Graduation Address

"Address to Graduating Class" University Monthly 29, 8 (June 1910): 211-214. (UA Case 67, Box 1)

"You are aware that the senate has decreed that in the present year, and in each year hereafter, there shall be a special address to the graduating class. The first to undertake that duty, I am conscious that I venture out upon an unknown journey; that in a sense I must set my own pace, and that any attempt to give you advice, to make suggestions, to utter warnings, must be done without support from preceding experiences or from forms hallowed by time and consecrated by usage.

"After a life of some, perhaps many, vicissitudes—religious, political, financial—our university today is in the proud position of being able to send out its graduates fitted to occupy important places in the judiciary and in the political institutions of the country, to fill chancellorships and lead classes in sister universities, to undertake and direct practical work in the construction of railroads, to explore the wide fields which forest protection opens before them, and generally to fit them to encounter and overcome the obstacles and difficulties which eager youth must meet on the journey of life in the great world beyond these quiet walls.

"To you all I may, however, safely say that you leave this university to day to enter upon the active duties of life or to take your part, be it great or limited, in the affairs at a period notable for activity and agitation to a greater degree than in any epoch preceding. You are going out at a time when there is a tremendous effort to bring about readjustment of the affairs of the world upon new principles and practices, an attempt to recognize society upon a basis widely different from that upon which it is organized at the present hour; at a time when there is a conflict of forces of a strenuous character, not simply as regards men and women in their personal and civil character, but in their intellectual and mental relationship and association with the world in which they live. There may be dangers in the fight though there be joy in the conflict." Senator Ellis then went on to tell at some length of the struggle that girls had in former years in order to be allowed to study in Edinburgh, Geneva and many other large universities.

"In some lands women have secured the right to vote. In some they are entitled to sit in parliament. It is not likely that the end is yet, and we may fairly expect to find throughout civilized lands a greater extension of woman's political powers. To secure that is a part of the stress and struggle of these days. We look with deep emotion upon the upheaval of a great nation in the effort to secure or extend its political, national, religions, intellectual freedom. How can we look other than with like emotion when the movement is one of half of the human race, the awakening of women all over the globe, to secure the right which they naturally have to enter the professions, to enjoy the possession of property, to all the privileges of citizenship. Therefore, I say to you, young ladies, that you appear to me to be going out from here to enter on the active duties of life at a remarkable period in mental development and in human history. We need but to look back upon what has been accomplished in the last half century for your sex and by your sex to reach the conclusion which I have reached. There cannot be any other forecast if we judge the future by the present and by the immediate past. One word more. The training which you have been undergoing in the past four years has been very largely intellectual training. You have acquired some facts, you have learned something of human history, and you have probably indulged in some speculations as to your destiny. Pioneer women in the great fields which women now occupy have suffered much in their crusades, but by their labor and their self-sacrifice they have conferred lasting benefit upon humanity. The work is not yet ended. Guides and leaders with hopeful hearts and with well regulated minds will continue to be needed. Duty and destiny may summon you to the strife, and what you have learned in this university may be your armor and your weapons in the pathway of duty."

Gentlemen, observations made to your classmates regarding tendencies of these times apply as well to you. You, as well as they, are entering upon the activities of life at a notable epoch. Some of you have made professional work—engineering—your study. These will be able to look with eager, perhaps envious, eyes upon one enterprise recently competed, the great dam at Assouam on the Nile, the work of a young Canadian engineer, Sir Percy Girouard; upon another work, the most stupendous undertaking of any age, the canal of the Isthmus of Panama, a work which is to split in twain this American continent to make South America an island, to affect materially the time for the circumnavigation of the globe, to enlarge the world of commerce, and to speed the traveller on many of his expeditions; and you will be in time to take part in the construction of the Quebec bridge, the greatest piece of bridge building yet undertaken, and one whose construction will test the ingenuity, the capacity, the skill of the modern bridge builder. The works which I have named do not by any means exhaust the opportunities of the engineer. The impounding of water for other purposes than the purpose of navigation is only in its infancy. Heat, light, power are in ever increasing demand. To this end the mighty St. Lawrence is to be dammed. I am not quite sure as to all the purposes for which the waters of our own Tobique are to be impounded. At the mouth of the noble river which flows almost at the foot of this University are the reversing falls, awaiting the magic touch of the engineer who will turn them to practical use. I hope he will be able to do it without injuriously affecting the beauty of the scenery. Electrical engineering is only beginning to show what a world power it is destined to become. Others of you are devoting yourselves to other scientific fields; for all of you the art of aviation is yet practically alive with opportunities to solve a profound problem and to win immortal fame. The fields of natural science, and of forestry are ever enlarging for the practical worker.

If I were to express a personal hope as respects you, it would be the hope that love for this University and kindly recollection of its usefulness to you may ever remain fresh in your memories, that you will find time to come back here on many pleasant occasions to inspire by your presence and your success those who may then be in the place in which you are today; and that, should your ships come home laden with treasure, you will cheerfully help to extend the foundations which, limited as they are, have been of such service to you, and which are substantial enough to build upon satisfactorily for increased advantage to those who follow.