to institutions founded or to be founded at vast ex-
pense? Even granting this to be theoretically right,
the practical difficulties are insurmountable. A col-
lege which is far behind its contemporaries will lose
its students, and especially its best ones. If one lib-
erty is allowed at Cornell, and not at Williams, our
students who hesitated which to prefer will gravitate
to the college which most strongly attracts them.
The New England colleges must, I suspect, pro-
gress together. They must aim at a common general
standard ; they must build laboratories and observa-
tories, study archaeology together, follow out the law
of their destiny, in generous rivalry and earnest at-
tempts to do what is just and best for their students.
The New England colleges are descendants of the
English universities. Unlike the German gymnasia,
which are expanded Latin or high schools, they have
always had some elements of university freedom.
Their pupils are not school-boys, confined to their
school-desks; but young men, who come to different
class-rooms for instruction, and then go back to their
lodging for study. And the general development of
the English universities must influence that of the
New Eng-land colleg-e.
On the other hand, the conservatives may rely upon
our faculty not to be too radical in this matter. We
are more than twenty in number, and represent many
branches of knowledge. The classical instructors, the
philosophical and historical teachers, the mathema-
ticians and physicists, will take good care not to be
188 WILLIAMS COLLEGE.
overwhelmed by the representatives of the lighter
sciences and the easier languages; nor will English,
in spite of its future position as a world's language,
be permitted to drive out Latin and Greek, as the
Germanic barbarians who spoke its cognate tongues
destroyed tlie Roman Empire. The adventurous few
who wish, without Greek, to become bachelors of arts,
can, if need be, be disabused of their soft illusions by
the discipline of the Calculus, of Anglo-Saxon, of
Middle Hiofh Dutch, and the old French dialects. In
adjusting the studies to the altered times and states
of public opinion, the Faculty are subject to pressure
from both sides. The students are anxious for greater
freedom ; partly because a portion of them can really
make use of it ; and partly because others wish easier
studies, owing to the seemingly innate tendency to
intellectual inertia in some boys' natures.
To a certain extent the young men who can best
use their freedom go elsewhere ; and this deprives us
of many brilliant intellects. On the other hand, the
idlers we always have with us; and the men who
wish to do something else than college work. They
are not absent from the university near Boston, it
seems ; and it is supposed that no New England col-
lege is altogether without them. Any serious study
required of them impels them to ask for easier duties
or more freedom. But more liberty means more ex-
pense ; and the new electives asked for cannot always
be granted, unless the liberality of donors has made
it possible. Colleges are usually too poor for com-
plete realization of their ideals.
ADDRESS. 189
The future of the College can only be predicted
from observation of its tendencies and past history.
It has long maintained, here, among the hills, a high
standard of religion and morality. It has had men of
original thought among its presidents and professors,
men who preferred the right to external success. The
luxuriance and beauty of the nature around us here
has long stimulated professors and students to the
pursuit of the natural sciences ; classic and historical
learning has never been neglected, and has never been
in better and stronger hands than now ; and the num-
ber of students is not so enormous that the individuals
disappear in the mass, and are freed from the personal
influence of older and it is hoped wiser men, when
they are necessarily farther from home in most cases
than they would be in great colleges in or near great
cities.
The past twenty years have brought the College a
prosperity which has been faithfully employed for the
benefit of its students and of learning ; this prosperity
will doubtless help attract the means of giving larger
and still more varied opportunities, and to more young
men ; and the institution which its Alumni love so
heartily will go on in its quiet place as a college, side
by side with its sister institutions about it, advancing
into a fuller life and a more extended usefulness.
ADDRESS.
BY PRESIDENT G. STANLEY HALL.
T REMEMBER very distinctly the closing sentence
in my Commencement oration. It has a certain
appropriateness at this time. '' To thee, O future his-
torian, we commit the issues of the present hour."
The future historian is likely to consider this meet-
ing which we have had here this morning, which is
a new departure, so far as I know, in this country,
quite as worthy of record as any other event dur-
ing this notable week. While I cannot attempt to
sum up in a few moments the various points which
have been suggested, I will venture to give brief
expression to one or two thoughts which have been
strongest in my mind during the progress of this
meeting.
We are wandering in the wilderness, and have been
to a certain extent, it seems to me, in all matters of
higher education, ever since the beginning of the elec-
tive system. When we began we had a symmetrical,
seasoned, well-digested college curriculum. The only
other example of a course of education known in the
history of the world was known long before this
country was founded. It was the course of education
represented by the old trivium, quadrivium and quin-
ADDRESS. 191
drivium, which held their own for a thousand years,
by the " ratio studiorum " of the Jesuits, and also by
the schools which Charlemagne founded.
A good course of education ought to be the result
of the consummate wisdom of a civilization brought to
bear in order to short-circuit the steps by which the
young advance up to the frontier, and are able to
begin where their elders leave off. It ought to do
what biologists tell us generation does, ā short-circuit
the processes of growth, as ontogeny shortens and
abridges phylogeny, so that the embryo and the young
offspring of an animal, in a day or an hour, or perhaps
in a minute, goes through stages of growth which it
took the animal world a thousand years, and even
more, to find out for itself.
Since we lost that course, ā and it is rapidly being
lost, ā we have been wandering in the wilderness ;
and all these most promising attempts, admirable as
they are, have not by any means completely solved
the problem. On the other hand, I think there is a
general consensus that the great problem is yet before
us and that it must be solved by new methods, if not,
indeed, to some extent, by new men.
It would be presumptuous in me to attempt to sum
up the results of current discussion ; but, speaking
individually, I believe there are one or two landmarks
already apparent, and the first of these seems to me to
be that the progress of reform in education is from
above downward. In this country we have gone, to a
great extent, up to recent times, on the opposite theor}^.
Beginning with the primary school, or at least the col-
192 WILLIMIS COLLEGE.
lege, we have hoped that in the long results of time we
should see, to use Lowell's quotation from Milton,
" the tawny lion pawing to get free," ā the university
slowly emerging from the college. There is now a
general consensus that that view of education is wrong.
There has never been, I think, in all history a single
instance in which a real reform which was not super-
ficial began in the lower or in the intermediate schools.
It has been the best men, working with the best mate-
rial and with the best training, who have made the
great reforms. It is the universities that originate the
material of culture, and the colleges and lower schools
are the canals for its distribution. How is it in France,
in regard to that greatest educational revolution in
history, by which since 1876 the entire budget of that
country has been increased over seven hundred per
cent ? New institutions, new methods, new men, have
appeared on the scene as never before. It has all
been the work of half a dozen of the very best men,
who stand at the frontier, and who have some of them
actually written text-books as w^ell as gone into the
legislative halls to further tliis cause, assuming, with
Lavisse, that the highest statesmanship always must
culminate in education. So that is coming to be re-
cognized. It is only about eight years since I heard,
in the National Council of Education, the largest edu-
cational body we have in this country, a very bitter
discussion in the managing board as to whether col-
lege presidents and professors ought to be given much,
if any, place on the programme. It was said, *' We
teachers understand education, and they don't know
ADDRESS. 193
anything about it." Now, it is a very striking illustra-
tion of how rapidly the American people respond to a
good wholesome movement, in that now, on all these
programmes during the last three years, the majority
have been those who have come from the college
and university, and who have interested themselves
in the concerns of the intermediate and the grammar
schools ; and the great reform which I believe now
impends in the reconstruction of the grammar-school
course has been almost entirely the work of these men,
working from above downward.
The second thing that it seems to me is coming to
be almost generally recognized is the indispensable
necessity of a little research in as many places as pos-
sible. That has been so admirably brought out by
the papers this morning that I should only weaken
the points made if I dwelt upon it. But what is re-
search ? It is not such a difficult thing ; it does not
need the tiptoeing that we sometimes imagine ; it is
not necessary that one should know everything about
a science before he can add to the sum of it. The
radical growths that start out near the ground give
new suggestions of fundamental principles, and often
cause those who have not mastered all the departments
of their specialty to make real contributions to knowl-
edge. Besides, research brings into play the active
faculties ; it brings into play the power to do, in
addition to the mere power to know. So that if
research achieved absolutely nothing for the progress
of science, its trend is in the direction of what is now
shown to be the strongest and most educable part of
13
194 WILLIAMS COLLEGE.
man, namely, his active faculties. And not only that,
but it brings heat and light ; it is a sifting process
which we so much need. This reform in France, as
every one knows who is at all acquainted with it, con-
sisted in selecting the best professors from among the
bad or indifferent ones, giving them additional pay,
uniting them in this school of science, and then securing
some of the best scholars and giving them scholarships.
So, wherever there has been great reform made, there
has been a distinction between the average dry-as-dust
teacher and the progressive teacher, between the aver-
agre student who shirks work and the one who means
business. That is the line of demarcation between
those who go to college for study and those who go
for a good time, between those wlio teach as a trade
and those who love to teach ; and that reform I believe
original research is designed to bring forward.
There is all the difference in the world between the
professor who stands upon his dignity, and is a little
afraid of a close intimacy with his students lest it
should injure this preternatural dignity ; the professor
wlio keeps his students at arm's length, and too often
sterilizes talent, ā vaccinates his pupils, as it were,
against any serious love of learning so that they
will never have it in anything more than a chicken-
pox form, and the professor who stands on the
frontier of the subject, and has even made one seri-
ous effort in his life to contribute something to the
progress of knowledge, adding a single brick, how-
ever small, to the great sum of human attainment.
Such a man teaches and inspires a freedom and inde-
ADDRESS. 195
pendence which are republican to the core, which
give the student a sense of liberty and usefulness,
and of having" a place in the world, ā a sense which
sets free the emotional nature, and gives a man a
zest and a real interest in things. The two professors
are as far apart, as some writer has said, as the divinely
inspired researcher who brings down, as Prometheus
did, that fennel stalk in which was hidden the divine
gift of fire to men, and the old mullen-stalk professor
whom Theodore Winthrop describes, about whom he
saw a few students tamely and lazily buzzing, like
the bees about some old belated dried-up mullen stalk
in the sheep pasture. The difference is very great
between these two.
Then the third thing that I think is generally
recognized is, that there is a real difference between
university extension and university concentration, and
that the two must go hand in hand. No man ought
to preach unless he has a message ; and I do not know
but that we shall come to say some time that no per-
son ought to teach unless he has a message. Univer-
sity extension is an admirable thing; it has done a
great deal for educational institutions and for the
country, and I would not see its sphere limited in
the least ; but it is '^ sounding brass and tinkling
cymbals" unless it is linked very closely with uni-
versity concentration. In what consisted this great
reform in France! There, as you know, until it
began, everybody could attend anybody's lecture. I
have seen, as many of you have no doubt, the lecture-
room of a distinguished professor cleared out almost
196 WILLIAMS COLLEGE.
by a hand-organ in the street, or the marching by
of a company of soldiers. There was university ex-
tension to the point of university distension. But
wherein did this reform consist"? It consisted in
estabUshing Httle esoteric circles, which the Parisian
press criticised severely, and said was cloistering
knowledge again; it consisted in taking one vigor-
ous professor with a few picked students, and making
that the centre of a university, by excluding those
who were not fit. That is the way in which I be-
lieve university extension and university concentra-
tion should go together ; and it is a striking fact that
in the report of the French government a few years
ago, it was found that there had been far more of these
general courses given, with a larger attendance, than
there had been before these esoteric research courses
were adopted.
In fine, it seems to me that what we want to accom-
plish ā one thing at least ā by all these educational
reforms, is to bring the young men to the highest
possible degree of maturity in all their faculties, to
send them out to the world vigorous in body and
mind. The ideal reconstruction which Professor
Baumann has suggested to the German government
is, that the universities there make health their watch-
word in everything, and apply science only so far as
it favors health, ā the best development of the brain
and the body. That is going pretty far; but it is
a straw which shows how strongly the tide of the
best influence is setting toward the making of liealth
fundamental. If we can turn out a body of academic
ADDRESS. 197
youth who are fresh, eager, intense, and concentrated ;
who have some real and deeply rooted intellectual
interest; who go out fresh, not sterilized, not with
that dull, apathetic, cynical indifference which blights
almost everything that it touches ; men who do not go
out laden with knowledge which they have hardly
the strength to carry, but who have assimilated all
so that they produce something at once if they ever
produce it; if we remember in all this training of
youth that youth is the golden period of life, that the
best and the greatest work in the world has been done
by young men who were perhaps under or a little
over thirty years of age ; if we can succeed in bring-
ing in a kind of active, positive spirit, a spirit that is
fresh and eager and a little naive, no matter if there
is a little awkwardness ("Oh, for an awkward, green,
gawky Freshman ! " said Phillips Brooks, in one of his
last public addresses) ; if we can send out young men
with strong and eager intellectual enthusiasm, men
anxious to add something to the sum of human knowl-
edge, who will not be contented to get off some satire
or epigram or cynical paraphrase of some of the great
productions of human genius, ā then I think we shall
have taken a step forward toward the goal of bringing
talent and native wisdom to its fullest maturity. And
this is the end of all educational systems, and by this
standard they will all be judged in the end-
TUESDAY, OCTOBER TEKTH.
The main events of the last day of the Commem-
oration were the Procession, the Conferring of Degrees,
the Historical Oration, and the Luncheon.
SERVICES IN THE CONGREGATIONAL
CHURCH.
Mk. C. a. Davison, of the Board of Trustees, arose
and said: ā
The Centennial Committee have selected as the
presiding" officer of this occasion one of the oldest
and most honored of the Alumni, ā one who, born
almost within the shadow of these college walls, went
forth from it sixty years ago to enter upon a career
of distinguished professional and public service. His
form has been a familiar figure at our annual gather-
ings. He is with us to-day, with eye undimmed, with
natural and intellectual force unabated, and with his
old-time loyalty for the College. It is scarcely neces-
sary to introduce him to an audience of Williams men,
yet I take very great pleasure, brethren Alumni, in
presenting to you, as the presiding officer at this time,
the Hon. Martin I. Townsend, of tlie class of '33.
MK. TOWNSEND'S ADDRESS.
Sir Walter Scott, in his work entitled " Peveril of
the Peak," has put into the mouth of that entlmsiastic
Puritan, Bridgenorth, these words: "Amongst my
wanderings, the Transatlantic settlements have not
escaped me, ā more especially the country of New
202 WILLIAMS COLLEGE.
Eno-land, into which our native land has sliaken from
her lap, as a drunkard flings from him his treasures,
so much that is precious in the eyes of God and of
his angels." The men that settled New England emi-
grated largely from religious motives ; but they were
men of intelligence, men of reflection ; and when they
reached this land, as soon as they had provided for
the barest necessities of life they began to look about
them, and to locate institutions where Milton has
placed the fount of Siloah's brook, ā fast by the oracle
of God. In 1638, but eight years after the settlement
upon Massachusetts Bay, but eighteen years after the
ever-memorable landing at Plymouth, John Harvard,
imbued with the spirit that nerved his neighbors, made
that gift which led to the establishing of the noble
institution which bears his name. As time passed
on, this institution grew by degrees, until now, after
two hundred and fifty years, it has become the peer
of any institution on the other side of the water.
Yale has not been far behind, ā a little slower in
point of time, perhaps, but not slower in intellectual
progress ; Yale has been built up into an institu-
tion to-day w^iich is the peer of Harvard herself.
The benevolences of those New England settlers ā
that body of precious immigrants so dear in the
sight of God and his children, aided by others
who sympathized with them ā have built up insti-
tutions in the North and the West of very great
influence, and have raised at the same time a popu-
lation superior in intelligence and in good order to
any population that this world ever saw. In this
ADDRESS. 203
same spirit, Colonel Williams, in 1755, when Williams-
town, encased in its setting of mountains, was prac-
tically an unbroken wilderness, conceived the idea of
establishing- here an institution whose influence should
not only be felt locally for good, but should extend
throughout the world, and be efficient in the cause
of benevolence for all coming time. The story of
that gift, and of the influence which it has exerted in
the world, we have all gathered to hear. It will be
told to us by an eminent son of our Alma Mater, who
has won great distinction as an instructor in far-off
Kansas and Nebraska, James H. Canfield, Chancellor
of the University of Nebraska, whom I now have the
pleasure of introducing to you.
ORATION.
BY CHANCELLOK CANFIELD.
TF the biography of a man may find its proper initial
point a hundred years before his birth, the history
of an institution may well lay hold of a somewhat
remoter past. If the solution of problems of character,
the analysis of motives, the proper estimate of the
effects of temperament, the just and true judgment of
personality, call for careful inquiry as to pedigree and
inheritance ; we do not go far astray nor lose much
time when, in seeking the history of this institution of
learning, we turn to that century out of which came
the American spirit and all the strongest and best
traits of American life. Indeed, without some knowl-
edge of this, without even considerable knowledge of
this, we shall vainly search for the true meaning of
the enterprise which resulted in the founding of this
college ; and we shall often be at a loss to comprehend
the spirit that sustained it through both the earlier and
later years of limitation and embarrassment, of almost
downright wretchedness and want. Unless we can in
some measure comprehend all that stirred men in
those days of small beginnings, of little things, and
that kept alive their faith in the greater things that
were to come, we shall never know why the college
ORATION. 205
of to-day exists at all ; much less shall we understand
its precedents, its customs, its character, and its life.
There has been an ever-present though perhaps unre-
cognized vital force within, a something more com-
manding than the mere details of its material existence
and growth. The College which we honor and which
honors us to-day is not the impulse of the passing
moment; it has not sprung full-armed from the ple-
thoric pocket of some millionnaire ; it is not grounded
upon bequests and devises, however pleasant and
helpful, and all-important even, such plethoric pockets,
such large-hearted bequests and devises, may be. It
has passed through long and dreary days of painful
conflict. The struggle for mere existence has more
than once been maintained in the face of tremendous
odds. The activity of enemies and the inertness of
friends, the hostility of competitors, and the often
strange forgetfulness of her own children ; unfavorable
legislative enactments, and local dissensions ; destruc-
tion by fire and deterioration by neglect ; worse than
all, the losses that have so often come from sheer
impotence to do what was felt to be both prudent and
imperative, ā these are the notes of conflict that have
sounded in our Alma Mater's ears, almost from her
very birth.
But there has always been a something which has
given this conflict its true meaning ; which has pushed
forward until a goal has been reached far beyond the
limits of the most hopeful and prophetic vision ; which
has caused this College, with its generous though still
all too scanty endowment, its multiplied buildings
206 WILLIAMS COLLEGE.
and its efficient equipment, to spring out of a move-
ment which simply sought to estabhsh a free school
among the hard-pressed people of the sparsely settled
frontier Massachusetts town. That this spirit was
something greater and more masterful than mere mate-
rial forces, may be seen at a glance in comparing the
two. Founded in 1793, it opened its doors for the
first time one hundred years ago yesterday ; then pos-
sessed of but one building, ā that which is now known
as West College ā for a quarter of a century it added
very little to its material resources. It was almost en-
tirely shut out from the w^orld about it. Up to 1820
no stage or other vehicle of public transportation or
communication ever entered the town. In 1816 it had
but two buildings, ā East College was built in 1797 ;
and the entire equipment of the senior recitation room,
including the locks on the doors, was valued at S7.26.
In 1822 the apparatus in chemistry is said to have con-