I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be charitable to me, gentlemen.
I know that one of the things which the graduates of the college look forward to with the most confident expectation and pleasure is the report of the President of the University. [Applause.] I remember that when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that almost every matter of business that required particular ability was sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to take the care of one of our regiments, and I know that he would have led it to victory. And when I heard that the same professor was nominated for President, I had no doubt of the result which all of us have seen to follow. I give you, gentlemen, the health of President Eliot of Harvard College. [Applause.]
NATIONAL GROWTH OF A CENTURY
[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at Cambridge, Mass., June 28, 1876. Mr. Lowell, as President of the Alumni Association, occupied the chair.]
Brethren:—Though perhaps there be nothing in a hundredth year to make it more emphatic than those years which precede it and which follow it, and though the celebration of centennials be a superstitious survival from the time when to count ten upon the fingers was a great achievement in arithmetic, and to find the square of that number carried with it something of the awe and solemnity which invests the higher mathematics to us of the laity, yet I think no wise man can be indifferent to any sentiment which so profoundly and powerfully affects the imagination of the mass of his fellows. The common consent of civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration of great events as leaving an interval spacious enough to be impressive, and having a roundness of completion in its period. We, the youngest of nations, the centuries to us are not yet grown so cheap and commonplace as to Napoleon when he saw forty of them looking in undisguised admiration upon his army, bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my own part I think the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear without calling in thirty-nine others to its assistance. [Applause.]
It is quite true that a hundred years are but as a day in the life of a nation, are but as a tick of the clock to the long-drawn æons in which this planet hardened itself for the habitation of man, and man accommodated himself to his habitation; but they are all we have, and we must make the best of them. Perhaps, after all, it is no such great misfortune to be young, especially if we are conscious at the time that youth means opportunity, and not accomplishment. I think that, after all, when we look back upon a hundred years through which the country has passed, the vista is not so disheartening as to the indigestive fancy it might at first appear. If we have lost something of that Arcadian simplicity which the French travellers of a hundred years ago found here,—perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of their impenetrability by the English tongue,—we have lost something also of that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials as of barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true advancement. It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to show some of that talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom of the race to which most of us belong. [Laughter and applause.] Even the Fourth-of-July oration is edging round into a lecture on our national shortcomings, and the proud eagle himself is beginning to have no little misgiving at the amplitude between the tips of his wings. [Laughter.]
But while it may be admitted that our government was more decorously administered one hundred years ago, if our national housekeeping of to-day is further removed from honest business principles, and therefore is more costly, both morally and financially, than that of any other Christian nation, it is no less true that the hundredth year of our existence finds us in the mass very greatly advanced in the refinement and culture and comfort that are most operative in making a country civilized and in keeping it so. [Applause.] When we talk of decline of public and private virtue I think that we forget that that better former day was a day of small communities and of uneasy locomotion, when public opinion acted more directly and more sharply, was brought to bear more convincingly upon the individual than is possible now. But grant that though the dread of what is said and thought be but a poor substitute and makeshift for conscience,—that austere and sleepless safeguard of character, which, if not an instinct, acquires all the attributes of an instinct, and whose repeated warnings make duty at least an unconscious habitude,—after all, this outside substitute is the strongest motive for well-doing in the majority of our race, and men of thought and culture should waste no opportunity to reinforce it by frankness in speaking out invidious truths, by reproof and by warning. I, for one, greatly doubt whether our national standard of right and wrong has been really so much debased as we are sometimes tempted to think [applause]; and whether the soft money of a sentimental sort of promises to pay has altogether driven out the sterling coin of upright purpose and self-denying fulfilment. [Applause.] I could wish that this belief, almost, provided it did not mislead us into prophesying smooth things, were more general among our cultivated class; for the very acceptance of such a belief tends in large measure toward its accomplishment. No finer sentence has come down to us from antiquity, no higher witness was ever borne to the quality of a nation, than in that signal of Nelson's: "England expects every man to do his duty." [Applause.]
Brethren, I thought on this occasion of the centennial celebration of our independence it was fit that some expression should go forth from us that should in some measure give contradiction to the impression that the graduates of Harvard College take a pessimistic view of their country and its institutions. [Applause.] Certainly I know that it is not true, and I wish to have that sentiment expressed here. Our college takes no official part in celebrating the nation's first completed century; she who is already half-way through her third has become too grave for these youthful elations. [Laughter.] But she does not forget that in Samuel and John Adams, Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and John Hancock, she did her full share toward making such a commemoration possible. [Applause.] As in 1776, so in 1876, we have sent John Adams to represent us at Philadelphia, and, perhaps with some prescience of what the next century is to effect, we have sent with him Madame Boylston as his colleague [applause]; and it may be that Alma Mater in this has possibly shown a little feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress that she is made her deputy. [Laughter and applause.] And in the hundred years since we asserted for ourselves a separate place and proper name among the nations, our college has been no palsied or atrophied limb in the national organization. To the jurisprudence, to the legislation, the diplomacy, the science, the literature, the art of the country, her contribution has certainly not fallen short of its due proportion. Our triennial catalogue is hung thick with our trophies from many fields. I may say in parenthesis, gentlemen, brethren of the alumni, that I am glad the July number of the "North American Review" is not yet published. In the January number there was so disheartening a report of everything—I am glad to say our religion is excepted, we have grown perhaps in grace—but we had no science, we had none of this and none of the other.