ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF COLLEGE – SEPTEMBER 24, 1914

It is a pleasure to welcome officers, students and friends to this opening exercise of the one hundred forty-sixth year of the continuous life of Dartmouth College.

To those who first join our fellowship today the College feels itself especially an host and offers an hospitality and consideration which we hope may be to you the assurance of a lasting friendship. The staff of the College has made preparations for your coming in the hope that nothing essential may be lacking of adequate provision for your well being.

While we meet with bright prospects for a successful year of mutual service and advantage, let us not forget that these happy conditions are unfortunately local. The world at large is in a deep distress.

The College met in very early days when our forefathers were deciding by force of arms whether or not this country was and ought to be a free and independent nation.

Later the College met to do its humane and civilizing work while arms decided whether or not we of the North and South should remain an united people.

Those before our time have assembled on this ground when the fate of European nations was in the balance. But never before has the College come together when such countless thousands of the brotherhood of men were shedding each other's blood.

It is indeed a dark and sobering day when several millions of young men not far removed from your own years and experience, those who are the world's great hope for the years to come, face each other in battle with no thought but to slay, to destroy, to bring to nought the richer promise of a brighter day.

It is a hard and an unequal conflict for those who lead and 'those who follow, for officers fall in larger proportion than the rank and file and the pride of Europe is daily humbled and crippled in the death and ruin of many leaders.

Let us guard against that lightmindedness which is deceived by the dramatic features of this titanic struggle. Be not blinded to its sordid and horrible realities by any outward pageantry. Half a century of broken lives and unnumbered sorrows and privations will follow in its wake.

To bring grim realities home to our thoughts, imagine what it would mean to you to have more than a third of our comrades gone to war, our chief halls made into hospitals for wounded, broken, dying men, to have yet other buildings converted into prisons. Such is the sad fate of Oxford and Cambridge.

On the universities of Belgium, France, Germany, Austria and Russia the blow has fallen yet more heavily.

What demoralization and dehumanization must follow when good-will, justice, brotherhood, are suddenly replaced by anger, blood-thirstiness and brute force, when men in a single day must change from peaceful builders to enraged destroyers.

The world has talked much of conservation, of constructive statesmanship, and now we have the melting pot. Civilization has lost her boast and now must stoop, and, with broken fragments, painfully begin on firmer foundations to rebuild her fallen house.

In this day may we hear no more that competitive armaments insure the world's peace; nor yet the false warning, "In time of peace prepare for war." In the usual order of things, that for which men or nations carefully prepare they will sooner or later undertake. Thus war is now the logical outcome of the world's preparedness for war. Existing armaments were through fear and distrust built up for defense, and not agression, yet the people of every nation now at war sincerely believe themselves fighting on the defensive against unwarranted and unjustifiable attack.

Thank God our nation, from her position, can, through wisdom, guarded speech and act and righteousness toward all, escape ill-will and may finally limit bloodshed; but there will be consequences of the storm we must not, can not, shirk.

To whichever armies at the end of the struggle victory may fall, all Europe will emerge breathless and exhausted. National treasuries will be empty; countless families broken; homes destroyed; the masses plunged yet deeper in poverty and distress. Much of Europe's genius and many of her potential great men will have perished. There must inevitably result huge national debts, a shrinkage in public expenditures, a crippling of public works, including higher education.

Fewer European youths will be able to afford college and university opportunities; and thus must Europe suffer as much morally and intellectually as she suffers in her material fortunes. The flower of her civilization will thus recover yet more slowly than her physical well-being.

From Europe in the past, America has drawn her chief inspiration in art, in letters, in science, in philosophy, in religion. The larger part even of our industrial greatness and prosperity has grown out of scientific discoveries made in European laboratories. Much of the capital needed for our commercial expansion and development has flowed from European sources. There is not a course taught in Dartmouth College which does not reveal Europe's great intellectual contributions to our culture and civilization.

This debt now cries aloud for payment, and the call will be insistent for half a century to come. We, as patriotic Americans, must strengthen our leadership; broaden and refine our ideals; take firmer hold upon our material, intellectual and moral resources; and manfully, unselfishly, give Europe that support, virility, inspiration and hopefulness, which Europe in the past, in unstinted measure, has given to us.

Men of Dartmouth, I call on you in the name of your home, your country, your college; call on you in the name of humanity and of all you hold most sacred; to use your college opportunities, to upbuild, to strengthen, to make more capable, to refine, your native powers, that you may the better help your brothers, upon whom so vast, so ruinous, a calamity has fallen. Gird yourselves mentally, morally and physically, for as great energy, fortitude and heroism to construct as Europe is now using to destroy.

In this room young men before today have been exhorted to a pure ambition, to scholarship, to a robust idealism, as a preparation for service and leadership in our nation. Today I call upon you in behalf of a wider cause to prepare to meet a more pressing obligation, to fit yourselves worthily for high service in the world, that the brotherhood of man may know no boundaries nor limitations.