ADDRESS DELIVERED AT COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES. 
11 
will strengthen the hands of the sanitary physician, and serve to 
create a public spirit which will demand as a right the exclusion 
of small-pox, plague, yellow fever and other exotic contagia from 
our shores. 
There are great possibilities before us, but they can only be¬ 
come realities if we prove ourselves equal to the work. To do 
this, we must be sound in professional knowledge, in the objects 
we aim at, and in integrity. To be an accomplished veterinarian 
is much, but to be an honorable man is much more. Fail here, 
and all your talents are worthless, and too often worse. Yon are 
even condemned in the court of your own conscience, and how 
can you hope for the confidence of the wise and good. Moral 
nobility alone will stand before God and man. Moral obliquity in 
a man, or in a profession, will sooner or later lead to ruin. 
Transgression of law will ever bring its punishment. I cannot 
touch the flame without getting burned; I cannot swallow atropia 
without being poisoned. But these may be done involuntarily ; 
and in the absence of all guilty intention the harm is physical, 
and will end with physical results. But when we sin against 
light; when we stain our conscience by a wrong act done wilfully 
and in full knowledge of the evil, we undermine the basis of all 
honor and nobility, and take the first step into a moral decay that 
will forbid all future rise to worth or excellence. 
A poet, who had looked deeply into the heart and life of 
humanity, says “An honest man’s the noblest work of God.” 
Here at the threshold of life, while full of youthful buoyancy of 
hope and vigor, in the strength of your early manhood, take up 
the standard of virtue and truth, and you will find it conducive 
to all sound material advancement, and, to what is much more 
valuable, to the possession of a name void of offence before God 
and man. 
