But they are wrong. The world is more than a game of cards. History is more than a record of gambling operations. Fidelity is more than selfish belief in the accuracy of another man's predictions. To a community which has no higher ideals than these, destruction is approaching rapidly. If it were true, as some metaphysicians tell us, that all action is necessarily selfish, the only difference being that some people admit their selfishness, others try to conceal it from the rest of the world, and a few go so far as to conceal it from themselves-the whole social order would centuries ago have gone to pieces. If it were true, as a large section of the community seems to believe, that a man's success is measured by the money and the offices which he can command, or that the test of a good education is to be found in the fact that it fits a man to make money and to get offices, the American Republic would be fast approaching its end.

In the face of conditions like these, we need to insist more than ever before on the possibility—nay, on the absolute duty-of that devotion to ideals which underlies social order and social progress. You will have failed to learn the best lesson of your college life unless you have caught that spirit which teaches you to value money and offices and other symbols of success for the sake of the possibilities of service which they represent, and to despise the man who thinks of the money or offices rather than of the use he can make of them. It is this way of estimating success which makes a man a gentleman in his dealings with others, which makes him a patriot when his country calls for his services, which makes him a Christian in his conception of life and his ideals of daily living. These are the things which count in the long run. If you value the world simply for what you can get out of it, be assured that the world will in turn estimate your value to it by what it can get out of you. A man who sets his ambition in such a narrow frame may have followers in prosperity, but not in adversity. He can secure plenty of sycophants, but no friends. That man, on the other hand, who values the world for what he can put into it; who deals courteous

ly with his associates, patriotically with his country, and who, under whatsoever creed or form, has that spirit of devotion to an ideal which is the essential thing in religion that man makes himself part of a world which is bound together by higher motives than the hope of material success. If you pursue truth, people will be true to you, and you will help to make them truer to all their ideals. If you love others, others will love you, and you will help to teach them a wider charity in all their dealings with the world. If you take the honors and emoluments of your leadership, not as a privilege of your own, but as a trust to be consecrated to the Lord, even as David poured out upon the rocks the water that represented the lifeblood of his followers, then may you be sure that each man who was devoted before will be doubly devoted thereafter, and will find, brought home to his heart, the true meaning of success in life, as no material prosperity or intellectual argument could bring it. "The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." Such has proved itself for nearly two thousand years. May it be our privilege still to preach this gospel of self-sacrificing action, and still to share in revealing the meaning of this gospel to the generations which are to come.

ELOQUENCE*

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

An Extract

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterward it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact. The orator is thereby an orator, that he keeps his feet ever on a fact. Thus only is he invincible. (No gifts, no graces, no power of wit or learning or illustration will make any amends for want of this. All audiences are just to this point. Fame of voice or of rhetoric will carry people a few times to hear a speaker; but they soon begin to ask, "What is he driving at?" and if this man does not stand for anything, he will be deserted. (A good upholder of anything which they believe, a fact-speaker of any kind, they will long follow; but a pause in the speaker's own character is very properly a loss of attraction. The preacher enumerates his classes of men, and I do not find my place therein; I suspect, then, that no man does. Everything is my cousin; and while he speaks things, I feel that he is touching some of my relations, and I am uneasy; but while he deals in words, we are released from attention. If you would lift me, you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me, you must be free. If you would correct my false view of facts-hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I can not go back from the new conviction.

The power of Chatham, of Pericles, of Luther, rested on this strength of character, which, because it did not and could not fear any body, made nothing of their antagonists, and became sometimes exquisitely provoking and sometimes terrific to these.

*From "Society and Solitude," Riverside or Centenary_Edition, and kind permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston.

We are slenderly furnished with anecdotes of these men, nor can we help ourselves by those heavy books in which their discourses are reported. Some of them were writers, like Burke; but most of them were not, and no record at all adequate of their fame remains. Besides, what is best is lost the fiery life of the moment. But the conditions for eloquence always exist. It is always dying out of famous places and appearing in corners. Wherever the polarities meet, wherever the fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, come in direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the spark will pass. The resistance to slavery in this country has been a fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connection by which it drew to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight, yet sufficient, party organization if offered, reenforced the city with new blood from the woods and mountains. Wild men, John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of nature in the heart of commercial capitals. They send us every year some piece of aboriginal strength, some tough oak-stick of a man who is not to be silenced or insulted or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they-one who mobs the mob-some sturdy countryman, on whom neither money, nor politeness, nor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats, make any impression. He is fit to meet the barroom wits and bullies; he is a wit and a bully himself, and something more: he is a graduate of the plow, and the stub-hoe, and the bushwhacker; knows all the secrets of swamp and snowbank, and has nothing to learn of labor or poverty, or the rough of farming. His hard head went through, in childhood, the drill of Calvinism, with text and mortification, so that he stands in the New England assembly a purer bit of New England than any, and flings his sarcasms right and left. He has not only the documents in his pocket to answer all cavils and to prove all his positions, but he has the eternal reason in his head. This man scornfully renounces your civil organizationscounty, or city, or governor, or army-is his own navy and artillery, judge and jury, legislature and executive. He

has learned his lessons in a bitter school. Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gantlet of the mobs.

He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight. Let him see that his speech is not different from action that when he has spoken he has not done nothing, nor done wrong, but has cleared his own skirts, has engaged himself to wholesome exertion. Let him look on opposition as opportunity. He can not be defeated or put down. There is a principle of resurrection in him, an immortality of purpose. Men are averse and hostile, to give value to their suffrages. It is not the people that are in fault for not being convinced, but he that can not convince them. He should mold them, armed as he is with the reason and love which are also the core of their nature. He is not to neutralize their opposition, but he is to convert them into fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.

The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment. It is what is called affirmative truth, and has the property of invigorating the hearer; and it conveys a hint of our eternity, when he feels himself addrest on grounds which will remain when everything else is taken, and which have no trace of time or place or party. Everything hostile is stricken down in the presence of the sentiments; their majesty is felt by the most obdurate. It is observable that as soon as one acts for large masses, the moral element will and must be allowed for, will and must work; and the men least accustomed to appeal to these sentiments invariably recall them when they address nations. Napoleon, even, must accept and use it as he can.

It is only to these simple strokes that the highest power belongs-when a weak human hand touches, point by point, the eternal beams and rafters on which the whole structure of nature and society is laid. In this tossing sea of delusion we feel with our feet the adamant; in this dominion of chance we find a principle of permanence. For I do not accept that definition of Socrates, that the office of his