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 pubUc 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 Hfe. 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 quaUties. 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 Ufe, is a moral struggle, and success 

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

 character. And the same law holds all through hfe. 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 Hfe bright and strong and even noble, 

 and that no other quaUties however briUiant can in any Ufe 

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

 who are not coUege men and who wiU be your superiors — men 

 who wiU do more for your art or profession, more for invention. 



