1897

The discovery of this letter, written on stationery of the President's Office, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H., gives me the feeling that it will be of interest to our classmates who may not have seen it.

Nantucket, June 21, 1907.

To the Men of '97:

Of the many disappointments growing out of my enforced absence from Commencement, none is more acute than that of not meeting with you at your tenth reunion. We took up college life together, you for the first time, and I again after the lapse of thirty years. But you had this advantage knew your generation. I had to learn human nature, so much of it as was under twenty-one, over again. You at once set about teaching me, and as I now look back on the process, I really think that I made pretty fair progress under your training. At any rate I came very soon to see and to believe that college fellows were to be trusted, respected, and taken into confidence. And from that faith I have not fallen away. Whatever success may have attended my administration, I attribute it in no small degree to the relation of mutual confidence, and cooperation, which was established at the outset between the admininstration and the students.

I hardly need say to you that I have followed your individual careers since you left college with increasing interest and pride. The class is remarkably well distributed among the professions, and among the various kinds of business which are most influential. So far as I know every man has pursued his career with honor. of those who fell by the way in college, and of those who have fallen since, we think not only with grief, but also with that pathos which belongs to unfinished lives of singular promise. Perhaps we dp well to think,that the things which might have been are greater than the things which will be. In reckoning up the accomplishments of the class you cannot leave out the well defined ambitions and purposes of those who were on their way to achievement.

I trust that your individual experiences have been such as to give you sane and wholesome, and therefore brave and hopeful, views of life. We cannot well help generalizing about men and things from ourselves, especially as the world opens to us. I hope that you have already come to like and to respect the world enough to determine that you will try to make it better at every point where you come into direct and effective contact with it. As I compare the time at which you entered college with the present it seems to me that the world, meaning by it the country, society, business, is growing more and more accessible to honest men who have the courage and the sense to make the right approach.

I hope that the days in which you are together will be full of good cheer. How much I should have enjoyed entering into your program, so far as I might fitly have found a place there. I very much appreciate your thoughtfulness in the sort of reunion which you had planned. I should have enjoyed a Sunday vesper service with you as a kind of memorial to former days and to absent classmates. And I have counted also, as I have said to your Committee, upon the pleasure, in company with Mrs. Tucker, of receiving you informally in our home.

But the things which we in common hold dear are with you. The Mother of us all greets you through all her traditions and associations, and bids you believe, as you return, that all which she has inherited, and all which she has gained, is yours.

I am, in continued affection, Most sincerely yours,

Secretary, Treasurer and BequestChairman, 114 State St., Bridgeport 3, Conn.