SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 21 



Address to the Class 

 Members of the Graduating Class: 



I suppose it would be regarded as a bit of baccalaureate 

 flattery to assume that college graduates are foreordained to be 

 leaders of men. As individuals, of course, they are not all so 

 destined — as a class they are. More and more in our time and 

 country they are coming to be, and are expected to be, leaders in 

 the communities in which they live — some leaders of few, some 

 of many. When a man emerges into public prominence and 

 his biography is given, we expect to be told at what college he 

 was graduated. This implies the acknowledged potency of a 

 liberal education in life. But it implies much more than that. 

 Graduation in a college of high grade selects men and women 

 by their moral more than by their intellectual qualities. Many 

 are called but few are chosen. Many start but few arrive. A 

 hundred enter a class and fifty are graduated. Not that all 

 who fall out by the way fail because they are unworthy to reach 

 the end. That we could not say remembering those who have 

 been with you for a time and whom you miss today. But in 

 general in our American communities the struggle for survival 

 to the end of a college course, the struggle with poverty and 

 hardship and the chances of life, is a moral struggle, and success 

 means the survival of the qualities that make up strong, masterful 

 character. And the same law holds all through life. Success 

 in any high sense is moral superiority — the ascendency of virtue. 

 And the virtue which here prevails is the aggregate of the simple 

 and elementary virtues which all men may have if they will. 

 What I have been trying to do for you today is to glorify in 

 your minds these simple virtues, to help you to see that they 

 make a plain, humble life bright and strong and even noble, 

 and that no other qualities however brilliant can in any life 

 supply the lack of them. You will be quite likely to meet men 

 who are not college men and who will be your superiors — men 

 who will do more for your art or profession, more for invention, 



