SONS OF HARVARD WHO FELL IN BATTLE
[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the "Autocrat," at the Harvard Alumni Dinner, at Cambridge, June 25, 1884.]
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Alumni:—Another day than this has been consecrated to the memories of the war. On that day we think not of the children of the university or the city, hardly, even, of the children whom the State has lost, but of a mighty brotherhood whose parent was our common country. To-day the college is the centre of all our feeling, and if we refer to the war it is in connection with the college, and not for its own sake that we do so. What then did the college do to justify our speaking of the war now? She sent a few gentlemen into the field, who died there becomingly. I know of nothing more. The great forces which ensured the North success would have been at work even if those men had been absent. Our means of raising money and troops would not have been less, I dare say. The great qualities of the race, too, would still have been there. The greatest qualities, after all, are those of a man, not those of a gentleman, and neither North nor South needed colleges to learn them.
And yet—and yet I think we all feel that, to us, at least, the war would seem less beautiful and inspiring, if those few gentlemen had not died as they did. Look at yonder portrait[7] and yonder bust[8] and tell me if stories such as they commemorate do not add a glory to the bare fact that the strongest legions prevailed. So it has been since wars began. After history has done its best to fix men's thoughts upon strategy and finance, their eyes have turned and rested on some single romantic figure—some Sidney, some Falkland, some Wolfe, some Montcalm, some Shaw. This is that little touch of the superfluous which is necessary. Necessary as art is necessary, and knowledge which serves no mechanical end. Superfluous only as glory is superfluous, or a bit of red ribbon that a man would die to win.
It has been one merit of Harvard College that it has never quite sunk to believing that its only function was to carry a body of specialists through the first stage of their preparation. About these halls there has always been an aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost in science or Greek—not to be fixed, yet all-pervading. And the warrant of Harvard College for writing the names of its dead graduates upon its tablets is not in the mathematics, the chemistry, the political economy which it taught them, but that, in ways not to be discovered, by traditions not to be written down, it helped men of lofty natures to make good their faculties. I hope and I believe that it will long give such help to its children. I hope and I believe that long after our tears for the dead have been forgotten, this monument to their memory will still give such help to generations to whom it is only a symbol—a symbol of man's destiny and power for duty, but a symbol also of that something more by which duty is swallowed up in generosity, that something more which led men like Shaw to toss life and hope like a flower before the feet of their country and their cause. [Cheers.]