I think this foundation of ours a quite unexampled thing. Surely never were the bases of such a structure as this has become and was meant to be, laid by a community of men so poor, in circumstances so unprecedented, under what seemed so sullen and averted stars. The colony was in danger of an Indian war, was in the throes of that antinomian controversy which threatened its very existence, yet the leaders of opinion on both sides were united in the resolve that sound learning and an educated clergy should never cease from among them or their descendants in the commonwealth they were building up. In the midst of such fears and such tumults Harvard college was born, and not the Marina herself had a more blusterous birth or a more chiding nativity. The prevision of those men must have been as clear as their faith was steadfast. Well they knew and had laid to heart the wise man's precept: "Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go, for she is thy life."

The fame and usefulness of all institutions of learning depend on the greatness of those who teach in them, and great teachers are almost rarer than great poets. We can lay claim to none such (I must not speak of the living) unless it be Agassiz, whom we adopted; but we have had many devoted and some eminent. It has not been their fault if they have not pushed farther forward the boundaries of knowledge. Our professors have been compelled by the necessities of the case (as we are apt to call things which we ought to reform but do not) to do too much of work not properly theirs, and that of a time so exacting as to consume the energy that might have been ample for higher service. They have been obliged to double the parts of professor and tutor. During the 17th century we have reason to think that the college kept pretty well up to the standard of its contemporary colleges in England, so far as its poverty would allow.

But the chief service, as it was the chief office of the college during all those years was to maintain and hand down the traditions of how excellent a thing learning was, even if the teaching were not always adequate by way of illustration.

It was a community without charm, or with a homely charm at best, and the life it led was visited by no muse even in dream. But it was the stuff out of which fortunate ancestors are made, and twenty-five years ago their sons showed in no diminished measure the qualities of the breed. In every household some brave boy was saying to his mother as Iphigenia to hers: "Thou borest me for all the Greeks, not for thyself alone." This hall commemorates them, but their story is written in headstones all over the land they saved.

To the teaching and example of those reverend men whom Harvard bred and then planted in every hamlet as pioneers and outposts of her doctrine, Massachusetts owes the better part of her moral and intellectual inheritance. They too were the progenitors of a numerous and valid race. My friend Dr. Holmes was, I believe, the first to point out how large a proportion of our men of light and leading sprang from their loins. The illustrious chief magistrate of the republic, who honors us with his presence here today, has ancestors italicized in our printed registers, and has shown himself worthy of his pedigree.

Let us, then, no longer look backward, but forward, as our fathers did when they laid our humble foundations in the wilderness. The motto first proposed for the college arms was, as you know, "Veritas," written across three open books. It was a noble one, and, if the full bearing was understood, as daring as it was noble. Perhaps it was discarded because an open book seemed hardly the fittest symbol for what is so hard to find, and if ever we fancy we have found it, so hard to decipher and to translate into our own language and life. Plato's question still murmurs in the ear of every thoughtful, and Montaigne's in that of every honest man. The motto finally substituted for that, "Christo et Ecclesiae," is, when rightly interpreted, the same, for it means that we are to devote ourselves to the highest conception we have of truth, and to the preaching of it. Fortunately the Sphinx proposes her conundrums to us one at a time and at intervals proportioned to our wits.

The questions for us are: In what sense are we become a university? And then, if we become so, what and to what and to what end should a university aim to teach now and here in this America of ours whose meaning no man can yet comprehend? And, when we have settled what it is best to teach, comes the further question, How are we to teach it? Whether with an eye to its effect on developing character or personal availability, that is to say, to its effect in the conduct of life, or in the chances of getting a livlihood? Perhaps we shall find that we must have a care for both, and I cannot see why the two need be incompatible, but if they are, I should choose the former term of the alternative.

When President Walker, it must be now nearly 30 years ago, asked me, in common with their colleagues, what my notion of a university was, I answered: "A university is a place where nothing useful is taught; but a university is possible only where a man may get his livelihood by digging Sanscrit roots." What I meant was that the highest office of the somewhat complex thing so named, was to distribute the true bread of life, the "pane d'egli angeli," as Dante called it, and to breed an appetite for it; but that it should also have the means and appliances for teaching everything, as the mediaeval universities aimed to do in their trivium and quadrivium. I had in mind the ideal and the practical sides of the institution, and was thinking also whether such an institution was practicable, and, if so, whether it was desirable in a country like this. I think eminently desirable, and if it be, what should be its chief function? I choose rather to hesitate my opinion than to assert it roundly. But some opinion I am bound to have, either my own or another man's, if I would be in the fashion, though I may not be wholly satisfied with the one or the other. Opinions are "as handy" to borrow our Yankee proverb "as a pocket in a shirt," and, I may add, as hard to be come at. I hope, then, that the day will come when a competent professor may lecture here also for three years on the first three vowels of the Roman alphabet, and find fit audience, though few, I hope the day may never come when the weightier matters of a language, namely, such parts of its literature as have overcome death by reason of their wisdom and of the beauty in which it is incarnated, such parts as are universal by reason of their civilizing properties, their power to elevate and fortify the mind - I hope the day may never come when these are not predominant in the teaching given here. Let the humanities be maintained undiminished in their ancient right. Leave in their traditional pre-eminence those arts that were rightly called liberal, those studies that kindle the imagination and through it irritate the reason, that manumitted the modern mind, those in which the brains of finist temper have found alike their stimulus and their repose, taught by them that the power of intellect is heightened in proportion as it is made gracious by measure and symmetry. Give us science, too, but give first of all, and last of all the science that ennobles life and makes it generous.

By far the most important change that has been introduced into the theory and practice of our teaching here by the new position in which we find ourselves has been that of the elective or voluntary system of studies. We have justified ourselves by the familiar proverb that one man may lead a horse to water, but ten can't make him drink. Proverbs are excellent things, but we should not let even proverbs bully us. They are the wisdom of the understanding, not of the higher reason. There is another animal which even Pindar could compliment only on the spindle side of his pedigree, and which ten men couldn't lead to water, much less make him drink when they got him thither. Are we not trying to force university forms into college methods too narrow for them? There is some danger that the elective system may be pushed too far and too fast. There are not a few who think that it has gone too far already, And they think so because we are in process of transformation, still in the hobble dehoy period, not having ceased to be college, nor yet having reached the full manhood of a university, so that we speak with that ambiguous voice, half bass, half treble, or mixed of both, which is proper to a certain stage of adolescence. We are trying to do two things with one tool, and that tool not specially adapted to either. Are our students old enough thoroughly to understand the import of the choice they are called on to make, and if old enough, are they wise enough? Shall their parents make the choice for them? I am not sure thot even parents are so wise as the unbroken experience and practice of mankind. We are comforted by being told that in this we are only complying with what is called the spirit of the age, which may be, after all, only a finer name for the mischievous goblin known to our forefathers as Puck. I have seen several spirits of the age, in my time, of very different voices, and guiding in very different directions, but unanimous in their propensity to land us in the mire at last.

I am familiar with the arguments for making the study of Greek, especially, a matter of choice or chance. I admit their plausibility and the honesty of those who urge them. I should be willing, also, to admit that the study of the ancient languages without the hope or the prospect of going on to what they contain, would be useful only as a form of intellectual gymnastics. Even so, they would be serviceable as the higher mathematics to most of us. But I think that a wise teacher should adapt his tasks to the highest, and not to the lowest, capacities of the taught. For those lower, also, they would not be wholly without profit. One of the arguments against the compulsory study of Greek, namely, that it is wiser to give our time to modern languages and modern history, than to dead languages and ancient history, involves, I think, a verbal fallacy. Only those languages can properly be called dead in which nothing living has been written. If the classic languages are dead, they yet speak to us, and with a clearer voice than that of any living tongue.

Harvard has done much by raising its standard to force upward that also of the preparatory schools. The leaven thus infused will, let us hope, filter gradually downward, till it raises a ferment in the lower grades as well. What we need more than anything else is to increase the number of our highly cultivated men and thoroughly trained minds; for these, wherever they go, are sure to carry with them, consciously or not, the seeds of sounder thinking and of higher ideas. The only way in which our civilization can be maintained, even at the level it has reached; the only way in which that level can be made more general and be raised higher is by bringing the influence of the more cultivated to bear with more energy and directness on the less cultivated, and by opening more inlets to those indirect influences which make for refinement of mind and body. Democracy must show its capacity for producing not a higher average man, but the highest possible type of manhood in all its manifold varieties, or it is a failure. No matter what it does for the body if it do not in some sort satisfy that inextinguishable passion of the soul for something that lifts life away from prose, from the common and the vulgar, it is a failure. Unless it know how to make itself gracious and winning, it is a failure. Has it done this? Is it doing this? Or trying to do it? Not yet, I think, if one may judge that commonplace of our newspapers that an American who stays long enough in Europe is sure to find his own country unendurable when he comes back. This is not true, if I may judge from some little experience, but it is interesting as imploying a certain consciousness, which is of the most hopeful augury. But we must not be impatient; it is a far cry from the dwellers in caves to even such civilization as we have achieved. I am conscious that life has been trying to civilize me for now nearly 70 years with what seem to me very inadequate results. We cannot afford to wait, but the race can. And when I speak of civilization I mean those things that tend to develop the moral forces of man, and not merely to quicken his aesthetic sensibility, though there is often a nearer relation between the two than is popularly believed.

The tendency of a prosperous democracy, and hitherto we have had little to do but prosper, is toward an overweening confidence in itself and its homemade methods, an over estimate of material success, and a corresponding indifference to the doings of the mind. The popular ideal of success seems to be more than ever before, the accumulation of riches. I say "seems," for it may be only because the opportunities are greater. I am not ignorant that wealth is the great fertilizer of civilization, and of the arts that beautify it. The very names of civilization and politeness show that the refinement of manners which made the arts possible is the birth of cities where wealth earliest accumulated because it found itself secure. Wealth may be an excellent thing, it means power, it means leisure, it means liberty.

But these, divorced from culture, that is, from intelligent purpose, become the very mockery of their own essence, not goods, but evils fatal to their possessor, and bring with them, like the Nibelung hoard, a doom instead of a blessing. I am saddened when I see our success as a nation measured by the number of acres under tillage, or of bushels of wheat exported, for the real value of a country must be weighed in scales more delicate than the balance of trade. The gardens of Sicily are empty now, but the bees from all climes still fetch honey from the tiny garden plot of Theocritus. On a map of the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, Athens with a finger tip, and neither of them figures in the Prices Current, but they still it in the thought and action of every civilized man. Did not Dante cover with his hood all that was Italy 600 years ago? And, if we go back a century, where was Germany unless in Weimar? Material success is good, but only as the necessary preliminary of better things. The measure of a nation's true success is the amount it has contributed to the thought, the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual hope and consolation of mankind.

Our scheme should be adapted to the wants of the majority of undergraduates, to the objects that drew them hither, and to such training as will make the most of them after they come- Special aptitudes are sure to take care of themselves, but the latent possibilities of the average mind can only be discovered by experiment in many directions. When I speak of the average mind, I do no mean that the courses of study should be adapted to the average level intelligence, but to the highest, for in these matters it is wiser to grade upward than downward, since the best is the only thing that is good enough. To keep the wing-footed down to the place of the leaden-soled, disheartens the one without in the least encouraging the other.

In the college proper, I repeat - for it is the birthday of the college that we love and of which we are proud - let it continue to give such a training as will fit the rich to be trusted with riches and the poor to withstand the temptations of poverty. Give to history, give to political economy the ample verge the times demand, but with no detriment to those liberal arts which have formed open-minded men and good citizens in the past, nor have lost the skill to form them. Let it be our hope to make a gentleman of every youth who is put under our charge, not a conventional gentleman, but a man of culture, a man of intellectual resource, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul. This we have tried to do in the past; this let us try to do in the future.