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 The Work of a College 
 during the War 
 
 Address at the opening of the 118th 
 
 year of Middlebury College, 
 
 September 20, 1917 
 
 By President John M. Thomas 
 
 MIDDLEBURY, VERMONT 
 
 19 17 
 
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 THE WORK OF A COLLEGE DURING 
 THE WAR. 
 
 In opening this 118th year of Middlebury College 
 we might ignore the situation of our country, hurrying 
 its energies into the great war, and counsel how we 
 might shut out from our minds during the coming 
 months the distractions of pubHc events and concen- 
 trate our attention on academic pursuits. I might 
 urge you to forget as far as possible submarines and 
 aeroplanes, and trenches and dugouts, and advise that 
 since you are now in college, enlisted for study, you 
 drop all thought of any personal relation to the great 
 conflict or of any other topic connected with war. 
 
 But even if it were possible to divorce our thought 
 from the stupendous events now occurring, and from 
 the awakened passion of our nation to bear its part in 
 the renovation of the world, it would not be patriotic 
 for us to do so. As teachers and students we are still 
 citizens, and even at the cost of considerable diversion 
 from the educational endeavors which are our primary 
 purpose, we must follow the course of the struggle, 
 informing ourselves as best we may of the deeds of 
 the armies and the fleets, and still more carefully seek- 
 ing to work our way through to the real issues of the 
 conflict and the principles which are being fought out 
 for the world to live by after the great horror has 
 passed. College men and women should allow none 
 to excel them in patriotism, nor in patriotic interest 
 in the problems and endeavors of their country. 
 
But it would not be in the interest even of your 
 education to attempt to forbid you all thought of the 
 war and its issues while pursuing your studies. To 
 ask you to forget the war would not be sound educa- 
 tional method. Education has for its object to make 
 one at home in the world, to enable one to take his 
 place as a man in the world of men. This war is 
 changing the whole face of things; the life of man is 
 going to be different in a thousand ways after it is 
 over. An education, therefore, which is sound and 
 practical, must fit one for life in the renovated world, 
 and that means that the process by which it is becom- 
 ing new, the principles and ideals which are being 
 thrown into the discard and the new ones which are 
 taking their places, must be taken into thoughtful 
 consideration. You are expected in about twenty 
 years to catch up with a very old world, and a 
 world which has been moving the last three years 
 at a pace never before maintained. To ask you 
 to remain indifferent to what is now occurring would 
 be to propose to leave you a whole era behind the 
 world in which you must live. Let us not try to for- 
 get the war, but rather let us inquire what the work 
 of a college should be during the war. I propose 
 that as my subject — the work of a liberal college dur- 
 ing the present conflict of the nations. 
 
 Part of that work is direct, — service under the col- 
 ors in army and navy. We are already represented 
 by over one hundred alumni and former students and 
 the list is growing daily. Middlebury is bearing her 
 full part of the great sacrifice which the American col- 
 
leges are making. When the statistics of the war are 
 compiled, it will be found that a larger proportion of 
 college men entered the service than of any other 
 class. They are subject to the same draft and they 
 were first to be called upon for the officers' training 
 camps. Their eager and noble response has been an 
 inspiration to the entire country, and their part in 
 the conflict will be a witness for years hence to the 
 sound and thorough patriotism of the American col- 
 leges and their great value and importance in the life 
 of our nation. 
 
 It may be that we are by no means through with 
 the sacrifice we must make. We have learned by this 
 time to be deliberate, to wait until we learn where our 
 service will count for most; but we stand ready, I 
 trust, to the last man to place ourselves under the flag 
 when the path of duty is clear. We are in the war to 
 win. A part of our heritage in our mother tongue is 
 the counsel of Tom Brown at Rugby, — **Boys, don't 
 fight, but if you do fight, don't give up while you can 
 stand or see." We tried to obey the first part of that 
 motto, and we will not be found disobedient to the 
 other part if it takes the last man who can pass the 
 surgeons. 
 
 But at present the nation has chosen whom she de- 
 sired and through high officers of army and navy, 
 through the national Commissioner of Education, 
 and even by the voice of President Wilson, has bid- 
 den the rest of us maintain our college at the highest 
 possible standard, both in attendance and in quality of 
 work. There can be no question of the wisdom or 
 
the patriotism of that advice. It has been suggested 
 that colleges and universities turn their laboratories 
 during the war into experiment stations for war indus- 
 tries and occupations. They were not built for that 
 purpose, and for the most part such work can be done 
 better elsewhere. A recent writer in The Nation has 
 proposed that college faculties, freed from pressure in 
 the care of students, become University Extension 
 lecturers and engage in a campaign to instruct the 
 public in the meaning of democracy. There are prac- 
 tical difficulties in the way of carrying out this sugges- 
 tion which perhaps I need not take the time to 
 mention. 
 
 I believe that a college can do its best work during 
 the war by being a college and doing the normal work 
 of a college under the stimulus of the great endeavor 
 of the nation in its fight for world-wide freedom. I 
 do not mean '^college as usual," college as if the coun- 
 try were not involved in the greatest conflict of all 
 times, but college as the issues and struggles of the 
 war have revealed that a college ought to be. I think 
 it can be shown that this great war has brought into 
 the clear a new ideal and purpose of college training, 
 or at least a purpose different from that which many 
 of us held formerly. 
 
 The aim of college education as held by those 
 undertaking it has been for many years increasingly 
 utilitarian. Young men and women have gone to 
 college, in order to better their prospects in life, as a 
 stepping stone to a profession or a place in business 
 in which financial or social rewards would be increased. 
 
This has held true of students in liberal arts colleges 
 as well as those in technical institutions leading direct- 
 ly to an occupation. One of the favorite arguments 
 for a college course has been a comparison of income 
 of college graduates with those of only a high or ele- 
 mentary school education, and the argument has been 
 used fully as frequently by classical and liberal institu- 
 tions as by technical and professional schools. 
 
 The sacrifices of men on the battlefields and of the 
 thousands in training for the service condemn this 
 attitude. While our brothers are giving their lives in 
 the service shall we pursue our selfish advantage here ? 
 While they face hardship and death, shall we plan 
 and labor to increase the comfort and luxury wherein 
 we may spend our hfe ? I trust we are of worthier 
 manhood than that. 
 
 Moreover, the war reveals the insufficieney of the 
 individualistic attitude. We might fit ourselves for 
 high personal rewards and find it impossible to reap 
 them because our whole nation is in bondage. We 
 are dependent upon our country. Without a nation 
 free, strong and wealthy, none of us can be free, 
 strong or wealthy. Lowell's great lines, — 
 
 "What were our lives without thee! 
 What were all our lives to save thee!" 
 were an appeal to patriotism, an apostrophe to the love 
 of country; but they are also a statement of cold, sub- 
 stantial fact. In these terrible days nations have ene- 
 mies which would enslave whole populations, rob 
 them of their homes and liveHhood, and ravage and 
 burn the very temples in which they worship God. 
 
What profit a university training, fitting its possessor 
 for a lucrative position, to a youth in Belgium today, 
 or to an Armenian graduate of an American college in 
 Turkey? The question — What were our lives with- 
 out our country — is a very practical inquiry as to fact 
 and condition. Our lives without our country to de- 
 fend and protect us, to make the conditions of our 
 living enjoyable and uplifting, to guarantee for us a 
 society in which justice, equity and benevolence pre- 
 vail were very little worth. 
 
 This war has led us very rapidly in the direction of 
 some form of socialism. Individual effort, compet- 
 itive strife for the largest possible share of the good 
 things of the world, is giving way rapidly to commun- 
 ity effort on a large scale and reaching down into the 
 intricacies of life in order to protect and conserve the 
 common good in which alone the individual may win 
 and hold any good for himself. The movement af- 
 fects even such personal matters as our daily food. It 
 were never more clear that no man liveth to himself 
 and no man dieth unto himself. 
 
 The Germans were the first of the great nations to 
 learn the lesson and they are today the most highly 
 organized and socialized people in the world. In their 
 view every member of the empire, from the Kaiser to 
 the humblest peasant, lives for the nation alone, and 
 the nation has a right to all that he has and is and 
 must direct his life to the last detail for the carrying 
 out of the national purpose. Each contributing his 
 part, whether in the army, the factory, or in the field, 
 they are putting forth a united energy that seems 
 
almost superhuman to make their empire the master 
 of the world. The end they seek is power, and pow- 
 er in order to wealth, that they may rule by land and 
 sea and be the master of the peoples of the earth, with 
 none to make them fear. 
 
 Shall we fight them on their own level and try to 
 put ourselves in the place they are seeking ? Shall 
 we seek to organize ourselves, politically, socially and 
 economically, to the end that we may make ourselves 
 one of the allied nations dominating the world, ruling it 
 by military power, and crushing the liberty and life 
 of others on the principle of the survival of the 
 strongest .? 
 
 It is the great achievement of President Wilson that 
 he has brought into the clear and imbedded in the 
 common mind through a phrase that will never be for- 
 gotten another and far higher purpose. The demo- 
 cracy which he has set in the heart of the world is no 
 mere political and governmental method. The Ger- 
 man statesmen who interpret it as an attempt at dicta- 
 tion as to their form of government miss the real 
 meaning of it. We have lived at peace with imperial 
 Germany all our lives and were strenuously desirous 
 of continuing to do so. Our national spokesman suf- 
 fered patiently for years reproach and rebukes without 
 number for his insistence on neutrality toward the Im- 
 perial German Government. The change from neu- 
 trahty to passionate attack, in which Mr. Wilson has 
 carried the heart of America whole-souled with him, 
 was caused and forced by immoral diplomacy and by 
 savagery and inhumanism in the conduct of the war. 
 
We are fighting for something more than freedom of 
 the seas, something other than to checkmate the plan 
 of a central European empire ruling the world from 
 its Une of fortresses from the North Sea to the Persian 
 Gulf. We are fighting for the maintenance in human 
 society of customs, laws, and usages which are proper 
 to civilized humanity, and we are fighting against the 
 attempt to estabHsh the laws of the jungle as recog- 
 nized and permanent usages in the relations of men 
 and governments with each other. Our enemy is 
 baby-murder on the high seas, and the bombardment 
 of the cathedral at Rheims, and the rape of Belgian 
 women, and the exile and enslavement of civilian 
 workmen, and poison gas and defiled wells and the 
 unsexing of Servian boys, and the massacre of 750,- 
 000 Armenian women and children — the most das- 
 tardly and horrible crime ever committed under 
 the eye of Almighty God. ' It is these things that 
 have overcome all the natural impulses of the 
 American people to abstain from war, and reversed 
 the deep-imbedded national policy, sanctioned by 
 Washington's great name, to hold ourselves aloof 
 from European quarrels, and which have brought us 
 heart and soul together to win against Germany. It 
 is not merely to make the world safe for nations of 
 democratic political method; it is to make the world 
 safe for the ten commandments and the Golden Rule, 
 to put down savagery and clear the way for a human 
 society in accordance with principles of justice and 
 charity. 
 
 A larger, nobler goal of manhood has dawned upon 
 
 10 
 
our horizon. We have been content hitherto to let 
 things in general drift, while we made each for our- 
 selves the most cheerful and comfortable place we 
 could, with as large a share as possible of the good 
 things of life, and of course with proper consideration 
 for those personal principles and ideals which bring 
 one happiness in the long run, as well as a decent re- 
 gard for the rights and privileges of our fellowmen. 
 Our manners and methods have been for the most 
 part tolerable, but our purpose and goal have been 
 wrong. Our philosophy has been individualistic, 
 whereas in the future it must be social. We have 
 based our life on the principle of the struggle for ex- 
 istence. Tempered with many amenities from our 
 natural humane impulses as well as from the teachings 
 of ethics and of religion, we have nevertheless held by 
 the principle of the utmost possible for ourselves in 
 the competitive struggle of the world as the main- 
 spring of our life's endeavor. But the old world of 
 competition and war, from which Darwin deduced the 
 doctrine of the survival of the strongest, doubtless with 
 all truth and accuracy, has become impossible. The 
 struggle for existence may have obtained once, and it 
 may be all right for tigers still, but as a philosophy of 
 the men of the future, it is branded by the light of the 
 flaming ruins of Europe as a doctrine of hell. If that 
 is human nature, we must change it. If that is the 
 world, the real and actual world of today, we must 
 build a new world. It does not follow that a biologi- 
 cal law which obtained in the era of the saurians must 
 hold good when man has come to his dominion. We 
 
 11 
 
may have descended from the brutes, but that is no 
 reason why we should stay brutish. Man is also a 
 creator, and in Galilee two thousand years ago there 
 was sketched a model for his work that shall not pass 
 from his heart till all things spoken by the prophets 
 shall be fulfilled. **And I saw a new heaven, and a 
 new earth : for the first heaven and the first earth are 
 passed away." 
 
 The problem of youth, therefore, is not. How can I 
 train myself for the position of largest personal advan- 
 tage in a world of competitive struggle — but rather it 
 is. What can I do to make myself a helpful and effi- 
 cient worker toward the worthier world we must cre- 
 ate? The task is not how to make one's self most suc- 
 cessful as a competitor, but how to develop one's 
 manhood to the greatest efficiency as a social unit. 
 
 The work of the college, accordingly, is to help 
 you grip the problem and work out a solution of your 
 own personal relation to the world's freshly discovered 
 task. You hear a great deal of the increasingly insist- 
 ent call for men and women of scientific training in 
 the industries and commerce of the country. The need 
 of trained workers in the laboratories and draught- 
 ing rooms cannot be supplied. But there is another 
 need not less urgent and still more difficult of supply, 
 that of men and women of mind and soul to under- 
 stand and interpret the new order of things in our 
 world. We are come to a new era. We have been 
 living under the laws of the jungle, and we must learn 
 to live under the laws of God in the great family of 
 man. We must work out and make clear a new con- 
 
 12 
 
stitution for human society on the basis of righteous- 
 ness and justice and mercy. We must have a new 
 philosophy of hfe, based not upon the struggle for 
 existence, but upon the struggle for worthier exist- 
 ence. The wages of selfish endeavor for personal ag- 
 grandizement, such as we all sought for under the old 
 regime, is death : the tightening grip at the throat of 
 Germany proves it. From the war, which at first 
 seemed to furnish evidence of the bankruptcy of 
 Christianity, is coming the revelation that only on the 
 basis of Christian truth, Christian morals, and the 
 Christian principle of life for the life of others, can a 
 stable and decent world be established. 
 
 This conception ought to give life to all our college 
 occupation. A new world is in the making. We 
 stand before the birth of a grander creation than that of 
 the dead and barren stars. A new earth ruled by jus- 
 tice and brotherhood is forming in the throes of war 
 before our eyes. The sign of the Galilean is in the 
 sky for one more victory. All our text books must 
 be re-written. The end of many a tendency and 
 struggle recorded in history has now come into evi- 
 dence, and in the Hght of the issue we must tell the 
 whole story anew. The new ideal of humanity will 
 affect our view of all ancient and modern literature. 
 Political and social science and economics must open 
 new chapters, more important than all which have 
 gone before. Even the natural and physical sci- 
 ences will take on new meaning from the higher 
 and nobler purposes to which their laws and 
 truths will be devoted. There is no institution 
 
 13 
 
which has a more practical and needful function 
 just now than the college which is devoted to the 
 study of the humanities. In the past our work may 
 have seemed at times a bit unreal, and you may have 
 thought that we were holding you back from practical 
 interests of vital moment. But nothing can be of 
 greater moment than the principles and ideals of the 
 manhood which henceforth is to be upon the earth. 
 To work these out together and to establish in our 
 minds the constitution of the world's new day when 
 the lust of the conqueror shall no more devastate 
 the earth and humanity shall unite its efforts, all for 
 the welfare of all, is our college work the coming 
 days and years, and may God grant us in the ful- 
 fillment of the task a zeal and devotion consonant 
 with the nobihty of the ambition. 
 
 Members of the Incoming Class: You begin col- 
 lege work at a time when thousands of your brothers 
 in our great country are making the utmost sacrifice 
 for the flag they love and for the cause of Hberty and 
 right. You can justify life in these pleasant halls and 
 the privileges of academic fellowship at such a time as 
 this only by your best endeavors to make yourselves 
 such men and women as will bless and ennoble the 
 nation they are defending with their lives. There is 
 but one place for every true man and every true 
 woman in this day of peril for our country — under 
 the colors, either at the front, or with Hke devotion, 
 for the country's good, in one of the needful tasks of 
 peace. There is no task more needful than the de- 
 velopment of manhood of the high ideals and the 
 
 14 
 
strength in the execution of them which the new era 
 requires. To that task I charge you through all the 
 coming four years to consecrate yourselves with a 
 devotion worthy of those who represent us where 
 deadly danger lies. 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 015 845 689 8 ^ 
 
 MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE BULLETIN 
 
 Published by the College September, October, November, Decem- 
 ber, January, April and July. Entered as second-class matter at 
 the Post Office, Middlebury, Vermont, under act of Congress of 
 July 16, 1894. :: :: :: :: :: 
 
 Vol. XII, September, 1917. Number 1