THE PIONEER SPIRIT
College training brings with it responsibility and reward. The responsibility is that of leadership—the kind of leadership which comes to the man of advanced knowledge and unusual advantages, who sees the needs of his time and does not flinch from the hardest kind of sacrifice in view of those needs. The reward is not always apparent to the world, but it is more than sufficient for the worker. Indeed, the American undergraduate is becoming more and more aware that his pay is not his reward. He is learning that the world is not keen to pay the cost of new ideas or to reward professional leadership with material values. Furthermore, his half-paid service does not tell the whole story of his sacrifice. His work is often lost in the successes of some other man who follows him. But the college-trained man who has weighed well these needs, and has deliberately chosen, is not to be pitied. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any one is more to be envied. He is under the impulsion of an inner sense of mission. The college has given him faith in himself and his mission. Many a graduate, going out from American halls of learning, feels somewhat as Carlyle felt when he said: “I have a book in me; it must come out,” or as Disraeli intimated in his answer when he was hissed down in the House of Commons, “You will not hear me now, but there will come a time when you will hear me.”
The undergraduate, spending laborious days upon the invention which shall make industrial progress possible in lands his eyes will never see, is carried along by an impulse not easily expressed. He realizes the feeling that Robert Louis Stevenson expressed when he said about his writing that he felt like thanking God that he had a chance to earn his bread upon such joyful terms. He has deliberately turned his back upon certain temporalities in order to face the sunrise of some new ideal for social betterment or national progress. He has heard the gods calling him to some far-reaching profession that is more than a position. There is stirring in him always the sense of message. He has caught the clear, captivating voice of a unique life-work. It urges him on to the occupation of his new land of dreams. Is this leader worried because some one misunderstands him? Does he envy the man who, following another ideal, sweeps by in an automobile which perhaps his own particular genius has made possible? The pioneer of letters who has known the sweetness and light of literary satisfaction, the fine frenzy of that creative, imaginative activity in which ideas are caught and crystallized in words, does not despair when his earthly rewards seem to linger.
The college, then, is a means only to the larger life of spirit and service. It exists to point out the goal the attainment of which lies inherent in the student. The college is like the tug-boat that pulls the ship from the harbor to the clear water of the free, open sea. The curriculum, the play-life, the laboratory, the patriotism of the college spirit, the buildings, and the men, are only torches gleaming through the morning shadows of the student’s coming day.