Page images
PDF
EPUB

account the depreciation of the battleship or armored cruiser, the entire cost of the thirty-eight battleships for a single year is greater than the administration of the entire American system of higher education.

Is it not painfully manifest that the cost of war constitutes a mighty argument for the economic mind of the student?

Moreover, I am inclined to believe that the very difficulties belonging to the triumph of our great cause constitute ground for its closer relationship to the college man. The college man wishes, as well as needs, a hard job. The easy task, the rosy opportunity, makes no appeal. He is like Garibaldi's soldiers, who, when the choice was once offered them by the commander to surrender to ease and safety, chose hardship and peril. The Boxer revolution in China was followed by hundreds of applications from college men and women to be sent forth to China to take the place of the martyrs. The difficulties in the progress of the great cause are of every sort and condition. Industrial narrowness and commercial greed, military and political ambitions, sectional zeal, national jealousy, the sensitiveness of each nation in matters of national honor, the glamour of the good and the beautiful under the sentiment of patriotism, the historic honor attending death for one's country, the ease of creating war scares among the people, the looseness of the organization of the higher forces of the world all these conditions and more pile up into a Pelion on Ossa as a part of the difficulties standing in the progress of our great movement. But such difficulties inspire rather than deter. The student says, "I will; therefore I can." He also says, "I can; therefore

[ocr errors]

I will." He knows that the forces fighting for him are more than those that fight against him, strong as these are. Man in his noblest relationships, the songs of the poet (the best interpreter, from Homer and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of logic all these and more are to him inspirations, and strengthen him in his great quest. He is a knight of the Holy Grail that is filled from the river of the water of life.

[ocr errors]

Perhaps, furthermore, the cause makes its most impressive appeal to the collegian in its internationalism, or interpatriotism. This internationalism addresses itself to his own international appreciation. The collegian is a patriot. He is a patriot not only against a foreign country but often against certain parts of his own country loyal to the interests which he believes a section. of his own nation properly represents. The German students have fought for their Fatherland; they have also fought for the liberal sentiments of their own land against reactionary movements, as in 1848. In the American Civil War no brighter record is to be found. than is embodied in the tablets in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, or in Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina. But the collegian possesses the international sense, and possesses it more and more deeply with each passing decade. His is the international mind, interpreting phenomena in terms of common justice. His is the international heart, feeling the universal joys and sorrows, woes and exultations. His is the international will, seeking to do good to all men. His is the international conscience, weighing right and duty in the

scales of divine humanity. Whatever interpretation he gives to the sayings of Paul that God made all nations. of men to dwell on the face of the earth and has fixed the bounds of their habitation, whether he stops with the words "the face of the earth" or whether he goes on to interpret the limitations of their residence, it is nevertheless true that his mind, his heart, his will, and his conscience do go out toward all nations in their endeavor to realize their highest racial and interracial peace. No man is a foreigner to him.

-

I have, I trust, said enough to intimate that these orations arise out of a natural and normal condition of the student mind and heart. They also, in subject as well as in origin, bear a special message of cheer and hopefulness to all who have a good will toward the collegian and toward the great cause for which we all are laboring.

CHARLES F. THWING

WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

CLEVELAND, OHIO

President

PRIZE ORATIONS

THE INTERCOLLEGIATE PEACE

ASSOCIATION

Origin. In the autumn of 1904 President Noah E. Byers of Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana, a Mennonite college, invited to a conference representatives of all the colleges in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio that are conducted by those religious denominations that advocate nonresistance as one of their essential religious principles. Such bodies are the Mennonites, the Dunkards, and the Quakers. In the spring of 1905 a more specific invitation was sent out, with the result that a conference was held at Goshen College, June 22-23, 1905. This date is important, since the call of President Byers for such a conference was the first active step ever taken to interest the college world, and particularly undergraduates, in the great movement for world peace founded upon the idea of human brotherhood. While the conference did not take place until a month after President Gilman had suggested to the Lake Mohonk Conference, in May, 1905, that it should extend its peace work to the colleges and universities, yet the call for the conference was several months prior to the action of the Mohonk Conference.

Eight institutions were represented at this conference Goshen, Earlham, Central Mennonite, Ashland,

« PreviousContinue »