Graduation Address

"Oration of Judge King" University Monthly VII, 9 (June 1888): 11-14. (UA Case 67, Box 1)

When I accepted your kind invitation the day of performance was so distant that a duty seemed a pleasure, but as I dragged the lengthening chain of unfilled obligation, I came to regard the approach of the day with some degree of apprehension.

This is however, a day of pleasure to many. It is such to the ingenious youths who make by it a year’s advance in dignities and immunities of student life. Abide in these pleasant hours. Hasten not through the embowered paths, for beyond are the sunburnt and wind-swept plains.

To those who, to day, complete their term of study here, and who now stand at the door "with forward and reverted eyes" to say farewell to the scenes amidst which they have passed four years, it is a day of pleasure, but of "pleasing pain."

Ah, happy hours; ah, pleasing shade;
Ah, fields beloved in vain.

To the communities of relatives and friends who look upon you with expectancy, the day is one of pride and hope; while to the body of people throughout the country who know how much of its future is with its educated youth, the annual recurrence of college festivals is a subject of profound interest.

It is not entirely because of the training you have received that this is so, but as well because we have a right to think that the scholars of our college are in a great part picked men; that the facts of their being here is some proof of that and this being so it is rightfully judged that after four years of work upon such promising material the result must represent a rightly finished product.

What has the university a right to expect of the young men it annually sends forth? If it has done its duty it has a right to expect much.

It perhaps out not to expect high scholarship to be generally maintained and independent research prosecuted, for the conditions of life amongst us are not such as to favor this, but still these may be looked for an ought to be occasionally found. Neither is it to be expected that all will demonstrate to a doubting world the superior advantages of scholastic training for, unfortunately, a certain proportion of failure seems inevitable and there will always be those whose waste of opportunity and talent will furnish material for discrediting the methods of their training.

Nor ought it to expect to find its graduates all successful in life in the sense in which the term is generally used, for amidst the schemes of education industriously propounded so far, no one has yet thought of founding colleges to teach youths how to get rich.

At the same time a liberal education is wanting in important particulars if it mains of disables it possessors in discharge of the primary duty of earning a living. No amount of training satisfies if the lesson is not learned that the young man should first and foremost make good his footing in the world as a condition of progress in it. This is attained by being able to do something which the world wants. Obedience to law is a moral and physical duty and you must satisfy the law which requires you to feed and clothe and house yourself. All healthy organisms are able to protect themselves. You must keep afloat before you can go ahead.

It is because it is thought that the training of the colleges does not help towards this, or at least is weak on this side, that many do not see the advantages of a liberal education. Their condemnation is expressed by calling it unpractical. But collegiate education should be above all things practical. If it could be said of it, that it is not practicable its condemnation would be nigh. What then? Is the course of studies to be laid down with a view of imparting the greatest amount of so-called practical knowledge and information? Is the training that most immediately and distinctly bears upon the future calling to be that which we are at aim at? Is a collection of odds and ends of learning the miscellaneous property of the memory to be the object of education?

The apprentice with the mechanic is first taught the nature and care of the tools, and how to use them, and upon the greater or less degree of skill in the use of these largely depends the degree of skill he reaches in the practice of his art and trade. When hand and eye and mind are trained to their use it does not matter to him whether he is called upon to make a table of a chair. Add to this a mind and eye for his work---what artists call "feeling" ---let him known good work when he sees it and know wherein it is good, and be content with nothing but good work and you have the master workman who needeth not to be ashamed.

Your work, gentlemen and scholars of the university lies in the region of ideas and life, and your instrument is the mind. How are you to get the most perfect instrument? How are your workers with it to accomplish the most by it? Is not that the problem? And is not the answer to it likely to be most practical in its effects? I believe that you are giving it the right answer in keeping to the simple lines of the time-honored and time-tested methods. I hope you may persevere in it and not be drawn into a futile attempt to teach everything in the four short years of a young man’s life. If it is said that your training should be such as to be of most use in after life, you will of course say, yes. But if it is further said that the subjects of study should be such as bear most distinctly on the work of after life, you will answer that your duty is to perfect the instrument and to train the workers in the use of it. Besides, here is a young man who comes to you at 16 or 18 years of age. How are you to know what he is to be in after life? How does he himself know? Of what especial value is the notion of an untrained and undeveloped youth entering your college as to his future course? Is he to be required then to select his future career in life and study for it? Suppose (as most likely to be the case) he makes a mistake? His special training in one direction is all misapplied. He is caught in a shift of wind with his ballast all up on one side.

On the other hand, I am convinced that there is no special study that enters into the practical courses of life, and which may be deemed specially useful in such courses, that may not readily be mastered by any young man, with an aptitude at all for it, who passes through college well trained in the general arts course.

Do the lovers of the practical realize how much they owe to the men that dwell upon the abstract? The abstract leads art into the concrete by a thousand paths. It is at the centre and heart: that to which all the forces subsisting in the concrete tend. Edison in his laboratory talks a language and thinks thoughts unintelligible to thousands. How much does trade owe to abstractions of chemistry? How much navigation, and the skill that hangs highways over broad rivers and roaring whirlpools, to the higher mathematics, of which latter science it has been finely said:--

"It begins in the midst of self-evident propositions, and its pathways is rendered luminous by successive revelations of immutable, universal truth."

Your course is different from that commented on. You take the youthful mind; discipline it by control and by regulated and severe study; you set it in full light of the past and forbid it to mistake its own fancies for special illuminations. It sees that there were kings before Agamemnon. You bathe in the invigorating tides of time. By linguistic studies, mathematics, science and philosophy you subject it to various tests and exercises it in varied movements. The faculties involved in close observation, concentration, analysis, reasoning, the practical imagination that presents various possibilities of actions and the practical judgment that decides upon the most correct, are all brought successively into sustained and vigorous action. If all has been well done, your youth steps into the arena prepared for any encounter. He will be apt at attack and defence; he will guard and give ground and hit and wrestle and throw. I am afraid to appear to encourage a present revival; but the great Plato who makes one of his characters ask: "Do you not believe that one pugilist trained in the most perfect manner to his work would find it easy to fight with two rich and fat men who do not understand boxing?"

To the youth trained as we have described, whose intellect, sensibilities and will are harmoniously developed, it will not matter whether he is called to enter one or another intellectual exertion. He summons his whole trained faculties and forces to the work to which any of them is called.

Further, as bearing on the practical character of your work, I would ask: Is not morality practical? Is not conduct practical? I hope I am not putting the scholastic life too high, but it seems to me that next to the institution of the family and the church is the discipline found in the well managed college. What a discipline is conduct in the course and nature of the studies, the fixing the mind upon serious and elevating subjects, the training of the reflective and reasoning powers, habits of attention, precision, and the love of truth. Add to this the counsel and examples of professors I have in mind the profound feelings of respect and admiration that 30 years ago pervaded a college in the United States regarding one who was to all who came under his teachings the ideal of high ability, of simplicity, dignity, unfailing courtesy and goodness. He drew the minds of young men to him as a magnet. He rarely said much in the way of direct counsel, but he would occasionally dwell on the conservative power of good habits in securing a steady and daily strengthening of the heart in all virtue. Such was Professor Alverson and such he continued to be until removed by death in middle life—the ablest mathematician then known in the denomination of which he was a distinguished ornament.

The 10 years succeeding the period when school life ordinarily closes are the most important because most dangerous. They mark the period of freedom from natural restraints and first contact with alien associations, and hence are years when peculiar temptations are likely to be encountered. I do not propose to slay the slain by confuting again the theory as to the sowing of wild oats. All I wish to do is add my judgment from my observations of life. I think that if they are to be sown, at all, the safest time is after a man has turned 40, but in the dangerous period between 20 and 30—the Goodwin sands of how many a soul---tell me whether a youth is not better furnished whose life has been spent in the sober and serious pursuits of the scholastic life.

In one of his dialogues Plato makes Socrates discourse of what he calls courage, "What kind of safe-keeping?" asks the interlocutor, when Socrates goes on to discourse of it thus: "The safe-keeping of the opinion created by law, through education, which teaches what things and what kind of things are to be fed; and when I speak of keeping it safe, without interruption, I meant that it was to be thoroughly preserved, alike in moments of pain and pleasure, of desire and fear, and never to be cast away." And if you like, I will illustrate it by a comparison, which seems to me an apt one. "I should like it, says Ideimantus, "Well then," says Socrates, you know that dyers, when they wish to dye wool so as to give it the true sea purple, first select from the numerous colors one variety---that of white wool and then subject it to much preparatory dressing, that it may take the color as brilliantly as possible, after which they proceed to dye it; and when the wool has been dyed on his system, its color is indelible, and no washing, either with or without soap, can rob it of its brilliancy. But when this course has not been pursued, you know the results, whether this or any other color be dyed without previous preparation."

And then the interlocutor says in his helplessly acquiescent fashion. "I know that the dye works out in a ridiculous way." Then Socrates goes on to say in words for the sake of which I quoted the passage: "You may understand from this what we were laboring to the best of our ability to bring about when we were selecting our soldiers and training them in gymnastics. Imagine that we were only contriving how they might best be wrought upon to take, as it were thye color of the laws in order that their opinion concerning things to be feared and on all other subjects might be indelible owing to their congenial nature and appropriate training, and that their color might not be washed out by such terribly efficacious detergents as pleasure which works more powerfully then any potash or lye, and pain and tear and desire which are more potent than any other solvent in the world. This power, therefore, to hold fast continually to the right and lawful opinion concerning things to be feared and things not to be feared, I define to be courage and call it by that name."

Call it by what name you will who will say it is not highest wisdom? It is a kin to St. Paul’s injunction to "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." Not necessarily to prove all things by passing all things through your own experience. To prove arsenic do not pass it through your blood---nor vice by indulging in it, nor unbelief by cherishing it; but by the tests your training makes you familiar with, by test of history, observation, experience, comparison, analysis, subject everything to its appropriate tests and when you get the good hold fast to it. "Prove all things---hold fast that which is good."

Who, I may ask, ought to be the more to hold fast continually they right and lawful opinion concerning things to be feared and things not to be geared in the testing days when the terribly efficacious detergents of pleasure and desire are at work upon the youthful soul just entering active life? And if, in such case, the young man who has spent several years in the close discipline of the schools, has an advantage over his less fortunate brethren, is not this a touching upon the practical? One of the most real fires of the soul and the church is materialism of life, of thought, of feeling. There is the materialism of thought. It denies immortality to man and existence to God. Then there is materialism in life, which lives as if there was neither immortality nor God. Riches, luxury, power, rank, are allies of this form of materialism. The sins that carry the work of Cain on their brow---envy, jealousy, hatred, uncharitableness, lust, lying, thieving, murder, these are known wherever they are seen. No one gets into company with these without knowing it. But luxury and wealth, and power, and the love of these things have equal danger for the soul. How different the verdict of history upon such things from the verdict of the present. We are captivated by wealth, but you cannot put wealth and luxury into a story and make it attractive. And all the wealthy men that ever lived fade away, grow dim and die in history before the ineffaceable brightness of one suffering saint. When does the moral judgment correct the present judgment which is controlled by interest. Can it well be doubted that the scholastic training is an aid to morality, by supplying reasons and motives against the dominancy of the present?

The claims of colleges, upon the support of those responsible for the care of the young were never in my judgment put better than by one of the earlier presidents of the Wesleyan University of Connecticut:---"The incessant transitions of childhood and the stubborn immobility of middle life and old age are alike unfavorable to the formation and establishment of permanent mental habits. Between these two points in the mind’s progress and history lies the region of fertility and sunshine and showers, where culture is omnipotent and where, in the absence of skilful culture, a luxuriant growth, however worthless and pernicious, springs up unbidden."

Was ever more impressive picture given of the seed plot of eternity? I am encouraged to give a few sentences more:-

"It is no exaggeration to say of a college peopled with eager youth that at this eminently forming age that it is a very focus of intense and effective influences, independent of all that is taught and all that is learned, causes are here vigorously at work that are to model the character and give it form and pressure for all future time. It is, indeed, the appointed time of change, when pliable impressible boyhood gives place to the harder sinew and more rigid features of the man."

I answer the question, then with which I began by saying that the university, if it has done its work well, has a right to expect of its graduates (and of you young men who to day pass into these ranks "that they live soberly and righteously in this present world, that they prove all things, and hold fast that which is good, and that they hold fast continually the right and lawful opinion concerning things to be feared and things not to be feared."

Judge King continued at considerably length his peroration being a master piece word painting. His oration was cheered to the echo.