would be quickened, and all feelings tender ; when it would be easy to get into close contact, brother with brother, in the deepest things of life and the highest 00 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. tliino's of life : when trutli would be illuminated and mighty ; when God would be near, and Christ pre- cious; when the life of love in sacrifice would seem glorious, and the life of selfish sinning hateful, until in glad companies men gave themselves to God for any service in the kingdom of his Son, — that would be a revival of religion, and that would be a help- ful and rational and delightful thing. Such many of you recall, such I remember; and I recollect no fanaticism, or any evil connected with them. Such in earlier times there were. " It came in the majestic stillness of God;" "there was heart-searching and confession ; " " heart after heart glowed and melted under the sacred flame," — that is the record. Under certain conditions such seasons will never be; but where truth is, and prayer is, and joyous holy living, they will sometimes come as comes the glad spring- time that mantles with beauty these familiar hills. How vital and intimate is this relation ! Something that we know, but cannot describe. We cannot get religion into college by making it a department ; it cannot be taught from text-books. It is not a science, but a life ; and the only way to get spiritual life is to get somehow into contact with great na- tures that have it. This is the profound meaning of the Incarnation, this is the philosophy and method of the gospel; and besides this method there is no other. The only fundamental question, therefore, of college religious method is the question of getting the large- natured, broadly cultured Christian man who is him- SERMOX. CI self in communication with the sources of life, and the allied question of getting him into vital contact with his students. " It matters little," says Emerson, ''what you learn; the question is, with whom you learn." Surely, all that is possible to be done, b}' ap- preciation and remuneration and free opportunity, to alhu'e the best men into the teachers office should be eagerly undertaken. There is trouble in getting contact after you have gotten men. Increase of numbers tends to weaken in- fluence. Tlie professors with large classes sometimes degenerate into automatic teaching-machines. The in- tercom'se between teacher and pupil grows unlovely, ■frigid, and formal. How alluring the contrast, — the idea of the academic family of the colleges of the English University ! President Woolsey is quoted as saying, "Had I my life to begin over again, I would throw in my lot with one of the smaller institutions. I could have more influence in training mind and shaping character." There was a greater teacher than he, who, when he would commit to the world truth of priceless value, was satisfied with a single class of only twelve. It is better to lead a few by the hand to the tree of life than, like a guide-board, point a multitude to the tree of knowledge. We have now glanced at the histoiy of the relation between religion and education in the past, especially in the American colleges ; we have considered some of the conditions for the profitable continuance of this ancient connection, and have reminded ourselves of certain reasons for such continuance ; s^^eaking finally 62 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. of a few tilings that are suggestive of metliods in tlie practical administration of religion in the college life. At the recent inauguration of the President of Illi- nois College, Thomas K. Beecher, from his serene heio-ht of aofe and wisdom, with broad outlook and keen vision, uttered these eloquent words, which I reverently quote : ''I cannot forecast the institutional future of State or Church, or college or university; but I certainly know, and do this day prophesy, that the eternal God can never be dethroned. What- ever may happen to these social organizations of mixed architecture in which God condescends to mani- fest himself, yet when, by the necessary infirmity of human nature, these institutions die into oblivion like the men who founded them, there will still remain the same inspiration of the eternal God, inexhaustible to our children as he was to their fathers. They are wise who believe and make long experiment of the wisdom of the Master, how he said, ' Seek first the kingdom of God.'" What the future holds we indeed know not, but that it will be more religious as well as more intel- ligent than the present we may be assured. Oxford does not grow ashamed of her old motto, JDomimis lUiiminatio mea ; Harvard at her two hundred and fif- tieth anniversary, by her Peabody and her Brooks, re- consecrated herself to " piety and learning," Christo et ecclesiae. Our mother Yale reads her ancient le- gend, Lux et Veritas, in loyalty to her ancient faith. For Williams I can only say in the words of one who SERMON. 63 was long a teacher here : '* If this college shall drop down into a merely secular spirit and a training of the lower parts of man's nature, so that it shall cease to be in sympathy with him whose object is to train to a perfect character that world which is symbolized on the missionary monument, it will no longer be Williams College." ADDRESS BY THE EEV. DR. C. C. HALL. CONFEEENCE ON THE RELATION BETWEEN THE MODERN COLLEGE AND APPLIED CHRISTIANITY. TN introducing the exercises which pertain to this part of our centennial commemoration, it is my duty and my privilege to state the fundamental positions underlying this conference. The theme proposed is : '' The Relation of the Modern College to Applied Christianit}^" In the language of this theme, and in tlie intention of tliose by whom it has been for- mulated, two positions are assumed as fundamental. First, it is assumed that Christianity — the religion of which Jesus is the Author, the Life, and the End — is applicable as a force to the social relations and to the vital problems of man in the present day for the purpose of correcting, informing, and guiding those social relations, and of solving those vital problems. The application of this force is described as Applied Christianity. Second, it is assumed that the modern college has organic relation to Applied Cln-istianit}' ; that a college of the present day vacates its noblest right and misses its supreme end if it fail of appre- liending its relation to Applied Christianity ; that Ap- plied Christianity seeks to find a channel for its force in and through the modern college ; that Christ would ADDRESS. 65 wield the modern college for the service of the world in which He died and rose again. Upon these assumptions our conference is founded ; and those who shall presently address you will seek to show how variously Christ would wield the Chris- tian college in the service of man. These two as- sumptions — that Christianity is more than a body of doctrine, even a living and life-giving force appli- cable to present social conditions, and that a college may be Christ's chosen instrument for the application of that force — these two assumptions, uttered in this hour of affectionate and reverential feeling, are, we believe, consonant with the history and with the spirit of Williams College ; and as we enter upon the fas- cinating and fruitful deliberations of this hour, permit me to define in a few sentences the point of view from which we, as a college, regard Applied Christianity and the collegiate relation thereto. Williams College regards Christianity as something more than the cherished faith and the holy tradition of nineteen centuries. To us Christianity means the present power of the living Christ operating in the earth through the varied ministries of the Divine Spirit. Jesus lives, not as a precious memory, but as a contemporary Being ; and because He lives, we live also, having received His living Spirit in ourselves. And, through men who are made alive by His Divine Spirit, the power of the living Christ becomes an ap- plicable force in the present age, to correct, inform, and guide social relations, and to advance the com- plete redemption of the individual. I say '' the 66 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. complete redemption of the individual." Herein see the broad purpose of the Redeemer. For the body, for the mind, and for the spirit of each man, woman, and child, the living Christ has a present gospel; to the end that in the world where He, the Son of God, as an Individual suffered and conquered, every son of man as an individual may conquer amidst his suffer- ings, by learning how to reverence the body, how to cultivate the mind, how to admit the spirit into the fellowship of God. This is Applied Christianity, — the power of a living Christ bearing upon the individual for his complete redemption, and, through the complete redemption of the individual, regulating the social relations of man. Hence the immense scope of Applied Christianity. It is the '' wideness of God's mercy, like the wide- ness of the sea." This afternoon you shall be shown this wideness. You shall see how the force of a liv- ing Christ is seeking to develop a genuine socialism, by making all men through whom the Divine Spirit can speak practical agents to reveal unto the igno- rant the better way of physical and mental life, how to keep the body clean and sacred, how to liberate the mind from intellectual debauchery. We shall see how the force of a living Christ is stimulating an experimental sociology, which, not con- tent to dwell in dreams and in doctrines, is going out, awake, vigilant, loving, along lines of practical relief. You shall see how the force of a living Christ is medi- ating for intelligent unity among the severed commu- nions of the Catholic Church, and how the light and ADDRESS. 67 heat of His Spirit are promoting mutual recognition and mutual affection between His members, estranged by ecclesiastical tradition. You shall see how the force of the living Christ is propelling through the present age a system of evangelization more practical and more comprehensive than those which any former generation has seen, — a system of concentric circles, metropolitan, national, universal : metropolitan, the work of city evangelization ; national, the work of home missions ; universal, the sublime and catholic endeavor of foreign missions. Thus is the living Christ evangelizing the spirits of men, and preparing the world for the consummation of His kingdom at His second coming. We assume in this conference, and the spirit and the tradition of Williams have for one hundred years as- sumed, that the college is organically related to these immense movements of Applied Christianity. Not only so ; we believe that in its relation to Christ's present work for the world is contained the chief end of the Christian college. We do not undervalue the subjective culture of individuals, which is the im- mediate mission of the college ; still less do we mini- mize the value of any work wrought for the world by lives untrained in the collegiate discipline ; but we hold that if Christ has among men a circle in which ]nore than in any other He speaks distinctly the call unto service, a circle to which more than to any other He charges personal responsibility for the redemption of the individual and the reconstruction of the social order, that circle is the circle of collegiate life. 68 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. Therein are found opportunities for comprehensive view and prolonged examination of duty ; thereto are given opulent advantages for physical, mental, and spiritual self-development; and unto the Christian collegian of to-day Christ constantly and gloriously affirms : " Unto whom much is given, of him shall much be required. He that hoardeth his life unto selfishness shall miss its meaning and its joy, but lie that poureth out his life for the world, in the fellow- ship of My redeeming mission, shall find it, both here and in the State Beyond, given back to him continu- ally, renewed with eternal strength and beauty." ADDRESS BY PEOFESSOR JOHN BASCOM. T AM asked to present, in a brief moment, tlie office of a Christian college at the present time in train- ing students to meet their social duties. Tliis, our period, is one of widespread, intense, and critical ac- tivity. Forces are rapidly deploying on every side, and a march in one direction or another must begin at once. It has already begun. What can we do in our college work still further to determine its course and secure its success ? Society was never more com- plex than now, and is looking constantly to greater complexity. Never were its energies more beyond the control of any one man, yet never was there a more distinct and urgent claim on the energies of every man. The number of devils to be cast out is legion, and the number of pure spirits to be evoked is also legion. The church — reform commences at the house of God — is in hand for more knowledge, more tolerance of truth, a more comprehensive and gracious purpose, more wealth of affection. The household is before us, that we may shield its inner purity and renew its outer strength. Society is under inquiry, that we may apply to it the vexed and vexing law of temperance, 70 WILLIAIkIS COLLEGE. may deepen its democratic temper, and make strong and wholesome within themselves all the ties that knit it together. Business — wealth-getting and wealth- dividincr — is arraigned, that we may probe once more, to the very bottom, the principles of economics, and see on what divine terms — if, indeed, they be divine terms — men stand with each other, labor with capital and capital with labor, in the intense and bitter strife of life. With whom is truth; with whom the deaf ear; with whom idle clamor? Our political in- stitutions, wliich have shed like autumn leaves the sense of entire adequacy and complete inerrancy which but yesterday attached to them, are before us — almost in the dock — to make answer to charges of class legislation, prodigality, corrupt methods, un- just taxation. In all these questions, and in many another, the most subtile, well-trained sense of right, the widest touch with humanity and the mind of God, the most unhesitating consecration, and the most supreme con- viction of all, — the conviction of the coming kingdom of heaven, — must be with us ; and in the measure in wdiich they are with us, shall we redeem the time. What can a Christian college do to help us ? Let us carry the word " college " over from the persons congregated in it to the ideas, impulses, inspirations that gather about it, and make it to be a living thing. These lifting powers, if they are to help in the struggle now upon us, must be of the most comprehensive and penetrating order. The college must be a centre of light; and the Christian college a centre of spiritual ADDRESS. 71 light, — not of dogma, but of life. The college must rise, like a mountain, into a free, pure, stimulating atmosphere, and this by virtue of its own spiritual elevation. All good things and true things cluster together, if we do but push each of them far enough toward the mind of God. Sunbeams may lie on the clouds, like a broken sheaf of light, diverging in all directions. Plant your eye in any one of them ; it guides you straight to the sun. You discern at once that these beams are all parallel, and have suffered dispersion, not from anything in themselves, but from your manner of looking at them. The Christian college, fulfilling its function, needs, first of all, to give coherence, unity, to wider, deeper, more diverse spiritual truth, — truth that in its abun- dant radiation seems shooting to every quarter of the sky. The college, making of itself such a centre, will kindle at its shrine many a lamp which will guide men's feet along the obscure and slippery paths of reform in which we are achieving light, and life by the light. This assertion of wide and concurrent truth is cen- tral, but it is vague and emotional. Let us give it more definiteness and intellectual weight by consid- ering under it one or more of the exact difficulties we are encountering in social construction. We are all aware of a growing feeling that our one supreme faith and tradition as a nation — the adequacy of popular and liberal education to conserve the gen- eral welfare — is showing itself to be something of a fetich ; that when we are through with all our training, 72 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. our feet have not quite reached the goal we started for. Let us take a single phase of this pervasive trouble of turning knowledge into moral force. It was thought, not long since, that a Christian college held a patent on this process, and that a secular, a State, in- stitution was a plain infringement of this right. But, behold, the same difficulty begins to show itself about equally in every method of education. If Yale Uni- versity has any advantage over the University of Michisran in social construction, each item in its su- periority needs to be carefully enumerated to make at all evident this eminence. Are not rather the trouble and the failure much the same in both, — in the Christian college and the secu- lar university? Does instruction readily rise high enough in either place to be truly inspiring ? This is not a question of the terminology we use in convey- ing ideas, — whether we speak of the divine decrees or the laws of nature, of the second command or of altruism, of the kingdom of heaven or of a synthesis of humanity. It is not a question of words, but of ideas. I grant that there are great advantages in lan- guage, but not half so great as in ideas. Carry a man onward, sweep him upward, whether by a pervasive sense of natural law or of divine grace, — will any one tell me exactly what is the real difference between them, so that the two shall not glide into each other while one's eye is upon them — and before he is aware he is earnest, reverential, devout. The wisdom that is buoyant, lifting the mind that entertains it, carries teacher and taught alike heavenward. ADDRESS. 73 Scarcely anything is shut out from a man by the form of an institution ; and scarcely anything is con- ferred upon him by its form. All good gifts come down from the Father of light, and come to all who can receive them. Even an empiricist travelling long and far in the glorious ways of visible things cannot fail to reach an Unknown, whose name is an enigma of worship ; cannot fail, like Zaccheus, to find himself in a sycamore, waiting for his Lord to go by. If we can but once feel that all knowledge is our inheritance, and run its lines together in the creative centres of thought, we shall be worshipful with the wisdom that palpitates from pole to pole. A college must have an atmosphere, an inspiration, quite its own, because it deals habitually with higher things, in a higher and wider way, than those elsewhere conceived by men or elsewhere achieved by men. There must be moral elevation in our educational life, and ele- vation always declares itself It is by elevation that nature ignites our thoughts, and hushes our words into awe. A second difficulty which our training discloses is a want of moral earnestness, a lack of inner spiritual momentum, in the average college graduate. He goes forth from the muzzle of our gun like a spent bullet searching for some suitable hollow to roll into ; not as a living messenger of the world's greatest power. This evil is certainly not less in our Eastern and in our Clu'istian colleges than in our Western and our secular institutions. We may attach too much im- 74 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. portance to the confessions concerning themselves which it has become the custom of our graduates an- nually to give us. There are an affectation of sin and a timidity of righteousness which do not leave them at liberty to do justice to their better impulses. And yet there are a perversity, paganism, and pro- fanity in these predilections of theirs that may well give us pause. The fault, whatever that fault may be, is not in the young men exclusively, nor in the college exclusively, nor in the community exclusively, but in all three. The three together fail to receive and to impart any divine afflatus. The communal life and the college life spring up and spread abroad on a low level. They are like the ground hemlock, a fresh, clean, wide-leaved, and inviting shrub, but one which flattens itself out over the earth, and never, like its congener, the hemlock, cames a crown into the sky, or in age holds aloft its stern, weird shaft, stripped to the timber by many a storm. This superficiality of thought, this shallowness of sentiment, this flippancy of speech, are aggravated by certain very desirable and necessary changes in our courses of study, but changes to which we have not as yet wholly adapted ourselves. An extended division of work, an immense amount of the minutiae of knowledge, a predominance of phy- sical facts and historical events, put upon the mind the constant labor of arduous acquisition, but bring it under the awe of no searching, humbling, elevating truths, give it no wide outlook over the spiritual land- scape. We are not alone on a mountain summit ADDRESS. 75 where the multiplicity of things and the magnitude of changes overpower the senses and awaken the spirit ; but we are each binding up his own bundles of fagots and speculating on their market value. Minute and restricted knowledge has an affiliation with conceit, and, in spite of accuracy, with superficiality, which cannot be easily overcome. These low-lying clouds cannot break up and pass into a clear sky without some wider, more cosmic movement. Whatever the past lacked, it did not lack that sense of darkness and mystery which broods the mind like an invisible divine presence, and hatches purposes, like eaglets that spread a wide wing on the air. Whatever light the present has won, that light is still garish, and hides the depths of the universe from us. If science is to grow, — and we wish it the widest growth, — if historic criticism is to rebuild our thought, — and may it rebuild it from the foundations upward, — we the more need that divine philosophy and the forecast of a creative mind shall be with us, lest we be deafened with the din and blinded with the dust which we ourselves have made. If society is to be reconstructed, forever open to growth, it must find its conquering life in its young men. The Christian college must gain the power to flow out into and overflow the community. It can do this only as it carries with it a wise solution, drawn from all sources of knowledge, of current ques- tions; only as it acts on the masses, sharing the breadth of the one stupendous, and the only stupen- dous, fact, — the building of the lives of men into the 76 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. kingdom of heaven. The Christian college will not effect this synthesis of humanity by clinging to its abstractions, valid as these may be ; nor by an eco- nomics and a civics, a science and a faith, as bare of flesh and as full of a fearfully dry clatter as the bones of a skeleton. The prophetic word has always been, and must always be : Let the dry bones live. We miss the heart of things in our social and reli- gious strife, because we do not ourselves abide at the heart of things. In our eagerness to hold up or pull down a man, we forget that there is only one thing that builds up or overthrows anything in this world of ours, and that is truth, — the mind of God. A great renovating impulse takes possession of the working classes ; but it confounds and baffles itself with empty, formal, socialistic devices, because it does not understand that it is dealing with the human spirit, and not with timber ; that what goes into the kingdom of heaven grows into it, as if it were, then and there, God's creative thought taking outline. Here is every young man's opportunity, — a vision, a better vision, of man's capacity and God's grace. Such a question as the entertainment or exclusion of the Mongolian occupies our attention. We beat about the bush ; we raise a thousand secondary or irrelevant points, and yet we miss the only consider- ation of any moment in the discussion, — how shall our own social life, to which we are first of all bound to impart purity and perfection of type for our own race and for all races of men, be affected by this absorption 1 ADDRESS. 77 Or a great and good cliurcli finds itself compelled — what strange compulsions rest on men's consciences ! — to confess that it finds no place in its kingdom- building for an able, active, and devout servant, be- cause, using earnestly the large powers God has given him, he reaches more conclusions than are found in a creed whose goods were shipped and whose hatches were shut down years and years ago for the entire voyage that carries the household of faith heaven- ward, — the bow ever turned toward a horizon ablaze with truth. If God's kingdom could only come without coming, if society could push forward with no change of posi- tion, could turn itself inside out, like a germinating seed, and alter not, then our final formulae and eccle- siastical methods might stand. But as long as we are in the very processes of creation, as long as intellectual and social and spiritual elements are astir under divine impulses, we, too, must submit ourselves to the one all-embracing and eternal law of growth. We resist it under the penalty of being cast out forever by it. How, then, is a Christian college to fulfil its func- tion in training young men to take a successful part in society, yeasty with contending forces ? Certainly not by an ism ; hardly by a prescribed method ; un- doubtedly by a steady leading of all knowledge, in its ample and manifold forms, into a knowledge of man ; by the constant gathering of truth into the ulti- mate truth of a spiritual universe ; by subduing and expanding action, personal, economic, and civic, into the fellowship of man with man in righteousness; 78 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. by gathering- all things and being gathered of all into the kingdom of God. The college must bring inspira- tion to society out of the high places of thought, — our own nature, our conjoint life, a spiritual universe, a wisdom that rules in them all forever. ADDRESS. BY THE REV. DE. H. M. FIELD. "ll^JE have come back to the old home. It is a ' ' long time since we went awaj. Fifty-five years have passed since a company of young men went down the hill from East College, and took their several ways in the journey of life. Of that little band all but seven are in their graves. One only have I met in all this crowd to-day.^ We had not looked into each other's faces for more than half a century. We have been young, and now are old ; yet have we not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread : we have not lost our faith in God nor in man. And so, though there are but two of us here, we are enough to lock arms and walk in the procession. In- deed, the more our ranks are diminished, the more sacred to us is the spot that is associated not only with the living, but with the dead. No stranger can enter fully into the feeling of this Memorial Day, or share our tender reverence for this institution throned among the hills. She is our Mother, and, like other mothers, grows more beautiful with age ; and, in the ^ The Hev. David Pise, D.D., pastor of an Episcopal church near Cincinnati. 80 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. eyes of her cliildren, was never so beautiful as now, when she puts on her head the crown of a hundred years. As we gather about her, to show our love and our gratitude, we would bring a slight offering, if it be only a suggestion from our experience, which may be of service to those who shall come after us. What is a college for I What use does it subserve in the economy of human institutions 1 Or is it for orna- ment rather than practical utility ? It is by no means necessary to success in life. Many of those who have attained the highest jjositions and wielded the great- est power, never saw the inside of college halls. Abraham Lincoln was the child of poverty. Born in a log-house, he had no education beyond that of the common school. What else he knew he picked up from rough teachers on the flatboat or in the for- est, when he was splitting rails. But was he any the worse for that ? On the contrary, I believe that he would have been spoiled if he had gone to college. He who was to do such a work for the people of his country, needed to be from the people and of the people. Those homely sayings which went to the heart of the nation in the hour of its great agony would have lost all their pith and force if they had been interlarded, like the speeches of Charles Sumner, with Latin quotations. Horace Greeley rather despised a college-bred man ; at least he thought him no better for having had ad- vantaeres that he himself did not have. His education had been obtained under the humble roof of a back- woodsman of Vermont, on winter nights, when he was ADDRESS. 81 stretched before the fire, reading by the light of pine- knots. What was good enough for him he thought was good enough for anybody.^ Out of such obscurity have come men of science. Sir Humphry Davy was wont to say that the greatest discovery he ever made was the discovery of Michael Faraday. And where did he find him ? Not at Ox- ford or Cambridge, but in the son of a blacksmith, who, being employed in his laboratory, showed a natural intelligence and a genius for science that after- wards astonished the world. But this does not argue against the value of a col- lege course, even though it be not always necessary. It only shows that mere book learning cannot take the place of a training which fits one directly for the work that he has to do ; and that even a college edu- cation is but a means to an end, and serves its pur- pose best when it best serves mankind. The point I wish to make is, that in this busy age, this age of in- tense thought and intense activity in every direction, it is of the first importance that a college should keep in touch with the life of the world ; not merely with the scientific world, but with the living world, the world of sorrow, of suffering, and of sin. Eminence in any sphere tends to isolate the individ- ual. The man who was born poor and becomes rich, * There is no more distinguished editor in the country than !Mr. Charles A. Dana, who took his first lessons in the office of the " Tribune " in its early- days ; and he says in a recent lecture on " Journalism " : " Horace Greeley told me several times that the real newspaper man was the boy who had slept on newspapers and ate ink. Although I served him for years and we were very near in our personal relations, I think he always had a little grudge against me because I came up through a college." 6 82 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. in that change of circumstances rises above the level of those around him, and separates himself from them. So scholars are apt to form a guild of their own, in which they keep aloof from " the illiterate vulgar." This tendency is fostered by institutions in which they live apart and form a community by themselves. In the Middle Ages learning took refuge in monasteries, where alone it was safe from the surrounding barba- rism. This has given somewhat of a monastic char- acter to modern universities. A student at Oxford who distinguishes himself so as to obtain a fellowship may take up his residence in its quiet cloisters, and live what is almost the life of a monk. American scholars are little exposed to this temptation ; and yet there is always a tendency in those pursuing the same studies to stand apart upon the heights of knowl- edge and look down unmoved upon the cares, anx- ieties, and fears of the world below. Hence the need of constant reiteration of the truth that knowledore o is not for its own sake ; that a man has no more right to hoard his knowledge than to hoard his money ; that in this case, as in the other, the value is in the constant circulation, by which knowledge running to and fro serves as the very life-blood of the world. To apply this to the college of to-day. It is not a monastic institution ; it is not merely a high-school for the study of the classics, mathematics, and met- aphysics ; it is a gymnasium for the training of athletes, for the intellectual and moral and even physi- cal discipline of those who are to be leaders in their generation. Never w^as there more need of practised ADDRESS. 83 gladiators in the arena than now, when there are tremendous forces at work to tear down and destroy all that is most precious in what has been left us from the wisdom of ages. Infidelity and Atheism stalk abroad in America as in Europe; while anarchists threaten an overthrow of law and order that would destroy society itself In the presence of such dan- gers, our institutions of learning cannot stand apart and look on as idle spectators. But what can they do? They can rebuild the foundations of faith. The atheism of our day is not the sneering, scoffing atheism of the last century: it claims to have a scientific basis, by which it accounts for all things without a First Cause. It traces the ves- tiges of creation without finding the footsteps of a Creator. How long is it since Tyndall, assuming the truth of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, went into an ecstasy of laudation of matter, — poor, dead matter, — in which, we were assured, " would be found the promise and the potency of all life," — a high- sounding phrase that was repeated all over the scientific world. And how was this pompous assumption overthrown I A few years since I was riding over these Berkshire hills, in company with the most eminent man of science of Great Britain, who was admiring the beauty of the scenery and occasionally lifting his eyes to the light clouds floating above us, when he suddenly turned to me and said, " Do you know how Pasteur exploded the theory of spontaneous genera- tion? He sent up into the clouds for his witnesses." 84 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. He explained to tliis effect : Men of science in France had subjected matter to what they considered a deci- sive test. They had boiled water, which they took for granted killed all the germs of life that might be in it, and bottled it up, and still life appeared ! Could anything be plainer than that such life must have been generated by some latent power in matter itself, which burst into visibility and activit}^ solely by its innate force? What need, then, of any other Creative Power? But Pasteur was not carried away by this lofty pronunciamento, and expressed his belief that the germs of life, if not in the water, might be in the atmosphere, however thin and exhausted it might seem to be : to prove which he sent observers to the top of the Alps, and even made use of aeronauts, whom he sent up in balloons, that they might breathe the most attenuated atmosphere, and even bring it down from the clouds in flasks, to be subjected to more decisive tests, when, behold, life was there ! Then he applied tests of his own to destroy the germs of life, after which not a trace of life appeared ! The experiment was fatal to the theory of spontaneous generation. Even Tjmdall gave it up, and in a later publication frankly admitted that there is no life in earth or air that is not the offspring of antecedent life ! Then what follows ? The inference is irresistible, that there must have been one Eternal Life, and that Life was God ! Thus out of the laboratory of Pasteur came the overthrow of that latest form of Atheism. Such is the service which in one memo- rable case science rendered to religion. ADDRESS. 85 There is another danger, not to faith, but to so- ciety, which calls not so much for science as for practical wisdom, and that of the highest kind. The great question of the day is not scientific, or political, or even religious, but social. '' All things are out of course," and the spectre of revolution lifts up its head in every European capital. Society is divided into two camps, which stand face to face, in deadly hatred, ready to break out in open war. This hatred is directed chiefly against the rich, but in some degree it is turned against scholars and professional men, as belonging to the classes that are supposed to live without labor, while the poor are ground to the earth, and starve and die. But surely this is the curse of the Old World, not of the New. Would that it were so ! There are painful contrasts even in our own country. To-day we are celebrating at Chicago the triumphs of civilization. Do we stop to consider how near barbarism lies to civilization, how they jostle each other in our streets? We have all read of Dark- est Africa and of Darkest England ; is it not time to ask if there be not a Darkest America ? This is a side of our city life that we do not put on exhibi- tion, to which we do not invite the attention of our foreign visitors. Do we reflect that in our greatest city, greatest in population and in wealth, there are tens of thousands who rise every morning not know- ing where they shall find food for the day 1 It is easy to harden our hearts against this suffering by saying that it is their own fault; that they have brought 86 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. it on themselves by their shiftlessness or drunkenness. That may be true in many cases, but in others it is not true : it is not their fault ; but the battle of life has been too hard for them, and they have been driven to the wall. They have gone to the very limit of their strength. Men, and women too, have struggled on and staggered on, pressed closer and closer, pushed from one poor lodging to another poorer still, till at last they find themselves in con- tact with all that is vile, — a contact that crushes and destroys at once the manliness of man and the womanliness of woman. Is it strange that men thus stunned by misery should feel that it were better for tliem that they had never been born ; that they should be tempted to curse God and die, or that they should turn savagely upon those above them I Between these two ex- tremes of society there is a great gulf fixed. Who can throw a bridge across it f Who can make the first approach to reconciliation? Not the poor, for they have nothing to ofi'er. Any advance must come from the side of the rich, who, as long as they are left in ease and luxury, are not much troubled by the sufferings of the poor. How, then, is it possible to negotiate a treaty of peace ? One heroic eifort has been made to dredge the bottomless pit of society, and to bring up to the surface the forgotten portions of humanity. The Salvation Army has marched into the slums of Lon- don, and catching the eye with the show of a military organization, forming in ranks, to the sound of trum- ADDRESS. 87 pet and drum, by the waving of banners and the tramp, tramp of a mighty host, it has sought to rally the outcasts of society, and to restore them at least to the level of decent poverty, — a poverty that is not inconsistent with self-respect, which gives hope that these poor, battered creatures may yet become true men and women, of whom society need not be ashamed. But where is the place for the college ? Our Eng- lish friends have taught us by setting us an example ; planting in the heart of London, or rather at the East End, in the centre of its poverty and wretch- edness, what is called an University Settlement, and is, what its name implies, a translating, not of college life, but of college men, from the quiet shades of Oxford and Cambridge into the midst of the vice and crime of the greatest city in the world. But what do these scholarly men go there for? To patronize the lower classes, to make them feel their inferiority f If that were their object and their method, they would make themselves more hated than ever. But they do nothing of the kind. They come among the poor, not as masters among slaves, nor even as teachers among pupils, but simply as friends and brothers, standing on the level of a com- mon humanity. Their doors are open, and all can enter. Tliere the weary can find rest. Even the wooden bench is not quite so hard as the stones of the street. Is it bitter cold? ''Come in and be warmed before the open fire ! " Here the naked can be clothed, and the hungry can be fed. Yet 88 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. this relief is given with care, lest it foster a spirit of dependence, and so degrade the self-respecting poor to the level of paupers and beggars. But the chief thing that is given, and that is worth all the rest, is personal sympathy. When a man clad in rags comes to the open door, he is not driven away by a stony look or a sharj) voice. Perhaps he is in an angry mood, sour and sullen with a sense of wrong. No matter ! His bitterness may dissolve in this soft atmosphere. Even though it were a man just out of prison, who presented himself like the convict to the bishop in Victor Hugo's " Miserables," a wild affrighted creature, he is calmed by a greeting that in act, if not in words, repeats the immortal salutation of the bishop : '' I know who you are. I know your name. You are my brother!" '^ Brother ! Brother ! " It is years since he heard that word. Instantly there comes a memory of one who loved him when he lay as a child upon her breast, and a tear trickles down his cheek. That word tells him that, poor and wretched as he may be, he is not wholly despised and forsaken by his fellow-creatures, nor forgotten by his Maker. That may be the turning-point in his history, the beginning of a new life. Such was the beautiful charity which I saw in London a few months since. Nowhere could there be more need of such places of refuge than in the capital of England; for it is a sad truth that the greatest barbarism, nay, the blackest heathenism, may lie close alongside of the highest civilization. I shall never forget one night many years ago that ADDRESS. 89 I was taken by tvvo police-officers tlirougli tlie Seven Dials, then the most notorious haunt of vice and crime. It was midnight, and yet the streets were ablaze with flaring gas-lights, and the gin- palaces were in full blast, crowded with drunken men and women. As they poured out into the streets, I saw an endless succession of the most horrible figures that ever bore the shape of human- ity ; and it seemed to me that the very earth was quaking, that the fires of hell were burning under our feet, and that these poor creatures, bloated with drunkenness or pale and haggard, were the spirits of the lost, walking about by the light of the flames. Scenes like that may be witnessed in our own largest cities. They are not pleasant to look upon, and I would advise no one to go to see them from idle curiosity ; but to a young man who is pure and strong, I would say. Go once, and once for all, and then come back and lay the question on your soul, if there be not something that you can do to abate all this wickedness and woe. If you desire to do it, this University Settlement, which has been reproduced in this country, fur- nishes you the opportunity ; and I do not hesitate to recommend this form of service to those who go forth from institutions like this, as a post-graduate course, believing that a few months spent in mis- sion work in one of our great cities, in daily contact with the poor, would be of more value to a young man at the beginning of his career, than if spent in a law office, a medical school, or even (begging the pardon 90 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. of my brethren) in a theological seminary. It would teach him what he could never learn within these walls. He would be a student, not of books, but of human nature, degraded and fallen. He would see the dark side, the night side, of our gilded city life, and would appreciate, as never before, the liollow- ness and rottenness that underlie our boasted modern civilization. Out of all this sad experience he would come with ideas somewhat subdued, but with a knowl- edge that would make him a better citizen, a better Christian, and a better man. With this suggestion, we who are passing off the stage leave it to the 3'oung and the brave who are coming on, to answer the question, what part edu- cation is to play in the future relations to one another of the American people. Is it to be a wall that shall separate class from class, — the rich from the poor, the learned from the unlearned, — or the bridge that unites them all ? If our country is not to go the way of all the earth, it can only be because the abyss is spanned by the splendid arch of education and religion, across which men can pass to and fro, having a common inheritance in knowledge, and in all that is for the benefit of mankind. ADDRESS. BY THE KEY. W. M. GROSVENOE. TT is surely most natural and fitting- that the sons of Williams should always, and especially at such a time as this, seek to be faithful to the spirit of Mark Hopkins. Our great teacher, were he here to-day, would, I am sure, tell us at least three things : to be absolutely true to our own convictions ; to be widely tolerant of the convictions of other people ; and to be very simple and direct in any statement of our opinions that we may wish to make. In the letter containing the Committee's invitation to me the subject was given as '' The Modern College and Church Unity ; " and these further words occur : ^'It was thought felicitous that this address should be taken by a clergyman of the Episcopal order." As a clergyman of the Episcopal Church I am here, and as a son of AVilliams I shall hope to state my convictions with sincerity, tolerance, and simplicity. We are the more willing to discuss the subject assigned because the Church to which we belong believes in unity so heartily, and deems it so impor- tant that she has offered to give up many most precious but non-essential things, that she might fur- 92 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. ther its accomplishment. She wins her right to speak by the things she is willing to sacrifice. The subject assigned asks us to think primarily of Church unity ; not simply the sentiment or spirit of unity found in the hearts of Christian people, but that oneness of life and organization which without con- tradiction was the characteristic of the earliest days of the Christian Church. The final aim and end of what we seek is that, through mutual understand- ings and the reign of love, we fulfil the prayer of Saint Paul to the divided church at Corinth : " Now I beseech you, brethren, through the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you ; but that ye be perfected together in the same mind and in the same judgment." As one looks out into the confusion of our modern religious world, this day of unity seems to be far distant. There are so many prejudices to be erased, so many hereditary traditions to be overcome, so much sectarian spirit to be eradicated, that for many, many years we may struggle on, simply creating the spirit and love of unity out of wliich the united Church, the body of Christ, will finally grow. But it can avail us very little to lose any high ideal out of our life because it seems at the present impossible, — much less the greatest ideal of all, of one king- dom of Jesus Christ. In the practical efi'orts and difficulties inseparable from realization of any such ideal, men are asking two questions: Is the ideal of Church unity worth ADDRESS. 93 seeking! and, By what method do you propose to reach it ? 1. Men in college and out ask, Is not emulation, rivalry in good works, on the whole a good thing 1 However much of special pleading we may use as an apology for our present religious chaos, surely the doctrine of " the most for the least " and ^' every man for himself," the law of competition, has never yet helped us to solve our great social problems, and that law of competition cannot be the law of the kingdom of love. The sect spirit is the competi- tive spirit. It is not the spirit of the Master Cln-ist, nor of the Apostle who said, " Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth." Rivalry in good works very often means the establishment of institutions that interfere with rather than supplement each other, and the multiplication of valuable mate- rial properties that in no way realize satisfactory spiritual results. Tliere also seems to be a most persuasive reason for the present condition of things and its continu- ance. You say that '' diiferent natures need different aspects of truth, and seek varying modes for the expression of their religious life." Granted, but that is just what the sect spirit denies. It says that the truth is too narrow to include all sorts and condi- tions of men. The reason for the sect is to gather into exclusive communion those who hold like views ; it denies that the Church, as such, must contain dif- ferent natures, and offers room for divergent opinions. This argument of diversity is an argument for a true 94 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. catliolicity in the one universal Clmrcli of Jesus Christ, not for any dividing- whatsoever. 2. And now, for a moment, we must turn to the question of method. By what means do you propose to reach this great ideal ? When we were in college, we remember studying with great interest Lord Bacon's Essay on Unity in Religion, and since then we have found no better method than he suggests. The harmony may be reached, *' if the points fundamental and of substance in religion were truly discerned and distinguished from points not merely of faith, but of opinion, order, or good intention." In otlier words, our method must be one of doctrinal and ecclesiastical sifting, because all through the ages of Christian history " men have been creating oppositions which are not." In any attainment of the deep underlying unities of the life of the Church, we have always to subordinate the ten thousand non-essentials, and discern between the accretions of opinion which the ages have brought and the simple faith of Christ and the simple creed of His disciples, without which there can be no Christian Church. In any such process we reach at last, of course, profound convictions which demand expres- sion. Here, among essentials, there are vital differ- ences which we must honestly face, and try to find their ultimate harmony ; but the spirit of unity would help to rid us of the wasteful organizing of mere self- willed opinions. The relation of the modern college to this great ideal, and the facility with which it can use this ADDRESS. 95 metliod, make us very hopeful. We look to the college with great confidence, because there are so many conditions in its life that cannot but assist us in our problem. Will you permit me to consider this relation from the student's standpoint, and to speak somewhat for him I In spite of all past traditions, the successful modern college, however religious and Christian it may be, is forced to be more and more unsectarian. What- ever may be the cause, the fact remains that our largest and most successful universities and colleges are subordinating the sectarian principle. However dominant the original religious impulse, and how- ever persistent the force of their hereditary traditions, you cannot say that Harvard is Unitarian, nor Yale Congregational, nor Princeton strictly Presbyterian, nor Columbia Episcopalian. In the Boards of Trus- tees, in the Faculties, and always in the body of stu- dents there exist religious elements of the greatest diversity, and they profess that they love to have it so. Surely in this college to which we belong, certain very marked religious influences have powerfully shaped its life. Never would we wish to lose any valuable truth which the earlier faith gave us ; never would we seek to rid ourselves of the good things which these hundred years, so rich in blessing, have brought us; and yet none the less shall we always rejoice as we see Williams College moving out of any narrowness of policy or any ungracious secta- rian prejudice to meet with progressive hopefulness the new issues of our religious life. 96 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. This new relation of the college to religion is often lamented by those who think they see in it the secu- larization of the college. There may be somewhat of danger here ; but to those who are waiting for the unity of the Church, this seems to be that necessary emancipation of the college from inadequate forms of religious truth which must precede the larger life found only through freedom. After all, it is putting Religion where she can work out her own great mission, which is not the enforced submission of un- willing minds, but the winning of unfettered souls, constrained only by the wondrous power of Christ the Master. The democratic character of the modern college is another thing that helps us in our reachings after unity. Here, in these days of ardent impulse, is a democracy of friendship. The social life in our towns, if not in our cities, is very apt to be divided by its churcli affiliations. Instead of the social life of the community unifj^ing divergent religious tenden- cies, the churches become the centres of sets and kinds and classes of people, and so intensify the divisions which social causes have produced. We hear with burning shame, and confess with deep con- trition, that it has been and is true that the Clnu'ch is a dividing force in our common life, — one body of Christians rich and influential and learned, another composed of the middle class, still another of the poor and ignorant; one church built and managed entirely for the rich, another for the poor. Even politically its divisions persist. The Mason and Dixon's Line, blot- ADDRESS. 97 ted out forever by our nation's blood, is still seen in churches Nortli and churches South. Now, all this is lost in the true democracy of college life. In spite of the attempts at exclusiveness made by some very immature individuals, the whole spirit of the college is democratic, — men of all kinds not simply meeting occasionally, but living together for four long years. Our friendships nothing can ever efface, be- cause they are the friendships of a true democracy. We came from homes so very different ; we brought with us influences, prejudices, convictions, manners, that had come to us from our fathers. We came with peculiarities and notions and conceptions, and we were thrown at once into a life all new and unknown. Here we met influences, prejudices, convictions, manners unheard of in our experience ; and these were held, not by some abstract imaginary being, but by our own familiar friends, whom we saw day by day. However positive our convictions, or vigorous our opinions, we could never look with tlie same intolerance at those opposing views, had we never known these men so well. It is wonder- ful how the touching of one life with another, one personality with another, dissipates false judgments. Entering into the life of a friend always means entrance into a more living sympathy. All that is good in a man and all that is bad in him un- covers itself at the bidding of such friendship, and the larger knowledge is a pei-petual challenge of re- ligious professions and the sincerity of a man's faith ; so we go into the world understanding at last how 7 98 WILLIAAIS COLLEGE. those otlier convictions are possible, and able to meet them in the future with an intelligent and sympathetic judgment. This democracy is not only characterized by friend- ship, but it is a democracy of young men. The young man is alive to present issues. "We might not be so willing to trust our problem to the Boards of Trustees or to tlie Faculties. But the college man is all unfet- tered by the prejudices that the many and far-reaching associations of life will bring in the after years. His convictions are more plastic, more capable of being moulded by new elements of knowledge and larger aspects of truth. His habits of thought are not har- dened. Past defeats have been few, and sturdy an- tagonisms almost unknown ; so his judgment has not been warped by preconceived errors. He has not yet committed himself to the dictation of any party leader. He has not closed the doors of his intel- lectual life, but they are flung wide open, waiting for new liofht and life. All that he is waits on what he is to be, and so we can be quite sure that with a larger independence he is able to receive and work out any great problem. This democracy contains another element ; it is full of manliness. In college as elsewhere we meet with types of weak piety and religious officiousness. We have known religion made ridiculous, and maudlin sentiment masquerading as goodness, and faith lost in mere profession quite as much in college as in the world. But the scorn with which it is greeted is lost in the world, while here, in the intimate associa- ADDRESS. 99 tion of our life, that scorn is most effectually felt. It is said that the college pulpit is difficult to fill satisfactorily, because the congregation is most exact- ing. It may be so ; but I believe that any vigorous man of sincere convictions may wholly trust his fate, if he but utter a straightforward gospel of living value, and having uttered it, knows when to stop. Nowhere will religious truth be more respected and pious platitudes be more completely ineffective than in the midst of that freedom of criticism inevitable in the democracy of college life. The sense of man- liness demands that everj^ question shall have an honest hearing; every man shall have fair play. It is perfectly willing to be proved wrong, if the proof be satisfactory. It is willing to suffer, provided the defeat be just. In other words, it estimates the whole problem of life and of faith from its own peculiar standards, and uses its own unconventional tests. Here among these elements of this democracy the ideal of the unity of the Church may more easily win its way. A critic of Church unity called it an iridescent dream. Many of you, no doubt, to whom the whole thing seems utterly impossible, have said, " Behold, this dreamer cometh." But where better could a dreamer come than into college life, the home of dreams I Take up your schedule of lectures and studies. What is it but the contemplation of the perfect f Your physiology is the study of the perfect body. You deal with the perfect logic, where every premise that is assumed excludes feeling, and every 100 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. conclusion moves to its absolute certainty, forget- ting life. You must tliink of the perfect political economy, where the laws of trade move smoothly to their own results, unmindful of all selfishness. Sociology deals not wdth refractory exceptions, but with the ideal society, where peace and plenty are always found. All art is seen in its completeness ; music, in its harmonies. In science it is the perfect form, the resistless movement, the unhindered pro- cess, the unbroken evolution of the world which we see. The philosophy that you are taught is the perfect life of man fulfilling the ''law of love" and of the completed universe, where love as law reigns supreme. Not only is every intellectual pursuit the study of the ideal, but here, too, come the dreams of life. All is future. Here, in the quiet resting days that lie between the thoughtlessness of youth and the anxious cares of our life work, come visions of what we hope to be. We think of the days of triumph, when every ambition shall find its crown. We linger thought- fully over careers issuing forth into great rewards. We build our future on foundations of living hopes. Here, in these college days, come great surging thoughts of work and its glory. Here, too, some sweet face imprints itself upon our hearts, until with fluttering hopes and fears we dare to shape for our- selves bright pictures of homes all beautiful, built and ruled by love supreme. Here, among these visions and ideals and far-reach- ing hopes, may we dream of everything except the ADDRESS. 101 perfected kingdom of our Lord? Shall we never dwell upon the ideal Church'? Must religion alone be the study of its poor fragments, the contempla- tion of its imperfect systems ? May we cling to our ideals, that they may help us to be valiant and full of hope in the midst of the prosaic duties of our daily life ; may Ave find our visions very useful and very needful in industrial enterprises and social reforms, where the great concept bears us through the storm and stress of opposition ; and yet are we never to be permitted to use our visions in the prosaic duties of our religious world ? May we stand upon moun- tain-tops here in this mountain-land, and see the kingdoms of tliis world and the glory of them, and yet never stand upon the highest peak of all, where we may see the heavenly glory of the kingdom of our God! Nay, but we will " lift up our hearts." We will go with Saint Paul, until we can see, with him, " the Church, which is Christ's body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." We will be carried with Saint John to a great and high mountain, and see with him that great city, the holy Jerusalem, not waiting in the heavens for this world to pass away, but descending from God, that here upon our earth we men may know its glory. We are going back to our old work. The anxious problems of our own household of faith will soon engross us. The claims of sect and party will soon, too soon, assert their power. Once more the push of jostling interests will separate us, and lead us X.02 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. often far apart ; but never will the old narrowness be quite so strong, nor the uncharitable bigotry be half so powerful, if we have been willing to gaze, even for a moment — and how much more if for the years of college life — into the vision of Christ's all-perfect Church. ADDHESS. BY THE EEV. DR. C. A. STODDARD. ' I "HE college is the nursery of men, the training- school of men, the place from which men, with their powers increased and disciplined, go forth into the world. Go forth — to be what are called home and foreign missionaries. Every man is one of the two. He lives, and builds, and uses his powers and capacities and influ- ence, in his own country or in other lands. Thus all college-graduates are missionaries, and the character of their mission depends largely upon what sort of men they are when they go forth from college. For although circumstances may modify character, and determine its force and applications, the original thing is developed and nurtured here. It is not likely that any man will be essentially different in the great world where his work is done, from what he was in the small world of the college where he prepared for that work ; nor that the discipline of life in after years will materially change the characters which are formed during a college course. Such a view is im- portant in estimating the relations of the college to all the work and the influence of educated men. 104 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. Men have gone forth from Williams College into the world, upon their various missions, for one hun- dred years. In that period three thousand, two hun- dred and sixty men, nineteen hundred of whom are still living, have been graduated here. A few hun- dred have spent their lives and have done their work in other lands. They have been foreign missionaries. But the greater number have remained in the country where they were born, and their mission has been at at home. They have occupied what are called the learned professions, the ministry of the gospel, medi- cine, and law ; they have become journalists, teachers, civil engineers, merchants, and farmers. Some have attained high position as statesmen, jurists, merchant- princes. A President of the United States, senators and congressmen, governors of States, officers of the army and navy, and public men who have filled al- most every grade of positions in the national service, have been educated here. Habits of industry and in- vestigation have been formed here. The seeds of lofty purpose and noble endeavor have been sown here. Character building has been the great work of Williams College. Its aim has been to make men of strong intellect who were able to think clearly and logically ; men of sound judgment who could discern between good and evil ; men of true patriotism who loved country more than party, and right rather than self-interest ; men of philanthropy who esteemed other men as brethren and lived by the rule of Christ, " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them ; " men, in fine, whose great purpose ADDRESS. 105 in life was, sincerely and truly to make the world better, purer, and happier, and to do so without refer- ence to what influence such an aim might have upon their personal comfort, or fame, or position. Such has been the intent and result of the training given here. It has not been so technical as to swallow up the individual in his study ; it has not aimed to make him a great linguist, a great mathematician, a great chemist, nor even a great philosopher. These are all minor objects ; they are the specialties of col- lege training, they are the scholastic part of education, which can be taught without a college and acquired without a teacher. But the character-building which has been the great work of Williams College, has been done by the im- press of mind and spirit upon the young men. Books and recitations have had their part in pro- ducing mental development, but that part has been small, compared to the power which flowed from daily association with men whose thoughts were grand and noble, whose ideals were pure and god- like, and whose life in its principles, its purposes, and its daily details, was worthy of study and of imita- tion. As President Garfield said, Mark Hopkins and a log were enough of a college for him. The tendency of the present period is to substitute impersonal and literary training for direct personal influence. This is a mistake. The instructor at the formative period of character is of even more impor- tance than the instruction that he gives. Facts must be vitalized in order to become fertile. Theories must 106 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. have the enthusiasm of personahty to encourage their study and secure their adoption. Even great princi- ples need the enforcement and apphcation of personal example to move mankind. A college or a university may be well endowed w^ith buildings, and books, and scientific apparatus, and scholarships ; it may even have men of great learning in control of its varied departments. Unless these teachers are also men of strong and high character and personal influence, the results of the teaching upon the students will be wholly disproportionate to the endowment. Williams College has always sought character and learning in its instructors, but cJiaracter first The force of that choice has been seen in its graduates and in the work which they have accomplished. Nowhere has the power of individual character been more evident than in the work which the men of Williams College have done in this country. My theme perhaps calls for more extended illus- tration than can be furnished by a single college, and if I had an hour at command, it would not be difficult to show the relation of college training in general, to Christian culture, to the development of unselfish citizenship and true patriotism, to improved methods of conducting business and politics, and to charitable and philanthropic endeavor. The enlargement of mind and the knowledge of the world and of man- kind which a thorough college course secures, tend directly to make men broader and better. In pro- portion as we know our fellow-men, their habitat, the ADDRESS. 107 influences under which they act, and the objects which engage their attention, are we able to serve them. The college affords great opportunities for the acqui- sition of such knowledge in a systematic and philo- sophical way. A student, therefore, who realizes and improves his advantages in college, has prepared himself to become an honorable man of affairs, a high-minded statesman, a true philanthropist, and an influential Christian. He has risen beyond mere personal ambitions and learned the real nobility of service to mankind. He will carry into every sphere of duty and labor, the idea, that to whom much is given from him will much be required ; he will hold himself debtor to all who are less fortunate than him- self, and instead of using his acquisitions like the miser for selfish aggrandizement, he will, in propor- tion to his own enlargement, contribute to the devel- opment of his fellow-men in all things that are useful and worthy. '' Because I have had much, others shall have more," will be his rule of action, and in fulfil- ment of such a motive, his life will become increas- ingly beneficent and happy. Such I believe to be the direct and natural result of the character-building which goes forward in our Christian colleges, which has been pre-eminently illustrated by the graduates of Williams College, and which has had nowhere a completer manifestation than in the lives and careers of those who have been especially known as home missionaries. It would be easy to cite many examples of this sort of influence from the wider range of graduates settled 108 WILLI AilS COLLEGE. in this countiy, whose mission has been fulfilled in secular pursuits, but I must restrict my illustrations. The familiar examples of noble and influential char- acter in connection with this college, which rise in the landscape of memory, as the mountains tower around this Berkshire valley, do not need to be rehearsed. It is sufficient to mention Edward Dorr Griffin, Mark Hopkins, and his consecrated brother Albert, to awaken glowing affection and institutional pride in every son of Williams. This is our centen- nial, and it is fitting that we should honor and glorify our own household. Passing these great names, which are written large on the college roll, let me select a few in special illustration of the single point which I have aimed to make in this brief address, namely, that Wilhams College has in the past hundred years developed noble characters, and in so doing has fur- nished to the world and to this country the best and most useful men. This country during the last hundred years has offered special advantages for home missionary work. During that period an immense and inviting territory has been thrown open for settlement. A variety of causes has united to bring into this territory immi- grants from all lands, but especially from the civilized countries of Europe. An average prosperity which has been paralleled nowhere else in the world has enabled tliese settlers to become landowners, and the facile institutions of the country have allowed them to secure speedily the advantages of citizenship. A common language, and freedom from the restrictions ADDRESS. 109 of rank and caste, have permitted and encouraged equal rights and general education, while the entire absence of priestly domination has facilitated freedom of religious thought and enabled religious teachers to present their systems with impartiality, fearlessness, and success. The period has also been remarkable in the history of mankind for the development of material resources, wonderful inventions, and philo- sophical inquiry, all of which have been assistants in educational and missionary work. Under such conditions it might be expected that men of marked character and thorough training would find a most favorable theatre for influential action. Let me now recall to your consideration a few names from the roll of our alumni, with incidents of their biography, illustrative of the value to home missions of the training here received. Jeremiah Porter, who died last July in his ninetieth year, was a good example of the average graduate of Williams College. He was the youngest of twelve children born to a physician in Hadley, Mass. He entered college when seventeen years of age, at the beginning of the presidency of Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin. After theological studies at Andover and Princeton, he began his home missionary work in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Fort Brady, where he was chaplain of the garrison in 1831. The troops were transferred to Fort Dearborn in 1833, and Mr. Porter went with them. Chicago had then less than three hundred inhabitants. He preached the first sermon ever heard in Chicago, and organized the 110 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. first religious society, a Presbyterian church, in that place. He went to Peoria, Farmington, Illinois, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. In each of these places he established churches and served in them durino- twenty-three years. When the civil war broke out he was appointed a chaplain in the army. After the war was over he built a church in Brownsville, Texas, while chaplain at Fort Brown ; thence he went to Fort Sill in Indian Territory and later to Wyoming Territory. He retired from active service in 1882, in his seventy-ninth year. He had nine children, two of whom have been missionaries in China for more than twenty years. Jeremiah Porter was a pioneer in religious work in the West, a founder of churches, a moulder of communities, a Christian soldier and patriot for threescore years. Williams College gave that little class of twenty-three graduates the best she had. Four became physicans ; six, clergjmien ; eight, lawyers ; and four, members of Congress. The only surviving member is the Hon. David Dudley Field, of New York. The pioneer missionary, Cushing Eells, who died within the year, was graduated in 1834 from Williams College, and had spent more than half a century in active service for the Northwest, in territory which now forms the States of Oregon and Washington. In March, 1838, he set out for the Pacific coast as a mis- sionary, and one month later he began his horseback ride across the continent. For fifty years he con- tinued to ride on horseback west of the Pocky Moun- tains, founding schools, gathering and consolidating ADDRESS. Ill churclies, and establishing colleges. The Willamette University and the Pacific University are debtors to him, and Whitman College owes its life to his efforts. It was literally built by Gushing Eells, on the conse- crated ground which drank the blood of the martyred Dr. Whitman, who had saved the whole Northwest to the United States. In 1861, Indian hostility having abated, the land which the government had given in aid of the Walla AValla mission, where Whitman and his associates were massacred in 1847, was to be sold. Mr. Eells felt that it would be sacrilege to sell this land without erecting a monument to the memory of that national bene- factor. The price was not great, but it was more than his means would purchase. By diligent toil and self- denial he and his son succeeded in raising two good crops, by the sale of which he paid for the land, and began to teach. By exertion and economy he was able to erect a college building, and by his unwearied efforts the college was endowed, and under his pru- dent management became a useful educational insti- tution. He first conceived the idea of a Christian college for the State of Washington ; he secured its original charter; he loved it with a father's ten- derness, and often said with truthful earnestness : "I could die for Whitman College." This college has been closely connected with Wil- liams College in its boards of government and of in- struction. President Eaton and three other graduates of Williams are members of its facult}^, and they are animated by the spirit of the heroic founder. 112 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. Beginning in 1877, Mr. Eells entered upon a new missionary work east of the Cascade Mountains. A large section of territory there receives the gospel chiefly through the donations and missionaries of the home missionary societies, not having as yet been developed to anything like self-support. In many of those destitute places, new and feeble at the start, Dr. Eells organized a church, aided in church erec- tion, and sometimes even built a church himself and gave it to the people. He would preach, gather in converts, organize a church, remain with it for two or several years as its pastor, without salary, and finally secure a successor to the work, when he would pass on into other new fields to repeat the generous, Christ-like service. There is many a church in Eastern Washington, and some in Western, that owe their existence to *' Father Eells," who earned that aff'ectionate title by his fatherly care over souls and paternal watchfulness and support for infant churches. This twelve years of service was very fruitful, and his story of it was a romance indeed. He travelled on his well-known sorrel horse, now nearly twenty-four years old, and twice at least he crossed the Cascade Mountains, riding 1,000 miles, with no other com- panion than the horse, camping under the stars, armed with nothing more deadly than the " sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." With his Bible in hand he met supposed hostile Indians, but he never knew fear, never met treachery among them, and was never injured in their service. Old Indians gathered round him on his last visit, and almost worshipped his ADDRESS. 113 venerable presence. With them beside a fallen tree he knelt in prayer, with them he ate a frugal meal npon which they had asked God's blessing as he tauglit them long years ago, and with them he will sing in the eternal life unto which he has gone and they will come. Such work was done in earlier times, nearer liome, by Jedediah Bushnell, of the class of 1797, who became a pioneer missionary in the region of which Syracuse, N. Y., is now the centre ; by Levi Parsons, of the class of 1801, who made a permanent settlement at Marcellus, N. Y., and was constantly starting other churches as the population increased, from 1815 to 1825; and by Leavenworth, of the class of 1804, who labored, at points now thickly settled, between Utica and Syracuse. Barrett and Calvin Bushnell, of the class of 1808, and Giddings and Halsey, of the class of 1811, en- gaged in the same work. Every three or four years a new man or band of men from Williams went into Central and Western l^ew York, till the whole region was evangelized. Did time permit, T could tell you how this mis- sionary life developed in Central New York from the labors of Williams men, and made that a centre which sent out rays of light to the Western Reserve, — where Israel Andrews presided for a generation over Marietta College, — to Michigan, Iowa, and to our Western ter- ritories. Or, entering other fields, I could narrate how Gerard Hallock wrought a revolution in journalism through the ''New York Observer" and the *' Journal 114 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. of Commerce," while his brother William organized and directed the American Tract Society for forty years. But I must close this necessarily brief sketch of of-raduates of Williams Colleg-e who have illustrated home missionary work in the annals of our nation. The college roll is brilliant with these examples of self-denying and philanthropic devotion. The evangelization of our country" has gone forward under their guidance ; the spirit of Christian patriotism which saved the Union sprung from their teachings. Successful efforts to elevate and educate the negro and Indian races, under the leadership of that soldier, teacher, and statesman, Samuel Cliapman Armstrong, had a kindred source. The education of the people through the columns of the religious ^^ress, whose pioneers, Gerard Hallock, Samuel Irenseus Prime, Henry M. Field, and their successors, were graduates of this institution, — belongs to the same class of influence. The record of the past stands honorable and illus- trious. It is a century of Christian educational life whose beneficent effects can be shown throughout this land. We can have no higher ambition, and utter no more heartfelt prayer for our Alma Mater, than that the spirit which has dwelt within this corporation during the last hundred years may continue to animate it, and that the graduates of Williams College may annu- ally go forth under the same sanctions to the service of God and their fellow-men. ADDRESS. BY THE KEV. G. A. FOKD. /^NE of the Dukes of Somerset is credited by Dr. ^-'^ Duff with saying in the British Parliament that ^'in the nature of the case, a missionary must be either a fool or a knave, and probably the latter." If the Duke was right, the relation of the college to the mission should be one of hostility to the " knave," and separation from the "fool." But He from whom Christendom takes its name put the matter in a very different light, when he said to his followers, " As the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you." On which side of this old contro- versy Williams College stands is shown by the topic assigned to me to-day. It is a matter of settled history that Williams Col- lesre considers the college and the mission as bound together by Divine appointment. Like day and night, they blend, until no one can say where each begins or ends. They are as veins and arteries in one cir- culatory system, comrades in every pulsation of weal or woe. Like the eye and hand, they must have one another. 116 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. The person of that prince among Williams's heroes, Mark Hopkins, whose spirit and memory are so dominant on this centennial occasion, and who was President of the college for thirty-six happy years, and for thirty years was President also of one of the greatest of missionary boards, ideally exemplified the blessed union of culture and missions. Those who distrust the colleges maintain that they breed pride and scepticism, and that missions will do better to draw their helpers from plainer ranks. This academic audience is safe enough from such an error, yet it is entitled to any refreshment that a glance at certain facts will give. In Apostolic Missions, the giant was the learned Paul, even as the giant of the Old Testament dispen- sation was the learned Moses. The other Apostles were not sent forth till they had spent three years under the constant tutelage of Christ himself, and had received those supernatural gifts that made their preaching and writings such a power through all these centuries. The universal Gospel of the Son of God laid hold indeed upon the common people, yet was it first sent to the most cultured and religious nations of that time ; and its triumphs among barbarians are passed over in the inspired record. Apostolic Missions affected chiefly the cultured, and Mediaeval Missions the uncul- tured peoples, while Modern Missions are affecting, powerfully and rapidly, both these extremes. Looking now at Modern Missions, we see that they were begun, as far as our country is concerned, in ADDRESS. 117 Williams College, where tlie new-born zeal drove some of the volunteers to enter other colleges simply to spread the missionary interest. The recent missionary revival, whose grand re- sults are manifest in most interesting statistics, as the binding together of thirty thousand students from four hundred and fifty colleges upon our continent in one organization that far outstrips every other college society, whether for athletic, social, or literary pur- poses, — this revival began in a meeting of college students, stimulated and guided by college men, in 1886, at Northfield, as an echo, perhaps, of that in the classic halls of Cambridge, England, the year before. The religious sentiment in our colleges is so strong to-day that while only five per cent of the young men of the country are ''professing Christians," fifty-five per cent of our college students are. Surely missions need not fear to trust themselves to college leadership. But the tongue of slander, in striving to alienate the college and missions, has chiefly attacked the latter, contending that they are unworthy of col- lege talents and confidence. The despised Bethlehem manger where the great Author of missions was born, was reproduced in England when the modern mis- sionary movement began, a century ago, and also in our own country and college, in the days of the " haystack meetings." Mills and his associates, whose monument yonder is one of the richest ornaments that Williams wears upon her honored brow, could count upon no sympathy from even the clergy, fac- 118 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. ulty, or fellow-Cliristians, wlien they organized that little society, " to effect, in the person of its members, missions to the heathen," and so they met at first in secret, like timid Nicodenius. After the churches were won over, the anti-mission war was waged by the semi-religious travellers and scholars. And now since we have the remarkable spectacle of the all but complete conversion of this class to the endorsement of missions, the hostile army is mostly made up (ac- cording to many competent authorities) of those whose hostility is itself the highest praise. This chanofe of sentiment in favor of missions is noted in Europe, as well as here, and has carried with it many illustrious names, among them the eminent scientist Charles Darwin. The bands that unite the college and the mission are further tightened and ennobled by a true concep- tion of the scope of missions. This is no longer taken to be the simple proclamation of the Gospel message, backed by consistent living ; but rather the much more effective (hence more exacting) work of planting upon new soil, as far and fast as possible, a rounded reproduction of Christianity that shall include those institutions which are its natural results. The tree of life will not exert its full attractive power, till it is hung, not only with the leaves of doctrine, that adorn its boughs and are for the healing of the nations, but also with the twelve manner of luscious fruits of beneficence, for the feeding of the nations, that declare its heavenly origin. It is wholly impossible for the Church to confine herself in mission fields to '' preach- ADDRESS. 119 ing- the Gospel," and yet obey witli any fulness the second table of God's Law, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Consequently, for the realization of the broader scope, the demands of missionary ser- vice are varied. In considering the twelve gates of access to the New Jerusalem of missionary success, we simply assume those other and familiar demands that are essential to all Christian work. I. The Physical Demands. — Missionary, like mili- tary organizations, require a medical certificate of fitness. Hard journeys and unavoidable disregard at times of all the laws of health break down very many constitutions, while still more are only saved from this catastrophe by contentment with a very partial performance of missionary ofiices. Besides, to win prejudiced and contemptuous foreigners, and to lead converts efficiently, give large scope for high physical endowments. II. The Mechanical Demands. — These grow out of the necessity of the missionary's making and draw- ing all plans, arranging all contracts, superintending all details of erection, and making with his own hands such requisites as the native artisans cannot make, for the proper construction and equipment of the needed mission buildings in numerous stations, — out of the necessity of quickening and directing the varied mate- rial advancement of those whom his Gospel civilizes. III. The Financial Demands. — To plan, in ad- vance, the expenses of a large and complicated net- work of missionary operations within the limits of 120 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. fixed appropriations ; to spend wisely and economi- cally the considerable funds entrusted to liim, and meet promptly every financial obligation as it arises ; to have well-kept accounts and present acceptable reports and balance-sheets, with due regard to the fluctuations of exchange, and the conversion back and forth of the items of his accounts from the currency of the home-land to that of his field ; and then to finance his own snuo^ salary so as to cover also the considerable requirements of private benefactions and extensive hospitality, and all without the aid of regu- larity or leisure, and among people who have no fixed prices for anything and no conscience to spare in money matters, — calls for abilities in this line of no mean order on the part of the missionary. IV. The Legal Demands. — These are for the protection of the mission properties and other rights, against the encroachments of avaricious neighbors, bitter persecutors, and crafty rulers ; and for the securing of suitable redress in cases of encroachment ; and also to meet the obvious obligation to aid his parishioners with proper legal counsel, which they cannot obtain elsewhere. V. The Diplomatic Demands. — When legal meas- ures fail through corruption, the champion of honest rights falls back upon diplomacy', consistently, of course, with Christian honor. Through these diplo- matic relations with the powers that be, he also guards those general rights guaranteed to missions by treaty, and obtains all possible additional facilities for his J. work. Few, indeed, can know what expenditure of ADDRESS. 121 time, what distasteful bondage to absurd etiquettes, what humiliating rebuffs and agonies of ingenuity it often costs to keep in motion under hostile gov- ernments the agencies of Christian missions ! Or what sad interruptions and disasters might doubt- less be averted, were diplomatic gifts more generally possessed by missionaries ! VI. The Medical Demands. — To open hearts and districts hermetically sealed against the Gospel and its herald without the aid of miracles, the missionary finds medical service exceedingly effective. He, therefore, needs as much skill as possible, that he may treat with simple remedies a host of simple ailments, sure to clamor for his help wherever he may be. It will often be as foolish as cruel to plead inability, and refuse to help those who have access to no other source of relief. VII. The Musical Demands. — Since worship is not complete without sacred song, and music is so helpful in evangelism, and since the missionary finds no preparation in this line, he must himself prepare both hymns and tunes, with such indifferent local help as he can muster, and then must train the schools and congregations himself, and the musical leaders that are to be. VIII. The Linguistic Demands. — To master even one foreign language (and, in most cases, more are needed) so as to do effective work with both the col- loquial and the written forms, baffies not a few who attempt it, and forms a signal difficulty of mission work. It is far too often true that a missionary 122 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. hobbles through his ministry, weak, if not ridiculous, on this account. IX. The Educational Demands. — From the ele- mentary three R's up to the heights of philosophy, science, and theology, the missionary has to carry those pupils who are to be the teachers of the future ; also to prepare the text-books, organizing and con- ducting the various training-schools, colleges, and seminaries, as well as the system of village common schools, which he must superintend with vigilance, and be so familiar with the text- books in the native lanofuaofes that he can examine not only the schools but the teachers, and give them the normal training which they need. The importance of this branch of the work is increasingly recognized by all missionary societies.-^ It may be called the left arm of mission work, being in most cases the only means available for getting hold of those who are to be moulded by the hammer of Divine truth wielded by the right arm of preaching. X. The Pastoral Demands. — These are more exacting than miglit be supposed, because tlie mis- sionary is really a superintending bishop of a diocese, with a considerable corps of native helpers, who look up to him as their pastor, and numerous congregations tliat depend upon him at least for the settlement of the knotty perplexities and serious troubles, that must, in the circumstances of the case, be numerous and obsti- ^ "Wisely have the American missionaries, like the Pilgrim Fathers, everywhere planted the school-house side by side with the church. In these twin buildings lies the hope of India." — Dr. F. E. Clark, Y. P. S. C E. ADDRESS. 123 nate, and call for much more paternal interference than does the care of more advanced congreffations. For the purity and prosperity of the laborers and congregations he must exercise a wise and constant oversight. XI. The Homiletical Demands. — The peculiar pressure here grows out of the importance, to the work, of such a reputation as a preacher as will enable the missionary to draw to the services during his tours, the many whom the native preacher in each station fails to reach ; so that, attracted and moved by the missionary at first, they may become regular attendants. He also needs, by his high standard of preaching, to give the native preachers, whose advan- tages are slender at best, such a stimulus and pattern as shall give them a strong uplift XII. The Conversational Demand. — This is exceedingly severe. The bulk of a missionary's time is taken up with receiving visits. The visitors usually come in companies, and believe in long visits. All day is not at all uncommon. These will often begin before his morning toilet is complete, and continue till the wee hours of the night, sometimes with no respite even at meal time. Their fullest play comes when he is touring, and his fatigue is greatest and his accommodations poorest. The call- ers represent, of course, every grade of society and intelligence, and every shade of prejudice and belief. Many will be as hostile to his mission as they are respectful to his person ; painfully sensitive in regard to anything that seems even remotely to antag- 124 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. oiiize their habits or creeds, and quick to imagine intended insults on the slightest pretext ; and mutual enemies will often be present at the same time. With little or no reading matter, they depend a good deal upon these missionary visits for reliable information on all points. So, also, for the settlement of many temporal difficulties, in the absence of any other fair and kindly tribunal to which they can resort. But these settlements always mean long hours, if not days, of ingenious and varied argument and pleading, in the interests of right and godliness. Now wherever the missionary goes, the high regard in which he is held makes it rude for his visitors to have much to say, and still more rude for him to have little to say. He must not only do the bulk of the talking, but if he pauses, it is either a slight to his visitors, or a confession that his own ideas have run dry, in which case something very like contempt is apt to be noticeable. Let no one imagine it easy to steer the bark of a conversation so one-sided in such perilous waters for so many consecutive hours, and combine successfully the requisite proportions of wit, science, news, and politics, praise, reproof, and exhortation, with that spiritual teaching which is his special mission ; so that those who come to him for the first time, and full of prejudice or indifference, and those who come self- righteous or despondent, the ignorant and the intelli- gent, believers and unbelievers, may all receive what will do them good. But this is the largest and most effective instrument the missionary has to wield, and ADDRESS. 125 here, first and worst, ia most cases will his incompe- tency show itself. While recognizing the fact that many missionaries have occasion to serve as specialists in medical, liter- ary, or other work, and that circumstances modify the demands made upon many others, it yet remains true that the average missionary needs to meet, as far as possible, the multifold demand just outlined. And while no one can be supposed to meet all these varied requirements successfully, it is not high proficiency in some lines so much as fair proficiency in many lines that best equips the missionary volunteer. Hence the special value of the symmetrical and many-sided development that a college training gives, no part of which, from the athletics to the summit of philo- sophical studies, but will come into honorable play upon the mission field. To keep the best college-trained men at home where, through the multitude of workers, the division of labor, and the helpfulness of the environment, suc- cess is easy and failures largely atoned for by sym- pathetic influences ; and to send the weaker and untrained men abroad, where the conditions are re- versed, and where each man must be prepared to serve as athlete, mechanic, financier, lawyer, diplomat, phy- sician, musician, linguist, educator, pastor, preacher, and conversationalist, — cannot be justified. It would be like planting the sturdy oak in the sheltered and watered valley, and the dependent vine upon the dry, bleak mountain-top. Missions are so deeply rooted at home that all 126 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. Christendom is proud of them, and gladly contributes annually about fifteen million dollars, entrusted to nine thousand missionaries from two hundred and eighty societies ; while books, by well-known authors on both continents, not officially connected with mis- sions, depict their wonderful success. The trunk of this great tree represents a community of at least four million open believers (one-fourth of whom are communicants) who cluster about seventeen thousand stations, where forty-five thousand native helpers labor; and who, in their poverty, give so largely that three of the British societies report the gifts of their native churches as two hundred thou- sand dollars annually ; while the ratio of growth has already left the home churches far behind, and the pro rata cost is also immensely in favor of the mission fields. The branches, too, have stretched so far that not only the governments of Christian lands, but even heathen sovereigns and magnates, have paid both ver- bal and financial tribute to this great cause; while slaving kidnappers among the savage islands con- tribute their spontaneous testimony, w^ien, to coax the timid islanders aboard piratical craft, they dress one of the crew in missionary garb. So valuable are the fruits already yielded outside the strictly missionary lines that numerous books have appeared, dealing wholly with the material and intellectual indebtedness of the world to missions. I. The contributions to science, and especially to Philology, Geography, and Anthropology have eli- ADDRESS. 127 cited from great scientists the highest encomiums. The colossal work of translating the Scriptures, in whole or in part, into more than three hundred languages and dialects, many of which were first reduced to writing and system by the missionaries, is of itself an incomparable contribution to Philology, better appreciated when w^e recall what time and pains each English version cost. II. The contributions to the commerce of the world are such that it is estimated that in Polynesia, every missionary stimulates a trade worth fifty times his salary, and that the American plows alone, sent to Natal, would meet all the expenses of the mission there. III. The contributions to the politics of nations have also been enormous, so that the great historians, states- men, and journalists combine in one inspiring chorus of acknowledgment. lY. The contributions to civilisation and pure phi- lanthropy head the list, of course. The latest and brightest conspicuous example is Africa, with her Living-stone and his successors. The Reform Move- ments that in various countries aim at the suppression of native evils, such as the suttee and child-widow- hood, infanticide, human sacrifices, and cannibalism; or of imported evils, such as the traffic in slaves and chastity, fire-arms, liquors, and opium, — all have their mainspring in Christian missions. But even now this flourishing tree is still a stripling, and full of buds of promise rather than of ripened fruit ; while the fruit already borne is mostly of the 128 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. intangible sort tliat, like all spiritual forces, no one can tabulate. Not only are the greatest results still in the future, but the greatest struggles too, no doubt, and in view of the ''tug of war" that looms up before us, there never was more need than now for the college and the mission to swear fresh loyalty and stand together. Whatever missions mean to Christian civilization, that they also mean, pre-eminently, to the college, which is the cream of this civilization. Now Christian missions mean an honest effort, — 1. To obey the clear and most emphatic Divine commands to fill the world with Gospel truth. This is a debt of loyal Obedience. 2. To pay as much as possible toward the dis- charge of the enormous debt owing to missions, from the time that the Great First Missionary left regions of light for those of darkness, and the Throne for the Cross ; or that His chief Lieutenant gave to the Church and world those matchless Epistles, every one of which was written to mission churches, up to the latest of the contributions we have just enumerated. The Christianizing of our pagan British ancestors ; the colonial impulse that crystallized on Plymouth Eock ; the securing in Revolutionary days the friend- ship of the '' Six Indian Nations ; " the preservation of our Northwest Territories in Whitman's time ; the es- tablishment of many of our colleges, such as Hamilton and Dartmouth ; the deliverance of Protestant Chris- tendom a century ago from rank rationalism and rigid ritualism, and the phenomenal growth and excellence ADDRESS. 129 of our college system, — all have in Christian missons their immediate spring-. This debt is one of Honor. 3. To offset as much as possible that stream of corruption which has borne from Christian to heathen lands, by means of our marine and military, tourists and traders, a dread infection of infidel ideas and vicious practices, and to supply with better beliefs the intelligent multitude abroad, whose superstitious, puerile faiths, our civilization has demolished. This is a debt of Justice. 4. To mitigate the multiform distress that hangs like a pall over all heathen peoples, dwarfing, crushing, and destroying them; in recognition of Christian stewardship that looks up to God as Father, and the Christian communism that looks out to every human being as a brother. Brotherly interest in our distant fellow-man is missions. This is a debt of Compassion and Gratitude. 5. To realize the highest type of goodness, — self- sacrifice ; and particularly the highest type of virtue, — that which takes hold of subjects who have the least natural claim, through distance, prejudice, and alien barbarism. Mere culture is intensely selfish, and, as such, is not only impotent but pernicious. The Duke of Welling- ton made no mistake when he said, '' Mere culture apart from the moral element makes clever devils." Culture is like the sun, that acts upon all within its range centripetally only, and must be restrained from its destructive tendencies by those more power- ful centrifugal forces above and beyond it, of which 130 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. science has only lately caught a gleam ; and of which, as related to culture, our Christian civilization has but just seen a glimmering dawn. The highest ideals of unselfishness can only express themselves in missions, and this fact alone ought to bind together forever the college and the mission. The larg-est, richest wish that we can tender to our Alma Mater on this her Centennial Birthday, is that she may maintain the lead she took so long ago in Christian missions ! MONDAY, OCTOBER NINTH. ADDRESS. BY DEAN H. P. JUDSOK THE RELATION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL TO THE COLLEGE. ^ I "HE development of education in the United States quite naturally has been like that of our polit- ical institutions. It has grown from beneath, instead of being imposed from above by the anxious forecast of a paternal government. Educational institutions have been local, individual, spontaneous, in their origin. Freedom is always a foe to uniformity, and so schools and their curricula from the first have been a pretty fair reflex of the multifarious notions of a great variety of communities. It is true that many schools have a general similarity in many points. This comes, of course, from their common origin, and from the similar conditions under which our widely- scattered commonwealths have worked out the prob- lems of civic life. And yet, notwithstanding this superficial similarity, a deeper study gives a pro- found impression of confusion. There is confusion in methods, confusion in courses of study, confusion in quality of work. This is true of higher education. It is true of secondary education. It is yet more markedly true of the two systems as related to each other. There is much college teaching which begins 134 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. nowhere. There is much academy teaching which leads nowhere. Only a small fraction of our high- school graduates ever reach the college. And those who do are as unlike one another in degree and char- acter of preparation as they are in outlines of physi- ognomy. A despairing professor of Latin once told me that his freshmen knew as many kinds of Latin grammar as they had varieties of nose. The colleges and the secondary schools do not at all points articulate. In the States political order has come out of polit- ical chaos. The nation of to-day has replaced the dis- cordant thirteen commonwealths of 1787. We have learned to combine a large degree of local freedom with a large degree of unity of national life. In education, however, local autonomy is yet su- preme. The school and the college are each virtu- ally an end unto itself It is only a moral influence which Williams exerts on other colleges. It is only an incidental and indirect influence which it exerts in the preparatory schools. And these schools have little to do one with another, and still less to do in shaping the policy of the college. Each local community is quite independent of every other. Now, of course, there is no small advantage in this vigor of local independence. The kind of education furnished is a direct outgrowth of the popular wants, and so has a more tenacious hold on the public in- terest. Moreover, whatever else it lacks, it certainly tends to create originality and strength of character. And all these are things worth having. ADDRESS. 135 Still, the lack of adjustment and harmony in our educational system means on the whole a decided waste of energy. And sound educational science implies economy of effort. Every piece of educational work should be defi- nitely related to something else. Everything wrought should be the immediate means of further accomplish- ment. School curricula should not be mere blind alleys. They should lead somewhere. There should be the same economy of intellectual expenditure and the same accurate adjustment of means to ends that makes the success of a cotton factory or of a bank. But, in many schools, the teacher ladles out knowl- edge as if the Atlantic Ocean were his tureen, and it mattered little how much may be spilled. Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of knowledge, — these are too common. One form which the incoherence of our systems assumes is the introduction of mere chance in the direction given to a boy's education. Undoubtedly, a considerable majority of those who finish a course of study in a high-school or academy never would go further in education. That must always be the case. But it is also true, as Herbert Spencer puts it, that motion takes place along the line of least resistance. If you make it especially difficult for a boy to get to college, he is apt to drift away from it. Conversely, if no especial intellectual obstacles lie between him and a college course, then the decision will depend on quite other considerations. And these will often be 136 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. sufficient to turn him into other lines of Hfe. Surely there is no need to multiply artificial and unnecessary barriers between the boy and the freshman class. Of course it is by no means desirable that every hig'h-school boy should take a college course. Still it seems to me that this is axiomatic : there ought to be in the nature of a school curriculum no insuperable difficulties calculated to make it impossible for the student who finishes it to go a step higher. But, to-day, just those difficulties exist in a great majority of schools. As curricula are laid down, certain lines of study lead directly to college. Certain other lines lead just as definitely away from college. When a boy starts out in one of these lines, which he takes is quite as often a matter of chance as of intelligent choice. Some parents definitely intend to send their boys to college. Others as definitely intend not to do so. But a very considerable proportion have no intention at all on the subject. They merely send their boys to school, and what is done afterwards will depend largely on what sort of tastes and capabilities the boys manifest while there. And if the parent's mind is blank as to the future, much more is tliat of the urchin himself. He knows nothing about education, nothing about himself, nothing about the world. He merely tumbles into some sort of combination of studies, and tumbles out of it into whatever happens to come next. In other words, what I insist is, that it is the merest chance that brings many students to college, and the ADDRESS. 137 merest cliance tliat keeps many others out. And this predominance of chance is largely due to our helter-skelter system, or no system, of organizing our various educational institutions with reference one to another. The problem, then, is : Can we preserve the advan- tages of local freedom of control, and yet secure such unity of adjustment as to save waste of educational effort, and eliminate this chance-medley from school- training, substituting for it the possibility of intelligent prevision *? I think it can be done. And if so, it must be by such agreement and adjustment among the colleges and schools that this fundamental principle of organi- zation is firmly established : every course of study in every secondary school shall always lead directly to some course of study in some college. Such agreement and adjustment mean nothing else than a somewhat definite federation among our insti- tutions of higher and secondary learning. This is better than the uniformity of State control, because it is free, it is natural, it is in strict accord with the genius of institutions with which we are entirely familiar. Such federation should include, not colleges alone, not secondary schools alone, but both ; and those not in one State or section, but in the nation at large. And obviously, also, such combined action must be initiated by institutions of high rank, capable already of maintaining a good standard of scholarship. None 138 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. should be considered whicli are not able or willing to reach the agreed grade. The essential principles of the suggested federation, it seems to me, must be something like these : — 1. There should be a general unity in the amount and kind of education indicated by a given bacca- laureate degree. That unity does not now exist. Degrees in some places are dreadfully cheap. Many of them are mere fiat parchments. In some States there is to-day as much "wild catting" in colleges as sixty years ago there was in banking. A national bank-note is what it is, only when and because it is worth its face in gold, from Maine to California. And every college degree should everywhere be the equivalent of its face value in intellectual coin of the realm. Should the federa- tion be formed, the degrees of a non-federate college would at once be known as mere educational " shin- plasters.'' 2. There should be a general unity in the require- ments for admission to candidacy for a given degree. If the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Williams means the same thing essentially as a like degree in the University of Minnesota, then the preparatory course for that degree in a Minnesota high-school should with equal ease admit to Williams. 3. At the same time, there should be considerable flexibility in these requirements. There should be a wide extension of the system of equivalents. The old idea of one inelastic required college course, is obsolete. In glancing at the Williams ADDRESS. 139 catalogue, recently, I was struck by its modern look. There are electives. It actually requires some intelli- gence in the student to make up his line of work. In my student day the entire college course was tied up in a bundle, and all we had to do was to shut our eyes and swallow it whole, like a dose of calomel. But flexibility in the curriculum means flexibility in the requirements for admission. It means that entrance subjects may be made up of a variety of groups. 4. Then, secondary school curricula should be so arranged that every course possible for a student to take should correspond with some one of these en- trance groups. To be sure, it is not to be sup- posed that every college will offer all the courses of study implied by all of these groups. But if group F, for example, does not lead to a possible course at Williams, it may at Amherst, or Cornell. And so my main contention will be realized : every course in every secondary school will lead to some course in some college. 5. The school diploma, indicating the particular group of studies covered, should then be the voucher of admission to the corresponding college course in the colleore which offers that course. Those colleges that prefer to require examinations would not be debarred from doing so. But my im- pression is that most colleges would sooner or later prefer the other plan, were they once assured that the school diploma means a definite thing. 6. Of course, the federation would provide for ade- 140 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. quate supervision and tests of secondary schools, to insure the high character of the diploma. 7. As has been intimated, it is not to be supposed that all colleges would offer all the possible combina- tions of subjects. The larger colleges would. It doubtless would prove good educational economy for contiguous colleges of limited means to develop on different lines, thus avoiding undue competition. These suggestions are not merely theory. Begin- nings have been made looking toward a closer union of educational institutions. Not to mention what has been done in New England, the correlation of colleges and academies under the regents of the University of New York, and the very successful co-ordination of the State universities and State high-schools in such States as Michigan and Minnesota, are steps in the right direction. What seems to be needed is a more comprehensive and thoroughly organized voluntary union for the ends indicated. It should be national in character. The secondary school, then, I hold, should not be a mere isolated nomad, an educational island. It should be in quite definite relations to other institu- tions of the same and of higher rank. It should not be a mere servant of the colleges. It should be a co-ordinate part of a definitely organized system, with a voice in important questions of mutual interest. Teachers in such schools should have aca- demic recognition as of a high grade of dignit}^ Perhaps if these more intimate relations between ADDRESS. 141 the preparatory school and the college should be formed, there would be fewer instances of the start- ling drop which students sometimes experience now, when they pass from the hands of the skilful and learned teacher of the fitting school into those of the callow college tutor. These are mere outline suggestions. But I am convinced that when the American Federation of Colleges and Secondary Schools is formed, it will be found that the colleges are enormously strength- ened, the fitting schools are lifted and energized, and that no boy or girl will be kept out of college be- cause at some time he was unconsciously shunted on a side track that leads away from anywhere. It will be found that in union there is strength. ADDRESS. BY PRINCIPAL J. C. GEEENOUGH. THE RELATION OF THE COLLEGE TO PEDAGOGICS. 'T^HE general purpose of this college is evident. ""- It lias always stood for sound learning and for thorough discipline. The subject of our discussion involves a specific work, namely, '' The specific pro- motion of education by the college, {a) by a normal school course included in the elective courses ; (&) by a connection wdth the common-school system of the neighborhood, and with University Extension." The course thus proposed is an elective course. We are aware that many of the alumni question the introduction of elective courses. They urge that the appropriate work of Williams is to enable her students to gain fundamental knowledge and discipline, service- able in every department of human activity, and to develop physical, intellectual, and moral manhood. They urge, that there shall be, first, the culture of the man, and then the training of the workman, — that elective courses in a college curriculum often result in leading students to choose what is easy rather than what is profitable. Now, granting all that may be said of the impor- tance of maintaining the college course in its integrity, ADDRESS. 143 the question still remains, whether elective studies may not wisely be introduced into the college This question has been discussed in the governing boards of every college in New England. It has been an- swered by the introduction of electives. The question now is not whether electives shall have a place in colleges, but whether this elective shall be introduced. Considering the number of electives now included among the studies of this college, unless there are valid reasons for introducing the one proposed, it should not have a place in the curriculum. For the sake of brevity, I may be allowed to include this course under the term "pedagogy." The first rea- son that may be urged for including such a course in the curriculum of this college is, that it will pre- sent important information, and will be adapted to promote intellectual and moral culture. It will tend to secure the objects of the college ; it will tend to promote manhood. Pedagogy includes the history of education. No other history is more important, for teachers rather than generals have determined the trend of human events. The clash of arms is the terrible expression of antagonistic ideas and opposing convictions. The teacher may not fight, but what he has taught nerves the arm of the warrior. Again, in the study of the history of education, the student becomes impressed with the personal qualities of the great leaders in the intellectual and moral progress of the world. No one can consider such men as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other eminent teachers, without feeling 144 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. the force of tbeir convictions and the warmth of their enthusiasm. The study of pedagogy also includes the study of mental science, for the purpose of apprehending those laws upon which, as principles, all true teaching must depend Pedagogy, on its practical side, prepares one to present truth, and to persuade men in public affairs and in the private walks of life. Again, the teaching of subjects as students under training to teach must teach, is an effective means of gaining clear knowledge, and the ability to use what one has learned. Sir William Hamilton, in one of his papers on " A Reform of the English Universities," says . '' The older universities, all of them, regarded the exercise of teaching as a necessary condition of perfect knowl- edge. In recent times the universities have, with equal unanimity, neglected this. Yet there can be no doubt of the superior wisdom of the more ancient practice. For teaching, like the quality of mercy, is twice blessed ; * it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.'" He adds : '' The preparation for and the very pro- cess of instruction react most beneficially on the knowledge of the instructor, if the instructor be what (intellectually and morally) he ought." " Teaching," he continues, " constrains to a clear and distinct consciousness of one's subject in its sev- eral bearings, internal and external ; it brings to his observation any want or obscurity lurking in his com- prehension of it as a wliole ; and urges him to master any difficulty, the solution of which he may have previously adjourned. The necessity of answering ADDRESS. 145 the interrogatories of others compels him, in fact, to interrogate and to answer himself. In short, what he had learned syntlietically, he is now obliged, for the inverse process of instruction, to study analytically. By a combination of analysis and synthesis is the condition of a perfect knowledge." In the earlier days of our New England colleges, a long winter vacation allowed students to teach winter schools. It was generally claimed by the faculty of the colleo^es that the loss of time at collesre was largely compensated for by the development gained by teaching As the present arrangement of terms and the de- mand for permanent teachers allow of no such per- sonal training by teaching, the need is so much the greater that the colleges provide at least an elective course in this training. The maintenance of a college does not find its end alone in the personal culture of the students. Though founded by private beneficence, such institutions exist for the public good. From the colleges radiate knoAvl- edge and culture. Granting all that is accomplished in the broad work of education by graduates who enter some one of the three learned professions, as they are called, yet it must be allowed that the colleges diffuse knowledge and extend their influence largely through those graduates who in our public and private schools teach the youth of our land. By providing better facilities for preparing teachers, the college will more effectively uplift the community for whose good it was founded and is maintained. 10 246 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. Nor is tlie moral effect of teaching upon the teacher to be lost sight of in this discussion. Preparation for teaching properly leads one to feel the force of the hio-hest motives. These motives are sublimely evident in the deeds and words of the Great Teacher, ''who came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his life a ransom." The end proposed by teaching, namely, to help the children and youth of our land to become true men and women, is second to no other as a motive to worthy action. Teaching persistently demands that one make the most of him- self, that one may help others in the formative period of life to make the most of themselves. If entered upon and pursued in proper spirit and with the right endeavor, it cannot fail to rouse and to sustain one's moral energy. It tends strongly to kindle the noblest aspirations. I liave spoken of the value of a course in peda- gogy to the student as a man seeking culture. But in whatever employment one engages, there wdll be occasion to teach. The preacher must so present objects of thought to his hearers that they will apprehend the truth respect- ing those objects, that is, the preacher must teach. Genuine teaching of important truth always interests the taught. One reason why so mucli uttered from the pulpit is uninteresting is, that there is so much preaching without clear teaching. Dr. McKenzie, the eminent preacher of Cambridge, once said to me, "I find that my people are quite ready to listen if one will teach them." And as, a ADDRESS. 147 few Sabbaths ago, I listened to Archdeacon Farrar in the crowded nave of St. Margaret's, London, I found in the clearness, simplicity, and directness of his sermon what I have learned to trace in his books, — the re- sult of his years of experience as a teacher in Marlborough College and elsewhere. The lawyer must teach the jury if he would per- suade. The ruling of the judge as he instructs the jury is a lesson taught, and the true method of teach- ing is the same for him as for the school teacher. There is no employment in which the college graduate has occasion to direct the thoughts of men in which a pedagogical training will not increase his power. Two questions remaining demand answer, " What should the course proposed include! and should it become one of the elective courses in Williams Col- lege? To these I can now make but brief answer. This course should include a knowledge of the human mind, as that which through its own activity is to be informed with truth and developed. Psychology, as now taught here, furnishes a basis for pedagogical in- struction in psychology. As now taught, the outlines of mental science are presented. Those who are to teach should study psychology again, that they may trace the relation of every law of the mind to teach- ing. By such study they will be led to evolve the fundamental principles of correct teacliing, and will be able in some degree to teach, not subjects alone, but minds. The genius of Dr. Hopkins was especially evident in teaching minds. When one asked him if he did not tire of teaching over and over the same 148 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. subjects, he replied, "No, I have different students in every class," The course in pedagogy should also include the study of the method of teaching as determined by clearly apprehended principles. One may gain a the- oretical knowledge of this method by studying the applications of the principles of teaching. This is the study of method in the abstract. To this study must be added the study of method in the concrete. This is the study of method applied. This can be done in no other way than observing the teaching of those skilled in the use of the method, and noting how such teaching affects the mind taught in different stages of its development. This observation will lead the stu- dent of pedagogy to study, not only the method, but the various modifications and ajoplications of method, as demanded by the individual minds taught. After this observation, the student of pedagogy should him- self have exercises in teaching, under tlie supervision and criticism of a teacher skilled in applying the true method, and having insight of the minds of pupils and such sympathy with them, that there may be no lack of adaptation to the individual needs of pupils, in the form of what are commonly called devices. This observation and training is the w^ork of the training school. It is the practical side of the teacher's pro- fessional preparation, and requires schools of different grades, from the kindergarten to the college, in which the application of principles and the development of mind at different periods can be observed. It is often remarked that nothing can be fully ADDRESS. 149 known until it is historically known. No course of pedagogy can be complete unless it includes tlie study of the history of education. This is a wide field, in- cluding as it does history both of earlier and of pres- ent periods. The student of pedagogy should at least be led into it, and helped to map out some of its paths, so that his subsequent reading and study may be profitable. The theoretical part of the preparation for teaching, Williams College can furnish as soon as a chair for that purpose is properly endowed. Harvard is already attempting it and with success. Harvard is also be- ginning to do something in the way of securing an opportunity for her students in pedagogy to observe schools of different grades. Williams College should, as soon as possible, open an elective course in theoretical pedagogy to her students. What is possible and what is desirable to be done in the way of practical training, you will, I judge, soon hear from my associate in the discussion of this ques- tion. Those who are to teach after graduating from this college need at least the theoretic course. There is an increasing demand for trained teachers. Those who enter college with the purpose of preparing them- selves to teach will soon seek those collesres that will furnish instruction in pedagogy. To hinder in any way those who are to teach from entering Williams is to prevent a still larger number from entering, for a majority of teachers direct their students, consciously or unconsciously, to their own alma mater. Such is the demand for graduates of colleges who have had a 150 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. normal training that tlie Board of Education have pro- vided a special course for graduates in some of the State normal schools; but the colleges should, by courses in theoretical pedagogy, lessen the work of the normal schooh The normal school is ready to provide opportunities for observing schools of different grades. The normal school is ready to teach the true method of teaching, and to give opportunity to the college graduate to train himself in teaching schools of different grades. The college can teach the history of education and theoretical pedagogy. The normal school, in short courses, can so supplement the work of the college as to enable the college graduate to superintend schools of different grades, or to teach in accord with the prin- ciples and the method which the recent progress in pedagogy demands. ADDRESS. BY DEAN E. H. GRIFFIN. THE RELATION OF THE COLLEGES TO THE PROFES- SIONAL SCHOOLS. 'T^HE lack of a collegiate education, on the part of so many students in our professional schools, is a long- recoofnized and often lamented evil. The re- ports of the United States Commissioner of Education have, for a number of years, presented statistics upon this subject, which, though incomplete, are doubtless approximately accurate. The report for 1889-90, recently issued, states the proportion of students of theology, law, and medicine, who have received the bachelor's degree in arts or science, as follows : stu- dents of theology 22 per cent., students of law 21.7, students of medicine 10 per cent. The Northern and Northwestern States make a more favorable showing than is represented in this average, the Southern and Southwestern States one much less favorable ; but, tak- ing the country at large, it would appear that scarcely more than one fifth of the young men who are prepar- ing to become clergymen and lawyers, and only about one tenth of those who are looking forward to the medical profession, have received a full academic training. It is perhaps surprising, in view of the per- 152 "WILLIAMS COLLEGE. sistence with which some of the great reh'gioiis de- nominations have insisted upon an educated ministry, that the proportion of college-bred men should not be greater among theological students ; but in the New England States, where this proportion is largest, it is, according to the commissioner's tables, less than thirty- nine per cent., while in those same States more than forty-one per cent, of law students are graduates of colleges. In the case of medical students the per- centage of academically educated men is startlingly small, being, in the South Atlantic States, according to the report of 1888-89, less than one per cent. There is no reason to suppose tliat, under existing conditions, the proportion of candidates for the so- called learned professions who will avail themselves of college opportunities will tend to increase. On the contrary, it is well known that this proportion is di- minishing. There is a strong and growing tendency to pass directly from the secondary to the professional schools. It is true that Harvard University is soon to require a degree in letters, science, or arts, from all who enter its law school, that the Johns Hopkins University requires the bachelor's degree from all who enter its medical school, but the institutions which make such demands will always be few. The provost of the University of Pennsylvania, in an address last year before the National Education Association at Saratoga, declared that '' if the four- year obligatory course in medicine, which will soon be enforced at the leading schools of the country, were to be associated with the requirement of the ADDRESS. 153 bachelor of arts degree for admission, there would not be a single institution that could stand the strain." It is significant that several of our oldest and most respectable theological schools have, within recent years, established courses of instruction for those who have not received a classical education. We must admit that the colleges are not maintaining their hold upon the learned professions, and that there is danger that this hold will become weaker in the future. It is desirable not to take a more unfavorable view of this than the facts require. It would be lamentable if we were compelled to believe that the decrease in the proportion of academically trained students indi- cates a lower average of attainment now than in former years. It must be remembered that the edu- cation furnished by the secondary schools is much better now than formerly, and particularly we must not forget that, within the last twenty-five or thirty years, a large number of industrial and technical in- stitutions have come into existence, which give a train- ing in many respects well adapted to young men who look forward to professional life. None the less, is it a grave misfortune that the colleges, which represent the tradition and the ideal of liberal culture, should render so limited a service in what may be properly considered their most appropriate sphere. If anything can be done to bring them into more effective relation to the young men who are looking forward to profes- sional careers, one of the greatest wastes and weak- nesses of our education will be overcome. One reason for the drift away from the colleges has 154 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. been so far removed by tlie changes of the last few years that we need not stop to consider it, — the feehng, namely, that collegiate education is not a sufficiently direct and immediate preparation for life. As obviat- ing this criticism, the modifications of the courses and methods of study, accomplished within recent years, have been timely. In this college, these modifications culminated last year in a revised schedule of studies, providing enlarged facilities in the great departments of knowledge, and offering the degree of bachelor of arts without the study of Greek. It is not probable that, at present, dissatisfaction with the methods and results of our colleges operates, to a large extent, upon the minds of well-informed persons. The causes which tend to restrain young men w^ho look forward to prolonged professional study from en- tering upon a college course are mainly of a different sort. The expenditure of money and of time which is involved is, in the case of very many persons, an obstacle which they cannot surmount, and a most practical and important question is. Can anything be done to make this expenditure less 1 This question is the more urgent in view of the great enlargement of the work of the professional schools. Within twenty years, the time requisite for the completion of legal and medical studies has been doubled. In 1870, the Harvard law course was eighteen months ; it is now three years, as it is also at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Two years were formerly sufficient for the attainment of a degree in medicine ; now at Harvard, the Uni- ADDRESS. 155 versity of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, the Univer- sity of Michigan, and hereafter at Columbia, four years are required. A fourth year is becoming common in theological institutions also. When one considers the hospital practice and foreign travel desirable for phy- sicians, and the office experience needful for a lawyer, it is apparent that the question of time is a very im- portant one. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the fact, made so familiar to us by recent discussions, that the increased requirements of the professional schools, together with the advance in the average age of grad- uation, compel many who desire a more thorough pre- liminary education, to enter their life work by way of schools of a lower grade. The importance, as bear- ing upon this, of lowering the age of graduation is so obvious, and the means to it are so easily to be dis- cerned, tliat we may expect the reform to be brought about. The average college student is older, by at least two years, than he ought to be. We must bring the age down to a more reasonable and practicable standard. A point that seems to deserve consideration is this : the possibility, or the expediency, of shortening the college course itself, or, if not that, of so organiz- ing it that it shall avail, in some degree, for the pur- poses of professional study. Can the pressure upon this class of students be relieved by any action on the part of the colleges that shall demand less of those who must provide for three, four, or five years of subsequent work? The few further words which the limits of time allow me will be devoted to this point. 156 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. A radical suggestion was made by ex-President Andrew D. White, in tlie '* North American Review " of October, 1890, which has been reiterated by Pres- ident Adams and others. This is that the colleges relinquish their students to the university at the end of the Sophomore year, the degree of bachelor of arts being given, as now, after two years of further study, by the university and not by the college ; degrees of medicine or law being given after four years, — two years being thus saved. It is urged that at the end of the second college year our students compare not un- favorably with European students entering upon pro- fessional studies ; that they have then secured as much preliminary education as we can reasonably expect to provide ; that it is better to secure this much than, in the attempt to secure more, to achieve our present unsatisfactory results ; that we have really developed a superfluous set of institutions, — the college being an intermediate term between the secondary school and the university, no such intermediate term being neces- sary. The colleges ought, according to this view, to become gymnasia, schools like Eton or Harrow ; they ought to confine themselves to fundamental studies. This seems to challenge the theory of a liberal edu- cation, as we have hitherto understood it. We have been accustomed to think of education as having three stages, or periods, — that of the school, that of the col- lege, that of the university. If the college is to be eliminated, specialized training will be superimposed directly upon school acquisition, — the broader out- look, which has been our traditional ideal, will be ADDRESS. 157 abandoned. It may be said, indeed, that those who go forward to four years of university residence will get this. Yet these years are to be given, or may be given, to professional work, and for those who do not go forward to university studies, professional or non- professional, no provision will be made. The sym- pathy with liberal pursuits which those have who pass from our colleges into industrial and commercial employments has been a leavening force of vast con- sequence in our national life ; it would be a grave matter if this should be lost. It is not impossible that our colleges may be forced down at last to this lower function ; it will not be eas}^, as our prepara- tory schools improve and our professional courses become more exacting, to maintain four years of liberal study between the two. But it does not seem to me that the time has yet come for the abrogation of the American college ; some less revolutionary solution of the difficulty should first be sought. Two, at least, of our leading institutions have adopted the plan of permitting students during the last college year, or during the last two years, to devote a portion of their time to studies of a professional character. At Columbia College, ten of the fifteen required hours of attendance may, in the Senior year, be devoted to the study of law, and the same privilege will probably soon be accorded in respect to medicine and theology. At Cornell University, either Seniors or Juniors, in good standing, are permitted to elect studies in the law school, which count toward graduation both in that school and in the general courses. For the 158 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. counting of studies simultaneously toward two de- grees — which certainly seems open to criticism — there are many precedents ; and at Oxford and Cam- bridge, theology, law, and medicine have, for a number of years, been treated as a part of general education, candidates for the B. A. degree being allowed to give a considerable portion of their time to them, the attainment of the degree in the superior faculty being rendered thus much easier. It is claimed that in this way time may be saved without detriment either to the academic or to the graduate work. Of this plan it may be said that, whatever its merits may be, it is applicable only to colleges which are connected with universities, whereas most colleges have no professional schools affiliated with them. To the plan, in itself considered, it may be objected that the methods of the colleges and of the professional schools are not the same, and that their distinctive features will tend to disappear if the prac- tice of enrolling men in both at the same time becomes common. It may be objected, also, that when liberal and professional studies come into competition, the latter are likely to prove so much the more engross- ing that the former will be neglected ; a young man has very strong motives to study that which is con- nected with his life work, and he is tempted to give only perfunctory attention to other things. Whether any gain on the side of professional education will not be counterbalanced by loss on the side of general education, may be questioned. At the best, this solution is applicable only to a limited number of ADDRESS. 159 institutions, and its tendency to obscure the distinc- tion, hitherto insisted upon, between two stages and methods of training, will, to many persons, seem a decisive difficulty. Various suggestions have been made in regard to shortening the period of college residence. A pro- posal of this sort, considered at Harvard University three years ago, had, as one of its features, a reduction in the number of courses requisite for the bachelor's degree from eighteen to sixteen ; but it is evident that this is not essential to such a plan, — that a diminution in the amount of requirement is not necessarily in- volved. The curricula of our colleges are determined in reference to what are believed to be the capacities of the average student, and it may be fairly asked whether the student of superior capacity is sufficiently regarded. Some one has humorously said that the Oxford degree is '' slept for," since residence during twelve terms is required, and residence is defined to mean sleeping at Oxford forty-two nights during the term. Whether our prescription of a uniform period of four years justifies a similar remark with reference to our abler men, is not an improper inquiry. Is there any good reason for a time requirement, any further than to secure that one be brought under the influence of an institution, and made to participate thoroughly in its spirit 1 A certain length of residence is, of course, indispensable ; the best results of college life are had through personal association, through contact with the men and things which constitute the college world. But, provided this be secured, is the matter IGO WILLIAMS COLLEGE. of time of any further consequence ? A young man of good abilities and good health, who has been well trained in his preparatory course, who is ambitious and willing to work, can fulfil the requirements of the curriculum in less than the ordinary time. Is there any objection to his doing so ? Another, of inferior capacity, imperfectly prepared, or deficient in industry, ought to take a longer time. Would it not be well that he should be able to do so without attracting unfavorable notice*? There are obvious advantages in expressing the requirements for graduation in terms of work rather than in terms of time. It is unfortu- nate that the four years tradition should have become so firmly established in our colleges. At the Uni- versity of Virginia, graduation has always been ac- corded on the basis of courses completed, irrespective of time ; this has been the method at the Johns Hop- kins University. Care must, of course, be taken to prevent students from attempting too much, but this can be easily regulated. The fact that, in spite of the inconveniences and difficulties involved, a certain number of men obtain the degree in less than the ordinary time, shows that, if this were rendered easier, the privilege would be taken advantage of. Why should we not organize the college course in such a way as to give the abler and more industrious students the benefit of their qualities 1 It is an injustice to hold a 3^oung man back if he is able to go forward. A more flexible administration in this particular would supply a valuable incentive. There would be a special advan- tage in tliis change as respects the matter of which ADDRESS. 161 we are speaking. A young man of limited means and of high ideals, anxious for a college training but unable to compass it, in view of the present demands of professional study, might see his way to the venture if he knew that by hard work he could shorten his college attendance. The chance of saving a year might be decisive with him. As a rule, it would be the very best class of students who would be influenced by this consideration. No serious modifi- cations of method would be involved in the change ; there need be no reduction in the amount or the quality of work. Let a certain length of residence be insisted upon in all cases ; let there be such super- vision as will prevent overwork, or undue haste ; and then let the time of graduation depend upon the ability and industry of the individual. The college course will thus be shortened for those who can profitably accomplish it in a briefer time ; it will be lengthened for those whose ability or application fall below a suitable standard. It may be conceded that, if an earlier graduation were thus facilitated, the number who would avail themselves of the opportunity would be relatively small. The four years tradition is very strong, and class feeling very influential. Even at institutions which have always employed the freer method, there is a marked tendency on the part of those who enter together to graduate together. It is desirable to devise means of economizing time available for the mass of students. This means may be found in a 11 162 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. more systematic and carefully considered use of tlie elective system. We have the authority of President Harper for the statement that the elements of Hebrew can be mastered in a course of two hours per week running through a year. If such a course were extended through the Junior and Senior years, the work of the first year of the theological school in that lano-uao^e mig-ht be done. Instruction in New Testa- ment Greek can readily be provided in tlie history and archaeology connected with the Scriptures, and in church history ; courses in ethics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy, can be adapted to the special wants of theological students. In the four years course of the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduates in arts or science are admitted to the second year, without examination, if they have had instruction in certain specified sciences, all of which are taught in our elective courses. The catalogues of many of our colleges ofi'er instruction to undergraduates in sub- jects available for students of law, — in sociology and economics, of course, and also in constitutional law, international law, and Roman law. Most of the work done in the professional schools during the first year may be incorporated into the college curriculum in perfect consistency with the theory of liberal edu- cation. The languages in which the Scriptures are written, the history of the Christian Church, the ethical and philosophical aspects and bases of the- ology; the sciences which are presupposed in the technical study of medicine ; the great principles of ADDRESS. 163 law, — these are liberal subjects, elements of general culture, which may properly be pursued by those who are not concerned with their practical applications. There may be some advantage in approaching these subjects, in the first instance, from a more general point of view. "All the vast body of truth," says a distinguished medical professor, " in all medical departments not immediately applicable to practice, is best conserved, and such studies are best pursued, where the scientific spirit is strongest, i. e., in uni- versities " (as distinguished from professional schools). It seems to me that it would be well, then, for each college to plan its elective courses with reference to the demands of the three great professions, and to make a distinct announcement in the catalogue of the studies most suitable to be followed by intending students of law, medicine, and theology. If this were done, the professional schools might be asked to recognize the provision by granting such advanced standing as might be proper. In this way, the advan- tages of the plan adopted at Columbia and Cornell might be secured without the infelicity of enrolling students in the college and the professional school at the same time, and without seeming to confound the distinction between pure and applied science. Our colleges are coming short of their opportunity and their duty in reference to a very important class of persons, — those who, as constituting the great learned professions, exercise a controlling influence upon public affairs and public opinion. It is ex- 164 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. ceedingly important that we make our education as attractive as possible to young men who have the professions in view, and especially that we offer it to them upon terms as little onerous as we can properly prescribe. No one is wise enough to say what the ultimate adjustment will be between the colleges and the schools of professional learning, but it would go far toward bringing about a better co-operation be- tween them if the colleges would do three things : — (1) Reduce the entrance age by two or three years ; (2) do away with all conventional restrictions affect- ing the time of graduation ; (3) adapt the instruction of the last two years, especially the portion of it open to election on the part of the students, to the special demands of professional study. r-? a J — o U T. ■♦-* «= — -< 3 ADDRESS. BY CHANCELLOR F. H. SNOW. THE PROMOTION OF EDUCATION BY THE COLLEGE THROUGH A CONNECTION WITH THE COMMON-SCHOOL SYSTEM AND BY UNIVERSITY EXTENSION. T TNDER Monarchies and Aristocracies the strength of the government is in proportion to the igno- rance of the masses of the people. In despotic coun- tries every instance of the educational elevation of a commoner from the dead level of ancestral ignorance is a menace to the peace and security of the kingdom. But in a genuine republic, education is the rightful heritage of every son and daughter. There is no effective safeguard against the perils which threaten the existence of the American republic, unless the colleges and universities devise more far- reaching plans for disseminating sound learning among the rank and file of the people. The highest educa- tional institutions must lend a sympathetic, helpful hand to the restless masses of society, or fatal politi- cal and social errors will undermine our Republican government, and lead us swiftly through anarchy to despotism. In the Western States where the University stands at the head of the common-school system and is one of its integral parts, an intimate connection with the 166 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. lower members of the system is by no means an ideal attainment. The transition from the high-school to the University is as natm*al, and almost as easy, as from the grammar-school to the high-school, or from the primary grades to the grammar-school. The Univer- sity helps the high-schools by elevating the standard of excellence to be reached by their graduating classes. The high-schools help the University by furnishing young men and women well prepared to take advan- tage of the generous provision of the State for their higher education. Admission is gained to the Kansas University by certificates from seventy-five high- schools, whose courses of study lead up without a break to the Freshman Class. But the ordinary high- schools making connection with the University are located in the larger and more wealthy towns of the State. The much greater number of smaller towns, and the nearly ten thousand country districts, have no rights in these high-schools. Accordingly, a sys- tem of county high-schools has been inaugurated, by means of which every country boy and girl with the requisite ambition and grit may obtain the pre- paratory training for the University courses. Only three such higli-schools have yet been put into operation in Kansas, but a considerable number of counties are agitating the subject, and the time is not far distant when every county with the necessary population and property will maintain a high-school of the first rank. It is the mission of our colleges and Universities the whole country over to discover and matriculate ADDRESS. 167 the largest possible number of young people whose natural abilities render them capable of profiting by a college education. From the lack of the county high-school thousands of the most highly gifted youth of every State in the Union fail to receive the intel- lectual awakening and development which necessitate a college education for their possessors. The close connection with the public-school system which is an absolute essential to the State University in the Western States is an equally desirable attainment for the colleges of the Eastern States, which have no state provision for the higher education. Education of the people, by the people, for the people is the watch- word of the Western educator. Let the same spirit prevade the Eastern States where colleges have been endowed by private benefaction. Let Williams and Amherst, Dartmouth, Bowdoin and Brown, as well as Harvard and Yale, promote the security and pros- perity of our political, social, and intellectual life by educating the largest possible number of both city and country youth. Private fitting schools will continue to be the most valuable feeders of the Eastern colleges, but the public-school system is the strongest safe- guard of our national life, and the college which would have in its veins the best blood of the age must renew and strengthen its connection with the public schools. The successful college of the future will keep in close contact with the life of the people. The education which will hold its own against the disintegrating influences of intellectual anarchism will be so near to the common people as to sympathize with them in 168 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. their real needs, and to aid them in their efforts to improve their social and mental condition. In order to bring about the desired connection between the college and the public schools, it will be necessary for the official representatives of the college to visit the towns in the neighboiing region, and hold con- ferences with the school officers, acquainting them with the advantages of this connection both to the school and to the college, and arranging the details of the connection. Personal visitation, at some ex- pense of time and money, will have a more convin- cing effect than long and tedious correspondence. Friendly acquaintance with a sympathetic college official will remove obstacles which would prove insuperable to formal written communications. The promotion of education by the college through University Extension is an end of hardly less impor- tance than the formation of a close connection with the public-school system. The college will exert the most effective influence beyond its own walls through the agency of its own graduates in all departments of professional and business activity. But the number of its beneficiaries may be greatly increased by a syste- matic attempt to cany the college instruction to the people in the surrounding communities. Our best college educators are becoming convinced of the fact that it is the mission of the college to extend the personal influence of its instructors to the community in general, as well as to the students gathered within the college walls. A deep-seated prejudice against college education has found frequent expression in ADDRESS. 169 the public press. It has been charged, and not always without reason, that members of the college faculties are visionary men, living in a narrow world of their own, and giving their pupils a very inadequate prep- aration for the actual affairs of life. The unquestion- able fact that our American colleges are the exponents of the best thought of the present time in literature, philosophy, and science demands a public demon- stration. They are not antiquated institutions from one to five hundred years behind the twentieth cen- tury, but may unhesitatingly claim the leadership of modern intellectual life. A system of University Extension adapted to the equipment of the college and to the facilities of communication with the neisrh- boring towns, will give ample demonstration of the fact of this leadership. The good effects of University Extension are two- fold, first, upon the members of the extension classes, and second, by reaction upon the college itself. The membership of the classes will consist largely of men and women of mature years, whose family and busi- ness cares make it impossible for them to become resident students of the college. The evenings and portions of the days are at their disposal, and they are able to devote two or three hours daily to serious study of the subject presented in the weekly exten- sion exercise. They may thus in twelve years' time obtain a fair equivalent of the four years' study of students in actual residence at the college. Their greater maturity of character and seriousness of purpose will go far to compensate for the disad- 170 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. vantages incidental to the pursuit of college studies in absentia. The personal influence of the instructor will thus be doubled, and the college will add greatly to the strength of its moral and financial support from the surrounding community. The Faculty of the Kansas University has during each of the past two academic years given regular instruction in twelve weeks' courses to upwards of one thousand citizen students. Of this number, more than one hundred followed the prescribed courses of reading and study, and took the final examinations. These received credit for their work in the same manner as if they had attended the classes of the same professors at the University. This extension work has been prosecuted at the earnest solicitation of citizens desiring the courses, the business ar- rangements in each case having been entirely in the hands of the local societies. In this way the most valuable friends have been made for the Uni- versity in Kansas City, Topeka, Wichita, Leaven- worth, and other important centres. The membership of the classes has been thoroughly democratic. For example, the class in Electricity and Magnetism at Topeka included architects, bankers, booksellers, book- keepers, clerks, civil engineers, carpenters, dress- makers, electricians, farmers, merchants, ministers, housewives, insurance agents, janitors, lawyers, plumb- ers, physicians, printers, railroad officers, reporters, speculators, tinners, and undertakers. The good effects of the extension work upon the college itself are manifest in the intellectual stimulus derived by the ADDRESS. 171 members of the faculty engaged in it. The professors come back to their classes at the University with a healthful appreciation of the fact that they are the servants of the public, and with minds invigorated by contact with men and women in practical life. It in the seclusion of the study and class-room they have cherished untenable theories in science or phi- losophy, the test of contact with the working world will have clarified their mental vision and dispelled many fascinating illusions. They are thus kept from the danger of that mental stagnation which some- times threatens the isolated college professor who knows no world but that of his college classes. But the amount of attention which can be given to outside instruction is necessarily limited. The time and energies of the College Faculty belong primarily to the resident students. It will, therefore, be imprac- ticable for any member of the faculty to make an engagement for extension work involving an absence from the college for more than one evening each week. As a rule, only those places can be reached which are conveniently accessible from the college town. Many invitations to furnish extension courses must be declined on account of inaccessibility. The proposed solution of this difficulty by the appointment of special instructors to whom shall be committed the University Extension work is not so satisfactory to the public as the method by which the college professors themselves conduct the work. The citizen students are anxious to be instructed by the distinguished specialists who hold the college chairs. 172 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. In conclusion, I may express the hope that our be- loved Alma Mater may continue to occupy the front rank among those colleges which receive their highest inspiration from helpful contact with the common people. The incentive to noble living which in my own college days was received from friendly associar tion of the resident students with the beloved Dr. Hopkins and his worthy colleagues, is being extended thi'ough the whole land by his spiritual and intel- lectual children. His most successful successor, the present incumbent of the presidential chair, has made and improved the opportunity to reach nearly twice as many students as Dr. Hopkins instructed. Presi- dent Carter will continue to add his powerful influence to that of the trustees and the alumni to make Williams College a source of intellectual growth to thousands who have never been blessed by the sight of the mountains which surround our American Jerusalem. ADDRESS. BY PEOFESSOR CHARLES GROSS. COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY IN THE UNITED STATES. TT is as difficult to draw a line of demarcation be- tween the college and the university as between the college and the high-school. But with the uni- versity we generally associate a larger volume of research work than with the college ; and the ques- tion which I have to consider is to what extent our Alma Mater should cultivate original research, and what should be the attitude of this and other col- leges toward the universities. No one will venture to deny the educational ad- vantages of research for students who are prepared to undertake it. It generates not merely indepen- dence of thought, but also the spirit of self-reliance, zeal for truth, and the love of patient, disinterested, conscientious labor. What can be more elevating to the spirit of a student than the consciousness that he is adding something, however little, to the sum of knowledge ; that he is advancing, in the dark forest of the unknown, farther along an unexplored path or by-way than any of his predecessors'? Training in this kind of work is, of course, most necessary for the student who intends to become a teacher, or to 174 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. devote bis life to one branch of learning. Though a successful investigator is not necessarily a successful teacher, he possesses one of the most essential pre- requisites for good teaching, whether in elementary or advanced subjects. '' Where the spirit of original inquiry is most active among the teachers," says Professor Seeley, "there the teaching is best; and, on the other hand, where this spirit is languid or dormant, the teaching, however assiduous and con- scientious, is degraded in character."^ A limited amount of research work may also be of great ad- vantage to other picked or mature students. A young man who intends to be a lawyer would profit greatly by a year of research in history or political science ; he would be taught to sift evidence, and to marshal facts from many different sources; and he would do it, not as a special pleader, but as a judge impartially seeking truth and light. The future physician would, in like manner, profit greatly by a year's investiga- tion in chemistry or biology. In both cases the later professional man would be better prepared for his practical work, and would be imbued with loftier ideals. In both cases professional success depends largely upon the exercise of faculties which are fos- tered by original investigation. Professor Roscoe has justly observed that '* a man who has learnt how successfully to meet the difficulties and overcome the obstacles which occur in every experimental investi- gation is able to grapple with difficulties and obstacles of a similar character with which he comes in contact * Farrar's "Essays in a Liberal Education" (1868), p, 152. ADDRESS. 175 in after life." ^ This is equally true of original inves- tigation in any form. The firm grasp of an enor- mous mass of details, the courage and patient industry required to investigate a large historical topic, for ex- ample, would suffice to run a great factory or bank, or to explore an unknown continent; and the kinds of energy expended, or habits of mind employed, in these various enterprises, are not as divergent as most people think they are. Scott perceives this truth, or a part of it, when he makes one of his characters in "The Antiquary" say, that the "habit of minute and troublesome accuracy [employed in antiquarian inquiry] leads to a mercantile manner of doing business." Granting, then, that original research is indispen- sable for the ideal teacher, and that a little of it may be of service to the future professional or business man, we must now inquire to what extent Williams College should foster this kind of study. Research work on any considerable scale requires: (1) extensive apparatus in the form of great libraries, museums, and laboratories, and (2) a large staff of instructors in each department. To investigate a subject in history, for example, evidence must be collected which is often scattered through hundreds of sources, and most of these are wanting in the average college library. A well-equipped professor can accomplish little in such branches of study with- out a well-equipped library. Museums and labora- ^ "Essays and Addresses by Professors of the Owens College" (1874), p. 36. 176 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. tories are abundant, but few of them have appliances for the highest original investigation. A college like Williams or Dartmouth cannot employ many instruc- tors in any one subject; and it is impossible for a professor to guide research work successfully when most of his energy must be devoted to ordinary teach- ing. It is clear, then, that such colleges cannot hope to compete with large universities in training young men to be investigators. It does not follow, however, that original research is or should be wholly neglected at the smaller centres of learning. A limited amount of investigation can be done incidentally in connection with almost any col- legiate course; and the colleges should always have some post-graduate courses whose primary object is original inquiry, especially in physical science, in which the equipment is more complete, and the diffi- culties attending the prosecution of original work are less formidable than in other departments. Such ad- vanced courses tend to elevate the whole tone of college life; they inspire the professors to higher effort, and to a certain extent stimulate the students in all the lower courses. But this kind of study should be carefully restricted in amount. We should always remember that the primary aim of the college is to produce cultured men and good citizens rather than learned specialists. " This college can never become a great university," says President Carter, in his last annual report. His statement may be put in another form by saying that this college cannot devote much of its energy to the ADDRESS. X*J7 promotion of original research among its students. That must be left to the larg-e universities. Colleore professors imbue the student with earnestness of pur- pose, which is the substratum of all research ; they awaken high scholarly ideals, and thus propagate the spirit of inquiry ; they plant the seed of original re- search in the student's mind, and often foster its ger- mination ; but the atmosphere of the university is more congenial to its full growth. The college should be the stepping-stone to the university: at the one a select body of students should be stimulated and pre- pared for the work which is to be accomplished at the other. The college offers some advantages for ordinary academic training — for broad culture and mental discipline — which the university does not pos- sess; while, on the other hand, the large universities have facilities for training investigators which the average college cannot hope to acquire in the near future. Thus the natural order of things requires a constant flow of students from the smaller to the larger centres of learning, and that is what is actually occurring. Every year the natural co-ordination of colleges and universities is becoming more complete, and the cur- rent from the former to the latter is annually growing larger. Last year 119 of the 206 members of the Harvard Graduate School were graduates of other institutions, and there were also 48 such graduates enrolled as undergraduates.^ At Johns Hopkins in ^ Many of the latter might fitly have entered the Graduate School, but were led to join a college class by their need of financial aid which could not be secured in the Graduate School. 12 178 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. the same year, 201 of the 270 graduate students had received degrees at other institutions ; at Yale, 59 out of 125 ; at Cornell, 119 out of 182 ; at Columbia, in the schools of philosophy and political science, 109 out of 212. Thus at these five universities there were 995 graduate students, 607 of whom were from other institutions. Nothing could do better for higher edu- cation in America than this gravitation of research toward a few great centres. We need more concen- tration of this sort. Too much energy has been frit- tered away by the aspirations of the small college to pose as a university. Each should recognize that it has a great work of its own to perform, and that both can co-operate to elevate higher education. This natural co-ordination of the college and the university is, I believe, gradually producing a fra- ternal spirit and a feeling of solidarity among those institutions. The young men who go from Bowdoin or Amherst to Harvard, to Johns Hopkins, or to Yale, measure their strength with students who have re- ceived their academic training in those universities, and the achievements of the former inspire the uni- versities with greater respect for the colleges. At Harvard, and probably at most universities, the graduates of other institutions, on the average, hold as high a rank as their Harvard competitors, and as a body are regarded with the greatest esteem by the university professors. At Harvard these new-comers are annually assigned a large percentage of the best scholarships and fellowships. In the academic year 1891-92, 251 persons applied for aid of this sort in ADDRESS. 179 the Harvard Graduate Scliool, and 69 of tliem re- ceived appointments. Of these successful candidates 39 were graduates of other institutions. Last year 44 of the 70 scholarships and fellowships held in the Graduate School were in the hands of men with degrees from other institutions. This current of students from the college to the university, and the constant flow of teachers from the university to the college, and from the college to the univer- sity, are beginning to generate an esjorit de corps in our higher education somewhat akin to that which has been begotten or fostered in Germany by the peri- patetic student life, and by the migration of professors from one university to another. In conclusion, I venture to make two practical sug- gestions. In the first place, the wholesome tendencies to which I have referred would be stimulated if each college should establish one or more graduate scholar- ships or fellowships with no condition of residence attached to them. The holders should be allowed to continue their studies either at their Alma Mater or elsewhere at their discretion. In some cases it might be advisable to remain in the college ; in others, to migrate to some university. These scholarships need not be richly endowed, for the beneficiaries can gen- erally obtain further aid or earn some additional money at the universities. There is a large provi- sion at Harvard and at some other universities for graduate students who need assistance, but it is wholly inadequate to meet the demand. Many promising young men eager to pursue original in- 180 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. vestigation are annually turned away forever from their chosen work for lack of means. The evil would be partly remedied if each college were to establish a small number of travelling scholarships for the benefit of young men whom its professors have stimulated to higher activity. The other suggestion is, that college professors should encourage young men to go to American in preference to German universities, or if possible, to divide their time between the two. There is at present in attendance at German universities a large number of American students, many of whom, in my opinion, miglit be pursuing their studies with as much or more profit at our own great centres of learning. In the winter semester of 1891-92, 446 such Americans were in Germany, 253 of whom were enrolled in the philosophical faculties. The number is rapidly increasing, and is probably not far from 500 in the present semester. The number has more than doubled in the past ten years.^ Some students should be ad- vised to go abroad, others can accomplish more at home. They should exhaust the resources of their own country before going abroad. There seems to be a general tendency to underrate the advantages of our own universities in comparison with those of Germany. I do not wish to disparage higher educa- tion in the Fatherland. German thought and methods * These statistics are taken from Lexis's "Deutsche Universifaten" (1893), vol. i. pp. 128-130. There are also many American students in France, Switzerland, and Austria. In the winter semester 1891-92, 99 attended the University of "Vienna. Most of them were registered in the Faculty of Medicine. ADDRESS. 181 have done mucli to elevate scholarship in every land. Many of the best American professors have been in- spired by German teachers, and are now communicat- ing to others the spark enkindled by German learning*. But for that very reason the graduates of our colleges can now, in many departments, acquire training in original research at home as easily as abroad. The wise American teacher, moreover, while adopting the essential features of the German method of research, has adapted it to our environment, and hence Amer- ican students often receive better guidance here than in Germany. It would be well if a part of the cur- rent which is annually flowing from the American colleges to Germany could be turned toward the American universities. It would tend to increase the spirit of fraternity, and to promote a more active interchange of life and thought among our colleges and universities. It would tend to create greater soli- darity and a more organic unity in our whole system of higher education. ADDRESS. BY PKOFESSOK T. H. SAFFOED. THE COLLEGE CURRICULUAL nPHE gentlemen who have preceded me show plainly enough by their presence that Williams College is justly proud of her sons as scholars and educators. They have by their speeches indicated what they think the College has done for them and its earlier Alumni, and how, in general, the course pursued when they were students is justified. Shall we conclude then that it is best to remain entirely conservative, in the educational movement? Shall we, here, content ourselves with the preparation of our Alumni for the higher institutions that some of them so worthily represent! Or shall we give to a portion of our students such a self-contained course of instruction and study that they will be able to go on without the help of other institutions to take up some of the higher professions ? Williams is and must remain a conservative institu- tion. Its position in a country town among the hills practically confines it to one faculty, that of arts. It will be possible here to teach the sciences ; we are in a manufacturing region, and examples of applied science also are readily found ; but our legal, medical, ADDRESS. 183 theological Alumni must get their professional train- ing in larger places. And our work will be bounded by the lines of a college. The New England col- lege traces its lineage, through Yale and Harvard, to Emmanuel of Cambridge, England. Is it desirable, then, to look back continually at our former condition as bounding our efforts at present and for the future ? But we are at once met by the fact that Mark Hopkins was an innovator in one direc- tion; he, a physician, introduced the study of the body as the basis of that of the soul. Albert Hop- kins built an astronomical observatory; Chadbourne pleaded strongly for increased attention to the natural sciences ; Perry developed his office as professor of history; and the history of innovation begins almost with the establishment of the school founded by Ephraim Williams. We are told that our last depar- ture — to give the degree of B. A. without Greek — was attempted from the first ; when Samuel Mackay, a Frenchman from Canada (with a Scotch name), was elected professor of his mother tongue, and the Fresh- men were examined in French and Latin, or Greek and Latin, as they preferred. The experiment seems to have then failed, simply because the preparation in French was very seldom attained. And even now the old course brings us the great majority of our pupils ; a few have been so placed that in their high-schools they could be prepared in those real equivalents, in higher mathematics and a modern language, which we rigidly demand in lieu of the usual " pass Greek." So far the students of Williams College have re- 184 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. ceived a full equivalent, in classical and mathematical, or literary and scientific studies, for anything which any pre\aous generation received. I am myself an alumnus not of Williams, but of Harvard. But I am certain that my class in that famous seat of learning were no more classically taught, or taught by no more thorough and rigorous methods, than my colleagues now employ. The difference is that a portion of the classic and mathematical training is now relegated to the lower schools, and is done there, and frequently very well done. The Freshmen were then taught entirely by tutors, — mostly young men who had graduated a few years before. Here and now the Freshman year's work is in the hands of our most experienced professors. The time thus saved is given to studies of a freer character than was customary fifty years ago. At Harvard, even then, men of eminent scholarship and great force had broken in upon the older routine. The New England colleges in general have partly followed the lead of Harvard. They have retained the old curriculum as a requirement, but have relegated much of it to the preparatory schools. They have not, however, with the exception of Harvard, abolished required study altogether ; the portion, in fact, of the classical, mathematical, and philosophical study of the old course which is taught in college, together with that taught in the preparatory schools, is fully equal, both in quantity and quality, for the great majority of pupils, with that part of the curriculum of half a century ago. The principal Latin and Greek authors, ADDRESS. 185 and the main branches of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics, are as well taught and as completely, now as then. The points insisted upon are in places changed, for better sometimes, for worse sometimes, and the training is substantially identical. But the room thus made by putting subjects earlier in the course has been filled by more modern studies and modern extensions of ancient studies. The basis is the same for the boy who is to be the man of the twentieth century as it was for the man of the nine- teenth; the superstructure is more varied, extended, and ornamented. To the careful observer the need of more solid foundations is apparent; the enormous development of our public schools has been rather hastily accom- plished. Only a very small portion of our primary teachers undergo the thorough training of the normal schools, of which an honored representative has pre- ceded me ; and the average student in college is not so well trained in the four ground rules of arithmetic, in the ability to write a legible hand, or to compose a correct succession of English sentences, with words rightly spelled, as he should be. But we may trust that these conditions will improve, as long as the interest in education continues vigorous. The ad- vanced work in the sciences which is now done in the upper years of the college is the result of laboratory teaching; as we need not here doubt when we see the magnificent results of Mr. Thompson's generosity. Let me here point out that our " old observatory" fur- nishes a proof that this principle was early recognized 186 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. here, by Albert Hopkins, clarum et venerahile nomenj and carried out at first by his own self-sacrifice. The same science has since then been promoted by the generosity of our own venerable Alumnus Hon. David Dudley Field; and in other sciences there are here monuments of early interest and collections which show how far the principles of objectivity in teaching- and the direct observation of nature have here prevailed. Laboratory teaching is the culmination of scientific instruction ; it is the bringing of the pupil face to face with nature herself I need hardly say to you that our great teacher Mark Hopkins was objective in his methods in a high degree ; he was a master in the Socratic art of bringing the pupil face to face with the subject studied. His class-room was his laboratory; his objects to be scientifically studied were his pupil's minds and souls. But laboratory instruction in science requires men and money; it requires more men than text-book instruction, because it is more individual ; the work which each student does requires supervision, and expensive buildings and apparatus ; it is also given to smaller classes, for science is very broad, and what appeals strongly to one pupil does not to another. Other subjects, even the classics, are now scientifi- cally analyzed; and the advanced work partakes in some degree of the same method and the same expen- siveness as that in the natural sciences. The higher instruction in the New England colleges resembles university work ; shall we therefore say that they are to abandon it and devote themselves to school- ADDRESS. 187 training 1 Shall tliey leave the method of universities to institutions founded or to be founded at vast ex- pense? Even granting this to be theoretically right, the practical difficulties are insurmountable. A col- lege which is far behind its contemporaries will lose its students, and especially its best ones. If one lib- erty is allowed at Cornell, and not at Williams, our students who hesitated which to prefer will gravitate to the college which most strongly attracts them. The New England colleges must, I suspect, pro- gress together. They must aim at a common general standard ; they must build laboratories and observa- tories, study archaeology together, follow out the law of their destiny, in generous rivalry and earnest at- tempts to do what is just and best for their students. The New England colleges are descendants of the English universities. Unlike the German gymnasia, which are expanded Latin or high schools, they have always had some elements of university freedom. Their pupils are not school-boys, confined to their school-desks; but young men, who come to different class-rooms for instruction, and then go back to their lodging for study. And the general development of the English universities must influence that of the New Eng-land colleg-e. On the other hand, the conservatives may rely upon our faculty not to be too radical in this matter. We are more than twenty in number, and represent many branches of knowledge. The classical instructors, the philosophical and historical teachers, the mathema- ticians and physicists, will take good care not to be 188 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. overwhelmed by the representatives of the lighter sciences and the easier languages; nor will English, in spite of its future position as a world's language, be permitted to drive out Latin and Greek, as the Germanic barbarians who spoke its cognate tongues destroyed tlie Roman Empire. The adventurous few who wish, without Greek, to become bachelors of arts, can, if need be, be disabused of their soft illusions by the discipline of the Calculus, of Anglo-Saxon, of Middle Hiofh Dutch, and the old French dialects. In adjusting the studies to the altered times and states of public opinion, the Faculty are subject to pressure from both sides. The students are anxious for greater freedom ; partly because a portion of them can really make use of it ; and partly because others wish easier studies, owing to the seemingly innate tendency to intellectual inertia in some boys' natures. To a certain extent the young men who can best use their freedom go elsewhere ; and this deprives us of many brilliant intellects. On the other hand, the idlers we always have with us; and the men who wish to do something else than college work. They are not absent from the university near Boston, it seems ; and it is supposed that no New England col- lege is altogether without them. Any serious study required of them impels them to ask for easier duties or more freedom. But more liberty means more ex- pense ; and the new electives asked for cannot always be granted, unless the liberality of donors has made it possible. Colleges are usually too poor for com- plete realization of their ideals. ADDRESS. 189 The future of the College can only be predicted from observation of its tendencies and past history. It has long maintained, here, among the hills, a high standard of religion and morality. It has had men of original thought among its presidents and professors, men who preferred the right to external success. The luxuriance and beauty of the nature around us here has long stimulated professors and students to the pursuit of the natural sciences ; classic and historical learning has never been neglected, and has never been in better and stronger hands than now ; and the num- ber of students is not so enormous that the individuals disappear in the mass, and are freed from the personal influence of older and it is hoped wiser men, when they are necessarily farther from home in most cases than they would be in great colleges in or near great cities. The past twenty years have brought the College a prosperity which has been faithfully employed for the benefit of its students and of learning ; this prosperity will doubtless help attract the means of giving larger and still more varied opportunities, and to more young men ; and the institution which its Alumni love so heartily will go on in its quiet place as a college, side by side with its sister institutions about it, advancing into a fuller life and a more extended usefulness. ADDRESS. BY PRESIDENT G. STANLEY HALL. T REMEMBER very distinctly the closing sentence in my Commencement oration. It has a certain appropriateness at this time. '' To thee, O future his- torian, we commit the issues of the present hour." The future historian is likely to consider this meet- ing which we have had here this morning, which is a new departure, so far as I know, in this country, quite as worthy of record as any other event dur- ing this notable week. While I cannot attempt to sum up in a few moments the various points which have been suggested, I will venture to give brief expression to one or two thoughts which have been strongest in my mind during the progress of this meeting. We are wandering in the wilderness, and have been to a certain extent, it seems to me, in all matters of higher education, ever since the beginning of the elec- tive system. When we began we had a symmetrical, seasoned, well-digested college curriculum. The only other example of a course of education known in the history of the world was known long before this country was founded. It was the course of education represented by the old trivium, quadrivium and quin- ADDRESS. 191 drivium, which held their own for a thousand years, by the " ratio studiorum " of the Jesuits, and also by the schools which Charlemagne founded. A good course of education ought to be the result of the consummate wisdom of a civilization brought to bear in order to short-circuit the steps by which the young advance up to the frontier, and are able to begin where their elders leave off. It ought to do what biologists tell us generation does, — short-circuit the processes of growth, as ontogeny shortens and abridges phylogeny, so that the embryo and the young offspring of an animal, in a day or an hour, or perhaps in a minute, goes through stages of growth which it took the animal world a thousand years, and even more, to find out for itself. Since we lost that course, — and it is rapidly being lost, — we have been wandering in the wilderness ; and all these most promising attempts, admirable as they are, have not by any means completely solved the problem. On the other hand, I think there is a general consensus that the great problem is yet before us and that it must be solved by new methods, if not, indeed, to some extent, by new men. It would be presumptuous in me to attempt to sum up the results of current discussion ; but, speaking individually, I believe there are one or two landmarks already apparent, and the first of these seems to me to be that the progress of reform in education is from above downward. In this country we have gone, to a great extent, up to recent times, on the opposite theor}^. Beginning with the primary school, or at least the col- 192 WILLIMIS COLLEGE. lege, we have hoped that in the long results of time we should see, to use Lowell's quotation from Milton, " the tawny lion pawing to get free," — the university slowly emerging from the college. There is now a general consensus that that view of education is wrong. There has never been, I think, in all history a single instance in which a real reform which was not super- ficial began in the lower or in the intermediate schools. It has been the best men, working with the best mate- rial and with the best training, who have made the great reforms. It is the universities that originate the material of culture, and the colleges and lower schools are the canals for its distribution. How is it in France, in regard to that greatest educational revolution in history, by which since 1876 the entire budget of that country has been increased over seven hundred per cent ? New institutions, new methods, new men, have appeared on the scene as never before. It has all been the work of half a dozen of the very best men, who stand at the frontier, and who have some of them actually written text-books as w^ell as gone into the legislative halls to further tliis cause, assuming, with Lavisse, that the highest statesmanship always must culminate in education. So that is coming to be re- cognized. It is only about eight years since I heard, in the National Council of Education, the largest edu- cational body we have in this country, a very bitter discussion in the managing board as to whether col- lege presidents and professors ought to be given much, if any, place on the programme. It was said, *' We teachers understand education, and they don't know ADDRESS. 193 anything about it." Now, it is a very striking illustra- tion of how rapidly the American people respond to a good wholesome movement, in that now, on all these programmes during the last three years, the majority have been those who have come from the college and university, and who have interested themselves in the concerns of the intermediate and the grammar schools ; and the great reform which I believe now impends in the reconstruction of the grammar-school course has been almost entirely the work of these men, working from above downward. The second thing that it seems to me is coming to be almost generally recognized is the indispensable necessity of a little research in as many places as pos- sible. That has been so admirably brought out by the papers this morning that I should only weaken the points made if I dwelt upon it. But what is re- search ? It is not such a difficult thing ; it does not need the tiptoeing that we sometimes imagine ; it is not necessary that one should know everything about a science before he can add to the sum of it. The radical growths that start out near the ground give new suggestions of fundamental principles, and often cause those who have not mastered all the departments of their specialty to make real contributions to knowl- edge. Besides, research brings into play the active faculties ; it brings into play the power to do, in addition to the mere power to know. So that if research achieved absolutely nothing for the progress of science, its trend is in the direction of what is now shown to be the strongest and most educable part of 13 194 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. man, namely, his active faculties. And not only that, but it brings heat and light ; it is a sifting process which we so much need. This reform in France, as every one knows who is at all acquainted with it, con- sisted in selecting the best professors from among the bad or indifferent ones, giving them additional pay, uniting them in this school of science, and then securing some of the best scholars and giving them scholarships. So, wherever there has been great reform made, there has been a distinction between the average dry-as-dust teacher and the progressive teacher, between the aver- agre student who shirks work and the one who means business. That is the line of demarcation between those who go to college for study and those who go for a good time, between those wlio teach as a trade and those who love to teach ; and that reform I believe original research is designed to bring forward. There is all the difference in the world between the professor who stands upon his dignity, and is a little afraid of a close intimacy with his students lest it should injure this preternatural dignity ; the professor wlio keeps his students at arm's length, and too often sterilizes talent, — vaccinates his pupils, as it were, against any serious love of learning so that they will never have it in anything more than a chicken- pox form, and the professor who stands on the frontier of the subject, and has even made one seri- ous effort in his life to contribute something to the progress of knowledge, adding a single brick, how- ever small, to the great sum of human attainment. Such a man teaches and inspires a freedom and inde- ADDRESS. 195 pendence which are republican to the core, which give the student a sense of liberty and usefulness, and of having" a place in the world, — a sense which sets free the emotional nature, and gives a man a zest and a real interest in things. The two professors are as far apart, as some writer has said, as the divinely inspired researcher who brings down, as Prometheus did, that fennel stalk in which was hidden the divine gift of fire to men, and the old mullen-stalk professor whom Theodore Winthrop describes, about whom he saw a few students tamely and lazily buzzing, like the bees about some old belated dried-up mullen stalk in the sheep pasture. The difference is very great between these two. Then the third thing that I think is generally recognized is, that there is a real difference between university extension and university concentration, and that the two must go hand in hand. No man ought to preach unless he has a message ; and I do not know but that we shall come to say some time that no per- son ought to teach unless he has a message. Univer- sity extension is an admirable thing; it has done a great deal for educational institutions and for the country, and I would not see its sphere limited in the least ; but it is '^ sounding brass and tinkling cymbals" unless it is linked very closely with uni- versity concentration. In what consisted this great reform in France! There, as you know, until it began, everybody could attend anybody's lecture. I have seen, as many of you have no doubt, the lecture- room of a distinguished professor cleared out almost 196 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. by a hand-organ in the street, or the marching by of a company of soldiers. There was university ex- tension to the point of university distension. But wherein did this reform consist"? It consisted in estabUshing Httle esoteric circles, which the Parisian press criticised severely, and said was cloistering knowledge again; it consisted in taking one vigor- ous professor with a few picked students, and making that the centre of a university, by excluding those who were not fit. That is the way in which I be- lieve university extension and university concentra- tion should go together ; and it is a striking fact that in the report of the French government a few years ago, it was found that there had been far more of these general courses given, with a larger attendance, than there had been before these esoteric research courses were adopted. In fine, it seems to me that what we want to accom- plish — one thing at least — by all these educational reforms, is to bring the young men to the highest possible degree of maturity in all their faculties, to send them out to the world vigorous in body and mind. The ideal reconstruction which Professor Baumann has suggested to the German government is, that the universities there make health their watch- word in everything, and apply science only so far as it favors health, — the best development of the brain and the body. That is going pretty far; but it is a straw which shows how strongly the tide of the best influence is setting toward the making of liealth fundamental. If we can turn out a body of academic ADDRESS. 197 youth who are fresh, eager, intense, and concentrated ; who have some real and deeply rooted intellectual interest; who go out fresh, not sterilized, not with that dull, apathetic, cynical indifference which blights almost everything that it touches ; men who do not go out laden with knowledge which they have hardly the strength to carry, but who have assimilated all so that they produce something at once if they ever produce it; if we remember in all this training of youth that youth is the golden period of life, that the best and the greatest work in the world has been done by young men who were perhaps under or a little over thirty years of age ; if we can succeed in bring- ing in a kind of active, positive spirit, a spirit that is fresh and eager and a little naive, no matter if there is a little awkwardness ("Oh, for an awkward, green, gawky Freshman ! " said Phillips Brooks, in one of his last public addresses) ; if we can send out young men with strong and eager intellectual enthusiasm, men anxious to add something to the sum of human knowl- edge, who will not be contented to get off some satire or epigram or cynical paraphrase of some of the great productions of human genius, — then I think we shall have taken a step forward toward the goal of bringing talent and native wisdom to its fullest maturity. And this is the end of all educational systems, and by this standard they will all be judged in the end- TUESDAY, OCTOBER TEKTH. The main events of the last day of the Commem- oration were the Procession, the Conferring of Degrees, the Historical Oration, and the Luncheon. SERVICES IN THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. Mk. C. a. Davison, of the Board of Trustees, arose and said: — The Centennial Committee have selected as the presiding" officer of this occasion one of the oldest and most honored of the Alumni, — one who, born almost within the shadow of these college walls, went forth from it sixty years ago to enter upon a career of distinguished professional and public service. His form has been a familiar figure at our annual gather- ings. He is with us to-day, with eye undimmed, with natural and intellectual force unabated, and with his old-time loyalty for the College. It is scarcely neces- sary to introduce him to an audience of Williams men, yet I take very great pleasure, brethren Alumni, in presenting to you, as the presiding officer at this time, the Hon. Martin I. Townsend, of tlie class of '33. MK. TOWNSEND'S ADDRESS. Sir Walter Scott, in his work entitled " Peveril of the Peak," has put into the mouth of that entlmsiastic Puritan, Bridgenorth, these words: "Amongst my wanderings, the Transatlantic settlements have not escaped me, — more especially the country of New 202 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. Eno-land, into which our native land has sliaken from her lap, as a drunkard flings from him his treasures, so much that is precious in the eyes of God and of his angels." The men that settled New England emi- grated largely from religious motives ; but they were men of intelligence, men of reflection ; and when they reached this land, as soon as they had provided for the barest necessities of life they began to look about them, and to locate institutions where Milton has placed the fount of Siloah's brook, — fast by the oracle of God. In 1638, but eight years after the settlement upon Massachusetts Bay, but eighteen years after the ever-memorable landing at Plymouth, John Harvard, imbued with the spirit that nerved his neighbors, made that gift which led to the establishing of the noble institution which bears his name. As time passed on, this institution grew by degrees, until now, after two hundred and fifty years, it has become the peer of any institution on the other side of the water. Yale has not been far behind, — a little slower in point of time, perhaps, but not slower in intellectual progress ; Yale has been built up into an institu- tion to-day w^iich is the peer of Harvard herself. The benevolences of those New England settlers — that body of precious immigrants so dear in the sight of God and his children, aided by others who sympathized with them — have built up insti- tutions in the North and the West of very great influence, and have raised at the same time a popu- lation superior in intelligence and in good order to any population that this world ever saw. In this ADDRESS. 203 same spirit, Colonel Williams, in 1755, when Williams- town, encased in its setting of mountains, was prac- tically an unbroken wilderness, conceived the idea of establishing- here an institution whose influence should not only be felt locally for good, but should extend throughout the world, and be efficient in the cause of benevolence for all coming time. The story of that gift, and of the influence which it has exerted in the world, we have all gathered to hear. It will be told to us by an eminent son of our Alma Mater, who has won great distinction as an instructor in far-off Kansas and Nebraska, James H. Canfield, Chancellor of the University of Nebraska, whom I now have the pleasure of introducing to you. ORATION. BY CHANCELLOK CANFIELD. TF the biography of a man may find its proper initial point a hundred years before his birth, the history of an institution may well lay hold of a somewhat remoter past. If the solution of problems of character, the analysis of motives, the proper estimate of the effects of temperament, the just and true judgment of personality, call for careful inquiry as to pedigree and inheritance ; we do not go far astray nor lose much time when, in seeking the history of this institution of learning, we turn to that century out of which came the American spirit and all the strongest and best traits of American life. Indeed, without some knowl- edge of this, without even considerable knowledge of this, we shall vainly search for the true meaning of the enterprise which resulted in the founding of this college ; and we shall often be at a loss to comprehend the spirit that sustained it through both the earlier and later years of limitation and embarrassment, of almost downright wretchedness and want. Unless we can in some measure comprehend all that stirred men in those days of small beginnings, of little things, and that kept alive their faith in the greater things that were to come, we shall never know why the college ORATION. 205 of to-day exists at all ; much less shall we understand its precedents, its customs, its character, and its life. There has been an ever-present though perhaps unre- cognized vital force within, a something more com- manding than the mere details of its material existence and growth. The College which we honor and which honors us to-day is not the impulse of the passing moment; it has not sprung full-armed from the ple- thoric pocket of some millionnaire ; it is not grounded upon bequests and devises, however pleasant and helpful, and all-important even, such plethoric pockets, such large-hearted bequests and devises, may be. It has passed through long and dreary days of painful conflict. The struggle for mere existence has more than once been maintained in the face of tremendous odds. The activity of enemies and the inertness of friends, the hostility of competitors, and the often strange forgetfulness of her own children ; unfavorable legislative enactments, and local dissensions ; destruc- tion by fire and deterioration by neglect ; worse than all, the losses that have so often come from sheer impotence to do what was felt to be both prudent and imperative, — these are the notes of conflict that have sounded in our Alma Mater's ears, almost from her very birth. But there has always been a something which has given this conflict its true meaning ; which has pushed forward until a goal has been reached far beyond the limits of the most hopeful and prophetic vision ; which has caused this College, with its generous though still all too scanty endowment, its multiplied buildings 206 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. and its efficient equipment, to spring out of a move- ment which simply sought to estabhsh a free school among the hard-pressed people of the sparsely settled frontier Massachusetts town. That this spirit was something greater and more masterful than mere mate- rial forces, may be seen at a glance in comparing the two. Founded in 1793, it opened its doors for the first time one hundred years ago yesterday ; then pos- sessed of but one building, — that which is now known as West College — for a quarter of a century it added very little to its material resources. It was almost en- tirely shut out from the w^orld about it. Up to 1820 no stage or other vehicle of public transportation or communication ever entered the town. In 1816 it had but two buildings, — East College was built in 1797 ; and the entire equipment of the senior recitation room, including the locks on the doors, was valued at S7.26. In 1822 the apparatus in chemistry is said to have con- sisted of one blow-pipe and a few retorts, stored in a small frame building in the yard near East College, — both building and apparatus having been supplied by the private resources of Professor Dewey. The south- east corner room of East College then held all the phi- losophical apparatus that the college possessed. The president's salary was originally one hundred and forty pounds per annum, and did not exceed a thousand dollars until 1815, the date of the accession of Presi- dent Moore ; when it was advanced to fourteen hundred dollars. The earlier members of the Faculty were paid sixty pounds a year. So slight was its endow- ment and so small was the attention paid to the young ORATION. 207 College by those who might have helped it if they would, that even a full half-century from the date of its charter President Hopkins could truthfully say: "No buildings have arisen here by private munificence, and no professorships have been so endowed." Up to that time, with the exception of the Woodbridge Little fund and two bequests of $1,000 each, the college had never received any assistance whatever by legacy or by private gift. All this and more seems very petty when compared with the opportunities and the possibilities, the setting, of the college life of to-day. Surely there must have been back of all this, inspiring and directing and guid- ing men in ways that knew no material limitations, lifting them far above all that seemed small and mean and discouraging, and almost hopeless in this earlier life, a latent and unquenchable fire, a great and over- mastering impulse, a steady and dominating purpose ; or the movement would have died in its very infancy, even had it been known at all. And all this seems the more surprising when we remember what a very plain and simple folk were those to whom this enter- prise was entrusted, and who pushed it forward so vigorously and with such wonderful success. Read any history of the colony, and you will find a race neither of heroes nor philosophers. These ancestors of ours were largely of the middle class, — the great common people of whom it is said that God must like them or he would not make so many more of them than of other folk, — the most uncommon common people the world has ever seen. They lived in a 208 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. very quiet way, — we irreverent fellows of this electric age would even say in a rather humdrum sort of a way. They supported themselves largely by the labor of their own hands, and rarely ate their bread in the sweat of other people's brows. They were pre- eminently practical, — nay, they were even pocket- book men ; for they drove sharp bargains with their simple-hearted neighbors on the south, and swapped the Indians out of their entire inheritance. They frankly admitted that they came to this country to cultivate the soil as well as the Christian virtues ; to worship God and to trade and catch fish. But they had a strength of purpose and a purity of character and a grip and grit that put us belated descendants to shame, and make us feel sometimes that our toughest sinews are very flabby. Though they were no theorizers, no knights-errant with a mission, no hobby-riders, it is, and probably always will be, true that the rigidity of Puritan faith, the simplicity of Puritan life, and the intensity of Puri- tan character have furnished this nation with about all the moral backbone it has ever possessed. This plain living and high thinking, or better, perhaps, this simple life so full of unconscious purpose and scarce recognized power, was even more manifest on the frontier than in the older portion of the colony, — and this was then the frontier. True, there had begun that movement northward which, it is said, later caused a change in the familiar language of the West- minster Catechism, and established the new question and answer: "Where do sin and misery lead to?" OilATIOX. 209 " Up into the new State." And true also that among* the first students are those who registered as from Vermont. But when Ephraim Williams — all honor to his name ! — abandoned that restless, sea-faring, roaming life that has always seemed to offer irresist- ible attractions to any in whose veins flows even a drop of the adventurous Northman's blood, — and I take it that we of New England are much nearer kin to those who in the sixth century or thereabouts seated themselves with gentlemanlike effrontery on nearly every throne in Europe, than we are to the slow-moving Saxon, — w^hen Ephraim Williams re- turned to the quiet of his father's home, only to be soon called into the active service of the colon}^, this was the northern and western frontier. Fort Massa- chusetts was less than three miles east of this spot, near the road to North Adams ; and was one of several similar defences against the inroads of the French and their crafty Indian allies, — or the Indians and their crafty French allies, as you may care to read history. If there is any doubt as to the neces- sity of this line of rude yet effective fortifications, recall that, in August, 1746, a thousand French and Indians stealthily crept up this valley and through its then dense forests, and made a sudden and savage attack, — only to be repulsed, and the settlers again breathed freely. Williams then took command of the entire line, with his own quarters at Fort Massachu- setts; and, both in 1747 and 1748, was obliged to put his skill and bravery to the test in again withstanding the enemy. 14 210 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. There are these simple folk, then, struggling for existence on the rude frontier of the colony still in its infancy, although a century had passed since the Plymouth Landing : and here is the College, type of so many. No great impulse was given it by the founder, surely. He himself was nothing more than a fair exponent of the average life of his day ; a man with no special love for learning so far as can be discovered ; a man of affairs rather than of books, of the camp rather than of the cloister; loving the salt sea-breeze better than the odors of musty tomes ; and quickened by his contact with liis fellows rather tlian by wliat Lowell calls, '' the smell of the leather ; " one of the common people whom he served so well ; one of whom little is now known except that he was upright, clean, manly, and a brave officer in His Majesty's forces, — which, by the bye, is enough to be known of the best of us ; one who made no great impression on his age. In fine, he was one of those unimportant, colorless people, quite apt to be over- looked by those of us who so value high color that we fail to distinguish between a fitful flash and a steady glow. Whence came the College then ? The stream, it is said, never rises higher than its source ; which can be easily proven true if the source is carefully noted. But, what was the source ? A superficial view fails to discover it in either the founder, or in the commu- nity within which its lot was cast. Something may be said of its trustees, the men who directed the early fortunes of the College. Nine of the original thir- ORATION. 211 teen were Yale men ; a fact which has its weight, and a condition which doubtless meant more then than we of to-day can readily understand. But we must go back of Yale or Harvard, and inquire more carefully and search a broader field before our question is fairly answered. I believe we must seek the answer within the circle of the century which saw the first great emigration to the shores of this almost unknown land. We often speak of the present century as marvellous in all that ministers to the higher life of man ; but the century to which I have just referred was certainly quite as full of quickening power. This age is electric in the wonderful mastery of material things ; that was electric in magnificent scheming to advance humanity. This age seeks for new truths ; that was distinguished by the creation of new minds, — always better than new truths, — a fact which some modern investigators will do well to remember. This is the century of organization ; that marked the death of the mass principle, and the new birth into eternal life of the individual mind. Now we build great cities, and marvel at the genius that controls the commercial destiny of states and nations ; then they rejoiced in great men, and sought and well-nigh worshipped the highest forms of human creative power. This is the hour of triumph of intellectualism ; that of imagina- tion. Our age is crowned with the brilliancy of material achievement ; that, with all the superb en- thusiasm of the newly awakened heart and hope of man. Ours is the age munificent ; that was the age heroic. 212 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. Think of it ! The discovery of the art of printing, the founding of great Hbraries and universities, the revival of learning, the voyages of discovery and con- quest, the Reformation, — what a marvellous concourse of great events ! No wonder Brougham said of this period, that " Each decade staggered under a load of events that formerly had only made centuries bend." It was energetic, vigorous, constructive. Yet, it had genius rather than mere industry, it had philosophy rather than mere learning, it had statesmanship rather than mere executive ability, it had inspiration rather than mere impulse. And genius and philosophy and statesmanship and inspiration, all animated by vast hopes, all magnificently at work, for the first time perhaps in the world's history, thought not only of kings and courtiers, paid deference not only to bishops and scholars, ministered not only to the masters of commerce and to the captains of industry, but labored for the vast common life of nations. Now, in the place of past authority came popular power; instead of brute force was found that legitimate sovereignty which Guizot tells us must always represent the will of the people, the best there is of national existence. The Past, mighty in its iniquity, august in its preten- sions, superb in its assumption ; this Past was sud- denly stricken with decrepitude and death that the glorious future might live. It was, perhaps, pre-eminently a century of strife. Divine purposes and plans may sometimes seem to originate in times of peace, but the first condition of human success is conflict. Christ may be born when ORATION. 213 the doors of the temple of Janus are closed, but there is and can be no peace when men strive for the mas- tery. So it was that the earlier settlers of America came out of the very midst of a hundred years of perpetual conflict. The old Past did not die easily, — evil never does ; and our fathers in the flesh again and again passed through the tempering fires. Storrs, in that wonderfully brilliant address on the genesis of the American spirit, which I can recall, but cannot quote, draws a striking picture of the intimate relations be- tween the early colonial life and the immediate past. The brilliant reign of Queen Bess, the shameful career of the Stuarts, the uprising of the Commons under the leadership of Parliament, and the final triumph of constitutional authority ; the great Protestant struggle in France ; the decline of Spain ; the revolt of the Netherlands ; the rise of Sweden ; the Thirty Years' War, — with all these came experience, and from all these came incentive. The fire of this strife was still in the veins of those who settled this new world. It is said that there were men in the colonies who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake ; certainly there were those who had ridden with Cromwell at Naseby and Marston Moor: men who not only understood and accepted the Magna Charta, but who had seen faitliful execution of all the provisions of what old Quinn, the actor, always called the ** Major Charta," — the right to behead a king. There was not a restless spirit in later New England who could not repeat the story of Hampden and the ship-money. The Adamses and the Hancocks, and all their following, only echoed the 214 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. claim of Wentworth that the liberties, privileges, and franchises of Parliament were the undoubted birth- right of every subject of England. Paul Revere, dashing through the night to arouse the country folk to a sense of their peril, always recalls that more magnificent ride of *' King Pym." It is not wholly a mere and meaningless coincidence that Harvard College took for its motto "Veritas" only five years after Galileo was condemned ; that Cervantes laughed chivalry out of existence just before John Smith landed in Virginia ; that the fateful Long Parliament began its sessions only four years after the founding of Providence; that the great Gunpowder Plot — remote ancestor of all modern dynamite schemes — was con- cocted and thwarted only two years before the settle- ment of Jamestown ; that Roger Williams went down to Rhode Island not quite two years before the Scotch, in their Solemn League and Covenant, consecrated all that they had and were to the cause of religious free- dom ; that Racine lived long enough to make a study of witchcraft in Massachusetts ; that Milton, who had written most stirring words in behalf of English free- dom, died just as Edmund Andros was made royal governor, and instituted a short-lived English tyranny in New England ; that Descartes, whose philosophy forms one of the great landmarks in the history of free thought, was at the very height of his power when the Catholics settled in Maryland ; that Spinoza, long per- secuted because of his bold and unconquerable love of truth, died just at the close of Bacon's Rebellion. These are not links in a chain ; there is no intimate ORATION. 215 connection, perhaps, between them ; they may not be related as cause and effect ; but they show what was in the air in those years of strife, of struggle with powers invisible and with the material world. Do you see what I am striving so very inadequately to suggest 1 Does this brief recital of historic facts and conditions bring to you new light and quickened thought as to what may be called "our inheritance"? Can you understand whence came the grave purpose and thoughtful endeavor, the independent spirit, and simple, manly life of our forefathers'? Do you see why they sought opportunity in this wilderness of God? Do you really feel that then, for almost the first time in all history, men opened their eyes and saw ? That this was the birth-night of individualism 1 Now began life other than life in herds. Now was known existence other than mass existence. Now came thoughts of personal liberty, and of that which was of far more consequence to the world, personal responsibility. Now arose slowly above the horizon of man's conceptions the idea of a government which is founded by the people ; which grows out of the necessities of the people, and that which is better, the necessities of the people as apprehended by themselves, which always and everywhere is for the people, or falls far short of its true intent and pur- pose ; a government in which each man must be held responsible for carrying intelligently a share of the public burden, for ministering in some small degree at least to the common welfare. Early gov- ernments had no thought whatever of this. They 216 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. were governments of tlie masses by the few, and mass government must mean lack of individuality, mass government can never mean a free government. The moment we speak of masses we forget the individual ; the moment we think of masses we have turned away from the individual ; and the moment we forget or turn away from the individual, free government per- ishes, and lordship and tyranny begin. When in this country to-day we speak of " masses of population," at given points, — and let us be thankful there are but few such points, — whether we appreciate it or not, we are referring to a society that has lost sight of the individual, in which the individual has little power of his own either to shun evil and misery and want, or to attempt achievement and success ; a society in which a few live well, and many only exist; and in which the few live well, and live as they live, because the many only exist. In the history of such society and of such govern- ments you will find little trace of the people. You may learn much of the form of government, of offi- cial caste or administrative power ; but you will find nothing of the people, except that there may be in monuments and inscriptions a few traces of this mass life. Large bodies governed in mass form can hardly be called citizens, no matter in what country or age they exist. In the exercise of authority they are regarded simply as one whole, — not as ten thousand or a hundred thousand, or a million units ; simply as one whole. No regard whatever is paid to their indi- vidual existence or rights, to their individual purposes ORATIOX. 217 or desires, to their individual hopes or fears. Yet history proves very conclusively that only as the individual man is so regarded, only as the advance- ment and development of each unit of the race is intelligently and sympathetically cared for, are gov- ernments successful. The state that regards the pedigree of kings, no matter what those kings may be, as of more importance than the progress of the people, for that state, no matter what the age or country, God's thunderbolts follow a straight track. Our forefathers, coming out of this period devoted to the individual, sowed the seeds, at least, of a gov- ernment which exists for the people and not for itself; which is simply the administrative system of a large and generous social life ; in which there are no rulers but public servants ; and in which the many are not always on all-fours and saddled for the few to ride. Were our ancestors wholly conscious of what they held within their grasp ? Did they in a certain wilful and deliberate and always intelligent way go about the task of developing a new state ? It would scarcely be wise to assert this. How many states in the world's history have been so developed ? Very few indivi- duals, even, know much about their powers, nor are they very definitely informed as to their own pur- poses. Most men and women drift into their life work, — not in a bad sense of the word, not in an aim- less way, nor in an ignorant way, nor in a way that necessarily indicates weakness ; but finding their true places, as most people only can find their true places, by trying many places. And so our ancestors, — often 218 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. narrow and hard and short-sighted, often stumbling and halting, often trying to feed the world on truth in homoeopathic doses because they fancied it not stronof enoug-h to bear a full diet, often branding- as error all that they themselves did not happen for the moment to recognize as the truth, often doubting with real sincerity whether God ever actually passed out- side of the church of Boston, — so our ancestors stumbled and blundered along, just as we their de- scendants have stumbled and blundered along in most of our undertakings. But God led them. I some- times think that even when they fell they rose with their feet where their heads had lain, and had gained a length ! *' It was the Puritan theory of life," says John Fiske, " that lay at the bottom of the whole system of public education in New England." What this theory was and whence it came I have already tried to tell you. Crude, indeed, as was their thought of individual responsibility, which always calls for indi- vidual intelligence, hampered as they were by cus- tom and prejudice in following their own ideas, yet they broke new ground and sowed new seed, and under God the increase is our own. They planted the church and the school-house side by side to strengthen and quicken each other ; and though they were nar- row and hard and short-sighted enough, God willed that their intolerance and their bigotry should be in their left hand, while in their right they held the torch which should finally light the way for the weakest and humblest child in the state to find the truth that alone ORATION. 219 can make him free. That beacon-light was the public school. Knowledge and faith were the banner words of our ancestors in the then New World. They ex- pressed the central idea of the new civilization, and were the brief summary of all that was sought through those years of hardship and suffering almost unparal- leled in the history of the race. This idea of the public school was unique, and was peculiarly so in its originality. Whatever else of custom or of precedent came with the early settlers to the Western World, the public schools are indige- nous in our soil. We could not have grafted this edu- cational provision on our common or statutory law because there was no recognition of such a system in the laws of any fatherland. It was a sort of instinct in the race, — that quick insight which has marked the American people at every stage of their progress, that ready grasp of the necessary details of a practi- cal movement which is so peculiarly characteristic of them, — it was this temperament that saw at once the necessity of a general education if we were to be successful in building a free state in the wilderness. They took up this work, perhaps, not so much through choice as through a certain kind of necessity. It was not so much, perhaps, for the sake of the child as for the safety of the community. It was not so much that special advantages might be offered the few, as that the great average line of life might be raised by advancing the many. Our fathers felt the intelligence and morality of its citizens to be the only safeguard, the only promise of perpetuity, the only principle of 220 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. endurance, in any state. They knew that the most alarming, the most dangerous, the most terribly swift and effective element working social, political, and financial disorder, decay, and ruin, is that tool of the demagogue and of the partisan, an ignorant and factious populace. They realized, as Chancellor Kent expressed it later, that '' To send a boy into the world uneducated is to defraud the community of a lawful citizen and to bequeath to it a nui- sance." Their act may have been a selfish one, but it was certainly enlightened selfishness. It was really an act of self-protection. They understood, as Washington said in his Farewell Address, that "In proportion as the structure of the government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened." They at least theo- retically accepted the truth, which we all repeat some- what pompously at times, and which we all at times forget, that a free government rests upon the whole people, and not upon any class. That we know no kings in America except that American sovereign who puts a man under his hat whenever he leaves his house, and rarely uncovers unless addressing himself. That we have no elite of the race in the sense of some special governing class. That our registered stock is scattered all through society and is found in every stratum. Pedigree counts with us, as it ought to count, when it gives men finer brains and cleaner hands and feet swifter in the service of their fellow- men. But pedigree counts but little because it appears in some human herd-book, and for even less because ORATION. 221 it happens to be found on the muster-roll of State or national officials. Our ancestors were at least beginning* a life in which the people were to be their own masters for good or ill; for freedom means freedom for self-injury, and cannot well mean less. That it might be a mastery for good and not for ill, there came this general de- mand for public intelligence. William Penn but echoed more plainly their thought when he said, so quaintly, " That which maketh a good constitution must also keep it, — men of wisdom and virtue ; qualities which because they descend not with in- heritance must be carefully propagated by virtuous education of youth." They knew that the history of education in some portions of the world proved very clearly that knowledge may easily become a force that shall divide rather than unite society ; that there are always men who prefer to sit in the shade by the full fountain, which they may appro- priate to themselves or to their class, rather than that water shall be poured out freely by the roadside. They well understood that there is such a thing as an aristocracy of culture and erudition against which the masses would beat, in vain asking either sympathy or support, were it not for the weapons forged in that great national armory, the public school. They understood that mental activity and mental vigor in the mass of the population meant national growth and strength. They believed that this general growth of the state, by which we always ought to mean the whole people, is a vastly different thing from the advancement of some 222 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. preferred class; is of far more importance than the extreme scholarship of a few individuals, or the rapid rise of specialists in any profession or calling. All this and more, and more of this even than they clearly recognized, was in the providence of God so inherent in early Puritan character that there could be but one future. All this and more was enfolded in Puritan life, only waiting the vast opportunity which was soon to come — which had already come — in the New World. And so it happened that here in Massachusetts in 1647, only a quarter of a century after the landing, and while they were yet struggling for mere existence, dealing as sturdily with the original forest as with the original savage, and battling just as bravely with Ori- ginal Sin, they chose a key-note so wisely and struck it so firmly that it is still ringing in our ears. In every township, they said, there must be a public school ; " and when any township shall increase to a hundred families or householders," the statute con- tinued, '' they shall set up a grammar-school, the master thereof being able to instruct the youth so that they may be fitted for the University." Ah, I have found the College ! You thought me lost in the maze of the past, entangled inextricably in the meshes of history, — and here is our Alma Mater. Born of the old free academy, heir to all its plan and purpose, it is to-day worthy of our reverence and of our affection only so far as it has been true to its privileges and responsibilities in the enjoyment and administration of this trust. This is its early history ORATION. 223 during these first hundred years. It practically mat- ters very little when this or that building was erected, or by whom ; it is of little consequence that in this year there were changes in the curriculum, and in that the number of students largely increased or was for any reason diminished. The constant question is and must be, Has the College been true to its traditions ? Has it kept the faith? Williams died in 1755. It was at Albany, while the opening of the coming campaign was delayed, and in the shadow of his approaching death, that he drew his last will and testament empowering Israel Williams of Hatfield and John Wortliington of Springfield to be his executors. The clause which, far more than his then conspicuous public services, has placed his name in history, reads as follows : — "It is my will and pleasure and desire that the remaining of lands not yet disposed of shall be sold at the direction of my executors within five years after the establishment of peace, and the interest of the money, and also the interest of my money arising by my bonds and notes, shall be appropriated towards the support and maintenance of a free school (in the town- ship west of Fort Massachusetts, commonly called the West Township) forever ; provided the said township fall within the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Bay ; and provided also that the Governor and General Court give the said township the name of Williamstown." For thirty years these executors faithfully discharged the duties laid upon them by their dead friend ; and it was not until 1785 that" a report was made to the 224 WILLIAMS COLLEGE. General Court, and the necessary act of incorporation was secured. At that time, the fund with its incre- ments amounted to a Httle more than nine thousand dollars. It was clearly seen that this could not accom- plish the purpose of the donor, and an effort was made to secure local subscriptions. But the frontiersmen had little money; less than a thousand dollars was raised this way; various difficulties were encoun- tered in selecting a site ; the neighboring township on the east asked questions which must be answered in the courts ; and nearly five years passed with little or nothing accomplished. Then recourse was had to the lottery, — the common practice as well as the general vice of the times, which brought in perhaps $3,500, — and in 1790, what is now known as West College was begun. How conscientiously and honestly, with what faithful devotion to the future, as well as to the then present, the work was done, the old building tells to every casual passer-by. What a landmark it must have been in those early days, with its four stories and with its " bevelled roof," set fair and square in the heart of the wilderness ! And here the free school began, — October 20, 1791, with two departments ; the Grammar-School, or Academy, with tuition at thirty- five shillings a year ; and an English free school. For the Academy the Board was instructed to pro- vide ''a man of good moral character, of the Protes- tant religion, well acquainted with the English and learned languages, the liberal arts, and the sciences ; apt to teach, with talents to command the respect of his pupils; of mild disposition, and of elegant and iff/.' ^t'.- //p^fi^'jf Try /nr^:- t M/^r.fK^ y^ \ ^JQ ^/x-.^^^.^^y /::,/,,/ ^/f/^ /.r/:.,.../, ...,>//f^ /!//:■ \S)^^/..^.y.^../i^ , . - - .^"'^ ^.'r.'.,,^'-.,'., yr,r,.„y?/?{r ,;.-,,l^;X^ A/r/zX Afff.ii^fr //^nttit^t/ /^,- '/f,r ,i^,/i/ft ^7, /vv//^ ,^,'i •/'•.■ //y.-^'..- ,'^/r/^in ^^.-Vj'^^ if-^^trrA,,^ //^ ^ryi^ ^t»f^i 6^. .^r r.^' ^f//;:z.y,,,/f/f>^,y^. t /j^^l^,^/ i^/f^^'/i'^n r/a J'r ^f^^^'/K ^/^y^^^ .Trr,^^^^-^^ y>^:^J'^^'^^-^'^'^'^^\ fAi^^.y^',^^^^" . ^>>->^-^«'^^^^^'5^^ -1 r ^^^ M^ ^"^^ 1^-^ '^' ^/'y^-^/-^/^ /lyi/i! ,/, y /attrn.» -C/y^viyi^rH^ ^^'aA^-Krti^e^^ ^^j>v^.f^/-^r^£Vj^ i. •i^'^crvX^/??^^^ ^^^ firP.-^/^^^ C^^^l'-r^,/^ «^OT^^ ■7>" <^ ^i^^^/iZ/'y ^^i'//)ir^-< /^i/'i<'ce;rt-/^^7i-, <^/^-rz^^*'£-'ii'^6» ^«i^.<»«/^/'ii^X^/: ^^5-4-^'©. 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