64 Alumni Reunion 



it was because he had them that the Johns Hopkins Uni- 

 versity, though launched in strange waters and with no 

 assurance of a safe voyage except what lay in the head 

 of the pilot, made straight for port from the very first. 

 Before the event, no one could have thought it possible 

 for a young institution to make so profound an impres- 

 sion on the whole intellectual life of the nation, and to 

 attain such recognition throughout the world, as did the 

 Johns Hopkins in the first five or six years indeed, in the 

 first two or three years of its existence. 



I shall not detain you to give any particulars of that 

 early history ; it is only the essential character of it that 

 I have wished to recall to your minds. It was a time of 

 hope and pride and enthusiasm ; a time of delightful work 

 and of that peculiarly grateful companionship which 

 comes from the sense of being partakers in the beginnings 

 of a new and great work, a work that is to mark an epoch. 

 But throughout that time of enthusiasm there was a man 

 at the head who knew how to prevent enthusiasm from 

 running to waste; who, as has been so well said by Pro- 

 fessor Gildersleeve, was the taskmaster of us all. Many 

 a thing was done against the grain, not because Mr. Gil- 

 man demanded that it be done, but because, as the occa- 

 sion required it, he made one and another feel that it 

 ought to be done. And this brings me to the mention of 

 the last of the qualities on which I shall dwell at any 

 length. It was as essential as any of those on which his 

 success here was based, and it was perhaps as rare as any 

 of them. I do not refer to his extraordinary gift in the 

 selection or in the management of men, to his untiring 

 industry, or to his remarkable capacity for detail. What 

 1 mean is the extraordinary comprehensiveness of his 

 active interests. Plenty of men have a curiosity to know 

 something about science, and something about history, 

 and something about art, and so on. And I am not affirm- 

 ing that President Oilman had a knowledge of a great 

 number of subjects that was of exceptional accuracy or 



