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THE PRESENT OBLIGATIONS OF THE SCHOLAR.

This is the holy day of the educational year. As this period is the end of academic activity, so it is the Commencement of active and responsible life. It is the day when the scholar is married to his vocation. What could be more fitting than that this wedding festival should be held in the most glorious season of the year? The blossoms are commencing to be fruit; the voices of singing birds greet us wherever we go; the fragrance of new life is everywhere. By a kind of proscriptive custom the last week in June is coming to be to education what the last week in December is to religion. All over the land thousands are coming together with glad hearts to pay their annual tribute to the work that has been done and to crown with praises and with blessings the choicest fruits of the year.

To us who have come here today the season seems one of exceptional beauty. These hills have decked themselves with even more than their customary charms. These lakes hold up their mirrors to the surrounding scenes with even more than their accustomed pride. These trees and these lawns and these flowers seem to be rejoicing with more than their wonted vitality and gladness, for they have put on new smiles and a new splendor in recognition of these days.

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Within the last year the State has said to us "Well done, we are pleased with your stewardship; we will no longer give you the means of life simply from day to day, or from year to year, but we will enable you to plan your work broadly and largely in the full assurance that so long as you exercise care and wisdom in your trust you shall not fail of receiving our encouraging support." From this bountiful mother, we, her grateful children, are to receive no more than for the past years we have been receiving, but what we receive has been wisely and nobly relieved from the elements of uncertainty and contingency. In all our rejoicings of this day let us not forget this bountiful act of the bountiful mother of the University.

Indeed it seems to me that every thoughtful receiver of these benefactions must on this day of days reflect a little his own obligations in consequence of these munificent favors. Even the most unmathematical of you can easily estimate the amount of the obligation, so far as it can be measured in dollars and cents. It cannot be repaid in kind, but repaid in one way or another, it must be, if you are to discharge your just obligations.

A part of what you have received has come from the State and a part from the general government. You have shared the benefits of that fixed policy of the nation in providing each of the states with the means of supporting and encouraging education in all its grades. Wisconsin has been one of the most favored beneficiaries of that wise and liberal policy. The The state supplements this bequest with her own bounty and then transfers it all to her sons and daughters. It follows that your obligations are due directly to the State, and indirectly to the nation; to the University also, in so far as the institution has administered its trust beneficently and wisely, you are under obligations which I am sure you will not be slow to acknowledge and repay. How shall this debt be paid? This brings me to the subject I have chosen for to-day, namely:

THE PRESENT OBLIGATIONS OF THE SCHOLAR. The old ideal of the scholar was founded on conditions which have now ceased to exist. The schools of the Middle Ages were not connected directly with the State; but a body of learned men came together and offered their instruction for the fees they received, somewhat as is now done in many of the summer schools. If the names of great benefactors have been preserved it is not because they bound their beneficiaries with any lasting obligations to the State; but rather because in the name of education they reared monuments to themselves and to themselves have established the obligations of perpetual gratitude. William of Wyckham, Queen Margaret, Henry the Sixth, and scores of others responded nobly to the calls of the civilization of their times. Let it not be supposed that the period of large gifts for education began within our own time. Whoever goes into the college grounds at Eton and remembers how many of England's greatest men have there received their inspiration and their impulse, will feel something akin to Gray's benediction:

"Ye antique spires, ye antique towers

That crown the watery glade,

Where grateful science still adores

Her Henry's holy shade;"

or, better still whoever happens to go into King's Chapel at Cambridge and recalls his Wordsworth can hardly help saying:

"Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,

With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned,

Albeit labouring for a scanty band

Of white-robed Scholars only - this immense

And glorious Work of fine intelligence!

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely-calculated less or more;

So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
Self-poised and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering -- and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality."

But these thoughts, glorious, great, and inspiring as they are, seem to carry with them no pressing sense of direct obligation to the State. They give a certain emphasis and beauty to the idea of the scholar, but it is of the scholar as represented in the old plays. He was ever the consumer, and never the producer. He absorbed, and if he ever gave out what he had absorbed it was in the form of some abstruse contribution to knowledge rather than anything to the practical affairs of every day life. You think of the way the scholar was represented upon the stage. He was looked upon as practically a worthless member of society. He was perhaps the dried up husband of a termagant and was everywhere the victim of ridicule and practical jokes. However well he could read Sophocles and Pindar, he could scarcely put on his own cravat or tie his own shoe. John Henry Newman, in his volume entitled "Idea of a University," elaborately promulgated the notion that a university is not a place for investigating and discovering new truth, but a place for absorbing and perpetuating that which is old. Even James Russell Lowell confessed, almost with a kind of pride, that he once defined a university as "a place where nothing useful is taught." Such notions were the natural fruit of the old method of endowment. If at that time the universities owed any special obligation to any institution whatever it was to the institution of the church. If there was any obligation on the part of the scholar, that obligation was to the church, and this feeling carried with it the moral obligation which the church always inculcated. So long as the church and the state were one, the scholar supported the state in defending its old abuses rather than in advocating ameliorations and reforms. He was true to Newman's "Idea." Every student of English history knows that the scholarship of Oxford has uniformly supported old and sanctified wrongs rather than modern and beneficent reforms, and if of late there have been signs of a change it must be

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