Alumni Oration

"Alumni Oration." University Monthly 37, 6 (May 1918):179-184. (UA Case 67a, Box 1)

George H. Locke, chief librarian of Toronto University, delivered the alumni oration at the University. His subject was "The Disciplining of a Nation." He dealt to a large extent with conditions arising out of the great war, and the address, which was very interesting, was as follows:

Professor William James, the eminent psychologist of Harvard, in an essay published two years before the Great War, said: "So far war has been the only force that can discipline the whole community." He lived long enough to see this terrible war commence and to see at least part of his implied prophecy fulfilled.

We were living, not merely at peace with the world, but at ease in the world. The quest of the material was broken only in spots by isolated outbursts of philanthropy, when men who had acquired such an amount of riches as was almost burdensome, gave part of it to movements which were designed to alleviate the suffering or increase the happiness of portions of the world.

We are moving towards an organization of life which placed the conduct of affairs in the hands of a few, so that legislation was working from the top downwards, instead from the bottom upward, as is essential in democracy. We confounded administration with legislation, a sin from which we are not yet free. Were there time I should like to enlarge upon this, what I think is a vital point, whether in the conduct of a nation, a municipality or even a school system. Legislation must come from the people if we are to be a democracy, but administration must be carried out by experts hired by the legislators to carry out the will of the people and free from legislative interference.

We were the devotees of experience and we spoke admiringly of "years of service." We were believers in the fallacious gospel embodied in the saying: "We learn to do by doing," and we left out of account the whole question of whether there was intelligence in the doing. In other words we were becoming worshippers, whether we knew it or not, of system, with which we often associated that fetish word "efficiency." "The line of least resistance" was the favorite way of travelling, and while we may have bemoaned the lack of interest and red blood in others, we confined our efforts to "armchair criticism" and were at ease in Zion. We proved to our own satisfaction that there could be no war, that the great interests, the banker, money lender, international trade and the rights of nations made such a contingency absurd, and most absurd of all and held up to public ridicule was the person who saw clouds gathering in the international sky.

Then the cloud suddenly burst, the storm was on us, war was declared, and we were face to face with a thoroughly organized and well equipped force of men having a definite object, and headed by those who had thrown away all the restrictions of honor and were out for conquest.

And how did we meet the crisis? Our machinery of experience was of a kind not useful in the face of an educated and prepared enemy, and indeed we were fettered by our own experiences. There were blunders, confusion and contradictions and we stemmed the first onset by sheer individual bravery.

"This was the little old army, the 'Contemptibles'.
'Those in the day heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages, and are dead.
Their shoulders held the heavens suspended,
They stood, and earth's foundations stay,
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay."

Then we recognized that we were in a struggle in which experience was not the great thing needful, but youth, with its imagination, hope and energy. We were to put an engine and a rudder in the old ship so that it could be driven and directed, not merely floated.

This is the war of the young man and young women. It needs the strength and vigor of youth to bear its hardships, but more than that it needs the facile brain of youth to meet the unexpected situations devised by an educated enemy. In this war we have for the first time the recognition of the Intelligence Department of the Army, that which tells us whither we are going, what is the disposition of the enemy's forces, photographs the ground in front of us and makes a topographical survey of the country so that we can fight intelligently; if it is true that the army marches on its stomach it is equally true that it fights with its brain. We were thrilled in the Canadian Club in Toronto by the Archbishop of New York when he described the way in which a young graduate of the Engineering School of our University who had gone over with the Canadian Contingent and who soon became the head of the Intelligence Department of the Second Imperial Army, had so thoroughly mapped out the portion of the country around Messines through his accurate aerial photographs and surveys that our armies won that great battle.

What is a college education? What does college do for a boy? True it cannot make silk purses out of a sows’ ears, that familiar saying of some of our bromidic friends. But it can find a use for sows' ears, and anyhow silk purses are not the only useful commodity in a community. You will remember perhaps what Gordon Graham said to his son in the course of discussion of the benefits of college education to the boy entering business life: "Colleges don't make fools; they only develop them. This boy would have been a fool even if he had not gone to college, but he would have been a different kind of a fool."

College makes a boy resourceful, takes him from the bashfulness of youth which makes him hesitate to try—the characteristic which has prevented so many men from becoming successful. It enables him to discover himself, and the greatest discovery in the world, and makes him then discover and respect his fellows. Isn't that what the war has done for us as a nation? We have discovered ourselves and discovered one another. We are being disciplined as a nation by war and being brought to the place which the crisis in a boy's life, the college struggle, brings to him. We have dropped most of our petty quarrelling, social and political; we have ceased to dispute concerning points of difference in Christian doctrine and discipline; we have seen the folly of taking ourselves and our circumstances too seriously; there has been a commingling of all classes in what we call "war work," and out of this has developed a new and sympathetic understanding which will make for a better citizenship, whether in the municipality, the province or the nation.

And if this war has been full of sacrifice—and the sacrifice of youth, with its promise, its future full of dreams for him as well as for his parents who watched his development with pride, if this struggle in which youth has taken the brunt of direction as well as execution that the rights of the small and the weak might be respected—that chivalrous ideal that thrills the youthful soul—if the women have closed up the ranks at home that industry and production may not suffer, and have gone abroad to alleviate human suffering—if all this has been done to make the world safe for democracy, to use the happy phrase of President Wilson, is there not a duty that falls to us at home to make preparations against the time when this war shall have ceased and we must be prepared for the problems of peace!

Are you and I ready for peace? War weary, the sense of grief in our personal losses of relatives and friends, and the feeling of sorrow over the devastated homes, makes us long that peace may come, and we are bending every effort to bring about that most desired of all human consummations.

Peace is not a static thing; it is not a state which we immediately fall into, it is a process of reconstruction with heavy responsibilities. It is a crisis as was the war, and are we to be as unprepared to meet the problems involved in it as we were to anticipate and provide solutions for the problems thrust upon us by the war? Is there to be a muddling period in the early days of peace? Here again I think we shall have to call youth to our councils, as we did eventually in the war, and settle the problems unfettered by experience.

What are problems of peace? We shall have hundreds of thousands of men coming to our country who have been well fed, well cared for, well disciplined. Those who are fortunate enough to escape wounds which incapacitate them for work, will be diluted into the population and must find work to do. They have been living in a great social world and will find it difficult to adjust themselves to the individual life in a small world.

You will remember that Kipling said of the man from the South African war:

"Things 'ave transpired which made me learn
The side and meanin' of the game
I did no more than others did
I don't know where the change began.
I started as an average kid,
I finished as a thinking man.
"So 'ath it come to me—not pride,
Nor yet conceit, but on the ’ole
(If such a term may be applied),
The makin's of a bloomin' soul
But now discharged I fall away
To do with little things again,
Gawd 'oo knows all I cannot say,
Look after me in Thamesfontein."

How much more will it be from the great war?

They were well fed in the army and well cared for. There was a regular income for the family at home, and now the state steps aside and the families becomes again its own support.

The manufacturers, whose works have developed so largely because of war supplies, will have to cease this production and the problem will be to find uses in the service of peace for this machinery and for three hundreds of thousands of employees who were on "war work" that they may not be dependent upon the state.

Already we are discussing the key industries—what they are and how they can be diverted into peace production. I think that sometimes in the discussion of whether steel, agricultural implements, or agriculture are the great key industries, we forget that the greatest key industry of all is education, the fitting of girls and boys, who now more than ever are the hope of our nation, to become resourceful and intelligent citizen! England sees this and the first great movement towards the reconstruction of the nation for peace is the bill passed in the House of Commons by which they have appropriated millions of pounds to the end that every child may be offered the opportunity of enjoying that form of education most adapted to fashioning its qualities to the highest use and that no child in England will be out of school training until he or she is 18. It is absolutely compulsory for full time until the completion of the fourteenth year, and eight hours a week then until the eighteenth year is finished.

This is the greatest bit of progress England has ever seen undertaken, because they believe that if they are a democracy they must be an educated democracy and have a harmonious operation of the best brains of all classes working unselfishly for the common good. It is contemporaneous and related to the electoral reform which established adult suffrage for man and woman.

There is going to be no muddling though in matters of the mind and we are to have in England a Minister, not of "Schooling," but of "Child Welfare."

Here is where England has taken the lead and, with the approbation of all classes, she has pledged herself to the reorganization and reconstruction of education as her first great peace problem. What are we doing in this matter? Are we to be behind our Mother, or are we to sit down in our complacent, satisfied fashion, which is where England was, and content ourselves, as we have been doing, in turning out a high average of men, but few leaders? If ever in its history, now is the time when Canada needs leaders of thought and action, men of genius, and such men are never found in complacent, self-satisfied, average surroundings, nor developed under a centralized and highly developed system of education.

And so I could go on and tell you how regularity of employment and production—the prime condition of social safety—must be provided; how the consumer must be protected, and surplus profits accrue to the general good; how state control of public utilities has its dangers as well as its excellencies and must be studied carefully; how the increased food production in rural districts is dependent upon the labour supply which in turn is dependent upon proper housing; to the end that we may have in peace the culture described by Mr. Asquith in strong contrast to the kulture of William of Germany.

"To be open minded; to struggle against preconceptions and hold them in due subjection; to keep the avenues of intelligence free and unlocked; to take pains that the scales of the judgment shall be always even and fair; to welcome new truths when they have proved their title despite the havoc they make of old and cherished beliefs."

These may sound commonplace qualities, but experience shows that in practice they are the rarest of all.