THE RELATION OF COLLEGE TO LIFE

An Address by President Hopkins in The Harvard Union, December 4, 1924

Men of Harvard: I have been offered a large subject tonight and have been given all the latitude in the world— the subject of the relation of college to life. Much as I should like to talk on various details of this, I want to take the time that is available to discuss the general theme. I think it is a subject on which we who are undergoing the college process are in need perhaps of greater understanding and more conviction than has been the case when conditions of life were more stationary.

We are apt not to realize how completely the relationship of the college man—to say nothing of the college as an institution—to life has changed. I could cite you a long list of statistics backing up this proposition, but I will give you only one. There are in the American colleges at the present time about 600,000 men, which is 70 per cent, of the number of men who have graduated from all American colleges since the founding of Harvard. Just get that. There are 600,000 men in the American colleges, which is 70 per cent as many men as have been graduated from the American colleges since the time when American colleges first were established.

Obviously, the relationship of the college man to the community is going to be very greatly changed under any such circumstances as these. Beginning from the earliest days of the American colleges, when Harvard was founded, and continuing until within a relatively short time, the college man has been set apart from life in general. He has been somewhat a superman in the community. He has been recognized as having had unusual advantages. He has been, not only in theory but in fact, generally a man better informed and better qualified to take a place of leadership in the community. It is very natural under such circumstances that the college man should have been awarded during those years not only all the prestige that was rightfully his, but also a certain artificial prestige which was the result of the recognition that he had been given special privilege.

I have gone over the records of some of the men of my own college a hundred years ago. Those men graduated from college; they went back into their home communities, and if they were qualified to assume the leadership in a community comprising not more than two hundred families generally, they were able to take that leadership immediately and without question. Studying the matter as a whole, you will find that the position of college graduates through the first century and a half or two centuries of the life of the American colleges was a position of recognized leadership and of conceded influence because of the fact that they had had membership in the college.

That condition has pretty definitely disappeared at the present time and will more completely disappear as these figures I have quoted become operative in greater and greater degree. Of course, the real proposition in regard to the matter is that college men are not unusual in any community at the present time, and the further sad fact prevails that the man who holds a college diploma is not necessarily either a man of unusual attainment or one of unusual capacity. The net result, consequently, is that the relationship of the college to life is simply the relationship which the individual college and the individual man establishes with life. The relationship of the college to the community has become one wherein a graduate goes out as any other man to become a part of the life of the community. Without any of the artificial prestige or any of the extraneous scenery which has given him a position of some distinction before, he is in a position at the present time where, on the basis of commonly accepted standards, he has to make good in a competitive field. He must make good on the basis of his own capacity and not on the basis of something which is ascribed to him, or may be ascribed whether with or without sufficient basis in fact.

Now, what is to be the attitude of the man in the college toward this question of what his relationship to life is going to be, and how is this relationship to be brought about? What can the man do that shall make him more useful in the world? What shall establish his claim to recognition? What can he do to fit himself for that unusual service which practically every man who goes through college desires to render?

I think that we have to approach these questions with an understanding of a great many different things in regard to the complex life of today. It used to be said before the War that society and the conditions of civilization had changed more in the hundred and fifty years since the industrial revolution than they had changed in the previous eighteen hundred years since Christ; and that statement was probably true. But whether it was true or not, I think it is a perfectly fair proposition to say that they have changed more in the last decade than they have changed in the previous century and a half. I think that there has arisen a more immediate necessity of change in the thinking of men and in their adaptability than ever has existed at any one time in the course of past centuries. Our generation is a generation which must adapt itself to this fact, and the extent and the way in which we adapt ourselves is inevitably going to define in very large degree not only our position in the community but likewise the position of our college in the public esteem, and the final estimate which the public will place on the American college, as a valuable agency of society.

It is only a little more than a hundred years ago that it took only twelve horses and two coaches to take care of all of the traffic between New York and Boston. I do not need to dwell upon the difference at the present day. The trip which I have just taken from Hanover down here took in those days longer than it takes now to go from New York to London. Distance is not a matter of measured miles; distance is a matter of time consumed in getting somewhere or in communication with one in some place. To the extent that you shorten such time you reduce the size of the world and you effectively condense within a smaller area the population of the world. Thus, the constant tendency today is for men to live closer together and thereby to conform themselves necessarily to the problems of urban populations, wherever the particular spot of their dwelling.

One evening recently, not having re- called that it was international night on the radio, I plugged in • between eleven and twelve o'clock and found myself immediately in touch with Scotland and listening to a station at Glascow. I shifted the selection points a little and found myself hearing Bournemouth. We are |lmost certainly on the threshold of developments which will be even more rapid and more revolutionary than anything we have ever yet known. The effect of all this is that each of these developments throws us more closely into contact with our fellows, makes every move of ours a move the influences of which go out in wider and wider circles throughout the world. Thus the intelligent man accustoms himself to conditions wherein men at the other end of the earth may affect .his welfare. Thus it becomes absolutely impossible for men to live as in former years with any theory of exclusive individualism. I say exclusive individualism because I would not exclude individualism as a force. That would be wrong because any theory which will be valuable to us and important to the world and vital to the world's progress will, in the last analysis, be dependent on our being able definitely to preserve to some degree a theory and practice of individualism.

The point I want to make becomes increasingly difficult to make as it becomes necessary to give so much attention to the association of all things in the world. The conditions have become such that we have had to acquire an entirely new understanding of, and an entirely new sympathy with, what our neighbors are doing. The reasons for their doing it and the effect of what they do, not only upon themselves but upon us, must be comprehended if we are going to live useful lives in this world and if we are going to accomplish anything which is commensurate at all with the investment of time which we are putting into our lives, when we spend from four to seven years in the realm of higher education.

I suppose that the poorest definition ever given in regard to the advantages of higher education was the statement of that ancient Dean of Christ Church, who said, when asked what he consid- ered the advantages to the student: "First, that he may be able to read the Scriptures in the original text; second, that he may be entitled to a proper con- tempt for all who cannot; and third, that he may be able to earn a larger emolument than his neighbor." Never- theless, we are not so far away from this in the minds of some men in the present day. One argument in regard to the college course with which I have less sympathy than anything else is the argument that it enables you to make more money than would otherwise be the case. If that is the only argument for going to college I should be willing to debate the question whether if a man went into business at twelve, thirteen, or fourteen years of age he might not possibly at middle age be able to earn more than he might qualify to earn by going to college.

There is also another theory about advantage in regard to going to college which I think is more justified, but which is too much accepted by the average college man. That is, that you can do your work much easier. It may be sardonically argued that college is the best preparation in the world for taking work easily, or at least for taking life easily, if one wants to utilize it that way. I am reminded that we had at Dartmouth in the middle of the last century a very colorful and distinguished College President. We also had at that time a rule which we no longer need against studying on Sunday. An undergraduate was called in before the President and taken to task for violating this rule, and he was given opportunity to make an explanation. He replied that he thought he could justify his act by Scripture. The President asked him what justification he could find in Scripture for studying on the Sabbath. The student replied that he had been brought up on Bible precepts, telling him among other things how to observe the Sabbath, and that he had been taught how one ought to help his neighbor's ass out of a hole on the Sabbath day. "But it occurred to me," he added, "that it would be a far more praiseworthy thing for the ass to help himself out.

As a matter of fact, I think that this story has in it a suggestion of certain essential features regarding the desirability of a college education. A college education ought to give to each one of us capacity to take care of himself and not be a burden upon his neighbors. I think, having done that, that it ought also to go much farther and to establish within our lives, as a working principle, the theory that we will be of service and that we will operate to help our neighbors as well as to take care of ourselves.

Now, if we are going to do that, manifestly we must understand something about the life we are living, something about the existence which is ours, and something about why we are doing the various things that we are doing. Perhaps this can be overdone. A Dartmouth freshman asked me the other night if I could tell him why man was in the universe. I told him that I would like to begin on something easier and to ask him why he was in Dartmouth College. Nevertheless, I think it is a thoroughly praiseworthy desire on" the part of anyone to wish to know why he is in the universe. And I think, likewise, if we undertake to know what the universe is that we are in, in so far as our human relations go, we will learn much that adds to the values of life.

We have at the present time, at best not only a densely crowded life, but we have to take, a part in affairs of a life in which it is impossible for us to know quantitatively anything but a minute fraction of the amount that is to be known. It is not so many hundred years ago that the encyclopedists committed themselves to the thoroughly praiseworthy and somewhat attainable purpose, at the time, to make themselves masters of all knowable knowledge. It is conceivable that some men of that time might have done it. When, however, you think of the amount of information that there is in the world today, when you think of the amount that any man has to learn to get a fractional part of some' specialized form of knowledge, the idea of course becomes absurd that anything in the way of universal knowledge can be at all attainable. Then we run up against the proposition of what advantage the college education should be to us, what portion of it we should utilize, and what use we can make of that to prepare us for life.

I don t think the exact thing' we are go- ing to do makes large difference at this point. The general requirement upon us as educated men is largely the same, whether we are preparing for life in the field of business, or whether we are go- ing to teach, or whatever we are going' to do. There are certain fundamental principles that must prevail to constitute a basis for useful citizenship. The most essential thing is that we shall have such command of our mental faculties as to make us able to utilize those faculties to get a result. In other words, the college man ought to be able to think and to apply his thinking to problems of social relations.

Ihis matter of thinking is something I am constantly more interested in, because I become increasingly conscious, all the time, how little I know about it and low little the best men alive know about it. I would like to try out a proposition on a group such as this and to ask each man when was the first time, or perhaps the last, that he made a deliberate effort to have reflective thought. As it happens, can remember perfectly the first time that I ever tried to think in this way. I was traveling with an older man whom I admired greatly. We had been on the sleeper together for a day when he went oft into a neighboring section of the car, saying that he would like to be undistuibed for a couple of hours because he was going to think. I undertook to figure out for myself just what a man did when he went off by himself and sat down for two hours and thought. It was an unheard of phenomenon to me. I had never thought steadily for two hours in my life and I had never made any attempt deliberately to think.

Moreover, I am not convinced that I was wholly an exception. I imagine there are a great many undergraduates in our American colleges at the present time to whom thinking is unknown except as a spontaneous or an automatic process; in whom there has never been the definite ambition and design to sit down and think out a specific thing and to think upon it until some result was achieved. And yet, that is what we have got to do in the world at the present time, and what we have got to do in an increasing degree. This matter of congestion of the modern world, the intimacy of contact between one man and another, one community and another, one people and another—these are; factors which have the greatest hazards in them as well as the greatest possibilities for good if rightly directed. It is all very well for us to dwell upon the fact that we are in a world where great benefits could be secured, if we were all working with a common social objective; where we could achieve great results and safeguard the world for a long time, if we could get all the people working together.

At the present time, however, it is more important to dwell on the fact that in this world of ours the hazards are immeasurably increased. In the olden time you could have people run amuck or you could have a nation run amuck, you could have all sorts of destructive theories exist in some single part of the world. The transfer of an impulse from one part of the world to another was so difficult that it was inconceivable that all the world should coincidently enter upon a destructive course. Take the wars of Napoleon or any other of those destructive wars of which we read. Those wars were little except armed tournaments. They were in the large nothing at all but representative armies waging test battles. For the area that was destroyed or impaired there was always the great compensating area of the world to draw upon, from which economic recovery could come in the least time. We do not need to go into a long discussion of what happened in the last World War, but we had practically no unaffected areas in the world upon which to draw. We had practically no physical, intellectual, or moral reserves in the world from which to draw refreshment.

While we are on this subject of intimacy of contact, there is a further interesting subject for college men to discuss—whether literacy, alone, really makes for education or not. I will not undertake to discuss that tonight; but there is this to be said in passing, that to the extent that you give literacy to the peoples of the earth—and most of them have it at the present time—it is needful to give them more than literacy or to consider if harm has not been done. To the extent that you make available to the peoples of the earth, coincidently, any printed assertion and give them the incentive to, and opportunity of, acting together on the basis of a commonly accepted belief, an idea may bring instant and world-wide action, regardless of its merit. An idea never could have come to immediate focus when transmission of it had to be by word of mouth from one individual to another, and when the great masses were only slowly influenced by the thinking of the few who led them, and when the few who led them were such detached groups that one had very little contact with another, and influence of one group upon another was slow in its effect.

You may understandably say this has very little to do with the proposition you had in mind—"What is the relationship of the college to life?" It has every relationship to your understanding of the magnitude of the problem which is to be yours. It means that you have to have complete and instant command of your faculties to an extent that men never had to' have in times past. It means, furthermore, that to the extent you do not have command of your faculties and do not have them promptly available in degree as other men do, you will be displaced in the race of life, and to other men will be awarded the attributes of leadership, while, more important, your influence to establish righteousness and to curb evil will be diminished, or even completely lost.

It becomes necessary, therefore, that we should go at this proposition on the basis of understanding that it is not so much the particular facts we know as the ability which we acquire to obtain knowledge. It is not so much a matter of what you think at first as the ability to learn to think constructively. Froude says in the first chapter of his "History of England," in effect, that going over the history of the world it will be found that the periods of stagnation in thought have been the periods when there was no change, and that the periods of change have come to be the periods of progress in thought; and that the sterile periods of the world have been the periods when the descendants trod into paths the footsteps of the fathers.

This thing we have to recognize as an axiom that the world is changing so rapidly that we cannot safely tie up to any sort of rigid thought, that we cannot accept in politics, in social theory, in religion, or in any other matter, a fixed system of belief, no matter how good that belief may seem to have been, without examining it and without attempts to understand whether that belief adapts itself to the needs of the present day and whether it can be applied to the developing problems of days before us. Therefore, I reiterate, we need to keep before us recognition of the fact that the world is changing faster than it ever has changed before. All the extraneous aspects and internal attributes of the world being different from what they have been, it becomes exceedingly necessary that we examine and re-examine all that -we have accepted as basic in a theory of life adjusted to entirely different circumstances.

Now if that be so, wherein is it going to affect us ? Wherein will be the difference from what would have been the condition had we gone out from college into life only a few decades ago ? I think most particularly we need to examine what that is which we call the professional life.

I used at the opening address at Dartmouth this year a quotation from Mr. Emerson's essay on "The American Scholar," written many decades ago. Interestingly enough, he suggests therein the dangerous tendencies to the man of that day of the rapidly increasing specialization of the time. Well, the dangers of specialization may have been marked at that time, but they are infinitely greater at the present time. No man can expect to make a success in life who does not specialize in his work. The necessity for specialization in life is going to begin immediately when you get out of college, and to the extent that you refuse to specialize you are unquestionably likely to fail of full success.

Hence the question inevitably arises in the minds of college men, who are thinking on this problem, as to the am- ount of specialization which they ought to undertake in college in preparation for the specialization which they are go- ing to undertake outside. And here is a point where I know I am not in agree- ment with many who discuss this sub- ject. The college course is the only open period of time that we have in adult life at the present day. I believe that the man will be a better specialist who utilizes the college course for studying those things which are going to be farthest away and most inaccessible when he gets outside. That perhaps is not the commonly accepted or the commonly preached theory. I submit it for you to consider for yourselves. This sort of theory ought not to be accepted from any man's say-so.

Supposing, however, that you go into law, or teaching, or suppose you go into business; every moment of your time for the next two or three decades is going to be absorbed in learning details, following up the processes, and mastering the procedures that go to make you assured in your knowledge of what to do and in your ability to do it. Even your social contacts are likely to be determined by your vocational associations. Do you want to be absolutely without knowledge and without appreciation of the significance of events, great and small, about you? 'lf you do not care, then begin your specialization far back in your college course. If, on the other hand, background, atmosphere, and scope of a man's mind seem important to you, look over your college curriculum, look over the things that are available for you, and from that store seek that breadth of knowledge which you will never have a chance to get at any other time in life. The fact, it seems to me, is more and more plain, that in a world where the pressure upon men is so heavy, in a world where limitations so fasten themselves upon the lives of men, and where the competitive features are so strong as they are at the present time, the man who is going to derive from his college course maximum benefit should get from his college course color and perspective which will not again be so generously available to him.

If you follow out this theory you are going to find in your lives later that here seeds have been planted which will flower in appreciations and satisfactions otherwise unattainable, and which will enable you to recall yourself, in Emerson's phrase, from a specialized interest in life to an interest in complete life, and in its unity.

A man thoroughly informed in regard to international affairs told me that he believed the recent catastrophe of the World War would never have taken place if the Germans had not delegated all their thinking in politics to their professional politicians and restricted their thinking each to his specialized field. I don't know whether that thesis can be proved or not in regard to Germany, but I am sure of this: that democracy in the United States will fail if we in preoccupation with our specialized affairs should ever come to delegate our thinking completely to one class of professionals. in the field of politics. If, because we are in law, or medicine, or scientific research, or something else, we say we do not understand politics and that it is of no interest to us, and that we will let the professional politicians do it, I know we will be in danger of far worse autocracy than under any other condition. It seems to me we need to keep constantly in mind that scope of life and breadth of interest are among the most essential things we can have, and if we do not have these we can never be complete citizens.

Now look over life. Consider the men whom you know. There are some lawyers who are absolutely and always interested in the fundamental theory of law and who accept the proposition that law stands for the establishment of justice, and who are constantly examining all of the processes of the law to see whether these are or are not conducive to making the spirit of justice pervasive. But you know and I know other lawyers who have no such thought at all, but who think of the law simply as a medium to accomplish a particular result, advantageous to themselves, and who have no particular solicitude whether the result conforms to justice or not.

In the same way, think over the doctors you know, and you probably will find yourself so unfortunate as to include in your acquaintanceship somewhere a doctor who is more interested in seeing the situation created where he will be the dispenser of drugs or the dispenser of visits than in creating a situation where there will be no sense of illness. And I say this in spite of the fact that I believe, on the whole, the medical profession is the most altruistic profession in the world. I believe, on the basis of my observation, that the men who are in medicine are in a greater proportion altruistic and devoted to the public weal than are the men, on the average, in any other single profession.

Look over the ministers you know, and certainly among that number you will find some who are more interested in dogmas and the points of theological discussion than they are in the validity of Christian ideals. Likewise, it is true that many of us who are in college work are interested in the procedures and technique of instruction than we are in what ought to be our chief interest how men are to be made more intelligent and how this can be done in the most effective way. So, in all walks of life you have these over-professionalized groups. And the process is automatic an cumulative in the fact that a man egmning to become over-professionalized gives his interest constantly more completely to the particular interest which he had adopted.

I would add, in passing, that from the purely selfish professional point of view of many a man, I think a mistake is fre- quently made which the right use of a college education would prevent men from making. It seems to me if the men, for instance, who are in the group which we know as the military group, if the men who are in the armies and navies, would simply say, "We are del- egated to maintain the only known es- tablishment for protecting security, and, this being the only known method, civilization not yet having worked out any other way, it is our responsibility to maintain this system at the highest peak of efficiency"—l believe the response would be very much greater to the appeal which they would make than to the appeal of a professionalized group defending war.

I think, in like manner, if those in the ministry would hold to the argument that there is no known way of perpet- uating and keeping alive the spirit of religion so effectively as through the church, and that therefore we all have responsibility to the church—l believe that from that line of reasoning a greater public response would be secured than does come from the argument of a professionalized point of view that the church has been through all time preordained as the only agency for expressing the spirit of Christianity.

In not unlike way you could go on through other arguments of professionalized groups and analyze their professional attitudes, but wherever you come upon professionalization of opinion you are likely to have the connotation of something incomplete. We recognize it when we say "the professional in athletics." We recognize that there are hazards in professional athletics that do not exist in amateur athletics; there are hazards in professional scholarship that are little existent in amateur scholarship. If we recognized that there was a distinction in motive and flavor between professional and amateur learning I think all our college courses would be better than they are.

Through heredity, environment, and all those subtle factors which influence our lives from birth, we acquire professional points of view and professionalized theories in regard to social relations. We tend to accept these attitudes without question, tend to accept them without observing what is happening to those things of other environments than our own or what results from other habits than those familar to us. We go out into life and we incline not to read those papers which do not argue for the things which we already believe. We establish our relationships and friendships with men who are personally agreeable to us. We go through life avoiding those who do not accept our beliefs or do not conform to our habits. We are all too likely to go entirely without that curiosity and mental alertness which is necessary if we are to fulfill our function through knowledge of how truth is to be found and protected. Here is the place where a college background ought to count.

Professor James, in his lucid lecture on "Habit", calls to our attention what we are apt to forget, unless we have had it particularly called to our attentionnamely, the extent to which the delegation of the daily task of life to habit removes from our lives the necessity of strain and effort which would be inevitable if we had to think out each thing as we did it. We get up in the morning and from the time that we get up until we sit down at the breakfast table, and perhaps until we get up from the breakfast table and go to our offices, we go through a routine of motions, day in and day out, almost without effort, as contrasted with what would be the mental strain of doing those things if we had to think out each motion and to pay attention to every essential part of our daily lives and every essential act which makes up our efficiency. There may, however, be danger in the process of delegating things so completely to habit that we fail to observe those things which are happening right under our eye and the knowledge of which is essential if we are going to qualify in any way among the men who are observers and among the group who reason from familiar phenomena to the unknown. No data can be disregarded by him who would analyze those great movements which sweep across in front of us, to which we become accustomed, and yet, as a matter of fact, of which we know so little.

I think I am right in saying that all of the great discoveries have come from men who have looked at things familiar to most of us—who have looked at those things with open and with inquiring mind. The steam engine came through Watts querying about the forces within the steaming teakettle. Newton discovered the law of gravitation by wondering why it was that the objects fell towards the earth instead of falling in the opposite direction. Faraday took a magnet and carefully turning it about in a coil of wire discovered that a current was set up therein.

Illustrating the fact that even when these things are explained their significance is not always understood by the public at large, Faraday went to London and was asked to demonstrate his discovery to a few friends. Among these was Mr. Gladstone who said, "This is all very interesting, but of what practical use is it?" Mr. Faraday looked at him a moment and replied, "Mr. Gladstone, some day you may be able to tax it." In any one fact which is so familiar that we do not observe it, or in speculation why any one of many things should, happen which happen constantly before our eyes, we may have the essential factor involved and the great truth included which, if it be understood and sufficiently investigated, will lead us into the field of constructive thought which our troubled world so greatly needs.

It is to be borne in mind that the scientific attitude, which has done so much for us in the world of the natural sciences, is just as applicable to the world of the social sciences. The social sciences are nothing in the world except the science of how we are going to live together; and unless we learn how to live together it does not make much difference what we acquire in the other fields of knowledge. The scientific method rejects no data without examining them to see how valuable they are. The scientific method accepts no data, no matter what may be the previous belief in regard to them, without repeatedly reappraising their value. Then, having carefully analyzed its data and having rejected some and accepted others, the scientific mind invariably holds itself open for the consideration of new facts and always recognizes that the greatest fallacy is likely to be found in a part truth.

Now, what happens in the realm of social science ? What happens in our contact with one another ? What happens in the realm of living together? Do we do anything of that sort? We do not. s Somebody brings us a new idea in regard to the validity of some theological tenet. The average man gives no attention at all. Somebody brings us a new idea in regard to the way in which people shall articulate their lives together. Our decision in regard to it is made on the basis of our preconceived notions of what we wish, rather than on the theory of finding out what ought to be. The result of the whole proposition is that the world goes ahead with its groups of professionalized points of view, its growing animosities, its increasing distrusts between peoples and between individuals. Thus we drift into a position where it is absolutely impossible for us to have anything approaching a scientific state of mind.

Right now we are in this country at a period of intolerance such as we have seldom known before. And the pity of the whole proposition is that it is a period when tolerance is needed more than ever before. We as a people are facing all sorts of problems, local, national, and international, precipitated because of the intolerance of our thinking.

What from among the available influences of Harvard College are we going to seek ? Is the college going to produce upon us the open-minded attitude which will make us willing to consider the desirability of conditions concerning which we have not had interest before? Is the college going to create within us that solicitude which will make us reach out and try to find whether or not those beliefs we hold can be substantiated ? Is the college going to produce within us that attitude of mind which shall make us humble in the presence of new facts and make us weigh those facts and say whether or not they are vital and whether we will apply them in the matter of living together? Do we wish the influence of the college to work upon us in this way ?

The world is tired and lazy at the present time; it has been worn out and it is being worn by impact upon the human mind of questions and problems greater than ever before. We fall easily into the situation of not wanting to do the difficult things and of seeking the easy solutions. I believe that if you were to analyze the situation you would agree with me that most of these things we call "isms" are attempts to find a simple formula—to* find an easy solution of problems that are difficult. I think Fundamentalism is nothing in the world except an attempt to find an easy road to religious belief. I think Bolshevism is nothing more than an effort to find an easy way in the fields of economics. And it seems to me that those who accept Pacifism as a formula are ignoring the fact that the securities which nations build up about themselves cannot be so easily disposed of as we find suggested in that particular device.

But whether any one or another of those statements is right, it surely is a fact that at the present time we- have the indisposition on the part of the world to do hard thinking outside that of the daily task; we have reluctance of the world to reason and to accept the findings of reason outside the paths of life's routines; and we have the almost impossible situation of a world full of peoples, increasingly crowded together, who are unwilling to consider and to be openminded toward the needs of others when these conflict with what we deem our personal interests.

Therefore, if I were to emphasize what the relationship of the college course to life is at the present time, I should simply say that we have this fact to remember: That the world has never yet long stood still and probably never will and therefore that we must accept the proposition that life is marked by changing conditions. And if we accept the proposition that there are changing conditions, it becomes immediately imperative that we continuingly seek adjustment to these by cultivating and preserving a sensitiveness of impression and a flexibility of mind, on the one hand, while on the other hand we develop our powers of analysis and judicially apply these to the procedures of bygone days, that we may ignore no worth distilled from the past and undervalue no treasures from the field of experience, of which our generation is made trustee.

These are factors, it seems to me, which constitute the real vocational training for which the liberal college is responsible—an education which ought to emphasize the wholeness of life instead of its parts, and which ought to make understood the fact of the unity of all knowledge rather than to become a special pleader for the preeminence of fragmentary bits.

In other words, men, it seems to me that the college education ought to be a stimulating influence upon us. We should seek from the college an effect which should give us both capacity to work harder than ever before and the desire to work in the interest of that greater comprehension and that broader understanding which we must have if we are to be citizens of consequence in our communities, if we are to be employees of value in the concerns in which we work, if we are going to be contributing factors of importance in establishing justice through law, if we are going to be agents of healing in medicine, or if we are going to be of those who give peace to the soul through the ministry, or aid in development of the mind through teaching.

Life never was as interesting as at the present time. Life never offered the challenges that it does at the present time. The colleges, in spite of all their faults and of all their weaknesses and of all their mistakes, never offered to the student such opportunity for developing the intellect as they do at the present time. And you men who are members of the oldest institution of learning in this country, you men who have all of the wealth of opportunity which Harvard offers to you, are subject to the requirements of the law of noblesseoblige in peculiar degree, as are, all men of good colleges.

The world is waiting for leadership, but meantime it can little define what leadership is. We still distinguish too vaguely between real leaders on the one hand, and swashbucklers, legendary heroes on horseback, or arrogant rulers, on the other hand. The latter type can never be a constructive force of permanent value under present day conditions. The needed leader of today is the man of influence rather than the man of mastery—the man who qualifies for leadership by living among men rather than apart from them. Such a man must have been humble in the presence of great minds and great souls, must have been simple in contacts with his fellows, and must have been indefatigable in his desire to cultivate and to maintain the power of his mind and to accumulate that knowledge which makes up the data of accurate reasoning. Moreover, not all leaders need be leaders of supreme rank. Society needs its captains, its lieutenants, and its sergeants, and more is asked of no man than that he shall use the talents given him. But let no man fail to utilize his opportunities or think meanly of the influence which he may exert.

These are the. accepted days for the beginning, of self-development. Are you men of Harvard qualifying yourselves? Or are you utilizing the opportunities which your College offers so that you will later be qualified?

I like to think sometimes how few men it takes to transform a situation. God told Abraham, who wanted to save his city, which was doomed, that if fifty righteous men could be found in it he would spare the city, and he gradually marked his requirement down to ten. As a matter of fact, it takes but a very few men to save a world. There are men enough gathered in this room tonight to save civilization if they were all qualified and disposed to take their places and do the work which is needed.

I am enough of an optimist so that I believe that civilization is going to be saved. I cannot believe it has been created to end in futility. I think the thesis that civilization is inevitably the final flower and that there is nothing to follow life but death are fallacies. However, I do think that that saving of humanity, which is necessary in every age and which is particularly essential at the present time, needs now to come more quickly and with greater strength than ever before, as I believe that it will come. But the question is, by whom shall it come? And the more there are who have within their souls the ambition to have it come by them, the more promptly and the more effectively and the more lastingly it will come.

I hope that in this room, gathered here tonight, there may be some who, figuring upon the relation of college to life, may see the opportunity to translate the ideals of this great University into life, and so, effectively translating them" into life as a whole, may become the saviors of life in all its parts!

Behind, the Lines at Carnival

It has been Possible to present the text of this address to readers of the ALUMNI MAGA-ZINE through the courtesy of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin. Editor