Things Worth While 13 



Therefore, I come to you to-day with such a theme as 

 that just announced; to the undergraduate, advice; 

 merely a reminder to the graduate, and for us older folk 

 a theme of appropriate reflection. Besides, for some of 

 our complexity and perplexity as well, education is her- 

 self responsible. We have grown complex. To my 

 father, the content of my subject suggested no special 

 difficulty. Life's duties were plain. Life itself was 

 simple and the preparation for it of correspondingly 

 modest compass. In my grandfather's family the prob- 

 lem was possibly more simple still. The young people 

 were taught to read and write ; to memorize hymns and 

 passages of scripture, the rules of good behavior and how 

 to do things that their fathers and mothers could do ; the 

 lads to swing an axe, to plow, to plant, to reap, to handle 

 tools; the girls, to sew and knit and spin and weave, to 

 embroider, to sing, to cook, to care for the sick all alike 

 at length to settle down quietly in homes of their own 

 to live with their children the same quiet, uneventful 

 lives. This was the ordinary procedure. There was no 

 thought of more general or extended culture, and the 

 vast benefits to be derived from the universality of learn- 

 ing were as yet unheard of. Only if a lad were destined 

 for the pulpit, or the bar, was a different education 

 thought of. Indications for this destiny were discovered 

 not as a rule in mental gift or intellectual aptitude, but 

 in reverse physical quality; a puny body, or indifferent 

 health, unfitting a boy for the rigorous service of a farm 

 or shop, were pretty sure to send him a candidate for 

 medicine or the service of the church. 



The lad sent to college experienced, however, in those 



