But, after all, gentlemen, the discouragements you will meet with will be far fewer than those with which your predecessors had to contend, while the pleasant side of your lives will be far pleasanter than was theirs. In fact, I think your lives have in many respects fallen in pleasanter places than have ours. Discipline and order protect you to a large extent from quackery and idiocy. The fads of the day disappear before the appearance of the flag and the sound of the drum. So-called Christian Science finds no place in your curriculum, and it will be long, I trust, before the army chaplain tinctures the military hospital with sectarian therapeutics or an Emanuel church cult. If by entering the army one may escape disgusting influences of this character, then it may become such a refuge that it shall thereby be made both inviting and invincible.
It is pleasing to those of us who co-operated in the movement, to have the assurances of the Surgeon General that the establishment of the Medical Reserve Corps has been of actual benefit to the regular Army Medical Department. While the military rank to which its members found themselves suddenly elevated was not so lofty as to cause any attacks of vertigo, none having been up to the present day reported, it at least gives us satisfaction to realize that help may thus be afforded from private life, and that a closer rapport has been effected.
And now it is well nigh as difficult a task to appropriately conclude these remarks as to begin them. Men come and go; a few leave imprints of their footsteps; the vast majority make no impression that lingers.
"Some when they die, die all; their mouldering clay
Is but an emblem of their memories;
The space quite closes up through which they passed."
Fain would I believe that many of you would make enduring records. Yet each can do his best, and I doubt not each will do it. You have so much to encourage you, so comparatively little to hamper or hold back. Glorious is your work, glorious may be your fulfillment of it. We have lived in a goodly time; you will enjoy one still more goodly. With scientific progress, whose like the world has never known, and with an altruism which makes the world constantly better, you will be able to do things never done by your predecessors.
"'Tis coming up the steeps of time,
And this old world is growing brighter!
We may not see its dawn sublime,