Commencement days

Preface

I COUNT myself in few things happier than in my remembrance of the friendship of two generations of college and university graduates. This book is a souvenir of those pleasant associations. It contains what I have found it in my heart to say in various Commencement Addresses and Baccalaureate Sermons. No one could get the consent of his own conscience to bring anything other than his best thought to such an occasion; and as these words have expressed to many graduating classes my deepest concern and my heartiest good wishes for their welfare, so I hope that many of those who shall come after them may find upon these pages the sober counsels of one who has never found it needful to talk down to young people, nor expedient to flatter them, but who has learned to believe that the call to the highest things is the call to which they are most ready to respond.

Washington Gladden.

Columbus, January 15, 1916.

PAGE

I. The School of Work 3

II. Castles in the Air 41

III. What is Worth While.^ 67

IV. Some Things I have Learned 87

V. Short Cuts loi

VI. Study and Growth 125

VII. Books and Reading 143

VIII. What For.? 165

IX. Good Work for Graduates 185

X. Leaders or Followers.'* 207

XL Form and Substance 227

I

THESE bountiful days of June have many delights and invitations for us; the roses are blowing and the wedding bells are chiming, and orioles and bobolinks are pouring out their souls in song; and amid all these pleasant scenes and sounds the scholars are gathering on the campus and in the chapel, to receive the meed of faithful work, to speak the parting word, and to linger, for a moment, in associations that have become dear, before they go out to meet the shadowy future. To some of us these days are memorable; our thoughts go back to other Junes in another century, when the bands and the banners and the marshals with their batons, and the old graduates with their mouldy jokes, and the mothers and the sisters and the cousins and the aunts beaming with appreciation and expectation, made up a mise en scene full of dramatic possibilities. I wonder if commence- 3 ment means as much to these young fellows as it meant to some of us old fellows, fifty years ago. It is hard for me to believe it. "The world is so full of a number of things" that were not within our ken in the middle of the last century, that it seems as if nothing could really mean quite as much to anybody as everything did in that slow old time. Yet I make no doubt there is more than one in this presence whose heart is heavy with the sense of what is ending here to-day; with the consciousness that something has been happening in the last four years that never can happen again; with a wistful and apprehensive premonition of what is behind the veil.

Yes, I am sure that these young men and women are consciously confronting here to-day much the same question that we older ones faced in the Junes to which we are looking back. The costume of the festival is diiferent; the realities of life are not radically altered. There are some of us who have more to remember than you, but you have more to hope for than we; and in this hour when yesterday and to-morrow have met together, when memory and hope have kissed each other, I would fain believe that all of us, old and young, are ready for a little serious thought upon the meaning of life.

Most of us have lived long enough to know that the end of a college course Is not the goal of intellectual attainment; commencement is the right word; those who honorably reach it are fairly over the threshold of their education; they have done well if they are now ready to begin to learn what life has to teach. A course in the University has served its purpose if it has laid some good foundations on which future accumulations of experience may rest; if it has given some training in habits of investigation; if it has developed some power of appreciating the best in life and art; if it has laid down the lines on which study may be usefully continued; if it has lifted up and clarified some worthy ideals of conduct and service. I hope that your four years in the University has done as much as this for most of you. If it has, the expenditure has been abundantly justified.

We frequently hear from those who have been popularly deemed the most successful men of this generation, the judgment that a college education is of little or no value; that it rather unfits a man for such enterprises as those by which they have risen to eminence. This is interesting testimony, and I trust that it Is true. If our colleges did equip men for such enterprises, that would be the strongest possible reason for never going to college. If your university training has not made you incapable of entertaining the plutocratic purpose, or of rendering the plutocrat willing and efficient service in the realization of his purpose, it has not done much for you.

It is to be hoped, however, that it has fitted you I to take up some honorable and worthy calling, some calling which will seem to you to be "affected," as the lawyers say, "with a public interest"; some calling in which you can feel yourself to be identified with the common welfare. Now, manifestly, there are some callings which no fair-minded man can so regard. There are some callings the aggregate result of which must be public injury; they are evil and only evil, and that continually. There are others which may result in some incidental benefits; by means of them we might do some good but the harm would outweigh the good; the more we prospered in them the larger would be the social damage. Such callings might be profitable financially, for, strange to say, there are millions of human beings who are ready to offer larger rewards to those who do them injury than to those who do them good; but no one on whom a college education has not been wasted, will select a calling the net result of which is social injury, no matter how large the prospective profits may be.

Some calling, then, which links itself with the well-being of our neighbors and our fellow men, the diligent prosecution of which will not only secure for ourselves an honorable livelihood, but will add, in some appreciable degree, to the sum of human happiness — this, let us trust. Is now or soon will be, within the choice of every member of this graduating class. Let me say also that this calling ought to be, in every case, a congenial calling. I know well that in some cases it cannot and will not be; stern necessity and relentless circumstance often drive us into occupations that are not thoroughly congenial and keep us in them; but so far as we have the power of choice we ought to choose the work we like best — not that which brings us the largest pecuniary recompense, not that which promises most speedily to enrich us, but that which is most interesting to us, that which most completely enlists all our powers of body and mind. What is before all things essential is that we shall be interested in our work; that we shall believe it to be worth doing; that we shall be able to put love and enthusiasm into it. And even though, by force of circumstances, we may be constrained to engage in work which does not at first strongly appeal to us, it is best to make a virtue of necessity and adapt ourselves, as best we can, to our callings. In any work that is worth doing we may surely find much that awakens thought and elicits enthusiasm; in industry, as in appetite, there are acquired tastes, and we may learn to take a genuine interest in work which at the beginning was unattractive.

The point on which I now desire to lay emphasis is this, that the discipline by which a man comes to himself and completes his manhood is mainly that which is won in the pursuit of the calling by which he gains his livelihood. "The great majority of men," says a late strong writer, "gather an edifying understanding of men and things just in so far as they actually and resolutely stick to the performance of some special, and (for the most part) congenial task. Their education in life must be grounded in the persistent attempt to realize in action some kind of purpose — a purpose usually connected with the occupation whereby they live. In the pursuit of that purpose they will continually be making experiments — opening up new lines of work, establishing new relations with other men, and taking more or less serious risks. Each of these experiments offers them an opportunity both for personal discipline and for increasing personal insight." *

Your education, then, the best part of it, will be gained in your work. The best educated men are educated not for their work but by their work. * " The Promise of American Life," by Herbert Croly, p. 404.

You may, Indeed, have Intellectual interests outside of your dally business; it Is well to have these; life is often greatly enriched by liberal studies pursued In leisure hours; but, after all, the best part of your education will be that which you win In the prosecution of your dally task. This means, of course, that your prevailing Interest in your work shall be in the work itself, rather than the money that you are making out of it. There Is real educational value in doing any kind of good work well; there is no educational value whatever In cultivating and gratifying the appetite for gain. Just to the extent to which the craving for more becomes the motive power of a man's life Is the educational process retarded, just so far does the man himself become dwarfed and deformed.

What you wish to do is to make the most of yourself; to complete your individuality; to become the man or woman that God meant you to be. This means for the community great variety of capacity and attainment. It is by these manifold diversities of power that society is enriched. *'A genuine Individual," says the author I just quoted, "must at least possess some special quality which distinguishes him from other people, which unifies the successive phases and the various aspects of his own life and which results in personal moral freedom." The man whose ruling interest is in his work is apt to become in this sense a genuine individual; but when the acquisitive motive becomes dominant, there is no chance for the development of any interesting personality. The man is going after the same thing that the rest of the crowd are pursuing; they are all shaped by the same forces; they are not likely to attain unto "any edifying personal independence or any peculiar personal distinction." "Different as American business men are from one another in temperament, circumstances and habits," says our author again, "they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." *

Consequently it is true that even in a society as active and strenuous as ours there is a vast amount of monotony. The commercial motive is suffered to be the dominant motive, and so far as this is true, the characters produced tend to one type. The ruling ideas are the same and there is a dreary sameness in the opinions entertained and the views of life expressed. Mammon is a potentate who does not encourage diversities * "The Promise of American Life, " by Herbert Croly, p. 410.

THE SCHOOL OF WORK ii

of gifts; no theories that disturb the standing order or the vested interests are permitted in his domain; of all new notions his devotees are apt to be intolerant. This explains the prevalence of fads and fashions In circles where the commercial motive Is dominant; the last place in the world where you would look for any kind of originality would be In the ranks of the four hundred. Where "wealth accumulates" until it becames the paramount and absorbing Interest of life, "men decay," or dwindle Into units of economic force:

"The individual withers, and the world is more and more."

If, then, what the commonwealth wants of each of us is a full-rounded and complete personality, It will never do for us to permit ourselves to fall under the spell of the prevailing Mammonism, for that inevitably reduces the dimensions of the man. It is in the work itself, and in the contribution which It makes to the common weal, that we shall find the enlargement and invlgoratlon of our manhood. "For," as our author admonishes us, "the truth Is that individuality cannot be dissociated 'from the pursuit of a disinterested object. It is a moral and intellectual quality and It must be realized by moral and intellectual means." The man comes to himself only when he is forgetting himself in devotion to some good outside of and beyond himself.

Let us assume therefore that each one of the young men and women before me will have found before many months, some calling which connects itself closely with the public welfare, and will be pursuing that calling, not primarily as a means of personal aggrandizement, but as a work which on its own account is worth doing, because it tends to increase the sum of human happiness. I wish to consider with you how such a calling, pursued in such a spirit, becomes a continuous and fruitful educational opportunity. Some of you may have been lamenting that your education must now be regarded as finished. I want you to see that although you may not look forward to postgraduate studies within academic walls, by far the best part of your education is still to come.

Let us suppose, for example, that your vocation is to be the most ancient and honorable of all — the work assigned to unfallen man in the Garden of Eden — is there not in this work a great educational opportunity.? I may fairly assume that those among you who are to be farmers have been studying agriculture here in the University, and that you have got some inkling of the need of

THE SCHOOL OF WORK I^

mixing brains with husbandry. You surely do not need to be told of the manifold problems that wait for solution, in the reclamation of waste lands, in the improvem.ent of the soil and its products, in the reforestation of the hills, in *' making the wilderness to bring forth and bud that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater," in socializing the countryside, that the people dwelling there shall find the stimulation and the solace of good companionship, and the opportunities of a rewarding culture. If these aspects of your work as farmers loom large before your thought, if it is by these that your enthusiasms are aroused, and your energies are directed, I am sure that you are in a fair way to become highly educated men. And this, I assume, is what you want to be. The main thing that you want to get out of this calling of yours for yourself is a large, fruitful, noble manhood. You expect, and you have a right to expect, that you will get a comfortable living out of your work; that you will have enough to eat and to wear; that you will have an attractive and beautiful home; and there is not much reason to fear that the man who puts brains and enthusiasm into the business of farming will not get as much as that out of it, and something more. But this something more is not your first concern. Your main question is not how large gains you can make but how you can most fully and worthily express and realize your life in this calling you have chosen.

You have a neighbor, perhaps, who went into this business for the money there was in it, and who has come to the end of his working life with a big balance in the bank, with a safe, full of productive securities, with three or four automobiles, and all the outward signs of abundance. But how has he done it? He has skinned one or two thousand acres of good land leaving it perceptibly poorer than when It came under his hand; he has neglected all opportunities of self- Improvement; he has pushed his Interests with no regard to the welfare of his neighbor; he has sown broadcast, as every selfish man always does, the seeds of dissension and suspicion and 111 will. Of course, in the process his own personality has steadily withered and dwindled. Most men, looking at the balance In the bank and the contents of the safe call him a successful farmer; do you.? If all men were such as he, society would cease to exist, and the earth would be uninhabitable.

He furnishes you, nevertheless, an excellent object lesson of the kind of man you do not want to be. I trust that the sight of him may Inspire you with the ambition to live In such a way that when your working days are over some one who knows you well may be able to say of you: "He is not a plutocrat; he is not leaving to his children any great accumulation of stocks and bonds by means of which they will be able to live in idleness on the labor of future generations. But look at his farm; see the fertile meadows where once were swamps; see the new forest clothing the once barren hillside; see the growing crops and fine farm buildings; see the splendid herds and flocks that enrich the pastures; look at the records that tell of the fruits and grains he has developed, of the pests he has stamped out; his own farm will sustain four times as much life to-day as when he began to till it, and every farmer in the land is his debtor. And see what he has made of himself. He is the brightest man in the county; these studies and experiments of his have been quickening his intellect and leading his mind out into many fruitful fields of knowledge and culture, and all these gains he has been free to share with all his neighbors; if you want to know what kind of a man he is, ask them. He is the heart and soul of all neighborhood life; he has done more than any other man to promote good will and friendship in the countryside and to make it a pleasant place for men and women and boys and girls to live." If something like that can be said about you when the end comes, then it will be clear that the foundations laid here in the University have been well built upon; that to-day's commencement was the bright beginning of a glorious career; that you have made yourself an example of a thoroughly educated man.

It would be easy to show how the same law holds in every other lawful calling. When the relation of the calling to the common good is recognized and emphasized, and when the calling is heartily pursued with that end in view — to make it as efficient as It can be made in the service of the commonwealth — the individuality developed must be high and strong and fine.

In some callings the fact that the man gets his best development in and by means of his work is so plain that it hardly needs to be stated. In the case of a teacher or of a minister of the Gospel, for instance, the purpose of doing one's work well, and the purpose of making the most of one's self can hardly be separated in thought. For myself I know that I have gained all the power I possess in the earnest endeavor to do my work well; to understand and meet the intellectual and spiritual and social needs of my fellow men. The college and the divinity school can help a little in laying foundations, but most of what any competent minister knows he gets in living contact with human beings, in helping men and women to be friends with God and friends with one another, in trying to bring heaven to earth. Any man who will give himself to that work patiently and diligently will have some fair chance to be a pretty well educated man.

Not less true is it that the physician's occupation links him with the common weal. His business in life is to do good; that is kept steadily before his mind. Through his work not only is his intellect invigorated but his sympathies and affections are given abundant exercise. For this reason the educational opportunity which his work affords him is of the finest and highest sort.

What shall we say of the work of the lawyer? I fear that we cannot say so much. The popular conception of the lawyer's function is altogether different from the popular conception of the physician's function. The suggestion that the doctor's business in life is to do good would be commonplace. The suggestion that the lawyer's business in life is to do good would be received with merriment by the unthinking crowd. It must be admitted that the modern practice of law does not always keep the ethical and social aspects of the lawyer's calling in high relief. The common conception is, no doubt, that the practice of law is essentially warfare, to which the maxim, "Everything is fair in war," may be legitimately applied. The lawyer, in the estimation of the populace, is a kind of mercenary gladiator, who is ready, for a fee, to help those who seek injustice or wrong; whose skill is often employed in showing transgressors how they may evade the law or escape its just penalty. It must be confessed that there are a good many lawyers in this country whose estimation of the nature of their calling, as their conduct shows, is not different from that of the populace. Some of them occupy conspicuous positions and have made great fortunes by the services which they have rendered to combinations of predatory wealth. The enormous creations of fictitious capital which are crushing the life out of the industries of the land, and which are liable to result one of these days in a national tragedy the like of which history has never witnessed, are largely the work of astute lawyers. The nation has had no worse enemies than the lawyers who have worked out the manifold schemes by which the strong are enabled to prey upon the weak.

When the lawyer's calling is so conceived and so followed, we can hardly think of it as affording an educational opportunity. Lawyers of this class are not educated by their work, they are de-educated; they may acquire a kind of wolfish cunning, but their better nature is dwarfed and crippled by such unsocial and traitorous practices. They are adroit men, resourceful men, masterful men, but we could not call them great men.

But there have been lawyers — there are lawyers — who do not so conceive their calling, and who could no more get their own consent to help men practice injustice than they could persuade themselves to poison their neighbor's well or set his house on fire.

Mr. Winston Churchill, in one of his stories, invents for us a lawyer who had made a large reputation by legitimate practice in St. Louis, and who, when he was called to New York to be chief adviser of one of the great trusts, quietly but positively declined a position ofi'ering him a salary of one hundred thousand dollars, on the ground that "a lawyer who hired himself out to enable one man to take advantage of another, prostituted his talents." There are such men, outside of story books. Abraham Lincoln was such a lawyer, as all the traditions agree. It was because he was such a lawyer that he rose to the mental and moral stature which made him the greatest American. He got his education, and it was a splendid education, in his work. There in that country law practice, in living contact with all sorts and conditions of men, holding steadily before his mind the great ideals of justice, integrity, freedom and good will to men, he developed an intellect and built up a character which qualified him to be, in the great crisis of our national life, the leader of the nation. The practice of the law, as Lincoln practiced it, affords a great opportunity for the development of the highest manhood. There is no better field for the exercise of the highest qualities of human nature than that which is open to a lawyer who regards his calling as a social function, and aims to make his daily work tributary to the common good. Such a lawyer will never advise a client to prosecute or defend an unjust claim; in all civil cases he will make sure that the cause which he espouses is the cause of righteousness. He is an officer of the law, and to the law, not to his client, his supreme allegiance is due. There are many things that he can do for honest clients, to protect them in their rights, to see that they get justice, to interpret and apply the laws which regulate their conduct, and in all this he is teaching respect for the law, which is the safeguard of freedom, and helping to make life and property secure. Beyond this it is his business, as an officer of the law, to study its workings, to note its defects, to find out how it can be made more simple and more equitable; how to prevent its being used as the shelter of rascality and the instrument of plunder; how to make it more and more the handmaid of liberty and the safeguard of well-being. So conceived and so followed, there is no more liberalizing, no more ennobling business on earth than the practice of the law; there is no occupation in which a man can grow faster, or win a more symmetrical and lustrous manhood. I will not promise the man who practices law after that manner that he will get any hundred thousand dollar salaries; the predacious classes will have no use for him; but I think that he may hope for a decent livelihood; that he may win and hold the love and honor of his fellow citizens, and that he may come to his end with a good consciousness of having left the world better than he found it.

It would be interesting to follow this analysis through all the vocations, but that would take a book. Let me speak of only two more, in both of which human faculties find large scope, and in which, if they were rightly conceived and used, the educational opportunity would be most inspiring.

The first is the railway business. The vast proportion to which this business has grown, the enormous magnitude of the systems in which it is organized, makes one doubt whether it ought to be or can much longer be entrusted to any authority less supreme than that of the commonwealth. But as things are now the business is under private management; and the policy of every great railroad system is shaped and guided by a few men — often by one man. What I am thinking of is the immense educational opportunity that comes to the man or the men on whom this responsibility rests.

To a very large extent the welfare of the community depends on the railways; they are the arteries of communication through which the life blood of commerce flows; if they are free and unobstructed the health of the nation is secure; if they are clogged or closed morbid conditions immediately appear. Few kinds of public service are, therefore, more important than that which is rendered by the manager of the great railway. The comfort, the safety, the prosperity, the well-being of the community are largely in his keeping. If he is permitted to regard this as his business, to be conducted by himself according to his own pleasure and for his own profit, he will exert tremendous power over the life and the liberty of the people. Whom he will he may set up, and whom he will he may put down. By slight and secret discriminations he may give one shipper or one community the advantage over another, enhancing the gains of some and sapping the resources of others. And where there Is no favoritism, the business may be so conducted as to be burdensome to the community; the railroad may be loaded with fictitious debts, the Interest of which must be paid by the public; for It Is quite possible for railway managers to devote the larger part of their energy to the manipulation of the finances, greatly neglecting the practical management of the business. I have heard bitter complaints from subordinate railway officials that their chiefs were more concerned about the stock market than about transportation; that far too much of the railway business was done on Wall street. It is easy to point out systems in which the deterioration of the service is traceable to this cause. When the railway Is, in the manager's thought, mainly a mill for the grinding out of what are known as securities, and the railway business is largely the reorganization of properties and the multiplication of debts and the floating of new issues, and all the manifold and exciting diversions of frenzied finance, the educational opportunity of the railway manager is not apt to be an inspiring one. That is not the kind of soil in which the finest manhood is apt to take root. The men who get their principal education in that school are not great men. They are great graspers, of course — great bosses, great buccaneers — but not great men. These operations of high finance have their root in unalloyed egoism; there is not a glimmer of consideration for the public good in any such transactions: many of them are barefaced robbery. It would be a grotesque conceit that men engaged in such occupations were in the way of developing their manhood. It is wolfhood, not manhood, to which they are reaching forth.