UC BERKELEY MASTER NEGATIVE STORAGE NUMBER 99-150.11 (National version of master negative storage number: CU SN99150.11) MICROFILMED 1999 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICE USAIN State and Local Literature Preservation Project Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities REPRODUCTION AVAILABLE THROUGH INTERLIBRARY LOAN OFFICE MAIN LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, CA 94720-6000 COPYRIGHT The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted materials including foreign works under certain conditions. In addition, the United States extends protection to foreign works by means of various international conventions, bilateral agreements, and proclamations. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. University of California at Berkeley reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. Wheeler, Benjamin Ide The abundant life. Benjamin Ide Wheeler. Edited by Monroe E. Deutsch | Berkeley, Calif., 1926 BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD TARGET University of California at Berkeley Library USAIN State and Local Literature Preservation Project Master negative storage number: 99-150.11 | (national version of master negative storage number: CU SN99150.11) FORMAT: BK LEVEL: r ISBN: GLADIS#: 189086A LANG: eng CNTRY: ||| LCCN: 26024530 MOD: 990512/MER ME: Wheeler, Benjamin Ide, 1854-1927. TI: The abundant life. Benjamin Ide Wheeler. Edited by Monroe E. Deutsch IM: Berkeley, Calif., University of California press, 1926 CO: 1p. I, viii p., 2 1, [3]-385 p. front., plates, ports. 23 cm CALL: LD772.W4 MAIN Microfilmed by University of California Library Photographic Service, Berkeley, CA FILMED AND PROCESSED BY LIBRARY PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 94720 DATE: 7/99 REDUCTION RATIO: 9 o 9 5 SV ON 2% Zz Vo Vo I, 7 “4 & al Q LV 4 RIE Vv, 7 \* NBS 1010a ANSI/ISO #2 EQUIVALENT fu wi Oo i jue > a. Oo Q Oo oc Oo = Q I a < c Oo Oo - Oo x a. ke x > ™ ~ = a 25 22 I ll 4.5 2.8 k= Jzs w 12 6.3 7. 10 125 To"1l1 "12 13" 14 16 7| '8| '9 ov ND 4 Do Qe; NX RS SF Y Re QY o° Vv Lx = x] i 2 2 ~ @ BoE =< Z = EC re S 2 < = go : 8 03 XA er eee = 2 Q A Eu de <3 § 2 Y- 8 m ies : wn O spy, Fre] cS & a Z 4 noes eC > om Z, So BM gE EE : = mM Jos BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER DURING HIS PRESIDENCY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA— FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF ABOUT 1913 i .. oood] ®esee ” ®Scee o— It is a pleasure here to record thanks— To the various publications in which the addresses and articles selected for this volume have appeared, for their ready permission to reprint them; and in particular to the University Chronicle (of the Uni- versity of California), in which a very large number of the addresses were first published; To the University of California, which has readily allowed its Press to issue this book; To the loyal and skillful Superintendent of the Printing Office, Mr. Josep W. FLINN; To my colleagues on the Executive Committee, Newron B. Drury, Davip P. Barrows, Morse A. CarrwricHT, ANNIE FLORENCE BrowN, RoBERT G. SproUL, CLARE M. Torrey, IsaBEL H. Jackson, Epwin J. Durr, and MarcoLm W. Morris, for wise counsel and active aid; and To Mrs. Desorar H. CaLkins, whose able assist- ance has been invaluable. A complete bibliography of the writings and addresses of President WaEeLER has been compiled in connection with the preparation of this book, and placed in the Archives Room of the Library of the University of California. Monroe E. DeEuTscH. [ vM1050<0 CONTENTS Inaugural Address COMMENCEMENT ADDRESSES Effective Living (1904) I Bid You Be Patient (1905) The Solvent of Human Sympathy (1907) Earning a Living (1911) Things That Are Worth While (1914) The Last Message (1919) STUDENT LIFE The Abundant Life Is High Scholarship a Promise of Success in Life? .... 102 Student Self-Government Shall Football Be Ended or Mended?....................... 113 TaE UNIVERSITY The American State University The President of a State University Learning and the Republic To Help Find The Way The Liberal Education What the University Aims To Give the Student Interchange of Professors GENERAL ASPECTS OF EDUCATION v PAGE Vocational TIGIINE.............c.ooioioiiciiiniinsniiivsiiinsivensaies 227 America’s Debt to German Education.......................... 229 Greek Mythology and the Child Mind........................ 233 . Travel and BAUAHON.................cccconv isis sisiisisiviasenissin 239 ORTHOGRAPHY... ccc coeniristsinsissnsscinissisr basins TR 241 BELIGION. .........ociniis unit sbastssnanomsabunasusnts ans nstanntsvinsnassssersnatns 257 The Kind of Man for the Modern Ministry ................ 259 THE WONDERS... irisiasnsccrsssnssssbuismmssvussasssnssanssninans 265 INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS. ..........ccoooseiiieiiernssivinsasivensinnsiaannnsn 271 Enforcing the Recognition of Justice............................ 273 Philology In Polities...................... ence csirinns 278 EYe tO IYO... dirs ridin iti isenssnsesninind 282 WeMust BoTriends................cococcciiiiciiiiiinsinimiinn, 287 Significance of the Panama Canal............................ 288 World CHh68 oc... dnb dinisbiibies 293 OFTIERNSEIID. ........cisihrrssismnnrissntsssnmiensionisitsnsmiissioisnsbinsisnrbisse 297 Righteous CitizensShip......................coccbieniuicssisarsiersavrnsirns 299 Our ToWneEIOUSE... .............oc iiss cdisbi sini atmiin saints 304 OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES. ............cocionviinsinnmsssissssuishessintssnras 309 MVIOSSaBBIER ..........oin ide eis iin eee 311 Californias anA Trane... .............iciodveesiniiomminsivinds 313 The Pioneer MOTIEr................coviniivisinminsnnaiesibis 315 The Founders... it rsdesriicasiarstdinsns tivation 317 Benjamin Ide Wheeler Hall..............................cooen, 318 A Message Heard across the Continent... ................... 320 CHARACTERRIZATIONS. .........ccoo0nnimsinsmivnsrecsrmsionssdesnsssassnssiansnine 323 William MeRinley...................c.iniissiicsansinateirisssanars 325 Theodore ROOSBVEIL... .................... ib ieerdsinrssrissasesiase 326 JEIIEE BIYO..........ccoocscnsimsrrasnssnisinsii ms sressratsransrsatsssrssesenr 330 JORM IRIE... cin arts ani sti vnsinsninasianinaes ansnes 330 Charles Kendall Adams..................ooomensiniisnisiinnn 331 David Starr Jordan..........................oceiiiennniionsminnionnier 332 Samuel Hl. Willlay................ccccc imi hinininiinsers sia, 333 CRON Day... er isimarisassaseideimsrares 334 Phoebe Apperson Hearst......................ccccooniiinniinnnnn 335 George Hearst... ........oiiiisinimfiaioniiiinimaresn 337 JANE IC, Naber... ooh itis ssirisseiniisn 338 CRANES TF. DIOR... ccipummsisinissavensssudganion 341 Encene W. Ihlgard.....................ooooiiii iin 341 Coorza HL HIOWISON........................oiooeceeress ctseensesaiovsensns 342 Bernard MIOSES.........................ccoocovemninisossn isons areas 342 Henry Morse Stphens..................ccocn0 cooeininsinenseses iosenens 343 David Prescott Barrows.....................coniivinviiasenssvnnns 346 Jom MM. Eshleman........................cc0 miscniinnissississssvions 347 OUTSIDE ACADEMIC HALLS................coovvmiishsisiiinings ann snis 349 ae ies ll ei 351 The Banker as a Public Servant.................................... 362 Beyond the Missouri River.................cccoonnniiniin, 374 Continuity and Security. ................ccoie cs cismrsinisrrenasan 379 vii ILLUSTRATIONS OPPOSITE PAGE Benjamin Ide Wheeler..................ccccoevnvnieninnnins Frontispiece The University of California in 1899.............................. viii (Photo by O. V. Lange) THe LABrary...........ccoccioniiinnniiniconss thes shen tae save aaa aie 36 (Photo by W. C. Matthews) COMMENCEINBIL DIRY......cserisveisssssersviramerismssmassrasssomssssensnsss 52 (Photo by Berkeley Commercial Photo Co.) A Portion of the Campus in 1919..................................... 116 (Photo by W. C. Matthews) Addressing the University Family....... snr li 182 (Oakland Tribune Photograph) The President's HOUSE....................cociiiiiiinnsbeinusirinhontivein 164 Benjamin Ide Wheeler Hall.............................c.c.cconnn, 180 (Photo by W. C. Matthews) TheCompusfromthe Hills...................................cconiinis 196 (Photo by W. C. Matthews) The Hearst Mining Building ...........................cnuniovsieininens 212 (Photo by Berkeley Commercial Photo Co.) Doctor of Laws, University of California, 1922................ 244 (Photo by Berkeley Commercial Photo Co.) THE OHRAE...............cco oni coi iirias cacti isso ssnsiaesssassntodions suassanitan 260 (Photo by W. C. Matthews) Charter Day, March 23, 1923...................c....cocciinniiininniars 292 (Photo by Berkeley Commercial Photo Co.) A Characteristic GHIMPSE.......................cococosiidesinsinsssinna 308 (Photo by W. C. Matthews) Theodore Roosevelt at the University of California, Charter Day, 1011...................ccci visits ssinsiososi dress 324 (Photo by Berkeley Commercial Photo Co.) Professor Henry Morse Stephens....................................... 340 THE ABUNDANT LIFE FOREWORD To those who have made this book possible the profound thanks of all who love Benjamin Ide Wheeler are due and gladly given, but since they themselves are to be counted in the number of those who love him, they expect, we are sure, neither thanks nor recognition, being quite content to have played a part in perpetuating the memory of the work and words of a great president of a great university. And to the individuals who have fos- tered the plan should be added for particular men- tion the class of 1926 of the University of California, which has very graciously and very touchingly made this volume its parting gift to the University. Nothing could be more significant, nothing more appropriate than that the students whom he so loved should bring him this tribute of affection; and that in honor of the one who built the system of student self-government, rearing it upon the basis of senior responsibility, the seniors of a period remote from his own presidency should make this collection of his utterances their most precious offer- ing to the University they are now about to leave. THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN 1899 AS BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER FIRST SAW IT INTRODUCTION For twenty years Benjamin Ide Wheeler served as president of the University of California. Dur- ing these years great changes occurred in the field of university education; many of them were the inevitable result of altered conditions in the life of the nation and of changes in the conception of a university and, as a consequence, in the composition of the student bodies themselves. Yet it must be conceded that of a considerable number of these developments at one important university President Wheeler was a great part. Because of his many notable contributions to the University of Califor- nia, because of the wide range of his interests, and because of the felicity with which he chose the apt word, his friends deemed it appropriate to select from the long list of his writings and addresses those that best express his ideas in a number of the . fields in which his mind ranged, and gather them together in this volume. #* * * * * Benjamin Ide Wheeler was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1854. His father was the Reverend Benjamin Wheeler, and his mother Mary E. (Ide) Wheeler. Thornton Academy in Saco, Maine, and Colby Academy in New London, New Hampshire, gave him his preparatory training. In 1871 he entered Brown University in Providence, og: ¢ n° THE ABUNDANT LIFE "Rhode Island, duly receiving his A.B. in 1875. His college career was a busy one, marked by partici- pation in student activities as well as by distin- guished success in his college work. He was a mem- ber of his class crew and his class baseball team, and played left field on the Varsity. In his studies he was particularly interested in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the classics; at Commence- ment he was chosen to deliver the classical oration, and his scholarship earned him election to Phi Beta Kappa as well. His fraternity was Alpha Delta Phi. For the four years immediately following his graduation he taught in the Providence High School; at the same time he completed the requirements for the degree of M.A. at Brown (1878). His alma mater called him as Instructor in Latin and Greek (1879-1881) ; during this period he served for a year as a member of the School Committee of the City of Providence, thus uniting, as he did on so many other occasions, the scholar and teacher along with the servant of the community. At this time, aged 27 years, he took two impor- tant steps. On June 27, 1881, he married Amey Webb of Providence, known to many generations of Californians as the devoted mistress of the Presi- dent’s House and the zealous helpmeet of Benjamin Ide Wheeler in his labors for the University. Shortly thereafter young Wheeler and his bride set sail for a stay of four years in Europe; he studied in Leipzig, Jena, Berlin, and Heidelberg, and at the latter University received the degree of Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1885. Several months of travel THE ABUNDANT LIFE 5 and study in Greece followed, and on his return he became Instructor in German at Harvard Univer- sity for a year. Cornell University called him in 1886, and there he taught for thirteen years, first as Professor of Comparative Philology, and later with Greek added to his chair. These years were fruitful ones from the standpoint of scholarship; they also revealed him as a most inspiring teacher. He took a deep interest in the students of Cornell, and the state- ment was made of him: ‘‘Dr. Wheeler has been for years the link between the students and the faculty.”” In the athletic policy of the University he took a great part; he was particularly interested in the crew. At the same time he gave much atten- tion to the Y.M.C.A. and taught large Bible classes. He served as a bond between the town and the University, and also between the alumni and the University. And his interest in politics, both local and state, led him to take part actively in them. His ability as a speaker was already well known. It is no wonder, then, that a man of these qualities should have been judged presidential timber. For the year 1895-1896 he was absent from Cornell, serving as Professor of the Greek Language and Literature in the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. While there—once more reveal- ing two sides of the man—he participated in the first excavations of the site of ancient Corinth and was a judge at the finish for the track sports at the first revival of the Olympic Games. THE ABUNDANT LIFE On July 18, 1899, he accepted the Presidency of the University of California to which the Regents had elected him on June 17, and entered upon the duties of his office on October 3 of the same year. And this office he held until he retired on July 15, 1919, after twenty years of service, and assumed the title of President Emeritus. Most previous presi- dents of the University of California had held office for but brief periods, and when Dr. Wheeler was considering the offer of the post, he was warned that his term would certainly be a short one. On the fifteenth anniversary of his inauguration, he said in this connection: ‘When I came here fifteen years ago I did not expect to be here fifteen years, in the first place because I did not suppose anybody could stay that long. I found out that the average term of the office had been three and three-quarters years, and I was perfectly willing to fall in with the usage.”’ At the present time he and his wife are living quietly in Berkeley in close proximity to the University and to the students in whom his deepest interest has always centered. The most important honor bestowed on him during his presidency was the appointment as Theodore Roosevelt Professor in the University of Berlin (1909-1910). To enumerate the various other honors that came to him during his career would be tedious, but a few may well be mentioned. The degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred on him by Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Illinois College, Dartmouth, Columbia, Kentucky, and California, while both the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 7 University of Athens and Colgate University made him Doctor of Letters. The range of his interests may be shown by a list of a few of his memberships in organizations and on committees: corresponding member of the Kaiserliches Archaeologisches Institut, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vice-President of the Archaeological Insti- tute of America, member of the Plattsburg Training Camp, Chairman of the California Branch of the League to Enforce Peace, Chairman of the Commit- tee on Resources and Food Supply of the California State Council of Defense. His writings have dealt with specific problems in Greek, with questions of comparative philology and linguistics, with Greek religion and history, with education, both in the University and in its general aspects; while in his addresses he has dis- cussed the myriad matters with which the State University has to deal. Probably his best known writings are Dionysos and Immortality (delivered as the Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard University for 1898-1899) and the Life of Alexander the Great (1900). When he came to the University of California, he found an institution of 2600 students, of whom - 1900 attended the colleges in Berkeley; the officers of instruction in those colleges numbered 153. At the time he retired, the University of California contained 7380 students, exclusive of those regis- tered in the Summer Sessions; of this number . 6980 were students at Berkeley. The student body 8 THE ABUNDANT LIFE had, in other words, trebled in numbers during his presidency. During the same period the faculty . had increased to 583 in Berkeley alone, in addition to 416 teaching or engaged in research at other centers. The buildings on the campus in 1899 that were used for instruction numbered twelve in all, seven of them of wood; four of the latter were built as ‘temporary make-shifts’’ in 1898 but are still (1926) in use. At the close of his administration, in addition to minor buildings, the following struc- tures of granite or concrete had been erected as permanent portions of a definite plan of building for the University—California Hall, Agriculture Hall, Boalt Hall of Law, the Campanile, Gilman Hall, the Greek Theatre, Hearst Memorial Mining Build- ing, Hilgard Hall, President’s House, University Library, and Wheeler Hall. President Wheeler brought to the faculty of the University men of the first rank; the names of Jacques Loeb and of Henry Morse Stephens are among those added to the roll of the University during his first few years here. Among the many others that might be named are Wesley Clair Mitchell (of Columbia), William Scott Ferguson (of Harvard), Gaillard T. Lapsley (of Cambridge, England), Joseph Marshall Flint (recently of Yale), Alonzo E. Taylor (of Stanford), George H. Whipple (of Rochester), and Frederick G. Cottrell (of Wash- ington, D. C.), to mention only those no longer connected with the University. To select the names of men of distinction still on the faculty who were THE ABUNDANT LIFE 9 chosen by President Wheeler, is difficult, but the difficulty may be obviated by naming only those who are in the brief list of Faculty Research Lec- turers and have been given this special mark of honor by their colleagues. Those on this roll who joined the faculty during President Wheeler’s administration are: Herbert M. Evans (Anatomy), Herbert KE. Bolton (History), Florian Cajori (Mathematics), Frederick P. Gay (Pathology; now at Columbia University), Charles A. Xofoid (Zoology), Gilbert N. Lewis (Chemistry), George R. Noyes (Slavic Languages), and Rudolph Schevill (Spanish). In this connection may be recalled the words of David Starr Jordan at President Wheeler’s inauguration: ‘‘He [the president of a university] must set its pace, must frame its ideals and choose the men in whom those ideals can be realized. It is through the men he chooses that the university becomes a living person. . .. It is what he can discern and divine in other men that gauges success. It is his instinet to know what the best work of others may be and how he can use it in the fabric he is building.’ In 1899 the University had, besides its colleges in Berkeley, no center for teaching or research save the Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton and the Affiliated Colleges in San Francisco, the latter linked very loosely to the University. Twenty years later two of this group, the Medical School and the Col- lege of Dentistry, had come into very much closer relations with the central institution. But there had also been created the Citrus Experiment Station 10 THE ABUNDANT LIFE at Riverside; the Southern Branch of the University in Los Angeles was just coming into existence; at Davis had been established the University Farm School, in San Francisco the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research, and at La Jolla the Scripps Institution for Biological Research. The expansion of the Summer Session belongs to this period. President Wheeler said in his first report (1898-1900): ‘‘The summer session of the year 1900 represents practically a beginning In summer school work. Then, for the first time, was this work incorporated under general University management. The summer session of the preceding year, 1899, had been attended by 161 students, most of whom were registered in physics or chemistry. Two courses in mathematics, two in history, and one in education completed the list of all that was offered.’”’” In the summer of 1919 there were 4300 students registered in the Summer Sessions con- ducted in Berkeley and in Los Angeles. While University Extension had existed before 1899, still it comprised only a limited number of courses of lectures given by a few members of the faculty and confined practically entirely to San Francisco and Oakland. The present elaborate system with its organization reaching to all parts of the State has been created during Dr. Wheeler’s administration; indeed, Henry Morse Stephens came to the University of California in 1902 to take charge of this work as well as to act as Professor of History. The departments of class, correspondence, and visual instruction, as well as THE ABUNDANT LIFE 11 lectures, have been gradually built up, reaching each year literally thousands of persons. It is, however, on the campus at Berkeley that the most important changes have occurred. The Department of Agriculture numbered ten members all told; by 1919 it had developed many fold both in the number on the faculty and in the various fields represented, as well as in the experimental work and research being carried on and the bulletins “issued for the farmers of the State. Aside from other developments may be men- tioned the creation of the following departments in Berkeley: anatomy, anthropology, architecture, bio- chemistry, household art, household science, hygiene, irrigation, Italian, library science, music, pathology and bacteriology, physiology, Sanskrit, and Slavie languages. But this list does not give a fair idea of the changes, since the work in already existing departments was also greatly enlarged; in some instances a single department, as History and Politi- cal Science, was cleft into three (History, Political Science, and Economics), and the offering of courses was in all departments greatly increased. Those who know something of the University of California will be interested in reading the conclud- ing passage in President Wheeler’s first report to the Governor of the State (November 1, 1900), in which he sets forth succinctly the most pressing needs of the University: | ‘“ Among the needs of the University for the nearer future I will mention the following: (1) Library funds to the amount of $500,000. 12 THE ABUNDANT LIFE (2) A library building suited to modern demands and capable of extension so as to accommodate the library that is certain to be entrusted to the keeping and use of this University. (3) An Alumni hall which shall form the center of the daily social life of the students, alumni, and teachers; the Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania furnishes a good model; it is a for- tunate thought of our alumni that they have under- taken to provide this building. (4) An Art Building, which shall furnish shelter for the objects illustrative of art, archaeology, anthropology, ete. (5) A School of Forestry. (6) A Department of Irrigation. (7) A School of Naval Architecture and Engi- neering. The eminent position which shipbuilding has taken here by San Francisco Bay makes it incumbent upon the University to furnish the best instruction in what has now come to be a character- istic California art. (8) A Department of Music. (9) A Department of Archaeology. It will be necessary, in connection with the Art Building, which will include large archaeological collections, to employ a number of curators, each of whom should be master in some particular field. The work of these various specialists should be united under the general oversight of the incumbent of the Chair of Archaeology. (10) A School of Architecture. The work which is to be undertaken here within the next few years, ie BB (F > \ TW, | 8 | Hy | | | ia THE ABUNDANT LIFE 13 in accordance with the Hearst Architectural Plans, will furnish the best practical opportunity that could be desired for the development of such a school. It is much to be desired that the one who shall be the supervising architect of these buildings should be at the same time the head of the School of Architecture. (11) A laboratory for a Department of Dairy Husbandry. (12) A Department of Physical Chemistry as part of the general department of Chemistry. This would require at the first an assistant professorship only. (13) An instructor or professor in the Art of Speaking, to be connected with the English Depart- ment. (14) Instructors or professors of the Spanish Language and Literature, of the Russian Language and Literature, and of general linguistics. (15) Lectureships and professorships for the School of Commerce.’ When he left the presidency, he could say of these several recommendations of his: (1) The Library appropriation for the purchase of books amounted in 1918-1919 to $25,000, an amount equal to the interest on the hoped-for $500,000. (2) The Library Building had been constructed. (3) The Alumni Hall had not yet been built, but the movement had already been begun to erect such a building as a memorial to Henry Morse Stephens. (4) The Art Building is still wanting. (5) A division of Forestry had been established in the Department of Agriculture. 14 THE ABUNDANT LIFE (6) There is a Department of Irrigation. (7) Instruction in Naval Architecture was offered beginning with the academic year 1918-1919. (8) A Department of Music exists. (9) Instruction in Archaeology is given, but not on the scale President Wheeler had contemplated. (10) The School of Architecture is in existence. (11) A laboratory for the division of Dairy Husbandry had been established at the Branch of the College of Agriculture at Davis. (12) Physical Chemistry is given much attention in the Department of Chemistry. (13) A Department of Public Speaking has been established. (14) There are Departments of Spanish and of Russian, but still no instruction in general linguis- ties. (15) The College of Commerce had largely in- creased its faculty. One very important feature of President Wheeler’s administration was the degree to which individuals made gifts to a State University. These gifts were of the most varied character, and it is difficult to think what the University would be today without them. They demonstrate, moreover, the extent to which the University was thought of as an institution worthy of the support of all and not as one to be cared for solely by the Legislature. The list of the University’s great benefactors must be headed by the name of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, often spoken of as the ‘‘Fairy Godmother of the University,” who gave thoughtfully as well as THE ABUNDANT LIFE 15 abundantly. Among the other benefactors dur- ing President Wheeler’s administration (invidious though it is to select) may be mentioned Jane K. Sather, Elizabeth J. Boalt, Hannah N. Haviland, Mrs. George Williams Hooper, Charles F. Doe, Rudolph Spreckels, Ernest V. Cowell, William Ran- dolph Hearst, Ellen B. and E. W. Scripps, Annie M. Alexander, and M. Theo Kearney. To this list should be added among others the legislatures of the State and its successive Governors who have dealt as generously with the University as the funds of the State have permitted. President Wheeler was the Moses who struck the rock from which these waters flowed. His conception of a University he set forth clearly in his addresses. ‘‘The University,’’ he said once in speaking to the students, ‘‘is a place for the training of life through the intensive practice of methods and acts which represent life best. Its aim is to make the individual life freer, healthier, and more effective for good, and to lift the total life of man in society toward better things. You have a duty therefore towards yourself and a public duty towards society and the state, and to whom much has been given, of him much will be required. Your duty is not under suspension, awaiting the event of your graduation. All this about you here and now is life, and what is good and honorable and seemly in life at large is the standard of what is expected of you here.”” Believing therefore that ‘the University is a place for the training of life through the intensive practice of methods and acts 5 THE ABUNDANT LIFE which represent life best,’’ he quickly saw the desir- ability, nay the need, of student self-government, not as a simple method of handling questions of disei- pline but as an important means of education. And so gradually the investigation and decision on student offenses were passed from the faculty com- mittee to the students themselves. In this plan of student self-government, in which was included the ‘‘honor spirit’’ in examinations, the senior class was selected to bear the main responsibility; senior con- trol, to use President Wheeler’s term, was stressed. And as an organ for the focusing of senior opinion, the regularly recurring ‘‘Senior Singing’’—com- mingled of college songs and yells along with earnest discussion of important problems in student life—played an indispensable part. In the Presi- dent’s Report for 1914-1915 he closes his statement with these words: ‘‘The operation of student self- government in this University has been of such far- reaching advantage to the order of the University community and, what is far more, to the attitude and spirit of the students themselves, that no pains must be spared to devise and recognize a procedure which will insure to the system workableness under the law and avoid any crippling of its freedom and full responsibility.”’ To the students he was indeed always devoted, and in their activities he always took the keenest interest. That interest was both general and indi- vidual, and many a student there is who can recall wise counsel and active aid given him by the Presi- dent at some crisis in his life. He was in effect his THE ABUNDANT LIFE 17 own Dean of Students, and kept in close touch with them in many ways. It was, for example, his usage to select as secretary some recent graduate of promise and ability, who had been a leader in student life and who therefore commanded the con- fidence and respect of the students. He was con- stant in attendance at meetings of student societies. He was never absent from athletic contests, rallies, etc. But—more important than all the rest—he knew students because he loved them, and they instine- tively trusted and loved him. The importance of research in a university he saw clearly, and the development of a great Library as the indispensable laboratory of a scholar was stressed from the very moment of his coming to Berkeley. As a means of providing for the publica- tion of research and thereby stimulating it, the University Press was established and expanded. His administration marks the growth of the grad- uate work of the University, definitely established under the name of the ‘‘Graduate Division.’’ With all the demands made upon his time by an institution growing so greatly in numbers, develop- ing new fields, and taking on new activities in many remote parts of the State, President Wheeler never- theless kept in close touch with the people of Cali- fornia by addressing audiences of many kinds and interpreting the University to them. As he often said: ‘To the people of the State the President symbolizes the University.’ Indeed, in his relation to all the elements making up the University constituency he regarded himself as the rallying-point about which all might gather. 18 THE ABUNDANT LIFE This idea he unfolded in his inaugural address, and it was an important element in his creed to the end of his task: ‘The office of president of an American univer- sity has grown with the development of American conditions into a unique institution. The great uni- versities of the Old World have nothing resembling it. It represents neither the perpetuation of a tradition nor the introduction of an arbitrary inno- vation. The situation has gradually developed it. The necessity of giving the University a representa- tive to its public constituency, whether that constitu- ency take the form of state or sect or community of graduates and friends, and of mediating between the divergent ideals of the supporting constituency and those of the university life, has called this office into being and endowed it with very definite func- tions and extraordinary powers. . . . At the present stage of its development, the office, in demanding sympathy with two widely-sundered points of view, demands almost the impossible and is the most difficult position which American society can call upon a man to fill. All this I have fully considered. None of this have I concealed from myself. I throw myself, Regents, Faculty, students, fully and frankly and trustfully upon your loyal support. Without that I am nothing; with that we can accomplish great things for California, for the University, for the nation, and for the cause of enlightenment among men.’’ Dr. Wheeler came to the University when the small college was about to become the large, inclu- sive University. He shaped its policies, he was the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 19 helmsman. Others contributed much, but that he was in reality directing it, no one could doubt. He came to the University a distinguished scholar; he proved himself a great administrator. He could understand the scholarly needs of the Uni- versity, but also the hopes and aspirations of the students. He could speak before the people of the State and make the University understood. Could we use such words as those with which he so beautifully conferred the degree of LL.D. upon its recipients, we should express this idea, but in far more fitting terms than we can employ: Benjamin Ide Wheeler—You abandoned the life of a scholar, in which you had already attained dis- tinction, to give yourself without stint or reservation to the service of the University of California. You have been a great administrator and a great interpre- ter of the University to the State and no less of the State to the University. In the inevitable word have you embodied your ideas. You have built in stone and concrete your dream of a greater university, you have also created mighty changes in the inner life of the University. But one thing you have won—worth more to you, we are sure, than all the rest—the affection of the sons and daughters of this University, who know that you have always been devoted to them and that, as you said in the first words you uttered on this campus: ‘‘The only thing that is of interest to me in a university is men and women. ’’ Moxgroe E. DEuTscH. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, May 10, 1926. 8; A Hi hy i 3 1g ; di i y a § 4) al i 3 1H PA A A NEE x a am Cary ee RY i in er he rR RR i. er ~ ea - Pe O Z, a x ) Y QQ . 0 = O z ~ i = Z = IT IS GOOD TO BE HERE This address, so well known in the history of the University, was delivered by President Wheeler on the morning of October 3, 1899. A small platform had been erected mear the flag-pole which then stood directly in front of Bacon Hall (not far from the site of the Campa- nile today), and before this the cadet regiment was drawn up. It is significant that this, his first address at the University of California, was delivered to the students. This was the day on which he assumed office, though he was not inaugurated until October 25. Students of the University of California, I rejoice that my first introduction to the University takes the form of an introduction to you. Hereto- fore this University has been to me.-more or less a thing of the imagination: I have known of it in the form of statutes and reports, names and titles, forms and observances; I have seen its admirably edited register; I have seen its honorable governing board in session; I have seen its buildings, its equipment, its mechanism, its gardens and its trees; but now, standing here in the golden sunlight, by its help under this real blue canopy, I look into the faces of the real blue and gold that constitutes the real living University of California. From this hour I know that I am a member in a real living association, 24 THE ABUNDANT LIFE because I am joined in association with men. The only thing that is of interest to me in a university is men and women. As long as I live, I trust I may never be interested in a university of mechanisms, reports, and papers; but only in a university of human beings. It has been a solicitude on my part, lest in enter- ing a presidential office, I might be so absorbed in administrative things, that my own loved work of teaching might be taken from me, and it will be a disappointment to me if in any wise my work here shall separate me from active interest in student affairs. Almost the only consolation I have this morning in entering upon my work is the belief that I am going to know you and to have to do with you intimately ; for all this work of the presidential office is burden and care. It is only done in order that the real thing may be reached, the real object, the bringing forward of a university made of students. I want you to find in me—to believe from the begin- ning and throughout, that you have in me a personal friend. I shall regard my mission here a failure if that is not the case. I want you to come to see me, and come to me as persons. Tell me your names—I beg of you, tell me your names whenever you see me; for whenever I see a man that I have seen before, I am apt to remember his face and to remember a good deal about him—almost everything except his name. So please come up to me and say “My name is ,’’ and if it happens to be Smith, give the initial. Please do not be afraid to come about petty matters, little matters. What interests THE ABUNDANT LIFE 25 you will interest me. And I hope I am going to have time enough to know about your petty affairs. Now there are a great many things that I am moved to say on this occasion. This is a stimulating sight. The golden sunshine coming down in genial, lazy haze, smiling upon the ripened brown of these magnificent hills, reminds me of my beloved Greece. It is more than Hellas that we have here. Greece looked out toward the old oriental world, Berkeley looks out through the Golden Gate to the oriental world that has meaning for today. I should like to talk to you about the glorious future that I discern for this University. I should like to talk to you about the work we have in hand, but in the few moments that I have in this supreme opportunity, I want to speak to you about the one thing that in my idea is fundamental in the life of a university—and that is university loyalty. A university is not a place where you come as empty buckets to the well to be filled. People are going to pump things into you, to be sure, but you are going to pour most of it out again. I believe from my own experience, that after all, we must take to ourselves the consolation that that educa- tive material does us the most good which we forget most entirely. Those things which hover on the superfices of the mind are oftener a stumbling block than a help. It is what goes over into spinal mar- row, what goes over into real life that makes us; and what we are likely to gain from our university life is not bits of knowledge, is not maxims and rules for getting this or that; but after all it is this one thing Aa AR ATR 26 THE ABUNDANT LIFE that we talk so much about and understand so imperfectly—it is character. The men you tie to are men of character. As I grow older I come less and less to respect men of brilliancy and to tie to men for their characters. And what men are going to get out of their university life is not what is pumped into the pail, but what goes over into life. And it comes not only from the lecture room, but from association with the best minds they find in the faculty, alumni, and student body—association with the whole life and character of the University. This University is a living thing. The real univer- sity is alive. Blood pulses through its veins. The spiritual life of the men who have gone before is in it. It is not a thing of buildings, of statutes, of courses—it is a thing of life. What you will get out of this University that is worth your while, that will stand by you, is what you will get out of association with it as a living thing. Therefore I say we are not a mechanism to furnish people with equipments; we are alive; we have a heart. And to that family life I charge you, students of the University of California, be loyal. It is worth your while. It is your duty. Be loyal to the University; be loyal to all its parts. Those who take the misunderstandings and quarrels of the inside to ventilate them in the out- side world are traitors to us. We are a family. You cannot make a university out of minds and brains. In a university, as elsewhere in the world, heart is more than head, love is more than reason. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 27 Hold fast to that love for the University. Stand strong, shoulder to shoulder, when you do its work. Let every man according to his ability do what the University asks of him, and let every man do in support of the other man’s work what he can. Let the quarter-back pass the ball, let the line stand solid, let the men guard the half-back when he comes racing round the end. Let us stand together. Let us have at the University of California what we call in football ¢‘good interference.’ This University shall be a family’s glorious old mother, by whose hearth you shall love to sit down. Love her. It does a man good to love noble things, to attach his life to noble allegiances. It is a good thing to love the church, it is a good thing to love the state, it is a good thing to love one’s home, it is a good thing to be loyal to one’s father and mother, and after the same sort it is good to be loyal to the University, which stands in life for the purest things and the cleanest, loftiest ideals. Cheer for her; it will do your lungs good. It has done me good to hear your cheer ringing over the campus. My little boy (five or six years old), who is already a loyal Californian, asked me, when I started to come out here, if I would please instruct him in the California yell; and I to my regret was unable to give it to him in the original. He looked at me and shook his head, entertaining some serious doubts whether I had any right to be the President of the University of California; and I shared his doubts. But we had not been in San Francisco many hours when the yell was learned. 28 THE ABUNDANT LIFE And so I say cheer for her; it will do your lungs good. Love her; it will do your heart and life good. Mr. F. G. Dorety, President of the Associated Students, spoke briefly on their behalf. After hearty cheers for the President, he rose again and said: It has been good to be here. I thank you, I thank you, I thank you a thousand times for your cor- diality and welcome. May we meet together in the future often, to consult, and arouse our enthusiasm together. Now it has been good to be here and we will go unto our homes in peace. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 29 THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS The inauguration occurred on the afternoon of October 25, 1899, on the athletic track, then situated in what 1s now called West Field; a temporary platform was erected at one end, and here the exercises took place. The speakers, in addition to Dr. Wheeler, were Dr. Jacob Voorsanger, Regent A. 8. Hallidie, President David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, President Daniel C. Gilman of Johns Hopkins University, who had been President of the Uni- versity of California from 1872 to 1875, and the Reverend Horatio Stebbins. Governors, Members, Friends of the University of California: You have laid upon me a heavy task; you have entrusted me with a high responsibility; you have crowned me with opportunity. A con- sciousness of my own limitations, which time and experience have made reliable and definite, would have forced the gleam of opportunity into the thick shadow of the task, had not your hearty confidence, which placed both in my way, called faith to the seat of distrust. As it were in a night a college has grown here into the dimensions of a university. A torrent- influx of students has overwhelmed and burst the barriers of organization, equipment, funds, and shelter. A mass of rapidly developing professional schools drawn beneath the name and aegis of the university has become attached to its organization 30 THE ABUNDANT LIFE by bonds of varying strength, but all ill-tested and uncertainly set. The schools of the State have been recently brought into a close connection with the University, a connection which is still tentative, but which looks towards a fine unity of action, toward a common aim. To intensify the stress and con- fusion, all things have happened at a period when throughout the land the whole mechanism of uni- versity education is in progress of readjustment and adaptation to larger work. Shifting, experi- ment, and change are on every hand: nowhere have settled norms been reached. All has happened, too, at a time when the state universities of this country are passing through a gradual change in the form of their government regarding educational and internal affairs. The earlier conception of the rela- tion of the governing board to the regulation of these internal affairs, fashioned after the analogy of the government of other state institutions, has been seen to place the state universities at such decided disadvantage to those of private endowment that the sound principle of internal self-government in things spiritual has come steadily more and more to acceptance. All this has come into being—the growth of the student list, the development of the professional schools into university stature, the consolidation of school standards under university cooperation, the liberalization of the state universi- ties, the disturbance of general educational tradi- tions—all this has come into being during a period at whose climax the unfolding of national and inter- national history has suddenly laid the burden of a 1 8A gy i i Ef a | ] | £ 8 | THE ABUNDANT LIFE 31 great responsibility upon the shoulders of Califor- nia by setting it in the center instead of at the confines, by putting it in the fore rank for the great commercial, industrial, and social conflict that is to absorb the thought and effort of the twentieth cen- tury. All this it is which heaps the task, all this it is which opens the gate of opportunity. If all the pressing needs of the University were marshalled in array, long would be the list. It will be enough if some few which force themselves, on brief observation, most obtrusively to attention, be presented as examples. The enormous and constant increase in the number of students has been proving in recent years a positive embarrassment to the institution. As tuition, in accordance with the un- mistakable desire of the State, is free to all, this increase brings no corresponding relief to the income. If the University work is to be maintained on its present level of efficiency, greatly increased supply of funds for the plain instruction must be supplied from some source, private or public. The provision of buildings and equipment has lagged far behind the need, and only temporary expedients have in recent years been adopted. So thorough-going is the need that nothing short of entire rebuilding and equipping can now be pro- posed. The wisdom and foresight of one whose life and strength and means have been unreservedly consecrated to the service of the public good have provided a plan of building, which constitutes the one frank and competent recognition of the obliga- tions laid upon this institution. All else has been 32 THE ABUNDANT LIFE tentative, halting, doubting; this sees with the open eye of faith and the certain vision of conviction. Among the demands for the internal develop- ment of the University, none rank in my estimation with those of the library. The present collection has been made with great skill and sobriety. By universal consent it contains little waste material. But it is far too small and incomplete in any depart- ment to serve the purposes of advanced study and research. In their isolation from the Eastern store- houses of learning our scholars require and deserve more than ordinary resources of this kind. If the best men are to be brought here and kept here, we must be able to assure them first of all that the library will afford them means to keep their learn- ing abreast of the times, and that their coming to California shall not mean the suicide of creative scholarship. A library located here has also in more than one regard special opportunity and obligation. We are tangent to the domain of the farthest world-half, of which the western world knows yet but little, but of which it will be called upon in the coming cen- turies to know much. Here on the borderland as in Alexandria of old must be garnered the accumulated lore of the East as well as the West. We are located, furthermore, on the soil which Spain took as its portion of the New World. Now that her heritage has, in large measure, fallen to us, we are bound to collect and establish here—and to do it before it is too late—all that records or can illustrate the history and fortunes of the Spanish THE ABUNDANT LIFE 33 occupation of North and South America. Instead of seventy-five thousand volumes there ought to be today three hundred thousand; instead of an income for purchases of four thousand dollars there ought to be thirty thousand. The library force is seriously overworked, the building is overcrowded. A fire- proof building, equipped with seminary rooms on the most generous scale, must be provided within the next three or four years. The newly founded school of commerce enters upon a wide and hopeful field. We have suddenly become an exporting nation instead of a home- market nation. Material civilization is extending in terms of iron, and we must supply the world with its mechanisms and with many of the products of its mechanisms. The study of international trade conditions and of foreign needs and markets be- comes, therefore, a first interest of the American commercial world. Here of all places in the land is the chosen spot for the training of those who are to be the intelligent guides and emissaries of trade, whether as trade agents of private interests or as consuls who represent, through the general govern- ment, the public interest. Here can be collected to best advantage data concerning the condition of markets in the Asiatic world, and here can be taught to best advantage the manners, customs, social con- ditions, civilization, and languages of that world. The peculiar situation and condition of Cali- fornia makes certain definite demands upon this University, which it cannot afford for one moment to neglect. In the field of mining engineering we 34 THE ABUNDANT LIFE must of course lead the world. In agriculture we must have the unquestioned best, and, particularly in the applications of agriculture to pomology and horticulture, we must have the means of very de- cided extension and development beyond what is now provided. The dependence of California, with its long periods of drought, upon a reliable water supply for mining and irrigation, and its exposure during the rainy season to fearful losses by floods, demand that without delay the wit of the hydraulic engineer be directed to the problem of storing the flood waters of the State. It is a peculiar problem, and the University must guide accumulated capital and public beneficence to the solution of it. Not only the naked hills of California, but the whole desert western slope of the continent, call for special study of the forest problem. A school of forestry is an earnest and instant need. The waters that sent forth the Oregon deserve a school of naval engineering. The attention of the national govern- ment, which now has a Pacific as well as an Atlantic to care for, should be directed toward this need. But what it does can be done in codperation with the University as an already established institution, and through development and differentiation of the existing courses. The uncertain relation of the various professional schools to the body of the University will demand careful attention in the immediate future. The Uni- versity cannot permanently lend the use of its name to departments or institutions over which it has no real control. The whole problem is not so much THE ABUNDANT LIFE 395 one of legality, however, or one of control, but one of thorough cooperation and of the prevention of duplication in academic work. If I am not led astray by brief impressions, the tone and instinet of the people of California prom- ises for the future a strong development of artistic taste and aesthetic demand. Signs of the presence of a strong bent toward literary art are unmistak- able, and nowhere do I see more promise for the rise of a distinctive type of literary art than here in the freshness and vigor and warmth and alertness of the Pacific Coast life. This movement it belongs to the University, already rich in excellent tradi- tions of literary production, to stimulate and lead. Among all the arts, that of architecture will, by common consent, be allowed to represent Califor- nia’s greatest present lack. When the University shall have once begun to teach this art by good example, it may also and must undertake to teach by good doctrine as well. Under the stimulus of museums of archaeology and art already planned, and whose equipment is already in generous purpose and act begun, and through the cooperation in practical training of the Art Association and Institute, we have definite hope and prospect of great things in the field of art education. Among the opportunities of lesser endowments none offer more immediate hope of appreciative reception and general usefulness than the establish- ment of lectureships which, under an annual in- come of $1000 to $2000, should call into temporary 36 THE ABUNDANT LIFE residence at the University the ablest scholars of the world. Both the isolation and the essential cosmo- politanism of this academic community demand and suggest such provision. The creation of traveling fellowships, which would allow the best of our students the opportunity for travel and study abroad, would prove a stimulus to our own work and supplement powerfully that equipment of our University which aids its graduates to climb the ladder of professional attainment. So the list of my examples draws itself out into unseemly length. The need is so vast—but it is a genuine opportunity that fashions the need! We appeal to a great people, noble and large-hearted as their domain is blessed and rich. Mountain-side and sea, soil and sunshine have dealt bountifully with them. The mines, the harvests, and the paths of the great deep have yielded to their zeal abundant tribute. They are liberal men, and the liberal man in the fulness of his heart deviseth liberal things. Only the best has, in the past, been good enough for California, and we propose now for the institu- tion which shall represent and lead its higher life, nothing but the best. If watchfulness and incessant care can effect it, not a dollar shall be wastefully expended, but if the large view can hold the meager and the mean at bay, not a dollar shall go for what is inferior or less than the best. But with all equipments and endowments and schedules, the University that we shall build here shall be and must be a thing of life. It will be, first of all, a continuation of the life of the University «3417 ALISY3IAINN 40 NIDAXO IHL ONIA3IA,, Advyd8IT FHL THE ABUNDANT LIFE 37 that stands here now. Not one drop of the life-blood of those who here, in wise forethought and loving toil, built their lives into the structure, can go to loss! The devotion and faith of those far-seeing men who laid the foundations of the College of Cali- fornia and the foundations of the University, the genial wisdom and nobility of him under whose leadership the pilgrim scholars came from Oak- land to Berkeley, the unselfish service of those who since then have taught and led, preéminently the quiet, sound prudence of him whose administration during the last nine years has leveled and prepared the ground for new building—all these as life elements are part and portion of the institution, and will unfold their branches and yield their fruit through all the ages. The University shall be a thing of life, too, in that it shall be a life-bond between those who together teach and study here. Between teacher and taught there is and can be in a true university no fixed boundary line. We are all students; we are all learners; we are all teachers. All teaching which does not deal in fresh, new visions of truth, truth seen and felt each time it comes to expression as a new and vital thing, animating the whole personality of him who sees and who summons the vision to the thought of others, is a dead and hopeless exercise. Education is transmission of life. The supreme purpose of the University is to provide living beings for the service of society—good citizens for the state. Between research and instruction there can be no fixed boundary line. Vital grasp upon new truth, 38 THE ABUNDANT LIFE the perpetual attitude of discovery must animate every work. Between the various forces and instru- mentalities for uplifting life and society which this community provides there can be no barriers set. The students of the ancient literatures and of the modern literatures, of the humanities and of the sciences, of the arts and of the handicrafts, are all working toward a common end under the inspira- tion of a common spirit. They are all seeking to give life perspective and power by delivering it from slavery to ignorance and to the rule of thumb. So, too, Berkeley and its sister university at Palo Alto, represent a common cause, and will labor together for a common end. We welcome the aid of this stout helper and we will share with it the work according to the human law of mutual helpfulness. In the internal regulation of the university order there can be in the last analysis no fixed boundary line between the governing and the governed. The age of paternalism in university government is well- nigh past. The rules and decrees of faculties which do not, in the long run, commend themselves to the best sense of the student public, I have found in my experience are probably wrong; they will be surely in the long run nugatory. Student bodies are today practically self-governing. In a healthfully organized university, the rela- tions between the faculty and the president, in his capacity as member of the university, should tolerate no barriers. In the real university life, the presi- dent must be a teacher among teachers, a colleague among colleagues, and the spirit of cooperation, not THE ABUNDANT LIFE 39 the spirit of authority, must determine their work together. The educational policy of the university must arise from within, from the body of teacher- colleagues, and not be imposed from without by either president or governing board. Leaving aside the conception of the university as a business organ- ization, the real university must be a family life in which loyalty of each member to the whole shall be the divine inspiring breath. The office of president of an American university has grown with the development of American con- ditions into a unique institution. The great univer- sities of the Old World have nothing resembling it. It represents neither the perpetuation of a tradition nor the introduction of an arbitrary innovation. The situation has gradually developed it. The necessity of giving the university a representative to its public constituency, whether that constituency take the form of state or sect or community of grad- nates and friends, and of mediating between the divergent ideals of the supporting constituency and those of the university life, has called this office into being and endowed it with very definite functions and extraordinary powers. Many of us in loyalty to the older conception of the university bond have deplored this development, but few who have come fully to appreciate the difficulty of harmonizing the university to the demands of its constituency have disputed the necessity. The presidency is today the medium of communication between the two main elements which give the university life and being. The incumbent of the office, as holding a dual 40 THE ABUNDANT LIFE relation, is not only subject to misunderstanding and to the consequent and common charge of duplicity, but is placed in a position that is frankly untenable except with the full confidence and loyal codperation of faculty and regents alike. At the present stage of its development, the office, in demanding sym- pathy with two widely-sundered points of view, demands almost the impossible and is the most difficult position which American society can call upon a man to fill. All this I have fully considered. None of this have I concealed from myself. I throw myself, Regents, Faculty, students, fully and frankly and trustfully upon your loyal support. Without that I am nothing; with that we can accomplish great things for California, for the University, for the nation, and for the cause of enlightenment among men. Full in the face of many difficulties and many- needs, but in the presence of an inspiring hope, in clear conviction of my own shortcomings, but in consciousness of a readiness, loyally and unselfishly, with such strength as I have, to serve a public cause, I now assume, with full sense of the responsibility it involves, the headship of this institution. I will, in dealing with the various bodies that constitute it, consult frankness rather than tact. I will value plainness of speech more than flattery. I will not, God helping me, be tempted myself to use, nor will I suffer anyone else to use, the University for the advancement of personal interest or ambition. Here in this presence I pledge myself, with all I am of body, mind and heart, to be dedicated to the service THE ABUNDANT LIFE 41 of the University of California; its interests, so far as I can discern them, shall be, under truth, the supreme guide of my official action. Governors, members, alumni of the University of California, let us all today join hands and hearts, and here by the flaming house altar of our loyalty, in high enthusi- asm for humanity and in the fear of God, dedicate ourselves together in holy covenant to the service of this University and the cause it represents. And may the Spirit which putteth wisdom into the heart of man guide us and the blessing which maketh rich abide with us forever. nn £2 2] xn = ~ A AO < fe Z = = 2 Q Z = = > Oo Q EFFECTIVE LIVING Delwered at the Greek Theatre, Berkeley, to the gradu- ating class on May 18, 1904. Members of the graduating classes of all the colleges of the University of California: You have come to this day by many paths. Hundreds of different teachers have taught you. You have fol- lowed various courses of study, variously framed out of the most various subjects of human querying and research. The educational theories according to which these different courses are guaranteed to different minds run the whole gamut from the baldest practical to the vaguest ideal, and claim every goal from the winning of bread to the saving of souls. You will be labeled today with various alphabetic combinations and will address yourselves forthwith to still more various pursuits. But with all the variety, one thing is common to you all. You are all human beings with one life apiece to use. As my time is brief, and especially as this com- mon factor counts for infinitely more than all the factors of differentiation put together, I shall use this supreme moment to speak of nothing but the common factor: one life apiece. You have one life to use; how can you make it count for the most and best? That is the question 46 THE ABUNDANT LIFE which must be with you today; and if it is not, it is time it were. I cannot provide an answer in the form of a standard recipe. If I could, it would be of no use. Every man must make his own, and every man must find within himself the will to apply it. But I think I know some of the ingredients of the recipe, and these I will not withhold from you. They are mostly simple, everyday, household materials, common as water and salt, and the tale of them must be plain and unembellished. Effective living is largely a matter of will. Some of you are quicker-witted than others; some are blessed with a superior memory; some excel in gifts of reasoning—in power to hold the line of continu- ous thought; some are better looking than others; your monthly allowances from home are not all the same. According to many considerations such as these you have seemed during your college days to differ from one another, and according to them you have been in the habit more or less consciously of classifying yourselves into grades. Ten years from now you will be thoroughly reclassified. Twenty-five years hence that classification will have crystallized into permanent form and be practically unalterable. And many who are first shall be last! In this new grading which life will give, the deter- mining element will be personal strength of will. What each one of you is to be in life will depend chiefly on what you will to be. It has been found in the history of every college class that a certain number of those whose scholarship has been poor turn out to be successful men—and a certain number THE ABUNDANT LIFE 47 of high students prove failures. So far as my experience goes, it is on both sides the will that is in play. The fact is that good scholarship in college is more a testimony of self-control and the power to force one’s self to do duty than it is to brains; and this is really the reason why the great propor- tion of the successful men come from the upper half of the college classes. The thing above all others that gives a man success is his grip on himself. It is his self-steering power. Will is keel and rudder —whereby the craft can cross currents and eye the wind—whereby it can go where it planned to go, and not merely drift on the currents of the Zeitgeist and be driven about by the fickle winds of opinion or the gusts of impulse and wrath. But on the other hand it must be remembered that stubborn- ness is no evidence of the real strength of the will. Stubbornness is merely a stranded log painted to resemble a steam yacht. It is no evidence of strength of character to be in general against things. On the contrary, it usually indicates a lack of creative energy coupled with envy toward those who do possess it. The best way to oppose a bad thing is to nominate a good thing for its place. Negation is poor business at the best, but pre- eminently for human beings trained as you have been, to lead, to enlighten, to upbuild. My advice to you is: Get into the world’s work with good cheer and tug and pull and help. Keep the traces taut, and save the breeching for emergencies. 48 THE ABUNDANT LIFE If you cannot say anything good of a fellow-man, in general keep silent. People are mostly good, especially if you treat them as such. Every human being is a composite—sometimes a crude conglom- erate, of all kinds of goodnesses and badnesses. It will make life infinitely more useful if you address yourself to the goodnesses rather than to the bad- nesses. This world of human lives into which you enter may seem to be a fixed and definite thing determined from outside yourself, but that is not so. It is what you make it. If it faces you with somber scowl, it is reflecting your mood. To the smiling heart it smiles in return. Your world is within your own soul; your empire is within your own will. This is your one graduation day, and you will make it a day worthy of its singleness, if you each one here and now summon your strength and pledge your vow to take this world of yours in hand firmly and courageously and in high faith, and to make it a sunny world full of good cheer and useful work. Refuse to count any human being your enemy, bear no grudges, engage in no feuds. Life is but one, and that too short. There are great and high things waiting for you to do; let the petty things go. Men are a mixture of good and bad; lay hold on the good and let the rest go. The world can never be lighted by purging out darkness, but only in the one old- fashioned way of letting the light shine in. Your University sends you forth to carry the light. The life of will is a life of work. Effective living comes of doing, of shaping, of creating, of building. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 49 Let us go to our work. There is no use waiting for the big things to do. We do not even know for sure what the big things are. The widow who brought her two mites to the treasury gave more than they all. If there are any ‘‘big’’ things, they are prob- ably those that lie next our door—namely our duty. The great thing is that we get to our work while it is yet day, and stay at it. Some people stop after every achievement to admire themselves and to cele- brate the event—and so lose the advantage of the acquired momentum. After routing the enemy the thing to do is to pursue him, not to hold a feast. Neither is it necessary to stop in the midst of one’s work to look for results. Plod ahead and the results will take care of themselves. There is nothing so vain as to manufacture artificial results. This is just what people are doing who push themselves instead of attending to business, who gamble instead of earn, who seek position by influence and ‘‘pull’’ instead of by work. All these seek to get what does not belong to them; what they therefore cannot naturally use; what will therefore either escape them or turn and rend them. You cannot found a genuinely effective life on anything but genuine hard work. You can cheat the world for a while by false motions, but it will find you out sooner or later, and the rotting of your own character will find you out sooner still. This world into which you are entering seems at first glance to tolerate a good deal of fake and tinsel, but it is a wise old world after all, and its deep foundations are laws just, irrefragable, and eternal. cama RN: Sm os PR pom he A o0 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The men and women it wants for its service, and the ones it will crown with its awards, are those who work patiently with head and hand, who know duty, who love the truth, who keep contracts, and who stay put. And now the common mother of you all stands ready to give you her blessing and bid you farewell. Your work calls, and it is time you were off. Go then, and know as you go that whatever befalls you of good or ill befalls the home that nurtured you, and stirs a heart that loves you. Go, having with you each that one life; go, and sell it dear. THE ABUNDANT LIFE I BID YOU BE PATIENT Delivered at the Greek Theatre, Berkeley, to the grad- uating class on May 17, 1905. When an army has captured the enemy’s camp, it is better not to fall upon the spoil, but to continue falling upon the enemy. When a man has achieved something, it is better not to stop for congratula- tions, but to move on. The achievement is to be treated as so much gathered headway, and the moment of victory is the moment of opportunity. Stopping to look at one’s self means loss of momen- tum, and in the race of life it is at any given time momentum more than distance that yields the reckoning; for in the things of the spirit it is tension and quality not weight and quantity that count. The leading runner in the dash dare not turn to watch his antagonist without periling the victory. Eyes were with purpose set in the front of heads, and they that make for the mountains must waste no time in gazing back toward the cities of the plain or measuring the way they have passed. Salt is good, but salt is the pillar and emblem of the static, not the strenuous life. Remember Lot’s wife. They that really run the race, they that really live the life, set their eyes on the goal, and press on toward the prize of their high calling. THE ABUNDANT LIFE Commencement day marks a beginning rather than an end. The ship has made the run down the harbor and is now going out over the bar. The diplomas are not awards, they are your clearance papers. The college course fitted the ship, towed you down the harbor, and gave you your bearings. Now spread your own sails, get out your sextants, and peel your weather eye. And one word further: much as we shall miss you, we cannot withhold from you the urgent advice to quit sight of harbor and lighthouse and land with all speed, and make for the open sea. The sooner a man learns that only what one gets for himself is really one’s own, the better. This con- sciousness of absolute self-responsibility, this sure knowledge that one’s fate is at the certain mercy of one’s own acts and choices brings with its first unfolding the appalling lonesomeness of the mighty deep—alone with one’s fate and one’s power to con- trol it; but until one has thus been once alone, he has never yet been once a man. You have heard good advice already to the full; you have had your minds made up for you already too long. You have now got to decide for yourselves, and having decided take for yourselves the consequences. You will still, if you are wise, collect from those who have had experience of life various guidances and advices, but they will be only the data for the solution of a problem, which is after all your problem. After you have assembled the data, you will have to decide yourself. You cannot, if you are to be strong, flit from one adviser’s solution to that of another, and «09 ISNW NOA NIHM ‘dn SI IWIL IHL ‘NIVNATHD AW ‘MON any,, AVA LNIW3IDNIWWNOD THE ABUNDANT LIFE 93 finally settle upon one of them. You must create, as a new creation of your own, your own solution. The real universe in which these souls of ours live is not made of materials and mechanisms, but is created clean and fresh in the deliberate choices of mind and will. You make your world as surely as the moulder’s hands fashion clay. You can rely on no other person, however near and true, to make it for you. Every strong man who has achieved the great successes of life will surely tell you that at one and another of the crises of his life he has won his victory by acting independently of, if not directly counter to the advice of every counsellor. It is only through the valley and the shadow of the almightly loneliness of personal responsibility that any man has won the eternity of character and strength. And now you set forth on your long voyage. It is a long unity. Every part belongs to the whole. Every mistake will count in the final balance, and so will every success; and both mistakes and suc- cesses will roll up by compound interest. In terms of the total result you will find that the patient doing of duty will count more than the brilliant strokes of wit. It is patience, patience, and yet again more patience that you will need; for your life is one long account, and you must give compound interest time in which to do its perfect work. Some one of the class will report after the first year a stately salary or a brilliant opening in business. Respice finem. I would rather have the chance of some other one who is quietly doing day’s work. After fifteen o4 THE ABUNDANT LIFE or twenty years that other will forge to the front with his steadily accumulated stock of sound reputa- tion and public confidence. I tell you it is patience you will need; patience to do the little things thoroughly and well; patience to keep you digging on your own claim, to keep you at work on what comes next to your hand, to keep you from skipping over to glittering deceits beyond; patience to hold you to the gaining of results by processes that naturally produce them, and the winning of success by the plain and simple deserving of it. The man who seeks a position by the use of the vulgar thing vulgarly denominated ‘‘influence’’ and by assem- bling endorsements from men who do not know him, the man who seeks business and conciliates ‘‘stand- ing’’ by joining societies he has no inner use for, and wearing buttons his coat has no outward use for, the man who covets an office he has no preparation or fitness for, the man who hastens to get rich by methods that do not naturally create wealth, each and all of them are drawing cheques with a false signature; they sooner or later will be found out, and society will in one way or another return their paper stamped ‘‘no funds.’’ The trouble with all such men is lack of moral patience, and this great immorality of impatience has its ultimate source in the great irreligion, whose devotees consume each day as if it were the whole of life, and whose creed distrusts the power that makes for righteousness in the moral order of the world. I bid you be patient with the divine patience. The way is long, the goal is far, but righteous toil 18 never vain. THE ABUNDANT LIFE THE SOLVENT OF HUMAN SYMPATHY Delwered at the Greek Theatre, Berkeley, to the grad- uating class on May 15, 1907. There have been many words of advice and admonition spoken to you here in these four years, and now I would I had the gift to speak one last word which, fitly suited to all your various needs, might set the seal of effectiveness upon all that you have heard. But that cannot be. It may, however, be that you will permit the weight of the occasion and the presence here of parents, friends, and teachers to lend what I shall say a larger meaning than any forms of thought conveyed in scanty forms of speech are competent to bear; for it shall be the heart of your alma mater that out of a deep concern speaks to you today, and not an official’s voice. You are bending forward today ready to start in the runner’s race. What you have been doing for four years means getting into condition and getting the pace. We hope that most of the training we have been giving you has been real running on a real track, and not mere study of pictures of runners, or of diagrams of the track, or of printed rules about the way to run. But however you were trained, the time for that is over; the starter’s pistol is in the air; in a moment you will be off; it is your race and you will have to run it for yourself; 56 THE ABUNDANT LIFE coaching from the sidelines might as well be barred; we shall sit on the bleachers, to be sure, and cheer, but you had better not listen much to either the coaching or the cheering; set your eyes ahead, and run your own race for your life. Before you start, however, I have, as is the trainer’s wont, one last admonition to give. It is not the whole doctrine, for there is not time for that, even in summary, but just one tenet thereof—one point which the solicitude of the moment some way urges to the front, one point through which may speak the total fervor of many desires in your behalf. | Your education has been in considerable part a training in the power to comprehend the thoughts and catch the point of view of others, whether of those older and wiser than you, or of men of other times, or other conditions, or even of your compeers and colleagues. Heaviest it is of human tasks to learn to see things as the other fellow sees them; but you have missed the largest value of your train- ing if through it you have not acquired some added suppleness of mind and heart to see the world from others’ eyes, to think their thoughts with them, to measure the weight and meaning of their motives and desires. At least half the total effort of education is expended toward this end. Reading, literature, history, social and political science, and philosophy make this their direct goal. The true interpretation of literature or the appreciation of any other form of human art, sculpture, painting, or music, is a process of entering into spiritual THE ABUNDANT LIFE ov accord by the solvent of human sympathy. Even the plain acts of writing and reading which consti- tute the formal basis of letters and learning repre- sent man’s effort to come into touch with men of other days and other places, and the first invention of these arts marked the longest forward leap in the history of human civilization, just as the acquiring thereof in the experience of the single human indi- vidual marks his most distinguished liberation from slavery to present time and present place. He that reads has burst the fetters of time and space. He that cannot may commune only with those whom his voice can reach and his ears can hear. The whole matter of letters and learning, from simple reading and writing up to the interpretation of literature and history of thought, is a warfare against the prejudice of tribe and cult and village. It is one long course of liberation from narrowness, one long unfolding into world-sympathy; for that after all is the truth that shall make you free. But entirely apart from the subject of study, your education has tended toward the encouragement of sympathy through the bare fact that it has pro- ceeded by social groups—in the classroom, in the clubhouse, on the athletic field, and on North Hall steps. One who has been sundry years housed, fed, and taught within a mass of active-minded young folk drawn together from various places and con- ditions is likely to have acquired the impression that there are possible points of view beside his own, and having acquired that first essential of human- ism, he may be regarded as well on his way toward 28 THE ABUNDANT LIFE a liberal education; no matter what he has for- gotten, no matter what he has remembered. The ability to assume the others’ point of view is the most valuable equipment that an education can give you; without it all the knowledges are as a tinkling cymbal. It surely is the all-important part of your equipment, if you are to be a teacher. The difference between a poor teacher and a good teacher is this, namely, that one is setting forth his own knowledge, the other is ministering to the needs of his pupil. The good teacher starts with the pupil, the poor teacher eternally revolves about himself. The difference is like that between the Copernican and the old Astronomy. If you are to be a lawyer you will succeed or fail largely in terms of the same discrimination. An attorney is indeed historically a person dramatized in the role of his client, and the judicial mind is, in the first instance, the one capable of entering frankly and fully into the thought and feeling of each litigant in turn. There is no walk of life in which this power of sympathy is not the prime test. We are human beings; and human animals are social animals. The ultimate test of efficiency is always a social test. You may think, if you are to be a physi- cian, that you can treat disease according to recipes in handbooks and reactions in test tubes, but you will find out the most of your problems are not chemical, but human. The good family physician is the one who knows each patient by himself as a distinct entity and takes the patient into account as an entirety even when he seems to ache only at one THE ABUNDANT LIFE 29 spot. Otherwise we might as well replace the physician with a piece of mechanism, and simply drop our symptoms into a slot-machine, and draw out a prescription. We are first and foremost social beings; we are animals of the pack. And the more we try to draw away into the life of rational individualism the stronger do we feel at times the pull of reaction toward our real and native estate. We cannot sep- arate ourselves too far therefrom without grave risk. We have got to share our lives with others in order to have them normal. Ultra-individualism means isolation; it is good as a corrective or a stimulant, but it is not good as a steady food. The plain fact is that we are members one of another and that we are not living in accordance with the nature of things—that is, we are not living in accordance with the facts, if we think only our own thoughts, and sit nowhere ever except upon the lonesome throne of our own outlook. Hatred between men, hatred between classes, hatred between peoples, represents always this stubborn unwillingness to get over onto the other hilltop and see how the plain looks from there. Your call is unto larger and better things. THE ABUNDANT LIFE EARNING A LIVING Delivered at the Greek Theatre, Berkeley, to the grad- wating class on May 17, 1911. It is foremost in the thought of you all today, that at last you are going forth into life. So, we hope, you are. But it may be profitable still to temper that foremost thought with some recognition that you have already been in life all the days you have been here. This University is not a patent incubator, holding the chill of the world aloof by artificial warmth. Much more than was the case in the old-time colleges you have been schooled in real problems and real risks. This is no incubator and you are no chickens. The world you are enter- ing will prove surprisingly like the world you have been in. Most of you, furthermore, are likely to be, in the days to come, just about what you have been in the days spent here. Your characters are long since pretty thoroughly set; in substance of being you will not change much, and, except for an oceca- sional miracle of conversion, your coming fate will depend upon the way each one of you adjusts this today existing mechanism of self to the material of your several environments, and puts that mechan- ism into use by grace of will. Most that you become and achieve in the first few years will appear to be largely matter of chance; THE ABUNDANT LIFE 61 after a decade it will begin to assume order as a natural and automatic output of character; most of it will be in fearfully rigid accord with what you have been and done here; and at the end, when the account is made up, it will all prove ‘‘true to seed’’— it can all be explained in terms of your past. There are few among your friends who have sufficient insight into character and its ingredients to foretell today what anyone of you will become, but at the end there will be few who have known your youth, who will not be able to connect your success or fail- ure with that which you are now. Who can read the pattern which the shuttle is flashing through the warp? But who cannot unweave the carpet’s threads, and explain the finished texture? As you sow, so shall you reap. If this were merely a maxim of fate, there were no need of my wasting words today. We should merely wait for the shuttle to flash its way on, till the inevitable pattern emerged. But it is because of the pronoun that I yet have license and hope to speak; for the words read: as you sow, so shall you reap. It is by grace of the pronoun that there is verge and scope for faith, and it is the deep mystery of the human will and what it, out of old material, can create anew, that draws the veil before the prophet’s eyes, and forbids him to see what the biographer later can read like an open book. As you sow, so shall you reap. It has been so, in a small way, since you have been here. It will be so, in ever increasing clearness and in ever enlarging measure, as your lives mature. 62 THE ABUNDANT LIFE All that you will ever really be, and all that you will ever really possess, will be what you have actually worked for—will be what you have act- ually earned. Getting is not possessing. The only way toward possessing and owning, whether it be owning goods or owning one’s self, is the old- fashioned king’s highway of earning by hard work. All the by-paths and short-cuts mean one of two thing, either failure or fraud. If you fail, you do not get; but if you get and do not own, as you can- not if you do not earn, all your accumulations of goods and titles and station are so much parapher- nalia and impedimenta. You can use them for the make-up of a part, but you cannot wear them; you can make yourself with them an actor and a fakir, but you cannot live the life. Everybody knows that it is of first importance for a man to be genuine; but you cannot be genuine if you seek results by arbitrary means, that is, by means which do not naturally and properly produce the results. You cannot be genuine, unless you pay the price for what yon get. You cannot be genuine, unless you earn. I suppose it would be hard to find anywhere within the limits of this land a group of young folk as large as this in which there is a more thorough- going and instinctive abhorrence for sham and for all that makes toward sham; but I wonder if you are all aware how wide are the ramifications of sham, and how covertly and insidiously that disease which I may call the disease of arbitrary devices eats its way into the life-plans of men. At the risk of rehearsing commonplaces, I shall speak of some THE ABUNDANT LIFE 63 plain everyday things, in the hope that they may take their place in a light that is not for all of you quite commonplace. Have you never heard of any one trying to obtain an appointment to West Point via the circumstance that his uncle was a friend and ardent supporter of the Congressman from his district? His uncle’s ardor for the Congressman had nothing to do with military affairs nor with the young man’s fitness for the exercise thereof ; the connection of that ardor with his ambition for an appointment was therefore an entirely arbitrary one. He might afterwards prove worthy of the place, but so far as the data before us are concerned he was trying to obtain something of value by violent and arbitrary means instead of by earning it. Writing a cheque and signing it is the natural way of getting money from a bank; breaking open the safe door is the arbitrary way. Have you never heard of any one who asserted above all his fellow-citizens a claim to the post-office of his town, not on the ground of any particular training or interest in such things as the transpor- tation and distribution of mail, nor yet on the ground of any notable business ability, but on some such ground as that he had guessed correctly con- cerning the result of the last primary elections? Or he may claim correct views on the wool schedule, or at least connection by marriage with some one who holds such views, or he may have been the tallest man in his regiment-before-Troy, or he may have a fine voice for campaign songs—or some other utter 64 THE ABUNDANT LIFE incommensurable! It is in the first place a project for taking money from the public without any apparent solicitude to give the public an equivalent; but, worse than that, it is a proposition to join together things that have no rational connection, and so is part of a larger proposition to build human society on untruth. This, in the last analysis, is the real sin of war; and the annulment of this propo- sition is the real issue of peace among men. The peace toward which the hearts of all the nations yearn must come by the substitution in human society of reason for the irrational and the arbitrary. Peace is order, war is the whirlwind. In war you seize or are despoiled; in peace you earn. But, you say, all the world is organized on this basis of influence and push and pull, and, if I do not conform thereto and use the world as I find it, I shall live in an unreal world, shall be labeled as ‘unprac- tical’ and shall not succeed. These are the usual suggestions of the adversary of souls. They are not true. Just in so far as you lean on crutches at a time when you ought to be gaining strength by standing up on your own feet you will incur inev- itably softening of the moral muscle-fiber. Society is full of men who, from the passion for’ crutches, haven’t any legs at all. This is the reason why so many men wait to be taken, whether physically or spiritually, to the polls in carriages. This is the reason why so many men who ought to be using their own judgment and doing righteousness, spend their moral strength in repaying favors. This is the reason why free citizens are herded in pens by THE ABUNDANT LIFE 65 bosses and bandits. This is the reason why freemen let themselves be bound through the craft of dema- gogues in the slave-chains of their own prejudices. It all begins when the young man is tempted to lean on artificial devices instead of just naturally standing up in his own strength. You will be advised and urged to join all sorts of fraternal societies, not alone or even chiefly for the entirely proper purpose of friendly association primarily inherent in these bodies, but with the canny and sordid purpose of getting business or practice, of being shielded from criticism, or of being advanced politically. You will even hear the sacred relation of church membership proposed for like base use by such as bring the tables of the money-changers into the temple court. All these things are feeble and enfeebling indi- rections; they are proposals to escape the toil and risk of earning; they are unworthy of men and women who are challenged by opportunity to make their one life-chance productive to the full by unfolding it out of itself in utter genuineness. If all the time and strength which young candidates for life spend in marking time and in going north- west and northeast to get north should be put into straightforward valiant trudging due north on the hard road toward the star, there would be more arrivals. The way to succeed at the law is to work at law and not go into politics to make acquaintances. I have seen too many men lose all zest for the real work of earning success, by absorption in the unreal motions of cajoling success, and gambling for it. 66 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Sudden successes we distrust, for they are not the safe and normal products of a past. You are climb- ing over ice, and we would rather see you chop each step deep and square, so that standing upon it you may have sure vantage to cut the next. And now you go forth, all into the same world; but it will be as many worlds as you are many. Each will make his own. What each brings to it, that it will be. In answer to smiles it will yield joy; to the open eye it will yield knowledge; to worth it will yield treasure. You may own of it just so much as by use and understanding you can earn. It is a world of stones; but with the Midas-touch of merit you can transmute it into the gold of a con- tented and a useful life. Go forth into your world; go forth and earn! THE ABUNDANT LIFE THINGS THAT ARE WORTH WHILE Delivered at the Greek Theatre, Berkeley, to the grad- uating class on May 13, 1914. You have been acquiring various knowledge here; I wonder how much of it has settled down into wisdom. Except as it has, it must still be labeled among the questionable assets. ‘Of all horned cattle in a newspaper office,’ said Horace Greeley, ‘‘gave me from a college graduate.”” He had prob- ably just been having some irritating experience with some recent graduate whose uncooked knowl- edge was encumbering digestion. One of the com- monest difficulties with green high school teachers resides in their tendency to carry over to the school unmodified and unabated, both as to substance and method, what they have just learned in the college. They convey it over in a pail instead of in a mind and in a life. The rate at which your knowledge will ripen into wisdom depends in considerable part upon your distinguishing between what is important and what is relatively unimportant. Some people seem never to know any difference between the footnotes and the headlines. What is true about knowledge is true about the general business of living; sooner or later, if you are going to live the life of wisdom, you will 68 THE ABUNDANT LIFE have to make up your minds what things are for you worth while—what things are worth while for you, you and your goal being what they are, and you will have to gather together the will to do those things which are worth while, and leave out those things which are meaningless. You have been born into a twentieth-century world, which, having just in- herited the discovery of the control of physical power, rejoices like a child in making the wheels go round, and takes to itself the keenest delight in purposeless activity and meaningless speed. If you would have a sample embodying the spirit of modern motion bereft of schedule you cannot do better than review one of your own too typical academic days. You arrive late from a hurried breakfast at a lecture in a course you chose because a friend of yours was taking it, and then go up to North Hall to attend one you chose because the hour fitted your card, and then drop into the ‘‘Coop,’”’ and are thereby reminded to fill your pen, and by that to purchase a few lemon drops, and you sit on the senior bench and miss a recitation, and attend a Blue and Gold meet- ing and hurry down to the photographer’s for a group-picture, and after luncheon on your way to a laboratory you meet a friend who takes you over to Oakland in an automobile, and on your return you hear cheering, which reminds you that there is a baseball game, and after the game you are invited to a cup of tea and talk about nothing in particular, certainly nothing you had planned to, but about any- thing which happens along; and during dinner you are called up on a telephone and asked to join a THE ABUNDANT LIFE 69 party for the theater, but that by reason of a mis- take in date degenerates to the ‘‘movies,”” and the next morning you awake with the brown taste of nothingness in your mouth and a dull foreboding in your conscience, that there is another day of earnest work before you, but you have forgotten what the work is. I have staged my illustration on the campus merely that through concrete examples you may understand me—not because these faults are pecu- liarly characteristic of college life. They are not, except that you are very young and very joyous. The main point is that you should understand my allegory. It symbolizes a way of living in which are hopelessly confused together the things that are, and the things that are not, worth while. It means the life which wastes its strength flit- ting hither and thither without plan or chart; which follows the suggestion now of this, now of that person under whose influence it accidentally falls; which suffers its fate to be determined for it by the accident of others’ interference, instead of dragging reluctant fate by the collar whither it would have fate go; it means the life all cluttered up with false motions, motions dictated by convention and fashion, by fear and fawning and policy, false smiles, false grief, false handshakings, false candi- dates, false platforms, all with an idea, so far as there is any idea, that it will all come out right in the zigzag, all defended by one sophistry after another, until the sense for truth fades and finally there is no truth, but only the various refinements 70 THE ABUNDANT LIFE of the lie. The abode and temple of truth among men is and can be found alone in personal characters which hold their own helm and steer their own course. For them alone the stars are fixed. You must choose for yourself the things that are worth while, and you must cast, though it may be with pain, the other things aside. You must plot your course and steer it through by light of the worth-while stars. To turn the face and look for applause or heed the sneers and detraction of men is to steer by the wisps of the fog. THE ABUNDANT LIFE THE LAST MESSAGE Delivered on June 4, 1919, at the Greek Theatre: the last Commencement Address of his presidency and at the same time his message of farewell. Regents, Teachers, Scholars, Friends: The Uni- versity bids you all welcome to her annual feast— but first of all does she extend her greeting to those who have risked and suffered for us in the great world war. In honor of them and in thankfulness toward them we shape the practices of this festival from the beginning to the end. But I see the graduates waiting here, and I will first give them a few words of counsel and injunction. Dearly beloved: The tasks of your apprentice- ship are completed. It is Commencement Day, and you are about to start out on the road and begin the practice of life. But before you shoulder your pack and trudge away I want to say a few words of counsel, being commissioned thereto by the dear Foster Mother, who sits by our hearthstone. They must be very simple words, else they would not fit all the variety of your need; they must be old words, for plain truth has no fashions; they must be very few words, for it is time you were going. The subject on which I am commissioned to address you concerns the use you are to make of your training here—how to make it issue in effective living. Without wandering farther afield, this much 72 THE ABUNDANT LIFE may be counted substantially sure—the result will be what you make it. Destiny is a great word, but so far as each one of you is concerned, it is a home- made article. You stand here before me today with undoubted diversity of talents, though not as great diversity as the world commonly estimates. The percentage you will earn upon these talents is the chief matter, and that will depend upon you. Aside from certain natural handicaps—and these more apparent than real—, you can be, and you will be, essentially what you here and now choose and here- after keep on choosing to be. If you keep on, how- ever, choosing to drift, then drifting will become after a while an automatic second nature, until you find yourself afflicted with cirrhosis of the will. Being what you choose to be sounds easy. But it is not. Positive decision costs pain. Until you have by constant practice gained control of the mechan- ism of the will, there is no finer torture than that involved in making up one’s mind—particularly when in order to effect the choice, you have to let some very good things go by. To come now directly to the point, I want to tell you some choices you ought to make under this free right of self-determination. This day being what it is—my last and your last, I must be tolerated if I preach; and as I can preach but one sermon, I must crowd all manner of things into it. So then, you can be what you will to be; what sort of being shall you will to be? Treat yourself with respect. Behave so that you can. Be careful to avoid failures, particularly in THE ABUNDANT LIFE 73 your early days; else you may lose confidence in yourself. Lack of self-confidence begets paralysis, too much of it conceit. Make a success of everything you set your hand to. Make good right from the first. Be careful about what you undertake. Cove- nant with yourself that you will not fail. Once you have begun a thing, put it over. Do not ever con- template failure as one of the possibilities. Make yourself no excuses. Accept no discouragement. Step out from under no burden. Do not be a quitter. Acquiring faith in yourself is one thing; accus- toming people to see you succeed at what you under- take is another. Both are good. The one is personal psychology; the other is social. It is a definite asset to be accounted reliable among your fellow-men. This means that your various acts yield consistent results. This means character, and the possession of character ranks, with wisdom, above all reason, knowledge, and wit. Leave people no doubt ‘‘ where to find”’ you. The third and next choice I would commend to you involves control of the apparatus of mind. Think about the things you want to think about. Bring them on in order. Extort their lesson. Think- ing is a scarce article, especially self-guided think- ing. Most people do not think at all, or, at the most, barely in dabs and flashes, here and there. What people commonly call their thinking is a mass of dreamy, watery thought-images imposed upon them in hearing or reading the words of others. This means drifting with the current, but real thinking feels the tiller and the keel. It goes where it is told to go. 74 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Thinking is hard work. To mean anything it must be intense and concentrated. And the final test of it is action. You must put your ideas into prac- tice. It is better for the ideas; that is what they were intended for. Exercise is their hygiene. And now I come to a fourth matter which is quite as much characteristic of your status here as any I could choose; you have been left here chiefly to your own devices, being allowed to choose your own ways and made to assume the responsibility of your own decisions. You have proved yourselves capable of self-government as most civilized communities would, if honestly trusted. What you have learned of yourselves as a community you will now apply to yourselves as individuals. Only what you do for yourselves, with the burden planted square on your own shoulder blades, will yield character, but every- thing that you have done for you, will minister to feebleness and issue forth in laziness and cowardice; and there is no more certain guise of cowardice than that which seeks to effect a career by the arbitrary use of influence and ‘“pull.’”’ This is a land of free opportunity, and there is one safe way to achieve its success and that is by hard work; any short-cut involves more or less of moral enfeeblement. There has gone out from the midst of us one who was gifted beyond all ordinary measure in stirring young men and women to realize the power that was in them and to fulfil it. Professor Stephens was great among teachers by virtue of his gift to quicken the lives of those he taught. He made men believe in themselves, in that he so mightily believed in THE ABUNDANT LIFE 75 them. By the very noblesse oblige of his confidence and love he compelled men—great heart that he was—to yield their best. He loved and was loyal, and he was loyally beloved. And now, my children, the time is up, when you must go; and I must be going too. For four years we have lived and counseled together and learned the lesson of service through trying to give unselfish service to this institution. I doubt if any other lesson you have learned is comparable with this. No life is worth living, that is not based upon continual sacrifice for worthy ends; whosoever will be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all. For twenty successive years I have delivered some last message to those who are setting forth, and now it comes time to say the last words of all. It is to you I shall say them as the latest children of my confidence and love, bidding you hand them on. And this is the message: It proved worth while being here; the burden was sometimes heavy, my shortcomings were not a few, but the cheer of your faith and tolerance, as that of my colleagues in the Faculty and Regents, carried me through. And the very last words shall be no new words but the old words with which I began today and with which I have steadfastly plied you all the years: You have one life to live; live it for the best there is in it; it is yours to decide; you can make it what you will. And may the blessing of the Almighty descend upon this University and abide within it. Amen. (= fo = = Z =] A - fe wn THE ABUNDANT LIFE 79 AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN Delivered by President Wheeler at the opening Uni- versity meeting of the academic year on August 22, 1904. This institution opens its doors today for its five and fortieth freshman class. Freshman Class No. 45, I have a few gentle words I wish to say to you. Though you are the biggest freshman class we have yet ever seen, we must presume you are individually moulded on the same old type we have known for years and are after all the same old freshmen. We shall not hesitate therefore to apportion to you out of the large stores of good old seasoned advice which former generations of freshmen have left on our hands unused. No particular attempt will be made to serve the meal in regular courses, but we shall try to dish it up in concrete and apprehensible form, and if to any members of the other classes any of the viands should appear toothsome, we beg they will make bold to draw up to the table and partake, even if this be in name a Freshman banquet. The salvation offered here is like the tuition,—free. My dear freshmen, you were just now so thor- oughly at the top of things in your high schools that it will be hard for you to realize how thoroughly you are at the bottom of things here. You will be welcomed, you will be viewed with much interest, you will be treated with much courtesy — much condescending courtesy, you will be entertained at 80 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Stiles Hall and other halls, you will even receive delicate attentions from the various fraternities, but it is well not to be deceived; you are at the bottom. It will be very hard to believe it, when you find yourselves centers of interest at the fraternity houses; but after you join, you will be undeceived. You are at the bottom, and the absolute bottom- ness of it will be only the more certainly set forth when some high-soaring, noble soul among you in vindication of his slighted worth shall gather his manhood about him and, smiting off the shackles of inglorious obscurity, shall seize the brush and paint upon the football fence the gleaming figures naughty-eight. The plain, wise thing for a freshman to do is to settle down to work as soon as possible, and retire from the limelight. It will be very easy, if you follow out all the distractions of these first few weeks, to wreck your college course at the start. The men who are esteemed and followed in later years of the course will generally be from the number of those who, at the beginning, lie low and saw wood. There are always some forward persons who are anxious to organize freshman balls and freshman teas, and who bubble with class enthu- siasm, but they are apt to transfer their allegiance to the next following class and graduate with it, if at all. Some people are born prominent, some have prominence thrust upon them, but pray take my advice, and if you were born prominent, try to hold destiny in check during your freshman year. In general, keep your eyes as open as possible, and your mouth as shut as possible. Do not, however, THE ABUNDANT LIFE 81 take what I have said as an excuse for isolating yourself from the University life or moping in a corner. Enroll yourself in the Associated Students, read the Californian and the Occident Magazine, come out on the field and try for a place in such sports as you may have any possible fitness for, place yourself at the disposal of your University, make yourself thereby one among us and of us, and be with all your heart and soul a college man. Appreciation and prominence will take care of themselves in their own good time. In the freedom of University life you are thrown chiefly upon your own resources and given the shaping of your own fate. The first year of this freedom is a trying time. The strong men are differentiated from the weak very fast—sometimes appallingly fast. Though easier for some than for others, it is within reach of every one of you to be strong; any one of you may become weak. Being strong means the conscious assumption of the steer- ing of your own craft. Being weak is drifting with the wind and current. A great deal will depend upon the associations you form this first term. Choose your associations voluntarily, and do not drift into them. Choose as a roommate one who is regular in his habits of work. When you choose a club or fraternity, proceed cautiously. You are practically certain to be very greatly influenced in your whole life-career by the fraternity you join. It is a serious matter. The opportunities of association and friendship offered in a good fraternity are invaluable. One which does not include in its membership a majority 82 THE ABUNDANT LIFE of sober-purposed, substantial, hard-working men may involve decided peril. On the whole I think the associated life represented in the life of the fra- ternity house constitutes a sufficiently important part of the educational opportunity of a college life to warrant me in advising a student as a general thing to look toward becoming a member in some such organization. The formation of additional clubs is possible, if the present supply prove not enough to go around. The letters of the Greek alphabet admit of an enormous number of combinations. It is to be presumed that every student entering here comes with some more or less clearly formulated purpose of making through this college course his life more fruitful. I say ‘‘it is to be presumed,’’ because I have no doubt there are some who have drifted in here as a continuation of ‘‘going to school,” or from lack of anything else very definite to do. You are all old enough now to quit drifting or being towed. Henceforward you have got to use your own steam and your own rudder. What you are to be will depend upon your own wills. You can be what you will to be. In this land of free opportunity practically nothing counts but will and work. So emphatically and fully true is this that I really believe birth and wealth to be a handicap more than a help,—except as birth confers sound moral and physical health. Strength and greatness come of struggle, and wealth geperally removes the impulse to effort. You have come to the place in your lives now where you will have to reach for all you really get. It will be possible still for some time to sit in THE ABUNDANT LIFE 83 recitation rooms and open the mouth mechanically to receive some doses of spoon-food that may be passed around, but it will not nourish. Make it your aim from the beginning to carry your reading beyond the requirements of recitations and to get as soon as may be beyond the recitation and the lecture into the laboratory and the seminary room for independent work. If you are following a non- technical course, shape your studies so that in the last two years you can come for the greater part of your work under the direct personal guidance of one of the great teachers. It will be more important that you pick your man than your subject. The most fervent influences of education come direct from personal life by personal inspiration, rather than indirectly through books. If you scatter your choices over many diverse subjects you are likely to fail of establishing intimate personal acquaintance with any one of your teachers. There is no inspiration in being taught by a gramophone, and without inspira- tion there is no real education. This University to those who enter in and partake is a great, abounding field of opportunity; it is a dreary wilderness of Sinai to those who murmur and wander; its very manna dropping from the heavens will cloy the taste and refuse to be food. Now a few simple things—plain as burlap. Do your work regularly as it falls due. Take no cuts. It does not pay; you get behind and lose interest. Besides, it pays to learn that you must keep appointments punctually. Make a schedule of your appointments and hours of work for every day. Make one you can keep and then keep it. Notice - A —————— EE a — 84 THE ABUNDANT LIFE that when you break it, you have merely betrayed your own weakness. If you do not learn anything else you can learn to lasso yourself. Dissect and study pitilessly your ebullitions of temper, and learn to control it. Every time a man gets angry he throws off his armor. Take physical exercise daily, if nothing more than setting-up exercises before an open window. Cultivate some form of athletic sports. If you cannot play football or tennis, put on the gloves. Watching other people take exercise is not athletics. Sleep eight hours at least out of the twenty-four and keep regular hours for sleep. Keep your body clean. Bathe daily. Washing the parts conventionally exposed to the weather is not a bath. Keep your mind clean. Unclean thoughts inevitably taint the mind. Dwelling upon them rots it to putrefaction. One of the commonest causes of insanity is unclean thinking. Sexual uncleanness opens the surest way to bodily decay and moral death. Of the substance of your daily thoughts will in time be shapen the ideals of your life. What your ideals are, that in time will you become. They will govern all your acts; with the years they will come to peer out at your eyes, and debase or glorify your countenance. The University opens to you here and now her gates and calls you to her feet, that she may teach you various lessons out of various lores. It is her sovereign desire, not that you be learned, but that you be free, that you learn to love the noble, that you gain visions of the larger life, that you stand fast in the truth. Will you hear her; will you give her your hearts? THE ABUNDANT LIFE 85 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Address delivered at Dartmouth College, June 27, 1905. We are living in days of abundance. The life of the average man lays daily tribute upon the resources of the world. The conditions of the old- time Salisbury hill-farm, which fed its owners on its spare-ribs and corn meal, and sweetened their taste with the crystallized sap of its maples, and which reckoned a man with a savings-bank account and a hundred stonewalled and unmortgaged acres ‘‘fore- handed’’ if not positively rich, have ceased to be the typical conditions of the American present-day prosperity. The forehanded farmer of twenty cows who dwelt in the square white house with green blinds, an elm tree in the dooryard, ten barrels of apples and twenty bushels of potatoes in the cellar, and six cords of split birchwood in the shed, knew no other home or abiding-place, had no clubhouse except the winter evenings in the country store or the space about the long box stove between forenoon and afternoon meeting on Sunday, and no outing or recreation except town meeting or the annual muster, or an occasional picnic at Hampton beach. The economic conditions of the last ten years have suddenly produced a portentously numerous class of American beings—so numerous as to make them the typical well-to-do—whose whole strength _ ee 86 THE ABUNDANT LIFE and wit are completely absorbed in devising the means of spending any reasonable proportion of their income. Their money has torn them away from the ordinary standards of home and civie life, created a new set of conditions for them, made them its servants. They change their abiding-place with the seasons, have no home, and have forgotten where they vote. Very common it is that the family has become nomadic only on the female side, father and son continuing the struggle in Wall Street, because, after the manner of the great American game, there is no good place to stop. They have the wolf securely by the ears, but they have neither garnered him in, nor dare they let him go. In this case, the abundance of this world’s goods has availed to break up not only the home but the family. Another situation is that where the father of the family is in attendance upon the nomadic exercises of his household. This generally indicates that his business has been absorbed by a trust. He has lost his old place in the world’s work, and has not found a new one. A faint relic only of his old business energy survives in his exacting discussion of the relative merits of hotels and his earnest efforts to secure a new and more dauntless chauffeur; and all that remains of his old business itself, shop, office, and mill, is concentrated in a pale clerk wielding the scissors in a subterranean safe deposit. There is nothing left for him to do. A valet packs his trunk, a trust company collects his rents, and a masseur takes his exercise. And the last state is worse than the first. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 87 The sudden dislodgment of life-conditions pro- duced by the rapid access of wealth, in the case of such as allow their lives to be mastered by material wealth, commonly results in a pitiful maladjustment of machinery to work demanded. A man buys more villas than he can live in, more clothes than he can wear, and more yachts than he can sail; and then he fills his life with false movements in a nervous attempt to keep the machinery going. He buys a crush hat and attends the Grand Opera when he would rather hear an anvil chorus, and orders French entrées when his old-home instinct would rather suggest to him a candid consideration of such viands as baked beans and brown bread, hominy and molasses. The wealth of our day has been created—not found, but really created, by bringing things together that belonged together in use, by transporting things from where they are not wanted to where they are wanted, and where they can be combined with other things to serve the purposes of human existence. Nature has scattered things helter-skelter without reference to the complicated needs of human society, and it is the art of man, preéminently the art of com- merce, that assembles, distributes, and classifies them to the satisfaction of the affinities of use in human civilization. Pepper was not wealth in its native Indies, but those who joined it with the insipid vegetables of northern Europe created the wealth of ancient commerce and set in motion the world commerce that has been drawing the two great halves of the world together. The wealth of Pittsburgh in 88 THE ABUNDANT LIFE this latest day has been created by bringing together there iron and coke to make steel, the wonderful substance that can fetter, control, and guide the new-found powers of electricity and steam. The world’s wealth is begotten of moving things about intelligently. The railway, the steamship, the post office, the telegraph, and the telephone, as the agents of intercourse, are the chief instruments of modern wealth-building, as the camel and galley were of old. Every epoch develops its own diseases in the form of parodies on its distinctive impulses. An age of liberation begets license and disorder, an age of religious intensity yields superstition and intoler- ance, an age of artistic creation deals in a by-product of aesthetic degeneracy, and in this, the world’s greatest epoch of wealth-building by intercourse, transportation, movement, the great characteristic disease endemic in all ultra-modern society is pseudo-motion. Those who cannot move intelligently, hustle; those whose nerves have been shattered in the rush of the day, if they cannot work, must needs move hurriedly. They fret the ocean with the nervous keels of steam yachts, though they go no-whither; they raise the dust of the roads and imperil the lives of sober folk with their automo- biles, but they have no real errand. The rigid firmness, and awful tensity, lined upon their faces speak of a goal and a purpose, but are really the index of delusion. These people are victims of disease; they are sick with Kinetitis, and their vision of purposeful movement toward a goal has nothing in it more real than the snakes of an alcoholic dream. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 89 One of the saddest features of these lives pursued by wealth consists in their isolation from humanity. The machinery and equipment of living establish the barrier. People who maintain steam yachts and dine Frenchfully at eight, and flit between Lenox and Newport and Palm Beach and Homburg, are natur- ally and automatically driven into the society of the like-conditioned, and bound there. Their sons attend the same expensive academies, their daughters are polished off at the same élite schools; their sons and daughters meet together at the assemblies of the Four Hundred, as well as at the summer resorts and winter resorts and spring resorts, and they intermarry and interdivorce; and the caste of the great rich emerges. Sound judgment and clear perspective in the motives and movements of human life are seldom found among these people of the caste, who drag the golden ball and chain. If you want to know what is stirring in the hearts of the American people, you cannot find it out in Wall Street. A man who comes fresh from touch with the warm popular life and current opinion of the great breezy central west and enters Wall Street to discuss a matter of national importance is bound to feel with Pip when he entered the cob-webbed house of Miss Havisham. The men immured there are wont to underestimate the intelligence and range of information of the American people. They recognize that the people have learned they are paying twenty to thirty per cent too much for life insurance only when the diminished returns for new insurance come in, and they learn reluctantly that 90 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Theodore Roosevelt has for his integrity of purpose the confidence of the farms and firesides of the nation only when the votes come in. The graves at the head of the street bring no competent reminder of the safe deposit where moth and rust do not corrupt, and the upward yearning tower points no one to the place where treasure may be safely lodged. Wealth can be verily a wall to bar a man from men, and it is written that it may become a camel’s hump to isolate a man from heaven. Enough has been said, though only by way of casual, if not too flippant, illustration to indicate the certainty that abundance of goods cannot insure either to a people or to an individual that quality of existence which we are justified in associating with the notion of richness, fulness, abundance of life. A man lives abundantly according as he opens his life to the opportunities of the world he lives in—opens it both to receive and to give, both to be and to do; according as he make his personality, being what it is, count for the most possible, time, place, and environment being what they are. This may be a pretty small world as worlds go, but it is a considerably variegated one. It contains all sorts and conditions of men, every one of whom is himself a complicated composite of good and bad, harsh and kind. It is seldom that the motive of any single human act is simple and single; certain it is that the motives of social action within the body of a community are always involved to the highest degree of complexity. Human action may be occa- sionally for purposes of legal defense reduced to THE ABUNDANT LIFE 91 apparent conformity with the forms of logic, but it is generally when so reduced that it assumes its most deceptive guise. The person who regards the action and character of individual, class, race or humanity from the simple and single viewpoint of his own status and condition and over the hair-line of his own logicis living the typical life of poverty,— the life of prejudice, bigotry, snobbery, and pro- vincialism. Have you ever caught yourself nurtur- ing a long and deeply rooted dislike of some person based on some apparently simple interpretation of that person’s manner or actions or views, and then on becoming really acquainted with the person found these things suddenly readjust themselves according to new lines of orientation, so that appreciation and admiration advanced into the place of dislike? What probably had happened was that you had through sympathetic acquaintance with the indi- vidual found your way to the correcter viewpoint whence the lines of action and character in that human life assumed the aspect of a more sensible and harmonious plan. The gossip, personal pre- judices, and cliques which haunt small towns are due to the presence of data in permanent incom- pleteness. A fixed prejudice is a case of arrested development. Like the petty village aversions, racial and social prejudices generally affect what is near at hand, what one sees and does not know. The man who has made up his mind that he dislikes Jews or Chinese or some other blood has introduced into his life a persistent source of narrowness, blindness, and poverty. He has raised a barrier between 92 THE ABUNDANT LIFE himself and the exceeding richness of human fellow- ship. He has shut his eyes to the recognition of some things well established in the best experiences and well worth a man’s while to know, such as that the poor and lowly are usually kinder and more generous to each other than are the rich, that most people are more good than bad, and that there are few humans and few kinds of humans of whom it may not be said that they are mighty interesting, if you get down where they are. Social prejudice is mostly of one sort with racial prejudice. The latter is surely in but small part due to physical aversion, if at all. It is in its sub- stance social and based in difference of inherited manners, garb, tongue, and modes or moulds of thought, in the ways of looking at things. Here we need the historical spirit to aid us to the hubpoint, so as to see the spokes straight. The exchange of messages between Togo and the Mikado after the great naval victory rings weird and quaint if not absurd to our occidental ears, but, judged in the acoustics of the religious-social atmosphere their fundamental thought has inherited, Togo’s attri- bution of the victory to the ‘‘excellent virtue of the Mikado,’’ and the Mikado’s satisfaction that he may make therewith ‘‘response to the spirits of his ancestors’’ are no gilded phrases, but expressions rich in beauty, worth, and truth. It is undoubtedly true that individual or people can safely build its way up into the wider atmos- phere of cosmopolitanism only by retaining sure foundations in the system of conduct and the view THE ABUNDANT LIFE 93 of life embodied as the vitalizing spirit in the family, the clan, the tribe, or the community from which they sprang. A process of cosmopolitanizing that moves so fast as to sunder connection with these foundations means moral disaster to man or people. And yet the opportunities of the larger life are con- tinually beckoning us away from the narrownesses of village and parish, and the man who is to play the full man’s part in the work of the greater world must lay aside the garb and the dialect of the province. We have gradually become a nation in place of an aggregation of states. It was not by a formal governmental union of the thirteen states strung along the Atlantic Coast, but through the uniting of the people of those states in the occupa- tion of land to the westward of them. The national sentiment has steadily worked back from the West toward the East. But local mechanism long since outgrown in the actual conditions of intercourse often survives to the embarrassment of our national life. We need national laws for divorce, for the oversight of insurance, for the regulation of the traffic of the great national system of railways. We are a nation and must have national laws for national concerns. We are a nation, and in the great mass of the interests of our lives we are commonly conditioned whether we live in New England, Texas, or California; and it behooves us while holding fast to local safeguards for local interests to court the inspiration of the fuller, richer national life, and be Americans. 94 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Provincialmindedness is in one respect only a larger size of that same selfishness which shows itself within the community as privatemindedness. Nothing proves so conclusively that we are funda- mentally and primarily social and civic beings as the aridity, blasting, and death which befall a man who devotes himself to his dooryard, to the utter neglect of his sidewalk. That attitude toward public affairs which bears upon its escutcheon the stirring heraldic legend, ‘I don’t see anything in that for me,’’ holds within it the potency for larger mis- chief in the future of free institutions than all the criminality of all the burglars and drunkards and murderers in the nation. The free institutions we inherit cannot be entrusted to the keeping of poli- tical specialists. The peculiar character of these institutions implies on the part of everyday citizens a political activity animated by public spirit and involving self-sacrifice. When it shall come to pass that no one takes any active interest in politics except those who expect sometime, either directly or indirectly, to get something out of the state, either by way of honor or gain, then the end may fairly be said to have come. All the jobs and all the job-craving and all the job-cravers will then have been rolled up into one gigantic political trust handling government like any other commodity, beef, tobacco, or oil. One cannot fairly advise a young man to go into politics, if that means office-seeking, and especially if it means bread-winning. A man who has the ability to succeed in politics could make a very much TTR THE ABUNDANT LIFE 95 better living in business than he can honestly in polities. The political need of today is for business men of education and character who will attend elections and caucuses and conventions as citizens and not as politicians. The caucuses are of more importance than the elections, and the conferences than the caucuses. It cannot be expected that a business man will ordinarily find the time to follow politics, but he can at least do what he does regu- larly, and keep the pressure on. In time he will find himself a force that the politicians reckon with; he will be consulted; his opinions will have weight. The spasmodic citizenship of some of our best people provokes Beelzebub to smile. Nothing dis- turbs him less than a reform movement or a New Year’s resolution. He is a great corporation and holds his attorneys on permanent retainers, and keeps his agents, promoters, and lobbyists always on the watch. If you are going to effect anything important against him you have got to join the organization and fight him with machine guns and not with mugwumpian bean-blowers. The canny advice which old business men some- times give young men to let politics alone, lest it interfere with business and alienate customers is the advice of a small caution that partakes of cow- ardice. The self-protective type of man that is always looking out for his own precious cuticle and is afraid of bumps will not live the abundant life. A certain amount of risk is inseparable from a gen- erous, virile activity in the full tide of affairs, and a certain number of mistakes is to be expected; and 96 THE ABUNDANT LIFE they will not matter much, if only you do not lie about them. Football is not much of a lady’s game, but a lame knee is better than smooth effeminacy. The abundant life may be full of bruises and toil, covered with dust, and harsh with publicity, but it is a man’s life and the life of red blood, which the cautious, cowering life of privatemindedness is not. It is a constant temptation of the scholar to hoard his learning as a miser hoards his ‘gold. Pedantry is bullion abstracted from circulation, or jewels hung upon the flesh like ear-rings. Hoarded bullion is dead money, and learning gathered a propos of no social need and suited to no human use 18 dead knowledge. It is only the learning that has gone over into life-blood and can govern action that is capable of being transferred to the awaken- ing of life in others. But here is the crux of all our learning and educating, to make it move in the veins. If education does not aid us to live more fully and richly, it surely fails. The purpose of all this elaborate mechanism of education cannot be to provide us with recipes or equip us with mystic formulas, or deck us with robes, or make us peculiar beings or members of a caste; its real purpose must be after all, with all its waste and mishits, with all its oscillations and mutations of pedagogic theory, to create in men good health, to make red blood flush the veins and fill life to the full with knowing, enjoying, being, and doing. The subjects taught in schools and colleges are intended to provide good food, not drugs, for grow- ing mental and spiritual organisms; and the purpose THE ABUNDANT LIFE 97 of the round of training we call liberal education is to preserve, encourage, and develop good health, plain, normal, sound good health without hyper- trophies. It is the good health that staves off infection, conquers illness, and is more contagious than disease. It includes good health of body with power to digest food, breathe air, and carry burdens; good health of mind with power to see straight, arrange concepts, construct thought, devise, invent, and imagine, and above all to use in judg- ment the priceless sanity of common sense; and thereto are added health of will with power to choose, decide, and act, and health of spirit with unsickened vision of the simple native order of the universe, which is the eternal right, and power to have sympathy with the hearts of men and hold communion with the life of God. Among the various forms of institutions devoted to American education the college as guardian of the liberal training is the one that has set itself most distinctly to the task of nurturing the fuller life. In its best significance and use it is the school of the abundant life. It does its greatest work through the establishment of a household. Life is trained and fed and inspired by contact with other life combined with it under the fusing influence of an institutional connection and institutional loyalty. We are social beings and must belong to things; if it is not clans and tribes, then it must be societies fashioned after the image of blood-relationships and inspired and informed by loyalties in place of the old blood religions and tribal cults. It is well if 98 THE ABUNDANT LIFE these loyalties are exercised toward an institution as noble and clean and rich in ideals as an American college. Ome healthful result of modern college athletics has been the stimulus it has given to college spirit as a reflex and image of tribal religion. Even the songs and war-cries, the dances and powwows of the council fire will bear the analogy. To the uninitiated they remain a mystery and ‘‘to the natural man foolishness,’’ but they are the power of Athena unto salvation. Many a college man out in life has found himself at the crossways of a vital decision and has chosen the narrower way, because he remembered his college and feared to disgrace her. Nothing should be permitted within the college to prevent the frank association of men of all grades, conditions, and antecedents. From this point of view the dormitory is better than the chapter-house. The danger of the latter is the insidious encouragement of a snobbish exclusive- ness—a thing utterly hostile to the spirit and intent of the American college. Men are associated in the chapter-house for the creation of a smaller family circle within which helpful intimacies may be assured as they cannot be in the larger forum. This 18 good, but it must be cautiously guarded lest it compromise the larger interests of the clan and tribe. To return again to the mention of college athletics, it must be said that great as is its service to the consciousness of institutional solidarity, it is at present tending with dangerous rapidity toward THE ABUNDANT LIFE 99 the conferment of its physical, if not its spiritual blessings, upon a few chosen specialists. It must be remembered that toughening of the vocal chords cannot really be regarded as satisfying the demands of physical culture in terms of achieving to the abundant life. Though association with one’s fellows and athletics weigh heavily in determining the import of the college course, it must be admitted that it is of some importance what one studies. With all the pending disagreements regarding the food-values of different subjects of study, I think we must be approaching agreement on the thesis that leisurely assorted courses selected according to the attractive- ness of their announcement, the relation of their hours to convenience of attendance, and the reputa- tion of their purveyors for severity of standard do not combine to make a full meal. It is seldom worth while to choose a course because one thinks he would like to know something about that subject. As far as specialization is concerned, it is my experi- ence that a student has made a mistake who cannot see at the end of his curriculum that he has brought his work to focus upon some field or method of inquiry and experiences some sense of independent control in the material of some science. It is also my experience that the best specialists, and the ones that wear best, are those who lay broad founda- tions, eschew attractive short-cuts, and bring their studies gradually toward the apex of a pyramid. All subjects tend to become scientific in their mode of treatment as they are adjusted to the needs of 100 THE ABUNDANT LIFE maturer minds. History, literature, and language as taught to advanced students demand scientific method. The real contrast that now shapes itself in the courses of the college is that between humanistic and nature subjects, not that between literary and scientific methods. While nature sub- jects undoubtedly serve more uniformly to quicken observation and encourage precision, they are less successful in quickening the imagination, arousing social ideals, and deepening human sympathy. They encourage more to the use of reasoning based on full data and employing the complete syllogism, but they enfeeble the mind for contingent reasoning and the use of the incomplete syllogism. And yet these latter are the forms we are compelled to employ in most of our life judgments. Here below we see mostly in a glass darkly, and we seldom find oppor- tunity to regulate our lives or determine their choices according to definite, complete, and final objective tests such as rule in the success of nature. A man who thinks he can govern his life by pure science is apt to be very wearisome to his neighbors and cumbersome to himself. It has often been said that the nature sciences deal with and disclose the real, but it seems to me far more likely that the real things still are those disclosed in loves and hopes, insights and faith, and that for these the methods of the objective test can only provide constant cor- rections and adjustments, not defeats. Life is nourished of life, and it will remain in the future as it has been in the past that the nurture of the suppler larger life and the culture of the THE ABUNDANT LIFE; '.:: 01. sounder health will proceed by use of the products of life. Life is begotten of life, and it will remain in the future as it has been in the past, that the health of the spiritual life passes neither from book or subject but from the life of the master to the life of the pupil. The greatest education is the giving of life, and the greatest teacher was one who came that ye might have life—and have it more abundantly. ___ THE ABUNDANT LIFE IS HIGH SCHOLARSHIP A PROMISE OF SUCCESS IN LIFE? Written April 23, 1900. This is a common question and the upshot of it is the other question: Do the tests which the college work applies resemble those which life exacts? The answer can be given only in terms of individual experience and observation, and I give mine for what it is worth. There are individual cases, as every one knows, of success from the lowest third of the class, and the comment of surprise gives them luster. I believe they are comets, however. In my observation the successful men come chiefly from the first third. When the high scholar turns out a commonplace man, as he not infrequently does, the dunces have their delight, and the one exception out- weighs five illustrations of the rule. A college man wins in life not by virtue of the special knowledge he has acquired so much as by the habits he has formed. Habits of mind involve an attitude toward truth. Habits of thinking involve a control of the mental processes. Habits of work involve sense for time and for duty. A man who has got into the habit of doing things at the time when they ought to be done, is likely to be wanted. It is the men who are wanted that are the successes. The men who are forever toiling to create a demand for themselves, they are the nuisances. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 103 The best scholars succeed best in life chiefly, 1 believe, because they have been most regular and punctual in doing their college work and meeting their college appointments. My experience with college students teaches me that they are intellect- ually much nearer a level than their achievements indicate. It is power of will more than power of mind that differentiates them. Must and ought have fifty times more stuff in them than might and could. I have known men of the superbest equipment and the finest intellectual and aesthetic training who were of no possible use for any sublunar pur- pose because they could not be relied upon to keep an appointment or to do anything they had agreed to do at a specified time. Having lost faith in their own wills they had ceased to plan their own work and went drifting on through life swept with every current and chance breeze and never reached a wharf or delivered a cargo. The college tests are not always such as to pre- vent some fairly small men and pretty mean men from reaching class honors by sheer digging, but the modern college offers them less opportunity than the old curriculum. Digging is good, for it betrays will-fiber, but the ‘‘digs’’ and ‘‘grinds’’ who lack heart and vision will prove to be men of the muck- rake. There is a type of man found well represented in every class of a modern American college from whom one may expect a successful life. He does his college work faithfully and stands well in his class. He takes part in student sports and student 104 THE ABUNDANT LIFE affairs without being pure athlete or impure class- politician. He is clean in manners, morals, and dress. He holds the solid respect of his class without being flabbily popular. He plans his work, keeps his appointments, moves toward a goal, and spends no time in watching himself grow. It matters little whether such a man is valedictorian or not. THE ABUNDANT LIFE STUDENT SELF-GOVERNMENT I The following account appears in the Annual Report of the President of the University to the Governor for 1914-15 (pp. 25-28): Since November, 1899, when a case of student discipline was first referred by the President for counsel and advice to an informally constituted com- mittee of the Senior Class, our system of student self-government has been steadily growing in range and effectiveness, and in the confidence felt toward it on the part of the student body. During all this time no formal agreements or contracts have been entered into as between faculty and students and no attempt has been made to give the system legal validity of any sort. The Undergraduate Student Affairs Committee, through which the system oper- ates, has been treated and considered rather as a household tribunal than as a court. Its inquiries and its findings have not been given any legal form. No one has been put under oath. The sole effort has been to find out as directly and frankly as pos- sible what the real facts were, relying entirely upon student honor as between man and man. And, to the credit of the system, it may be unhesitatingly said that in all of the various cases which, in the sixteen 106 THE ABUNDANT LIFE years, have come before it, there has rarely been one in which the substantial facts were not laid clearly bare by the investigation. Very seldom has there been any case in which the defendant has refused to cooperate in finding out or revealing the facts, or has sought to hinder the inquiry by concealment, except for a natural inclination to place a favorable interpretation upon the conceded facts of his own conduct. It is, perhaps, to be said, in reflection upon the mass of cases, that the committee has, on the whole, shown itself to be a mechanism better adapted to discovering and determining all the facts than to devising a form of punishment suited to the offense committed. After a man has shown himself ready to cooperate in determining the exact character of the facts in respect to which he is an offender, and has once and for all recognized the full extent to which he is an offender, the matter of punish- ment becomes a thing of secondary importance and interest. Punishments have most usually taken the form of a recommendation to the President that the offender be reprimanded by the President, or that he be deprived of credit in the course in connection with which the offense, as, for instance, dishonesty in examination, has been committed, or that he be placed on probation for a term of a year, this latter punishment involving the unpleasant incident of having the fact of this probation noted on the student’s record card. The reprimand from the President is probably not generally regarded by the student as an eminently agreeable form of social intercourse, although it has usually taken the turn THE ABUNDANT LIFE 107 of a friendly talk of some length about what is worth while in the world and has given the President, for his part, a reasonably appreciated opportunity. Recommendation of punishment by suspension or expulsion has been relatively rare. It has, of course, always been understood that the legal authority in matters of discipline rested with the faculty of the particular college in which the student was enrolled. So it is plainly provided in the Organic Act. In accordance therewith, it has always been the practice that the findings of the Student Committee, in so far, at least, as they involved actual punishment, such as suspension, or canceling of credit, should be referred to the disci- plinary committee of the faculty for its approval or disapproval and, for ultimate confirmation, to the faculty of the college concerned. As the meetings of such faculties were held in connection with the meetings of the Academic Coun- cil only two or three times in a term, the report of the committee usually covered the list of cases, decribed in briefest outline, indeed almost only by title. It has, indeed, been found that even this for- mality has been omitted during most of the last two years. The findings of the Student Committee have been so universally accepted by the student com- munity and the faculty that they appear to have obtained a standing of their own, independent of any support by faculty action. It should also be noted in this connection that it had always been the usage of the President to inform any student of action taken against him by the Student Committee 108 THE ABUNDANT LIFE and to inquire whether he accepted the decision. Cases forwarded to the Faculty Committee were practically all cases in which the student concerned had accepted the verdict. On this account, all the more was reference to the faculty coming to be a matter of formality. An unusually trying and painful case of disci- pline occurring near the end of the academic year 1914-1915 called attention to the necessity for a formulated and consistent procedure. It is evident that the student tribunal, in order to be genuine, must be left to its own spirit and devices and must not be, in any way, adulterated by the devices or the membership of a faculty element. It must be, out- right, a student affair in its thinking and its doing, otherwise student self-government will be a farce. It will be faculty government disguised with a sweater. It is evident, from our experience, that the Presi- dent should always stand in intervention between the student action and the faculty action. The two forms of action represent a total difference of theory and point of view. These two forms must be kept distinct if student self-government is to be a reality. In the case of discipline mentioned above, the accidental failure of the President to discuss with the accused, as was his wont, the charges brought against him before allowing the Faculty Committee to be notified, advanced the case too hastily out of its phase as a matter of the household tribunal into its phase as a matter of punishment in accordance with formal law. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 109 The President, on learning that the student accused does not accept as reasonable and fair the judgment of the Student Committee, will, in normal cases, be justified in asking the committee for a review before submitting the affair to the Faculty Committee. It is surely in the interest of a successful student self-government that the faculty action should not come to be considered and felt as an action of a higher court to which the student has appealed. And yet it must always be the duty of the President, in asking the student whether he accepts the judgment of his fellow-students, to in- form him that he has, under the law, a right to a hearing before the Faculty Committee representing his college. It must, however, be understood that, in practice, the great mass of the judgments ren- dered by the Student Committee do not involve the assignment of any such definite punishments as would raise the legal questions of rights. The operation of student self-government in this University has been of such far-reaching advantage to the order of the University community and, what is far more, to the attitude and spirit of the students themselves, that no pains must be spared to devise and recognize a procedure which will insure to the system workableness under the law and avoid any crippling of its freedom and full responsibility. 110 THE ABUNDANT LIFE II In the Commencement Address delivered on May 13, 1918, one section deals with the origin and characteristics of the system of student self-government: Our system of student self-government has come to be so thoroughly wrought over into the everyday life of the University that it is taken for granted, is accepted and used, and but little discussed or men- tioned. And yet, with an unseen power it holds its strong and steadfast sway in the lives and doings of the thousands constituting this community. It took its practical beginning in the Jim Whipple case, November, 1899. Whipple was captain of the football team and had played in the ‘‘big game’’ contrary to faculty order. The order had reached him the night before the game. The reason was a deficiency in some one course of study. It was too late to rearrange the line. Whipple thought it his duty to go ahead facing possible expulsion. We won the game and Whipple was a hero. Public opinion among the students regarded it as im- possible that such a man should be punished. The faculty while deploring the situation felt that the law had been defied and the culprit must suffer the severest punishment. Whipple himself agreed, but said that under like conditions he would do the same thing over again. It was a deadlock between two points of view. A committee composed of leading men of the senior class was then called together by the President and the recommendations of that com- mittee were later adopted by the faculty. Some who THE ABUNDANT LIFE 111 were humorously inclined reported that Whipple had been suspended during the winter vacation, but it was a matter of fact that he received his degree a half-year late. Punishment and pride, however, all proved to be of small account as compared with the spirit of help and cooperation which took its rise out of the discussion and settlement of this case. It was not until 1904 that self-government found any formal recognition in the action of the faculty, and even then it was a minimum. The success of the plan is indeed and has been in large measure due to its simplicity and its avoidance of written rules and enactments. It exists chiefly in a well established tradition. The other characteristics of the system which determine its workableness are the following: (1) It is administered under the leadership of the Senior Class. This corresponds to the existing facts in student life. It does away with that noxious inheritance whereby the juniors prod the freshmen to unseemly activity and the seniors defend the soph- omores in resenting the same. The primacy of the seniors tends furthermore to favor the family form of government as against the military and legal. (2) The membership in the committees and boards is made up entirely of students. A mixed committee or tribunal bringing in if it be no more than one member of the faculty is likely sooner or later to raise among the students the apprehension lest after all they are being regulated from outside. (3) The scheme will fail if it bear any suspicion of camouflage. It must of all things be genuine. To use it as a covert means of governing is fatal. 112 THE ABUNDANT LIFE (4) It is essential to the plan that it should find certain trustworthy mechanisms for the ascertain- ment of public opinion and its stimulation to action and defence. For this we have found the Thursday night ‘‘senior singing’’ good, also the various honor societies, and in matters of more limited range the fraternities. Best of all when definite issues are raised is the mass meeting, with the seniors stating the case. (5) The fact that few cases come before the Student Affairs Committee is not an evidence of its limited influence ; quite the reverse. The mechanism works so nearly automatically as to yield scarcely noise enough for reasonable advertising. (6) The Student Affairs Committee has always avoided legal forms. It assumes rather the guise of the family council. In cases where legality is involved, as in expulsions, suspensions, etec., the final action must be taken by the faculty. (7) It is fortunate that the Student Committee takes cognizance of other cases than those involving punishment. (8) An enquiry prosecuted by the committee is fortunately free from the tradition that one must not ‘‘tell the teacher.”” A man’s word of honor is good; and one seldom suffers from frankness—quite the reverse. Student self-government is typical of the sort of education which serves the purposes of a democracy. It encourages men to the frank, full exercise of popular government, which is a government spring- ing from within a man or within a community, not imposed from without. | THE ABUNDANT LIFE 113 SHALL FOOTBALL BE ENDED OR MENDED ? Published in the American Monthly Review of Reviews, vol. 33, pp. 72-73, January 1906. There are various ways of playing football, most of them good. It is the present American Inter- collegiate game that is not good. This game has been fashioned out of the old Rugby scrimmage by a process of militarizing. Two rigid, rampart-like lines of human flesh have been created, one of defense, the other of offense, and behind the latter is established a catapult to fire through a porthole opened in the offensive rampart a missile composed of four or five human bodies globulated about a carried football with a maximum of initial velocity against the presumably weakest point in the oppos- ing rampart. The ‘‘point’’ is a single human being. If it prove not to have been the weakest to start with, it can be made such, if the missile is fired times enough. Herein lies the distinctive American con- tribution to the Rugby game. By allowing players to advance ahead of the ball, the American feature of ‘‘interference’’ has been created and therewith the ‘“mass play.”’ The process of militarization has been aided by making the ball always, at any given time, the possession of one of the two sides. There is nothing final or ideal about the present form of 114 THE ABUNDANT LIFE the game, nor does it exist by an authority descend- ing out of Sinai. It happens to be what it just now i8 by virtue of tinkering legislation of the sort that gave us last the profitless quarterback run and changed the field from a gridiron to a multiplication table. The participants in the game are not players, but cogs in a machine. Each man does one thing over and over. One man does practically all the kicking, two do all the carrying, and the rest keep each to their own specialized pushing. A man may play the season through without having finger or toe against the ball. Weeks of special physical training are necessary before venturing into the game, and once the ‘‘season’’ is over no one thinks of going out to play it for fun, not even the men who ‘‘made the team.’’ In fact there is no game for the individual to play; it is a body of evolutions into which every man of the squad must have been drilled by patient repetitions of the same movement in precisely the same relative position to the other members of the squad—after the manner of chorus girls in the grand ballet. To put it briefly, Ameri- can Intercollegiate football is a spectacle and not a sport. If the element of ‘‘gate-money’’ were removed, the whole thing would vanish away—in season as well as out of season. The game is to be judged therefore in the present situation not from the point of view of college sport and physical culture, but from that of the query: is it desirable in the interest of institutional solidarity or ‘‘college spirit’’ to maintain such a THE ABUNDANT LIFE 115 spectacle? It has been unmistakably determined that the public is glad to lend financial support in the form of admission fees to the maintenance of the spectacle; shall a few stout young men in each of our universities lend themselves to the gratifica- tion of this public taste? Only a few are needed. In the ten years from 1892 to 1902 at the University of California only seventy-five different men made the team as players or substitutes out of four thousand or more different male students during that time in attendance. As a player generally holds on for three or four years, seventy-five men, with a certain number of hopeless ‘‘candidates’’ as background, will suffice for the pro- posed task in any decade. A better solution in my opinion is to return from the spectacle to the sport; take off the headgear and the noseguards and the thigh-padding and the knee- padding, and introduce the Association game for light men and runners, indeed for the average man, and the restored Rugby, perhaps with its Canadian or Australian modifications, for the heavier and more vigorous men. Then let the student mass descend from its enthronement in sedentary athletics on the bleachers, and get health and fun and virility out of the heartiest and manliest of the Anglo-Saxon sports. eT “si % iin — mr “ BC PT A - SWE virgen irene TT ro in ; —— Fear 2 a - a Sm Re HE aes y bc eo ee, E EE pe" ET a See ea aE at " A PORTION OF THE CAMPUS IN 1919 A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE CENTRAL GROUP OF BUILDINGS, TAKEN FROM THE SAME SPOT AS THAT OPPOSITE PAGE: - Et THE UNIVERSITY ‘THE AMERICAN STATE UNIVERSITY As President of the National Association of State Universities, Dr. Wheeler delivered the following address at the meeting of the Association held wn Berkeley on August 30, 1915: In attempting today to follow from afar the usage which allots to the president of the year the pleasant honor of presenting an address at the opening of the Association’s annual meeting, may I be excused, or at least be dealt gently with, if instead of unfolding a definite topic I undertake to sweep together a wide variety of scattered and mostly commonplace items which taken in the mass may help to characterize the present status within its evolving fate of the American State University? It is an utterly unique type of educational insti- tution, representing a crude blend of the American privately endowed college and the European state university in process of vigorous adjustment to the expansive needs and imagination of the central and western communities of the United States. As a stellar phenomenon it may well appear to the vision of the lay observer more as orbit than as matter, and seem likely unless subjected to frequent ‘‘sur- veys’’ to wander out of reach like some of the asteroids. 120 THE ABUNDANT LIFE It is far removed in machinery and temper from the European, say, e.g., the German state university. The latter is shaped to the uses of the upper classes and is not, like the former, based upon the free public high school, but upon the fee-charging, aristo- cratic gymnasium. It does not include in its body the technological schools. It is a place of learned rendezvous, rather than a body of requirements and ordered curricula. It knows nothing of pre- requisites and units, and still less of credits for dramatics, physical culture, and dancing. It knows nothing of studious constraints distributed through the years, but relies for formal test and spur solely upon the black cloud of thesis and examination im- pending at the end of the course. Even this affects scarcely more than one in four of the students, and he must pay a hundred dollars for the privilege of the risk. For each lecture course the student pays a fee to the professor and he is presumed to take such courses either for information and stimulus he hopes to gain or directly to prepare himself for the final examination. In the chilly facts of practice all this turns out far less ideal than it promises in sound, and European professors are often found wishing they might introduce some features of the American definiteness to relieve them of the waste- ful idling which their system entails; but they find no place at which to begin without overturning all, and the benefits of their simplicity and freedom are too plain to set at risk. The plain fact is the two systems are so wide apart in manner and spirit as not to be comparable. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 121 For the initiation of our university scheme and type we borrowed much stimulus and some machinery from Europe, but we are well past borrowing now. In plain mechanism such as the equipment of labora- tories and the handling of libraries and in practical devices for keeping large bodies of students at work we are now well ahead. If there is borrowing in the future it will proceed in the reversed direction, by Europe from America. But it is enough for our present purpose to note that the American state university is now a thoroughly American institution shapen on American needs. Neither can it be denied that our older type of privately endowed universities is distinctly and thoroughly American. These institutions have had, indeed, their roots longer in American soil. They have shared longer the vicissitudes of American life and history; they have longer memories. Their studies, their policy, and their method are less likely to correspond to the temporary enthusiasms of this or that recent period of the nation’s experience. They are less disturbed by the dust-whirls of fad. It might indeed in argument be contended that they represent better than their counterparts a cross- section in time of the totality of American life. Be that as it may, it is presumable that the two types can never drift widely apart; they are naturally held together by the fact of their common service to American society; they are both engaged in edu- cating young Americans. Should it, however, at any time grow to be the usage for the sons of the wealthy to attend prevailingly the privately endowed 122 THE ABUNDANT LIFE universities and to receive their preparation therefor prevailingly in expensive private schools, then the gap will widen rapidly and the privately endowed universities will render a great and very sad contri- bution to the development of a caste line within American society. Though the two university types are today not widely differentiated, they are apparently not approximating. One who has had occasion to pass as a teacher from one to the other has noted a marked difference in atmosphere, even though he could not connect it with personnel of teachers or students or with specific methods or appliances. There are certain features which are bound to contribute regularly, even though they are exter- nals, to the differentiation of the state university. (a) There is first and foremost coeducation, which always lends an air of painful dutifulness to the scene, as well as of gentle sentiment. (b) Then come the technical disciplines in engineering, which help to raise standards of hard work and to crucify imagination. (¢) Agriculture leaves the door open and lets the cold air in, and, presenting a cheese or some other real thing as a thesis, brings pain to the metaphysicians. (d) So long as religious worship is confused with religious theories, we shall not be able to administer peaceably and hence profitably church or chapel in the state university. This is deplorable, but the loss we experience will probably soon be more than offset by the work which the different religious bodies through our lack will be stimulated to do each for its own. (e) The emergence of compulsory THE ABUNDANT LIFE 123 military drill in the midst of a presumptively educa- tional institution where otherwise everybody, except the president, does pretty much what he wants to, is really a blessing and a relief to teacher and taught. (f) The absence of a robust and frank tuition fee, such an one as would meet, for instance, one-half the cost of educating a student undoubtedly encourages a sentiment which lurks inarticulate in the atmos- phere of the place, to the effect that the student has conferred a favor on the state by recognizing the wisdom of its provisions and may, therefore, expect to be nurtured, protected, and ultimately aided to employment; all this, and ‘““My father is a taxpayer,’’ and ‘‘I will see about this’’ comes from the least worthy, while the best are asking themselves only: “What can I do in loyalty and love to repay my university for the inestimable gifts she has lavished upon me?’”’ These observations must ever press home upon us the query whether it would not be better, whether it would not be fairer to the state and all its taxpayers, whether it would not be better for the students themselves, if we compelled the few—the relatively few who avail themselves of the state’s provisions, to pay a part, e.g., a half or a third of what their education costs the state. An ample allowance of scholarships might then be used to prevent excellent students from losing through lack of means the benefits of an education they deserve. As matters stand now, many students drift into the university merely because the high school is finished and this seems to be the next thing. Such abuses as dropping out of the university two or 124 THE ABUNDANT LIFE three weeks after registering would be checked. There would be less floating in and floating out. More would think twice. At any rate it is a fact that lack of the tuition fee conditions to some degree the peculiar atmosphere of the state university. (9) The query we have just raised leads to another: is it or is it not true that the mass of the students in a state university show less spirit of loyalty to their institution than the students of a privately endowed university? They cheer just as loudly on the bleachers—but that arises out of the zest to win, and that is the same everywhere. It is my experience that at least the public-spirited half of the student body is quite as fervently loyal as in the other type of institution, especially if you give them and the alumni something to do. Otherwise they will leave the university ’s interests sleepily to the legislature and the regents, and particularly the soggy lower half will feel no more ideal and patriotic zeal than that which inspires the hearts of our citizens at the sullen progress of the pork barrel through the halls of Congress. It behooves the state university particularly to displace in the student mind the query, ‘What can I get out of my univer- sity?”’ with that better one: “What can I do for my university?’’ The state university even more than its privately endowed counterpart needs from all who are connected with it, students, teachers, graduates, and administrative officers, full exercise of this spirit of unselfish service. This is no fanciful supplement; it is a fundamental, essential constituent of the education the state provides, without which THE ABUNDANT LIFE 125 that training is a dry and hollow shell. It represents the attitude which a right-minded citizen must bear toward his country. (h) The peculiar atmosphere of the state univer- sity bears with it by general consent a stronger ingredient of respect for and sympathy with the popular interest and will. This is in some part due to the relative prominence in its study lists of the applied sciences, but it goes deeper than this and bears constant though not readily confessed relation to the source of the bread supply in the appropriation bills of its master’s crib. Though the popular will often shows deficient interest in the cultural theories of education and often overestimates the value of imitating in the schools the vocational processes of actual life, it must be confessed after real experience that the popular mind knows what it wants in terms of educational results far better and more wisely than the trembling faith of the school-men has been willing to allow. The American state university as it exists today in work, in scope, and in spirit is a peculiar insti- tution—eminently so in its present combination of fields and duties. There never has been anything like it in any country or time; perhaps there will never be anything just like it in the epochs to come. But what it happens to be, Just now, is due in greater measure to what the supporting communities desire it to be, ie., to what parents and people want to have taught and want their children to learn, than has ever been the case in any institutions of the higher learning, since first education began to educe and pedagogues to profess. 126 THE ABUNDANT LIFE All this has been attained, however, without direct and immediate application of the power of the public will. Wherever such direct application in the form of legislative interference or control has been attempted, the result has scarcely ever escaped some form or degree of disaster. Politics as represented by the legislative is in mood and manner so radically estranged from education and research as repre- sented by the university, that is, the voltage is so different, that the two must in operation be firmly differentiated and a transformer introduced between them. This transformer has been found in the form of a commission called the Board of Regents, and the mechanism has been mounted and used—on the whole with most beneficent results. Anciently the government of the college as handed down to us from English tradition was vested in a Board of Fellows in whose hands lay undiffer- entiated the two functions of teaching and of holding and administering the property. From the very beginning, i.e., in the organization of Harvard College, American usage effected a differentiation between the two functions by creating a corporation known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and over against it a faculty, appointed by the corporation, but charged with the office of instruction. The relations of corporation and faculty became in the state universities the prototype of the relations of regents and faculty, between which two resides the president as automatic coupler, alter- nately squeezed and stretched, or in more violent collisions, alternately forced up into dangerous THE ABUNDANT LIFE 127 eminence and dragged beneath the wreck. Fortunate operation of the university machinery consists in a proper distribution of powers and tasks between the three elements: regents, faculty, president. In the last analysis under proper organization the Board of Regents undoubtedly represents out- right the state to the university; but in the ordinary case and under normal conditions the Board of Regents represents more exactly the state as a political body to the university as a mechanism for education and research. I suppose that the spiritual university as set down in the New Jerusalem will have no Board of Regents—and for that matter, presumably no president. Under existing mundane conditions, however, it is plainly essential to the quietude and effectiveness of the university that the board should exist, and that it should not be forced to share its powers with another state body like a Board of Control. As a board of audit, i.e., post- audit, the Board of Control will serve excellent purpose as assuring publicity and security, and in unifying the state’s financial administration, but the assumption of the right of pre-audit means inevitably a crippling of the Board of Regents which will reduce it into something analogous to the position of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Power drifts toward the moneybags. In states where the university is divided into two or more institutions—the University proper, the Agricultural College, the School of Mines, and others—the establishment of a Board of Conference as between and over the two or more regent boards 128 THE ABUNDANT LIFE and made up chiefly of representatives from these boards, will help hold in check false competition and may render the state a good service, particularly if such board limit its meetings to the period of preparation for the session of the legislature, and limit its activity to the purpose thereby indicated. The plan of creating one Board of Regents for the two or more institutions has yet to prove its value. The plan of dispensing with a board or boards of regents and committing all forms of educational institutions within the state in one fell congeriate mass into the hands of one all-supreme board, by whatever name it be named, means the touch of death for all the finer and higher things of the university; means a grizzly alternation between neglect and the intrusion of ignorant violence ; means an inevitable ignoring of the distinctive office of the university as over against all other forms of educa- tional endeavor—that office whereby it leads and inspires men to find out for themselves the way to truth and appoints itself within the state against the insidious power of politics and wealth the one sure citadel of freedom of thought and freedom of speech. The board of instruction constitutes the second element in our university organization. It is really the first, and for three good reasons: (1) the other two were historically differentiated out of it; (2) instruction and nurture are the central purpose of the institution; (3) the duties and opportunities of the teachers are not limited ; the board of instruction naturally takes over such functions as the two other THE ABUNDANT LIFE 129 factors of the organization do not assume. The individual professors continually perform at need offices not ‘‘nominated in the bond.”’ They are not employees of the university, but members of it. The right attitude of service in the manifold demands of the university can not be obtained or expected from men uncertain of their tenure; neither can freedom of thought, research, or expression, espe- cially in subjects traversed by the daily thought of the community. Without such freedom we lose the full value of the teacher’s presence among us. If the teacher is hampered, whose ideas does he teach? Those of the regents? of the president? or of the legislature? But science does not follow the election returns. Within the range of the teacher’s special equipment and knowledge, not as oracle at large nor as bearing an arbitrary license, but in the name of his science, he must be free to teach. Otherwise the university is an imitation and a sham. We ean better afford to be patient and tolerate a considerable degree of inefficiency in this or that chair than incur the suspicion of unseating a teacher for the views he may hold. On the other hand, there are two things that must be said: (1) inefficiency cannot be permanently used as a shield; (2) the students who are seeking instruction have some rights. In pro- ceeding against a professor for incompetency no step should be taken without full and careful conference with his nearest colleagues in the faculty, preferably in a body as well as individually. The professors themselves above all others should be vitally interested in helping establish the standards of 130 THE ABUNDANT LIFE their profession by aiding in the excision from the teaching staff of dry rot, incompetence, indifference, and misfits. The American Association of University Professors will render both to itself and to education worthy service, and one proceeding straight toward the chief need of the hour, if it will but undertake the determining of methods by which this ameliora- tion can be justly and safely effected. A way can be found whereby the faculty can take the chief part in purging itself. It can do it better than the president alone. From what I have seen I am convinced beyond a peradventure that it will do it far more thoroughly. And the president, whose path is sad enough at the best, will be relieved of a lonesome duty which brings him today the chief misunderstanding and odium attaching to the admin- istration of his office. In preparing to nominate to the regents for the filling of a professorial vacancy the president will find it wise to act with the counsel and consent of the most nearly related chairs, except that in the case of institutions far removed from the Source of supply the president who must travel in search of men may be expected to interpret more broadly the nature of this ‘‘counsel and consent.”’ It can never be in wisdom overlooked that in many important regards a college faculty is a community of colleagues; and this constitutes one prime reason why the maintenance of the old-fashioned faculty meeting is worth while, even in the large university where councils, committees, and department meetings in full organization absorb the handling of special interests and details. It is good to have a free THE ABUNDANT LIFE 131 forum corresponding to the scope of the whole com- munity where any matter may reach the open air and any item seek its final philosophic category, no matter if waste do seem to be involved. Efficiency is not everything. The family, for instance, is not an institution which stands or falls on the sole issue of efficiency. The third chief factor in the university organiza- tion is the presidency. This office is not to be viewed either as the residence of power or the fountain of educational policy. As correctly viewed it is set in the center of the university, not at its top, and is set there as an integrating force and a regulator. It holds equal relations to students, faculty, and regents, and maintains by natural right a member- ship in each of the three bodies. As an integrator it seeks to draw together into unity the various elements which should compose the university. As a regulator it seeks to distribute work and weight according to the law and the equities, giving ‘‘to each his portion of meat in due season.’”’ The presi- dent is not only a universal coupler, but a universal buffer. A high degree of elasticity and particularly of resiliency a university president must surely possess, and on the whole this is more essential than a teeming force of initiative. Hard rubber is perhaps more nearly the emblem of the office than steam, but it is not safe utterly to omit the bat. The incumbent of the office must command versatility of talents, catholicity of sympathy, and patience, but the greatest of these is patience; in addition hereto the 132 THE ABUNDANT LIFE state university president must possess a high degree of public-mindedness, wide democratic charity for people and things just as they come, a certain hardi- ness of temperament, and considerable thickness of skin. There are many who lay great stress upon tact and caution and the wisdom of the serpent, and surely all these things must be done and not left wholly undone, but it is possible our experiences have already made some of us so diplomatically tactful of act that we cannot be discerned as to whether we are going or coming, and so cautiously wise of utterance that we stutter. The university president has little occasion to ask for increase of power particularly as against the faculty. The man who is asking for a ‘‘free hand’’ is on the wrong track. What the president wants 1s not more power but more sharing of responsibilities and better distributed cooperation. He is not the one spring of university policy nor is he a French or English premier to make an issue of his own views and threaten to resign if he does not have his way. When it comes, however, to the formulation of policy into action that is another matter. So also as against the regents in the matter of appointment or displacement of teachers; here he must be given, after consultation with the faculty as outlined above, the right of initiative, the regents of course reserving to themselves the right of rejecting his recommendations. No president can give an institution his best service where his tenure stands in continual jeop- ardy. The evils of such a situation are not abated ADDRESSING THE UNIVERSITY FAMILY DR. WHEELER SPEAKING IN THE GREEK THEATRE DURING THE LATTER YEARS OF HIS PRESIDENCY THE ABUNDANT LIFE 133 by appointment for stated term; the perils are only focused thereby more definitely upon a single period. To begin with, no man should be entrusted with functions capable of such violent and arbitrary use as to offer continual temptations to unseat him; but finally, if in spite of every precaution in his selection and appointment he prove unfitted to his task, he should accept without odium retirement from his executive position and continue in a position as teacher. No man should ever be appointed to a presidency who is not master of some subject of instruction and competent to teach. One pregnant source it is of our present difficulties regarding the presidential office that we have been differentiating too sharply between teaching and administration. Deanships and presidencies ought not to be encour- aged in the development of a separate administra- tive caste. Teaching is the main business of a university. The American state university is undoubtedly passing through a crisis in its affairs. Not because the people oppose it or distrust it, rather because the people expect so much of it, and desire so much of it, are so many proposals rife for its amendment. Its reéstablishment in normal and orderly use will come not by radical undermining of its foundation walls nor by the adding of fanciful verandas and the hanging of festoons, but by some plain adjustments in simple architecture under calm restraint against undue expansion. The perpetuity of the structure in essentially its present proportions is guaranteed in the plain persistence of the public need. 134 THE ABUNDANT LIFE THE PRESIDENT OF A STATE UNIVERSITY This address was delivered at the inauguration of David F. Houston as President of the Unwersity of Texas on April 19, 1906. A man who is just entering upon the presidency of a state university is for several reasons an object of interest, but not least for his hardihood in under- taking such an office. There is no more difficult and complicated task to which an American citizen can address himself. Let him combine all the energetie skill of a business man, all the intellectual subtlety of a scholar, all the commanding grace of a diplomat, all the persuasiveness of an orator, and all the magnetic force of a leader; he will yet find the demands of the position greater than he can meet. The presidency of a privately governed institution such as the older universities of the East generally are, offers vastly less complication and difficulty ; but even that is a peculiar office developed upon Ameri- can soil to meet American needs. Two features of the American situation have conspired to make the presidency what it is in contrast to its prototype, the headship of an English college. First, in the English college the ownership of the property and the administration of the finance were invested in the master and fellows, i.e., in the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 135 teaching body as well as the educational administra- tion. There was no board of regents or trustees. This was evidently a continuance of the traditional organization characteristic of the monastic bodies, and no respect for such tradition came over with the colonists sufficient to commend a system by which teachers should administer and allot the moneys out of which they themselves were paid. There arose therefore the corporation or board of trustees by differentiation out of the composite functions of the old board of master and fellows, but the president maintained a place on both boards and, sharing in both functions, became the medium of intercourse between the two bodies and the buffer between what were often two diverse points of view, the academic and the businesslike. Second, the old world colleges were in a state of static condition of real or supposed adaptation to social needs and conditions with which they had grown up, and such is in large measure their con- dition today. In the new world the need of constant readaptation to newly forming conditions was keenly felt, and continued to be felt, never more indeed than in the past twenty years. While experience has shown that faculty government is competent under static conditions, it has shown with equal clearness that for progress and readjustment strong executive leadership is essential. At the demand of these two considerations the office of the American college president has come into being, half man of affairs, half scholar. The tradition of their origin in an ecclesiastical purpose 136 THE ABUNDANT LIFE has’held many of the smaller colleges to the usage of selecting a clergyman to fill the office; the avail- ability of clergymen with their better opportunity, as compared with teachers and investigators, to develop public and executive talents has often encouraged continuance of this usage. Then some- times the pendulum has swung toward the business side and away from the scholar; just now it is swinging back toward the scholar and away . from the ‘‘promoter.’’ It is necessary in order to maintain the best spirit of scientific and literary work that the president should have sympathy with that work through personal experience with some branch of it. The ideal of the situation is fulfilled if he be regent- wards a man of affairs, and faculty-wards a scholar, and this is no easy combination to discover. Happy the president who can carry both roles and yet not ‘““wear two faces under one hat.” If he fails to establish himself in either role, he is sure to be ground between the upper and nether millstone jr and he may be anyway. To the difficulties of the ordinary presidency are added in the case of the state university all the com- plications which spring from the factor of public con- trol. These have been so great and have proved so ominous in the eyes of prospective candidates that the state universities have in recent years found it difficult to fill the office. Indeed it must be said that the most serious obstacle in the present outlook of this type of university control associates itself with the apprehension lest these institutions should not be able to command for the direction of their affairs THE ABUNDANT LIFE 137 that caliber of talent and experience which their relative importance warrants and which can be com- manded by the privately governed institutions. The tenure of office of state university presidents has been, for example, at least until the last decade, ominously insecure, and among the smaller institu- tions is still insecure. In fact only the University of Michigan, over which Dr. Angell has most worthily presided for thirty-four years, can offer an instance of the established length of tenure, though Dr. Northrop’s excellent twenty-one years at Minne- sota stand a good second hereto, and will doubtless be yet abundantly amplified. Too often the position has been made the football of shifting popular moods of party politics, or worse . of factional strife. Unless the university in all its working and being can rise, like a lighthouse, high and clean above the surging and dashing of the transient and the sordid, unless it can lay hold with its foundations upon something more solid than the shifting sands of opinion and prejudice, unless it “can look down calm and undismayed in its anchorage of truth upon the battling waves around it, conscious that their fury cannot reach it, there might as well be no university. Its light will be no good. It will fail when needed most. It will deceive those who trust it. I am warning here not alone about the common brew of party politics, but about the meaner brew that is stirred in the name of private pull: the influential citizen who wants his wife’s cousin appointed to an instructorship; the editor who wages 138 THE ABUNDANT LIFE a grudge because a friend who was an incompetent instructor lost his place; the assemblyman whose brother’s boy must not be expelled, lest appropria- tions in the next legislature suffer; the professor whose salary had better be raised because it will be acceptable to certain important people with whom he goes camping in summer; the janitor who, though he toils not neither does he spin, is girt with the breastplate of membership in some order that must not be offended, or has rendered service in the primaries; the builder and contractor who skimps the mortar of cement, but is related to a prominent politician; the man who has always been a warm supporter of the university, and has shown this by sending three of his children to enjoy its free education, and who now feels that the professor of chemistry ought to find the right ingredients in the oil from his well; the man who wants a position to teach French, and, though he cannot speak French himself, belongs to an influential family and had an uncle who once played the French horn. All this business is full of backhanded blackmail and back- handed stealing, but is tolerated and often promoted by otherwise well-intentioned citizens of sluggish public conscience, who dazedly conform to the vul- gate notion that some way or other public money cannot be expected to have as much value as other money. A public official, whether president or regent of the university, or member of a school board, or mayor of a city, or governor of a state, or keeper of the dog-pound, who uses his position to secure public office and pay for a man inferior to THE ABUNDANT LIFE 139 the available best, because of personal and private relations or obligations to that man, has used public money wherewith to settle private accounts; he has treated a public trust as a private possession; he has stolen public money; he is a thief. The man who urges an official to do such a thing, has incited to theft, and is partaker in the crime. If there is any doubt about it, wherein does the doubt lie? Among other difficulties, one has been alleged to inhere in the position of a university under public control, which may in some circumstances constitute a real danger to academic liberty and the liberty of truth. This concerns the possibility that free inves- tigation and frank instruction concerning subjects involved in the partisan contentions of those parties or societies into which the public is divided may be restrained or perverted through the influence of these organizations. A few pitiable cases have occurred in state universities, but immeasurably more in private institutions. In fact these latter are often organized in loyalty to some idea or set of beliefs, which very fact precludes the free scien- tific treatment of subjects having relation thereto. A state university should certainly lend no aid to partisanship of any kind, but on the other hand I have no hesitation in expressing my conviction that if the conditions of public control require that any field of human interest and social need which demands investigation for the social good must be excluded from the purview of the state university because of such control, then the basis of organiza- tion is false, and public control is a mistake. A i on er eae CT — 140 THE ABUNDANT LIFE university with blinders on is no university at all. But in actual experience I am persuaded this difficulty does not in any real form exist. Scientific truth soundly determined and objectively stated in scientific form and spirit by real investigators who have been guided by their eyes rather than by their prejudices and who seek the truth and not con- firmation of preconceived views is not the thing which awakens distrust and arouses protest. The formulations of ideas on which partisanship of every guise is usually organized seldom approach within solution distance of the real scientific formu- lations. Translation of one into the other must practically always be indirect. The significance of the movement toward public control in connection with which has appeared the astonishing growth and development of the state universities in recent years can be appreciated only in terms of the entire history of the American colleges. Each of the nine colleges founded before the Revolution came into being more or less at the instance of their respective colonies, and most of them received to some extent state support. In the case of most of them, too, some semblance of state control was asserted at the beginning, e.g., in the form of making one or more colonial officials, as the governor, ex officio members of the governing board. Harvard was surely, whatever the legal relation, the college of Massachusetts, Yale of Connecticut, Dartmouth of New Hampshire, Brown of Rhode Island, Kings (Columbia) of New York, Princeton THE ABUNDANT LIFE 141 of New Jersey. This connection with the state was early and assiduously nullified. It was mainly to serve ecclesiastical purposes that the institutions had been founded, and with the growth of denom- inational diversity in the several colonies the idea of state control or even oversight became increas- ingly impossible. The type of government which had therefore established itself before the Revo- lution was that of the self-perpetuating corporation. Entrenched behind this barrier, the colleges went on living for their own limited purposes a placid and reasonably satisfactory existence, but gaining no hold on the community at large, on the contrary becoming increasingly separated from consideration of its general needs and touch with its life. - As Dr. Brown* says in his excellent monograph on the origin of the state universities: ‘At the same time there was growing up a widespread distrust of the colleges as then conducted. This took many forms, and was shared by men of the most diverse political and religious convictions. But it all came back virtually to this: that no one of the colleges fully answered the public need as regards higher educa- tion. Every one of them was the college of a faction, or section, or a sect, within the commonwealth, and failed therefore to be a college of the commonwealth in its entirety. The democratic spirit which had been rising, very slowly, since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the interest in civic affairs, which increased rapidly as the Revolution drew on, both tended to accentuate this feeling of distrust.’’ * Brown, Elmer E., The Origin of American State Universities, p. 17 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1903). 142 THE ABUNDANT LIFE After various attempts had been made, notably in the cases of Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth, to establish on the part of the state some right of visitation or oversight which might result in bring- ing the colleges into some better adaptation to the needs of society, and after these attempts had failed, as all attempts on the part of the state to delegate its work and duty in this regard seem likely in this country to fail, the impulse to an outright and direct assumption of the task gathered headway and gave us in 1819 the University of Virginia, an explicitly devised and cleanly planned foundation of the state, supported and controlled by the state for the direct good, first and foremost, of the state. Twenty-four years prior to that, indeed, the University of North Carolina, and in 1805 South Carolina College, had been established as state institutions. The needs of the great Northwest, which was now rapidly springing into being, arose to enforce the move- ment, and there soon followed the foundation of the University of Michigan and of the University of Indiana. Thence the type spread through the West and South, and later reacted upon the East. In no way, however, has this movement so surely betrayed the depth and range of its real power as in the change of spirit and attitude which during the latter part of the same period that saw the establishment of the earlier state universities overtook the older universities of the East. Though they still preserve the form of the close corporation or have at most admitted the election or nomination of some of their trustees from the body of the alumni, the larger ones THE ABUNDANT LIFE 143 among them have now come so fully to appreciate the essential responsibility to public sentiment and public needs that, in spite of the outward form of their government, they may be said nevertheless in some very real sense to be public institutions and under public control. Meantime the state universities, after passing through many tempestuous experiences of youth, are emerging from the period of experimentation and Quixotism, and are taking on some of the sober- ness and stability of their older counterparts. And it is well that they should. There are some great essentials postulated of a university, however its charter may read. Desirable as it is that a state university should be ever keenly sensitive to the conditions and needs of its community, it cannot be a university if it is swept about by every wind of doctrine, if it is overset by every wave of change. The university is the compass-needle, not the weathercock. The university, and particularly the state university, is under obligation to deal with knowledge in the living form of discovery. We mean by this that all its methods of teaching and study must tend to assume the type of independent research. The dogma, the textbook and the word of the master must yield to the free vision of the searcher and the trained judgment of the self-poised thinker. Dogma, textbook, and word of authority are all the glass in which men see darkly when it behooves them to see the truth face to face; they are all of them crutches upon which men hobble when it behooves them to stand erect on their own ANI TF SA pn a % rm. 144 THE ABUNDANT LIFE legs and grow strong. The slavery from which education seeks to free men is not only a blank slavery of ignorance, but slavery to the word of formal authority. Superstition is the horrible slavery of those who wear the fetter of formula, having in their hand no file to test its metal, whether it be softer than lead. A liberal education is and always was no other than an education that liberates a man out of the bondage of convention, recipe, and ruts, into the freedom of the sons of God. Memoriz- ing the opinions of other men never made any man free, but discernment of the basis of opinion and the methods of their forming has placed in the hands of many a man the chilled steel that smites off chains. A first and inevitable qualification of a university teacher is that he should at least once and some- where have stood upon the picket line of the advance of human knowledge. One who has once stood there with the appreciated known behind him and the blank unknown before him, has been made thereby to differ from others as the Paul who had seen the vision of his Lord differed from the Saul who breathed out slaughterings. He is a converted man; he is one of the elect. He knows the frontier between knowledge and non-knowledge, where the one ends and the other begins, and hence how the paths lead to the next advance. Considerable difficulty has been experienced in finding an appropriate definition for a university in distinction from a college. I do not hesitate to find the basis for such a definition in the predominance of ‘‘converted’’ men within the faculty. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 145 Everyone who has ever been at a college knows well enough that the influences which have been a power in his life are but faintly associated with the recipes and knowledges he has adopted, but chiefly if not totally with the inspiration to see and judge and work for himself that he has received from living touch with the souls and lives of certain living men. After all, the high mystery of the propagation of the intellectual life finds still, in spite of all the pedagogies, its plain unfolding in the parable of the Shunammite’s son. The real education is one of stimulus rather than dictation, and results in open- ing the eyes more than filling the mind. The efficiency of university training will be measured on the whole in each case in terms of quality more than quantity, of intension more than extension. The zest and intensity of some part of the student’s work will probably determine his pace for the use of his education in life. There is everywhere in our American universities, I am convinced, too much dawdling, too much toying with vaguely applicable subjects of study, too much use of the optimistic analogy between a university and a bureau drawer in which Bartlett pears are laid away to ripen, too much affiliation with that estimate of learning which values it in the class with robes and titles, nose rings, and tattoo marks. There is too little appre- ciation of it in terms of hardness of fiber, strength of character, and rate of efficiency. A good teacher in a university must fulfil two requirements. He must know his subject at first hand. He must have the sympathetic imagination to share the outlook of his pupil. Some of those 146 THE ABUNDANT LIFE who bear even in universities the title of good teachers are, I fear, only clever concocters of doses and preparers of capsules, things suited to be re- ceived by the normal human gullet without struggle or the excessive use of lubricants. I cannot leave this topic entirely without ventur- ing an expression of my opinion that in the recent high organization of graduated curricula throughout our whole system of public education from the grades through the high schools, and the college to the professional graduate work, we have tended too much to lay foundations upon which houses are never built, and have encouraged students to take so long a start that they lose their breath before they come to the jump. To be creative in scientific or literary work a man must keep his imagination fresh. There is such a think as ¢¢ going stale’’ with too much study and too little doing. It may be that in order to set a broken bone conclusively a medic does not need to have reconstructed the osteology of a mastodon. But all this in a footnote by way of warning, not of doctrine. A state university exists to set and maintain the standards of higher education in its state. It neither precludes the existence of other institutions, nor is it a ragged school. Local or denominational colleges will always exist and are to be welcomed as offering variety of opportunity, of discipline, or of influence suited to the varying instinet and interest of various elements of the community. It should be especially welcome if such colleges pay particular heed to the more direct personal over- sight of students in the earlier years of a college THE ABUNDANT LIFE 147 course. The state university will, however, inevi- tably provide the standard forms of professional and graduate work, and will provide the standards and represent the general oversight of the whole body of higher education in the state. Of antagonism there can be no reasonable expectation; indeed con- tention would argue the relative weakness of the party contending, for there is evidently more work to do than all the colleges put together can compass. A situation, however, with which it might prove difficult for a community to deal would be created by the tendency to develop two state universities within a single state. Such a situation is surely impending in those states which have established an agricultural and mechanical college as distinct from the state university. There is no exact line of delimitation to be found between these in their inevitable growth. Duplication of work and conflict of interest before the legislature is a sure result. But the state cannot wisely afford to be divided against itself, and consolidation, at least under one board of regents, is the solution that time and good wisdom and sweet reasonableness will certainly sug- gest. The state university represents the state, yea, is the state, in its attitude toward higher educa- tion. It expresses by its existence a clear public conviction that in free communities where universal suffrage prevails and the state is the possession of the whole people, education is primarily, and as a matter of plain self-protection, must needs always be the function of the state, i.e., the state must be responsible to itself. Modern states are ‘‘progres- sive’’ states by virtue of enlightening and liberating ee Cha A pi a a CE 148 THE ABUNDANT LIFE education. Society which conceives of the present as only by and for the present is either savagery or a civilization launched upon the sordid ways of death. Society which conceives of the present only as part and parcel of the past is the stagnation of China. Society which conceives of the present as part of the future, looks upward, has the breath of divine purpose in its nostrils, and we call it ‘‘pro- gressive.” When we provide for the training of the young, we do it in confidence that the duty of the present is not satisfied in caring for the present, but that the claims of generations yet to be must be heard in the courts of today. The university’s real commodity is light, not the pitch-sputtering torch of the agitator, nor the painted lamps of the bigot, but the calm and steady light of well-determined truth. The plain, fair truth inspires no riots, provokes no panies, undermines no civil or commercial confidence, destroys no substan- tials of faith; it has no charm for the agitator or the sensationalist, being not crude enough for the former nor pungent enough for the latter; but the exaggeration and the half-truth are more perversive than the lie. The truth is harmless because it is the real. He who evades and suspects it proclaims thereby his doubt that there is a real. But there is a truth and there is a lie; there is a right and there is a wrong; somewhere in the moral universe of God there is a heaven and there is a hell; there is a light and there is a blackness of darkness; the university casts in its lot with the light. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 149 LEARNING AND THE REPUBLIC Address delivered before the Southern California Teachers’ Association at Los Angeles, California, on Decem- ber 21, 1908. George Washington even in his lifetime was a staid, and, on the whole, an exasperatingly proper personality; and now that more than a century intervenes between us and him, there is ground for apprehension, lest in the vision of the minds of men the distant snow-white peak may be irrevocably blending with the sky. Before, however, the Ameri- can people dismiss him to the heights of apotheosis and make of him a pale symbol and a name, they have yet some things to learn from the real man Washington and some debts to pay him. Deifying one’s creditors is a mean way to settle with them. Pay first and deify afterwards. Washington repeatedly and earnestly recom- mended the foundation at the Federal city of a National University, and in his last will attempted to make provision for the nucleus of an endowment for it. As yet nothing has been done. We revere his name and image beyond measure; we quote fer- vently his words of advice, and assume to be guided by their generalities, but the one concrete and specific recommendation upon which he laid the stress of a vital personal interest, his chief concrete desire, we have overlooked and spurned, forsooth 150 THE ABUNDANT LIFE because it is concrete, and Washington himself a generality. Far better were it to do first, and gen- eralize afterwards. It is well known that besides attempting to make provision in his will for the nucleus of an endow- ment for a National University, he had repeatedly recommended the plan to Congress, discussed it at some length in a communication of J anuary 28, 1795, to the Commissioners of the Federal Distriet, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson of March 15, 1795, and again in a private letter to Alexander Hamilton, dated September 1, 1796. ‘To show,’’ he says, in his letter to Hamilton, ‘‘that this is no new idea of mine, I may appeal to my early communications to Congress; and to prove how seriously I have reflected on it since, and how well disposed I have been, and still am, to contribute my aid towards carrying the measure into effect, I enclose you the extract of a letter from me to the governor of Vir- ginia on this subject, and a copy of the resolves of the legislature of that state in consequence thereof.’’ Washington had been suggesting to Hamilton in this letter that some mention of this plan might be made in the final revision of the Farewell Address. Ham- ilton, however, thought a specific recommendation like this unsuited to the general tenor of that address. Washington accedes, but the words of his reply in his letter to Hamilton of September 6, have a touch of pathos that constitutes for us and as against us, when we read them today almost an in- dictment: ‘To be candid, I much question whether a recommendation of this measure to the legislature THE ABUNDANT LIFE 151 will have a better effect now than formerly. It may show, indeed, my sense of its importance, and that is a sufficient inducement for me to bring the matter before the public, in some shape or other, at the closing scenes of my political exit. My object for proposing to insert it where I did (if not improper), was to set the people ruminating on the importance of the measure, as the most likely means of bringing it to pass.”” In that day of slender beginnings, of poverty, and multiplied embarrassments, Washing- ton might well in his modesty forgive the deafness of men to his appeal, but you surely do not believe he thought a century would pass, and never a Con- gress have ears to hear. All his statements concerning his plan show it was no part of his purpose to decorate or glorify the state he helped to found with the insignia and monu- ment of a university; plain and common-sensed man as he was, he wished it to serve the plain and useful purpose of training up good American citizens. ‘‘It has always been a source of serious regret with me,’ he says in his will, ‘‘to see the youth of these United States sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education, often before their minds were formed or they had imbibed any adequate ideas of the happi- ness of their own, contracting too frequently not only habits of dissipation and extravagance, but principles unfriendly to Republican government and to the true and genuine liberties of mankind, which thereafter are rarely overcome.’”’ He counts also on the influ- ence of residence and study at the central city as likely to overcome somewhat of ‘‘local attachments 152 THE ABUNDANT LIFE and state prejudices,”” and aid in * ‘acquiring knowledge in the principles of Politics and Good Government’’; or as he puts it in another writing, ‘acquiring the liberal knowledge which is necessary to qualify our citizens for the exigencies of public as well as private life’’ (To the Commissioners of Federal District, January 28, 1795) ; and again in his letter to Hamilton he has it: ‘‘I mean education in general, as one of the surest means of enlightening and giving just ways of thinking to our citizens, but particularly the establishment of a university; where the youth from all parts of the United States might receive the polish of erudition in the arts, sciences, and belles-lettres; and where those who were dis- posed to run a political course might not only be instructed in the theory and principles, but where the legislature would be in session half the year, and the interests and politics of the nation would be discussed, they would lay the surest foundation for the practical part also.’ Washington was neither a learned man nor an educational theorist, but he saw in his simplicity straight and plain; he saw the university as the necessary complement of the state, an essential con- dition of national life. The present German Kaiser, in speaking of the intimate and essential, yet inde- pendent, relations existing between the German state and its universities, is quoted as saying: ‘We stand vis-a-vis with our universities. ’’ Jefferson with his heart in the single state devised the type of the state university ; Washing- ton with his heart in the Federal nation conceived THE ABUNDANT LIFE 153 the type of the national university, and, though his desire has thus far been rebuffed, the very ripening to success of the state university type within these latest years has now brought in the day when the national type is demanded as the crown and cap- stone. It is not so much that we want another great university, one more added to the score we already have, it is not that we want more professorial chairs nor more or higher titles and degrees, for we have quite professors enough now, of the run-about class, and as to degrees, we do most fervently hope that the national university will have outgrown them entirely; we want an institution that shall integrate the system of public universities already developed in the separate states and shall take its place, to use the Kaiser’s expression, vis-a-vis the national government, just as the public universities of the various states have come to stand relatively to the life and government of their own communities. That this is no merely abstract or theoretical need is proven by the fact that a very considerable portion of the materials for a national university has already come into being in Washington auto- matically, and as it were, unconsciously. The Congressional Library is really the library of the National University. This joined with the Smith- sonian Institution and the scientific branches of the departments, such as the Geological Survey, the bureaus of plant industry, soils, chemistry, forestry, the coast survey, the bureau of statistics, and a score of other agencies, when once merely opened to re ET ri — ee dB (ESE GIT ei RE po a RAR re SVR i i ar ES - vm Sd An vs A St hr SR i i 154 THE ABUNDANT LIFE graduate students for the practice of research would already constitute the essential nucleus of the uni- versity. The university is already there, without buildings, name, or organization. In the various forms of scientific work which the departments are carrying on all over the country in more or less intimate cooperation with the local universities, his unnamed and undiscerned national university is already emerging as the keystone of a national system. The real university is made not of pillars and titles and tests, but of the will and vision of freemen who seek out the truth and establish it in human use. But I am not here to plead for the establishment of a national university. That is not my subject. My one desire here and now is to emphasize that Washington’s conception of such an institution gave it an undisguised public character, placed it frankly under public support and control—‘ ‘under the aus- pices of the General Government,’”’ are the words in his will—and devoted it directly to the betterment of public and political conditions. Now this is my subject and Washington’s subject: the public university an essential of the life of the republic. We all hold that of the public common schools; but we are not so sure regarding the universities. And yet there is nothing so sure in the history of education—in the history for that matter of every movement for the spiritual unlifting of mankind—as that progress has always been from the top down- ward. The roots are in the skies. It is the hand reached down from above that lifts men, not the mud THE ABUNDANT LIFE 155 beneath them. Whether we reckon in terms of the middle ages or, in a narrower sense, of modern times, the public university antedates the public schools, and the schools have always received directly or indirectly their refreshment and succor from above. Then in its turn the university could rise as the expanding growth of the schools occupied the space beneath. The older universities of this country were mostly designed as public, indeed as state universi- ties. Harvard was the university of Massachusetts, Yale of Connecticut, Princeton of New Jersey, Brown of Rhode Island, Dartmouth of New Hamp- shire. Their religious connection was that of the ruling sect or, to speak in terms of the still pre- vailing thought of the day, that of the established or state church, while Rhode Island, having no established church, distributed its board of control among the existing sects proportionately to their then existing strength. These state universities of the older type soon shrank back, however, from the full implication of their office, through dread of political interference, chiefly in the form of legislative inspection, and became close corporations. They thus came to rest for their substantial control: (1) in part upon one of the religious sects, a control from which with the lapse of time they have tended to free themselves; (2) in part, especially in later days, upon the interest and loyalty of their graduates; (3) but in chief part upon a sense of responsibility to the wealth and common public consciousness of their local 156 THE ABUNDANT LIFE constituencies, such constituencies being vaguely determined by financial support, patronage, and gen- eral interest, rather than by any definitely confessed boundaries or policies. In the uncertainty the money-hunger has sometimes become the dominant guide. We men of Brown cannot cease to remember with shame how a committee of the governing board once intimated to the beloved president of the university that his usefulness was apparently ended because certain views which he honestly held on a public question had seemed to incapacitate him for securing gifts of money from the large possessors thereof. At that moment the university was not a public university; it did not represent the public, nor address itself to the public weal. It was not free; it was tied in its allegiance to the interests of a few. Except as it is free, the university cannot serve the public weal. And this is no small matter, for if the university is not free, where is any free- dom left? Look about you and see! If the univer- sity is to hold the confidence of the public its pursuit of the truth must be absolutely free. Not that it should speak with any official authority or set any seal or stamp upon its products, or strive to stand- ardize the truth, but that it should be known to seek and see with eye single to the facts. It cannot utter finalities or provide the ultimate recipes for life and conduct, for its freemen will differ and clash in the future as they have in the past; the sanc- tions of its authority with human kind will rest solely on the disinterestedness, the sincerity, and the integrity of its attitude and its labors. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 157 This is true as concerns those who investigate and teach; it is equally true as regards those who administer its affairs. The things at stake in the freedom of the American universities are too high and precious, that the pursuit of endowments should be suffered to affect the attitude or judgment of the man at the head, or his public expressions or acts suffered to count as repayment of benefits received. To appoint your college presidents solicitors of bounty is to make them jesters at the tables of the rich. The next occurrence in the proper sequence of events is for some earnest teacher to hear from the president that his doctrine jars upon the nerves or wakens the conscience of some benefactor in the offing or already landed. And yet men will say the universities which look directly toward public support have their troubles, too. So they do. When they appear before their legislatures, they are often made to feel the lash; they are often opposed; they are often told what the people really want, when they think the people do not know what is really good for them; they often yield to popular desire; but this much must be said: the criticism has come from out of the people they seek to serve, and is public and not in a corner : furthermore, a public hearing of the answer can be had, which experience has amply shown results more often in increased public interest and support than in defeat. Experience has also shown that the people have often been right in their demands upon the uni- versity and that genuine progress was made through listening thereto. The progressive adaptation of 158 THE ABUNDANT LIFE the great public universities of the West to the life- needs of their communities during these latter years and the cordial response of their communities thereto constitutes the most encouraging feature in the modern unfolding of democracy. The fear of a still grosser intrusion upon the freedom of a state university—namely, that of par- tisan politics whereby, for instance, the dominant political party might secure the appointment of a professor of its own stripe, or repress or unseat one holding hostile views—such fear seems not to be In any way justified by experience. In the earlier history of the state universities, especially in the smaller ones, there were some trying experiences and a few high-handed misdeeds of the sort under mention. The populist looting of the Agricultural College of Kansas has been so often cited and with such universal denunciation that it counts more as an inoculation against recurrence than a case of the disease. A public opinion of such firmness and vigor has been developed against such practice, that it is as good as unthinkable in any one of the larger universities, and if the suspicion of such a proceeding developed in one of the lesser states a publication of it before the people would call forth storms of disapproval and react with no uncertain vehemence upon politicians and party, as is proving the case just now in Oklahoma. The fact is, the discussions of the university seminary, laboratory, and lecture-room move in a so much higher range of scientific treatment than the cruder formulation of political doctrine suited THE ABUNDANT LIFE 159 to the platforms of parties and the oratory of cam- paigns, that it is practically impossible to reduce the one directly into terms of the other, and, further- more, the character and scientific outlook of the men who are now being utilized for university chairs almost forbids their being classified summarily and conveniently branded as of this party or that. As fast as political doctrine and deed ripen into coordi- nation with the thought and work of specialists and experts, such as university professors ought to be, they inevitably pass into the province and the hands of commissions of experts. That is where the tariff soon will have to go, and the money question too. But, first, the politician pioneers of the hustings and the country store have to be allowed to cut the brush and burn the stumps. That is the wasteful, but in the long run beneficent, manner of democ- racy—of democracy, itself the greatest institute of education under the stars. The most striking advantage in its relation to the people of its community which the public university enjoys as over the privately governed and supported is one which can scarcely be appreciated by those who have not lived and worked in both. This con- sists substantially in the consciousness of the people that the public university is theirs, their own. It exists for their service and the training of their children; it is there to rescue their children from slavery to the crystallizing strata of caste; it is a normal part of the stated equipment of their life in state and society, like the roads and the letter-box; if they are not as yet in touch with it in any other 160 THE ABUNDANT LIFE way, their pocketbooks are touched when the tax bill comes, and proper Americans as they are, inclined to plan sooner or later in some way to get their money’s worth. They expect the university to tell them what to plant in their fields—expect it to increase the gluten content of their wheat; to make them tomatoes that will pack conveniently in boxes; to make their pippins slenderer when they tend to take on flesh and lose their shape; to wire them, on the occasion of an earthquake, what geology sug- gests as the best thing to do next; to portion them out their weather and rainfall in due season; and to tell them whether the new century began in 1900 or 1901, thereby probably settling a bet, and finally, if nothing else can be done for the university, it is at least a plain civic duty at stated intervals to criticize its president. All of which is good. Elsewhere they do not know there is one; at most they know the football captain. It would be, however, unfair to the facts to imply that state universities of the older type, as they exist in the East, are not in an important sense public universities, though privately controlled. Surely it is to the public consciousness of the intelligence and moral sense of their communities that they are finally responsible, and by this they are finally gov- erned; they feel, though, less quickly and intimately the blood-heat of the people’s life, and they claim less of the people’s interest. To be suspicious of the American people is not the way to get at the best there is in them. It is a distemper of the times that our educated and . THE ABUNDANT LIFE 161 well-to-do classes are afraid of their own American politics. They shrink from the plain exercises of citizen’s duty in discussion and political action through fear of soiling their hands with ‘dirty polities,”’ a dirtiness which, in so far as it is real, they have helped create by their own neglect, and, in so far as it is an imaginary dread, is a creature of their own aloofness. It was in the spirit of this distrust that the old state universities a century or two ago shrank back before the ogre of politics and legislatures, and relinquished their birthrights; and it is in continuance of this same distrust, then far better justified than now, that the same men who voice grave apprehensions concerning the future of our state universities and evidence a feeling of repulsion at their connection with the political mechanism of their states—the same men oppose the plan of Washington for a national university, lest forsooth it be debased by politics. But he expected politics to be uplifted by the university. The world will never be saved by the device of staying out of it. Free government with all its life demands the university, but it does not want it lowered to it on the end of a rope, ready to be drawn back in nervous fear. The two must stand together in frank dependence on each other, side by side, back to back, and vis-a-vis. Democracy and the university. They were made for each other. Both are training schools of self- reliance and responsibility, the one for the people, the other for the individual. Both teach that the sanctions of a control that is real, whether for a CE SS 162 THE ABUNDANT LIFE people or an individual, must be from within and not from without. Self-government for a people and self-control for a man; these are the tests of civilization; these are the final baccalaureate honors in the career of the race. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 163 TO HELP FIND THE WAY Founders’ Day Address at Leland Stanford Junior Unwersity, March 9, 1916. At Cornell University, on a noonday twenty-five years ago I saw a carriage drive rapidly away from the house of Andrew D. White on its way to the Ithaca station. In the carriage were Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford. They had paid a brief visit to Dr. White in order to gain his advice regarding the educational organization of Stanford University, and especially regarding the man to make President. So definite and convincing had been the good doc- tor’s nomination that their visit was cut short to a few hours. A luncheon party on which a number of us in the faculty had counted for favorable introduction was hastily annulled, and the visitors hurried away to take their train and set it en route for Bloomington, Indiana. Within less than two days, we heard of Dr. Jordan’s acceptance. The loss of the luncheon and the hurrying dust of those carriage wheels left a very emphatic im- pression upon my mind. Even though I looked on only from afar, I could not fail to appreciate that something involving great definiteness of intent was in the making; but only as the years passed by did I come to know in full the certitude of purpose which, inspired by beneficent will and pledged in the i i il i We f 3 1 164 THE ABUNDANT LIFE tenderest of human affections, animated the action of that devoted pair in those great days five and twenty years ago when the foundations of the Leland Stanford Junior University first were laid. So far as their part was concerned in what was to be done, they had no hesitation, uncertainty, or doubt. It was their will and purpose to give to the many foster-children of their love, who in the years and centuries to come should tread these halls, the means of making their lives useful and effective to the full. To this end, they provided endowment, buildings, and equipment, abundant beyond any measure known hitherto; they chose, to organize and lead the work of education, a man of largest mould, large-minded, generous, large-hearted beyond the usual measure of men. Unstintedly, unflinchingly they did their part. The rest they left to the gene- rations of scholarship and teachership, and to them who, in the coming years, shall have the gift of making men. As to their part, they had no doubt ; have we as to our part? They determined it that their foster-children down through the generations should have the privilege of a university education, but as to what constitutes a university education, they left the determination to the teaching profes- sion, and their successors in the trusteeship of the great estate have done likewise. They left this determination most trustfully to our profession; I wonder if we, as a guild, are worthy of the trust? Do we know ourselves what a university is or are we really much concerned to know? Or are we, for example, more concerned to act as special attorneys SNVId TVENLOILIHONY 1SMVIH IHL OL ONIQ¥OOOV NNO3E ONIaTINg LS¥Id IHL 3SNOH S.1N3AIS3dd IHL THE ABUNDANT LIFE 165 for the subjects we severally teach and the depart- ments which represent them? Do we use the bodies of learning which constitute our subjects for the upbuilding of our students, or do we use our students for the glorifying of our subjects? Are we concerned to estimate the social value of each of our various subjects within the body of the whole and assign to our students each his meat in due season, or are we engaged in a fine banditry to capture and impound all we may? Are we not floundering in the deep and rich sloughs of theories and abstract conditions without building solid roads of sound training toward definite goals? Are we able to say from actual experience which of our prescriptions of studies will produce a certain required result, other things being equal? Can we confidentially tell why we prescribe calculus in one case and English literature in another? Have we noted in our experience the effect of Greek in one case as against that of metaphysics in another? We have theories enough as to what ought to happen, but have we developed even the outlines of an em- piricism based on stateable facts, which will guide us confidently to a prescription for a new case? And yet this public of ours expects it of us—not in every case and not with equal trustfulness toward all of us, but by and large they expect it of us. They probably think we have special knowledge on the subject, derived from the oracles of our guild— knowledge which we do not reveal except to the candidating neophytes and on payment of a fee. It is the same old story of the professional monopoly 166 THE ABUNDANT LIFE all down the ages—the lawyer with his phrase and seal; the medicine man with his mysterious presecrip- tion, and his senatorial courtesy toward the doctor first called in the case; the cleric with his formula of escape from the pollution of sin and the punish- ment eternal—no matter how they differ, all agreed in the imposition of a fee; indeed unless the fee is paid, the special knowledge cannot be expected to go into effect. It is remarkable how seldom our public forces us to give account of the values we attach to the long concatenations of courses and curricula by which we hold the patient candidates aloof from their goal of degrees, and build up the long Par- nassan staircase with many annual steps called grades ripening toward the top into the broader biennial grades called landings where we let them take their breath while they assume a fresh title; matriculant, certificated junior, bachelor, master, doctor. Meantime the gentle public looks on, its gaze more than ever preoccupied by the shifting colors of the kaleidoscope, its mind more than ever indisposed to exact an explanation of conditions so elaborate, and its tolerant heart more than ever unwilling to interfere with the solemn Roman augurs, who, enthroned in the ancient seat of augury on the hill, proceed with their interpretations of the flight of birds. So we go on laying down our systems of pre- requisites for this course and that, building up our requirements for this college and that school, interposing Subject A and Subject B with calm THE ABUNDANT LIFE 167 confidence in the inexhaustibility of the alphabet, and entrenching our degrees behind barriers and entanglements past finding out except to the Re- corder or the Registrar. All this is doubtless good, except on the theory that the student himself is an interested party and will often wish to choose what is best for him, as he is the one who suffers if he takes what is wrong for him; but we are not here and now so much concerned with what is doubtless good or doubtless bad. We are rather concerned to note the fact that the prescriptions and requirements are made and accepted without our being held to strict account as to what symptoms and results the prerequisites may be expected to produce in the patient and why— as to whether the prerequisites are really necessary or only a pleasant embellishment, and why so—as to whether, for example, prerequisites may not in large measure mean merely relative immaturity in the pupil. It certainly is a high compliment to the teaching profession and a commanding evidence of popular confidence that we are so seldom commanded or even asked to lay bare the mysteries of our guild. The great uninitiated throng rests, it appears, in a quiet assurance that we know where we are going, though we do not tell; and that we know the way, though the chief evidence we publicly give thereof may to the world seem to be only a patient and steadfast continuity in the drawing of our salaries. Most of us of the profession, if put on the defen- sive, would stoutly deny and deny with all candor po 168 THE ABUNDANT LIFE that there is any educational guild whatsoever, still less any holy mysteries in the keepership of a guild. We are sure we have no sacred incantations where- with to expel the evil spirits of ignorance, in spite of the courses in pedagogy required for a teacher’s certificate; and we are sure we rely on no conse- crated formulas and recipes wherewith to equip the neophytes, though with some of us the textbook has become a Bible and our lectures issue from the sere and yellow leaf, more than from our blood-red lives. The indoctrination which proceeds by the dictation of dead formulas is a totally different thing from that inspiration which springs direct from life to life by the contagion of personality. We are quite sure, furthermore, that we main- tain no guild protecting a monopoly or the outlines of one, and yet we cannot help noting here and there a touch of aversion among the regular initiates as toward those who ‘‘come up some other way like a thief or a robber,’’ via University Extension and the summer school. It must, too, be confessed that in certain exter- nals we give our uninitiated public, even though it does not seem much to mind it or resent it, some reason to think that we are quite busied with the maintenance of the guild spirit. We nourish a weird ritual of bleachers, dervishes, and oskies; we culti- vate all the forms of association: brotherhoods, alumni unions, symbols, initiations, and feasts for the dead; we lay stress on matriculations and grad- uations and degrees and decorate our plain names with the feathers and scalps of various alphabetic THE ABUNDANT LIFE 169 combinations; and, like the Pharisees of old, we make broad our phylacteries and enlarge the borders of our garments. There is, indeed, fair reason to presume that when the sisters and the uncles and the aunts come down for Commencement and look dazedly on at the mysteries, we are quite willing they should be impressed that something important is going on and has been going on for these four costly years, even though we might not always be able to tell them just what it is. And then there is that solemn moment when the two Roman augurs wink at each other. This sounds all very terrible, but at the worst it means no more than that these thousands of students who in hundreds of schools and colleges are moving up toward sure leadership among their kind and toward helpfulness in society, are obtain- ing various equipment which we denominate by the one term, education, and are obtaining it all of them by aids and processes which are abhorrent to the theories and prognostications of some one or another of the educational authorities—or are not supported by any theory whatsoever or conceived of in relation to any theory. Learning to spell and absorbing the multiplication table and developing a handwriting were never in the good old times recom- mended and enforced by reference to any abstract considerations. We just had to know that eight times seven was fifty-six, for the very good and competent reason that we had to. The compell- ing power was not a body of psychological and biological considerations based on theory, but the erp — rome as AM ) lf ipa 6 abi a So tsi 170 THE ABUNDANT LIFE quickening power of the teacher ultimately based on love and muscle fiber. Nowadays our methods of instruction are founded upon broad reflections concerning the attitude which ought to inspire the pupil when facing the multi- plication table. He must not see it all at once, lest dismay lay hold upon him. He must be encouraged to entertain for it from the beginning feelings of friendliness and such as will naturally lead toward a desire for further helpful acquaintanceship in the future. A reasonable solicitude must also be exercised lest there should arise in the pupil’s mind a possible protest against the seeming arbitrariness of assigning exclusively to the number fifty-six the resultant of the union of seven and eight, and, coupled with the protest, an ill concealed desire for a somewhat larger liberty. The method of earlier days as I remember it involved a direct attempt to intrude the multiplication table forcibly and in large masses into the human throat until these masses protruded considerably beyond the pupil’s mouth. The methods of those days were harsher and more persistent than these of today, but it can scarcely be denied that multiplication and addition were held to the firmer conventional anchorage and that hand- writing was less likely to include the vertical and both slopes on a single document. What is true of our elementary education is in its own way true of the university. We are floundering in pedagogic speculation and expending, in theorizing regarding courses and methods, much good strength that is sorely needed for consistent training, the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 171 acquisition of accurate knowledge, and the prepara- tion to assume the service of man in society. In spite of the conflicting cries which rise here and there from the market place, it would seem there are some plain things of simple observation con- cerning which those who sit one side in the porch might be esteemed to be reasonably agreed. First, there is the importance of learning some one thing well. The achievement of units bears a very lax relation to getting an education. A congeries of two- and three-hour courses selected because of their convenient time, their pleasant name, and their charitable basis of credit, may yield a degree but will not, however numerous, make mind, any more than many moulds of jelly will build a wall. Sooner or later, the student must learn the self- denying lesson that there are many attractive propo- sitions in the Announcement of Courses which he must let go by, as there will be afterwards in life. In doing one thing well, he will learn more or less about other things. Through one field mastered, he gets the lay of the land all about him. It is the one way known among men. John Eshleman, nobleman, just now taken from us by an all too early death, chose to spend his graduate period at the University in deepening his hold on the philosophy and Greek that he had studied in his undergraduate years, so that he might somewhere have solid ground under his feet. He never regretted it, far the reverse; and surely no one who knew how deep were the fountains at which he drank, can believe he was aught but the finer lawyer and statesman for the choice he made, short as were his days. 172 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The subject of study a man chooses is of far less importance than the attitude he learns to assume toward the truth. With the shrewdest of foresight he can exercise, a man is very likely to achieve his life-success in a widely different field from that of his expectation. But that is no ground for disap- pointment; it is not even certain that the shift involves waste. It is not a man’s outward equipment that counts, but his character. The subject of study is to be regarded as little more than a certain healthy food for a growing mental organism. Feed well, keep clean, and let nature do the rest. Of more importance still than subject or training is the competence to transmute the form of learning into the form of discovery. Toward stimulating this competency, in short range or great, all higher training must strive. Men who naturally discover and who, as carriers of infection, can in any form teach, must be made to teach and not allowed to isolate themselves in institutes,—for fresh thinking is the very breath of life to a university. A man who has once in small or great exhausted all that is known on a given matter and having proceeded alone beyond the outer picket line of the advance has gained glimpses of new lands in new relations to the old, he has become thereby a changed man for all his life. A new fever is in his blood. It is no longer worth his while to borrow. He has discovered. Man rises to the highest there is in him, when he shakes himself free from imitation, superstition, and convention and setting free mind above the ruts of matter re-discovers his world by re-thinking it. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 173 The university is distinctively a social body. It arose out of clubs and dining halls. It exists pri- marily today as a body of scholars living together and stimulating each other in work and counsel. The education its students receive, so far as the typical students are concerned, comes less by tasks and prescriptions than by the unseen influence of atmosphere and the zest of environment and standards. We deplore it when we hear that parents send their sons and daughters to certain colleges where they may acquire fortunate social connections in point of caste and wealth, or even that they are sent to New England ‘‘at least long enough,’’ so the saying goes, ‘‘to take on their broad a’s,’’ but this is after all only a passing perversion of the finer and nobler social meaning of the college. This is a social world we have come to live in and no matter what the field of work we choose, our preparation for it must assume in first line the social form. The day is already well past when a man because he plans to be an engineer can profitably judge that he has to deal only with dynamos, pumps, and wheels, and not with men and motives. Engineers, quite as much as men in any other profession, will find that they have to adapt their lives and fitness to the needs of men living in social communities. Already the strong demand is rising all through the engineering world for men trained in commercial law, in economies, and in the efficient use of English speech. A university is a place where men living together in the sharing of outlook and tasks may shape their 174 THE ABUNDANT LIFE lives to social need by learning to understand one province where human thought has leveled roads and by helping find the further way. If our walls are to bear but one inscription, let these five words standing at the entering in of its gates tell what the university is for: To Help Find the Way ‘Help,’ because we are a social body and share our tasks; ‘The way,’ because our goal is the truth; ‘Find,’ because our mode is that of search. Our path shall be the plain straight ahead. We will abjure the maze and drive for the open. We will annul the mysteries and shake off the barren formulas of authority. We will set the man above the schedule, and the truth above the form. This shall be, as ‘our part’ the echo to that clarity of purpose which spoke from the hastening carriage wheels in Ithaca five and twenty years ago. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 175 THE LIBERAL EDUCATION Date and occasion unknown. Liberal education,—it is a time-honored phrase that comes echoing down to us through the college halls of the past. The gardens and porches of Attica heard it first, and like many another word that since has changed from substance to symbol, they alone heard it in its plain simplicity, and understood it. A freeman’s training—the training that befits a freeman—that was the word which rang in the ears of Greece and ran with a meaning which the thought of Greeks alone could give it. Nowhere, we may be sure, has the word freeman ever connoted just the peculiar value it carried with it there. It gathered, first of all, its brilliancy against the heavy background of slavery. Half at least of all the population of Attica were slaves; and how blessed a thing it is to be the master of one’s lot he knows best who holds himself in contrast with the sodden mechanism of the life of the slave. It had its meaning, too, in terms of political rights, for the ancient state was based in its very theory upon the existence of slavery. There was in the state the part that thought and willed, as there was in the body the brain and heart, and over against it and subject to it was the mechanism 176 THE ABUNDANT LIFE that served and wrought. To be a freeman meant to be a citizen and a constituent part of the con- trolling life of the state. It had its meaning again in terms of that deep-seated contrast which distinguishes the temper and thought of the Asiatic East from that of the European West.. The man of the East felt himself bound to a system of fate. The universe worked its will. The plan was the plan of the Absolute, and He recognized no right of suffrage or of referendum. The life of man was determined from without, was swept on in the current. The man of the West looked out into a world in which he had the right both of initiative and of referendum. He chose and leveled his paths. He steered his craft across the currents; he even changed the course of currents by plan and effort. With him the individual will of personality stood in the foreground, not the unscrutable will of Fate. In this deeper, deepest sense the Greek as the typical man of the West was a freeman, and in his courageous naiveté of freedom it was given him to discover and lay before the world of all time the riches and potency of the free human soul,—free to see, free to judge, free to shape the world about him. ‘Man is the measure of the Universe.’’ This is more than the dictum of the sophist; it is humanity ’s declaration of independence. It inspired the study of man and of his institutions, art, literature, his- tory, philosophy, statecraft. It inspired man to the study and the domination of nature. It has through all the generations of culture given the keynote to THE ABUNDANT LIFE 177 idealism whether in art, religion, philosophy, or life, and tuned the hymn of human uplift and the pean of human prayers. Instinct with this strange blend of values the phrase ‘‘liberal education’’ passed on from Greece to the schools of Europe. It does not concern us here to recount the subjects and the methods which the Greeks deemed proper to the training of a freeman—enough to know that they sought to develop the individual to the fulness of his inborn capacity, and to give him the power of self-direction and self-control, and while they aimed at making him automobile they trained him to respect the established roadways of social and civic life. Noble as the original conception was, and noble and ennobling as the use of it in modern education has been, it cannot be denied that it has entered the modern world with the taint of slavery upon it. Its idea of freeman was shapen as the counterpart and complement of a slave. In England the liberal education has been the ‘‘gentleman’s’’ education, and ‘‘gentleman’’ as Old England used the term, was a close translation of the Greek word freeman. The conception of the slave to be sure was not at hand to serve as a counterpart and background, but there were others,—or rather another under various names,—sometimes the name is laborer, sometimes menial, sometimes shop man, sometimes ‘tourney.’ The English college has prided itself on offering an education suited to continue gentlemen’s sons in the estate of gentlemen, though it has not always escaped servile use as a connecting 178 THE ABUNDANT LIFE track on which rich brewers’ sons and the like might be switched over from the sordid to the sublime. The atmosphere of class distinction hangs, too, about the German gymnasium, though nothing in its organization or requirements openly expresses such distinction. It has nothing about it of the social selectiveness that continually expresses itself in the hall and garden of the English college and stands grand in the tutor’s room and the porter’s lodge. Still it remains a fact that the peasant’s son only as an exception is expected at the gymnasium, and that the shopkeeper and laborer are deterred from entering their sons both by the long nine-year course and its expense, as well as by the settled order of life which appoints the son, other things being equal, to follow the career of his father as the line of least resistance. The fashion of the liberal education in England has been set by the demands of the gentleman class, of that in Germany by the standards of bureauracy. It may now be questioned whether we have in all this anything suited to the needs of an American Democracy. We certainly are unwilling to recognize an institution which tends to foster class distinction. It must be doubted whether we are willing to tolerate any system which adapts itself even to the supposed needs of such distinction of states or class as may for any reason exist. The question then may fairly be asked: Has American life any place or use for the ideals of liberal culture? Has it any form of institution which may be trusted to recognize it? THE ABUNDANT LIFE 179 This is no artificial question that I raise. We hear it voiced on every hand: ‘Why not teach our young people something that is practical?’’ ‘Why not give them something that they will use in getting a living?”’ The practical tendency of the American mind lends emphasis to the question. It is the American habit to go straight toward a goal. Why wander on the devious path of liberal culture when the terminus is straight ahead and a straight road can be built thither? The peculiar conditions under which American institutions of the higher learning have developed have lent opportunity to the query. We inherited from England the college and the secondary school, the college providing education to the youth of 17 to 21. As standards improved, we tended at first to push the college up. The ideals of the German university laid hold upon us first in the sixties, then with increasing strength in the seventies and eighties. Under a vague impulse toward developing the colleges into the German university we set to work to raise the level of the college by increasing the requirements for admission. As the age of admission rose, and the age of graduation with it, specialization of studies forced its way in from the top and steadily spread downward toward the bottom. The college was tending fast toward absorp- tion in the specialized subjects, and the old ideals of the liberal culture shrank back into the freshman and sophomore years, disputing the ground as they retreated, but slowly and surely yielding in a failing 180 THE ABUNDANT LIFE cause, The rapid multiplication of subjects claiming college recognition rent and tore asunder the old curriculum. Professors of the new differentiated disciplines became attorneys and special pleaders for the interests of their own subjects, and sought to secure them a footing in the earlier years of the course in order to acquire a constituency among the up-coming students. Especially was this pressure marked in the colleges which were part of a larger university system, because of the larger number of subjects represented, and consequently the larger number of special attorneys pushing for a hearing. This pressure from above finding insufficient satisfaction in the progress downward sought sup- plementary relief in the establishment of graduate courses. The process of jack-screwing up the college into the university was held in check by the inertia of the many, and especially by the vested interests of the ‘‘small colleges.’”” The result was a confusion such as Babel only can understand, and today no man seems prepared to state the mission and place of school, college, or university. We have pushed the college too high or not high enough, and here we stand by the jack-screws uncertain whether to give them another twist and put a story underneath or to settle down on strong cellar walls and try for a story or two on top. The upshot of the whole movement has been that just at the time when the old liberal culture and its adaptability to American uses has been called into question, the type of educational institution which stood to represent it has seemed to be SAILINVIWNH 3HL NI NOILONYLSNI OL G3I1OA3A ANV LISINVINH Vv Ol g3lvoia3aa TIVH d3T133HM 3Aal NIWvVIrN3g Pet. Yes too ii PA . THE ABUNDANT LIFE 181 preparing its exit from the scene. So then, when I raise the query, Has American education any use for the old ideal of the liberal culture, and if it has, is there any form of institution willing to represent it, and capable thereof?, I am not devising academic discussion to while away the leisure hour. The question is upon us in definite and practical form. It knocks at our doors. It is the one all-important question now pending in the educational courts. How ought it to be decided? What have we to say about it here today? Beyond all question it may be asserted there exists in America no general demand for a training of that sort of freemen who shall constitute a ruling class and dominate slaves of any name or state, nor again for the type of freemen who shall refresh and maintain the classes of a bureauracy;—nor again for the type of freemen who abjure productive labor, follow the fox-hunt, and vegetate in elegant leisure. American society has developed no form of respect nor even of recognition for a personality that does not vindicate itself as such through power to act, to shape, to create. America can therefore scarcely be expected permanently to adopt and fully to assimilate the system of liberal education which Europe commends to us. Men, we admit, are much the same creatures with much the same needs wher- ever you find them, but social conditions differ, and man is a creature of society. American society has needs of its own, and must, to a considerable extent, settle its own educational problem. American society will not hold that school or curriculum guiltless which launches young Americans ~~ 182 THE ABUNDANT LIFE into the world without some power acquired through education to grapple at increased advantage with the work of living, that is, the work of winning bread and doing good here in this sublunar and subnebular world of actual swamps and mountains, mud and pavements, politics and piety. We shall not be satisfied with a passive culture bred of pleasant roamings in many pleasant fields of learning and decked with chance-culled beauties. We shall insist upon some definitely planned work looking forward toward a definite purpose. The course of study, to use one figure, must have a vertebrate column. It must, to use another, lay a broad foundation, pyramid-like, on articulated sub- jects and lead up toward an apex which represents intelligent control in the material of one. Still, after all has been said, it must be admitted that nowhere in all the wide world is there a keener sense of, nowhere a stronger demand for, the qualities of personal force and character which inhere in the totality of personality and are entirely independent of tinseled acquirement—than just here in America. Nowhere is there so pronounced a need for the plain article, men. The mere specialist, sharp as a needle and equally broad, will find poor acceptance. 1 doubt indeed if anywhere in the world, present or past, was ever found so large an opportunity and so natural a place for the liberal education in its fundamental sense as here in the land of freemen who are free after a larger plan than the world has ever yet known. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 183 When the fog of present uncertainty shall have cleared away and the various fog horns and per- sonal horns of uncertain sound been laid to rest, I prophesy that we shall find the best thought of our people and of the masses of the people to be arrayed on the side of a good old-fashioned sound liberal education,—of an education that seeks to train the man more than to equip him, to train the man to be rather than to know. I venture furthermore the prophecy that out of the present mashing and dashing of courses there will come a genuine American type of the liberal education expressed in well formulated groups of studies and entrusted to the care of the American college. The unlimited ‘‘elective system’ concerning which there has been so much ill-judged flourishing of trumpets, is merely a state of revolu- tion and anarchy historically intruded between two systems of order. This liberal education must look toward the training of men and women who are to be American freemen. Freshmen must first of all be good citizens converted and baptized into the religion of public spirit, regular partakers of the obligations which the state lays upon citizenship. They cannot be allowed to nourish even a taint of the feeling that business and work and the common affairs of life are vulgar or that the exercise of a citizen’s duty of active participation in politics involves the soiling of hands or of clothes. The college must yield men who have seen and understood the vision of the housetop and refuse to call aught common or unclean that throbs with the divine life of human intent. 184 THE ABUNDANT LIFE They must be men of good health, deep-chested, sane-minded, clean-souled. They must be more inclined to create than to criticize, more disposed to cooperate than to kick. For present American uses the tugs and traces are more important than the breeching. They must be trained to act and not to dawdle in hesitation before the plunge into the cold bath of action when once the clothes are off and the court is clear. They must be able to think consecutively, hold the mind with a firm grip to the problem in hand, and force it to step surely from premise to con- clusion. This involves the old-time service which mathematical training has rendered in education. They must be able to see facts, brush aside the cobweb illusions of fancy, hope, and prejudice, and boldly, serenely, and heroically face the facts. This involves the superb service which the sciences render to education and to thought. They must be able to see and understand present situations as part of an unfolding experience of human society, to test and weigh the schemes and policies that emerge upon the arena of public debate in the broad perspectives, which are alone the true perspectives, of world conditions and history in time. This is the service which the study of the social sciences and of history renders in the training of men. They must be able to reason, as life reasons, in incomplete syllogisms and not be tied to the syllo- gism of the logician and mathematician. Contingent w THE ABUNDANT LIFE 185 reasoning is the form of reasons we all apply in dealing with the common emergencies of human experience. That inestimable gift we call good Judgment, a thing inhering in a larger whole we term good sense, deals with this type of reasoning and employs, to gather its premises, those insights or intuitions which in their chastened form yield the superb indefinable touch of taste. All this belongs to the humanities preéminently of literature and art to quicken, direct, and train. Good sense, good judgment, good taste, are indeed rare nuggets, priceless gems. They are the product of the soil, nature’s own gift, and most would hesitate to allow education any hope of producing them, but still I believe it has the power to better them, yes, to quicken them and even bring them to the light and into being. The miner and the gem-cutter are both, after their sort, producers. Good judgment demands first sanity, good health of mind and body. It is quickened by dealing with men, by insight into the turnings and workings of the human will and by acquaintance with human experience. The shabby judgment of the crank, the agitator, the extremist, is based upon a false con- fidence in objective tests and upon the supposed adequacy of the logician’s syllogism to meet the needs of life-experience and life-problems, things which at the best can promise only partial premises. The building which we dedicate today stands in its purposes for that study of man and his works that uses as its tools the chastened and ever self- chastening intuitions of sane human judgment and 186 THE ABUNDANT LIFE good taste. So must it be, for the life of man is more than our rules can measure. It takes hold on the unseen; its roots like those of the day lie behind the sunrise, and its fruitage behind the sunset. Its meaning and its yearning fail of expression in all that our sciences and eruditions can formulate, and we leave this to the artist’s dream, the poet’s vision, the believer’s faith. Here let the structure stand,—good hearthstone, strong citadel in the inner court of the American college, the institution that shall remain devoted to the making of all-round men such as our country supremely needs, men of sanity, men of intellectual grasp and intellectual self-control, men of moral purpose, men whose faith casts anchor behind the veil,—and all this means men of character. a THE ABUNDANT LIFE 187 WHAT THE UNIVERSITY AIMS TO GIVE THE STUDENT Written November 19, 1904. A modern university is rather a poor mechanism for giving anything to a student which he does not reach for. Indeed, it is a question whether a student ever really gets anything he does not take. A university sets a pretty good table, but does not guarantee either an appetite or a digestion. The education which a man gets which will really count must involve a change in himself,—in his character and being. A university has at its disposal no alchemy by which brass can be turned into gold. The gilt form of education wears out very soon and is worse than nothing. The university constitutes for the student an opportunity of entering in and making the most possible out of himself. It proposes to rescue men from slavery and make them free, in case they want to be free. It proposes in the first place to make them free from the bondage of ignorance. It proposes in the second place to make them free from the bondage of prejudice, routine, and the rule of thumb. A freeman is a man who can initiate, who has sufficient control over his walks and ways to do as his reason and out- look tell him is right and best. A man who acts on a prejudice, or drives his wagon in any other 188 THE ABUNDANT LIFE ruts is a slave, no matter how much he may pride himself on his prejudices and loyal adherences. The whole purpose of the university is to provide men with the means of seeing into things themselves, so that they shall not be dependent, but independent. The university proposes to give the student such insight into the facts and the way of determining the facts as will put him in a position of control over some field of knowledge or human activity in which he is to exercise his being for the good of those about him. Thirdly, the university aims to give the student the highest and best form of control of himself. Unless a man finds himself and finds out how to get a grip on himself, so as to be able at times to shake himself, he is not educated. The method by which the university proposes to give these things to its students is in substance the one simple old-fashioned method of the trans- ference of life. The university is essentially a society of scholars working together. The leaders inspire their followers; the older guide the younger. The best thing the university can give to its students and the thing that includes all others is the inspiration to noble and useful living. aaa - THE ABUNDANT LIFE 189 INTERCHANGE OF PROFESSORS Presented at the meeting of the Association of American Unwersities held March 14, 1906. The question of interchange of professors viewed from the administrative side is evidently first of all a question of cooperation. If cooperation conceal beneath a beneficent name any form or degree of consolidation or syndication, it may justly be viewed with suspicion. The universities happen to be at present almost the only refuge of freedom left to us in this home of the free, and it behooves them in the interest of the body politic and of themselves to adhere most at this time with reinforced jealousy to their heritage of congregational autonomy. It may have seemed at first the dictate of an exorbitant caution which caused this Association to refrain from the usually harmless exercise of adopting resolutions, but it must be now clear that the only unity toward which our converse can justly and safely lead is to be spiritual rather than corporeal. All that we can exact of these meetings is sufficient practical result in terms of mutual appreciation and common understanding to keep them alive from year to year. We ought not to be particularly desirous of growing more alike. It is to the interest of the country that we each maintain a character of our own, true to our historic traditions and adjusted to Re a re Fan 5 3 apn Sea or SRE PAR wn RR Sa dor SR SRE 190 THE ABUNDANT LIFE the work we each have at our doors. Particularly is this desirable in the case of the smaller institutions called colleges. I think they do well to fill at least half their positions from their own graduates. A college full of migratory teachers will be a colorless college. The latter-day abhorrence of breeding in and in has given all our institutions a reasonable immunity from isolation, and the larger universities, where research is encouraged and where in the making of appointments the vulgate ratings of the professional specialty as established in publications and the intercourse of associations are freely con- sulted, are surely not tending at present in the direction of particularism. The issue of particularism and distinctive char- acter is not however involved in that of autonomy. The necessary inertia of established home will always be sufficient to prevent any amount of interchange of teachers that ever may be cultivated into existence, from disturbing the essential continuity of each university’s life. The complete autonomy of each institution will be preserved under a system of interchange provided each case is settled for itself by individual agreement between the two institutions concerned. Beyond that I should be loath to see the system extended. Lovers of high organization will of course allow their minds to wander into wide fields of exchange bureaus and agencies and even perhaps to the creation of a distinct order of migratory scholars who shall interpret university extension in Erasmus’ sense of extending the h'gher intellectual life amongst the universities. Rn aad THE ABUNDANT LIFE 191 The question of interchange is in the second place a question of flexibility. Interchange is in the main applicable only to institutions of a sufficiently large and diversified corps of instructors and of sufficient freedom of curricula to admit of leaving out specific courses and adding others practically at will. All universities seem to be obliged to maintain a certain number of stock courses in the most frequented departments and especially for the lower classmen. The greater the proportion of this fixed schedule, the stronger is the barrier to interchange. It will be mostly vain to fit professors into existing courses. A university will of course get the most out of a visiting professor when it leaves him free to teach what he thinks he can teach best and in his own way. The full-year courses are also a barrier. The more fully we all come to the frank adoption of the semester arrangement, the better it will be for every cause of migration whether of students or professors. A semester ought to be long enough for any professor to unfold a subject and to inspire in any student a pronounced taste or distaste which shall be a beacon to his life. It would be better if one-hour courses and perhaps two-hour courses were abolished altogether, and the concentration upon the semester would aid toward this desirable end. No man who values intellectual calm ought to be interweaving four or five distinet courses into the fabric of a single week. The five-hour course is the best type, and excepting the weekly seminary, nothing else but the three-hour course is ordinarily economical. 192 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The semestral system affords, it must also be noticed, a convenient opportunity of bisecting the sabbatical year, which ought to be embraced oftener than it is. The University of California now permits a professor to claim either a free year after six years of teaching or a free half-year after three years. For many reasons two half-years will often, and I think oftener, prove better than one whole year. An interchange for a semester, furthermore, may often be practicable when one for a whole year would be too cumbrous either for one or both of the universities concerned, or for the professor. Flexibility must furthermore extend to the sub- jects exchanged. It ought to be possible, namely, not only to institute an exchange between, we will say, a teacher of medieval history and modern European history, but between physics and chemistry, or any two subjects within one of the greater groups. It is the men and not the exact topics that should be interchanged, the interests only of the students who may require some continuity in their own work being considered. The matter of salary is capable of introducing difficulties, but it seems to me that the most reason- able solution and the one least likely to introduce artificial embarrassment would be that which does not insist always upon the interchange of men of equal rank and remuneration, but which continues each man upon the salary he receives at home with a small addition for the necessary traveling expenses and extra cost of establishment in a new home. The advantage to the professor must be found in the BE a THE ABUNDANT LIFE 193 stimulus of a new environment, the acquaintance with new places and new conditions, and enlarge- ment of his intellectual constituency. It is to be hoped the interchange may not be limited to older men of established reputation. Young men will gain most from the opportunity. It is a most unfortunate limitation upon the usefulness of a great body of our professors in all the univer- sities, that they have not taught in more than one institution. They are limited in their associations, limited in their conceptions of what it is possible to do by way of teaching, study, research, and limited in their views of university policy. Many a good university man would have been rescued from aridity if by transfer to another institution he could have been shaken out of his congealing ruts before the frosts of fifty fell upon his way. It is in general a safe rule not to allow a man to receive his three advancements in the university career—instructor, assistant professor, professor—at the hands of one and the same institution. The only form of professional interchange which the University of California has thus far tested connected itself with the Summer Session. While there is herein no direct exchange of services between universities, there is yet present the full opportunity of testing the advantages on the one side, namely, on the side of the recipient of services. The bringing in of summer session teachers from other universities has had as its first notable effect the loss of some of our own best professors through calls to universities from which the visitors came. 194 THE ABUNDANT LIFE This is symptomatic of what interchange is certain to bring about. It will tend toward bringing pro- fessional values out into a general national market. It will tend toward securing the best positions to the best talent. But the visiting professors have proven to be far better than spies upon our good things. They have, to be sure, taken much of our property away with them when they went, but they have set the impress of their benediction upon what they left behind, which was so vastly more than they took that the balance sheet still shows great advantage to us and ours. it GENERAL ASPECTS OF EDUCATION THE CAMPUS FROM THE HILLS LOOKING TOWARD THE GOLDEN GATE THINGS HUMAN Delivered before the University of Chicago chapter of Phy Beta Kappa June 17, 1901, and published in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. 90 (1902), p. 636. Man is unquestionably a highly rational being. Still, if you travel and observe, from the mouth of the Danube to the Golden Gate you will find most men wearing a coat with a useless collar marked with a useless V-shaped slash, and decorated with two useless buttons at the small of the back, and one or more useless buttons at the cuffs. The collar, the slash, and the buttons are there in answer to no rational need; it is not a common climate nor a common racial need of protection against climate that they represent, but a common civilization whose form and ritual they mutely confess. Over this entire area those who aspire to be of the Brahmin caste deck their heads for wedding, funeral, and feast with a black cylindrical covering, suited, so far as we can discern, neither to avert the weapon of the adversary or the dart of the rain, nor to provide a seat whereon man may sit and rest himself.. And as for the women contained within this same area, we behold that the amplitude of the sleeve, the dis- position of the belt, and the outline of the skirt all obey the rise and fall of one resistless tide which neither moon nor seasons control. 198 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Wherever civilization and education have done the most to make individuality self-conscious and rational, there it is that individualty seeks most earnestly to merge itself in the external confessions of membership in the body of the whole. What it openly seeks in the matter of external confession, it however unconsciously assumes in all the inner framework and mould forms of manners, customs, morals, law, art, and faith. The statement of creeds, the standards of morals, the forms of art, men adopt without regard to race and blood or to climate and natural environment. They have them and hold them as historical endowment, and their lives, no matter how they may struggle to make them other- wise, no matter how they may think they succeed, are formal more than they are rational, are his- torical more than they are begotten of the day. It is because man is a social being that he is an historical being, and a social being he surely is first and foremost. Individualism and the theory of individual rights are late discoveries. The ‘Indi. vidual’’ is scarcely more than a dried Preparat, an isolation developed in the glycerine and preserved in the alcohol of the philosophico-legal laboratories. Some very wise people assume to have found out a century or so ago that society and the social compact were created out of a voluntary surrender of individual rights. This holds good much after the manner of Mr. O’Toole’s interpretation of the power-house at Niagara, ‘‘The machinery what pumps the water for the falls.”’ THE ABUNDANT LIFE 199 It is because man is a social being that he is an historical being. This does not mean that by nature he maintains a family tree or revels in historical research. The very social order, in which as the inseparable condition of his existence he finds him- self, is an historical deposit, an historical resultant. It is indeed history itself—history pressed flat, if he only knew it—or rather, history itself is the attempt to raise the flat pictures into relief and give them depth. The historical interpretation constitutes the only genuine explanation of those complexities of condi- tion and usage which characterize the social fabric, and in default of historical perspective most men at all times and all men at most times simply marvel and conform. This elaborate and unaccountable structure of laws, usages, and religion impresses the normal, untanght mind as a thing too solid, too intricate, and too vast, that the minds and hands of men such as those of the day should have fashioned it. Only gods or heroes could have devised it. Hence it is that the age of heroes always precedes the age of history. But Homer prepared the way for Herodotus, in that the explanation by way of the gods and the heroes offers a first satisfaction to the first groping quest as to how this marvel of society and state could have come to be. And yet neither of the two methods, that by the heroes or that by history, does more than skim the surface. For most purposes and for the great mass of the matter we simply, with more or less protest, conform and are content to restrict that individual inquiry and 200 THE ABUNDANT LIFE origination which we like to call freedom to the close limits of some snug private domain well fenced from the common and the street. The labor is too vast, the hope of remuneration too doubtful, the ultimate benefit too questionable, for us to assail the well-established conventional orthography of society. It is evidently more rational to spell the word could with a cood. It may be that some will find it a moral duty to truth or to the rising generation so to do, and perhaps they will do it merely for the purpose of setting a good example. With all the complexity of interests attaching to the use of written English as a social vehicle over the great English-speaking domain, it looks veritably as if the good example were like to be seed sown by the wayside. And even if it should take root and bear its ample fruit of phonetic spellings, would it yet represent a gain to have shut the language of the present off from the past, and made the English of Shakespeare and Milton a dead language to the readers of the next generation? We live in a great society with all the centuries of English thought since the days of Elizabeth; and the written English in the form of a more or less established conven- tional orthography is the bond thereof. It is very irrational; it is very illogical, so the reformer and radical tell us, and they are undoubtedly correct. But the interesting feature of the matter is that for these persons the question is herewith settled, and orthography is sentenced forthwith to violent death. If orthography is illogical they esteem it competent THE ABUNDANT LIFE 201 for them to say, ‘so much the worse for orthogra- phy,’ but if orthography serves a high and necessary purpose and still is illogical, may it not be competent for us to say, ‘so much the worse for logic’? We may indeed suspect that all this logic has been far too shallowly conceived. I have not introduced this allusion to spelling and spelling reform with any desire to stir your minds to strife on this peaceful occasion. It is not my purpose to embroil myself either with the Spelling Reform Association or with that portion of the alphabet known as the W.C.T.U. The fact is, nothing furnishes a better illustration of the human-social institutions such as we are discussing than does language, and especially in those features of its life which reveal the processes of standard- izing, and the tendency toward cooperation and uniformity. The forces which make toward estab- lishing the uniformity of the so-called laws of sound are ultimately, as social forces, the same as those which create the standard literary idioms, or Schriftsprachen, and the conventional ortho- graphies. They are, too, all one with those social instincts that develop the standard formulas of courtesy, the usages of etiquette, fashions in dress, standards of taste in literature and art, the conven- tions of manners and morals, the formal adherences of religion, and the established law and order of the state. These are all of them the things human that go with man as a social, historical being, and, of them all, language as an institution utterly human, utterly social, utterly historical affords the clearest 202 THE ABUNDANT LIFE illustrations of those principles which hold sway in this field of humanity pure and undefiled; and so it is that the speech-reformer in every guise, from the Volapukist to the phonetic speller is typical in general outlook, method of thought, and plan of procedure for all the theorist-reformers who have ever hung in the basket of a Phrontisterion. We hold no brief for toryism or against the reformers; but to the end that that socialmindedness which we incline to stamp as historicalmindedness may be sufficiently set forth and characterized, we are con- strained to point a contrast and isolate for use as a foil the extreme opposing type of mind and atti- tude of life. It is seldom that we find a man who is all one, or all the other. The concept ‘theorist’ and ‘doctrinaire’ is ordinarily obtained as an abstrac- tion from many men’s actions in many different fields, and yet single specimens have been found of almost typical purity. I imagine, for instance, that, the somewhat ill-defined term ‘crank’ represents a struggle of the language to label an article of humankind which has been absolutely sterilized from the taint of historicalmindedness. The name crank is, I believe, a title we reserve for other people than ourselves, and in the exercise of our own peculiar forms of crankhood we prefer to allude to what we call ‘‘our principles.’”’ It becomes there- fore a somewhat dangerous task, especially in a Phi Beta Kappa address, to deal with the concept ‘crank,’ lest we seem to be laying profane hand upon the sacred ark of principle, even though it be only to steady it along the rough way of human life. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 203 I presume there is nothing of which we are more weakly proud, especially we men, than our logic. And yet it is our logic that too often makes fools of us. The fact is plain logic is usually too simple an apparatus for the need. The data for the con- struction of a perfect syllogism can only be obtained from an artificially prepared cross-section of life, which never does it justice. To operate with plane geometry and neglect the third dimension on the axis of historic order is to do offense unto the con- stitutive principle of human social life. To be human is to be social, to be social is to be historical, and human judgments to be sound must be historical judgments. Those judgments which, in life-affairs, appear to be the soundest, and which betray that priceless thing termed in common parlance common sense, are based on a contingent reasoning that frankly confesses the incompleteness of its syllo- gisms. The leap across the gap in the syllogistic structure is akin to that the spark of wit and humor takes, and the direct intuitions in which women are believed to deal with such success are much the same, though the syllogistic structure is only sketched in dotted lines. Pure reason and plain logic have been always much commended to us as a guide of life. They level the rough places and make the crooked paths straight. For the sorest problems they furnish the easiest solutions. Their prophets are such as have withdrawn from the world and in the quiet of their bedchambers have thought out the formulas of life. The clearest visions that are vouchsafed to living 204 THE ABUNDANT LIFE men concerning the great problems of international finance are shown unto these men in the breezy free- dom of the prairie far from the stifling bustle of Wall Street and its confusion of established facts. Inasmuch as life is not logical, these men generally find that most things in life are to be disapproved of, and incline to be pessimists. For the same reason they are unlikely to be codper- atively inclined, and criticize more than they create. As it is much easier, by reason of its shallow rationality, to formulate pessimistic discourse than optimistic, it follows that these people and people who temporarily assume their réle are more in evidence in the public press and on the public plat- form than their relative numbers or importance would really justify. It certainly would be an unwarranted general- ization if I should assume to find the source of all pessimism in this pseudo-logic of life, much of it having of course a physical, and indeed specifically hepatic source, but it is well to mark the genetic relation between the two, for pessimism is as false to life as logic is. In human life and in all things human, the inspiring, life-giving, creative forces are the inseparable three: hope and confidence and sympathy. They are positive: they draw materials and men together and scatter not asunder, they con- struct and not destroy. For human use it is evident that criticism was intended by Providence as a purgative, not a food. Our occupation with the phonetic spelling re- former as a type of the logical or pseudo-logical THE ABUNDANT LIFE 205 doctrinaire has for the time carried us away from the characterization of that historical order in human life with which this discourse on things human had its beginning, and which we had ven- tured to call the orthography of human society. Every year of our swiftly unfolding national history brings to our view with startling emphasis some illustration of the great fact that our national life is composed out of social conditions intricately dovetailed and interlaced, which have their roots in a history too complex for the easy analysis of the political theorist. On every hand a warning comes for political sobriety and patience. It is now about a quarter of a century since an amendment to the Constitution extended the ballot to the negro of the South. The action was taken in deference to the evidently logical application of certain principles of human right believed to be well established. Those who aggressively favored the action were men of noblest purposes, of undoubted patriotism, and of positive moral enthusiasm. The case was to them so clear as to leave no room for hesitation or doubt. The logic of war had enforced the logic of reason. Time now has done its clarifying work, and behold in spite of all the logics the social facts that were there, lying in wait, have reasserted themselves. In the name of consistency a violence had been done. Despite all our aversion to the evasion of the writ- ten law, the people of the North, so far as one may infer from public expressions, have quietly, slowly withdrawn from the field of protest, leaving the his- torical facts to do their own sweet will and work, —— A 206 THE ABUNDANT LIFE community by community, state by state. War and logic prevailed at the first, the historical facts pre- vail at the end. We as a people are said to come of a practical- minded stock, and that practicalmindedness which made the English Constitution, asserts itself con- tinuously in our national life, as we show over and over again our capacity flexibly to adjust ourselves both as people and as government to the changing conditions which arise about us and reshape our duty and our opportunity. The recent decisions of the Supreme Court, tangled as they seemed at first report, resolve themselves into a plain significance as regards their main bent. The letter of the law written in view of distinctly different conditions and for radically different purposes and safeguards cannot restrain the people through their repre- sentatives in Parliament or Congress from devising means of procedure that shall satisfy existing needs. Whether we assume to live by written or unwritten constitution, it will always be, with a people such as we by spirit and tradition are, the constitution written in the people’s life and work that holds the sway supreme. There must be after all some deep philosophy in Mr. Dooley’s apprehension that whether the flag follows the Constitution or the Constitution the flag, the decisions of the court follow the election returns. Five years ago we were in the midst of a frenzy of popular logic on the currency question, which has now so far abated, leaving so few traces, that it cannot be considered unsuited for mention under THE ABUNDANT LIFE 207 the far-famed freedom of the academic platform. The supporters of the doctrine of the free coinage of silver were, I believe, in the main sincere. The doctrine was easier to understand and advocate than its opposite. Its simple crystalline logic appealed particularly to large masses of people who are impatient of complicated historical instruction, but to whom as to all of us humans it is a high satis- faction to think we are thinking. The opposing doctrine labored under the embarrassment of being founded in the historical facts of established inter- national usage, but in its good time the historical logic prevailed over its shallower counterpart, as it must needs always do. It is always a prolific source of danger in a government such as ours that parties are tempted to set forth in platforms far-reaching policies which seek their grounding in smoothly stated a prior: principles of right and government. These strokes of radicalism, like the French radicalism and its argument from the state of nature, serve to clear the air, though usually at high cost, and we should not like to see them utterly withheld from the people, and a politics of organizational and personal struggles utterly displace them. The safer and more veracious use of the party platform will be that which deals with questions within practical range and proposes policies in reference to existing actual conditions. It is not necessary to explore the ultimate problem of the origin of evil and original sin every time a henroost is robbed. i I 8 I 8 i # i if PA | 208 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The manners and morals of any social commun- ity at any time constitute a firm historical deposit with sanctions and guaranties so strong that the hammer and acids of analyzing reason find it an ill-paid task to stir them. There are men who have thought it worth while to raise persistent protest against that gentle convention which garbs us in the dress coat. It would be an easy matter doubt- less to prove after reflection its unworthiness as protection for the lungs or thighs, and it might be difficult to defend it against a proposition to redis- pose its material by transfer from back to front, but the dress coat is there, and convenience uses it rather than serves it. This is far easier than to think out a new coat on eternal principles every year. In general, the issue does not appeal to the interest of the great public, and no one is likely to find his political fortunes advanced by any manipu- lation thereof. That institution of civilized society, the family, framed through the uniting of one man and.one wife until death do them part, is an institution confirmed in the testings and pains and joys of centuries of human experience. It is anchored and framed and jointed into the very fabric of society, until society is unthinkable without it. In the presence of a social structure so established and whose existence and purity are bound up with the very life of society, there is no place for the small queryings of the theorist. If he abides among us he will conform. Society cannot tolerate, and will not, that one family be dissolved and another ‘‘announced’’ at the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 209 instance of some personal convenience or some shallow logic of affinities. There is a certain law and order which human society must insist upon as a prior condition to all discussion regarding forms and mechanism of gov- ernment and distribution of rights and privileges. The first thing to do with a debating society is to call it to order. The first thing to teach a child is to do what it is told to do, and for the reason that it is told to. Other reasons await the more placid oppor- tunity afforded by complete pacification. We have of late been traversing in educational matters a period of much experimenting and much unsettling of views and aims and methods. One may not there- fore with any confidence expect a general agreement upon any proposition, however elementary. It has seemed to me however that there ought to be agree- ment, even if there ¢s not, concerning one thing; namely, that our aim in educating is to make the individual more effective as a member of human society—I would indeed venture to make it read, ‘effective for good.”” If education addressed itself simply to the development of the individual as an unclothed immortal soul, the mundane state would scarcely be justified in its present interest. It is as a prospective member of society and a citizen that the pupil claims the interest of a school- supporting state. An education now which accepts this definition of its aim cannot admit itself to be in first line a branch or dependency of biology. Children are little animals surely enough, but it is for our practical purposes immeasureably more 210 THE ABUNDANT LIFE dnd important that they are incipient social beings. That the biological theory of education has exercised in many a detail an injurious influence on the practice of the schools, I believe has not escaped the atten- tion of many of us. One leading result has been a groping vagueness that has possessed the minds of teachers and professors of teaching themselves, a vagueness which has arisen through cutting loose from the solid piers of the historical facts, close akin to that which we mark in that vagrant disci- pline which seeks to deal with society apart from history and decorates itself with the name of sociology. The education that educates remains in spite of all the vivisections and postmortems a trainimg—a training that adapts and fits the little barbarian to his civilized environment, an environment in part natural to be sure, but preéminently social and historical, a training that makes him punctual, and dutiful, and obedient, and conscientious, and courteous, and observant, and self-controlled, law- abiding, moral, and gives him sobriety of judgment and encourages health to abound—health of body and mind, which is sanity. In the attitude toward human life there abide the two contrasted types. One is the voice crying in the wilderness, the man clad in skins, ascetic, teetotaler, radical, reformer, agitator; and of him they say he hath a devil, he is a crank. His mission is to awake with a ringing ‘‘Repent!”’ the dormant public mind and stir the public conscience, but in him is no safe uplifting and upbuilding power. His THE ABUNDANT LIFE 211 errand is fulfilled in a day, and after him there cometh one whose shoe latchet he is unworthy to loose—the Man among men, the Man-Son, living the normal life of men, accepting the standing order, paying tribute unto Caesar, touching elbows with men of the world, respecting the conventions of society, healing and helping men from the common standing ground of human life. The call which comes to the university from the need of the day is a call for trained men, not extra- ordinary specimens of men, but normal men, not eccentricities but gentlemen, not stubborn tories or furious radicals, but men of sobriety and good sense, men of health and sanity—men trained in the school of historicalmindedness. i I iE ET EERIE EB i matte. et... a as. 212 THE ABUNDANT LIFE CALL NOTHING COMMON Delivered at the meeting of the National Education Association wn Los Angeles, California, July 12, 1907; published in The Western Journal of Education, August, 1907, vol. XII, pp. 395-398. Human society of this present time and. place evidently believes in education. It is inclined to stake its life upon it. It believes on the whole with a faith that is childlike and bland. It is often per- plexed about what to teach and why, and how to teach it and through whom, and yet the perplexities seem only to sanctify the deep mysteries of paid- ology, and strengthen faith in the systems that issue from the cloud-wrapped mount of education. If education fails in an individual case, the faith is still strong enough and the charity gentle enough to judge that there ought to have been more of it in quantity, or else a higher voltage; the operation was successful, though the patient died. For all the social ills education has come to be as universal a prescription as blood-letting in the older medicine. If people are leaving the farms, if divorce is under- mining the family, if the political machine is looting the cities, the remedy is to be found in education; the schools must look out for it. This is the habit of opinion today. The habit appears to be a good one; the opinion is presumably in substance correct. Surely we of the craft are not inclined to discourage it. But the demand comes in the avalanche form. Those ONVESNH ¥3H oL IVIHOWIW V SY 1ISuvaH NOS¥3ddv 3830Hd Ag a3lo3y3 ONIaTTINg SNINIW L1S¥UVIH IHL ; t | { } } i f a THE ABUNDANT LIFE 213 that would be healed throng upon us and ‘‘cannot come nigh for the press’’; men are fain to uncover the roof and let down the sick in beds upon us. Despite the gratification this cannot fail to bring to those who have chosen the field of education for a life-work, in that their special product promises to gain enhanced value in the markets of human estimate and their profession has thereby prospect of rising out of the relative disparagement and depreciation which have, through the ages, notwith- standing much theoretical blandishment, in actual practice really invested it—despite such gratifica- tion, we must be conscious that the situation brings with it grave responsibility and no little ground for apprehension. We know that any man whom public opinion has grossly overestimated is in serious peril —peril before the reaction that must follow disillu- sionment, and yet greater peril for his own character in the temptation to perpetuate the deception by false devices. The profession of medicine has had its sore experience from accepting the blind popular confidence in its knowledge and command of drugs; it has seen the reaction tear from its hands the control, and open the door to the pitiful deceits of quackery and the patent medicine and to multiform vagaries of ignorance and superstition. Out of this experience the best medical practice of today has learned to limit its sure claims to what it knows it can actually do, and to deal frankly and objectively with patients and disease. If we as a profession of teachers find that we are responding to crude popular demand by dealing out our one medicine, the exact varieties and potencies 214 THE ABUNDANT LIFE of which we do not notice, and the precise workings of which we do not understand, treating all cases out of one bottle and blindly following traditional recipes and formal courses of treatment, it might be time for us to adopt as our own the burning proclamation: ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall be no sign given to it.”” We will not at any rate cloak our helpless- ness under the schemes and schedules and curricula of other days or aimlessly rely upon mechanism devised for other and nearer ends; nor will we, of all things, encourage a public credulity which blindly trusts in all the doings of the schools and colleges for all purposes, so long only as they bear the sacro- sanct name of education, and assigns to them some thaumaturgic power by mysterious process to make black white and the white matter of brains gray. If we still do not know what subjects should be taught, or why, or how they should be taught to give appreciable results, we can at least be frank in confessing to ourselves the limits of our own ignor- ance and candid before the world in claiming no command of mysterious processes. If we have applied the light of biology and of psychology and of sociology and of the history of human training and of statistical science to our inquiries, and have thus far been disappointed in our results, we shall do well frankly to state the measure of our dis- appointment, as a safeguard to what we really have learned and a guaranty to ourselves against self- deception and to the world against disingenuousness and pretense. If we have indeed with all our search- ings in pedagogy found no device of human training THE ABUNDANT LIFE 215 that finally takes the place of the warm life of the teacher, nothing that can replace it, or be in any wise commensurate with it, nothing that can pro- voke a deposit of good education out of a bad teacher, nothing whether of subject or method that can get bad education out of a good teacher, we can safely reaffirm our old faith in the old educa- tional doctrine of ‘‘the Word made flesh,’”’ and adopt the fulness of the proclamation: ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall be no sign given to it, but the sign’’ of the teacher and his living personality. If there is any mystery in education, it is the one, lone mystery of the inspiring and converting power of personality. At the very heart of the present-day belief in education is our people’s faith in the common schools. They have developed pari passu with our democracy. Our people are persuaded that the maintenance of our peculiar institutions of popular government is dependent upon their existence, and the full and successful working of these institutions upon their efficiency. There has appeared no com- petent reason for impugning the wisdom of this decided and increasing popular conviction. Not all the graduates of our common schools become good citizens, nor yet of our unversities; but statistics assign criminality overwhelmingly to the class of the illiterates. We do not teach young humans read- ing in order that they may read the Constitution; their understanding might conflict with that of the Supreme Court ; but we teach them reading that they may share the thoughts and observations of people of other place and other time, and so be delivered a AE 216 THE ABUNDANT LIFE from slavery to the immediate vision, and to all the prejudice and ignorance and mal-judgment which such slavery involves. At the basis of orderly living, which ¢s moral living, rests the power to discriminate as to what belongs here and what belongs there; next comes the will to classify accord- ingly. We cannot therefore omit the equipment and training of the intelligence from the training that prepares an individual to live his life in community with other people’s lives. That means moral train- ing. Moral training is always implicit in all the work of the common school, though the com- mandments be not stated or the code rehearsed. Obedience to the public laws is latent in the diseci- pline that the school exacts, though civics be not taught and the flag be not saluted. The real democ- racy of equal opportunity, fair give-and-take, and a scratch start, ancestors barred, is involved in the assemblage from many dooryards upon the benches of the common school, and the indiscriminate tumbling of future citizens of variegated fates dur- ing recess in the schoolhouse yard. The democracy is there, waiting for you, though Jefferson and the fathers be not named. No, the people of the nation have made no mis- take in their confidence in the public school as a training for democratic citizenship or as a guaranty of the continuance of free institutions. Their one solicitude must be lest changing conditions of social life dislodge it from its place and throw it out of tune with the democracy it was set to represent and support. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 217 Our democracy involves no proposition of equal- ity of achievement, but straightly and supremely equality of opportunity. It was devised in the pro- test against the privilege of class. It anticipated the modern doctrines of heredity, and trusted men, in the opportunity of a fair field and in the strength of their divine inheritance, to rise as individual creations out of the disease and thraldom of their - parentage and the limitations of class and craft and caste. It meditated no crime against nature; it bandaged no feet and strapped no skulls. It estab- lished no standard size of foot or brain; it set no bounds upon spiritual vision, upon intellectual reach, upon inventive imagination, upon creative skill, or upon the acquisition of substance, except as the rights and free opportunity of others might be impaired. It proposed to give every man a free chance to make the most possible out of his single life. It was conceived as a gospel of self-realization for the sons of men. It is as a faithful counterpart to such a demoec- racy that the public school must be kept. But if you have called it the common school, as the nursery of a hopeless mediocrity, and if with the name you have thought such a thought, or devised such a use, you have torn it away with treacherous violence from the very spirit and life of the democracy in which it had its birth. It is and must be kept the school of the best nurture in the best things. We too often hear the remark that the teaching and studies of the public schools must be shapen to the needs of the children of families of moderate means, or of no means, or the children of the masses, i i i } i 218 THE ABUNDANT LIFE or of certain classes; and that if wealthy parents want to give their children a better education or one that leads to higher station they must send them to private and special schools. All this is the voice of a spurious democracy. It is no democracy at all. It is a reversion to the notions of the ‘‘ragged school.’’ It is the voice of class spirit. It contemplates the classification of helpless children according to conditions of birth, and deliberately proposes to rob them of full and free opportunity. Who knows that the children of the poor or lowly do not need to study certain things? Who knows that they will not make full use of the best instruction and the best courses of study? Experience seems to show that a larger percentage of them make better use than do the offspring of the mighty. The children of the rich labor already under dis- abilities enough without being isolated in private academies and being inevitably limited for their later acquaintanceships in life to those whose scope of vision and range of action is hedged about with all the paraphernalia of yachts and motors and multiplex houses, clubs, assemblies, valets, and inno- vation trunks. Both by the limited association in school and by that of after-life these children of the rich are disabled for largest usefulness through their inability to know the mind of the great body of the people among whom they are to live. Their separation is also a loss to the community, and the creation of a fixed caste a detriment and peril to society. We surely ought to beware lest we are doing anything to drive such pupils from the public schools or omitting to do anything that should hold THE ABUNDANT LIFE 219 them. For pupils who require special treatment or tutelage, either through their own weakness or through lack of home influences or through the desire of their families to provide such special tutelage, the private school will always have its place and mis- sion; but if the private schools and academies are offering anything else of method or substance or curriculum that is better than in the public schools, it behooves us to find it out. What is good for the children of the well-to-do is peculiarly desirable for the children of the moneyless—unless indeed we deliberately propose to use the public schools for the creation of social strata instead of their prevention. The public school must be made and kept the school for all without recognition of classes or con- ditions, and it must shape its work and plan so as to close no door but rather open the freest oppor- tunity for the best achievement and the highest advance. The present rigid system of the grades, whose chief excuse has been economic necessity, must yield to permit the more rapid advance of gifted and diligent pupils. The old district school without the grades was more humane. Nowadays the machinery of grades and courses is wondrously perfect, but the school exists for the child and not for the grades. The place of a child in reference to the grades is at any time to be determined not by what he has gone through in the past, whether of pages or classes, but by the work he is able to go on and do next. Too many minds and too many wills and ambitions are dulled by the routine and tread- mill of the grades; and that means bandaging the foot and strapping the skull to produce a standard 220 THE ABUNDANT LIFE size. Particularly do the two last years of the grades need to be refreshed and readapted. There is too much threshing of old straw in them; they are too wooden; they lag behind the growing life- interest and the advancing mental cravings of the pupils. After completing six grades a boy is ready for something new and something that will lay hold upon his opening interest in the processes of life. If you withhold it you may lose him or at any rate his interest in the school; and if you lose that, you might as well lose him. Your boy is twelve years old or more. Now is the time to offer him the oppor- tunities of instruction in the industrial arts, or the agricultural arts, or in business practice, and now is the time to begin language study if any foreign language is ever to be learned. The fact is that our old one-story ranch-house in which we all lived together happily around a court has been gradually transformed, now that the city has grown up about it, into an eight-story tenement house (with base- ment and roof-garden), and we are shocked to find how much of our time and strength has to go into merely climbing stairs. So much by way of illustration, but the flash of an illustration must not daze the doctrine; the pub- lic can afford to have for the public schools the best teachers, the best equipment, the best studies and courses; it cannot afford to do anything else. The common school is of noble name, noble like the commonwealth it stands to represent, but he who falsely shifts the value of its name is warned he dare call nothing common or unclean that service of humanity at large has cleansed. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 221 THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL Address at the meeting of the National Education Association in the Greek Theatre, Berkeley, on July 10, 1911, The American public school confronts today an utterly different task from that implied in the pur- poses which first gave it birth. It was called into being to serve the uses of a reasonably homogeneous people—homogeneous in language and traditions under a strong predominance of Anglo-Saxon blood and spirit. The sources of Anglo-Saxon immigra- tion have long since been choked and the Anglo- Saxon stock in the new world becomes less and less productive with the years. It is a dying and vanish- ing race. Within the last decade the scale has abruptly tipped, in the count of population, from the old inhabitant to the newcomer. In our chief American city scarcely one in ten is old American, and even in old New Haven but one child in five in the public schools is of native parentage. In Boston the balance has already shifted from the Puritan to the newcomer. The old United States as it existed before the Civil War is hurrying off the scene, a new people mixed of many European bloods most of which had little or no share in the original occu- pation is coming to possess the land, and give inevitably a new meaning to the name American— a new meaning inevitably, so far as it refers to cent RO IRS 222 THE ABUNDANT LIFE blood and bone and even to type and temperament, but what of ideas and ideals? Can or cannot the precious heritage of social liberty and equal opportunity which long struggle and sacrifice have associated with the word Americanism be safely transferred along with the name from the old pos- sessors to the new? The time is short, the inheritors are legion, the possession vanishes from the hand of him who understandeth not, like a tender perfume from the unsealed jar. Whether the transfer can be made, that is the new problem which confronts us as a people; and the solution of this problem constitutes the new task which the unfoldings of these later years have re- vealed and assigned to the American public school. The splendid institutions of enlightenment, schools, libraries, museums, institutes of art and instruction, which the sons of the Boston Puritans created for themselves and their children have already been assigned, by a power that knew better why they builded than they knew themselves—to the task of assimilating into the American community the children of those whom Europe neglected and oppressed. Such too may well be the destiny of that whole system of institutions shapen to the better- ment of society with which the old Americans as forerunners endowed this land. They may be a van- ishing race, but if an estate which they, beyond the ordinary measure of men, were potent to create shall have served for the betterment of mankind in the hands even of heirs by adoption, they will have done their work and justified their existence. This THE ABUNDANT LIFE 223 is no new thing in the ways of the world and the fates of the races of man. The Myceneans inspired in the later-coming Greeks the zeal for building and art, and the Etruscans laid foundations upon which the Latins learned to build the: Eternal City, by which in the process of the years wave after wave of invading barbarism has been absorbed into civilization. The most potent instrument by which the school operates to mould the diverse elements of popula- tion into a people capable of nationality is the main- tenance of a common standard of speech. Differ- ence of race loses in the presence of unity of speech its divisive power. Nationality all over the world tends more and more to shape itself on social inter- course as determined by language. The power to make oral use of the English tongue simply, directly, exactly, is a fundamental equipment for good eciti- zenship and effective living. The establishment of this use throughout the nation is a fundamental guaranty of that uniformity of intercouse among its citizens which provides a basis for the permanent commonwealth. It is the plain and correct use of language that we ask the schools to teach and not to neglect it in the pursuit of the artificialities of rhetoric and the esthetics of literature. American does not mean Anglo-Saxon, nor is it at all a word of race. We are a nation by virtue of our common speech, and, more than that, by virtue of certain instincts, faiths, and predilections which we group under the term Americanism—and these are some of them: to judge men as individuals and 224 THE ABUNDANT LIFE not as members of a class nor by the possession of goods; to abhor fixed and wooden standards in the judgment of flesh and blood and to try to see things as the other fellow sees them; to shift often the per- spective lest little things gain bigness by being too near the eye; to resent the exaction of the uttermost farthing; to count on human brotherhood despite the race lines; to be interested in everything human; to be hospitable toward innovation and change; to have constant faith in betterment and belief that all which lives improves; to trust many things to right themselves; to have more confidence in the law that is within than in the exercise of force; to allow a man free opportunity for unfolding his life; and to give all men of whatever class or wealth equal stand- ing before the law. We are ludicrous optimists; we tolerate all sorts of laxities; we are humbugged and deluded; we suffer from lack of training; we waste our materials fearfully, but we are charitable toward the diversities of human character and equipment, and with all our losses prefer to give men their freedom rather than make them machines. This is Americanism. It is the religion of a land where all the races of Europe are mingling their bloods and tempers to bring into being the new Occidental man and set him to face the man of the East. And here today, where half the world looks out through its farthermost gate toward the other world-half, that power which has in its hands the fate of the peoples has assembled and seated itself in council—the American public school. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 225 THE DEMOCRACY OF EDUCATION Published in the Labor Clarion (vol. X, no. 29, p. 13), San Francisco, California, September 1, 1911. I repudiate the idea that the children of laboring men should be differently educated from other peo- ple’s children. Advising laboring people to give their children industrial education, simply because they are the children of laboring people, is most un-American. The manner and subjects of a child’s education should be determined by its aptitudes, and not by the occupation of its parents. It is all too common to hear it said that an industrial education is good enough for the children of laboring men. Industrial education is good, and so is liberal education; the mixture of the two is best. But any education will perforce lean either to the one side or the other. That leaning should be determined, as I have already said, by the aptitudes of the pupil concerned. Children of laboring men should have an oppor- tunity and should be encouraged to pursue studies in philosophy, history, language, when their abilities turn that way. Those liberal studies tend toward giving flexibility of mind and range of thought, and therefore toward intellectual leadership. No single class of society should have a monopoly thereof. | | | 226 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Those who recommend the laboring man to send his children only to industrial schools in order that he may labor with his hands alone are contemplat- ing the building up of castes. There is no reason why a child in this free country should inherit the occupation of his father. The public system of education, from the grade schools up to the university, is intended to run a shaft straight across the stratifying tendencies of society and break up the strata. Any bright boy today, in states that maintain state universities, can, if he has the will power for it, go through to the top and win himself leadership in science or literature, or in one of the professions, or in knowledge of human affairs as represented in sociology, government, and history. The way is perfectly free and open; especially is it so here in California, where boys can so easily earn enough of a living to make their way through college. American society will never settle down into stratifications by caste as long as we have a free public-school system, and as long as all classes of our people make use for their children of all parts and capacities of it. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 227 VOCATIONAL TRAINING Delivered before the California Teachers’ Association in San Francisco, California, April 6, 1915. We claim to be getting more democratic these days and talk much about it. I have my doubts. We are priding ourselves on various new mechan- isms for the realization of democracy. Still I doubt whether we are in spirit growing more democratic. I think on the contrary I have noted in recent years an increeping of the spirit of caste. We have heard the milionaire assert and defend loyalty to his class. We have heard representatives of the LW.W. preaching the saving value for their people of the class spirit and class consciousness. This is cer- tainly not democracy. It flies in the face of the old democracy of the New England town meeting. 1 wonder if this emergence of the caste spirit may not be one indication that we have been of late years receiving more material of men and ideas from Europe than we can in the available time assimilate and digest. At any rate, our retreating or advanc- ing democracy, as the case may be, will have to be measured not in terms of mechanisms for voting but in our attitude toward things like caste. It is a matter not so much of the political machinery as of the social feeling and organization which lie back of politics. oe P45 0 228 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The spirit of our public schools is fundamental to democracy. Let us apply the test there. Is the caste spirit showing itself there? Are the sons of the rich tending to forsake the public school for the private school? If they are, it is bad for society, bad for the state. But it is also bad for them. They have a hard enough time and a heavy enough handi- cap at the best. I am wondering, too, whether this most recent zeal for vocational training with all its possibilities of good may not respond to the spirit of caste and minister to it. As such it surely bears within it the seeds of sin and destruction. Does it propose that the life-occupation of a child shall be determined for it early in life? That means that children shall follow mainly the crafts of their parents. It is the old device of monarchical-aristocratic Europe for committing the young to manual and industrial pur- suits. It is the old derailing switch which can be relied upon to shunt the children of the laboring classes out into the labor field at the age of twelve and shut them off from the open road to highest attainment even though they have the talent and the will for it. That is not democracy. It is just the opposite. Democracy is a matter of free oppor- tunity, a fair field, and equal chance. The teaching of a vocation to young children, furthermore, does not provide them with an equip- ment which will be available in the handicrafts and industries of real life. It is misleading in making them think it does. The instruction of later years is another thing. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 229 AMERICA’S DEBT TO GERMAN EDUCATION Date and occasion unknown. The debt which we as a people owe to the German educational system is not likely to be over- estimated. We leave for the moment entirely out of account the indirect influence upon us of German schools through the substance of their teachings, and their discoveries in philosophy, music, philology, the natural sciences, medicine, and theology, in all of which they have led the van. We leave out of account the applications of the natural sciences to the arts and needs of human life in which applica- tions Germany has been preparing the basis for a new and inevitable economy on this crowded and more crowded globe. We leave out of account all these things, distinctive products of the German universities though they are, in order to set high in clearer relief the benefits we have received in terms of education, pure and simple—in terms both of its spirit and of its institutional forms. So far as outward forms are concerned, it is at the beginning of the educational structure and again at the end and topstone that Germany im- pressed its notable influence: the kindergarten and the graduate school. The first kindergarten, openly and confessedly an outright copy of Friedrich § y B \ B Sa see I. aR pte 230 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Frobel’s mercy to children, was opened about 1855 in Watertown, Wisconsin, by the wife of Carl Schurz. In twenty years from 1882 to 1901, the number of kindergartens in the United States multi- plied by ten—from five hundred to five thousand. From beginning to end, it was a German importation. But better and deeper than the formal institution was the new spirit of inquiry regarding the real meaning and aim of elementary education. This spirit Germany both fostered and fed. Horace Mann’s inspection of German schools in 1843 led to the first remodeling of American schools, indeed to the first attempt at founding these schools upon any form of rationality or upon much of anything other than dame-school tradition. On the other hand, the graduate school of the American universities stands clear and undeniable as of German origin. Through the graduate school, which was in reality the German Philosophische Facultit, came the veritable American university. The American college was of English origin. It was social and cultural in its tendencies. The graduate school was distinctly vocational and specialistic. The college relied on requirement, the graduate school on the freedom of the inner impulse. The former taught on the authoritative word of the master and the textbook, the latter upon the instinct of search for the truth. The former labeled the ful- fillment of its course with the A.B., the latter with the German Ph.D. We have for the time kept both, superimposing the latter upon the former and are working through a period of transition wherein the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 231 three years of the one is being partially telescoped into the four years of the other. Each for the time being preserves more or less of the character of its national origin. England and its culture look toward an exalted amateurism; (fermany looks toward exact training for a pro- fession and fits more definitely means to ends. England isolated from the continent by channel and seas cultivates freedom and is a bituminous civiliza- tion; Germany squeezed in the center of Europe between Slav and Roman cultivates efficiency and is an anthracite civilization. England’s higher educa- tion counts on the free unfolding of personality; Germany’s counts on the shaping of personal gifts to institutional needs. England’s goal is freedom but its method prescription; Germany’s goal is training, but its method rests upon the fullest recog- nition of the Lehrfreiheit and the Lernfreiheit. The frank acceptance of the German quantity into the American system and the creation thereby of the American university dates from the founda- tion in 1876 of the Johns Hopkins University, though halting beginnings of a graduate school appeared at Harvard in 1870. Most of the men who constituted the first faculty at Johns Hopkins had studied and thirteen had received the degree of Ph.D. at German universities, three at Gottingen, three at Heidelberg, three at Leipzig, and one each at Strassburg and Freiburg im Breisgau. The little stream of American students which set toward (German universities, beginning with Edward Everett and George Ticknor at Gottingen ems A IO nt 232 THE ABUNDANT LIFE in 1815, had reached in 1850 a total of two hundred and twenty-five. They all brought back home with them the glow of a new enthusiasm for the possi- bilities of a new meaning for university life and work. In succeeding years, hundreds followed in their track who on their return to America made possible the development of the type of American university which under the strong pressure of public need was struggling to assert itself. By still another and totally distinct channel the influence of Germany made itself felt in the estab- lishment of the American university type. The older universities of the East developed out of the oldtime colleges were privately endowed and con- trolled, but in the West the prevailing type modeled after the University of Michigan (founded 1837) was the state university publicly supported and con- trolled as the capstone of the public school system, and this type, particularly in the case of Michigan the prototype, was established in conscious imitation of the German university. To this people who in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century cordially and generously opened the doors of their universities to young Americans seeking help, and who without hindrance or charge beyond that exacted of their own sons offered these aliens the fairest and best they had to give, thereby lending the first impulse to the creation of the American university—to this people we owe a debt of honor we may never forget. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 233 GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND THE CHILD MIND A portion of the introduction to Heroes of Myth and Legend, volume seven of Collier’s Library for Young People (1903). I have a boy now about nine years old to whom for three or four years I have been reading various stories as known and loved by various peoples of various times. Though Alice in Wonderland and the Jungle Book well maintain their prestige, it is clear that on the whole the oldtime stories are the ones that lay strongest hold on the youngster’s interest and bear multiple re-reading best. As if they were once for all as old as they can be, they are the ones that brighten with eternal youth and freshness, the oftener they are read. Church’s Stories from Homer was one of the first books of its sort attempted. It tells the stories in brief and simple form, but does not fail to carry something of the genial dignity and stately form of speech that give the tales much of their timeless worth. The words are simple, but the charm of dignity and rhythm is there: ‘‘ And Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it on the ground, and caught his child in his hands, and kissed him and dandled him, praying aloud to Father Zeus and all the gods: ‘Grant, Father Zeus and all ye gods, that this child may be as I am, great among si A In Ta pa es 234 THE ABUNDANT LIFE the sons of Troy; and may they say some day, when they see him carrying home the bloody spoils from war, A better man than his father, this, and his mother shall be glad at heart’.”’ If anyone thinks a boy can resist this, try him and see. Long names like Andromache and Agamemnon are no stumbling- blocks. They only help lift the picture into the skies of the grand unreal and as for themselves with their mellow ring become, with Abou Ben Adhem and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Tippecanoe, eternal pos- sessions. The Iliad I found was in general preferred to the Odyssey. It must be the rush and movement and double heroic therein that prevails: ‘So spake he, and drew the mighty sword that hung by his side; then, as eagle rushes through the clouds to pounce on leveret or lamb, rushed on the great Achilles.’’ Still the story of the Cyclops is unrivaled in all juvenilia for its soul-compelling power. How many children has Hawthorne led into the Tangle- wood Paradise with his Wonder Book and its Gorgon’s Head and Midas’ Touch! Miss Hall’s Four Old Greeks with its deft adaptations and half- realizing touch is so different in its short sentences and lack of rhythm from Church’s Stories, that one might expect it to fail, but it does not. The stories are there, well and more fully told, and after all it is evidently the stories that count. In reading with a child a collection like Bertha Palmer’s Stories from the Classic Literature of Many Nations it is noticeable how strongly those from Greek and Hebrew sources stand out from the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 235 rest in the immediate interest they command. This collection offers from the Old Testament only the story of Joseph, but there are many others that stand the test valiantly, Noah and the Ark, David and Goliath, David and Saul, Absalom, Ruth, The Escape from Egypt, ete. But in the Old Testament stories the great men and giants have to take the place of the gods of the Greek and Hindu tales, and this sets a restraint that childhood does not appreciate. Children learn monotheism out of the catechism, but polytheism is frankly much more to their liking. The gods and demigods do big things with so much readier ease and abandon, and the whole atmosphere of poly- theism is so much freer from these subtleties of analysis which in developed monotheistic thought distinguish the provinces and powers of God and man, man and nature, that the unbridled naturalness of the child finds its affinity there, not here. The children of civilized men like other savages regard the discrimination which restricts reason and speech to men and denies it to other animals as a gratuitous snobbery—that is, if they regard it at all; at any rate they prefer animals that give an account of themselves, and are tremendously interested in learning what the account is. Like other savages they furthermore prefer that the sun should be a dragon or a charioteer or a big chief or anything rather than a clump of gases. They will at school learn formally and reluctantly of the latter estate but they will hear gladly by the hour about the goings and doings of a real live Sun. The only device which 236 THE ABUNDANT LIFE has succeeded in stirring in the juvenile breast a yearning for botany even when cloaked under the name of ‘‘nature study’’ is that which presents the life-struggle of plants under a mythological guise as involving conscious personal existence. The instinet which made Daphne and Narcissus and Hyacinth proper names amongst the Greeks holds everywhere in the human race the parterre and is repeated in the childhood of every individual life. A reflective civilization may purge from the ripen- ing mind the demand for nymphs and dryads, but the child mind, if fairly dealt with, will really know and love brooks and trees only as persons, brooks as they murmur and chatter, glide and jump, trees as they wait and watch. The dearest activity of the child mind is that which spends itself in awakening to life-conditions and life-use certain dead and useless materials we call playthings. The activity itself we call play, as ‘playing horse,’ ‘playing house,’ ‘playing cars.’ It matters not whether it is the endowing of the bestridden broomstick with the life of a horse or the awakening of a string of barrel staves into the life-conditions of a railway as used in life. The child mind knows no distinction between the life of horse and the life of railway. All that is scientific after- thought. Vivifying and personizing constitute from the point of view of child mind and of savage mind one and the same process, and the two are perfectly blended in what we call play. Myths and child’s play deal with a fathomless credulity,—the deeper indeed the better, for it is the creative and active THE ABUNDANT LIFE 237 credulity—that which awakens the life-conditions— which gives the highest joy. Even in the receptive credulity it is the perception of the life-conditions on suggestion of them which stimulate the mind, not the mere passive hearing. It is a well-known fact that the cruder toys yield the child more delight than the more realistic ones. An old rag doll wins a deeper and more lasting hold on a child’s interest and affections than the finest Parisian facsimile. A toy railway-train mounted to run on perfect miniature rails and equipped almost to the extent of a working model with the finest mechanism of locomotion will be found, in general experience, after arousing a temporary interest in seeing the ‘‘ wheels go round’’ shortly to pall upon the child’s attention and be forsaken for some simpler, cruder toy that gives the imagination more to do. It is the positive activity of awakening and animating stocks and stones in the fashioning of visions, dreams, and ideals about them, in them, and out of them that constitutes at once the zest of play in the mind of the child, and the charm of myth-making and divinity-making in the mind of the primitive man. * * H* * * The whole tangled framework of an elaborate polytheism like that of Greece or India was the resultant of various differentiations out of many growths hopelessly confused and crossed, but all growths from the common soil of a primitive thought wherein nature and man still blended and belonged to each other. Grown folks will read the stories of gods and heroes, and some of them will find 238 THE ABUNDANT LIFE refreshment in following these oldtime pathways trodden by the early feet of our race; but others will stumble in the simple roaming paths, being too long accustomed to pavements and being many of them also blinded by the light of the lamp they always carry. Children skip gladly along the paths and stumble not; they are on familiar ground, and furthermore have not acquired the habit of the lamp. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 239 TRAVEL AND EDUCATION Published in San Francisco Examiner, March 3, 1909. Everybody must be agreed that travel is educa- tive. There is, however, one particular reason why this is so, which has been, I think, neglected, and yet it is in my opinion the chief reason. One of the leading benefits of education is the power it gives to see as others see; that is to say, the suppleness of mind whereby one is able to transfer himself to the point of view of other people, other times, other cultures. Travel takes a man out of his own settled environment, shows him how other people live, and shocks him with the revelation that there are other ways of doing the trick of human living than the set ways by which he has been reared. We are all too apt to think our way is the only way. Travel takes a man out of the ranges of the petty home gossip and shows him there are things worth knowing besides those of the local town square and the backyard. A man can tell to what extent he is provincial in his interests by the sort of news he yearns for. If he has gained perspective in the larger human life he is likely to be interested in occurrences which affect the whole nation or the whole state or the whole body of mankind, rather than in incidents of only local range. It is good for a man to travel in order that he may get used to the fact that there are many 240 THE ABUNDANT LIFE sorts of human beings. It is well for him to find out, too, that there are excellent men in all the sorts. Travel is training in humanity; it helps a man gain the humanistic view. In other words, it is liberalizing. And I am inclined to think that education, after all, so far as it is good for anything, is humanistic. The ultimate problem is one of getting on among men. The ultimate test of all measures, inventions, discoveries, is their applicability to human need. The social test is the final test. ORTHOGRAPHY _— ei Rt WRN » ORTHOGRAPHY This address was delivered at the Commencement of Stanford Umiversity, September 15, 1906. The great earth- quake which had taken place April 18, 1906, is most often thought of in connection with the disaster in San Francisco, but it also caused serious damage to the buildings of Stanford University. At this time there was being carried on in the United States a most earnest discussion of spelling reform. We are assembled today in the name of the university not built with hands. The same disorder of Nature which last April made men distrust the solid earth on which they dwelt, revealed to them the sure resource of human helpfulness; and the same distress which showed how small their actual need in things of sense, pointed straight toward the things that are real and the things that abide. The same disaster which doubly decimated the monied support of Berkeley and disheveled the glories of Stanford’s peecile walls unveiled to clearer view the greater University of Man we always knew was always there, the university of common purpose in common love of truth and cleanness,—not anchored to the soil of any place, not named with names, not built with hands. I am sure there never was a time when, by the touch of world-wide sympathy, Stanford felt more 244 THE ABUNDANT LIFE certainly conscious of its part in this greater univer- sity; I am sure there never was a day when the hand-clasp of Stanford and Berkeley carried the heart-beat, as this day which by its very circum- stances reminds of common loss and common task, and blends oneness of fate with oneness of spirit. A memorial will we rear today ‘‘out of our stony griefs,’”’ and it shall be a witness between us, and Mizpah, the watch-tower, shall be its name: The Lord watch between me and thee when we: are absent one from another. The chief instrument of that inner communication amongst men upon which is conditioned human sympathy and mutual understanding as the basis of the larger life in human society is language. The significance of this occasion prompts me therefore to some remarks on unity of standard in intercourse by language, and I am further encouraged thereto by the consideration that philology having of late “got into politics’’ a little, is suffering the usual maltreatment in current discussions. It is not with a view to taking sides in a practical controversy, but in order to present some fundamental principles of the science of language pertinent thereto and commonly ignored, that I make this my venture, trusting to your kind allowance, that philology, now that various other walks of life have had hearing in the matter, may not seem to trespass in claiming for its adumbrations the right to throw some further shadows upon the question. The definition of language as voice expressive of thought is doubly inadequate. In the first place, it HO0SS3D3a3x¥d SIH NOdN I LVNO.LD0a AHVHONOH IHL SNIMOLSIE SMONNVE AN3qIS3dd 2261 'VINYOAITIVD 40 ALISN3IAINN ‘SMV 40 doldooa THE ABUNDANT LIFE 245 is far less a means of expression than a vehicle of communication. Historically it takes its form almost entirely, not from the prompting to express what is within one, but from the suggestions of hearing as to what will be intelligible to others. It is a means of communication; it always takes into account the other man; it is preéminently a social instrument. In the second place, it is, in modern civilized society, addressed more to the eye than to the ear. Most of us read every day more language than we hear, even if we limit our reading to newspapers and textbooks, but if we turn to the higher intellectual life, there can be no doubt that our acquaintance with the larger range of powers and possibilities in language is determined immeasurably more by reading than by hearing. Broadened intercourse in the world of men is calling more and more for an intercommuni- cation of thought not restricted to the range of a speaker’s voice. We resent the power of distance to keep men and ideas and sympathies asunder, and we refuse to condition intercommunication upon a certain physical propinquity of larynxes and ears. The phonograph and the telephone are ultra-modern devices for annulling distance and bringing larnyx and ear nearer together without the crude necessity of bodily transporting one or the other. As such these instruments aid in returning language to its original character as sound addressed to the ear. Still if we were from this time on to abandon alto- gether the pen and the printing-press and make our libraries into storehouses of phonograph-cylinders, we should at least cut ourselves off from the past, ER a Erm nS VG = os gu FERS Pec ri ea ae he a mm ER Lo a ES a Ee g Lio sa ar re et ry ys Sr 246 THE ABUNDANT LIFE for written language is an instrument not only of triumph over space, but even more significantly, as a means of record, an instrument of triumph over time. One may fairly presume, I think, that the device of written language, by which man has been slowly lifting himself during the last four millenia out of the shackles of space and time, i.e., out of savagery, is not likely to be abandoned forthwith. The problem, however, of how to hold the written language in intelligible relation to the viscous body of the spoken language without sacrificing the essen- tial value of the former as an agency of civilization will command increasing attention, and will demand the cooperation of special knowledge, broad human wisdom, and, withal, much caution, for the problem is beset with grave difficulties, and most especially as concerns the English language, of all languages that are or ever have been. As every language serves the purpose of commu- nication among the members of its speech-community it follows that every language is a standardized product. This is true of spoken language as well as of written language, though in a more refined degree and less obtrusively. In the last analysis and from the purely descriptive point of, e.g., phonetics, every speaker possesses a language of his own; there are as many languages as there are individual speakers. Each one has his own selection of words, uses some of them in special meanings or with individual limitations of meaning, has his own intonations, or peculiarities of pronunciation or special colorings of particular sounds, but all these individualisms THE ABUNDANT LIFE 247 are held in continual restraint and subjected to a perpetual leveling influence by what the individual is daily hearing from those about him, as well as by the necessity of making himself understood by those about him. The result by countless imitations and compromises is the unconscious standardizing which creates and maintains the idiom of a speech- community however small it may be. The constant struggle between the centrifugal forces of individual usage and the centripetal forces of intercommunica- tion within the community yields on the one hand, standard, on the other, life, as the source of progress and historic change. But the mass swings as a whole, and reduces the individual languages approximately to its own orbit. The same conditions which held the individual language in subservience to the com- munity speech operate in holding or reducing the speech of the lesser community to accord with that of the larger community according to the dictation of intercourse. Isolation allows dialects to emerge and shape themselves in separate standards; resumption of intercourse levels them out and constrains them into subservience to the greater mass and recognition of the wider standard. So the great national lan- guages are created in part by leveling, in part by absorption, but always in response to the facts of national life and intercourse. The man who desires to have part in the larger community and gain a hearing will accommodate himself to the standard, be it unconsciously through natural imitation of that which he admires, or consciously and with toil, as in the case of actors and public speakers who cannot 248 THE ABUNDANT LIFE afford to bear the provincial mark. There arises, too, in cases of the rapid extension of a standard such as has characterized the history of English in the last century, the intervention of the school- teacher, the dictionary, and even the elocutionist as valiant exterminators of dialectal vermin. Theirs is rather rough work to be sure, but after all they are the frontiersmen of an advancing unitary civilization founded upon free intercourse that insists upon a uniform, standard means of inter- communication. A man who moves about much among various classes and in various places and wishes to be generally acceptable to all audiences on short acquaintance had better standardize his theayter and obleege and massacree and aint and hist (hoist) and Roostan and Euro’-pean; but at home it will make no difference. It ought not to make a difference anywhere, but it does; it seems to start a suspicion that he may not be the bearer of a message from the great world. The matters I have just been discussing fall mostly under the guardianship of orthoepy and orthophony. I have indeed fetched a compass in my approach, but the goal toward which I am tending is orthography, which is to the written language what orthophony is to the spoken. Writing arose from the demand for record for those sepa- rated in time or for communication with those sepa- rated in space. Writing began as pictures of objects, then gradually attached itself to their names, then to syllables, then to single sounds. Writing began in Europe when the Greeks, receiving the Phoenician THE ABUNDANT LIFE 249 symbols and with them their names, applied them with the value generally of the initial sound of these names in writing down sound by sound, as best they could, their own words. It was a painful exercise in phonetic spelling, and their early inscrip- tions are abiding monuments of the agony. The speech of different localities differed in dialect, and each district wrote as its own dialect sounded with the result that the writer of one district could scarcely ‘decipher the writing of his neighbors. Added to this was the embarrassment that different districts had accepted the symbols with somewhat different values; thus the Ionians who dropped their h’s accepted the letter heta (our H) with the value e, to them the initial sound, while the Athenians who kept their h’s gave it the value of h. After awhile, about 400 B.C., the Athenians, by way of conformity to the more brilliantly worldly Ionians, compromised to the extent of adopting their letters and their values but continued to spell at first more or less phonetically. The shape, however, which the pho- netically written word assumed during the following generation proved to be the form the word was to keep for all the generations thereafter. The literary prestige of the fourth century established the word in place of the letter as the unit, and ever after, even down into the present Modern Greek, the assemblage of symbols marking the word remains unchanged. The sounds have changed but have dragged the letters with them. And what is more, with the decay of provincialism and the rise of a national Hellenic consciousness based upon intellectual achievement 250 THE ABUNDANT LIFE and embodied in Alexander’s empire, the Athenian form of the words as the vehicle of a nation-making literature became the accepted form for all the dialectal districts. So there became one normal form for all Greece in all the generations; and Syracuse could read a newspaper of Byzantium, if there were one, and Polybius could read Thucydides, six centuries before him, and never suspect that he could not in a seance understand Thucydides’ ghost, if there were one. This written language of Greece was an orthography, nothing more nor less, and this is what an orthography meant for Greece: It shaped and maintained a nation, though tribes and states decayed, manners and faiths shifted, and no gov- ernmental system stood to represent the national existence; and when in the nineteenth century the little state reémerged from out the black lava crust of Turkish rule that had submerged and almost choked it, it was an orthography, more than any one thing else, that gave it the breath of a national life. With the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821 the only strand—to be sure it was a golden thread—that joined the new back to the old was the language preserved in the service of the faithful ancient church of the east, and preserved essentially unchanged in outward form from the tongue in which were first written the Epistles and the Gospels. The modern state is national by virtue, not of unity of blood or faith, but preéminently by virtue of unity in the medium of intercourse, primarily by writing, secondarily by speech. Germany has one THE ABUNDANT LIFE 251 recognized standard language overlying various shrinking dialects of speech; likewise France, Italy, Holland, Spain. Norway is held aloof from Sweden by a distinct standard of Scandinavian speech, and is turned toward Denmark. Austria-Hungary fails of nationality from lack of a common idiom. I come now to speak of the English language. This has made more than a nation, and more than an empire. The one instance in history of a single language serving two great empires, it has dedicated a broad region belting the globe to free intercourse and equality before the law. Historically it is a dialect of the English mid- lands elevated by natural processes to supremacy above its colleagues and gradually extended with the spread of the English empire throughout the world, being enriched and cosmopolitanized, lifted out of its provincialism and fitted for its broader tasks by materials absorbed from multifold sources, and being simplified in its structure and mechanism by submitting to use in the mouths of men of various minds and various tongues. Prior to the sixteenth century its spelling, though not self-consistent, owing in general to the diversity of the sources of the language and the confusing influence of the French spelling, was still quasi-phonetic, i.e., though it did not always represent the same sound by the same symbol, it undertook to represent the spoken word. The appearance, however, in this century of an abundant literature, coincident with the devel- opment of printing, tended to fix the spelling and remove it from subservience to sound. Its call to a 252 THE ABUNDANT LIFE higher and wider use cut the language loose, per- force, from the spoken idiom of any single district or class. Our present orthography may therefore be roughly said to represent nineteenth-century words by means of symbols, which though by no means used with the simplicity and self-consistency of phonetic spelling, really stand for sixteenth- century sounds. At that time the vowel-symbols were used essentially in the ‘‘continental’’ values. We now, e.g., write the phonetic word naym with a because it was pronounced naam in the sixteenth century, and write mile with + because it was then pronounced meel. We write the word see, on the one hand as sea, commemorating its former pro- nunciation with the open ay-sound, and on the other as see, as a record of the older close ay-sound. The two words were distinct in Shakespeare’s time. The influence of printing, the appearance of dictionaries in the eighteenth century, and the patient insistence of teachers and spelling-books through generations gradually reduced the orthographic diversity to the present uniformity. It was a long, hard struggle, but it was a struggle which would not have been made, had not society had in view an end which it was of serious importance for it to attain. The intensity of the struggle has left its trace in an extraordinary orthographic orthodoxy, or even prudery, which often treats false spelling as a mark of vulgarity, if not of mental inferiority. But this is the way in human affairs with things which seem necessary, but cannot give a full rational account of themselves. The fact is that English orthography THE ABUNDANT LIFE 253 was compelled under existing circumstances to find its source of authority in the hasty crystallizations of usage rather than in the intelligent rulings of a rational tribunal—hence the blind orthodoxy and herein some claim to forbearance. As to the resultant orthography it cannot be denied that many inconsistencies are frozen into its mass. One and the same sound is denoted by various different devices, as when, to cite an extreme case, the voiceless lingual sibilant is indicated by sh in shine, si in pension, s in sugar, ss in issue, sci in conscious, ti in nation, ci in social, ce in ocean, and ch in charade. On the other hand, one and the same device may denote different sounds, as ough, which denotes of in cough, o in dough, uf in enough, and au in plough. Words of like sound are differ- ently spelled, as cite, site, sight, but this last must be esteemed rather an advantage, as an appeal to the eye. It must also be admitted that the language in its preoccupation with adjusting itself to its importunate tasks laid itself open to the tricks of false pedantry and rococo decoration, such as the b in debt and doubt, the gh in delight, the ue in tongue, the hy in rhyme. Such are the familiar materials of the oft-repeated indictment against our orthography. It is undoubtedly a barrier to the acquisition of the language now extending itself as a common vehicle of intercourse beyond its natural habitat. In the inevitable discussion of its reform, however, a sober consideration of all that is involved must warn against the rash imperiling through shallow judgment of the greater good for the lesser benefit. Here follow certain points of view: 254 THE ABUNDANT LIFE First. Uniformity in the written language throughout its entire territory in any given period, as the present, is a prime demand of civilized intercourse. Second. The establishment for the United States of a standard of written English different from that recognized elsewhere in the English-speaking terri- tory is an isolating and divisive movement promising loss and waste to intercourse and culture; and introducing consciousness of contrariety where the opposite is desired. The needless irritation caused by the minor differences already existing points ominously to what would result from greater. Third. The English language is not the property of the people of the United States, still less of its government; it is a precious possession of the English-speaking world, and the moral authority to interfere in its regulation must arise out of the entire body, and not from a segment thereof. Fourth. Every person who is born to the use of the language inherits thereby a definite advantage in the world for intellectual gain, for influence and effectiveness, yes, even for commercial success, by very reason of its extension of use in uniformity of standard. This inherited advantage constitutes a vested interest, and must not be trifled with. Fifth. Any radical change, such as for instance would be involved in phonetic writing, would have the effect of cutting us off from the language of Shakespeare and the English Bible, making of this a semi-foreign idiom, to be acquired by special study. Indeed, our entire present library collections PR THE ABUNDANT LIFE 255 of English books would be placed beyond the reach of the ordinary reader, and be as Dutch to his eyes. The bond uniting all the products of the language from the Elizabethan period to the present day creates a very precious heritage for every speaker of the English tongue. Sixth. The adoption of a phonetic writing, it should furthermore be remembered, would involve imitation of the various dialectal forms of the spoken language,—all of which is highly interesting to phonologists, but to the plain reader anathema. Seventh. Print is addressed to the eye, and the reader’s eye taking in whole words or even the composite form of whole phrases in rapid glance is disturbed and hindered by abnormal forms of spelling. . Eighth. The proposal gradually to introduce through the codperation of volunteers a certain number of new spellings, and then, when these are well under way presumably certain others, seems to promise an era of ghastly confusion in printing offices and in private orthography and heterography, as well as of much irritation to readers’ eyes and spirits. Ninth. The list of three hundred words proposed by the Simplified Spelling Board is a somewhat haphazard collection following no very clear prin- ciple of selection. One hundred and fifty-seven of them, such as color for colour, are already in their docked form familiar to American usage. The remainder seem to owe their inclusion in the list to their having been misspelled a number of times a i | Sh Bp Ry epee le a or ROR a ar a CE a OR HN 55 mT TP 256 THE ABUNDANT LIFE in English literature; thus the y is tabooed in pigmy (for pygmy) not in synonym; the older spelling is resumed in rime (for rhyme), but not in gest for guest, or tung for tongue. There is no excuse, how- ever, for thru (for through) from any point of view. The symbol % carries generally in English the value yu or # (in but) ; only very rarely, as in rural, rumor, has it the value oo. Thru has not even the authority of error. The interests here involved are too serious to be treated craftily, or on the principle of the entering wedge. If these are all the changes to be made, they lack system and are unworthy. If more are to be exacted, let us know what we are doing. ~The English tongue is our priceless heritage whereby we as a people and as individuals are made members of the widest community of intelligence and freedom in the records of mankind and sharers of the amplest traditions of vigor, integrity, and self-government ; and it behooves us to deal consid- erately with it, and keep it in honor. This possession furthermore we hold in joint title with many peoples in many lands, and we may not ask for the portion of goods that is ours without injuring the rights of others and likewise impairing our own estate and the inheritance of our children in the jealous keeper- ship of our children and our children’s children, the tongue in which our fathers spake the freedom of the individual man shall become the chief instrument of unity and peace among all men. RELIGION A Eo he a Sp : ag ans 5 4 LE Mee vy my ae = Spi ow, 3S a PNET. - I RE rR THE KIND OF MAN FOR THE MODERN MINISTRY This article was written December 14, 1907, and ap- peared in The Recruits Series published by ‘‘ The Student Recruits for the Christian Mimistry,”’ Berkeley, Calif. (vol. 1, no. 5). In choosing a livelihood a man generally inquires first as to what work people seem to want to have done; then he looks himself over and estimates as to which of the demands he is likely to meet to best advantage. Now it is a fair question, and one a man who is considering the Christian ministry is bound to ask, whether there appears to be a strong demand in Protestant communities for more and ever more clergymen and for the sort of work they are generally expected to do. The habit of church- going does not seem to be on the increase, and in comparison with old New England standards, it is in pitiful decline. But we cannot make people go to church, either by argument and the unfolding of general principles, or by authority and the attach- ing of special penalties. A multitude of various agencies have arisen to share the idealistic energy of the church, and many of them, in the specializing tendencies of modern society, have been differen- tiated out of all organic connection with the church. 260 THE ABUNDANT LIFE And yet they render service once latent and implicit in the purpose of the church, and now are giving satisfaction to many a pious zeal that once would have assumed the cassock or the cowl. But the church is there yet. A shrewd old Yankee who kept a small country store in a down-east village was observed to have his loft full of common chairs, and when inquired of regarding this seeming disparity in his stock, yawned the reply: ‘Well, I reckon how’t settin’ down ain’t agoin’ to go out o’ fashion so very soon.”’’ / As long as the day is pent in between the nights and the mourners go about the streets, as long as life hungers for more than bread and a man’s reach is higher than his grasp, we shall need and use religion, and as long as men remain social beings, ordered and conditioned in space by communities, and in time by history, usage, and descent, we shall need and use the church. Religion can never be reduced to pure individualism; it demands social organization and public expression, for it is essen- tially social in its origin and nature, and however rich may be the development of the individual experience of religion, its deepest roots are in the family, the clan, and tribe. Therefrom it derives the instinct of its growth and form, and although modern society has dissolved the tribe and clan, and threatened the family, religion still assembles itself a basis of support in the village or parish community, as the quasi-clan. Therefore the priest and the prophet are with us still, and their presence represents an inextinguishable need. 8 2 Zz @ . 0 2 > a 0 - € m mn > a Cc " - < 0 ~ Cc w - xX m ® > 0 m tcece COC C ¢ ct . ss? THE ABUNDANT LIFE 261 With the shifting conditions of society, however, the position of the church within it and the work it has to do have shifted too, and a different type of man is demanded for that work, if that work is to be done. A young man who is measuring himself to estimate if he will do, cannot afford to measure himself by the accepted type of the clergyman of twenty and thirty years ago. It may be we ought to want that type and that we are decadent because we don’t, but the fact is that we don’t, and one of the important reasons why men do not yearn toward the church and church-going is that this vehemently changed demand has not been sharply met. Watch and you will see that ministers who have a real message for modern life and tackle real work in a real world fill their churches, gain cordial following, and find ready hands to help them in their work. The trouble is that most of the present-day preach- ing, most of the church procedure and the church machinery is fashioned by rote on the usage of an earlier day begotten of other conditions and other interests. I am not referring here to the formal order of public worship, which may well be con- servative, but to the whole spirit and interest of the church in its larger relations to social life and its whole conception of its place and tasks. If a young man is considering whether he should enter the ministry, let him carefully observe the work and spirit and method of a minister who is getting a hearing, is building up his church into generous activity, is helping men live nobler and better lives, and is stirring the civic life of his RR a a — A i rd TT TE me Te , 262 THE ABUNDANT LIFE community toward better things, and then let him consider whether he would like to do that sort of work, and whether he thinks he can. If he finds he would like to and thinks he can, he may be reason- ably confident that for him there is probably no work quite so well worth doing. It is not wise to drift into the ministry because your grandmother had always wanted you to be a clergyman. It is not safe to accept the intimations of neighbors and kinsfolk that your well-observed dignity of bearing and solemnity of tone single you out for the sacred office. Success in writing essays at college or in impressing an audience at an oratorical contest does not constitute a valid call to the ministry nor a safe promise of prophetic gifts. Evidence of stubbornness such as are con- tained in an inclination to accept and defend anti- quated arrangements of doctrine, and to insist on believing unbelievable things, and to persist in maintaining outworn formulations and perpetuating meaningless usages, because forsooth they are estab- lished and orthodox—these do not convey any sure indication that you are appointed to be either a defender of the faith, a great theologian, or a helper and inspirer of men. A man will not make a good clergyman simply because he has a liking for old things and for things because they are old. This is the outfit for a bibliophile and an antiquarian, not a minister. You cannot test the genuineness of saving doctrine by its worn holes, as you do with old furniture. What we want is a message that will help modern society, stir it into consciousness of THE ABUNDANT LIFE 263 God, set it moving toward accord with His will. And the men who will bring the message are not likely to be traditionalists or antiquarians, archae- ologists, philologists, or scribes. You cannot save men by citations, appendices, and footnotes, after the manner of the scribes; you must speak as one having the authority in himself—the authority of his own experience of God and of his own abundant life. A taste for the refinements, the delicacies, the niceties and the softnesses of life is rather less likely to indicate a call to the ministry than robust- ness and athletic virility—anaemia distinctly less than a hearty appetite and a good digestion. Social aloofness and love of seclusion are furthermore not characteristic of the type we demand, for, while a clergyman must be capable of reflection and of intense concentration upon study, he must be one who always enjoys the full currents of social life and the living association with living men. The sermon that counts, that men glady hear, that they take home with them and put into their lives of the week, is the one that is drawn fresh from the preacher’s personal experience and observation of the real factors of daily life among his people in the household, on the street, in the field, on the mart. The day has passed for the old sophistical sermon with its marvels of analysis and its wondrous unfold- ings of unsurmised and unintended symbolisms in the text which it treats as a cabalistic motto. If a scriptural passage is to be used as the foundation and subject of discourse we should like to hear what the passage means in its context; that is, what Sh Gi SEATS a ea EE a mv re a en nt fr 264 THE ABUNDANT LIFE the man who wrote it intended to say. Otherwise it would seem to accord with respect for the sacred writing that a subject should be announced rather than a text. The sort of man we need today in the ministry is the man who is enough in touch with real things and sufficiently impressed with real human need, and its call for help, not to waste the high opportunity of the sermon hour upon a series of sophisticated puzzles or a rhetorical tour de force. I should furthermore think the right sort would be characterized by a natural interest in public affairs and civics rather than, for instance, in Hebrew, and in the workings of public charities and corrections rather than in homiletics. For a young man who is strong and virile and human, who finds an interest in human beings just because they are human and are entangled in the old human problem, who enjoys the society of human beings and has patience and charity for the individual problem, who is quick to discern the good there is in every man, and rejoices to help it over- top the bad, who has power to lead and organize and even to plan financially and execute as a busi- ness man would do, who has public spirit and interest in public affairs and loves to help the good overtop the evil in public life, who loves the honor- able and the true, and hates what is mean and the lie, who believes that the breath of God is within the sons of men and that man and society can be saved only as men claim their right to be sons of God— for such a young man there is work enough to do in the Christian ministry, and I doubt if he will find any other work quite as well worth doing. THE WONDERS THE WONDERS Published in Self Culture for Young People, vol. 1, wssued vn 1906 by the Twentieth Century Self Culture Association (New York, Chicago, St. Louis). Pity for the man who has no delight in wonders! He who has not begun to wonder is the carnal savage; he who has ceased is the cynic. Human culture began with the passing of fear into wonder, and today it turns toward degenerate death in the sneer at honest enthusiasm. No matter how firm our intellectual conviction that the laws of nature operate in total sweep and perfect uniformity, there is always room for the miracle. Electricity remains, after all the control that knowledge of its habits has established, still a source of mystery to the engineer, and radio- activity is just beginning to work its miracles before the eyes of the physicist. The genuine man of science is the man who more and more wonders. Instead of forcing upon nature his knowlege or his preconception, he persists in his experiments; that is, he persists in asking nature questions, and heeds her answers. It is the fool who hath said in his heart, I am not surprised. The Grand Caifion of the Colorado is a colossal exhibit in geology, but it is not geology that makes 268 THE ABUNDANT LIFE the caiion great. Science is not the one official guide to wonder in the things of nature; wonder is the protoplasm out of which science grows. The cafion is great, because it doth greatly teach and move the various sons of men according to their various knowledges and needs. It brings the shock of new perspective in the life of man upon the globe, in the life of man with men; it strikes new balance among the things worth while; it courts new visions and other doing; it breaks the ruts, and beckons out. This is what the world’s wonders have always been doing ever since wonder rose above fear. Long before the mountains and the seas had ceased to be girt with dread the mighty works of men had become the objects of wonder; indeed it was in the main only by transferring the analogy of man’s great works to the majesties of nature and discerning therein the control and purpose of men writ large to gods and demigods, that nature was brought near enough to be familiar and so to emerge from the domain of fear into that of wonder. And even today the commonest device of human wonder at the works of nature sees domes and pinnacles in the mountains, and pillars and but- tresses in the cliffs. The childhood of the race is still in our blood, and we turn aside, perhaps jour- ney miles, to view some giant profile against the mountainside, reluctant to believe that some intelli- gence akin to ours has not designed it. Reason says it is an accident, a freak of nature, but deeper than reason is a feeling that gives the freak its charm, and therewith is nature-worship, THE ABUNDANT LIFE 269 which we had banished to the ancients, present with us in life and vigor still. Near akin hereto is therefore the wonder of the Parthenon and the Pyramids, of the Colossus and the hanging gardens. Surely they were built by men of greater wisdom and strength than those of today—so speaks the wondering child within us; surely there was a virtue in the past higher than that of the present; surely there was a silver and a golden age before the age of iron. All this is part and parcel of the oldtime, age-long doctrine of heroes and the heroic, always seeking the founda- tions of states and of goodly usage, the standards of the arts and wisdoms and the sources of authority for faith somewhere in a nobler, statelier past. It is all the wonder of children, but the wonder calls as to the ear of the child Samuel through the dark of the temple. The great that is about us calls to the great that is within us, and bids us be worthy. a Sees abet ale gi a CE Ra iy ee zp peaks 3 = BS dic in Gi SS Et as GE 2 — 3 es Ei RES Sa i — Ta ERE So ea EE OE A LE om BE Stee, SS i Ee EE rh ES 5 BU Eng TUNIC... A dA. A; ee es H i i i yi | | | | | | , INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS ENFORCING THE RECOGNITION OF JUSTICE An address delivered before the League to Enforce Peace, Washington, D. C., on May 27, 1916. If anything can be done to abate the chances of war, it must be done in the general field of the programme sketched out for this League. So over- whelming, indeed, is the assent in the marts of opinion, as to stir a distrust that the sketch is a curtain dropped at the line where the troubles begin. In all human affairs we are justified by experience in leveling suspicion against any scheme which offers simplicity and beams upon us with an easy, smiling face. It is also true, however, in all human affairs that, to secure coGperation among great masses of humans, the first requisite is the provision of a vast and simple sweep of level standing-ground. We must presume that the relative bareness of the scheme before us represents a fair effort to bring together as a basis of organization, the maximum of that in which we can presumably agree and the minimum of that concerning which we are likely to disagree. Even as it is, our optimism may have led us too far in tempting us to use the word peace. The asso- ciations which come to us from the hopeless and , ™ ] J spin Tt — PE rr — a Ee ¥ REE emma oi } 5 fi 5 y i ji al 0 i § he § Fists cd A § 08 i 2 Pit 43 | 3 % i SRR 3, £4 3 1 3 oR rt GE Bie | ERE Bi A § . iy ¥ i | i §i 4 EE ha {1% TE Le | Blog ! { t $ & 1 4. EF i ¥ 274 THE ABUNDANT LIFE light-winged use of that word in organizations, movements, and orations warn us that what we perhaps meant to say was: League to Enforce the Recognition of Justice. It is a delusion and a snare to speak or think of peace as a normal status of human affairs, to which we must seek return. It is a delusion to think out our problem in that order—a delusion of the same cast as the oldtime argument from ‘the state of nature.” This argument from the state of nature finds no standing in anthropology nor for that matter in zoology. Man is by anthro- pology and zoology a homicidal mammal. He kills and often eats his enemy. The normal status of human affairs involves competition, contention, strife. With that he starts; from that he must seek to advance. Advance comes only by the intrusion of time and wider consideration in the place of impulse and inconsiderate violence. Then the reasonableness begotten of time may strike the bal- ance we call justice. For the recognition of justice we must have the check of time, and for time we must have, so far as we know the mood of human affairs, the check of power. What we need to find is some form of expressible innate power in human society which will induce the recognition of justice. In seeking such a form of power and the mechanism for its expression we find ourselves engaged in a strange new quest. Rising to face us at every turn stand bristling the barriers of that new nationalism which until today we had esteemed as the protecting walls of national liberty and the chief guaranty of human freedom—and, namely, as THE ABUNDANT LIFE 275 against all arbitrary assignments to alien dominion and government from without. These protecting walls are built out of unity of language, the inheri- tance of common traditions, the possession of common goods in folk-lore, poetry, festivals and dance, costume and manners, the memories of great names and deeds, a common attachment to moun- tain and river, and the romance of places, a high patriotism mingled with prejudice and a vehement chauvinism; and of late years, with accelerating zeal, these walls have been building themselves ever higher through the artificial cultivation by organ- ized effort of national songs and reverence of the flag and through artificial revival of vanishing tongues, costumes, festivals, traditions coupled with a concurrent antipathy and out-rooting zeal toward various forms of foreign usage and production. History as well as poetry have been used to stir the flame upon the altars of national pride. Lord Bryce discusses this subject in his remarkable address before the University of London on February 22, 1915, and I quote his words: ‘“Men’s souls are raised by the recollection of great deeds done by their forefathers. But the study of the past has its dangers when it makes men transfer past claims and past hatreds to the present. . . . The learned men and the literary men, often themselves intoxicated by their own enthusiasms, never put their books to a worse use than when they filled each people with a conceit of its own super-eminent gifts and merits. ”’ ~ Bn Seow mc 55.5 aE I rE aE a Seatceom re me ei Brean ae TR co ohana ea EL pe : a a Se Ass sais 7 TS rE ERE re i i a a. Sr nog — ama a a ie " ” ER SPR SEE LE Bi ws 3 ih ir aa X ER I a i a 22 Ba Ps Rr ———— G . ll Es Se Si ii eS ——— fed] a _", cp aap - SH ts —— Pr Ris fe Ls OL sno——— Ra - Re MA 276 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The development of this new nationalism is a peculiar product of the nineteenth century, having its roots in the American and French Revolutions. The completest type of new nationality is found in the Kingdom of Greece, which bases its right to be, in the inheritance of tongue and traditions and glorious memories from the great Greece of antiquity. But on every hand in Europe these nationalities-by-natural-right are forcing their col- ors through in disregard of the boundaries on the old political map. Poland insists on asserting itself against the triple division. Bohemia persists in the use of its own language for its schools and univer- sities and in the maintance of every other mark of its own individuality. So the Magyars and the Serbs and the Roumans and the Bulgars. Norway differentiates itself from Swedes and Danes, even to a shuffling off of the Danish standard of the written language. Italy sets everything at stake in behalf of the Italia irredenta. Ireland will not be obliterated. This new nationalism shapen in the high senti- ments of loyalty and patriotism has undoubtedly brought with it into the world a new nobility, a new and uplifting passion, a new object of sacrifice and service, a new type of the religion of the state. But there is reason to fear, and we may not be blind thereto, that it has also brought with it the possibility of certain grave perils, among which are two: a slackened allegiance to the cause of humanity at large, and a magnified sentiment of national pride, involving wounded honor and satisfaction by the oldtime route of the duel. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 277 In seeking the form of power which shall set a check upon war, we must utilize that very spirit of nationalism which through unguarded assertion of national claims has involved us in world peril. If, in the hysterical haste of those last sad days of July, 1914, when speed begat speed in accelerating ratio, some power could have arisen to set brakes by which speed could have automatically begotten delay, there would have been no war at the time. But the time-factor involved the occasion, not the cause of the war. The cause was the earthquake fault running from Central Europe through the Balkans and on, by the southeasterly trade route on the line of the Bagdad railway, toward the Persian Gulf. It ran in Asia parallel to the Suez route of England and across the face of the Russian advance, and in Europe, it ran through the crust of the Balkans weakened by the recent disruptions of the newly emerging nationalities. Another great fault- line runs somewhere, north and south, through the bed of the Pacific Ocean. And there are others— but it is first and foremost in reference to these two, and in terms of these two, that our immediate effort must be shapen. To undertake the automatic and unerring production of peace—all kinds of peace at all times and everywhere—is an inspiration of folly. oo GRC gy Rr rn ET Cl 278 THE ABUNDANT LIFE PHILOLOGY IN POLITICS Written December, 1901. A few weeks ago Athens in Greece was possessed of a furious mob. Out of the every-day quiet there had suddenly burst forth the fever of violence. Quivering with wrath the people gathered them- selves together. They left the market booths of the lower town and came seething up through Hermes Street; they came out from the cafés of Harmony Square and out from the halls of the University and poured their masses in through Stadion Street. Peasants, priests, shopmen, men of leisure, students of the University, they met together in Constitution Square and swarmed before the palace of the king to pelt it with their howls of indignation. Not until squadrons of cavalry and volleys of musketry had scoured the square and the streets, and seven students had added their names to the glorious list of martyrs, was the outer quiet restored. Not until the king had compelled the resignation of the Metro- politan, chief prelate of the national church, and had accepted the resignation of the ministry, was quiet restored in the heart of the people. And what was it all about? The government had authorized a revised version of the New Testament. We have known good people of our neighborhood who have entertained serious apprehensions against any substitutes for the King James version, but THE ABUNDANT LIFE 279 we have never been threatened with a mob, nor has any political party, whatever the dearth of issues, seen fit to ‘‘insert a plank’’ on the subject. The solicitude of these loyal Greeks is absolutely unin- telligible to us. The comments one hears upon their action and reads in the press treat it as a weird folly, a bland subject for superior laughter. I do not remember indeed to have read among the com- ments any explanation of the occurrence which credits it with any serious grounds. The Greeks of the day are, to be sure, children, in that the things which look to them big are little in the eyes of the great world. Their world is a little one, and is singularly isolated from the greater world by mountain and by sea. No railroad joins them yet to Europe. They are neither in Europe, Asia, or Africa. Their political issues are their own, and what these lack in range and extension they make up in intention. They are, it is true, only dust- whirls, but they are organized on the cyclone plan, and while they last and for the territory they cover, they raise the dust beyond anything on record for the mightiest storms. Southeastern Europe is peculiarly the region where philology is in politics. In Austria, Rou- mania, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania, the lan- guage question always burns. What shall be the official language of the government and of the courts, that is the great question. For this whole region this is the usual form of statement for the home-rule problem. For Greece the same is true, only more so. 280 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Greek nationality in the minds of the Greeks is chiefly valid by reason of the Greek language. It has emerged out of the deluge of the Slavs and Turks by force of the language. Connection with a glorious past gave the little nation its modern life, this was its only raison d’étre, and this connection is outwardly demonstrable neither by culture, cult, or blood, but almost alone by language. Whoever lays impious hands on this, stirs the sacred pillar upon which rests the State. The holy fire which handed down the life of old Greece to rekindle the hearth-fire of the modern State was preserved by the Church in its monasteries, and it was from them in 1821 that the movement issued forth which ended in the Liberation. The language of common usage was a mass of local dialects, mere patois innocent of literary use beyond some shepherds’ songs, and incapable of meeting the demands made by modern life upon the standard idiom of a nation. The con- servative form of the language, however, which had been preserved in the ritual and service of the Church, and which was so closely in touch with the ancient idiom of the great days, as to open up the rich vocabulary of the old Greek to the uses of the modern nation, offered a safe foundation for the construction of standard language which should be the voice of the new State. So it came about that language and Church, Church and language became inseparably identified with Greek nationality, and love for the Church and love for the language became of one substance with patriotism. To be- lieve Modern Greek and Ancient Greek essentially one, that was loyalty. To tolerate the pronunciation THE ABUNDANT LIFE 281 of Ancient Greek by the ‘‘Erasmian method,’’ and so to put asunder what God, the God of freedom and the God of battles, had joined together, that was high treason and impious sacrilege all in one. The proposed translation of the New Testament into Modern Greek involves a violence somewhat less than the rendering of Shakespeare into modern English. The average unschooled Greek under- stands his New Testament about as vaguely as a like conditioned American understands Chaucer, but he can stand that. He cannot, however, stand and will not, the confession, officially expressed, that Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are two distinct idioms. This would make him a plain, rootless modern like the Bosnian, Serbian, or Albanian. A people such as that can be engulfed in Austria, Russia, or Turkey without the hope of effective protest before the courts of the world. Eminently suspicious, too, is the proposition to translate, when it comes from Queen Olga, who the Greeks never forget, as she never herself forgets, is a Russian, and a Russian of unwavering faith in Russia’s mission ultimately to enfold in her embrace those peoples who, scattered through southeastern Europe, represent the empire of the old Byzantine or East- ern Church. The cry of the mob before the palace in Consti- tution Square is therefore more than the voice of children calling in the market place; if we see as the people of Greece see, and think as they think, it is the voice of a remnant people claiming kinship with an honored past and claiming therewith the right to endure. rem Ge bs. gi —— i a Si Eom tr EE A ET i iil AY aan rg pe——— TM N n a — -_—, Eee eS : EY FE — : aro — TI mn SALE 5S Cp rE ——— or y 5 _ § oa ’ = oe — Sr o- - = S a ini eb ; pe - I NS medi To WO BE " i Kon BETppT ir Ei. WE STII nyc my 282 THE ABUNDANT LIFE EYE TO EYE Published in ‘‘ America to Japan,’ edited by Lindsay Russell (G. P. Putnam’s Sons of New York and London, March, 1915), p. 214. Japan and the United States must get on together in neighborliness and cooperation. The fates of geography and commerce make them sharers of the great Northern Ocean. Down through the coming centuries they must live more and more in touch with each other. They must share and be patient; seek to see each through the other’s eyes, yield a little, abate each a little of the full measure of theoretic right. They must with deliberate intent plan to get on together. They cannot afford to let things drift, else there will arise continual sources of misunderstanding. They inherit fundamentally different traditions. In them meet the two poles of the historic world-order. It is not primarily a matter of racial contrast; it is a contrast of social and economic standards. Glossing over the fact with thin veneers of smiles and nice words and formal assurance is sheer folly, and folly fraught with immeasurable peril to both parties and to all the world. What we need is frankness of speech and honesty of action. Diplomacy is good as an occasional sedative, but inadequate as a food. We must face the plain facts. We must see with open eyes and confess with calm and righteous judgment THE ABUNDANT LIFE 283 the difficulties under which we each labor in reach- ing a basis of common understanding. How to understand each the other’s situation and point of view, that is the problem—a hard problem, but there is no other way, except the way of anger. And anger settles nothing. It effects nothing but joint injury. Whatever our later misunderstandings it is most fortunate that our first introduction to each other was favorable and all the early days of our inter- course most satisfactory. America will not soon forget how trustfully Japan gave her her hand to be led in at the gates of occidental civilization. Nor ‘will Japan forget the sympathy and support she received from America in her days of greatest stress. America has always entertained a feeling of real admiration for the people of the Island Kingdom and has regarded their progress with something of a godfather’s pride. Such a tradition and such a relationship constitute for either people a definite national asset, and cannot be lightly thrown by the board. We appreciate the wisdom of Japan’s consent to the practical exclusion of Japanese laborers through the device of withholding passports under what is known as the ‘‘gentleman’s agreement,’’ and we recognize the honorableness with which Japan has carried out her part of the contract. This would seem to be a fair example of one nation’s appreciating the difficulties inherent in the situation of the other, i.e., of seeing things as the other sees them. We ask for a continuation of that attitude 284 THE ABUNDANT LIFE of sympathy. The Japanese people surely under- stand that it is not on merely arbitrary grounds that we insist on the necessity of denying admission to their laborers. If for any reason the ‘‘gentleman’s agreement’’ should be abrogated, we should find it extremely difficult to agree upon a treaty which would accomplish the purpose. Japan is one of the great powers of the world, her people represent one of the highest types of the world’s civilization. They are not unnaturally jealous of their position and sensitive regarding any apparent infringement of their claim. They would not welcome American legislation discriminating against them and they certainly would not agree to a treaty which by their very acceptance of it would constitute or seem to constitute a documentary confession on their part of oddity, if not of inferiority. We know these things are facts, and these facts make up the chief difficulty of our position—a difficulty for which we have as yet found no solution, a difficulty regarding which we earnestly solicit the sympathy of the Japanese people. The main reason why none of the measures looking toward exclusion have been adopted by recent congresses is to be found in the unwillingness of our government to offer what might be interpreted as an affront to the Japanese people. We are hoping, however, that with the passage of time the Japanese people may come to recognize that our exclusion policy is by no means directed against them as a people, nor against any other people, but concerns a world-area wherein economic THE ABUNDANT LIFE 285 conditions through age-long training and compacting have come to be essentially different from those prevailing in the sparse-settled lands of the fron- tiersmen. There could be no more convincing proof of this than that British Columbia and Australia, constituent parts of an empire with which Japan is allied, agree entirely with California, Oregon and Washington as to the absolute necessity of exclusion and have adopted more drastic measures thereto, than have the United States. As regards California and other Pacific states, I beg one item of tolerance. These states are not made up of perverse, rude people, slaves of labor unions who have arbitrarily conceived a malicious pleasure in misrepresenting and opposing people from the other side the sea. They are rather to be thought of as being the Americans who have had practical experience of the problems involved in the contact of East and West and have arrived at the most sensible view regarding these problems; and it will be safe and reasonable to estimate that other Americans, as fast as they come to a full understanding of the situation, will take the same view. So much for my prayer that the Japanese may regard with sympathetic eye our difficulties; now I have to admit that in one chief point the Japanese have good reason to ask a return of the favor. I can see that in spite of all good will the Japanese government finds it increasingly difficult to explain to its people our apparent discrimination against them. It appears as if we ranked them among the 286 THE ABUNDANT LIFE secondary people. It is not our intention; but if we look at the matter from the eyes of the Japanese, I think we cannot fail to see how the national pride is affected and how we are inevitably convicted in their minds of unfairness. They are a strong, proud people, naturally conscious of their achievement, rightfully ambitious of full recognition as a civilized nation. We shall have to listen to their desire and give it full weight. It is no specific thing that they ask—but only equal treatment among the nations. In this connection there commends itself to our attention the proposal of Dr. Gulick (The American Japanese Problem), which admits from any land, Asiatic or European, a certain fixed percentage of those from the same land who are already natural- ized American citizens. This proposal has the double merit of avoiding a sudden change in the proportions of immigrants from different countries and of treating all on a common basis. I am sur- prised to see how little attention has thus far been devoted to this remarkable suggestion. More will surely be heard of it in the days to come. In close conjunction therewith will be considered the prob- lems of naturalization now forcing themselves to attention. But whatever we consider and whatever we do, we must go to our work with the plain under- standing that in one way or other we must get on together. For we are neighbors. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 287 WE MUST BE FRIENDS Message to the Japanese students of the University of California, published in the Berkeley Lyceum, June, 1909. The Japanese and the people of the Pacific Coast must needs be good friends. They are to pursue the chief purposes of their being in the Pacific Ocean together. Their destinies bring them together. They must trade together, and one must supply what the other lacks. They must know each other and commune frankly with each other, and the one must help the other where the other lacks. The instincts of the two peoples are in many regards different; their inheritance is very different. But they are able, working together, to help each other greatly because one can bring to service what the other lacks. We Americans, and especially we Californians, admire very greatly the ready adapt- ability of the Japanese man to new conditions and strange tasks. We admire very greatly his capacity for organization, such as he showed in the medical department of his army during the recent war with Russia. We admire beyond all measure his devotion to his country and his Empire and his willingness to make personal sacrifice for the greater cause. We admire the delicate taste in form and color and action which the best of his people display. There is no finer taste in color and there is no finer courtesy of act than that which appears under the name and the auspices of Japan. May the two peoples always fairly understand each other. Ce a I LR Bs Simm SERA 3 a CRT bE Sw RE er a Wi a md pm a eT ee RE a z = Be RR a + ee EET, a s os SS SS EES FA 288 THE ABUNDANT LIFE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PANAMA CANAL Published in the souvenir book issued by the National Education Association (pp. 24-26) in conmection with the meeting of the Association in Oakland, California, August 16-28, 1915. The Canal is open. It was begun with righteous promptitude, built under suppression of graft and yellow fever, and opened on time and on equal terms to all nations. Had there not been a considerable exercise of the promptitude, particularly in securing right of way, the Canal would not have been begun; had it not been for army engineering and army sanitation, no man knows when the work would have been completed; and, had it not been for the repeal of the tolls-exemption act, we should have had vari- ous and ever-recurring reason to wish we had never tried to build a canal at all. The Canal and its building are a distinguished credit to our government, and it even looks as if its administration would shortly become such. In fact, it may well be that the building and operation of the Canal will give the world the best concrete assurance on the largest scale yet offered, that democracy is able to avail itself of the best expert service, and set upon itself the restraint necessary to such use. If so, we shall have to reckon this by-product among - THE ABUNDANT LIFE 289 the chief benefits of the Canal. The whole work bears a good name for its ‘‘politics’’—or relative lack thereof; and its beginning, its carrying out, and its ending bear witness severally to the firmness and wisdom of three successive administrations, to each of which, as far as the Canal is concerned, the American people, in spite of its wont, can afford to be ungrudgingly thankful. It is evident that the Canal will have—must have—with the process of the years, an overwhelm- ing influence in readjusting the conditions of human life upon the globe. There are four connections in which the Canal opening will be immediately felt: 1. The eastern and western coasts of the United States will be drawn closer together. They have been wide apart. Their interests are different. They do not understand each other. Closer rela- tions will, however, show how admirably they supplement each other. The West yields the raw materials of industry and foodstuffs. The East is industrial. Interchange with the development of interdependence will make their very differences a source of union. 2. The west coast of North America will be made accessible to the world. All through the ages of man on the globe the Pacific has been a waste and neglected area. In our geographies the world maps always begin and end within it; the Pacific is as good as never in the middle of the map. It is so with the days; they end somewhere in the Pacific, and then begin all over again with new number and dress before they land in Asia. 290 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Everyone who has looked out onto the Pacific from the beaches and bluffs of California must have felt it a lonesome ocean. And California with its vast plains and scant population often seems a lone- some land. Though evidently created for the special use of humans, it has had to wait long for humans to come and find it. It lies far off under the sunset, a blessed island pent up between twelve hundred miles of mountains and desert on the one side and five thousand miles of barren sea on the other. The narrow Pacific Coast strip of North America which California’s position represents has been hitherto about the most isolated part of the usable world. Chile was much more accessible to ships from Europe. Ships which continued their voyage to San Francisco had not only to cover seventy degrees of latitude, but must traverse westward the equivalent of the width of the United States; for Valparaiso is in the longitude of New York, not that of San Francisco. Immigrants from Europe, who formerly had to add a long and uncomfortable transcontinental journey to their sea journey, will now be set down directly upon the pier at San Francisco, and at a cost, including food, not more than eight dollars greater than the fare to New York. The density of population in California is fifteen; that of the entire strip of western countries from Alaska to Chile is seven. Across the way China has 275, Japan 350. If we allow one-half of California’s area for mountains and give the remainder a density equal to that of Rhode Island the population of the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 291 State would be forty millions. There is evidently some colossal leveling-up to be done. Twenty-five years of free influx from Europe will abate the Oriental peril, at least for the present. 3. The states and peoples of South America are to be drawn decisively nearer to us. Not only are the people of the west coast to be brought into inti- mate relations with the Atlantic States of North America, but northern and eastern South America will open an entirely new connection with the Pacific States. More than ever is it clear that there is a Pan-American entity. All the Pan-American states have a common interest as regards European entanglements. All must unite on a common basis in administering it and defending it. We have no longer occasion to assert for the purpose any exclu- sive or unique position. 4. Japan and our Pacific Coast are drawn more closely together into a common area of trade and intercourse. Each will have to know what is going on with the other. Japan’s great-circle route to Panama on her shortest way into the Atlantic passes the Golden Gate only a hundred miles out. Japan is no longer an occasional neighbor. We must make up our minds to settle down and live in the same world, even if not in the same country, with the Japanese. Our misunderstandings must be frankly met and boldly and fully stated—not glossed over with formal smiles. We and our sons and our sons’ sons will have to know them and deal with them. We must get their point of view and understand their case. It is the only way. We cannot ignore A IESE i os 292 THE ABUNDANT LIFE them; they are in our world, and very much in it. We have no hope in violence. Wars settle nothing— not even who is strongest. The cutting of the Canal is the avenging of Columbus. When he started across the seas he was seeking, not America, but the Old Orient of India and China, and their gold and spices. The heart of man had always yearned unto the East and its riches. There was nothing new in the object of Columbus’ search. All that was new was the direc- tion. Columbus went west. Judged in terms of its original purpose his voyage was a total failure. He started straight for Asia, but ran upon the long, broad dyke of land we now call the Americas. It has cost more than four centuries for him and those who swarmed after him to traverse and conquer the hindering dyke which rose in his path and forbade him Asia. The opening of the Canal is the first cutting of the dyke, the avenging of Columbus, the end of the four-century halt, the resumption of the advance toward the Orient. CHARTER DAY, MARCH 23, 1922 PRESIDENT EMERITUS WHEELER, SIR AUCKLAND GEDDES, BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES, AND PRESIDENT DAVID P. BARROWS THE ABUNDANT LIFE 293 WORLD-CITIES An address before the Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco on August 28, 1916. The fates of the great world-cities are written in terms of geography. Nineveh stood inevitably where the long trade route from China-Turkestan to Tyre and Sidon on the sea crossed the north- south route from Bagdad (Babylon) to Trebizond. Constantinople stood inevitably where the narrows between Asia and Europe, between the East and the West, crossed the water route from the Black Sea and the Russian grain fields through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean. With or without the counsels of man, the city which surrounds San Francisco Bay is inevitably destined to become the Constantinople of the future. The Old World, made up of its two halves, Occi- dent and Orient, met in the Eastern Mediterranean, and looked in upon this inland sea as upon the court or patio of a Roman house. In the Orient man was a creature of fate and bowed himself in humble desire to be in accord with time and nature which environed him; in the Occident mind and will sought dominion over nature, and the impulse of individual freedom set mind above matter and discovery above conformity. Back and forth across the boundary created by the Bosporus, the Dardanelles, and the {i AE (i | { Y : od iL St 5 1. gh EE EE a = cae Sa EEE i i - RE RR - wn phases . Toe oa a : ee i a. a EE i TPR LB Bit 294 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Aegean, the tide of struggle surged between Occi- dent and Orient. The incursions of the northmen Greeks into Asia Minor, typified for instance by the Trojan war and the Greek colonization, were answered by the insweeping hordes of Persian Xerxes, checked at Salamis. Then the counter onslaught of Alexander’s conquering legions was centuries later answered by the sweeping tide of Mohammedanism, which slowly spent itself and left European Turkey a stranded hulk upon the beach lands of Southeastern Europe. Through it all Con- stantinople remained a jagged rock in the midst of the contending tides. Down through the crusades and into the political life of modern Europe the fate of nations and the issues of peace and war were quoted in terms of Constantinople and the ancient frontier it marked. And even today Europe is ablaze with war on the score of the disordered Balkans and the Bagdad route from Europe toward the Persian Gulf. From the dim past down to the unhappy present the issue of nations and of peoples has been framed in some reference more or less distinet of that ceaseless yearning of the West toward the gold and the spices and the mystery of the East. First, it used the old caravan routes where the dull camels plodded their way by Kashgar and Mosul, then it was the way by Alexandria and the Red Sea, then the route around the Cape of Good Hope, then back again to the Suez Canal. All of these were from the West toward the East. But it was a bold sharp break with the past, and one THE ABUNDANT LIFE 295 destined to undo the order of the world, when Colum- bus set forth to seek the Orient from the Hast toward the West. It was not America that he wanted—and he died without knowing there was one. He wanted India, but the dyke which rose in his path was the unwelcome North and South America, which for four centuries held back from their goal him and his successors. Most of these years were used by wanderers from Europe in settling the eastern border of the new land. They thought of the land as offering them refuge from the storm-swept and bondaged soil of Europe and its slavery to Mediterranean politics, and through most of the years they kept their faces set toward the old world. Slowly they occupied the hinterland, but they backed in—their faces were still set toward Europe. Not until they crossed the Missouri and set the prairie schooners on the way to the western coast did any of them even surmise that their country had an outlook and a mission shapen even in part in terms of the great ocean of the west. Now there are many who see and know that so certain as it is that the first four centuries of the North American occupation have been shapen in terms of its place on the Atlantic facing Europe, just so certain is it that its coming life and duty is to be shapen in terms of its place on the Pacific facing Asia. The old world consisted in substance of the Orient and the Occident facing each other over the great rent at Constantinople from the Black Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean. But the venture of em A is ET La re Ca BBB iain Hs EER Ea GE ya TIAL get i RE tis ol err at wl Ta a ve gig A LA, 296 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Columbus in its final effect has turned this old world inside out. The old world looked inward upon an inland sea, where Europe faced Asia Minor, and the frontier citadel was Constantinople. The new world looks outward toward the great ocean, where America faces Asia, and the frontier citadel is San Francisco. Those who sit here in the seats of judgment and authority have laid upon them heavy responsibility. Men of various bloods and various heritages swarm here together. We shall therefore have to learn here how to see things as the other fellow sees them, and be charitable. Variety of occupation, of stand- ards, and of interests will meet here in conflict, and human nature will abound. More than anywhere else in all this new-and-old world of geographic destiny are we summoned here in San Francisco to the exercise of human patience. CITIZENSHIP Snax. | | i EE 3 a Tl rnd RA Sha Lg yar ge Phe RIGHTEOUS CITIZENSHIP Delivered before the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, March 21, 1904. The call to the exercise of citizenship was never so clear as today and here. There never was a nation or society whose fate was made to depend so directly on the quality of citizenship as this state and society of ours. There never was a time in the history of this nation when the need of intelligent and patriotic service was so keenly felt. The sudden enlargement of the field of national purpose has introduced new problems which concern the foundations of government. The sudden piling of wealth has introduced a contrast of conditions and a shifting of social relations involving the entire fabric of society. The sudden broadening and intensifying of intercommunication have revealed possibilities in the organization of wealth and of work that make the old-fashioned freeman to fold his cloak in awe about him. The sudden widening of vision and enrichment of knowledge, coupled with new homes, new works, new ways have twisted old faiths from their foundations and disturbed the sanctions of the holiest laws. New endeavors on new seas! The compass quits the star! Old con- fidences. fail! Perhaps there is no North or South; oi SS Si OR AEE T AAIL a Ts Raia 5 ors Eek ALE SREB ASS Sa ha 300 THE ABUNDANT LIFE perhaps there is, men dare to think, no right or wrong, but only the savage law of violence, whereby he who can is right. Society and state wherever they have existed in the history of humankind have arisen and been maintained through some form, however crude, of the conception that life has pur- poses larger than can be expressed in the momentary wants and satisfactions of the individual. The consciousness that an individual life is part of some greater whole is the impulse to that attitude we call religion, out of which and not without which arise society and the state. Society, as history has known it, never has existed and never can exist on the purely economic, i.e., the selfish, bread-and-butter, basis; it must claim sacrifice, it must appeal in some form or measure to that religious instinct we call by various names, but recognize most surely in patriotism, public spirit, and good citizenship. Righteous citizenship is the knowing of right and wrong in the things of public life, is the recognition of right and wrong in the relations of individual life to the life of the commonwealth. I am to speak here today of the call to righteous citizenship that rings through the office and the counting-room and lays its commands of duty upon those who sit in the places of trust and responsibility for the manage- ment of institutions and of business affairs. They are the men who most often shrink from contact with politics lest they become entangled to the hurt of their private interests; and yet they are the men most often of whose counsel and aid the state has need. They are all too often the men who shut THE ABUNDANT LIFE 301 their ears to the call for public service because of engrossment in private aims; but the public interests cannot afford to lose them, and they cannot afford to abstain. Public office is a public trust, but there is no private office which does not involve its public duties and responsibilities. It is the man of the business office who is most likely to shun political duties lest his garments be besmirched, for politics is forsooth a ‘‘dirty pool.” Can these men not be aroused to see that nothing which is involved in the sacred duties of American citizenship can be called common or unclean? It is most often the man of the business office who is heard to say, ‘‘I am sticking to business and letting politics alone. I will not imperil my business interests by incurring enmities incident to taking a decided position on public questions. I will not waste my time and divide my thought by attention to such matters. There is nothing in it for me.’’ This is the common voice of that blighting private-mind- edness which is the dry rot of society and of political communities. It means selfishness and narrowness and stagnation. It means the commitment of political affairs to the hands of ignorance and corruption. The call to citizenship is by no means a call to candidacy for public office. The best citizens are commonly those who have no eye upon office or its emoluments. It is a call to appreciation of the noble inheritance left us by our fathers, and to recognition of responsibilities incurred through the inheritance. It is a call to the man who sits in the office to recognize that even that wealth he calls his own a AE pt Sut i at A 302 THE ABUNDANT LIFE exists by virtue of society and the state and is in reality a trust committed to his care. Still clearer and more emphatic is it to the man who controls wealth to which society has given that form of possession we call the corporation. It is not good citizenship, it is not righteous citizenship when the man of the corporation counting-room exclaims: ‘I will do with mine own as I will, and the public be damned !’’ The corporation is created by the public and must be administered in harmony with the public good. It is not righteous citizenship when the masters of a corporation chartered to do a public work yield to public need and convenience only what is extorted by clamor and struggle. Their duty by virtue of their opportunities of knowledge is to anticipate needs and foresee conveniences; it is a duty inhering in their tenure of a public trust. And it is not only good citizenship, it is better business so to do. Good citizenship and large-minded, far-seeing business- likeness go hand in hand. It is the mean business spirit and the bad citizenship that wraps its talent of public trust in a napkin and hides it in the earth. It is not righteous citizenship when the man of the office, the corporation master, extorts from those who labor for him all the strength his position will allow without remembering that he and they are co-laborers, and that he by his position holds a trust for them. It is not righteous citizenship when the man of the office says to his employees who ask a hearing that ‘‘there is nothing to arbitrate.’”’ There is always something to arbitrate among us who are set here to live together in society as brothers and THE ABUNDANT LIFE 303 children of a common Father. We are set here to talk together and try to understand each other. The soul of life is the living together. He lives the largest life who has the largest sympathies, who has gained the largest power to see from the point of view of others. The call to citizenship as it comes to the ears of the man of the office is a call to publicmindedness, to a larger, freer, nobler conception of his duty toward the community and the commonwealth. The solution of the grievous questions which agitate the social body today and threaten the divisions of society by fixed lines of occupation and status into organized belligerent camps cannot come by violence and the assertion of might; it cannot come in terms of dollars, nor by tables of statistics, nor by much reading of many books in the sciences of money and values; it must come through human patience guided by human interest and human sympathy toward the understanding of each other’s point of view. This means that it cannot come out of any form of that view of life which estimates life in terms of self and in terms of the day. It can come, so far as. I can see, only in the spirit of that larger view we call religion, the religion plain, simple, old-fashioned, by which our fathers and mothers lived and died, the religion which guaranteed the family and home under which we have been sheltered and which inspired the founders of our state—the religion of Jesus Christ which bids us to live not for ourselves alone, but to remember we are bought with a price; the religion which proclaims him to be first among us who gives himself freest in service of all. SE EE a a Ca CR BS SS tO aii RE SS a mE rr ALTA i 304 THE ABUNDANT LIFE OUR TOWN-HOUSE Address delwered at the laying of the cormerstome of the Berkeley Town Hall, June 27, 1908. Fellow Townsfolk: The building we propose to erect here represents far more than the Capitol at Washington the essential foundations of free government. It is through their local governments that the American people must be trained to the knowledge of democracy and the exer- cise of self-government. Here are the concrete and immediate issues that they can see and understand. Through them alone can they interpret safely and sanely the larger and more distant questions of state and nation. A reasonable approach to the study of geography is better made for one of our children through observation of the Berkeley hills and San Francisco Bay than by either reciting the list of bays on the Maine coast or outlining the great mountain chains of the globe. It is a dangerous proceeding to begin the political education of an individual or a people with vague theorizing about constitutional prerogatives and states’ rights and tariff and imperialism without the solid concrete basis of observation and practice in things near home. We tolerate in ourselves an amazing degree of prejudice and traditionalism and sentimentalism regarding national politics largely THE ABUNDANT LIFE 305 because our grasp of the issues involved is so much a matter of vague theory and so little determined by actual knowledge of present facts and real condi- tions, that we are not made ashamed of our shallow vagueness. It is not unlike the case of people who quarrel over the fine-drawn metaphysics of the Trinity and the various doctrines of the atonement without the slightest practical understanding of their duties toward their grocer’s bill and their neighbor’s chickens or umbrella. It is perfectly easy to fight about a theory you cannot explain or demonstrate or even understand, and perfectly easy to become a rock-ribbed partisan for vague and distant causes you cannot state, still less defend. The less connection your tenets have with vital experience and present facts, the more do they entrench themselves in stubborn prejudice. The chief reason why we as a people have thus far made such a mess of municipal government may be found in our inclination to derive such govern- ment from the aerial blue instead of building it up out of the ground. The business of managing a modern city is a plain practical matter of electric lights and water and sewers and sidewalks. It demands good business sense and strict attention; it is a big business enterprise. There is too much at stake in terms of people’s money and people’s comfort to admit of much indul- gence in the popular sport of politics, at least if the business is to be properly done. The trouble thus far has been, however, that we had developed no theory of businesslike government but only a theory i A Hh: i 3 i r 306 THE ABUNDANT LIFE of rights and government in general. The doctrines of the Declaration of Independence and the discus- sions of the Federalists are a blessed heritage; but they are but very remotely applicable to the work- aday problems of municipal government. Here we have got to retire a little from the clarion call, the bonfire, the waving of the flag, and the shrieking of the eagle, and get down to strict business. In the long run, if our local institutions are not maintained in purity, our superstructure will fall over our heads. It was in the beginning true that the New England Town Meeting was the real foun- dation of free government; our democratic system was made possible because of it. The congested system with its elaborate mechanism has long since made the outward form of the Town Meeting impossible. None the less must we maintain a form of local government that adjusts itself to present needs. A people cannot have the consciousness of being self-governed unless they attend themselves to the things over against their own doors. The real imperialism, the real oppression, the real political slavery, is the intrusion of power from without into a local condition. If we are to have self-government in the large, we must first have it in the small. Government must be distributed among localities according to local interests. The conditions that reign at a distance, the desires of men who live at a distance, must not determine the life of any com- munity. If we are to keep our local institutions pure, a second condition must be that every individual citizen does his part; voting and other political THE ABUNDANT LIFE 307 actions must be conceived as a duty, not merely as a privilege. If we leave the management of our affairs to men who want to get office or emolument for themselves or their friends, or to mem who have set themselves apart to the special work of running politics, then have we accepted an ologarchy —we are no longer a democracy. When no one is willing to do anything for the city except those who expect to get out of the city something that they perhaps do not deserve, then is the city in genuine trouble and well on the way to destruction. It is very much like the case of college athletics. As long as the sports inure to the advantage of the great body of students they are good and conditions are healthy. When they pass into the hands, however, of the few professionals who exercise themselves and the thousands of bleacher-bedded rooters, who exercise nothing beyond the vocal chords, then the condition is unnatural and unhealthy. It is not true that there are certain persons of certain education who are peculiarly adapted to par- ticipation in politics and the management thereof. Unless all the citizens participate the situation is false. It is not even true that a legal education is essential. I would much rather vote for a man for public office who is not a lawyer. If we apply the parallel to the field of religion, this insisting on lawyers is very much like holding that none but professors of theology can be saved because only they can understand the doctrines of the atonement. A great portion of the work done in a city gov- ernment must unquestionably be done by experts. Bh Sh 5 ST is gi Ce a es Ro maa is Foi. Ee bE CF a —~ apa C—O, a ha _- -e a RRL 7 i a SH ———— — a I IN A tins tor Bmpr Steal 308 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The city has to have its clerks, its tax collectors, and its engineers. A city will secure the best engineer it can get just as we may presume a business concern would do. It is in the interest of all of us that he be a good engineer. His is an activity that has isolated itself entirely from what we ordinarily call politics. This is the only form of professionalism that we need in connection with the city government. The Capitol at Washington cannot stand unless our town-houses have good cornerstones—firm-set and true. And this shall be our town-house; that we will respect the rights of others; that we will all be citizens and stay amateurs; that we will live together in mutual helpfulness; that we will try to make Berkeley the best town there is. This is what I mean by a safe and genuine form of liberty—equality, brotherhood. A CHARACTERISTIC GLIMPSE AS PRESIDENT WHEELER WAS OFTEN SEEN ON THE CAMPUS ci i is oc RRS ai OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES MASSACHUSETTS At the Panama Pacific Exposition tn San Francisco the Massachusetts Building was a reproduction of the State House in Boston. President Wheeler delivered the follow- ing address on the occasion of its dedication (March 15, 1915). At this exposition it is Massachusetts, the mother state of the six, which speaks for all New England. The commonwealth sends its message in form of the State House which crowns the triple hill of Shawmut. It is the building seen afar from over the waters of Boston harbor, the highway by which came the life of the community transplanted from the old Lincolnshire Boston of the Old England. Out from among the undespoiled graves of the fore- fathers on the slopes of Tremont, it rises symbolic of consistent law and order grounded in respect for the past. Out over the free acres unabridged of the Boston Common, it looks calmly down in firm respect for the people’s right in the common wealth,—a boon for the present rescued from the village community of the old Germanic world,—a promise and a lesson for the newer communities of the farther west in the days to come. It is no wonder that here at this great assemblage of the states, Massachusetts of the farthest east sets a CS ci ET Rs pl CRS aan x 4 ee ERP Sa SEL pM ey A a a ED Lo TE Com oe 312 THE ABUNDANT LIFE its hearthstone of all the states the farthest west. From the depth of its foundations and the reach of its ideals it runs the gamut of them all. The golden dome of the Massachusetts State House brings greetings to the farthest outpost of the Golden Gate. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 313 CALIFORNIA AND FRANCE Address at the dinner to M. Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador, in San Francisco, June 5, 1909. There is no land in Europe where the Californian feels quite so much at home as on the soil of sunny France. There is no people in Europe to whom the Californian owes quite the same spiritual affinity as that which binds him to the people of France. The Californian speaks the tongue and obeys the insti- tutions of the Anglo-Saxons, but his moods and his temper and his loves are not theirs. He shares with them much of his blood, but a bolder sun has warmed it, a wider venture has stirred it, and a quicker heart has pushed it to its work. Then Californians are a people by themselves. Others have dug in the hills for gold and tilled the fields for gain, but these Californians have done it with a way and a passion of their own. Like the Frenchman they have shaped their life to the world they live in, and they both have found it, as worlds go, a world exceeding good to live in. Neither of them has looked out upon it through the grim visage of the Puritan, and to neither has it been a vale of tears. The rich and abundant joy of life, the courtesies of intercourse, the grace of hospitality and help, and the love of beauty have for both of them turned the dank and somber vestibule into the very inner sunlit court of the eternities. And so it is that through their ) H & i i 8 i | 4 I Ar Ora Sa ST Ea a ge oe Er nc a 314 THE ABUNDANT LIFE undenied humanity these two peoples are in sym- pathy and accord. There is nothing that is human in all the ranges of the world that shall not find its human kinship. We might well have expected, tuned as we are to one note, that the sentiment of France would have sought us out and found us, both in the distress and in the courage of our supreme trial. And now there comes to us the plain assurance thereof by message and by .token. France understood us. We are of one kind. We understand each other. What France has seen and understood is that which we should best like understood. It is that which only our spiritual kindred could understand. We like it too that the message and the token come to us by the hand of one who by his writings and his statesman- ship has proved himself a highest representative of his own people and a sympathetic friend of our people, and who in his temperament and ideals is all Frenchman, and, as we now see at a glance, all Californian. As the statue stands by the Eastern gate of our land testifying to a common instinct for liberty, so shall this token you have brought, sir, abide here by the Western gate to bear the memory of a com- mon instinct of duty under the common lot of men. And it shall be Mizpah between us all the days of the world, both when we are present and when we are absent. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 315 THE PIONEER MOTHER The statue of the Pioneer Mother erected at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco was unveiled on June 29, 1915. President Wheeler’s address on that occasion was as follows: We stand in a great place. The mountains look down on the sea. Tide and the highway meet. The new West faces the ancient East. We are assembled on a great day. High festival proclaims how a youngest nation, joining its coasts into one, opens here the chief portal of its fate. It is a place and a time where such symbols as we rear speak with their deepest meaning. - The skill of the artist has fashioned in beauty for us here the figures of mother and children. What they shall, however, mean to each one of us will depend upon the eyes wherewith we each shall see. But this much will be open to every eye: where the mother is, there is the present home; in the faith of the mother’s forward look, there is the hope of the days to come. It is the work of the men to take risks and to pursue the irregular and the extraordinary; it is the task of women to establish normal standards and to appoint the recurring order of things. Men drive at the shifting goals of the day; woman’s life yearns toward permanence and order, morals and the home. a 316 THE ABUNDANT LIFE The men of the pioneers were riskful and virile far beyond the ordinary lot of humans. Seldom had men in all the experience of the world been called upon so suddenly to create for themselves a new mode of living. The vehement and the temporary were written on all their doings and arrangements. Danger and hardship beset them in all their paths. But for the presence of woman it would have been after all only a foray or raid. Men would have taken what they wanted, scarred the hillside, and made off. Beauty and order, home and fireside, school and church had not been there at all. This woman who draws her children about her creates the sacred shelter of the home and lays thereby the deep and sure foundations of human society. This ‘woman who peers out widely over the rough paths and perils toward a vision of blessed valleys brings with her the promise of sweetness and light and faith in better days and nobler things. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 317 THE FOUNDERS Dr. Wheeler delivered this address on April 16, 1910, at the dedication of Founders Rock on the campus of the Umwversity. It was at this rock that the trustees of the College of California, the predecessor of the University of California, assembled on April 16, 1860, “to dedicate this site to the holy cause of learning,’”’ for here it was deter- mained that the College should some day be erected. The men who in April, 1860, assembled at this rock were idealists. They shaped their deeds in accordance with vision. They shook themselves free from bondage to the present and beheld the image of a coming day. They laid off the garment of a real environment and robed themselves in the slender fabric of a dream. They left the trodden ways of life as it was, and plunged into the open fields of imagination as to what shall be. The past is immanent in the present, and it is the historian’s task to discern it. The future too is immanent in the present, and it is the spiritually cleansed eye of the seer that alone can trace its outlines. ‘‘By faith Moses when he was come to years refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.’’ Those men who on the April day of 1860 left behind them the secure and ordered life of the Oakland streets and struck out five miles into the wilderness of oaks and oats to the north were the leaders of a new people and a new cause which through a wilderness were to find a promised land. 318 THE ABUNDANT LIFE BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER HALL On March 23,1916, was laid the cornerstone of Benjamin Ide Wheeler Hall, a building devoted to imstruction in the humanities. In this one instance the precedent that Umwversity buildings should not be named after the living was disregarded. President Wheeler’s words on this occa- sion were as follows: The typical activity of a university is teaching— but teaching inspired by fresh thinking. The buildings of a university are of two sorts: on the one hand, library and laboratory, on the other, the halls of instruction. The laboratories for the sciences and the library for the humanities yield the oxygen of the university life. | Back to back with the library and its seminaries representing discovery stands this new building representing teaching. Research and teaching—we must have them both and have them blended. Teaching without the quickening force of discovery will soon grow stale. Research, without telling its story to the quickening of others, and without em- bedding its lessons into the uses of human society, will grow selfish and die by the hand of its own zeal. Here in this stately hall, for centuries to come, each generation will transmit to its successors the lessons of the past; here, by the contagion of sympathy, each generation will inspire its sons and daughters to nobler living; here by the mystery of THE ABUNDANT LIFE 319 inspiration, vision shall awaken vision and person- ality shall give its spiritual life-blood to the handing on of life, like as fire by the handing on of the racer’s torch. Go now to thy place, old stone. Take up thy long burden of the years. i oh fr Ta Een EG Eke. THE ABUNDANT LIFE A MESSAGE HEARD ACROSS THE CONTINENT At the Convocation of the University of the State of New York held in Albany, October 20, 1916, President Wheeler delivered the following address, speaking by tele- phone from Berkeley: President Finley and Friends of the University of the State of New York: I am glad to be present again at an old-time Convocation. It calls up charmed memories of happy years spent under the aegis of the Empire State and of blessed associations with men who held the gift of personality. One of these was Hiram Corson. In the first doctoral examination in which I participated at Cornell I shared with him the duty of examiner. The major subject was Anglo-Saxon. I examined in linguistics, and along with others plied the poor, pale candidate with arid philological questions. With a struggle Professor Corson held his peace, until, at the conference following the examination, he passed judgment on the candidate with a side-stab at my philology. “This candidate,’’ he said, ‘‘will never make a really good Anglo-Saxon scholar; he hasn’t the voice for it.”’ Corson was once asked which was the right pronunciation herth (hearth) or harth. ‘‘They are both right,’’ he replied, ‘‘but harth is warmer.”’ THE ABUNDANT LIFE 321 He knew as I then did not, that the human voice is the directest expression of personality. We un- consciously assume to interpret character, to like and dislike, to trust and distrust according to the tones of the voice. We form a pleasant judgment based on the expression of the face and then over- turn it when we suddenly hear a rasping, whining voice, issuing from the midst thereof. The voice is certainly by nature the best native representative of total personality. The place of voice in education is therefore well determined by a fact we never can escape, no matter how we frame curricula or multiply machinery, namely, that direct personal influence is the very heart and life of education. Every teacher should be trained in the acquisition of a pleasant, musical, and adaptable voice. The English we want taught in the schools is the English of the tongue rather than of the pen. We are coming indeed to speak our manuscripts rather than write them. Literature should be read aloud to yield its best; so only can verse, or for that matter good prose, assert its rhythm and power of words. The ancient Greeks always read aloud even when ‘‘reading to themselves. ”’ The use of stenographers and typewriters and of telephones is bringing us surely back to the old rule of the living voice. Evidences multiply on every hand of a return to the standards of oral language after generations of submergence under the formal- isms of writing and printing. The scrawls which issue from our schools of the day indicate that we 322 THE ABUNDANT LIFE are forgetting how to write as we have already forgotten how to spell. Writing and spelling seem to be on their way back to the scribes. The size of the ancient city, Aristotle says, was limited to the reach of the herald’s voice. This latter-day development of the telephone has given the human voice like reach with the nation, and restored it to its ancient potency as the chief instru- ment in building the social community among men. My blessing on the University of the State of New York. Good night. CHARACTERIZATIONS THEODORE ROOSEVELT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, CHARTER DAY, 1911 ON THE STAGE OF THE GREEK THEATRE ARE MRS. PHOEBE A. HEARST, REGENT A. W. FOSTER, THEODORE ROOSEVELT, PRESIDENT WHEELER, AND AT THE EXTREME RIGHT PRESIDENT DAVID STARR JORDAN OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY es Rr rR Se ERE WILLIAM McKINLEY On May 15, 1901, the University of California conferred the degree of Doctor of Laws upon President McKinley; the words employed by President Wheeler in bestowing are quoted below. These words were so api ““that they struck the fastidious taste of John Hay, then Secretary of State, who wrote and asked for a copy of them from President Wheeler. On the receipt of this copy he sent the following letter to President McKinley, a letter which now seems filled with a strange and unconscious prescience : ‘Dear Mr. President: President Wheeler sent me the inclosed at my request. You will have the words in more permanent shape. They seem to me remarkably well chosen, and stately and dignified enough to serve—long hence, please God—as your epitaph. Yours faithfully, John Hay.’ >’ (Frederic Hartzell, The Nation’s Memorial to William McKinley, 1913, p. 74). The prophecy was fulfilled, for these very words of President Wheeler are inscribed on the pedestal of the statue of William McKinley which stands in front of his mausoleum at Canton, Ohio, and constitute his epitaph. William MecKinley, President of the United States, a statesman singularly gifted to unite the discordant forces of government and mould the diverse purposes of men toward progressive and salutary action; a magistrate whose poise of judg- ment was tested and vindicated in a succession of national emergencies; good citizen, brave soldier, wise executive, helper and leader of men, exemplar to his people of the virtues that build and conserve the state, society, and the home. Gin Som ives ora A EET STE oT TO Ar SE SE omg a bi es SA rn a a — PRL SESE Ss lL a ST rr etree a = sv I ih a —._- 326 THE ABUNDANT LIFE THEODORE ROOSEVELT ~~ Dr. Wheeler and President Roosevelt were intimate friends from the time when the former was a member of the Cornell faculty; the inttmacy lasted through life, and the correspondence between them bears evidence of it. This account was written November 30, 1901, just a short time after Theodore Roosevelt had succeeded President McKinley, and was published in the Umiversity of Cali- fornia Magazine, vol. VII (December, 1901), pages 367- 369. Theodore Roosevelt is decidedly a personality. It is a personality that no robes or insignia of any office can bemask. In the White House he is the same man precisely that hundreds and thousands have known as governor, colonel, assistant-secretary, commissioner, or citizen. If anyone is counting upon President Roosevelt to be a very different man from Theodore Roosevelt, he is leaning on a broken reed. The man is incapable of masquerading. His indi- viduality is too strong for him even to assume a role. If anyone has ever thought him guilty of what is vulgarly termed posing, it was someone who had seen him only in one function or office, and did not recognize that what seemed the part played was in all reality merely the life lived. He is no actor, for he plays all parts alike. If the people have not become acquainted with him yet, they soon will, for there is nothing compli- cated to learn—one plain, manly character, open as THE ABUNDANT LIFE 327 the light, strong as the north wind, buoyant as the sunrise. After the people have once learned him, they will have nothing to unlearn. They will soon find that in public matters he has no secrets. What he tells his intimate friends he will tell the public. What he says to the reporters will be found to corre- spond accurately to what he says in private—with an accuracy indeed that will occasionally startle the one who had thought himself favored with some particular confidence. He is a great believer in light and fresh air, and the oxygen of publicity is his favorite remedy and prophylactic against political abuses. There may be some shocks of surprise in store for us under this caption, and cases may arise where shrewd and prudent folk will shake their heads, but when the people come to learn how frankly they are dealt with, and appreciate that what they are told is the ‘‘whole story,’’ confidence will surely preémpt the seat of distrust. There are undoubtedly some surprises in store for those fathers of the state who in urging appoint- ments are wont blandly to omit the item of fitness. These surprises may, indeed doubtless will, lead to some embarrassing difficulties with the party organization in the law-making bodies, but the ulti- mate result will be that these fathers of the state will revise their standards of nomination. The President will make every appointment a matter of personal study and assume it as a matter of per- sonal responsibility. He shuns no labor, and is incapable in his magnificent patriotism of setting any interest before the public welfare. 328 THE ABUNDANT LIFE Some have thought him rash, because he has the habit of quick decision and rapid action. His mental pace however is naturally rapid, and his quick decisions are more likely to be sound than such decisions often are, because he has always accustomed himself to the straight, frank view of everything and generally has his materials for judg- ment, both of principle and fact, ready at hand in clear-cut form. Neither haziness nor sluggishness are to be accounted as conditions of wisdom. He is every inch of him, in every fiber an Ameri- can. His mind cannot frame a lie nor his heart conceive fear. He is a gentleman in the high sense which democracy has given to that otherwise much abused word. His claim to the title is earned by work, not idleness, by service for the public, not private ease or gain, by sympathy toward men just as they come, and not by social exclusiveness in any guise or form. He believes in work and action and puts less trust than some in natural drift, and more than most in the guidance of human affairs through the intervention of the energized and enlightened human will. This marks him to represent the full vigor of the occidental spirit. He is an occidental of the occidentals, an American of the Americans. His energy, his courage, his intellectual interests, his high ideals of public service, his hatred of shams, sloth, and all untruth commend him preéminently to the ultra occidentals of the ultra-West. After Theodore Roosevelt’s death, President Wheeler spoke of him at a University Meeting on January 24, 1919; a portion of this address is as follows: THE ABUNDANT LIFE 329 An event has occurred which measurably changes for each one of us the world in which he lives. This is the death of Theodore Roosevelt. Of all Ameri- cans he had come nearest to expressing and embody- ing the patriotic ideals of his fellow-countrymen. Upon his words and acts hung the trustful attention of every-day Americans for most days in greatest mass. Of all men he was most like most Americans. Therefore they knew him and believed he knew them. Of all their leaders he was the one who was nearest to them—in his thought, in his will, in the burning zeal and fervors of his love for home and country, for liberty and truth. And now he whom they loved, and whom in their love they now and again chastened, has gone out from among them and left them confused and dismayed. Who can easily believe that one so inherently vital, so replete in all his fiber and being with the very essence of life, has really laid himself down into the eternal quietude of death? And this must be from now on a world without Theodore Roosevelt in it—a weirdly changed and empty world for many who knew him best and loved him most, and a world of doubt and appre- hension to thousands for whom he had long been prophet and interpreter of public duty. We needed him. He had the vision to see; he had the courage to do. 330 THE ABUNDANT LIFE JAMES BRYCE In conferring upon James Bryce the degree of LL.D. in 1909, Dr. Wheeler thus described the eminent author of The American Commonwealth, who was at the time Ambas- sador of Great Britain to the United States. Diplomat, statesman, scholar: —counsellor and servant of his own government and peoples, inter- preter of ours both to the world and to ourselves; an historian of candid judgment and sympathetic vision, envoy of good will and of the common under- standing between two kindred peoples; under all the variant usage of the English tongue a gentleman, and in spiritual allegiance and by moral right a citizen of the Greatest Britain. JOHN MUIR The degree of Doctor of Laws was bestowed on John Muir, the well-known naturalist, in 1913 with these words. Born in Scotland, reared in the University of Wisconsin, by final choice a Californian, widely traveled observer of the world we dwell in, man of science and of letters, friend and protector of nature, uniquely gifted to interpret unto other men her mind and ways. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 331 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS President Wheeler in his opening address to the student body on August 18, 1902, described Charles Kendall Adams wn the following words: On the 26th of July passed to his rest from within the shelter of this State one of the most devoted friends of education this country has ever known, Charles Kendall Adams, successively pro- fessor at the University of Michigan, president of Cornell University, and president of the University of Wisconsin. He had established the home of his declining years at Redlands, in this State, and had become a Californian; he had with great delight accepted a proposal to deliver before this University in the coming autumn a course of historical lectures, and had already in his stong heart’s interest enrolled himself as one of our academic household. Therefore I may speak of him here; and, because he was to me a fatherly friend, and to many another like me, I must speak of him. He merits for one thing above all others our respect; he labored for the institution and the cause he represented, not for himself. He had no private ambition to rise in rivalry with the interests of his university. He was ready to be forgotten, or to sit down under reproach, if only the great cause throve. It was given him to lead two institutions, Cornell and Wis- consin, out from the condition of commonplace, local colleges into the ranks of the ten leading national A tt Co REEL SS Es i ti ui NR EA RE - > rr = ea Xm i po er gn a 332 THE ABUNDANT LIFE universities. Each of these under his administra- tion acquired significant library collections and library buildings which rank among the three best university libraries in the country. For each he assembled a teaching-force of first-rate quality. He never considered so base a fear as that his faculty might contain men stronger than himself. He did not excel in personal attractiveness, and was not called magnetic. He bore no marks of brilliant genius. He was a plain American reared on a Ver- mont farm, and the strong lines of his rugged face told of struggle, and somewhat of suffering; for once and again in his life the knife of detraction and bitterness had cut to his heart’s center—but wise and well-poised he carried no bitterness in his soul. He suffered in silence and out of his suffering rose glorified in sterling manhood, like gold tried in the fire. Now he goes down to his grave covered with honor, blessed in the memory of a generation of students, and two great American universities rise to be his unperishing monuments. Farewell! Faithful man, Great-heart, wise friend of education, farewell ! DAVID STARR JORDAN Dr. Jordan, President of Leland Stanford Junior Uni- versity, became an alumnus of the Umiversity of California in 1915, on recewwing the degree of LL.D. Man of generous mould, in whom sympathy with men burst the bourn of natural science and reared a humanist. Teacher, founder, and preacher. A good neighbor. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 333 SAMUEL H. WILLEY The College of Califormia was in existence from 1860 till 1868, its seat being in Oakland; at the end of that time it was amalgamated with the project for a State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts under the Morrill Act, and the result of the umion was the Umiversity of California. Dr. Willey was Vice-President and, tn the lack of a President, chief executive officer of the College of California at the time of its opening vn 1860; he cooperated heartily in the absorption of the College into the Unmwersity of California. In 1849 he was chaplain of the Constitu- tional Convention, which marked the beginning of the State of California. The degree of LL.D. was bestowed on him in 1910 with these words: Samuel H. Willey, founder, prophet, seer, be- holder. It has been given you to see the hilltop of vision transmuted into the mountain of fulfill ment and a dim-focused future dissolve upon the screen into a firm, clear present. The prayer you offered when the foundations of this commonwealth were laid has found its largest answer through the institution you established. Your life is a bond between our beginning and our present, between your dream and its embodiment, between your prayer and its answer. eon AE re RD 2 er - A pe Ese bia Bay © wi eG _ er re 334 THE ABUNDANT LIFE CLINTON DAY Mr. Day was a graduate of the College of California, the predecessor of the University of California. He was an architect of mote, the Memorial Church at Stanford Umiversity being one of his most important works. It was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906 but has been rebuilt. Dr. Wheeler thus characterized him tn making him a Doctor of Laws in 1910: Inheritor of the best blood and best traditions of Yale; graduate of the last class of the College of California. He came forward as the first California- bred builder to bring fresh and orderly influences to bear upon the commercial architecture of San Francisco. This was the first and strongest stimu- lus toward beautifying the city and shaping the taste of its people. The rich beauty, too, of the Stanford church was his conception. Earthquake and fire tore most of his creations from the immedi- ate vision of the eyes, but in a bettered taste and cleaner seeing among all the people they survive glorified and unperturbed. The advancement of good taste, the spreading of good cheer, and the perpetuation of a good name contribute to a worthy career. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 335 PHOEBE APPERSON HEARST Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst was the Umiversity’s greatest benefactor. From her have come many gifts both large and small, but all alike showing the realization of a need and confidence in the University. Among these may be chosen for mention the Hearst Architectural Plans, the Mining Building, scholarships for women, funds to seek out and purchase archaeological materials for the Univer- sity’s collections, and Hearst Hall, the building for the women students; the last named was destroyed by fire, but William Randolph Hearst is now (1926) erecting a stately structure to replace it, as a memorial to his mother. But in addition to any list of her bemefactions, however long, there would still remain the aid she gave individually to young men and women, of which she saw to it that the world should know nothing. And her generosity was very far from being confined to the University of Califorma. She became a Regent of the University August 10, 1897, and continued to serve for the rest of her life. On her death, April 13, 1919, President Wheeler issued the fol- lowing statement: In the death of Mrs. Hearst, the University, the whole people of the land, and every single one of us has lost a good, great friend. Her heart moved quick to sympathy with all human kind. With those who rejoiced she was glad, and toward those who carried the heavy burdens of want and pain and loss she opened the stores of her love and reached out her help. Much as she did to help others in 336 THE ABUNDANT LIFE various ways and widely separated places, she car- ried each case on her heart by itself. She forbade it to become the product of rote or machine. It came always warm and of her life, with enriched human and personal values. She believed in the best things. She fostered all best undertakings. She loved beauty and sought to give it a creative and ennobling place in the lives of all her fellow-humans, rich and poor alike. She believed in education which should train, quicken, fi and adorn the exercise of human life, and there are | Ka hundreds of young men and women who by her help {OW have found the way to an education. iL li She was herself gifted not only with exquisite bi taste, but with a singularly clear and powerful mind. Using her high gifts to the full, under the permis- sion of a fortunate providence she has lived a life which has been really great. Better though than that, for years and genera- tions to come, there will arise those—and they will be many—who will call her blessed. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 337 GEORGE HEARST In memory of George Hearst, who derived his wealth from the mines of the West, and who at the time of his death in 1891 was serving as the representative of Califor- nia in the United States Senate, his widow, Phoebe Apper- son Hearst, erected on the campus the beautiful Hearst Memorial Mining Building. At the entrance to this edifice a bronze tablet bearing the following words has been placed: This building stands as a memorial to George Hearst, a plain, honest man and good miner. The stature and mould of his life bespoke the pioneers who gave their strength to riskful search in the hard places of the earth. He had warm heart toward his fellow-men and his hand was ready to kindly deed. Taking his wealth from the hills, he filched from no man’s store and lessened no man’s opportunity. 338 THE ABUNDANT LIFE JANE K. SATHER Mrs. Sather has been another of the Uniwersity’s great benefactors; the Sather Gate, the Campanile, the professor- ship of history and that of classical literature, and the book funds for the classics and for law have been her major gifts. The following address was delivered by President Wheeler at a meeting held at the University on December 17, 1911, shortly after her death: The name of Sather is for all coming time to be identified most intimately with the fate and fame of California. At its chief public institution two structures, the gate and the tower, two professor- ships, that of history and that of classical literature, and two book funds, one for law and one for classics, will in perpetuity bear that name. It has been an unusual fortune for a state university that when the growth of its demands exceeded the possibilities of state support, private generosity has sprung to the rescue. Buildings which have been given to the University already bear the names of Hearst, Bacon, Harmon, Lick, Doe, and Boalt. Endowed professor- ships bear the names of Mills, Flood, Tompkins, Mackay, and indeed the entire instruction in the department of commerce is supported from the Flood endowment. That another body of wide- spread and long-lasting benefactions is now to be set upon its path of help and health down through the recurring generations of the young, is due to the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 339 keen wisdom and tenacious purpose of Jane Krom Sather. It is in recognition of her life and deeds that we are here and now assembled. Both in her habit of thought and in her style of expression, she was singularly objective and acute. She despised the lie. First of all, she did not tell lies to herself; secondly, she disliked in others all perfumed and evasive speech; and, thirdly, she was wont herself to say just what she meant. It is cer- tain we should not hold her respect if she knew of our using false and fulsome words concerning her today. She was herself strong with an amazing power of will, and toward feebleness and weak will and soft fiber in others she displayed but slight store of sentimental sympathy. Her mental powers were clear and her thinking accurate; vague and hazy ideas could not commend themselves to her; soft sentiment and far-ranging theory could not move her, but rather repelled her. And yet she was far-seeing and highly capable of taking into the account large issues and far-reaching results. The future of this University she could foresee, and, intensely practicalminded as she was, could estimate the advantage of associating her deeds and the memory of her life with the indestructible vitality of such an institution. Sentiment she undoubtedly possessed, and the idea of making her wealth apply to the betterment of men and society through all the coming days did undoubtedly appeal to her imagination, but she would never allow herself to fall under the sway of sentiment, or be influenced by the temporary popular opinion of her neighbors. 340 THE ABUNDANT LIFE It would however, I can well believe, have been keenly distasteful to her that her neighbors should have attributed her deeds to a tender mood of char- ity. In choosing the departments of study which should profit by her beneficence she was influenced rather by consideration of the need and of what branches, as being cultural and idealistic, might in the practical tendencies of the day be more easily overlooked, than by any studious interests she might personally have entertained. Cool judgment and practical sense dominated all her choices. But above all was her action characterized by an unfaltering tenacity of purpose. What she planned she carried through. Other plans of captivating possibility might be presented to her, and other objects of beneficence, but she held to her single purpose. Perfect clarity of mind and singleness of purpose brought peace, and the certain knowledge of high achievement and useful service shed through all her latter days a calm and gentle light. The work is done, her plan has been fulfilled, her life has counted. Unnumbered generations will be her debtors. PROFESSOR HENRY MORSE STEPHENS ‘‘THERE IS BUT ONE MORSE STEPHENS’ THE ABUNDANT LIFE 341 CHARLES F. DOE Another of the great donors to the University was Charles F. Doe of San Francisco. That he was interested in the institution and its needs was not known till after his death, when it was found that in his will he had made provision for the erection of a Library Building on the campus. President Wheeler has thus characterized him in an inscription placed on a bronze tablet at the entrance to the Library: He was a quiet man of simple tastes and orderly life. Diligent in business, he dealt honorably with all men. Charity for divergent views and a gentle tolerance toward the beliefs of others tempered the native sternness of his convictions. Shrinking from the social turmoil, he found through books abundant converse with the best who have thought and recorded; and now that he has yielded the steward- ship of his goods, his last desire opens the compan- ionships he loved to the use of all the recurring generations of the young. EUGENE W. HILGARD Dr. Hilgard was a noted authority in the chemistry of soils and for many years was the distinguished head of the College of Agriculture: the University gave him the degree of LL.D. in 1914. Pioneer in the use of ordered knowledge to bring food for the peoples from the breast of the earth. AP i tir ro eS 342 THE ABUNDANT LIFE GEORGE H. HOWISON Professor Howison held the Mills Chair of Philosophy at the University for twenty-five years, and many of the country’s most distinguished philosophers have been his students; in philosophy he was an idealist. He, too, re- ceived the LL.D. in 1914. : A masterful teacher gifted to establish the ideal as the veritable real, and make it a saving power in the lives of men. BERNARD MOSES Bernard Moses was the venerable head of the Depart- ment of Political Science, with which for many years History was united. His writings have lain particularly wn the field of Spanish-American history; he was a member of the first Philippine Commission, of which Judge (later President) Taft was the head. In 1918 he became a Doctor of Laws of the Unwersity of California. A publicist of high intellectual clarity ; unfriendly toward shams. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 343 HENRY MORSE STEPHENS Professor Stephens was Professor of Modern European History at the University from 1902-1919; to the students he was devoted, and ‘‘ Henry Morse’’ was their idol. At the present time Henry Morse Stephens Hall, the center of student life on the campus, perpetuates his memory. In the American Magazine of July, 1913, President Wheeler thus describes his colleague of Cornell days, whom he himself summoned to join him at Califorma: This is a very real personality. There is but one Morse Stephens. If there is any doubt on this score one may just ask any student who was at Ithaca between 1894 and 1902 or at Berkeley between 1902 and the present date. Besides this there are hosts of people all over the country who have heard him lecture and know the charm thereof. Three times at least he has given courses before Lowell Insti- tute in Boston, once or more at the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, Amherst, Richmond College, Va., etc. Many who have not heard him lecture have heard him talk with or with- out a dinner table, and that may be counted, if possible, better still. He says he loves more than anything else to talk; he means, of course, when intelligent people listen. And intelligent people, when at hand, always do listen. They themselves talk only just enough to keep him under headway. His lectures he claims are nothing but talking, and ce ERE ER RE Bl noi 344 THE ABUNDANT LIFE he says it is really a shame to be paid for doing what is his chief joy in life. No one, however, collects and arranges his material for a lecture more carefully than Professor Stephens. Every lecture course is accompanied by a thorough-going syllabus with ample bibliography, and he knows and his audience knows at any moment beyond a peradven- ture just where he is in the unfolding of his subject. His field is modern European history, with a chief interest centered in the French Revolution, concerning which he has written the most modern, or (shall I say?) most scientific account. He insists by the way that he is of the modern school of his- torians, who are chiefly concerned about the facts, and abhor the ‘story,’ and the plot, and the moral. They spurn the notion that history should try to be literature. One has an idea that this sort of history would lack charm. Now Professor Stephens is probably most assiduous about his facts—I am sure he is, but strangely enough, he and his lectur- ings and his writings continue to be most interesting. It must be that truth is stronger than fiction. It may be however after all that more depends upon the man than upon the prospectus of his school. Certain it is that this is a man cast in an unusual mould. He is big and generous, fond beyond all measure of society and of friends, loyal in friend- ship, unsordid and unselfish to a fault, giving freely, nay prodigally, of himself, his time, his strength, and his marvellous store of learning to all those who are about him. His memory of names, faces, characters, and occurrences is for accuracy most THE ABUNDANT LIFE 345 unusual ; it would sometimes be a bit uncanny, were it not that his gift serves so largely the purpose of cheering his fellow beings along the pathway. People like to be recognized, particularly by name, and Morse Stephens’ recognition (say, of an old student) is a very hearty affair and includes the name and generally the Jehn or Bill or Stub that goes with it. There are few men in this country who have more acquaintances, most of them out- right friends, than Professor Stephens. He has them scattered all over the land wherever Cornell and California boys have gone, and wherever his own peripatetics have taken him, whether to Boston or Sonora. To be adopted by Morse Stephens as a friend means something very definite; like being initiated into a fraternity. It means that he surely will let you know when he comes to town—not merely promise to—and that he will come right home and stay with you, if you have an extra bed. But that is nothing compared with what he is ready to do, when you come his way. When you are absent from him, you are the person and thing which char- acterizes the face and fate of the city or institution where you reside. When such city or institution is mentioned, he commends you. One friend, as far as Stephens is concerned, would save Sodom. At the club, in his rooms or in the ‘‘Grove’’ he moves and lunches in the midst of a plurality of the friends initiate. Some day there will be a society organized and called the friends of Stephens (Phi Sigma). One reason why they love him is that he can be counted on to be found where they left him; another is that he is a pretty good lover himself. SE, 346 THE ABUNDANT LIFE DAVID PRESCOTT BARROWS Dr. Barrows after serving as Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculties, filled the presidency from 1919-1923 as President Wheeler’s successor. He has always been deeply interested in public affairs and served during the World War as Lieutenant-Colonel in Siberia. Dr. Wheeler said in conferring the degree of LL.D. upon him wn 1919: i Alert to contend for the truth; noble, outright, and frank as the day; joining the gifts of citizen, teacher, and soldier; abounding in life. I~ THE ABUNDANT LIFE 347 JOHN M. ESHLEMAN John M. Eshleman was a graduate of the University of the class of 1902. After a brilliant undergraduate career, he served successwely as member of the State Legislature, District Attorney of Imperial County, President of the State Railroad Commission, and Lieutenant-Governor of the State. He died in 1916 at the age of 39 years, as he was about to become Governor, ill health having pursued him for years before his entry into the University. The following words are an excerpt from Dr. Wheeler's Com- mencement Address of May 17, 1916: I have spoken in generalities, but for each I have had an individual case in mind. For the whole of my doctrine, however, I have carried before my mind throughout the life and character of John Eshleman. Abstraction and theory may not reach you; but you know what I mean when I say: ‘‘Look at John Eshleman. Well, he took the larger view. He lived the life generous.’’ He was one of your kind. He grew up among your hills and valleys. He suffered with toils and the handicaps of poverty and ill health as much as any of you. He might easily have found excuse for sparing himself the severer disciplines of study or for humoring his strength in the fulfillment of public duty. That was not his way. He laid the broadest foundations for the structure of his intellectual life; in public office he gave unsparingly of his best. a SO NCR ns a ee OE AREA OR IR rn — a ee CE os = i eA PB APE ee 5 eh Bi EB EI EE SS A Ei teu AERA bist Simoni rr i - co» ® a, — PP ein ; ho = aon 348 THE ABUNDANT LIFE He might have been expected in shaping his public career to choose the easier way and slip along in the minor currents and eddies of policy and opinion. Never for a moment! No—he pushed out always into the Gulf Stream where it was broad and deep. The question he asked himself regarding any plan or measure was ‘‘What is the fundamen- tally right and fair?’’ When he found that out, he proceeded in all simplicity to put it into effect. He was incapable of doing anything else and people found him out. They came to expect nothing else. What looked like the harder way proved the easier. I wonder why more have not tried his way. He made himself the type and standard of what the Railroad Commissioners, under the new conditions, ought to be. In every office he held, he satisfied the public desire. There was nothing in the gift of these California people which they would not some day have rejoiced to give him. “What shall we ever do without him?’’ was the cry from the stricken heart of his nearest colleague in the government. ‘What shall we ever do without him?’’ was the echo from the heart of the people. What wonder? The masses of the people have Jost a prophet, seer, and friend. The kindly eyes which, peering out far, saw on their behalf, were closed. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”’ OUTSIDE ACADEMIC HALLS i A — Ses rp LIFE Address delwered August 12, 1915, before the National Association of Life Underwriters at its annual convention held in San Francisco. I appreciate very highly the opportunity which has now opened to me by grace of the kindness of Mr. Hathaway, who insisted on putting me on this program. I did not appreciate, when I said yes, how great the opportunity would be, for I have been sitting all my life listening perforce to life insurance men, and have never had a chance to talk back. After those talks which came to me, snowing down from heaven like manna which fell on the path of the Israelites of old, the opportunity has always seemed to me nothing short of miraculous. My door opens and a man enters. He seats himself, and begins to talk about a subject concerning which I know nothing and have no interest. He has called because he is a fellow-citizen of mine. He wants to see the University, and then he wants to talk a little with me, and he trusts there is plenty of time this afternoon for him to have a talk with me. In case I tell him that I have only about three minutes, he says, ‘“Well, it will do just as well, and I will call another day, and you may name the day, and the hour, and I don’t want to talk very long with you. 352 THE ABUNDANT LIFE I think if you can give me about half an hour to an hour, I can make the matter that I have on hand perfectly clear to you.”’ And then I have had the talk with him. That is, he has had the talk with me. He has presented figures, and I have looked at him in a dazed way while he recounted the list of figures, and made everything come out just as he said he would at the beginning. I have an opportunity here, gentlemen, and I propose to grasp the fullness of it. It is the first time I have ever had a chance to speak in the pres- ence of any representative of Life Insurance. A remarkable body of men! I have sat there at my desk, with a dazed look on my face, hour after hour, as these talks went on, and I like to stand here and see the dazed look on your faces, wondering what I am talking about, where I am coming out, what a high-brow is any way, and what he is for: how in the world he should venture to speak on any subject before a body of men so thoroughly and distinctly committed to a specific cause as are agents of Life Insurance com- panies, and how he should propose a topic of such general scope as the word ‘‘Life’’ represents, and what in the world he means thereby. I have come here to elicit the dazed look on your faces, and I have got it already. The dazed look which I have carried on my face hour after hour, as I have sat in my chair behind my desk, and looked at that man who kept bringing out of the recesses of his clothing book after book and table after table. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 353 How 1 sat there unable to say to him, ‘The inter- view is at an end,’’ because he was so kindly in his manner and so engaging in his expression, never telling me where he intended to come out, or what the interview was for, but going on and on, holding the bait always before my mouth, the bait of this dazed trout, who only sees a strange worm dangling somewhere before him, and is expected all of a sudden to jump at it. I sat there as the dazed trout while he spoke. How many of us there are who represent that. How many there are, gentlemen—you don’t know it—who listen to you while you reel off your figures. Do vou know that you make your figures prove anything in the world that you start out to make them prove, and we are perfectly helpless? We cannot stop you. We don’t know when to intervene. We go from Agent A, who has called to us and elicited the dazed look for one-half hour, and turn to Agent B. We think we have a perfectly clear case, and that Company A is undoubtedly able to furnish us the insurance which we want at a slightly lower figure than any other company, and we go to Agent B and he makes it perfectly clear to us within ten minutes that there are certain considerations that we have not taken into account at all in the conversation with Agent A, and then we look more dazed than ever, for we are unable to meet him on his own ground. The scriptural text and passage that really belongs to you, I suppose, is the parable of the unjust judge, who dealt with the widow who came 354 THE ABUNDANT LIFE to him over and over again, soliciting that he give her a hearing and a judgment, and finally for mere weariness, lest she might keep on overwhelming him with her importunities, the judge gives her judg- ment, and he is an unjust judge, but the woman by her importunities has finally got a judgment, and it is intended that we sit there with a dazed look, and finally decide, and we take insurance for fear the agent will keep on coming to us. | We are inclined furthermore, we of the dazed look, to wonder how in the world the life insurance companies can provide for us so much engaging conversation, and at what price they furnish it. These are the days of efficiency, of economy, of thrift in economic enterprises, and we are wonder- ing—we of us who sit there and listen to the agents who talk to us—we are wondering where the money comes from that remunerates this person for talking so consistently and so excellently before us. It is evident he must have been trained for the job. He is an educated man. He knows about his business, and he is able at any time to talk half an hour about things we do not understand, and which he does not make us understand one whit better than we under- stood them when he came in. I am simply telling you the plain truth. I thought you came possibly with the desire to learn something, and so I thought I would tell you about it just as it is. It certainly costs something to have this man talk to me. It certainly is not the way by which I want to get at the subject of Life Insurance. It probably is the way bygivhich Life Insurance has THE ABUNDANT LIFE 355 been brought to the attention of people who other- wise would pay no attention to it. It is a four de force probably by which you establish yourselves in the community and get yourselves a surplus and gradually start to educate the community on the subject of Life Insurance. That is all right, only I wish you would have it in the schools and educate the school children. The people who are in the habit of dealing with children are better pedagogues than you are. The real trouble with you Life Insurance agents is that you have not studied pedagogy. You have not learned how to regard the other man’s ignorance. You do not know how ignorant we are. That is it. You nod your head; you look dazed ; but that is the fact. What you need is pedagogy, education, as they call it when they get tired of the word ‘‘pedagogy.’’ ~ There are too many men who do not appreciate these educators. When American people want to say anything against a man, particularly when they want to say anything against the President of the United States, they call him a schoolmaster. Ever heard that? They call him a schoolmaster. Oh, God, give us more schoolmasters! More men who see the other fellow’s difficulty, who can understand the other fellow’s needs. It is a great, big, mixed-up world we live in, gentlemen. It is a mixed-up world, and we are running off into specialties to such an extent that we do not know the other fellow’s needs. We do not see his difficulties. We cannot think in his thoughts. We cannot speak according to his needs. We need amongst you, I am confident, more I ———— RS A RT eS 356 THE ABUNDANT LIFE THE ABUNDANT LIFE 357 | i of the attitude of the schoolteacher. Some of those women who take care of little children in the early grades, below the fifth grade, are wonders. Go and study them. Go and see how they talk to children. One great trouble in the American family today is that the parent is so busy he does not get an opportunity to get into the real interior of the minds of his children, he does not understand what they want and what they are talking about, and what their yearning is. The parent of the dazed look, I call him. You represent a great social undertaking. To begin with, you seem to be interested in an under- taking that gets you premiums and makes you a rich living. You seem to be engaged in a task of reeling out figures. You seem to me, when I hear you talk, to be the most wonderful arithmeticians that the globe has produced. And yet before you get through we are inclined to think that perhaps after all Life Insurance does not belong to the exact sciences, and is not thoroughly based on mathe- matics, but may be after all a branch of humanistic studies, particularly rhetoric. I wonder, after all, whether these books of figures that stuff out your right-hand interior pocket so, may not be all a bluff, and after all that you are preachers, you are evangelists, and that your great trick in trade is the ability to convince people, to see people’s wants, and convince them that you have the very thing that will apply to their need. That is the way we take your prescriptions finally. You remember the fellow who was looking | doubtfully into the window of a drug-store, and finally ventured to go in, and he looked about and turned about, and one of the drug clerks came up to him and said finally, ‘‘Do you want something here?’’ And he said, ‘‘I am wondering whether this is the place where I bought a porous plaster for my back a couple of weeks ago.’”’ And the druggist clerk seemed to convince him that he thought that was the place, and that he was the man who sold it to him, and asked him if he wanted to buy another, and he said, ‘No, it is not that I want. I wanted to see if you had not got something to get the other one off with.” The plaster is a policy. And after we have listened to the importunate widow until we have procured a plaster, it is often the case that we did not understand about it, after all, in spite of the rhetoric, in spite of the admirable presentation, in spite of the apparent adaptation of means to our flickering ends. And yet, gentlemen, I understand— I think I do—that you represent a great human, sociological undertaking, and that your figures and your policies and your plasters are only temporary things as compared with the meaning your work has for society. You are engaged in a great solidifying social undertaking. It has to do with that mysterious thing we call life, and the word rings through the world spoken by the greatest of prophets, ‘‘I came that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.’’ It is the same life the prophet talks of that you deal in. You deal in it sometimes 5 EL be en RI ME 358 THE ABUNDANT LIFE as a commodity, and it is a cheap, short, coarse thing which you utilize for your short coarse human aims. But it is deeper and more profound than that, for this life of man on the globe is made up of social quantities, and everything that is worth knowing about, studying about, thinking about, has to do with this mysterious thing we have here on the globe, called life. Life is not a matter of physiological tissues, nor of pulse-beats. Life is not a thing that goes out when the blood pump stops operating, or comes in with the cry of an infant’s voice. Life is not a thing that is pent up within the fleshy walls of the body of a man. Life is a social factor. We animals are social beings. We have come out of the herd and the pack, and we live not as single beings with blood pumping in them, but we live as social quantities. Life is a thing that is made up of associations and institutions and attachments and affections and sacrifices. The real thing that makes life is that attachment to others which leads us to make perma- nent associations, leads us to found existence upon sacrifice and achievement. Now that is life, and the Master came that we might have it more abundantly, that we might enter more fully into these relationships and live into them and be thoroughgoing social beings. A man is not a man when he merely lives and his heart throbs. He is a man and lives the life when he enters into the community of his fellow-beings and utilizes that community for all there is in it; has a real social existence; has a family and children; and is true THE ABUNDANT LIFE 359 to the family cause; is a good citizen; knows that it is his duty to register and to vote; knows that he dare not vote for his selfish interests, but must vote for the interests of the community of which he is a member; ready to sacrifice; expects to sacrifice; belongs to organizations; belongs to the lodge, if you like, or the church, if you like; and pays for the support of those things. We cannot have community life such as this that we live in without cost, without trouble, without effort. We cannot have it without those things we call human institutions. And the man who lives the life is he who takes his part in the institutions of mankind and society, belongs to things, carries burdens, assumes positions that do not immediately offer return, because he is willing to make sacrifice for the establishment and the perpetuation of society. A man begins to be a man when he begins to establish himself into the permanent relation with society which is indicated by that thrift of his which starts by accumulations of property. You have anarchy without it. Life, in this social scheme which we are in, proceeds by the possession of goods. That gives a man a conservative outlook toward these institu- tions of society. And your business is to promote thrift, is to make people solidify themselves into the institutions of social life. Yours is a method of provision for the family, giving the family solid and continuous existence. Yours is a method of promoting thrift; inducing people to make regular 360 THE ABUNDANT LIFE payments toward the business of establishing them- selves in permanent relation to the organizations and institutions of society. The bachelor is irregular in his life; throwing a bit of money here, too much money there, and living in a freedom which he thinks he is fond of, because it seems to give him freedom from the burden of responsibilities of that man who is tied up in the family. But we must be tied-up citizens. We should be tied up with relations to all these institutions of society. We ought to do our part toward sustaining the school. The proficiency of our social scheme is very largely determined by the institutions of educa- tion. The good citizen in favor of good schools, defends them and promotes them. We have churches, because no matter whether you like this or that statement of theology, no matter whether you would prefer to have a bishop or Billy Sunday set forth the truths of religion, you must recognize that religion represents a depth in the picture, a background in society. These phenomena that slip by, visions of the day, graspings of the moment, they are not life. Life has to have some- thing deeper than that, against which to show itself, in front of which to recognize itself, and that background and that depth of the picture is religion. We must have religion in life. We are compelled to believe in something. We find it necessary to stand firm on some of the common fundamentals of human life and outlook. And you belong, with your work, in there. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 361 Go on with your columns of figures and your books that pad out the pocket, and your talk that makes me dazed in my looks to you! Go on with it! That is all superficial. It is all the beginning of it. What you are looking forward to is helping society erect its steadfast pillars. I recognize your work. I believe that it is to receive in the years to come extension in method and mind which you can hardly dream of today. You are engaged in a work that has a future before it, depth in its purpose, height in its aspirations. It is for you, gentlemen, it is for you to see it plainly, to live up to a great opportunity in the unfolding of a great work. 362 THE ABUNDANT LIFE THE BANKER AS A PUBLIC SERVANT Address delivered October 4, 1910, before the convention of the American Bankers’ Association in Los Angeles. I am neither a banker nor the son of a banker. I have been all my life a teacher, and my tangencies with the banking business have been accordingly inconsiderable and transitory. My acquaintance with bankers also has been regrettably limited, though it has been my regular practice for many years to loan them a sum of money at the beginning of each month on short time. My training in the banking business has been limited to a vigorous schooling in that department of arithmetic known as partial payments, and to certain instruction in bookkeeping. Neither of these branches of a liberal education has, however, proved of much practical value to me. The system of partial payments has appeared to involve no ultimate advantage, but only a certain postponement of the evil day with added bitterness; and I have never kept books, except my cheque-book,—and that only to learn, with the accumulating and painful experience of the years, that the banks, on the whole, keep books more reliably than I do. Being charged therefore with the honorable duty of giving counsel to the assembled bankers of the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 363 nation, I must from the outset deny myself all right to speak from your common point of view with the voice from within, but must rather take the position of the onlooker from the outside and assume the voice of one crying in the wilderness. How do bankers and banking look to the outsider, and what have he and public opinion to say about them? Perhaps the bankers do not care to know. They deal with complicated interests and recondite prob- lems which plain people of the general public cannot be expected to understand. They have acquired by long experience insight and skill which make them judges unto themselves, with the possible right to resent and reject the interference of alien opinion. By a sort of semi-inheritance they may have estab- lished themselves into a guild or profession or priesthood with its own standards and rules, which they may feel the uninitiated are bound to accept and regard as the solemn mysteries of an order. They may even have come to consider themselves in the possession of certain recipes for health, welfare, and salvation, which the public may use on payment of a fee, but whose ingredients the public must never enquire into, and whose health-giving virtues the public must never question. Or, to make it concrete, Wall Street knows what is good for the country; and if only those miserable interlopers, the social- istic sociologists who write articles for Muck and Slum, the college professors who write books about finance, without having any finance of their own, and those godless profaners of the temple, the windy insurgents from Wisconsin and Kansas, the 364 THE ABUNDANT LIFE long-haired advocates of parcels post, postal savings, rate-regulation, bank guaranty, trust-control and conservation—if only these men might be muzzled, and everything referred to the care and keeping of a safe and sane Wall Street, then all would be well with the state, and all the people would be more or less saved, and a certain few still more, so. These are all well recognized ear-marks of the guild-sense. They are as old as the medicine man, the augur, the soothsayer, and the dervish. The chief stock-in-trade or capital of these rudimentary ‘‘professions’’ was full and complete ownership of the orthodoxy patents. The old Roman college of augurs interpreted the flight of birds according to rules of its own, and its complete possession of the oracles of orthodoxy consisted in this, that no one outside the college ever ventured to raise a question of why or wherefore. When a man held the seat of supreme authority so securely that no one quite knew why, or would even think of asking why, he called himself king by divine right. The business of being augur or king was largely dependent for success upon the other fellow’s not raising the question. This is a principle of wide validity in human affairs; especially is it fundamental in determining the institutions of the early world. The myth- maker was the one who asserted so surely and well, that no one thought of asking him how he knew; and the leader was the one who commanded so confidently that no one thought of asking for his credentials. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 365 The schools of the prophets, the associations of dervishes, of rhapsodes, of healers, and of diviners I have called rudimentary professions. They were bound together by the supposed possession of mys- terious knowledge and powers and by the exclusion of the rest of the public from the right of visitation, inspection, and criticism. The so-called professions have in some form con- tinued this down into the broadening daylight of modern life, but in a steadily losing fight against the two great influences which create the spirit of that modern life; namely, (1) the spread and establish- ment of objective scientific tests, i.e., real knowl- edge, and (2) the democratization of intelligence in human society. We can still remember when the guild of the physicians was believed to be in possession of cer- tain mysteries of therapeutics, and when the doctor was not expected to give account to others, and for that matter could not to himself either, of what disease really was or what his medicines actually did to it. The old order survives in the quack and the fakir and the patent medicine man, but a new science of medicine based on pathology and physio- logical chemistry has banished the mystery, brought in the objective test, and made the individual physician open and responsible to the question why. The wide diffusion of scientific knowledge through- out the community makes it also possible for the average man to understand in substance the answer of the physician to the question why. Now and then even among the best physicians we find the old 366 THE ABUNDANT LIFE guild-sense surviving, when another physician is called in consultation who feels it in courtesy to the profession necessary to shield his colleague and cover up some partial error of diagnosis by some statement like, ‘‘ We find the condition of the patient as stated but would suggest some changes in the treatment.’’ Enough of this all too customary and baneful usage survives in the practice of the pro- fession so that at least we may appreciate what is meant by the ‘‘guild-sense.’’ The profession of teaching has been only in late years escaping from the limbo of this guild-sense. The tradition that certain subjects were preémi- nently or exclusively suited to the nurture of the mind and that certain traditional methods were the divinely appointed way of affecting it, have grad- ually yielded to what we may call a new physiology and pathology of education. Direct scientific tests as to what we wish to accomplish and why a certain course will do it, have slowly pushed their way for- ward to dispel the haze of traditional mystery. And the new education has made its way largely through pressure from outside. It was often a pain and a shock to the staid respectability of the old guild- sense to hear the old education vehemently criticized by insurgents and outsiders, by men who knew no pedagogy and perhaps had little education them- selves but only knew what they thought they wanted their own children to learn in the schools; and much of it was forthwith branded as demagoguery. But the rapid democratization of intelligence has made it possible for enlightened public opinion to establish THE ABUNDANT LIFE 367 a victory over the guild entrenched behind its mys- teries. Public opinion knew better what it wanted the guild to accomplish and what it ought to accom- plish, than the guild knew itself. It is a much mooted question whether a good citizen may venture to criticize the courts. The courts constitute our ultimate assurance for the right of possession, and their decisions offer the only attainable basis for order in society. The law which issues from their interpretation and application of legislation and from their unfolding of the principles inhering in the historical structure of social life con- stitutes the body of rules according to which the game of life in human society must be played. If there are no rules, there is no game. The bottom goes out from under society. It must therefore be evident that any toleration of disrespect for the law or for the agency which brings it to statement must lead directly toward anarchy. When it comes however to individual decisions of a court, it can hardly be expected, and is not in fact by the judges themselves expected, that the intelligence of the community shall be estopped from forming an opinion concerning them. The decision of a court can no longer be regarded as a voice issu- ing from out behind the clouds of Sinai. It would be a peril to society to seek to give it such a value. A decision is supported by argument and is subject to definite objective tests. It is not an arbitrary statement issuing from mysterious sources. It is not, or ought not to be, a merely technical product fabricated from exclusive recipes in possession of Tavares to 368 THE ABUNDANT LIFE a guild, but will conform to good and righteous usage and good and common sense. In the long run it will assert its validity, though indirectly, by its appeal to a final public opinion. To deny the laity all right of opinion, to take from them, for instance, the right of reading and estimating the minority opinion rendered perhaps by four judges against five, involves an artificiality not to be con- templated in these days of public intelligence and public opinion. It involves a return to the college of augurs, when it was only an augur who might wink at an augur. It now remains to be considered whether a plain and unfinancial citizen may venture to have an opinion about banks and bankers. It may be reason- ably inferred from what has just been said regard- ing other professions, and particularly the teaching profession, that the bankers are being gently led toward the perception that it might be of value also to them to see themselves as others see them, or at least to give the outside world a hearing now and then, seeing that the proceedings of banks and bankers are of large importance to the well-being of society and men. Last winter during a five months’ residence in Berlin, I kept an account at one of the leading banks, and on the basis of my experience there I felt myself in a position to give the officers of the bank some very serviceable suggestions and advice. Such ten- tative movements, however, as I made in that direc- tion seemed to reveal to me an utter lack of desire on the part of the bank to profit by the opportunity. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 369 I may then tell you, who do not need them, some of the things I would have fain told them, who I am sure did need them. On presenting a draft or drawing by letter of credit, there was no way pro- vided for transferring the proceeds to my call account other than that I should receive the amount in cash and carry it bodily over to a distant wicket- window to be there deposited. After the money had been carefully counted by being laid out in a great rectangle of five twenty-mark pieces to the row and checked off on the large and elaborate sheet upon which I had made my entry accompanied by the number of my account, my name, and other personal allusions, I was very courteously asked to retire to a seat in the center of the hall, and await events. I duly awaited them some five to ten minutes, when my name was called out loudly from behind the wicket. I went over there, confessed to the name, and received, I think it was from another clerk, an elaborate and thoroughly signed and stamped receipt which after being twice folded fitted into my large pocket-book. Whenever I drew money from the account I was obliged to go through a similar process, always waiting for five minutes or more until my cheque had been to the bookkeeper and been duly entered on the books. My cheque-book, which was far too large for anything but desk use, I had purchased at the time of opening the account and receipted for under explicit mention of the number of cheques it contained and their exclusive numbers. When I came to closing my account at the end of my stay, I found that as the amount 370 THE ABUNDANT LIFE reported as standing to my credit was too large, cer- tain of my cheques had probably not been presented for payment. There was however no mechanism provided for giving me a copy of my account, and the only recourse was for the bookkeeper to bring to the window the ponderous ledger and cant it up so that I could read it through the wicket; and make a rude copy of the entries. This was done for me, I mean the ledger was supported, very patiently and courteously. I have no reason to suppose the arrangements any more convenient in England. A friend of mine who had a draft on the Deutsche Bank in London sought to cash it at a well-known bank in Bartholomew Lane where he had been doing business and was fully identified by his letter .of credit; but there was no other way than for him to go in person to the Deutsche Bank—where he was not ‘‘identified.’’ But you will say: ‘‘None of these inconveniences would happen at an American bank.’’ That is pre- cisely what I want to bring out; and the reason for the difference is, that the American banker has gone much farther in adopting the point of view of the public than has the German or English banker, who, hobbled by the traditions of the guild and swathed in the bands of self-sufficiency, refuses to learn from the needs or the demands of those who stand with- out the pale. The American bank is, in a very large and real sense, a public institution. Its capital stock is of course private property; it is itself a private cor- poration; it is, as the legal phrase goes, privately THE ABUNDANT LIFE 371 controlled. But still, in its relation to the life of its community, in what we might call its social rela- tion, it is a public institution. The typical condi- tions can be found best in the smaller cities, and there the bank ranks with the post-office and the public library. One chief purpose of a bank, perhaps the chief purpose, is to take cognizance of existing property values in its community, with a view to being able at need to transfer these values from their special form to the universal form of money. If this task of taking cognizance is not to be fulfilled in a very gross and mechanical manner, the bank must be closely adjusted to its relatively narrow community; its officials must have wide and intimate acquaintance with the living beings of that community; the bank must be close to its constituency; it must be near the people. It is of great importance to this nation that the bankers, and especially the representatives of the great metropolitan institutions whose constituency is wider than the city and practically national, should know their constituency. The more inti- mately they know and understand the American people, West and East, the better it will be for all concerned. To those who do not understand this people its moods, especially its pre-election moods, are often disconcerting. One who knows only certain classes of the population, especially the wealthier classes, may well be pessimistic—and generally is! But one who knows a good mixture of farmers, laboring men, and shopkeepers in a mixture of 372 THE ABUNDANT LIFE localities, for instance in California, Wyoming, Nebraska, Indiana, and New York, will always, I venture to say—always, unless he be some sort of a sick man, declare his faith in the soundness and rightmindedness of the American people. No one who really knows the people will gather any soliei- tude from the prevailing unrest concerning tariff, trusts, and conservation, or the demands for direct legislation and direct election. It is true the people are just at present somewhat ‘‘on the rampage.’’ The recent tariff measure was a disappointment to them. They refuse to be governed by consolidated wealth, and have no idea of giving money in any form a vote. They oppose burning up the resources of the country under forced draft, where the gilded phrase ‘development of the country’ hides a concen- tration of vast wealth and power into single hands at public cost. They are not satisfied with the present representative system as giving proper effectiveness to the popular will in party and nation. There is no possible doubt as to their desire and intention in these matters. They will get what they want. But there is no reason for gloom in the premises. A certain portion of the governmental mechanism does not work right, and the people pro- pose to change it. The result they wish to attain by the change is the result that was originally sought in the mechanism about to be discarded— nothing more nor less; namely, the plain and accurate expression of the public will. It goes no further. Property rights are not menaced; the pillars of the state are not undermined. They are THE ABUNDANT LIFE 373 both being rendered more secure. It will only be when the government does not express the people s will and the people cannot change it, that real peril will arise. We are, as compared with all the other great nations of the world, a conservative people. We seek after a state and an order of society in which the family, based on cleanliness and the assured possession of goods, may thrive, in which the indi- vidual man may establish the highest purposes of his single life and being, and in which the light and the truth may in all their simplicity increasingly prevail, and we shall find it in a state where farmer and artisan, banker and teacher shall live and work together, abasing the rule and maxim of the guild and craft before that high, all-human doctrine: The welfare of the people is the highest law. 374 THE ABUNDANT LIFE BEYOND THE MISSOURI RIVER Address before the Trans-Mississippi Congress, October 7, 1908. I recently heard a man account for a case of stagnating pessimism by saying: ‘‘They don’t get out beyond the Missouri River often enough.’’ The man who made the remark was the President of the United States, a man who himself absorbed a good deal of his fine sense for the essential mood and manner of Americanism through his own sojourning in the upland ranges and ranches behind that self- same river. There was a time when Mason and Dixon’s line made the frontier between the two con- stituent moods and interests of the land; nowadays it is the Missouri and the lower Mississippi which mark the boundary between the nation’s halves. I have always noticed when the train passes North Platte coming west, that men stop wiping their necks at the edge of the collar, and that they begin to ask each other for a match, without reference to present condition of bank account or previous condition of servitude. By the time we have passed Buffalo Bill’s ranch, agriculture begins to yield to grazing, men sit on top of the horse instead of behind him, and the hat brims grow stiffer. And then you begin to search for the concept hidden in the phrase, ‘beyond the THE ABUNDANT LIFE 375 Missouri River,’ and concept there must be—other- wise what is the use of holding a Trans-Mississippi or Trans-Missouri Congress? And concept there surely is, for who has ever shifted his life from one side of this frontier to the other without feeling he is in another world? If you look into the maps in the physical geogra- phies, you will see that almost all the land beyond the River is painted brown in deepening shades; for most of it is over two thousand feet above the Ievel of the sea. The trans-Missourians are nearer the stars, but farther from the safe deposit vaults. In the trans-Missouri region too the air is thinner, but the skin is thicker. It has to be—a little. The sticks are thicker. And almost everybody carries one. The quality of ¢tness is somewhat more gen- erally distributed amongst the population than over yonder. Hearts beat several times a minute more here than over yonder, but then there is more here for hearts to do than there. Here the blood flows freer, there the perspiration. But blood is thicker than water. Here the air is drier, there the hearts are drier. Here to the west of the Missouri is the land of elbow room. Everybody feels it, and acts it. Every- one likes to wear his arms akimbo, and put the space to some good use. Do you know that, though we have here but one-fifth of the population, we have a good half of the area, and surely two-thirds of the breeze? We are a breezy people in a breezy world. On the other side they positively jostle against each other, so thick are they set. Massachusetts has 376 THE ABUNDANT LIFE 340 to the square mile; New York, 150; California but 9 and Wyoming but one. When a man has a whole square mile all to himself, if he does jostle, he is likely to have acquired momentum in getting there. And that is what we find in fact. Detached cars on a grade unite and come to a halt with less peaceful results than a well-coupled train. But it is glorious to be free and have room enough. The biggest men there are, the biggest-hearted and the most self-reliant, come from these breezy, free square miles. To the east of the Missouri they are wont to accept the rainfall as dispensed by Providence. They are like the Puritan settlers of New England, who voted to adopt the laws of God until they had time to make better. To the west of the Missouri they propose to put the water on the ground when and where they want it. It has an audacious ring, especially when there isn’t any water in sight, but it is part and parcel of that whole endeavor of civilized and scienced man whereby he twists Nature to his uses, and by prying on her secrets, with what he calls his science, learns to domesticate her to his yoke and rule her by means of her own habits. The use of irrigation represents one of the highest and most characteristic activities of civilized life, and those who are forced to practice and develop it receive thereby high education both in the scientific control of Nature and in the sociology of her oper- ation. But still there is one thing which more than dry air or dry farming, more than heart beats or elbow THE ABUNDANT LIFE 377 room, more than grazing flocks, or teaming mines of yellow ore, or orchards of golden fruit, helps to yield the ultimate concept of ‘beyond the Missouri,’ and that is the long haul. Perhaps this is only a corollary of our elbow room but certain it is that our entire social and economic existence is condi- tioned by the fact that most of what we get and what we send must be carried over great spaces. In railroads we live and move, and in transportation we have our being. Material substances, whether ore or fruit or meat, are in themselves of no value, but only as they are set down where there is need and use for them. Wealth is created not by growing anything or digging anything out of the ground, but by classifying material substances and transporting and assembling them according to human need for their use. The railroads are our great public instru- ment for accomplishing this end, and nowhere is railroad transportation so closely wrought into the very life-physiology of a community as here beyond the Missouri. It is a matter of life and death. It is not raiment or ring, but tissue and blood. Their joint interests are not separable. The prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the other. A finer consciousness of this mutual interdependence and of a mutual responsibility would be advantageous to both. But there is still one more item for our trans- Missouri concept. The early settlers of this conti- nent occupied first a fringe of the Atlantic shore, and their faces were set toward Europe and the East. Then they pushed back into the interior, but 378 THE ABUNDANT LIFE they backed in; their faces were still set toward the Atlantic and the East. It was not until the prairie schooners had crossed the Missouri, that prows and faces were set toward the West. And now that we have found another ocean, and begin to see that our nation has destiny and tasks in terms thereof—a destiny and tasks that well may make its future history to be as certainly controlled by its position on the Pacific facing Asia as was its early history controlled by its position on the Atlantic facing Europe—, portentous as these tokens are, it still remains that it is only the people of the prairie schooners and their successors who really set their faces toward the West. THE ABUNDANT LIFE 379 CONTINUITY AND SECURITY An address delivered between 1899 and 1902 before the Fire Insurance Underwriters in San Francisco. My friends: The fact that under certain circum- stances carbon and oxygen have a tendency to combine, is a very blissful and blessed thing for the human race. It has made possible this evening the excellent filets mignons, which we have tested, and the roast squab, which we have devoured; it has made it possible for you gentlemen to have money enough to pay for what you have eaten thereof, and what I and several others have eaten. It has brought to the human race in all its days the oppor- tunity of glory and advancement. That grand old hero and pioneer of the race, the oldtime Prometheus, who reached his hand up into the heights where the Olympian gods do dwell and brought down eternal fire to earth, kindled therewith the opportunity whereby primitive man protected himself against the wolves that howled at his cabin door and against the microbes that swarmed in the meat he tried to eat. Thereby he became man, and civilized man, by using fire and by accepting all the blessings that this tendency for carbon and oxygen to get together has created for the world. But sometimes it not only blesses, but brings its curse. On your program you have printed the picture of the fire that«swept 380 THE ABUNDANT LIFE away grand old imperial Rome, to the blessing, be it told historically, of its architecture—a hope that seems not to stand before Mayor Phelan’s San Francisco, because redwood, it seems to me from my experience in trying to build a hearth-fire with it, will not combine with oxygen. So, in spite of all the benignant intentions of chemistry, and by the help of the mayor’s excellent fire department, much that shocks my eye in architecture I fear will remain many a day. In the other picture that you have, I find a group of men uniting in some sort of exercise that must have something to do with fire, else you would not have it on your program, in which they hold aloft something that looks like those sacred vessels of glass that I have seen hanging on the walls of many a house, which are said to contain fire water. Whether these young men are preparing to hurl these vessels into the fire in order to stop the spread of the same, I have not learned. But I am sure that fire water is in some way involved. So here again we come back to the same old tendency for carbon and oxygen to get together, for what these young gentlemen are dealing with is certainly one of the combinations of carbon and oxygen, though the chemist tells us it is a somewhat more complicated one. So, then, out of all the carbides and the carbates, and whatever else chemistry may concoct from these elements, out of them all there comes blessing and curse to men. We are all of us engaged, we who are steering the ship of society, in trying to deal THE ABUNDANT LIFE 381 with fire as a blessing and to prevent it from being a curse. I welcome you to the fraternity of those who are engaged in making life more solid and continuous, and in making the conditions under which life exists more secure. For that, after all, is the business of university teachers and fire- underwriters alike, to give life its due continuity and its due security. That is what civilization exacts; that is what peace means; that is what is the hope of progress in the world, to give society a chance to live under permanent and continuous conditions. We are not looking, those of us who look for the best, for revolutionary reform; we are looking for continuous conditions which shall admit of progress. And that which you are undertaking to bring about is a condition of things whereby life may be isolated from all avoidable risks. Fire insurance means that by charging off a percentage of earnings, men may obtain increased assurance that accident and arbitrary hap shall not intrude upon standing conditions. In such security it is that the arts of life which bless and make glorious always thrive. In these great times of industrial change and industrial expansion, the chief intent and purpose of governmental interference is, in my belief, not greed of territory, but the demand which extended intercourse has created for more extended security of life-conditions. The old recipe, Trade follows the flag, no longer quickens the interest of men. They take vastly more interest in the flag as giving security to conditions of life in which humanity 382 THE ABUNDANT LIFE can progress. Flags, in the progress of political ideas, have ceased to be symbols of martial sov- ereignty; they have become mere guaranties of continuous conditions. The consular courts and other forms of extra-territorial jurisdiction that were established in outlying countries long before flags went there, existed for the purpose of assuring commerce and commercial men, and missionaries and scientific men, that they should find in those places where they went, security of conditions, con- tinuity of life; that life should be secure, that prop- erty rights should be recognized, and that contracts should be held valid. The world has been drawn together in these last days, and men have ventured into places where the law has not reigned as it did in their homes. The world has been drawing together around the great industrial possibilities of the Pacific, the industrial possibilities which are to make the Pacific and its shores shortly the center of the world’s activity ; toward this the events of the closing years of the last century all tended unmis- takably. All the forces that look for achievement are pushing their way toward the Pacific. Here, before our gates, this problem is being solved of how the Pacific, with its industrial potencies, shall become the center of the industrial world. And all that is asked for around its shores and within its bounds is that same security in the conditions of life which you, after your sort and in your way, help to produce. The business man, the commercial man of today, is not worried so much about the figures at which tariffs are rated, so long as tariffs are not THE ABUNDANT LIFE 383 tampered with by the politician; he is not worried so much about whether things are measured by a yard stick or by a meter stick, so long as the standard is continuous and is understood. He is not worried so much whether the word d-o-l-1-a-r means twenty-five cents, or fifty cents, or a hundred cents, so long as he can rely upon its meaning one con- tinuous thing. He must have, in order to do busi- ness, a solid ground to stand upon. Wise men are not the men who are continually pulling up plants to look at their roots to see whether they are growing; they are men who plant, and who stand by the plant and the laws of con- tinuous growth. The theorists, the mad men, the dreamers, are not the leaders of the day. The leaders of the day are the men who assist, by a combination of forces, the great movements that sweep on in the well established and well protected channels of the world’s possibilities, its actual pos- sibilities. There is an unsettling spirit in the words of those who ery aloud in the market place and deal in theories undermining historical life, a spirit that has no mission in the practical affairs of this present world. I am often reminded, when I contrast the visionary proposals of the theorist with the prac- tical work of the men who do things, of Sam Jones’ steamboat, that used to work up and down the little waterways of central Florida. It was a stern-wheel boat, a mighty little steamboat, painted white, with a great, smoking tall, black chimney on it. And it, small steamboat as it was, had 2 tremendously big 384 THE ABUNDANT LIFE whistle—a perfectly tremendous one. Every time it whistled, it had to stop. That is very much the condition which confronts the practical business man when he is asked to stop his steamboat, in order to give some political prater, some theorist, some vis- ionary, an opportunity to blow his whistle, and to use the whole steam power of the state therefor. What we aim for in society, is solid progress along established lines, on solid ground. The uni- versity joins with you gentlemen in the desire for that. The university, if I understand it, is an insti- tution which seeks to give the activities of life an intelligent basis, which seeks to create level-headed men, men with balance and sense, men with con- trol, men who have not skimmed their subject but have learned it and know it in its historical roots and in its bearings. The universities of today lay their hands upon all the activities of life, and spare not any. There is nothing common or unclean any longer in this world of ours. The university will have its part with all these activities, trying to raise and ennoble them all and save them all from slavery to the rule of thumb. It educates, not only the lawyer and the doctor, but the electrical engineer, the mechanical engineer, the civil engineer, the agri- culturist, the miner, and now it will undertake to educate the men of commerce. Our University is moving ahead in the development of a department of commerce, one part of which shall take cognizance of the insurance business. We propose to treat the business of insurance as one of the professions, in order to give it bearings, in order to give it length THE ABUNDANT LIFE 385 and breadth and thickness, in order to make it as a subject which has roots to it, in order that those who deal with it may have that esprit de corps that belongs to a worthy profession engaged in a work which has a purpose and meaning in terms of the whole life of men. Your profession has roots to it and a meaning to it, a great big meaning, in terms of the life of man. It undertakes to give continuity and security to that life, and the University joins with you in that endeavor. We are all of one intent and of one blood. We stand by the altar-fires of Minerva, and we see to it that they burn well; but we see to it that they reach not the roof, to consume the rafters. Fire, and this love of carbon and oxygen for each other, is at once a blessing and a danger. It has power, it has life in it. It is the men who have played with fire that have risen from childhood into manhood. There is fire in the veins of man. Because it is there, man is man, because he controls it and makes his life secure, continuous, and self-controlled. | END OF TITLE | END OF REEL | PLEASE REWIND