Page images
PDF
EPUB

guidance. The object of all good education is to develop just these powers-accuracy in observation, quickness and certainty in seizing upon the main points of a new subject, and discrimination in separating the trivial from the important in great masses of facts. This is what liberal education does for the physician, the lawyer, the minister, and the scientist. This is what it can do also for the man of business; to give a mental power is one of the main ends of the higher education. Is not active business a field in which mental power finds full play? Again, education imparts knowledge, and who has greater need to know economics, history, and natural science than the man of large business?

Further, liberal education develops a sense of right, duty, and honor; and more and more, in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor, as well as on good judgment. [Applause.] Education does this through the contemplation and study of the moral ideals of our race; not in drowsiness or dreaminess or in mere vague enjoyment of poetic and religious abstractions, but in the resolute purpose to apply spiritual ideals to actual life. The true university fosters ideals, but always to urge that they be put in practice in the real world. When the universities hold up before their youth the great Semitic ideals which were embodied in the Decalogue, they mean that those ideals should be applied in politics. When they teach their young men that Asiatic ideal of unknown antiquity, the Golden Rule, they mean that their disciples shall apply it to business; when they inculcate that comprehensive maxim of Christian ethics, "Ye are all members of one another," they mean that this moral principle is applicable to all human relations, whether between individuals, families, states, or nations. [Aplause.]

Now, there is no field of human activity in which ideals applied are of more value than in business. Again, higher education has always made great account of the power of expression in speech and writing, whence has arisen an opinion that liberal education must be less useful to the man of business than to the lawyer, or minister, because the business man has less need than they of this power. It seems to me that this view is no longer true. Have we

not all seen, in recent years, that leading men of business, particularly those who act for corporations, have great need of a highly trained power of clear and convincing expression? Business men seem to me to need, in speech and writing, all the Roman terseness and the French clearness; the graces and elegancies of literary style they may indeed dispense with, but not with the greater qualities of compactness, accuracy, and vigor. It is a liberal education indeed which teaches a youth of fair parts and reasonable industry to speak and write his native language strongly, accurately, and persuasively. That one attainment is sufficient reward for the whole long course of twelve years spent in liberal study. [Applause.]

But you may say: This is all theory; what are the facts with regard to the connection between higher education and successful business life? To investigate the results actually obtained in this respect by the American colleges during the past forty or fifty years would require the cooperation of a very large number of persons; for no satisfactory result could be reached which was not based on an intimate knowledge of the careers and personal fortunes of thousands of men who are in no sense public men. Business life does not necessarily bring a man before the public as the life of a lawyer, minister, or politician does: each individual can only report the facts which have fallen under his personal observation. My own class in Harvard College numbered eighty-nine at graduation. Eleven of that number, or one-eighth of the whole, have attained remarkable success in business-a larger proportion than have distinguished themselves to a corresponding degree in any other walk of life. [Applause.]

Among the young men who have graduated from Harvard University within forty years, I have seen many cases of rapid advancement from the bottom to the top of business corporations in great variety. A young man leaves college at twenty-three and goes into a cotton mill at the bottom; and in four years he is superintendent. Another lands in a Western city, three days after his graduation, without a dollar, and without a friend in the city, and ten years afterwards he is the owner of the best establishment for printing books in that city. A young

man six years out of college is superintendent of one of the largest woolen mills in the United States. Another, but a little older, is the manager of one of the most important steel works in the country.

These are but striking examples of a large class of facts. In eastern Massachusetts graduates of Harvard get greatly more than their due numerical proportion of the best places in banking, insurance, transportation, and manufacturing. This is the case not only in the old, wellestablished occupations, but in the new as well. For example, the president of the corporation which controls one of the newest industries in the world is a Harvard first scholar. I speak from no little personal observation. when I say that there is no more striking general fact about the graduates of Harvard during the past fifty years than their eminent success in business. From one-fifth to one-third of the members of the successive graduating classes ultimately go into business. The same is probably true of many another American college.

Finally, successful business men themselves give no doubtful answer to the question we are considering. I observe that successful business men, with the rarest exceptions, wish their sons to be educated to the highest point the sons can reach. No matter whether the father be himself an educated man or not; when his success in business has given him the means of educating his children he is sure to desire that they receive a liberal education whether they are going into business or not.

I should not worthily represent here the profession to which I belong if I did not say in closing that liberal education is an end in itself, apart from all its utilities and applications. When we teach a child to read, our primary aim is not to enable it to decipher a way-bill or a receipt, but to kindle its imagination, enlarge its vision, and open for it the avenues of knowledge. The same is true of liberal education in its utmost reach. Its chief objects for the individual are development, inspiration, and exaltation; the practical advantages which flow from it are incidental, not paramount.

For the community the institutions of higher education do a like service. They bring each successive generation

of youth up to levels of knowledge and righteousness which the preceding generation reached in their maturity. Public comfort, ease and wealth are doubtless promoted by them; but their true and sufficient ends are knowledge and righteousness. [Prolonged applause.]

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

[Address of Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist and poet (born in Boston, May 25, 1803; died in Concord, Mass., April 27, 1882), delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:-I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

« PreviousContinue »