The Function of Scholarship.

A word also to the students. Athletics are good; study is even better; and best of all is the development of the type of character for the lack of which, in an individual, as in a nation, no amount of brilliancy of mind or strength of body will atone. Harvard must do more than produce students: yet, after all, she will fall immeasurably short of her duty and her opportunity unless she produces a great number of true students, of true scholars.

Moreover, let the students remember that in the long run in the field of study judgment must be rendered upon the quantity of first-class work produced in the way of productive scholarship, and that no amount of second-class work can atone for failure in the college to produce this first-class work. A course of study is of little worth if it tends to deaden individual initiative and cramp scholars so that they only work in the ruts worn deep by many predecessors.

American scholarship will be judged, not by the quantity of routine work produced by routine workers, but by, the small amount of first class output of those who, in whatever branch stand in in the first rank. No industry in combination and in combination will ever take the place of this first-hand original work, this productive and creative work, whether in science, in art, in literature. The greatest special function of a college, as distinguished from its general function of producing good citizenship, should be so to shape conditions as to put a premium upon the development of productive scholarship, of the creative mind, in any form of intellectual work. The men whose chief concern lies with the work of the student in study should bear this fact ever before them.

The Duties of Citizenship.

So much for what I have to say to you purely as Harvard men. Now, a word which applies to you merely as it applies to all college men, to all men in this country who have received the benefits of a college education, and what I have to say on this topic can properly be said under the auspices of your Political Club. You here when you graduate will take up many kinds of work; but, there is one work in which all of you should take part simply as good American citizens, and that is the work of self-government. Remember, in the first place, that to take part in the work of government does not in the least mean of necessity to hold office. It means to take an intelligent, disinterested and practical part in the everyday duties of the average citizen, of the citizen who is not a faddist or a doctrinaire, but who abhors corruption and dislikes inefficiency; who wishes to see decent government prevail at home, with genuine equality of opportunity for all men so far as it can be brought about, and who wishes, as far as foreign matters are concerned, to see this nation treat all other nations, great and small with respect, and if need be with generosity, and at the same time show herself able to protect herself by her own might from any wrong at the hands of any outside power. Each man here should feel that he has no excuse, as a citizen in a democratic republic like ours, if he fails to do his part in the government. It is not only his right to do so, but his duty; his duty both to the nation and to himself. Each man should feel that, if he fails in this, he is not only failing in his duty, but is showing himself in a contemptible light. A man may neglect his political duties because he is too lazy, too selfish, too shortsighted, or too timid; but whatever the reason may be it is certainly an unworthy reason, and it shows either a weakness or worse than a weakness in the man's character. Above all, you college men, remember that if your education, the pleasant lives you lead, make you too fastidious, too sensitive to take part in the rough hurly-burly of the actual work of the world, if you became overcultivated, so over-refined that you cannot do the hard work of practical polities, then you had better never have been educated at all.

The weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community. In a republic like ours the governing class is composed of the strong men who take the trouble to do the work of government; and if you are too timid or too fastidious or too careless to do your part in this work, then you forfeit your right to be considered one of the governing and you become one of the governed instead--one of the driven cattle of the political arena. I want you to feel that it is not merely your right to take part in politics, not merely your duty to the state, but that it is demanded by your own self-respect, unless you are content to acknowledge that you are until to govern yourself and have to submit to the rule of somebody else as a master--and this is what it means if you do not do your own part in the government. Like most other things of value, education is good only in so far as it is used aright, and if it is misused or if it causes the owner to be so puffed up with pride as to make him misestimate the relative values of things it becomes a harm and not a benefit. There are a few things less desirable than the arid cultivation, the learning and refinement which lead merely to that intellectual conceit which makes a man in a democratic community like ours hold himself aloof from his fellows and pride himself upon the weakness which he mistakes for supercilious strength.

Misuse of Education.

Small is the use of those educated men who in after life meet no one but themselves, and gather in parlors to discuss wrong conditions which they do not understand and to advocate remedies which have the prime defect of being unworkable. The judgment on practical affairs, political and social, of educated men who keep aloof from the conditions of practical life, is apt to be valueless to those other men who do really wage effective war against the forces of baseness and evil. From the political standpoint, education is a harm and not a benefit to the men whom it serves as an excuse for refusing to mingle with their fellows and for standing aloof from the broad sweep of our national life in a curiously impotent spirit of fancied superiority. The political wrong-headedness of such men is quite as great as that of wholly uneducated men, and no people could be less trust-worthy as critics and advisers. The educated man who seeks to console himself for his own lack of the robust qualities to bring success in American politics by moaning over the degeneracy of the times, instead of trying to better them, by railing at the men who do the actual work of political life, instead of trying himself to do the work, is a poor creature, and, so far as his feeble powers avail, is a damage and not a help to the community. You may come far short of this disagreeable standard and still be a rather useless member of society. Your education, your cultivation, will not help you if you make the mistake of thinking that is a substitute for instead of an addition to those qualities which in the struggle of life bring success to the ordinary man without your advantages.

Your college training confers no privilege upon you save as tested by the use you make of it. It puts upon you the obligation to show yourselves better able to do certain things than your fellows who have not had your advantages. If it has served merely to make you believe that you are to be excused from effort in after life, that you are to be excused from contact with the actual world of men and events, then it will prove a curse and not a blessing.

If on the other hand you treat your education as a weapon the more in your hands, a weapon to fit you to do better in the hard struggle of effort and not as excusing you in any way from taking part in practical fashion in that struggle, then it will be a benefit to you. Let each of you college men remember in after life that in the fundamentals he is very much like his fellows who have not been to college, and that if he is to achieve results, instead of confining himself exclusively to disparagement of other men who achieve them, he must manage to come to some kind of working agreement with these fellows of his there are times of course when it may be the highest duty of a citizen to stand alone, or practically alone. But if this is a man's normal attitude if normally he is unable to work in combination with a considerable body of his fellows it is safe to set him down as unfit for useful service in a democracy. In popular government results worth having can only be achieved by men who combine worthy ideals with practical good sense, who are resolute to accomplish good purposes, but who