Stepping Into the Past
The bogy-man in the cellar is not conjured with in governing children now as much as formerly, still a child likes those plays best which give a good deal of exercise to the imagination. So on the other hand the ills we imagine afflict us most. The microscope magnifies the object without altering it. How the thoughts of those troubled times of long ago come trooping over the hills and valleys of memory after so many years have been passed to our account in the book of the Recording Angel. There are some sights that we can never forget. Some occurrences are so scenic and suggestive that they come home unbidden to every man's heart and are with him in the market and on the street.
The College Empire
When I first came on the campus the students' rooms were bare and uninviting. No freshman's room was carpeted. A mat in front of his desk and one in front of his bed, a very plain bureau, three or four chairs, a wash-stand, pail, pitcher and bowl, and a few text-books made the outfit. An apartment was featured best by what it did not have. We lived the simple life. "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." The new president came in the morning of an opening educational era, during which more improvements have been made than occurred in long centuries before. With great distinction he served his day and its sun sank before the horizon in its evening splendor and that of his youthful, buoyant successor rose in its morning glory. The initial steps or incidents in the election of the present sovereign if ever known are now lost to history. The event was so spontaneous and natural that we can only say in scriptural language, Now it came to pass. The vote was only a memorandum. It was what everyone wanted, everybody expected.
In my day we all knew one another. A college may be good as an institution of learning and still fall far short of supplying what we feel this elite college did for us. The elective system has not been wholly a blessing. If left to himself, a student might elect to follow the line of the least resistance. In one of these institutions the whole class never meets together after the first day for any academic purpose. The class is no longer the social unit it once was. No two men take exactly the same course.
Just How it Feels
A boy's relation to his home is changed the instant his feet betake themselves to classic ways. His face is set toward an independent career. It is a beginning of a detachment and the home is behind this program and perhaps without quite recognizing all the results and sacrifices that are involved. No family is ever again quite the same after it has a son graduated from college. The plane of life is lifted all around. The kind of atmosphere in which he must live and move and have his being, for four years, will affect him. The traditions and the predominant type of student character will give him a pull which it is hoped is in the right direction. Where the majority of the students are disposed to do right, and to make a serious use of their great opportunities, the chances are that the graduate will feel his life long that he paid his tuition to the college, when he was for a fact most indebted to his associates. All testimony shows that students recite to the faculty and learn from one another. We are well beyond the old heresy that a boy goes to college for his mental training, enters society for his social life, and the church for his religious development. The college ideal, as stated, is to give a boy opportunity to do for himself the best he can do, also to do for each student the best that can be done for him and to give all possible advantage to the poorest student.
Just Plain Friends
We all drank at the same fountain and felt the thrill of the same spirit. There was no caste or social class. We may well doubt whether higher life success would have attended us, if we launched from a different port. An earnest endeavor was made to put a young man on an equality with the demands of his time. It undertook to furnish a basis from which it was possible for him to advance himself to that level of usefulness, in his generation, to which his native gifts relegated him. The college cannot undertake to supply brains. In the presence of stupidity even the gods are powerless. I do not need to praise the college. As Cromwell said of his government, "This is a thing that speaks loudly for itself." Webster made, in the greatest address ever delivered to a jury, much of the proverb, Murder will out, but this is no peculiarity of murder. Character will out, mental discipline will out, education will out, and the lack of education will out. Without this item some vocations cannot be entered at all, and there is no vocation in which the mental training would not be a fine additional equipment.