LIBRARY ^University of California^ IRVINE^ COLLEGE AND THE MAN College and the Man An Address to American Youth By David Starr Jordan President of Leland Stanford Junior University Boston American Unitarian Association 1907 L/3 Copyright, 1907 American Unitarian Association 9 Printed by The Heintzemann Press, Boston TO JOHN CASPER BRANNER (JACK BRANNER OF THE "CORNELL STRUG*') WITH FRAGRANT MEMORIES OF THE GOOD HARD TIMES OF THE EARLY SEVENTIES 9 PREFATORY NOTE THE substance of this little book, in one form or another, I have used many times in talking to boys and girls in the high schools of America. Part of the matter ap- pears in thejirst chapter of a volume called "The Care and Culture of Men "published by Whitaker and Ray, in San Francisco, and by their courtesy the paragraphs in question are here used again. whole of your life must be spent in your own company , and only the educated man is good company to himself" r N this little book I have a plain word to say to certain men and women of youth and promise who look for- ward to making the most they can of themselves. It is a plea as strong as I know how to make it, for higher edu- cation, for better preparation for the duties of life. I know those well to whom I wish to speak : to the boy and the girl who will heed it, the best advice that I or any one else can give is this, Go to College! And you may say : These four years are the best years of my life. The good the college does should be a great one if I must spend all this time and all this money, all I have perhaps and all I can borrow, to gain it. What will the college do for me? It will do many things for you if you are made of the right stuff. If you are not, it may do but very little. You can- College and the Man College and the Man [12] not fasten a five thousand dollar educa- tion to a fifty-cent boy. The fool, the dude, the shirk come out of college very much as they go in. They dive deep in the Pierian springs as the duck dives in the pond, and they come up as dry as the duck does. The college will not do everything for you. Whatever you are you must make yourself. The college will not of itself doanythingforyou,butawellspentcol- lege life is the greatest help toward all good things. Everything depends on how you use it. The college means op- portunity for growth, for culture, for power, for range of enjoyment. If you learn to use it rightly all these the col- lege will offer you. The college will bring you into con- tact with the great minds of the past, with the long roll of those who through the ages have borne a mission to young men and young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer and Euripides, from Shakspereand Goethe, to Schiller and Browning.The great men of all ages and climes will become your brothers. You will learn to feel, with the ancient Greeks, the consolation of philosophy. You will turn from the petty troubles of the streets to the thoughts of the mas- ters. You will learn the art of "walking in hallowed cathedrals," whatever may be your actual surroundings of the day. If you once learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. Moreover, the whole of your life must be spent in your own company, and only the educated man is good com- pany to himself. The uncultivated man looks out on life through narrow win- dows and thinks that the world is small. He also thinks it mean and unworthy because the dog-fight in the gutter is all that his eye can reach. The man of cul- ture has infinite resources within him- College and the Man College and the Man ['4] self, because within himself is the key to all the best tfiat men have thought and done since men first began to think and act. Your college course will bring you in- to contact with the great problems of Nature. You will learn from your study of Nature's laws more than the books can tell you of the grandeur, the power, theimmutability of God. You will learn to face great problems seriously. You will learn to work patiently at their so- lution,thoughyou may know that many generations must each add its mite to your work before a final answer to any problem can be reached. You will learn to know "facts amid appearances," to distinguish truth from the weight of au- thority. You will find out some things which you will know to be true, eter- nally and absolutely true, and beside this knowledge the"traditions of ages" will count for no more than the hearsay of yesterday. You will learn insensibly to govern your life by the influence of real- ities and not of shams. You will learn how little through the ages it matters what men say of each other and how much it matters what a man does. You will learn your part of the law of heaven and earth, the law which is ever "solid, substantial, cast and unchanging." I know that the conceit and flippancy of the college student is proverbial. But you will find that the conceit of the col- lege student who knows something, if not much, is a very little th ing beside the conceit of a man who knows nothing at all. Man's life, says Pascal, lies between two ignorances: theignorance of stupid- ity ,which imagines that itknowsall that is worth knowing, and the ignorance of wisdom, which perceives the infinite disproportion between what we know and the great unknown. College and the Man College and the Man [16] Your college life will bring you into contact with men whose influence will strengthen and inspire. The ideal col- lege professor should be the best man in the community. He should have about him nothing mean or paltry or cheap. He should be to the student as David Copperfield's Agnes, "always pointing the way upward." That we are all this I shall not pretend. The college profes- sors I know are all too human. We have lived too early to ripen well. We have been soured and starved and dwarfed in many ways, and most of us are not the men we might have been if we had had your advantages for early training. But unpractical, one-sided, pedantic though the college professor may be, or though you think he may be before you know him, he is sound at heart and he is sure to help you to higher ambitions. He is not mercenary, and his ideals are thoseofcultureandprogress.Heiskeep- ing the torch burning which you young men and young women of the Twenti- eth Century may carry to the top of the mountain. But here and there among us even now is the ideal teacher,the teacher of the fu- ture, the teacher to know whom is of it- self a liberal education. I have met some such in my time, and there are many more such now than there were when I was younger. Here are the names of a few of those I knew, and there are many more such: Louis Agassiz, Andrew Dickson White, Goldwin Smith, Charles Frederick Hartt, Burt Green Wilder, James Russell Lowell, George William Curtis, Daniel Kirkwood it was worth ten years of one's life to know well one such man as these. I remember very well the day on which as a freshman at Cornell I first met a great man. I was wandering across the fields on the East Hill above Ithaca, College and the Man f'7] College and the Man [18] when I saw two men in their shirt sleeves lying down in the shade of a tree. I went up to them, I do not remember why, nor do I know what either of them said to me. B ut I came away exalted : my feet touched only the high places. I became for the time a poet, and reminiscent of the wonderful day when Browning once "saw Shelley plain," I made this record of my experience: " Once in his shirt sleeves lying on the grass, Beneath the shadow of a chestnut tree, I saw James Russell Lowell face to face, And the great poet rose and spoke to me." This is not much considered as poetry. It is everything considered from the standpoint of the dawning of a boy's in- tellectual life. Garfield once said that a log with Mark Hopkins at one end of it and a student at the other would be a univer- sity. Such a university would not give everything, but it would give a prepa- ration for every thing and it would yield the choicest product of university life, the personality of the scholar. And now in the years when men build great universities as they once built cathe- drals, the one thing hardest to find, and most precious when found, is the man who has the power of moulding young men, the power which was the attribute of the great teacher of Williams Col- lege. But go where you will, in great colleges or small, in institutions meanly clothed or in those grandly equipped, you will find some man who will be to you in some degree what Mark Hop- kins was to Garfield, and to know him will repay you for all your sacrifices. It was said of Eliphalet Nott of Union College that he " took the sweepings of other colleges and sent them out pure gold." Such was his influence on young men. "Have a university in shanties," said Cardinal Newman, "nay, in tents, College and the Man ['9] College but have great teachers in it." "It and the doesn't matter much what your stu- Man dies are," Emerson once wrote to his daughter. "It all lies in who your teacher is." Again, the power that comes from as- sociation withone'sfellow students can- not be overestimated. Here and there some young invertebrate given too much money to burn, or, it may be, spoiled by home coddling, falls into bad company in college and leaves it the worse for having entered it. But how- ever conspicuous these fellows may be, or in what degree in some places they may seem to set the fashion, they are really few in number and weak in influ- ence. Most of our apples are not worm- eaten at the core. The average student enters college for a purpose and you will lose nothing and may gain much by associating with him. Among our col- [ 20 ] legestudents of to-day are the bestyoung men and young women of our time. All the strong men of the future will be col- lege men, for the day is come when the man Df force realizes that through the college his power will be made greater. The college is ready to give him help which he cannot afford to lose. And in this relation each college man and wo- man helps to mold the character and to shape the work of every other. In the German universities the comradeship among free spirits, "Gemeingeist unter freien Geistern," in the words of Ulrich von Hutten, is one of the noblest ele- ments in the whole system of higher education. The name " College Spirit" is applied or misapplied to many differ- ent things. But of all its meanings this one is the best: " Comradery among free spirits," one of the noblest gifts of the sane college life. In his eulogy on his great patron Hum- boldt, spoken half a century ago, Agas- College and the Man [21] College and the Man [22] siz thus speaks of his early life in the University of Munich : "The University had opened under the most brilliant auspices. Almost all of our professors were also eminent in some department of science or litera- ture. They were not men who taught from text-books, or even read lectures made up from extracts from original works. They themselves were original investigators, daily contributing to the sum of human knowledge. And they were not only our teachers but our friends. The best spirit prevailed among the professors and students. We were often the companions of their walks, often present at their discussions, and when we met to give lectures among ourselves, as we often did, our profes- sors were among our listeners, cheering and stimulating us in all our efforts after independent research. "My room was our meeting place: bedroom, lecture-room, study, muse- um, library, fencing-room all in one. Students and professors used to call it the Little Academy. "Here, in this little room, Schimp- fer and Braun first discussed their new- ly discovered laws of phyllotaxy, that marvellous rhythmical arrangement of the leaves of plants. Here Michahelles first gave us the story of his explorations of the Adriatic. Here Born exhibited his preparations of the anatomy of the lamprey. Here Rudolphi told us the results of his exploration of the Bava- rian Alps and the Baltic. Here Dr. Dbllinger himself first showed to us, his students, before he gave them to the scientific world, his preparations of the villi of the alimentary canal; and here came the great anatomist, Meckel, to see my collection of fish-skeletons of which he had heard from Dbllinger. "These, my fellow-students at Mu- College and the Man College and the Man [24] nich, were a bright, promising set, boys then in years, many of whom did not live to make their names famous in the annals of science."* Thus it was at Munich, eighty years ago, and the influence of that little band of students is still felt in the world of science. Such a history, in a degree, has been that of many other associations of stu- dents, interested in other branches of thought, in history, in philosophy, in philology, in religion. We are told that Methodism first arose in a little band of college students, in- terested in the realities of religion, amid ceremonies and forms. At Williams College, in Massachu- setts, there stands a monument which marks the spot where a hay-stack once stood. Under this hay-stack three col- * Condensed from Agassiz's Eulogy on Hum- boldt. lege students knelt and promised each other to devote their lives to the preach- ing of the gospel of Christ among the heathen. Thus was founded the first foreign mission of America. In my own field I have had this expe- rience. In the year 1868 I entered a newly- founded university as a member of its pioneer freshman class. I wished to be a naturalist, and I was the first student who had come to the university with that ambition. A special feature of Cor- nell University was to be the promotion of science,and so young naturalists came from all over the land to make use of its advantages. We formed a society, something like the little academy of Munich, and in this we trained each other. We told each other of all that we had seen and how we had tried to see it. Nor has this mu- tual influence yet faded away. College and the Man College and the Man [26] I look over the record of the Cornell alumni, and I find that each of these men,boys of forty years ago,is now him- self the center of a similar circle of young men. Comstock, Gage and Nichols, profes- sors now at Cornell, Trelease in the Shaw Botanic Garden, Patrick in the University of Kansas,Branner andDud- ley at Stanford, Kellermann and Lazen- by in the University of Ohio, Simonds in the University of Texas, Holmes in the University of North Carolina, Scott in Princeton College, Rathbun and Hitchcock in the Smithsonian Institu- tion,Salmon andBarnard in the Depart- ment of Agriculture, Derby at the head of theNational Museum of Brazil,The- odore Comstock in Los Angeles, Bray- ton in the Indiana Medical College, Gushing among the Zuni Indians, a Zu- ni chief himself, engaged for years in worming out the secrets of their ancient civilization, Copeland, brightest of all, who first studied with me the fishes and birds of Indiana, and who died untime- ly, before the world had come to know him. All of these, in the early seventies, used to meet in a little room in Ithaca, and to show each other birch-blossoms and bacteria and bluebottle flies, and to dis- cuss with each other the problems of Na- ture,those problems of the ages, " which are always inviting solution, and which are never solved." Each of us owes much to the college, its professors, its libraries, its laborato- ries,but something of the powers of each, as teacher or as investigator, has been given by each of the others. Many a great genius has risen and de- veloped in solitude, as the trailing ar- butus grows in the wood and scorns cul- tivation. Some men of the finest fibre or the sweetest fragrance are like this College and the Man College and the Man [28] shrinking flower of the northern pine woods. Poets sing because their souls are filled with music, not because they have learned the gamut of passions in the schools. But all great work in science, in phi- losophy, in the humanities, has come from entering into the work of others. There was once a Chinese emperor who decreed that he was to be the First ; that all history should begin with him, and that nothing should be before him. But we can not enforce such a decree. We are not emperors of China. The world's work and the world's experi- ence does not begin with us. We must know what has been done before us. We must know the paths our predecessors have trodden if we would tread them further. We must stand upon their shoulders dwarfs upon the shoul- ders of giants, if we would look farther into the future than they. Science, lite- rature, statesmanship, cannot for a mo- ment let go of the past. Thoreau lived in the woods by the side of Walden Pond and spoke lightly of the influence of Harvard College. But he had the librarian's card of Har- vard College in his pocket, and on the table of birch-bark were books from the college library which Harvard College taught him to read, and these books, as well as the influences of Walden Pond, produced those clear-cut sentences of his which we so much admire. Walden Pond alone could not do it. Walden Pond and Concord Woods produced the screech-owl and the loon and the " Men of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits," of which their historian tells. Harvard College did not make Tho- reau, for it turns out for every Thoreau, or Emerson, or Lowell, or Sumner, a hundred idlers or cynics ; but she cer- College and the Man College and the Man [30] tainly did make Thoreau worth more to the world than he would have been had his whole life been spent on the shores of Walden Pond. There was once in the North of Scot- land a common or, rather, a very uncommon stonecutter. He had no schools but the quarries and the moun- tains no schoolmaster but nature. Yet when Agassiz came to visit Crom- arty and Stromness in search of fossil fishes, he found that in these quarries was a man who could give more of the testimony of these rocks than could the great naturalist himself. Hugh Miller knew Stromness as no one else could, yet another great geologist of that time, Alexander Von Humboldt, knew the whole world almost as much as Hugh Miller knew Stromness. The man of the schools had entered into the labors of his predecessors, while the stonecutter had been compelled to hew his own path unaided, and great as he was, his pathway led little beyond the confines of Stromness. The chances are that you are neither a Robert Burns nor a Hugh Miller, and if you are left to work out your own education unaided, you will probably never do it. The stimulus of daily duties is needed to bring out your strength. There is nothing like the steady pres- sure of the schools to enforce habits of mental diligence.Theunschooledmind rebels at steady work but it is the steady work that counts. The great lights of history are not flash-lights. The race is not always to the swift, but to him who has the staying power. He will know a pop-gun from a cannon, and as Emerson says, "he will not quit his belief that the pop-gun is a pop- gun, though all the ancient and honor- able of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom." College and the Man College and the Man [32] The college teaches men the value of team work. This is one of the lessons for good which come from college athletics. College men learn to pull to- gether, to yell together, to work to- gether, each one subordinating himself to the success of the whole. The me- thods which honorably win in a foot- ball game will win anywhere else. Let college men stand together in public affairs, and they will wield an influence which no other group of men can with- stand. For college men know how to do this, and to do it for the sake of an ideal, not for money or for notoriety. It has been well said of President Roose- velt, a typical college man in public life, "Money can never defeat a man who is not working for money." Again, the training of the colleges em- phasizes the individuality of a man. It takes his best abilities and raises them to the third or tenth power, as we say in algebra. Itistrue that our colleges have tried and many of them still try to sup- press individuality, to cast all students in the same mold. To do something of the kind, to make each student a typical gentleman or a typical clergyman, was for centuries the ideal of more than one of the English colleges from which the American college took its early form. Musty old men in the dust of libraries, "who knew no use for the hands save to holdanoldbook in them," have tried to make young men like themselves. "The sceptre of the Ro- man emperor has crumbled into dust," says Rasmus Anderson, "but the rod of the Roman schoolmaster is over us still." The colleges have placed memo- ry above mastery, glibness above since- rity, manners above manhood, and the disputes of the dead past above the work of the living present. But say what we will of old methods, College and the Man [33] College and the Man [34] and in my time I have myself said a good many hard things and I may say them again, they were often effective towards great ends. The individuality of the youth burns through the cast-iron cur- riculum. He does his own work, thinks his own thoughts and lives his own life, and the man is much more the man he ought to be for giving these years to higher thoughts and to the nobler com- radery of the college men. There has been a steady progress in the development of university ideals in America. The old motto of Winchester College in England is this: "Manners make the man." We have passed beyond this. We have learned that manners are outside the man. They serve their end by making the man more agreeable and more effective, but manhood wanting, it is of little consequence what the manners are. If manners make the man, solely by raising him from the rude class of workers to the choice class of idlers, they have served no good purpose whatever. An early ideal of college education was just this, to raise a man from one class to another, from the caste in which he must work for others to the finer one in which others would work for him. In all these mat- ters scholarship in itself availed but little. Mental training was but an ac- cessory to social training,and in the his- toric colleges of England, the ultimate ideal of education is still a social one. In the universities of Germany the so- cial side has been scarcely considered. The German mind ploughs deeply. It goes to the bed-rock, and on almost all questions the last word is said by Ger- man erudition. The value of thorough- ness is the great lesson which Germany has given to modern civilization, and our American colleges have not been slow to heed this lesson. College and the Man [35] College and the Man [36] But after all, the purpose of higher education in America is not erudition any more than it is social perferment. It is found in the development of individual effectiveness. Education is needed in the business of living. The man is worth more to the community and more to himself in proportion as he realizes his native possibilities. His work may deal with great things or with small ones. His aims may be ar- tistic, scientific, philanthropic, com- mercial, selfish or altruistic; the more capable the man in attaining these aims the better it is for all other men. " There is always room for the man of force, and he makes room for many." "America," says Emerson again, "means opportunity." We look up to no class of men: we look down on none. There is no class of men whom we wish to uphold, and no other class whom we wish officially or socially to degrade. We would develop all the latent talent of the youth of our com- munity, the most precious of all its pos- sessions, as President White used to say, and we would give this talent the chance to make itself effective. This is the highest purpose of the American public school, and the American uni- versity, whatever its form, in its essence must always be a public school, a crea- ture and a creator of democracy. It is not true that this ideal of effec- tiveness is essentially a commercial one, that the higher education in America is conditioned by dollars and cents. It asks that each man do well the work he has to do. Whether in engineering problems or financial organization, whether in pure science or in art, it asks that whatever is done should be done wisely and well. It should be done with brains and energy, with deftness and taste, with courage and conscience, College and the Man [37] College and the Man [38] and this is the ideal of effectiveness. Throughout the world, the best of our Americans are counted among those who bring about results. To be with "him that overcometh," to learn his methods and to share his spirit is a good reason why you the boy to whom I write these words should go to the American college. To do small things does not take much preparation. But it is as easy to do great things as small if you only know how. The need of great things is about you everywhere. You have but one life to live make this one count. And for doing great things when the time comes, the best preparation is to practice on the smaller ones. And a graded series of these smaller tasks which lead to larger ones it is the aim of the American college to prepare. It is true that great men in other days have set their own tasks, gained their own training, and made the world bet- ter at last for having lived in it. Abra- ham Lincoln grew up in the woods of SpencerCounty,Indiana, training him- self to the mastery of language by the burning hickory bark on a frontier hearth. Other Lincolns may do the same in future days. So often as Lin- colns are born in a land of freedom, in some fashion their power will be felt. But the Lincoln of to-day will use every help he finds about him. The help of the state university costs but little more than the shagbark hickory, and his strong arm is good for the differ- ence. The Lincoln of your century, like the Lincoln of the last, will be a self-made man. All men of force and individuality are self-made men in this sense, but they are not made without material. Your self-made Lincoln of to- day will use the best tools he can find in the making. And the best tools College and the Man [39] College and the Man [40] which wise men know how to make, tools of books, of apparatus and of methods, are gathered together in the college. As matters are in America to-day, the education gained through the pine-knot on the cabin hearth is not an evidence of perseverance. It is rather a sign of indifference, the mark of a man careless as to the best way of doing things. A training which fails to disclose the secret of power is unworthy the name of Education. I have spoken thus far of the college as though all colleges were alike. In a way, they are. They all aim at exal- tation of the mind, but they differ very much in breadth, in honesty, and in effectiveness. Consciously or uncon- sciously, they differ in their aims, and in the kind of men to whom these aims appeal. You must learn to feel this difference and to seek among them the men and things you need. It is no part of my purpose to discuss these dif- ferences. That is your part. All col- leges have a message, and all have a message for you; and it is for you to listen to the one that speaks in clearest tones. Again, the educated man has the cou- rage of his convictions because the edu- cated man only has any real convictions. He knows how convictions should be formed. What he believes he takes on his own authority, not because it is in the newspaper he reads, in the creed of his church, or in the platform of his party. So he counts as a unit in every community, not as one of the do- zen, the hundred, who can be counted to vote at the word of their party lead- ers. To "see things as they really are" is one of the crowning privileges of the educated man. To help others to see them so is one of the greatest services he can render to the community. College and the Man College and the Man [42] But you may say, all this may be fine and true, but it does not apply to my case. I am no genius. I shall never be a scholar. I want simply to get along. Give me such an education that I can keep accounts, or teach school, or run an engine, and not have to work out of doors in the winter, and I shall be satisfied. Any kind of school will be good enough for me. "The youth gets together his mate- rials," saysThoreau, " to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or a temple upon earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them." Now why not plan for a woodshed at first and save all this waste of time and material? But the very good of it all lies in the effort for the higher things. So long as you are at work on your bridge to the moon you will shun the saloon and we shall not see you on the dry-goods box in front of the cor- ner grocery. The man who sets out in life to build one great temple is the one who ends in building many. " I never dreamed that I could do so much." This is the experience of the man who has learned to save his time, to seize his opportunities, and to do all things well. There is many a man who spends his life in a woodshed who might have built a temple if he had only begun right. It does not hurt a boy to be ambitious. In the pure-minded youth ambition is the sum of all the virtues. Lack of ambition means failure from the start. The man who is aiming at nothing and cares not to rise is already dead. Only the sexton and the undertaker can serve his purposes. The great army of the unemployed and of the unemploy- able now disturbing the social peace of England, is made up of those who work College and the Man [43] College and the Man [44] in the way they call "ca' canny" in the British factories. "Ca' canny" is to do as little as possible so as to make the job go as far as it can. By and bye there are no more jobs, or they go to some one else. If a man has a right to work, the work has a right to the man. It must ask him to do it with a snap. If one is not willing to do his part on the earth, he would, as Mark Twain puts it, better " be under it inspiring the cabbages." It is said that the mod- ern philosophy of labor is to do a little less work all the time, and al- ways for a little more pay. Against this is set the blunt wisdom of Gene- ral Booth in his talk to English work- men: "Perhaps you have the foolish notion that there is an easier way of living than by hard work. This is sil- ly. The easiest way of earning a liv- ing is by working for it and taking a delight in your work." The old traveler Rafmesque tells us that when he was a boy he read the voy- ages of Captain Cook and Le Vaillant and Pallas, and that he was inspired to be a great traveler like them. " And so, I became such," he adds shortly. If you say to yourself I will be a historian, a statesman, an artist, an engineer: if you never unsay it, if you take advan- tage of every aid which comes in your way and reject all help which would turn you aside, you will sometime reach your goal. 'The 'world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going! But a college education costs money, you may say. I have no money, there- fore I cannot go to college. But this is nonsense. If you have health and strength and no one dependent on you, you cannot be poor. There is no greater luck that a young man can have than to be thrown on his own resources. I know that the air is filled with the College and the Man [45] College and the Man [46] dolorous whine that the poor man has no chance, the rich grow richer while the poor grow poorer, that opportuni- ties are all taken and that there is not enough money or work to go around. There is some truth at the bottom of this cant, but none to the young men of spirit. Never since the world began has he found such opportunities as now. Wealth and poverty, success and fail- ure, happiness and misery rest more and more on the man and the man's own deserts, less and less on society. If you choose failure and misery you will get it more surely than men did a hundred years ago. It will come more quickly and may-be last longer. But the same is true of success if you choose that. The whole thing rests with you, with you yourself, not with your grand- father nor with the set into which you were born. Do a little more than you are paid to do, and men will be eager to pay you more, but always on the same strenuous conditions. There are only two castes in America, the one which tries to get more than it earns, and the one which tries to earn more than it gets. The first class is divided into two suborders, those who succeed the idle rich, and those who fail the idle poor. And in our country, in our day, the odds are against the rich man's son. Of the many college men who have risen to prominence in my time, the great majority were college boys who had no wealth to back them. In the early days of Cornell Univer- sity there was a boarding club of poor students, the " Struggle for Existence" it was called, but later even letters be- came expensive and "the Strug" was the only name it could afford. Its mem- bers worked at all kinds of jobs, what- ever would help to make both ends College and the Man [47] College and the Man [48] meet. They lived " close to the bone," as the old phrase is, but they carried it through, and to-day there are more suc- cessful men who have graduated from "the Strug" than from any other club or organization within my Alma Mater. The rich man's son may enter college with better preparation than you, he may wear better clothes, he may feed at a finer table, he may graduate younger, but you can make up for lost time by cleaner grit. You will step from the Commencement stage into no un- known world. You have already meas- ured swords with the great antagonist and the first victory is yours. It is the first struggle that counts. There is no virtue in poor food or in shabby cloth- ing. Too long experience with such things will make a man worse instead of better. Poverty strikes in. It is not the yoke of poverty, but the effort by which you throw it off which makes a man of you. If you rise to freedom you gain the habit of rising, and the same power of effort you can use in a thousand ways. If you say : I won't try. I shall never amount to anything, I am too poor, and if I wait to earn money I shall be too old to go to school ! If you say this and act accordingly you will never amount to anything, and later in life you will be glad to spade the rich man's garden or to shovel his coal at a dollar a day. I once knew in Wisconsin a poor man who earns a half-dollar every day by driving a cow to pasture. He watches her all day as she eats and drives her home at night. This, is all he does. The one balances the other, the one enriches the world as much as the other. Put here your half-dollar and there your man. If it were not for that cow the world would not need that man at all! I have heard a father say sometimes : College and the Man [49] College and the Man [50] I have worked hard all my life and I will give my son an education so that he will not have to work as I have done. The result of this every time is disap- pointment, for the manhood each of us attains must depend on our own hard work. But if the father says: my son must be a worker too, but I will give him an education so that his hard work will count more for him and more for the world than mine has done, the re- sults may be far beyond the expecta- tions of either. The boys who are sent to college often do not amount to much. From the boys who go to col- lege come the builders of the future. I said just now that you cannot put a five-thousand-dollar education on a fif- ty-cent boy. The experiment has been tried thousands of times. All our col- leges are trying it over and over again, and it generally fails. What matter if it does? It does no harm to try. A few hundred dollars is not too much to risk on an experiment like this. Maybe we have undervalued the boy. In any case we have given him the only thing we can give any man, that is, a chance to be fairly tested. But what shall we say of the man who tries to put a fifty- cent education on a five-thousand or a million-dollar boy, to narrow and cramp him throughout his future life. Just this is what a million fathers and mothers in America to-day are trying to do for their sons and daughters. Twenty years hence these young men and women will blame these parents for their shortness of sight and narrow- ness of judgment, weighing a few pal- try dollars, soon earned, soon lost, against the joy and power and useful- ness which come from thorough men- tal training. For a man to have died who might have been wise and was not, this I call a tragedy! Something College and the Man College and the Man [52] like this was once said by Thomas Carlyle, and something like it has been said or thought by thousands of men when the time was past in which they could find a remedy. A young man can have no nobler ancestry than one made up of men and women who have worked for a living and who have given honest work. The instinct of industry is in the blood. Some naturalists believe, though I do not, that the habits of one generation are inherited by the next, reappearing as instincts. Anyhow it is easy to inher- it laziness, easier still to develop it; and no money or luck will bring the lazy man to the level of his industrious neighbor. The industry which grew with the pioneer life of the last generation is still in our veins. Sons of the western pioneers, ours is the best blood in the realm. Let us make the most of our- selves. If you cannot get an education in four years, take ten years. Take all the time you need. It is worth your while, and your place in the world will wait for you till you are ready to fill it. When I was a boy on a farm in the Genesee Valley in New York, a friend whose name, John Lord Jenkins, I write in gratitude, advised my parents to send me to college. " But what will he find to do when he gets through college?" they asked. "Never mind that," said Dr. Jenkins, "he will al- ways find plenty to do. There is always room at the top." Always room at the top. I have heard a thousand men say that since, but then the word and thought were new to the boy. "Al- ways room at the top, but the eleva- tor isn't running." If you want to reach the top, you must climb for yourselves. All our professions are crowded in College and the Man [53] College America. That any one can see, but and the the crowd is all around the bottom of Man the ladder. The man who knows his business and who loyally does his best never finds his way hampered by com- petition. It may take a little while to show his mettle, but the right place will find the right man. Accident aside, sooner or later, in our country, every man finds just the recognition to which he is entitled. He gets just about what he deserves. If he is worthy of something better than he gets, be- cause he does more than he is paid for then something better is sure to open before him. The crowd is around the bottom of the ladder. Do not say that I expect too much from persistent resolution, that I give you advice which will lead you to fail- ure. For the man who will fail will never take* a resolution. Those among [ 54 ] you whom fate has cut out for nobod- ies are the ones who will never try! Frederick Denison Maurice tell us that " all experience is against the no- tion that the best means to produce a supply of good ordinary men is to at- tempt nothing better." "I know," he says, "that nine tenths of those the university turns out must be hewers of wood and drawers of water, but if you train the ten tenths to be so, the wood will be badly cut and the water will be spilt. Aim at something no- ble, make your education such that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be a manhood in your lit- tle men of which you do not dream ! " " You will hear every day around you ' ' this Emerson once said to the divini- ty students at Harvard "You will hear every day around you the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that your first duty is to get land and money, place and fame. What is this which you seek ? College and the Man [55] College and the Man [56] What is this beauty ? men will ask in de- rision. Nevertheless, if God have called any of you to explore Truth and Beau- ty, be bold, be firm, be true! When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions. I must eat the fruit of the land and let learning and romantic expecta- tion go until a more convenient season.' Then dies the man in you. Then once more perish the buds of art and poetry and science as they have died already in a hundred thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis in your history!" But you may ask me this question: Will a college education pay, consid- ered solely as a financial investment? Again I must answer yes, though the scholar seldom looks upon his power as a financial investment. He can do better than to get rich. The true schol- ar will say, as Agassiz once said to a Boston publisher, "I have no time, sir, to make money." It is also true that in certain kinds of wealth-pro- ducing, an enlightened mind is no help, but rather a hindrance. But this is not the career toward which you are looking. If it is, I am not speaking to you, and I am sure you would not lis- ten if I did. The world does not owe you a living, and will only grant it to you, I hope, in exchange for something better than what it gets from others. If money is all you want it will divide your interests and confuse your purpos- es if you grow fond of something else. But if you ask for effectiveness in the conduct of life, the broader your out- look the wiser will be your actions. Education is better than ignorance. It is more practical, as light is more practical than darkness. To be enlight- ened is to know what is worth doing ; to be trained is to know how to do it; and the work of the college is to College and the Man [57] College and the Man [58] give both training and enlightenment. We shall not measure a man's success by the amount of taxes he pays nor by those whose payment he escapes. Any one of our railroad magnates or bo- nanza kings gains more money in a month than any scholar in Christen- dom can earn in a life-time. Tested by our standard, is this success ? If so you measure it, it is not to you I speak. I know a dog that has buried more than a hundred bones in his master's garden, and yet he is not on the whole very much of a dog. We speak sometimes of the college course as distinct from the course of the university. In America, college and university are very much blended to- gether, and they will doubtless remain so. The college course strictly speaking is intended to make a man of you. The university is to fit this man for his spe- cial work in the world. But in our talk here, we may speak of both together as college education, for in America the two forms of education are not separated in spirit or in fact. But this is true the college train- ing, the university education, will not make you a millionaire. The acquisi- tion of great wealth is a specialty, the gift for which comes to but few, not always to those who most value it. The inheritance of great wealth is a thing very different from the creation of it ; and again, to gather is not to create. Mere inheritance is an anachronism, a belated custom of feudal times, which civilized nations have not yet abolished. Money inherited is more often than otherwise a misfortune to the individual whose life it overshad- ows and sterilizes. Creation of wealth, like all forms of creation, should en- noble and strengthen: gathering de- pends on the methods of the gatherer. College and the Man [59] College But leaving all these questions aside, and the in our nation of working men and wo- Man men it i s true that the educated man gets the best pay. Brain work is higher than hand work; skilled labor is better than muscle labor. It earns more money and it is better paid. And as industries progress and grow differentiated this distinction will be greater and greater. The man with the mind is the boss, and the boss receives a larger salary than the hands whose work he directs. All development of skill in labor is a form of education. The unskilled la- borer should not exist in a free country. For with any degree of political free- dom he can never be free. If he were, he would be a skilled laborer. The unskilled man has not made the most of himself and hence he is by nature a slave, a slave to destructive habits, a slave to the tyranny of capitalists, or to [ 60 ] the parallel and fiercer tyranny of his brother workmen. What the unskilled laborer can do, a hod of coal and a bucket of water will do better if han- dled by skill if directed by some man of education. To save the unskilled la- borer from the bonds into which igno- rance suffers him to fall is the purpose of our public school system. The truth makes free, and it has the same influ- ence all along the educational line from the primary school to the university. This is the justification of the public school system, and the same justifica- tion holds for every part of it. Everywhere in our professions it is the trained men that take the lead. Among our teachers, our preachers, our lawyers, our doctors, our politicians even, the college men stand at the head. Short-sighted and foolish is the young man who goes into the sharp competi- tion of life without the best aid that lies within his reach. College and the Man [61] College and the Man [62] Some time ago Chancellor Lippin- cott, of the State University of Kansas, wrote to each of the graduates of that institution asking each to state " briefly the advantages which your experience proves that you derived from your uni- versity life and work." Here are some of the answers: One says : " My love for the State grew with every lesson I received through her care. I saved five years of my life through her training and I am a more loyal and a better citizen." Another had " A better standing in the community than I could have gained in any other way." Another " Would not exchange the advantages gained for a hundred times their cost to the State or to myself." Another found it "Financially the best investment I ever made." Another had " The gratifying feeling that I know at least a little more than is absolutely necessary for making my living." Still another received " Strong friendship with the most in- telligent young men of the State, those who are certain largely to influence its destiny." And in similar vein, the rest. Thus it is in Kansas, and thus it is everywhere. For the young man or woman of char- acter, the college education does "pay," from whatever standpoint you may choose to regard it. We are proud and justly proud of our common school system. The free school stands at every northern cross- road and is rapidly forcing its way into the great new south. Every effort is made to elevate the masses. There is no College and the Man [63] College and the Man [64] upper class reaping the benefits of an education for which the poor man has to pay. There is no caste, educated and ruling by right of birth ; no hereditary house of Lords. Our scholars and our leaders are of the people, from the people. The American plan has made us an intelligent people. The number of persons ignorant or indifferent is less in our northern states than in England or Germany or France. But for our number, we have fewer educated men in America than have any of these na- tions. In literature, in science, in phi- losophy, we still go to Europe for our models. In mechanical invention we lead the world, for there is no one who so readily adapts circumstances to his purposes as the American. But in every other department of thought, Ameri- can work has been contented to bear the stamp of mediocrity. The world has a right to expect better things of us. The land of freedom, as Emerson has said, has failed, is failing to "satisfy the reasonable expectations of mankind." All our professions are crowded with men who have rushed in prematurely. They jostle each other around the foot of the ladder they are unable to as- cend. All this is less true to-day than it was twenty or thirty years ago, but it should not be true to any extent at all. In the different training schools of our states, great and small, many thou- sands of young people are gathered to- gether to prepare for the profession of teaching. Of these not one in fifty will remain in school long enough to secure even the elements of a liberal educa- tion. Fifteen minutes for dinner; fifty weeks for an education ! For the lowest grades of schools there are candidates by the score, but when a college wants College and the Man [65] College and the Man [66] a man for a man's work, it cannot make use of these teachers, excellent as many of them are in the lower field they have chosen. We must search far and wide for the man to whom a present offer of fifty dollars a month has not seemed more important than the grand oppor- tunities of a scholar's life. A bird in the hand is not worth ten in the bush. You cannot afford to sell your future at so heavy a discount. We say sometimes that the American public school exists for the elevation of the masses. This is true, but it has in fact a higher aim than this. It is to break up the masses that they may be masses no more, but individual men and women. Its aim is to draw forth the individual, to make the most of his powers, whatever these may be; for each man is a separate creation, and his array of force in its full range was never borne by any man before, nor will its exact likeness ever be known again. America is the land of the individual man. For better or for worse, and on the whole for better, each man in our country lives his own life, and on his own character and training depends its outcome. We see a regiment of soldiers on parade. In dress and mien all are alike, the mass. By and by in the business of war comes the call to lead some for- lorn hope, to do some deed of bravery in the face of danger. From the masses steps forth the man. His training shows itself. On parade, no more, no less than the others, he stands above them all when the time for trial comes. So it is in other times, in other places, for the greatest need of men is not on the field of battle. In like fashion we see a thousand boys to-day at play in the fields of our own state. Let us train these boys as College and the Man [67] College well as we can ; let us try to make them and the clean, honest, enlightened. But among Man them here and there we shall find the future leader of men. Let us raise him from the level, or rather, let us give him the chance to raise himself for the pine in the thicket needs no outside help to place its head above the sassa- fras and sumac. If our public school system, primary school and university, makes our masses into men, if it helps the individual to be his most effective self, it has given us all that we can hope all that we ought to ask. "The best political economy," says Emerson, "is the care and culture of men." It is not achievement which we ask of it it is aid to individual growth. The glory of America lies in the future, not in the past; not in what we have done and finished, but in the hope of growth. We try to do things better each suc- [ 68 ] ceeding year, and sometimes we sue- ceed, often enough at least to j ustify our confident optimism. What does the college do for the moral, the religious education of the youth ? It may do very much if it gets at it in the right way, but its means must be largely personal, not official. "To bring boys and girls into ways of righteousness we must let them see how righteousness looks when it is lived." If your college assume to stand in loco parentis, with a rod in hand and spy- glasses on its nose, it will not do much in the way of moral training. "Free should the scholar be, free and brave." " The petty restraints which may hold in check the college snob and the col- lege sham are an insult to college men and women." It is for the training of men and women that the college exists. The college cannot be a reform school. It cannot officially take the place of the parent. To claim that it does so is mere College and the Man [69] College and the Man [70] pretense. You cannot drive young men into ways of righteousness through fear of the college faculty. This the college can do for moral training : it can strengthen the student in his search for truth ; it can encour- age manliness in him by the putting away of childish things. Take the dozen students at Munich of whom Agassiz has spoken. Do you suppose that Dr. Dbllinger caught any of these cheating on examinations? Did the three young men at Williams College choose the haystack rather than the billiard hall for fear of the college faculty? The love of knowl- edge, the growth of power, the sense of personal responsibility, these are our college agencies for keeping off our evil. The love which casts out fear is the enthusiasm for real work, for the higher activities of the higher life. As in moral so in religious matters, the college must operate through work and through example. The college cannot make a student moral or relig- ious through enforced attendance at church or chapel. It cannot arouse the spiritual element in his nature by any system of demerit marks. But let him find somewhere the work of his life. Let the thoughts of the student be free as the air. Give him a message to speak to other men, and when he leaves your care you need fear for him not the world nor the flesh nor the devil ! If your Christianity or your creed seem to the student to need a bias in its favor, if it seem to him unable to hold its own in a free investigation, he will despise it, and if he is honest he will turn from it. Religion must come to him as a " strong and mighty angel," asking no aid of church or state in its battle against error and wrong. Whatever the temporary phases of College and the Man College and the Man [72] the student's thought, he will come out all right in the end. He whose mind is trained and free stands in no danger from the scoffer or the bigot. He will not mistake a fly on the object-glass of his telescope for an eclipse of the sun. This is a practical age, we say, and we hold in low esteem all sorts of dreams and visions. We ask what is the value of truth and beauty, of zeal and devotion, of religion and piety, as though all these things, for sale in the city markets and shopworn through the ages, were going at a sacrifice. But the practical rests on the ideal. " My son," says Victor Cherbuliez, "my son, we should lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth or else we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we lose a great many of them by the way." It is the noblest duty of higher education, I be- lieve, to fill the mind of the youth with these enthusiasms, thoughts of the work a man can do, with visions of how this man can do it. It should teach him to believe that love and faith and zeal and devotion are real things, things of great worth, things that are embodied in the lives of men and women. It should teach him to know these men and women, whether of the present or of the past, and knowing them his life will become insensibly fashioned after theirs. It should lead him to form plans for the part he has to play in science, in art, in religion. His work may fall far short of what he would make it, but a noble plan must precede each worthy achievement. "Colleges can only serve us," says Emerson, " when they aim not to drill but to create. They bring every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by their combined effort set the heart of the youth in flame." College and the Man [73] College and the Man [74] I once climbed a mountain slope in Utah, in midsummer, when every blade of grass was dried to a yellow crisp. Here and there I saw a line of vivid green across the yellow pastures running down to the lake. I could not see the water, but I knew that the brook was there, for only the flow of water can keep the grass as green. Like this brook in the hot fields may be the life of the scholar in the world of men. I look out over the lives of struggling men and women. I see the weary soul, the lost ambition, " the haggard face And form that drooped and fainted In the fierce race for wealth." Here and there I trace some line in life along which I see springing up all things good and gracious. This is the scholar's work and along his pathway I trace the growth of love of nature, the love of goodness, the love of God. For best of all the scholar's privileges is that which Dr. Hale has called " Lending a hand." The scholar travels the way of life well equipped with things which others need. He may not travel that way again. You know the word of the old Quaker, what he does for his neighbor must be done where his neighbor is. The noblest lives have left their traces not alone in science or in literature or in history, but in the hearts of men. " Some years ago, in a Southern Indi- ana neighborhood," William Lowe Bryan once said, "I came across the traces of a man. They were just as dis- tinct and as satisfactory as the traces of a vanished glacier. A good many years had gone by since the man went into Southern Indiana to teach. No great experience nor breadth of training was his. I know not what methods or text- books he used, but in all conditions College and the Man [75] College and the Man [76] of society I could trace the fact that this boy-teacher was a man, earnest, courageous, inspiring." As I have gone about over this coun- try of ours, I have found here and there, East and West, North and South, in cities and in villages, traces which show here and there clearly that a man had lived. And the best traces of a man are shown in the better manhood of those who have grown up around him. Now you will go to college for better or for worse. Where shall you go? The answer to this is simple. Get the best you can ! You have but one chance for a college education. You cannot afford to waste that chance on third- rate or fourth-rate schools. Go where the masters are, in whatever line you wish to study. Look over this matter carefully, for it is all-important. Go for your education to that school in whatever state or coun- try under whatever name or control that will serve your purposes best, that will give you the best returns for the money you are able to spend. Do not stop with the middle-men. Go to the men who know, the men who can lift you beyond the primary details to the thoughts and researches which are the work of the university. There is but one thing which makes a university strong and useful. That is a university faculty, a body of wise men, sound and earnest, men who know and men who can do along the lines of their own precepts. All other matters, without this, are of less than no impor- tance. Buildings, departments, libra- ries, laboratories, wealth and numbers, rules and regulations, do not make a university. It is the men who teach. Go where the masters are in whatever line you wish to study. Far more important than the question College and the Man [77] College and the Man [78] of what you shall study is the question of who shall be your teachers. The teacher is not a machine for prodding and plodding, to put black marks after the names of lazy boys. He should be a source of inspiration, leading the stu- dent in his department to the farthest limit of what is known, inciting him to excursions into the infinitely greater realm of the unknown. Let the school do for you all that it can, and when you have entered on the serious business of life let your own work and your own influence in the community be ever the strongest plea that can be urged in behalf of Higher Education. DATE DUE A 000 495 824