PHILOSOPHY OF SERVICEABLENESS
Such works, with numerous other tendencies which might be mentioned in the line of unpaid and voluntary service for college publications, musical organizations, debating organizations, and athletics, lead one to define the American undergraduate’s philosophy of life as one of service. Unlike the German or Indian, his seriousness is not associated with metaphysical or theological discussion or expression. He asks not so much What? as What for? His aims belong to “a kingdom of ends.” Student theory operates in a real world—a world where contact is not so marked with creeds and laws as with virile movements and living men. The undergraduate is enamoured of a gospel of action. To him “deeds are mightier things than words” are. His spirit slumbers under sermons and lectures upon dogma and description, but rises with an heroic call to give money, time, and life for vital college or world enterprises. Difficulties stir him as they always stir true men. He admires the power that is “caught in the cylinder and does not escape in the whistle.” More and more plainly in all his undergraduate and graduate work the American student is revealing his love and ability for that serviceableness to the state, to the church, and to industrial life which, though often unpaid and unappreciated, brings to the servant a satisfying reward in the doing.
A few years ago a Harvard athlete played in a hard and exciting foot-ball game against Yale. Toward the end of the game, when it was nearly dark, this man was fairly hurled through the Yale line in a play that shortly afterward resulted in giving the game to the Cambridge men. It seemed a strange irony of circumstance that just before time was called the heroic player was disqualified. When the game was over and the crimson men were marching wildly about the field, yelling for Harvard and carrying the foot-ball players on their shoulders, the man whose playing was largely contributory to this triumph was down in the training-quarters, almost alone, but with the satisfaction that, although forgotten by the crowd, he had “played the game.” Certain alumni, who had seen this man’s plucky but unpraised fight for his Alma Mater, sent to him these words of Kipling:
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working....
We must admit that the undergraduate’s philosophy of life may be obscure at times, even to himself; that it is as subtle and evasive as the moods of youth; and that its expression is as cosmopolitan as nationality, and as varied as human nature. For some students, too, we must conclude that trivialities and immoralities bury far out of sight the true meaning of college training and life-work; but in other students, and these are the majority, underneath his curriculum and his customs, his light-heartedness, his loves, and his seeming listlessness, one may discern the real American undergraduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and strenuously eager for those great campaigns of his day and generation in which the priceless guerdon is the “joy of the working.”