REMARKS OF PRESIDENT TAFT AT THE THIRTY-FIFTH ANNUAL DINNER OF THE WASHINGTON ALUMNI

MR. CHAIRMAN. GENTLEMEN OF DARTMOUTH AND FELLOW GUESTS:

The first sensation I had in coming into the room was that of a feeling that this is the same audience I have addressed twenty times in Washington the same habitues and the same people with the banquet habit. Our friend the Ambassador from France, the Ambassador from England, the Speaker they make up a frame that just sets my mouth to going.

It is hard to come into a meeting and speak at once; and, therefore, I asked the mercy of your chairman to have at least two speakers precede me who had had the advantage of me of being in here and breathing in this atmosphere of college enthusiasm, in order that I might collect my thoughts.

One thought that came-to me during the speech of the Speaker was not that the college education or university education was not a great advantage, but that great must be a country which without these advantages could produce such men as called for admiration from him in Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and Joseph Cannon.

Another thought that came to me was that our Uncle Joe was on just a little bit of thin ice; that in order to make his point in favor of small colleges, he was emphasizing something which perhaps Dartmouth men are not now willing to admit, for I have understood that Dartmouth claimed now to be on the otner side of the line, and to be one of those which had grown out of the class of small colleges and had become a great college.

Uncle Joe took from me I suppose a reference that perhaps has been used before, the Dartmouth College case. Certainly every Dartmouth meeting ought to suggest that as a basis for the conservatism and the principle of vested rights, without which up to this time this country would never "have been what it is today.

And then when you come in and hear that mellifluous voice, that voice sometimes full of English and sometimes full of Esperanto, you are carried back to the magnificent periods of Daniel Webster.

I have been trying to formulate in my mind an idea that I have had with reference to Dartmouth and Harvard that I was frightened out of expressing myself fully upon by the presence of a Harvard man. We had preside at a Yale meeting once in Washington, away back in 1890, when Uncle Joe and I were young, Senator Wolcott, and he referred to Harvard University as a university that prepared men to shine in Boston society and made them insufferable elsewhere. Now my experience with reference to Dartmouth and Harvard, in coming in contact with the capital of New England and the men who make the wheels go there, is that when you meet a man of social grace or literary excellence, you can trace him back to Harvard, but when you meet a man who is making the wheels go and who is forcing public opinion, you usually call him a Harvard man but you find he graduated at Dartmouth. ' Just why that is I don't know. Perhaps it is because the "spawn" of the great university have spread over a wider field and have become thinner as they are spread wider, and that Dartmouth has devoted its attention chiefly to New England. Certain it is that at Dartmouth there is taught to her sons the principle that if they would have anything worth having, they must earn it; that they are willing to start in the race of life even, with an education and nothing else; and with no other luggage they are able to make the race better than if they had that wealth and appreciation of comfort that makes one willing to accept something less than the first place in the race.

Now 1 agree with my Uncle Joe that theVsmaller college is of the utmost advantage to this country. Our friend, Ambassador Bryce, had said so before Uncle Joe placed his imprimatur on the statement, and he pointed out that the reason was the opportunity by proximity that it gave to every youth of this country to improve himself to the uttermost by an expenditure of small means.

We have all sorts of universities and colleges in this country, and I presume that meetings like this are constantly projecting into the discussion, for lack of something else to say, the difference between the state college supported by taxation, the university supported by great foundations, and the small college supported by such foundations as they have and the legs and prayers of their presidents. But certain it is that every one of these agencies to prepare young men to meet the problems of life is to be encouraged. One who has attended a large university may advance arguments in his individual case why he has been favored by that opportunity, but I think that all of them present this advantage and benefit, wholly aside from the knowledge or education that one gets, which one has to go through college to understand the advantage of, and that is the association and friendship that you form with the men whom you meet at college during that formative four years of your lifewhen the friendships that are formed between young men entirely disinterested, and with the tendrils of their hearts reaching out to yoke themselves with the tendrils of other hearts, make that a time in life that is never forgotten, no matter how long the life and how stern or how joyous the years that follow. I know that if you Dartmouth men were asked whether you would rather give up the knowledge which you received at Dartmouth or the association and friendship with the fellows whose friendship has lasted until today, you would say, "Well, I would hate to be ignorant, but I believe I would rather have the friendship of the boys." Such association makes character. Such association presents to you and to all of us who have enjoyed the opportunity, a selfrestraint, a keeping in the path of honor and industry, an attempt to be useful that so far as I know can be derived from no other association. The desire to stand well with the men who for four years stood shoulder to shoulder with you as the warmest friends, and the humiliation you would feel if it were to come to them who gave you their highest hopes for your success, that you had departed from the path Of honor and gone downward and disgraced yourselves, your education and your college, is a self-restraint than which I know no stronger to keep men in the path of virtue and make them work for the uplift of their fellowmen.