Page images
PDF
EPUB

have ever stood in the past. It makes it possible to maintain an equality of political rights and obligations in the midst of advancing civilization. This equality is always a precarious thing in any community where work is regarded solely as a task or burden to be shifted as far as possible on to other shoulders. In such a community the strongest will always seeks to impose this burden upon the weakest; and this effort, so far as it is successful, will cause a separation into social classes. The obligation to work becomes a badge of inferiority; the right to play becomes an exclusive privilege of the few. This separation into classes, so fatal to real democracy, has in the past been avoided only in those cases where nature was so niggardly as to deprive all men of the chance to play and render the existence of leisure impossible, or where religious Puritanism was so rigid as to lead all members of the community voluntarily to renounce the chance for such leisure and the opportunities for improvement which come with it.

Under an advancing civilization the former alternative is done away with and the latter becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Improvement in the arts of life, at Athens or Rome or Florence, meant loss of democratic spirit to the community as a whole, because people had not learned to combine work and play, and therefore separated themselves into working classes and leisure classes as soon as leisure came into existence at all. But if we have learned aright this greatest lesson of the Nineteenth century, democracy in America can escape this danger. If work and play are mingled one with another; if service becomes in the popular mind not a badge of inferiority, but a means of self-development and enjoyment; then it lies in our power to realize, as the world has never realized before, the possibilities of government by the people. [Applause.]

Our thanks are due to those who have brought this combination within reach of their fellow men, not alone for the pleasure which they have directly given, nor for the work which they have made directly possible, but for the stimulus which they have given to a new conception of the relations between work and play, which will make the Twentieth century greater and better than the Nine

teenth. Whether they have identified themselves with better methods of education in school and college, which help to give work the vigor and spontaneity of play, or with better methods of recreation in after life, which give play the unselfishness and permanent value of work, they have in either case contributed to an expansion of our conceptions and a consolidation of our ideas greater far in historic importance than all other movements of expansion. and consolidation, whether in the world of science, of business, or of politics. [Applause.]

[graphic][ocr errors][subsumed]

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

"WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?"

[Baccalaureate address by Edward Everett Hale, clergyman, author, leader in many religious, educational, civic, and philanthropic movements (born in Boston, Mass., April 3, 1822; -), delivered at the Commencement of Cornell University, June 12, 1881, and repeated at the Commencement of Antioch College, June 22, 1881.]

Two or three hundred colleges of America send forth their graduates upon the country this summer. The largest will give degrees to two hundred or more, the smallest to one or two. That would be a high estimate which supposed that six thousand graduates were this summer added to the little company of the liberally educated men of the land. That little company starts at tremendous odds, if we count them by numbers only, in the effort for which all its members have been educated, to maintain the Idea. It is enrolled to maintain in the land the sense of Spirit, of Spiritual Law and of the Eternal Realities; in the face of smoke and dust and the things that perish in the using; in the face of those empirical observations which are called Physical Laws; in the face of man's wish to heap up in bulk the visible materials for future greed, indolence, and ease.

We shall be taught this summer by the more careless part of the public press that the supply thus afforded of educated men is much greater than the demand. A certain education is needed before a man can write a paragraph for a newspaper, and the more ignorant of the men who have achieved that standard are always for warning the rest of mankind that there is no more room. But Mr. Webster's great word is more true. "There is always

601

« PreviousContinue »