THE TEACHER AND THE STATE 



All lacking in recognition indeed your speaker might 

 well be esteemed, did he not hasten in his earliest sen- 

 tence to express appreciation of his privilege in this for- 

 tunate hour. To appear thus before some hundreds of 

 enthusiastic young people, all expectant of honor and 

 congratulation, might well stir the sympathy of any who 

 would essay, by uttered speech, to meet the thoughts of 

 his fellow-men. There is really nowhere in the free life 

 of this commonwealth anything finer than the scene be- 

 fore us this morning ; whether we contemplate the beauty 

 of the immediate spectacle, whether we estimate the sig- 

 nificance of this ceremony, or whether, more keenly an- 

 alytic, we go behind the present and see in all this the 

 culmination of varied effort, of days and weeks of toil. 



This is the time for gratulation; weightier matters, I 

 am advised, may now for this day, at least, be laid aside. 

 Comenius and Pestalozzi, Herbart and Montessori, Hegel 

 and Schleiermacher, and all the rest may be forgotten. 

 To-day is to-day, and all its windows open to the future. 

 Needless to say, that the future, for this class of 1914, is 

 very bright. This is Iowa; white clouds only sweep 

 slowly through azure deeps, flowers deck all the land- 

 scapes, and the sunlight lies upon the rising harvests. 

 And yet, were we called upon to give reasons for such 

 optimism as at this moment here prevails, such confi- 

 dence, such security of mind, we might find ourselves, as 



