The last public acts of the Reverend Francis Brown
The last public acts of the Reverend Francis Brown were those which he performed as one of the Trustees of Dartmouth College. The honor of inducting President Hopkins into office had been delegated to him, and, with all its entailed responsibilities, had been accepted. In spite of illness whose seriousness he doubtless realized more fully than any one else, he came to Dartmouth and remained for the entire inaugural period; serving scrupulously at all points as one might,—by strength of will overcoming the weakness of the body,—when aware that the things he was doing were final things, to be completed perfectly.
Always a majestic figure, Doctor Brown gave more than majesty to the ceremonial of the induction. None of the assembly, perhaps, could say what was the mystical spirit manifesting itself through wonted dignity of bearing and eloquence of spoken word; but all felt that, somehow, the rite being enacted before them had taken on a solemn significance that rendered it a sacrament.
The following morning Doctor Brown attended the usual quarterly meeting of the trustees. Here, quite regardless of himself, he remained until he had introduced a resolution of appreciation for the work of others in connection with the inauguration. Eight days later, sad premonitions were fulfilled: Doctor Brown's tired heart ceased beating. On the eighteenth of October he was brought back to Hanover for burial.
Francis Brown was one of the greatest men whom Dartmouth's century and a half has produced. The nature of his life and its large achievement can not be adequately treated here and now. It must be left for another month. Today there is sorrow and the sense of loss: yet with it a certain great gladness that, if the end must thus gladcome untimely, it should come when the laurels of service to his College were fresh upon his brow.
THE MAGAZINE has had its say regarding President Hopkins. The forecast was inadequate to the immediate fulfilment as exhibited in the President's inaugural address. That document is here printed in full. It has called forth, from all quarters, the most favorable opinion. The spoken tribute of the academic world has been immediate and generous. The press has been no less responsive. Of the many editorials which have appeared those from the Boston Herald and the Boston Transcript are here reprinted as satisfactory examples of comment from unbiassed sources.
Says the Herald under the caption "Good Tidings from Dartmouth:"
President Hopkins spoke his inaugural yesterday where the first Dartmouth teachers, some 150 years ago, cut a six-acre clearing in the Hanover pines and then complained that even so they could see the sun only toward noonday. He followed their example in putting his axe to the root of the trees and in regarding his new horizon as far from final.
A college, he declared, is but a means to an end. With praise for schools of applied science, he pointed out that the college proper must perpetuate our heritage of culture in the humanities. The business of a college, in his opinion, consists in bringing into the hourly service of the state the ideals in history and social sciences, in literature, art and philosophy. For every social group the colleges must furnish leadership. To this end the college must make character an open aim. It must bind to itself the alumnus not as a mere giver of money, but as a receiver of motives needed after graduation even more than before. In the face of changes that the European war has assured, the American college must regain that early ardor which ennobled those who reared the old red walls of our New England homes of learning. And yet—for President Hopkins knew the difference between the rim of a clearing and the eternal hills - as the college sets hand to the sobering problems, it must remember that through the battle smoke and the social turmoil it can see but little of the future it must serve. It has no time to sleep, it has no excuse for dogmatizing.
Convictions like these, quietly spoken, bring cheer and challenge like those of Hanover's own wind from the hills. The new president evidently looked into his heart and wrote. His address makes a happy omen not for Dartmouth alone, but for liberal education in America. In days like this we need to hear more about life's ends and values; our ordinary talk is of ways and means; our conscience dozes on efficiency.
Those humanities to which President Hopkins, with most of his New England colleagues, wishes our colleges rededicated, seems nowadays to hardheaded sons of hard-headed fathers but as the carved goddesses who, as St. Augustine remarked, could not defend their own defenders. Greek has left our high schools; it languishes a little longer in our universities. Latin is not the staple it ought to be; it has become an item in one of many routes through high school or academy; grown persons leave it behind them with other troubles incident to youth. History finds little time for analysis of characters and principles. Literature sags to the short story, the prize play, the vers libre; we recognize the classics, of course but we read cleverer things. Economics hangs close upon facts and tabulations; it has forgotten how to lean back and ponder society as a whole. Philosophy, real philosophy—who writes it now or reads it ? Through all the field of education, as along the roadsides of busi- ness and politics, law and medicine, we are satisfied with what is merely so, with contacts as direct as steel on steel, with accomplishments of comfort and easy social position. And our wits, like mowing blades, sharpen themselves only in the clash of action; our convictions come of causes instead of resting on grounds; our ideals of the state, the neighborhood, the family, even of our own selves, bother us no more than so many belfry pigeons. President Hopkins is right in thinking that we need cultural colleges as never before.
Of course it is always easy to see good things going to the dogs. Men complained of the decay of learning almost before there was learning enough to decay. From the time of the Seven Wise Men, the better art has ever been the older. But with all allowance for illusion, can any one look at the valuation the humanities today are carrying and not give thanks that in our college halls a less utilitarian day, when at last it shall dawn, will find still the ordered fuel and the cherished embers ?
Technical schools, as President Hopkins reminds us, not only supply the skill on which our conveniences and major comforts hang, but also through the severity of entrance tests, the thoroughness of their courses, the authority of their call to self-directed studies in new fields, they are setting the oldtime colleges new standards in scholarship. But even so, the technical schools cannot supply what the nation is soon to need far more than rheostats and dyestuffs. Plato made it a commonplace in Athens that either philosophers should be rulers or rulers should be philosophers. But we Americans are ashamed to say that a president or a governor should have clear ideas of anything so vague as ethics or social science or the philosophy of history. With what a smile Plato would have watched Mr. Ford's recent sally into the councils of embattled Europe!
In carrying out the purposes announced yesterday, Dartmouth will take her place less unmistakably with the other New England colleges that see their duty in training for this dangerously wide land men and women who will think straight ; who also will feel the charm of fine action, who will put persons before property, who will see that a man's measure is his devotion to something worthy of a man's devotion. It was not granite or fishing banks, nor pinetrees or field corn, nor tannery, shoe-shop or cotton-mill that gave New England in two hemispheres the name she is glad to own. The secret of her strength has been the very thing that President Hopkins has reworded as "constructive idealism, interpreted in terms of service." If you have a doubt, call the roll of the men and women that New England honors as her noblest gift to the nation.
The Transcript is perhaps more personal in its analysis. Its editorial of October 6 follows in full:
Not alone the sons and supporters of Dartmouth but also, and for a particular reason, the watchmen standing in all the academic towers of New England have turned their attention to the New Hampshire College on this day when Dartmouth has inaugurated its eleventh president, Dr. Ernest Martin Hopkins. Unlike the usual circumstance on such an occasion as this, the interest of the other colleges is not drawn by any force of developed prestige previously accumulated by the new incumbent. On the contrary, Dr. Hopkins is a man hitherto comparatively unknown in the world of scholarship, quite young in years and in experience of great educational problems as that experience has come to be counted today. He is not a specialist in any one subject of learning, as so many college presidents have been known to be at the time of their selection—President Meikleiohn of Amherst, the philosopher, for instance: President Garfield of Williams, the political scientist; Dartmouth's former President Nichols, the physical scientist. And for the very reason that Dr. Hopkins appears to lack some of these traditional attributes of the college president, the colleges have turned to him today to discover what are those qualities resident and potential within him which could have led the trustees of Dartmouth so enthusiastically to select him for the honor and responsibility now conferred.
They need not go far beyond the inaugural address which President Hopkins delivered today, and which is printed in full on another page of this issue, to receive warrant that he is a capable thinker, constructive and well-balanced, distinctly a man of promise. It is both fair and fundamental to say this—that President Hopkins gains more than he loses by not being a specialist in any one field of education. He has brought to the problems posed in common before all the colleges as distinct from the complicated universities, a clearer, more comprehensive but less complicated understanding of those problems than has many another man in a similar position, and he has spoken of them in a way which should be more clearly understood by the rank and file of his alumni and students than has many another new college president. In an age when half of the educational world, on account of the war's tremendous demand for efficiency, is going half mad in favor of the development of scientific and technical education, President Hopkins stands firmly and quietly, not in hostility to the sciences, but in enduring hospitality to the other studies without which he is convinced no cultural college can rightly serve its purpose. Not blinded by specialism in his attitude toward the sciences, he is equally free, in his advocacy of the humanities, from the charge often brought against the classicists that they do protest too much. He makes a better piece of pleading for the cultural studies than the special pleaders themselves are wont to make.
In so far as Dr. Hopkins approximates the specialist in any respect, he is a specialist in these two ways—in his knowledge of conditions in the business world today, the human and fundamental conditions apart from the technical, gleaned by several years of highly praised service for several great companies, and in his knowledge of conditions at Dartmouth, achieved through his service with President Tucker and extending, so the address shows, into a considerable experience of collegiate thought throughout the country. These dual assets Dr. Hopkins appears prepared to turn to the utmost account. Frankly recognizing, in the first place, the essential fact that the largest percentage of college men today are no longer moving into the professions but into various forms of commerce and industry, he is eager to effect the adjustment of collegiate ideals which this changed condition requires. And to do so, he contemplates no short-sighted confounding of the business office with the college classroom. He is bent on accomplishing the great and far-sighted thing. He would have college men less trained for individual and selfish success and more to the end that their collective influence as a group may be more distinctly and more helpfully exerted upon the world of business today. It needs to be.
To his aid in this campaign, as in other of his purposes for Dartmouth, President Hopkins especially seeks the counsel and co-operation of the alumni. What he has to say should be closely read in all of our institutions. The fact that Dr. Hopkins was able to arrive at his present conclusions and intentions betokens of course an unusual acquaintance with the alumni of his college and an unusual understanding of the average graduate's point of view and of the shortcomings of that viewpoint. It was so that President Hopkins was heralded to us—as pre-eminently "a Dartmouth man," especially well acquainted with all the men and traditions of Dartmouth. His inaugural address has shown us in what way he holds that acquaintance. It includes no word of bombastic praise of Dartmouth—all too frequently associated with the college at Hanover—no American Teutonisms about Dartmouth ueber Alles. It breathes instead a very sincere and devoted loyalty to Dartmouth, whereof the chief resulting motive is the desire that the college of which he is to be president should labor not for the selfish gain either of the college or of its followers, but for service to the American State in this hour and in all future hours of its need.
In its editorial make-up THE MAGAZINE will continue this year as last. Professor Clark's general oversight during the past few years has been such as to make him an indispensable chief. Professor Childs and Mr. Rugg will exchange their responsibilities, the one taking over the book reviews and the other covering the news of the College. From his abode at Chelsea, Vermont, Mr. Comstock will watch with argus eyes and report upon the doings of the alumni."
Each year a senior assumes charge of the department of Undergraduate News. During the months to come it will be George Keyes Page. Mr. Page has, since entering College, been prominently connected with various student activities. He was editor of his Class Aegis and is now editor in chief of TheDartmouth. His review of student affairs should be worth reading from month to month. Mr.. Keyes will continue to be responsible for editorial opinion expressed.
The trustees having voted to print in full the proceedings of the inauguration of President Hopkins and to distribute copies of the book to the alumni, THE MAGAZINE has considered it wise to keep its report of the inauguration within the briefest possible space.
