It may be as well to say that the doctor's degree or diploma was a license to practise. There were no State regulations for the practice of medicine, and no matter how obtained, a diploma allowed practise. As some one has well said the diploma, then, was a license to practise, not medicine, the Lord knows! but to practise on one's patients until one had learned some medicine. It is out of this slough of despond in medical education that we have climbed in the last thirty-five years. We are getting back to the{373}old-time university traditions. Let us hope that we shall not allow ourselves to get away from them again. There are ups and downs in medical practice and medical fashions and medical education, and all depends on the men who compose the profession at any one time and not on any mythical progress that holds them up and compels them to do better than those who went before them. The highest compliment that can be paid to American medicine and medical men is that, in spite of this handicap of education they did not utterly degenerate, but, on the contrary, somehow managed to maintain the dignity of the profession and do much good work.
It is to you to-day, entering on this profession, that we look to do your share in keeping up the dignity of the medical profession and in maintaining standards in medical education. We have a glorious tradition of 6,000 years behind us with the great men of the profession worshipped as gods at the beginning, because men thought so much of them, and remembered fondly as great masters when they came in the after-time. From I-em-Hetep through AEsculapius and Hippocrates and Galen and Guy de Chauliac and Sydenham and Boerhaave down to our own time, the men whom we delight to honor are the ones who did not work with an eye single to their own success, but who tried, above all, to do things for humanity and for the profession to which they belonged. The man who is successful as a{374}money-maker in his profession is only doing half his duty. He must make medicine as well as money, that is, he must by his observations help others to recognize and treat disease better than they did before; he must labor for the benefit of humanity, and, above all, he must see that there are no decadence of professional spirit and no deterioration of medical education as far as his influence can go. It is men of this kind that we hope to send forth from Fordham, and you stand in the van of them all, and I wish you God-speed.
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"Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers."--Tennyson,Locksley Hall."The foundation stones of the whole modern structure of human wisdom have all been laid by the architects of yesterday. Thrice wise is he who knows the quarries and builders of by-gone ages and is able to differentiate the stones which have been rejected from those which have been utilized."--Anon."Ideo Medico id in primis curandum, ut ab aegro circumstantias omnes accurate intelligat, intellectas consideret, ut inter curandum media illa adhibeat, quae tollendo morbo apta sunt, ne ex medicina nocumentum proveniat." --Basil Valentine,Triumphal Chariot of Antimony.[The physician must therefore especially take care that he understand all the circumstances of his patient very clearly, and after understanding them weigh them well, so that during his treatment he may use those means which are especially suited to control the disease, lest any harm should come from his medicine.]
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[Footnote 25: Address to the graduates of St. Louis University Medical and Dental Schools, May 31, 1910, at the Odeon, St. Louis.]
It affords me great pleasure to accept the invitation of your Faculty to address the graduates of a university medical school here in the Middle West. I wondered, of course, what I should talk to you about, and have come to the conclusion that as an historian of medicine any message I may have for you is likely to come from my own subject. It so happens that we are just beginning to realize that the history of medicine may have much greater significance for us than we have usually been accustomed to think, and, above all, that it may mean much in furnishing incentive for the maintaining and raising of standards in medical education. In recent years there has come a very decided improvement in medical education in the United States. It is not hard to understand that the foreigner lifts his eyebrows in surprise when he is told that most of our medical schools a generation ago required but two terms of four months each, and that there was then just beginning to be a demand for a little more complete course and better facilities. There was a large number of medical schools, turning out graduates every year with the degree{378}of doctor of medicine, which was a license to practise in every state in the Union, for there were no state or federal laws regulating the practice of medicine. As for preliminary requirements the less said the better. If a man could write his name and, indeed, he did not have to write it very plainly, he found it easy to matriculate in a medical school and to be graduated at the end of two scant terms of four months each. He might come from the mines, or from the farm, or from before the mast, or from the smithy, or the carpenter shop; he need know nothing of chemistry, nor physics, nor of botany, nor of English and, above all, of English grammar, and he was at once admitted to what was called a professional school and graduated when he had served his time. Practically no one was plucked. The desire of the faculty for numbers of students forbade that in most cases. The two terms in medicine were not even successive courses. The second-year student listened, as a rule, to the same lectures that he might have heard the preceding year.
We all know the reason now for this extremely low standard of medical education. Proprietary medical schools made it their one business in life to make just as much out of medical education as possible and the historic septennate of professors, or sometimes the Dean, pocketed the fees (I came near saying spoils) every year, and robbed medical American education of{379}whatever possibilities it might have for the real training of young men in the science and art and practice of medicine. Perhaps the most interesting feature of this maintenance of extremely low standards in medical education, however, is the fact that in spite of it, men, or at least some of them, succeeded in obtaining a good foundation in medicine and then by personal work afterwards came to be excellent practitioners of medicine. Professor Welch said not long since: "One can decry the system of those days, the inadequate preliminary requirements, the short courses, the dominance of the didactic lecture, the meagre appliances for demonstrative and practical instruction, but the results were better than the system. Our teachers were men of fine character devoted to their duties; they inspired us with enthusiasm, interest in our studies and hard work, and they imparted to us sound traditions of our profession."
Nothing that I know is a better compliment to American enterprise and power of overcoming the difficulties of the situation than the life stories of some of the men who came from these completely inadequate schools. If with the maimed training and incomplete education given a generation ago American medicine not only succeeded in maintaining the dignity of the profession to a noteworthy degree, but also developed many men who made distinct contributions to world medicine, what will we not do now that{380}our medical education is gradually being lifted up out of the slough of despond in which it was and the preliminary education for medical studies set at a standard where real work of thoroughly scientific character can be looked for, from the very beginning of the medical course?
Is it any wonder, then, that those of us who have the best interests of American medicine at heart are watching with careful solicitude the movement that is now reforming medical education in this country? The one hope of medical education is, and always has been, organic connection with a university. Real University Medical Schools, that is medical schools as the genuine Post-Graduate Departments of Universities with the fine training that they give, have opened our eyes to what is needed in medical education in this country. Some of the old-time medical schools here in the United States had been connected by name with universities but this was more apparent than real, and the medical faculty ruled absolutely in its own department and throttled medical education and divided the income of the college among themselves, devoting as little as possible to equipment, to laboratories, to all that was needed for medical education.
Now has come the epoch of university medical schools in this country. I came near saying America, but we must not forget that the Spanish-American countries, having adopted their educational systems from the mother Latin country,{381}have always maintained the organic connection of the medical school with their universities, and as a consequence a good preliminary education, the equivalent of three years of college work with us, is required and has always been, and then some four years in the medical school and, indeed, in most of the countries five or six years and in one at least seven years of medical study required. I have thought, however, that this story of medical education in connection with universities and real university work will be especially interesting to the graduates of this thorough Western university, whose work in medicine is acknowledged as up to some of the best standards of professional attainment and whose organic connection with a great university assures not only the continuance, but the future development of medical education here along lines that shall place this among the serious progressive medical schools of the world.
The first university medical school that well deserves that name is the one that came into existence in connection with the University of Alexandria. I have been at some pains, because it is so delightfully amusing, to point out how closely the University of Alexandria resembles our modern universities in most particulars. It was founded by a great conqueror, who had gone forth to conquer the world, and having attained almost universal dominion sighed for more worlds to conquer. Then he set about the foundation of{382}a great city that was to be the capital of his empire, and endowed a great institution of learning in that capital that was to attract students from all over the world. When he died prematurely the Ptolemys, who inherited the African portion of his vast dominions, carried out his wishes. Money was no object at Alexandria: they put up magnificent buildings, founded a great library, bought a lot of first editions of books in the shape of author's original manuscripts, stole the archives at Athens, used Alexander's collection (made for Aristotle) as the foundation of what we would call a museum, paid professors better salaries than they received at that time anywhere else and housed them in palaces. What a strangely familiar sound all this has! Then Alexandria proceeded to do scientific work.
Euclid wrote his geometry, and, unchanged, it has come down to us and we still use it as a text-book in our colleges. Archimedes, following up Euclid's work, laid the foundation, of mechanics in his study of the lever and the screw, and of hydrostatics and of optics in his studies of specific gravity and burning mirrors and lenses. He made a series of marvellous inventions showing that he was a practical as well as a theoretic genius, who would be gladly welcomed, nay, eagerly sought for, as a member of the faculty even of a university of the highest rank or largest income in our modern times. Ptolemy elaborated the system of astronomy that had been so ably{383}developed by teachers at Alexandria before his time, and Heron invented his engines, which we have had as toys in our laboratories for centuries. We realized the true significance of one of them only when the turbine engine was invented and we found that the principle of it was in the toy engine of this old natural philosopher of Alexandria. They even did their literature scientifically at the University of Alexandria. We have no great original works from them in literature, but they invented comparative literature; for this making the Septuagint translation of the Holy Scriptures and doing the same for many other religious documents of the surrounding nations for comparative study.
It is rather easy to understand, then, that a medical school arose in connection with this scientific university, and that it did excellent work. The collections of Aristotle contained many illustrations which served as the basis for zoology, botany, comparative anatomy and probably even comparative physiology. The Ptolemys were very liberal and allowed dissection of the human body, so that human anatomy developed from a definite scientific standpoint better then ever before. The number of strangers in the town and the rather unhealthy climate of Egypt left many unclaimed bodies. It has always been the difficulty of obtaining bodies much more than prejudice against the violation of the human body on any general principle, that has been the reason{384}for the absence of human dissection in many periods of the world's history. We object to having the bodies of friends cut up, but we do not mind much if the bodies of those who are unknown to us are treated in that way. So long as men did not travel much there were few unclaimed bodies. With the advent of travel came abundant material for dissection and the Ptolemys allowed the medical school to use it.
Two great anatomists built up the structure of scientific human anatomy on the rather good foundation that had been laid on animal anatomy in the foretime. After all, the anatomy of the animal resembles that of man so much that very precious knowledge had been gained from zootomies in the previous ages. These two anatomists were Erasistratos and Herophilos. Both of them studied the brain especially, as might have been expected. For just as soon as the opportunity for dissecting man was provided, this, his most complex structure, attracted instant attention. Herophilos has named after him thetorcular herophili, and the name he gave the curious appearance in the floor of the fourth ventricle--thecalamus scriptorius--is still retained. He describes the membranes of the brain, the various sinuses, the choroid plexuses, the cerbral ventricles and traced the origin of the nerves from the brain and the spinal cord, recognizing, according to well-grounded tradition, the distinction between nerves of sensation and motion.{385}He described the eye and especially the vitreous body, the choroid and the retina. He did not neglect other portions of anatomy, however, and his power of exact observation, as well as his detailed study, may be judged from his remark that the left spermatic vein in certain cases joins the renal.
Erasistratos, his colleague, was perhaps even a more successful investigator than Herophilos. He represented the best tradition of Greek medicine of the time. He had two distinguished teachers, one of them Metrodoros, the son-in-law of Aristotle. It was probably through this influence that Erasistratos received his invitation from the first Ptolemy to come to Alexandria. The scientific work of Alexandria was founded on Aristotle's collections, on his books, for his library was brought to Alexandria as the foundation of the great University Library, and then best of all on the direct tradition of his scientific teaching through this pupil of his son-in-law. Erasistratos' other great teacher was the well-known Chrysippos of Cnidos. Cnidos was the great rival medical school to that of Cos. Owing to the reputation of Hippocrates we know of Cos, but we must not ignore Cnidos.
Erasistratos' discoveries were more in connection with the heart than anything else. He came very near discovering the circulation. His description of the valves and of their function is very clear. He looked for large-sized{386}anastomoses between veins and arteries and, of course, did not discover the minute capillaries which required Malpighi's microscope to reveal them nearly 2,000 years after. Like Herophilos, Erasistratos also studied the brain very faithfully.
One story that we have of Erasistratos deserves to be in the minds of young graduates in medicine, because it illustrates the practical character of the man and also how much more important at times it may be in the practice of medicine to know men well rather than to know medical science alone. Erasistratos was summoned on a consultation to Antioch to see the son of King Seleucus. Seleucus was one of the four of Alexander's generals who, like Ptolemy, had divided the world among them after the young conqueror's death. His portion of the Eastern world, with its capital at Antioch, was probably the richest region of that time. There had been no happiness, however, in the royal household for months because the scion of the Seleucidae, the heir to the throne, was ill and no physician had been able to tell what was the matter with him, and, above all, no one had been able to do anything to awaken him from a lethargy that was stealing over him, making him quite incapable of the ordinary occupations of men, or to dispel an apathy which was causing him to lose all interest in affairs around him. He was losing in weight, he looked miserable, he seemed really to have been stricken by one of{387}the serious diseases as yet undifferentiated at that time which were expressed by the word phthisis, which referred to any wasting disease.
As a last hope then almost, Erasistratos was summoned from distant Alexandria as a consultant in the case of young Seleucus. The proceeding, after all, is very similar to what happens in our own time. The head of an important department in medicine at a university is asked to go a long distance to see the son of a reigning monarch, or of a millionaire prince in industry, or perhaps a coal baron, or a railroad king, and a special train is supplied for him and every convenience consulted. A caravan was sent to bring Erasistratos over the desert to Antioch. It is such consultations that count in a physician's life. I hope sincerely that you shall have many of them and that you shall conduct them as successfully as Erasistratos this one.
The young prince's case proved as puzzling to Erasistratos for a time as it had to so many other physicians before him. Like the experienced practitioner he was, he did not make his diagnosis at once, however. Will you remember that when you, too, have a puzzling case? It is when we do not take time to make our diagnosis that it often proves erroneous. Not ignorance, but failure to investigate properly, is responsible for most of our errors. He asked to see the patient a number of times, and saw him under varying conditions. Finally, one day, while he was{388}examining the young man's pulse--and I may tell you that Erasistratos made a special study of the pulse and knew many things about it that it is unfortunate that the moderns neglect--his patient's pulse gave a sudden leap and then continued to go much faster than it had gone before. At the same time there came a rising color to the young man's cheek. Erasistratos looked up to see what was the cause of this striking change, and found that the young wife of the King Seleucus, the prince's stepmother, had just come into the room. Seleucus, as an old man, had married a very handsome young woman, and it was evident that the young man's heart was touched in her regard, and that here was the cause of the trouble. Erasistratos did not proclaim his discovery at once. He did announce that now he knew the cause of the trouble, that it was an affection of the heart that would be cured by travel, and he proposed to take young Seleucus back with him to Alexandria. In private, very probably, he told his young patient that he had discovered his secret, and then persuaded him that absence would be the thing for him. Very probably the young man considered that cure was impossible, and with many misgivings he consented to go to Alexandria, and as has happened many times before and since, in spite of the patient's assurance to the contrary, the travel cure proved effective even for the heart affection.
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I hope sincerely that you shall have as much tact, as much knowledge of men and women and as much success as this great teacher at the first of our modern university medical schools, when the great consultations do come your way, for it is easy to understand that when the young man recovered under the kindly ministrations of Erasistratos and the good effect of absence from the disturbing heart factor, Erasistratos was loaded with the wealth of the East and acquired a reputation that made him known throughout all the world of that time. There is a curious commentary on this story that I think you should also know. It is Galen who has preserved the incident for us. He does so in the book on the pulse, mainly in order to show, as he thinks, the fatuity of such observations. After giving the details he says, "Of course, there is no special pulse of love." Poor Galen, how his wits must have been wool-gathering, or how forgetful he must have been of his own youth writing in the serenity of age, or how lacking in ordinary human experience if that is his serious meaning. The older man was by far the better observer, and I hope that you shall not forget in the time to come that there are many things that affect men and women besides bacteria and auto-intoxications of various kinds and metabolic disturbances and nutritional changes. Erasistratos seems to have known very well how much the mind, or as they called it in the older terminology, and we{390}still cling to the phrase, the heart, meant for many a phenomenon of existence supposed to be physically pathologic and yet really only representing psychologic influences apart from the physical side of the being. I may say to you that the more you know about these old teachers of medicine the more you will appreciate and value their largeness of view, their breadth of knowledge of humanity and their practical ways.
It is no wonder that students from all over the world were attracted to Alexandria for the next three centuries because of the opportunities, for the study of medicine afforded them there. After the first century of its existence not as much was accomplished as at the beginning, because what always happens in the history of medicine after a period of successful investigation, happened also there. Men concluded that nearly everything that could be, had been discovered and began to theorize. They were sure that their theories explained things. Men have persisted in spinning theories in medicine. Theories have almost never helped us and they always have wasted our time.Observation! Observationis the one thing that counts, Alexandria continued to have her reputation, however, and in the first century of the Christian era was the centre of medical interest. It was probably here that St. Luke was educated, and as we know now from the careful examination of the{391}Third Gospel and of the Acts, he knew his Greek medical terms very well. Harnack has shown us recently once more how thoroughly Luke converted the ordinary popular terms of the other Evangelists into the Greek medical terms of his time. Luke must have known medicine very well. His testimony to the miracles of Christ is therefore all the more valuable, and so the Alexandrian medical school has its special place in the order of Providence.
We are prone to think because of the curious way in which not only the histories of medical education, but of all education, have been written, that while there were some medical schools in the interval from the days of Alexandria and Rome down to the modern time, these were so hampered by unfortunate conditions that men practically did nothing in education and, above all, scientific and medical education until comparatively recent times. Nothing could well be more absurd than such an opinion. The great universities founded during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries attracted more students to the population of the countries of the time than go to our universities to the number of our population in the present time. These universities are the model of our universities of the present time and, indeed, the history of many of the old European universities is continuous for seven centuries. They had an undergraduate department in which students were trained in grammar, rhetoric, logic,{392}arithmetic, astronomy, music and gymnastics, and graduate departments of law, theology and medicine. Professor Huxley, reviewing mediaeval education, once said that the undergraduate education of the mediaeval universities was better than our own. He doubted "that the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture as this old trivium and quadrivium did."
Their post-graduate work was just as fine as their undergraduate work. They made the law of the world in the thirteenth century, and laid the foundations on which the philosophy and theology of the after-time have been built up. Strange as it may seem to many accustomed to give credence to far different traditions, they did the same thing in medicine. Take as a single example what they did for the regulation of medical education and practice. A law of the Emperor Frederick II, issued in 1241 for the Two Sicilies (Southern Italy and Sicily proper), required three years of preliminary training in the ordinary undergraduate course at the university before a man was allowed to take up medicine, and four years at medicine before he got his degree. But even this was not all; after graduation, a year of practice with a physician was required before he was allowed to practise for himself. If he were going to practise surgery an extra year of the study of anatomy was required. But it may{393}be said by those who cannot persuade themselves that the Middle Ages so far anticipated us: since they knew almost nothing of medicine and surgery, what did they spend their time at during these four years? The more we know about the details of that early teaching, the more we respect them and the more we admire the magnificent work of the old-time professors and their schools.
Probably the most surprising feature of their teaching was surgery. We are rather likely to think that the development of surgery was reserved for our day. Nothing could be more untrue. The greatest period in the history of surgery, with the possible exception of our own time, is the century and a half from 1250 to 1400. What they taught in surgery we know not from tradition, but from the text-books of the great teachers which have been preserved for us, and which have been recently republished. Three men stand out pre-eminent: William of Salicet; Lanfranc, who taught at Paris, having been invited there from Italy, where he had been a pupil of William of Salicet, and Guy de Chauliac, to whom has been given by universal accord the title of Father of Modern Surgery.
There is practically nothing in modern surgery that these men did not touch in their text-books. Perhaps the most surprising thing is to find that William of Salicet, in discussing his{394}cases, suggested that sometimes he succeeded in obtaining union by first intention by keeping his wounds clean. Alas for the surgery of succeeding centuries, Guy de Chauliac, a greater mechanical genius than William, insisted that union by first intention was an illusion and that it could only come through pus formation. Laudable pus became the shibboleth of surgery for centuries, imposed upon it by the genius of a great man. Most men think that they think, they really follow leaders, and so we followed blindly after Guy until Lister came and showed us our mistake.
Guy was the professor of surgery down at Montpellier, and also the physician to the Popes, who for the time were at Avignon. His text-book of surgery is full of expressions that reveal the man and the teacher. He said the surgeon who cuts the human body without a knowledge of anatomy is like a blind carpenter carving wood. He insisted that men should make observations for themselves and not blindly follow others. He discussed operations on the head, the thorax and the abdomen. He said that wounds of the intestines would surely be fatal unless sewed up, and he described the technique of suture for them. His specialty was operation for hernia. There are pictures still extant of operations for hernia done about this time in an exaggerated Trendelenberg position. The patient is fastened to a board by the legs, head down, the board at an angle of{395}forty-five degrees against the wall. The intestines dropped back from the site of operation and allowed the surgeon to proceed without danger. Guy said that more patients were operated on for the sake of the doctor's pocket in hernia cases than for their own benefit. His instructions to his students, his high standard of professional advice, all show us one of the great physicians of all time and historians of medicine are unanimous in their praise of him.
The next great development in medicine came at the time of the Renaissance with the reorganization of the universities. In the sixteenth century Italy particularly did magnificent work in the universities, stimulated by close touch with old Greek medicine. At Padua, at Bologna, above all, at Rome, the great foundations of the modern medical sciences were laid. I need only mention the names of Vesalius, Varolius, Eustachius, Fallopius, Columbus (who discovered the circulation of the blood in the lungs), Caesalpinus, to whom and rightly the Italians attribute the discovery of the systemic circulation nearly half a century before Harvey. These men all of them did fine work, everywhere in Italy. They were doing original investigation of the greatest value. Whenever anybody anywhere in Europe at this time wanted to do good work in science of any kind,--astronomy, mathematics, physics and, above all, in any of the medical sciences,--he went down to Italy; Italy was and continued for five{396}centuries after the thirteenth to be what France was for a scant half a century in the nineteenth, and Germany for a corresponding period just before our own time. How curiously the history of science and of medicine was written when it seems to contradict this.
Above all, what ridiculous nonsense has been talked about Papal opposition to science. The great universities of Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had charters from the Popes. They were immediately under ecclesiastical influence, yet they did fine work in anatomy and surgery. The Father of Modern Surgery was a Papal physician. The Papal physicians for seven centuries have been the greatest contributors to medicine. The Popes deliberately selected as their physicians the greatest investigators of the time. Besides Guy de Chauliac such men as Eustachius, Varolius, Columbus, Caesalpinus, Lancisi, Malpighi were Papal physicians. We have even a more striking testimony to the Papal patronage and encouragement of medicine and to the Church's fostering care of medical education, here in America. The first university medical school in America was not, as has so often been said, the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania founded in 1767, but the medical school of the University of Mexico, where medical lectures were first delivered in 1578. Our medical schools in this country have only become genuine university medical schools in the sense{397}of being organic portions of the university in the last twenty-five years. Before that their courses were brief and unworthy and no preliminary education was required.
The universities of Spanish America from the very beginning required three years of preliminary training in the university before medicine could be taken up, and then four years of medical studies. These four years became five and six years in certain countries, and at no time during the nineteenth century did the medical education of Spanish America sink to the low level unfortunately reached in the United States. The lesson of it is clear. When medical education is seriously undertaken as a university department, all is well. When it is not, the results are disastrous.
In our day and country another great awakening of university life has come and with it a drawing together in intimate union of universities and their graduate departments. Above all, the medical schools have profited by this closer connection with university work, and the prospects for medical education in the United States and a new period of wonderful progress in it are very bright. You have my hearty congratulations, then, on your graduation from a great university medical school here in the West, and I hope sincerely that you shall prove worthy of Alma Mater. You have had the privileges of university education and these involve duties.{398}This is ever true, though unfortunately it is somewhat seldom realized.Noblesse oblige. We hear much in these days of the stewardship of wealth, and do not let us forget that there is a stewardship of talent and education. Much more will be demanded of you because of your opportunities, and we look for an accomplishment on your part far above the ordinary in medical work and maintenance and uplift of professional dignity, that shall mean much for your fellows.
Remember that you are doing only half your duty if you but make your living or even make money. You are bound besides to make medicine. For all that the forefathers have done for us we in this generation must make return by a broadening of their medical views for the benefit of posterity. If you were graduates of some fourth-rate proprietary medical school, perhaps it would be sufficient if you succeeded in making your living out of your profession. Perhaps even your teachers would then be quite satisfied with you. No such meagre accomplishment can possibly satisfy those who are sending you out to-day. Above all, you must remember that your education is not for yourself, but for the benefit of others as well. If, somehow, its influence becomes narrowed so as only to affect yourself and your intimate friends then it is essentially a failure. You must not only live your lives for yourselves, but so that at the end of them the community shall have been benefited and medicine{399}and its beneficent mission to mankind shall be broader and more significant because you have lived. With this message, then, I welcome you as brother physicians and bid you God-speed in your professional work.
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"Non scholae sed vitae discimus."--Seneca,Epist., 106.[We learn for life not for school.]"Nec si non obstatur, propterea etiam permittitur."--Cicero,Philip., xiii, 6.[And because a thing is not forbidden that does not make it permissible.]"Ubicunque homo est ibi beneficio locus est."--Seneca,De Vita Beata, 24.[Wherever man is there is room to do good.]"Then let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or ill-defined. At present, when we speak in terms of praise or blame about the bringing up of each person, we call one man educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated man may sometimes be very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship, and the like. For we are not speaking of education in this sense of the word, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only training, which upon our view would be characterized as education; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all. But let us not quarrel with one another about the name, provided that the proposition which has just been granted hold good: to wit, that those who are rightly educated generally become good men. Neither must we cast a slight upon education, which is the first and fairest thing that the best of men can ever have, and which, though liable to take a wrong direction, is capable of reformation. And this work of reformation is the great business of every man while he lives."--Plato,Laws(Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 174. Scribner, 1902.
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[Footnote 26: This was the address to the graduates at Boston College, June 29, 1910]
Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: The custom is, I fear, for the orator who addresses the graduating class to talk over the heads of those who have received their degree to the larger audience who are assembled for the academic function. Now, that I do not propose to do. What I have to say is to you. My message is meant entirely for you. Since your friends are present I have to raise my voice so that they shall hear what I have to say, but I consider that they are here only on sufferance and that I am here to say whatever I can that may mean something for you in the careers that are opening up to you. Now, I am not of those who think that the main purpose of the eld is to give advice to the young. Man is so fashioned that he wants to get his own experience for himself. It is true that "only fools learn by their own experience," wise men learn by that of others. But then we have divine warrant for saying that there used to be a goodly proportion of fools in the world and human experience agrees in our own time that not all the fools are dead yet. Our advice may not be taken in all its literalness; that would be too much to{404}expect, but it has become an academic custom to give it, in the hope that it will be a landmark, perhaps an incentive, it may be a warning, surely some time a precious memory in the time to come. Few men who ever lived were less likely to think that their advice might mean very much than dear old Bobbie Burns, to whom one of your number referred, and yet some time I hope that in some serious mood you'll read and think well on the poetic epistle of advice to his youthful friend. There are some lines at the beginning of it that have haunted me at times these many years when I have been asked to address studious youth at the commencement, as our term for the occasion so well declares, of their real education in the post-graduate courses of that University of Hard Knocks which valedictorians at this season of the year are so prone to call the cold, cold world. The Scottish ploughman bard said in the choice English he could so well assume on occasion:
"I long hae tho't, my youthful friend,A something to hae sent you.Though it may serve no ither endThan as a kind memento;But how the subject theme may gang.Let time and chance determine;Perhaps it may turn out a sangPerhaps turn out a sermon."
One thing is sure, whatever I shall say to you shall not be a song, though, alas! addresses{405}of advice are prone to sound like sermons. Yet the sermon, after all, in the old Latin wordsermois only a discourse, and I am going to make mine as brief as possible. It shall, I hope, serve to round out some of the things that you yourselves have been saying with regard to Catholics and social works and, above all. Catholic college men in social works.
We are rightly getting to estimate the value of a man in our time in terms of what he accomplishes for others much more than for himself. Almost any one who devotes himself with sufficient exclusiveness to the business of helping himself will make a success of it, though some may doubt of the value of that success. What is difficult above all in our time, when the spirit of individualism is so rampant, is to make a success of helpfulness for others while making life flow on with reasonable smoothness for one's self. I do not hope to be able to impart to you the precious secret of how surely to do this, but something that I may say may be helpful to you in leading a larger than a mere selfish life, so that when the end shall come, as come it must, though one would never suspect it from the ways of men, the world will be a little better at least because you have lived.
Education has become the fetish of the day and the shibboleth by which the Philistine is recognized from the chosen people of culture and refinement. Popular education has become the{406}watchword of the time, and all things are fondly hoped for and confidently promised in its name. We are somewhat in doubt as to the mode of education that will be surely effective for all good and we are not quite certain as to how the results are exactly to be obtained, but education is to make the world better; to get rid gradually, yet inevitably, of the evil that is in it; to lift men up to the higher plane of knowledge where selfishness is at least not supposed to exist, or surely to be greatly minimized, where crime, of course, shall disappear, and where even the minor evils so hide their diminished heads that the millennium can not be far distant. It is true that some of these glorious promises seem long in fulfilment to those who are a little sceptical of the influence of particular forms of education that are now popular, but, of course, the response to that is, that so far we have not had the time to have the full benefit of education exert itself.
At the end of the eighteenth century the Encyclopedists in France, in their great campaign for the diffusion of information among the people and the spread of what they were pleased to call education, though some of us are prone to think that they hopelessly confused the distinction between education for power and education for information, confidently promised that when men knew enough, poverty, of course, would disappear and in its train would go all the attendant evils,{407}vice and crime and immorality, and with them, of course, unhappiness would disappear from the world. That is considerably over a century now, but we have not found it advisable as yet to do away with courts of law, nor jails, nor policemen, nor any of the mechanism of the law for the suppression of crime and immorality. Indeed, there are those who are unkind enough to say, that we now have to make use of more means than ever in proportion to the population for the suppression of vice and crime, and that they are more emphatically demanded even than at the time of the Encyclopedists. As for unhappiness and poverty, recent investigations in our large cities show so large a proportion of people willing yet unable to obtain a decent living wage, that it is quite startling. Our insane asylums are growing much more rapidly than the population, and not a few of the inmates are there because of immorality. Suicide is on the increase faster than the population and unfortunately the greatest increase is noted in the younger years. It is between fifteen and twenty-five that suicides are multiplying.
Of course the answer to this is, that education is not as yet carried to that extent among the great mass of people which would enable it to have its full beneficial effects. Our common school education is not enough to bring people under the beneficent influence of this great civilizing factor for the development of mankind.{408}Educators would urge that it is the higher education which serves to obliterate the ills that human flesh is heir to, moral as well as physical, as far, of course, as that is possible in so imperfect a world as this. If we could but extend the advantages of the higher education, of college and university training to the majority of the people, then say the advocates of education as a panacea for human ills, we would surely have that approach to the millennium which intellectual development by the diffusion of information can and must give.
It is worth while analyzing that proposition a little and applying it to present-day conditions as we know them. After all we have been turning out a large number of those who have had the benefit of the higher education from our colleges and universities during the last generation or so. They have gone out by the thousand to influence their fellows and presumably to be shining lights for profound improvement of life, striking examples that surely will prove an incentive and a source of emulation to others to do the right, avoid the wrong, be helpful instead of selfish and, in general, show the world how much education means for the happiness of all. There is a slang expression familiar in New York just now that you in New England may not know, for I understand that even the owls near Boston do not say "to-whit-to-whoo" but "to-whit-to-whoom," that may be quoted here: "Some men are born good,{409}some make good and some are caught with the goods on them." Not all of the graduates of colleges and universities were born good, of course. I wonder what we shall find with regard to the other two phases of existence. There are not a few who are critically perverse enough to say that, while many have made good, too many have been caught with the goods on them.
Let us take the subject that is so strikingly brought before us in our everyday life in recent years, the question of political corruption. Of course it is to be presumed that it is the non-college men who are both corruptors and corrupted. It is, of course, just as confidently to be presumed, on the other hand, that it is the college men who are the forerunners in all the exposures of recent years. Alas! for human nature, it is just the contrary. The leaders in big corruption, the mainstays of what has come to be called "big political business," have nearly all been college men. This has been true in California, in Missouri, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in Illinois. It would be easy to add other states, but I am only mentioning those where investigations are not yet forgotten, though we American people have cultivated a really marvellous power of forgetting. The states are sufficiently far apart from one another to make it very clear that the condition is not limited to a particular locality but is practically universal. In recent years we have been getting closer to the{410}man higher up. In a great many of the cases, I should say in a majority of them, he has proved to be a university man, and if not, then university men have been his right hands in the accomplishment of evil. The boards of directors of corporations, life insurance, fire insurance, railroads, great industries and manufactures, even banks, who have known that laws were being violated and who have not cared because it was money in their pockets, have in many cases, perhaps even in the majority of cases, been college men. Certainly college graduates have not proved to be the little leaven that would leaven the whole mass for righteousness.
In the even more dangerous evils of our time that have risked the very existence of democratic government, in the imposition on the people by the privileged classes of indirect taxes and tariffs that make life hard for the poor, but add largely to the wealth of the rich, college men have only too often been the active agents. Without their active co-operation certainly these crying injustices to the poor would never have been accomplished. They have often been adding useless millions to useless millions simply for the game; not caring how much the poor had to suffer. They have been accumulating at the expense of the working classes what Governor Hughes of New York so well called, not long since, a corruption fund for their children. They have been the prime factors in many agencies{411}for evil and they have not been the guardians of the rights of others, the weaker ones, that we have a right to expect of them. In the awful evils that have been exposed as a consequence of the fellow-servant doctrine and the contributory negligence principle at law, which have been the root of so much suffering in the world, college men have not helped to point out evils and organized for the solution of them, though they have been closely in contact with all the problems of them as judges, lawyers, directors of railroad companies, and industrial concerns. In general, while they have been in a position to know and alleviate some of the worst ills of our social system, they have done very little. They helped to bind fetters. It is men of much lower social station and education who have awakened us.
The investigations of recent years as to the condition of wage-earners have shown us many unfortunate evils. It was known that one in four of the population in London was living in dire poverty and this was thought to be due to the special circumstances in London. An investigation of York in England showed, however, that smaller towns, even cathedral towns, that were supposed to be almost without poverty, were hot-beds of it and were nearly as bad as London. Then, we took the flattering unction to our souls that these were altogether foreign conditions. Such investigations as we could make in New York, however, showed that we were little if any{412}better than the reports from England and Germany revealed abroad. Then it was said that the large city, that brood-oven of vice and misery, was responsible. Pittsburg, for instance, set up the claim that while great fortunes were made there the workmen were paid better wages than any place else in the world. Alas for the fallibility of human judgment in social affairs! The Pittsburg Survey was made and it was found that while a few of the better-class workmen were paid very well, the great mass of the workmen were awfully underpaid, and it was impossible for the majority of them to live decently on what they received. Further investigations into industrial conditions have only emphasized the conclusions obtained from the Survey.
Human life has become very cheap in this country. A prominent clergyman said not very long ago that it was safer to be a murderer in the United States than a brakeman. The expression is true if the proportion of brakemen who lose their lives to murderers who lose theirs in this country is taken. We are careless of the lives of the honest workman, and sentimentally over-careful of the lives and comfort of the criminal. Every now and then there are inevitable reactions against this laxity of the law, and as a consequence, while Canada has no lynchings and there are none in England, while peoples of our stock have no need to appeal to force, we lynch many more than we execute in this{413}country. The leaders of many of the mobs, as the directors of the industrial companies who knowingly allow the waste of life to go on, have had the benefit of our American education, such as it is. Educated people are responsible for things that are and unless they meet their responsibilities there will be no improvement.
Some of these abuses have risen to a climax. Not long ago a story was told that illustrates, as it seems to me, some present-day feelings very well. A great steel company having a contract for a bridge in the Far East, was rushing the last steel beams for the completion of the contract. America is noted for its marvellous power to do work rapidly that other countries take time for. There was a heavy penalty attached if they did not complete the contract on time. A fast steamer was waiting in New York harbor all ready to take this last consignment out with it. A special train was standing in the yards of the steel plant, to be rushed to New York just as soon as the beams were completed. In the midst of all the hurry and bustle a workman got his foot caught in the huge crane which transports the immense beams from one portion of the plant to the other. An examination of the manner in which he was caught showed clearly that he could not be released without taking the crane apart. That would mean that thirty-six hours would have to be spent in the mechanical handling of that crane. If that were done it would be{414}quite impossible to make the shipment on time, so closely was the period of completion calculated. Not only was there a heavy money penalty, but there would be a decided loss of American prestige.
The workman who was caught was only a foreigner. He was only getting $1.25 a day. Just one thing was to be done evidently, because that steamer had to sail on time and that freight train had to get out the next morning. The other foreign workmen were put out of the shops, only the confidential men were left, an ambulance was summoned; as it appeared in sight the crane was run over the portion of the foot that was caught, the man was removed to the care of the surgeon, his wound was dressed at the hospital, the contract was completed on time and American enterprise and power to do things faster than all the world was vindicated.
We are making money. In the meantime the directors of companies under whom such things are done are mainly college men. Whether they feel it or not they are personally responsible for everything that happens in their business, for it is their business by which human life is sacrificed or human suffering increased, or human morality deteriorated. Probably the majority of the stockholders in the companies are college men. Some of them are college women. They are deriving incomes from forms of injustice, from conditions that cause human suffering that{415}might be avoided. They are, whether they know it or not, committing one of the crimes that calls to heaven for vengeance--defrauding laborers of their wages; because to pay a man less than a decent living wage is to defraud that laborer of his wages. No man has a right to go into the labor market and buy labor as cheaply as he can. Men must live, they must support their families, and to compel them to take less than a decent living wage is to hold them in slavery. Every man who derives an income from such sources must know whether there is injustice at work or not in whatever he benefits by. It is easy to plead ignorance, but the ignorance is no justification. When we take money from something we must know that that money has no taint of injustice about it. There is a startling passage in the Scriptures that I have often thought should be repeated more frequently in our time. It is, "From the sins we know not of, O Lord deliver us."
There are many things that are done for the educated rich in our time, things that are full of injustice, yet from which the rich derive great benefits for which they will be held responsible. I cannot see it else. We hear much in our time of the stewardship of wealth, of the fact that if a man has much more money than others he is bound thereby to do more good with it, just inasmuch as he has superfluous means must he accomplish not only actually more but{416}proportionately more than those who are less wealthy around him. What is true thus of material wealth is even truer of intellectual wealth. The man who has more education than his neighbors is bound thereby to be helpful to his neighbors, to uplift them--how much one hesitates to use that much-abused word,--to help solve their problems, to make life happier for them; he is bound to use his faculties, God-given as they are and developed by intellectual opportunities, not for himself alone, but for all those around him.
Unfortunately recent generations of college men have not taken this responsibility seriously, or have not seen the duty that lay before them and the burden imposed on them by the very necessity of conditions. As a consequence they have often been leaders in evil. They have almost invariably been protagonists of selfishness and of individualism. So long as they have gotten much out of life they have not cared whether others have had the paths for even reasonable happiness and some opportunities in life made smooth. Only too often they have been a stumbling block in the road for others less educated than they. They have been the men higher up, the bribers who are ever so much worse than the bribed, the company directors who have turned aside and seen evil and injustice and pretended in smug propriety that it was no affair of theirs, or perhaps have said in self-justification--and such self-justification!--that if they did not do it{417}others would; the wealthy men who have used every means to get around the law to oppress the poor, to add useless wealth to useless wealth at the cost of others, even at the risk of subverting liberty, overturning government and ruining this latest experiment in democracy. I am not a muckraker, but we cannot hide from ourselves and we must not miss the real meaning of the events in the life around us as it really is.
When I think of the situation I am prone to compare with it other generations of college men and what they accomplished. History is not worth while if it tells us only of the past. It is of no more value than any other story, real or fictitious. History is significant only when the lessons of the past are valuable to the present. We are prone to think of education as influencing deeply only recent generations. Let me try and tell you briefly the story of some generations of college men who accomplished things that it will be worth while for us to consider to-day.
When the universities came into existence in the early thirteenth century social conditions were about as bad as can well be imagined. The incursions of the Goths had rubbed out all the old Roman law and the customs of the various nations had been obliterated in the disorder of the migration of the nations, when might absolutely made right. Gradually out of the inevitable lawlessness of the Dark Ages the Church, by her beneficent influence, brought the beginnings of{418}law and order so far as barbarous peoples could be lifted up. In the sixth century there was nearly everywhere in Europe social chaos. During the next centuries came the gradual uplift. Christianity in Ireland did much even in the preceding century, and then helped in the regeneration of Europe in the succeeding centuries. Charlemagne helped greatly, as his name chronicles, and Alfred, well deserving of the name the Great, carried on his work. In the tenth century everywhere the dawn of better things was to be seen. In the eleventh century organization of civil rights begins to make itself felt; in the twelfth century the universities were coming into existence; and then with the thirteenth century there was a great rejuvenescence of humanity in every department, but, above all, in the social order. Under feudalism men had no rights of themselves except such as were conferred on them by some external agency. In the thirteenth century the essential rights of man begin to make themselves felt and find confident assertion.
It is not hard to trace the steps of the development. Magna Charta was signed in 1215. The First English Parliament met in 1257. The representative nature of that parliament became complete in the next twenty years. The English Common Law was put into form about the beginning of the last quarter of the century and in 1282 Bracton published his great digest of it. The principle there shall be no taxation without{419}representation, our own basis for the Declaration of Independence five centuries later, was proclaimed as early as 1260 and was emphasized by the great Pope Boniface VIII at the end of the century. Early in the century, the great Lateran Council decreed that every diocese in the world should have a college and that the Metropolitan Sees at least should have such opportunities for post-graduate study as we now call universities. The first great Pope of the century, Innocent III, laid the foundation of a great City Hospital in Rome and required that every bishop throughout the world should have one in his See and that the model of it should be that of the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Leprosy was an epidemic disease among the people, somewhat as tuberculosis is now; measures were taken for the segregation of lepers, leper hospitals were built for them outside of the town, and these great generations solved a problem in hygiene as difficult as is ours with regard to tuberculosis.
Above all, the rights of the people were assured to them. At the beginning of the century probably the most striking thing among the population of the various towns, if a modern had a chance to visit them, would be the number of the maimed and the halt and the blind. We would be apt to wonder where were the industrial and manufacturing plants responsible for all this maiming of the people, and look in vain for the belching chimneys of factories or trains. It was{420}another form of selfishness that produced cripples in the twelfth century. Punishment was by maiming. For offences against property a man lost an eye, or a hand, or a leg. Very often the offences were of a kind that we would resent punishment for in the modern time. If a man were caught poaching on a nobleman's preserves of game, and sometimes it was the hunger of his children that drove him to it, he lost a hand. For a second offence, he lost an eye. For failures to pay various taxes, if the offence were repeated, maiming was likely to be the consequence. All this was in as perfect accordance with law as our fellow-servant or contributory-negligence doctrines. So that the sight of the maimed person might deter others from following this example of recalcitrancy, it was hoped that these cripples would not die, though in the imperfect surgery of the time they often did. Always the selfish pleasures of the upper classes so-called, when they are thoughtless, mean the loss of all possibilities of happiness for the lower classes. The ways of it all may be different from age to age, the results and the responsibility are always the same.
In the thirteenth century all this was changed. St. Louis of France sent one of his greatest noblemen who had unreasonably punished student poachers on a penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land and inflicted a heavy fine, and all notwithstanding the protest of the most powerful nobles{421}of his kingdom whose rights were invaded. How we do always hear about the invasion of the rights of the entrenched classes. In England men, even men without any patent of nobility or clerical privilege, began to have rights and others had duties towards them. Above all, men were given opportunities to bring out what was best in them. The great cathedrals were built, the great monasteries, some of the greatest castles, some of the fine colleges at the universities. Many of the municipal buildings were erected in the glorious architecture of the times. At these men were employed in what is probably the happiest work that a man can do. They had the chance to express themselves in the beautiful achievements of their hands. The village blacksmith made gates, and locks, and bolts, and hinges for cathedrals that are so beautiful that all the world has wondered at them ever since. The stained glass is the finest ever made. The illuminated books are beautiful beyond description, the handsomest of all times. The needlework of the vestments stands out as the most beautiful in history. The men and women who did these things were happy in the execution of beautiful works of art, and as the population was only scanty a large proportion of them were closer to beautiful things than the world has ever known.
Blessed is the man who has found his work. These men had found their work and were happy. Instead of going out to the deadly routine of{422}work they did not like, but that they had to do, because they must earn enough so as to get bread enough to eat for themselves and family, so that they might live and go out and work once more to-morrow and to-morrow, and so on to the end of recorded time, the workman dreamt of the beauty that he might express; went out hoping to achieve it; failed often but still hoped, and hope is life's best consolation; came away reluctantly, thinking that surely he would accomplish something on the morrow. It is the difference between mere routine work and the handicraftsmanship that satisfies because it occupies the whole man. Is it any wonder that our workman is discontented; is it any wonder that the England of that time should be called merry England and the France and Italy gay France and Italy?
All this organization of the workmen was accomplished by the university men of the time. They were mainly clergymen, but they had in them not only the wish, but the faculty to help those around them, and so there arose the beautiful creations of that time in art, architecture, literature and political freedom which did so much for the masses of the people. There were more students at the universities at the end of the thirteenth century to the population of the various countries of Europe than there are at the present time. That seems impossible, but so do all the other achievements of the thirteenth century,--their cathedrals, their arts and crafts, their{423}universities, their literature,--until you go back to study them. There is absolutely no doubt about these statistics. These university men were trained to self-government and to the government of others in the university life of the time. They took that training out with them, not for selfish purposes alone, but for the help of others. What they accomplished is to be found in the social uplift that followed. There is scarcely a right or a development of liberty that we have now that cannot be found, in germ at least, often in complete evolution, in the thirteenth century. The Supreme Courts of most of our states still make their decisions following the old English common law which was laid down in that century.
But it will be said, while so much was done for the workman, have we not heard that his wages were a few cents, almost nothing, and that his hours were long and he was little better than a slave? Only the first portion of this has any truth in it. He did get what seems to us a mere pittance for his day's wages. As pointed out by M. Urbain Gohier, the French socialist, when he visited this country to lecture a few years ago, the workmen of this time had already obtained the eight-hour day, the three eights as they are called, eight hours of work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for themselves. Besides they had the Saturday half-holiday, or at least, after the Vesper hour, work could not be required of them, and there was more than one holy-day of{424}obligation every two weeks, on which they did not work, and on the Vigil of which work ceased at four o'clock. As for their wages, by Act of Parliament they got fourpence a day at the end of the century and this does not seem much, but the same Act of Parliament set the minimum wage and the maximum price that could be charged for the necessities of life. A pair of hand-made shoes could be bought for fourpence, and no workman can do anything like that for a day's wage at the present or usually for more than double his daily wages. A fat goose cost but twopence halfpenny, and when the father of a family can buy two fat geese for his daily wages, there is no danger of the family starving. Our wages are higher, but the necessities of life have gone up so high that the wages can scarcely touch them.
In the parliament that passed these laws the greater proportion were college men. I suppose probably three-fourths of the members of both houses had been at the university. Now that the question of the abolition of the House of Lords is occupying much attention, we sometimes hear of it as a mediaeval institution. It is spoken of as an inheritance from an earlier and ruder time. I wonder how much the people who talk thus know about the realities. They must be densely ignorant of what the House of Lords used to be. At the present moment there are in the English House of Lords 627 members, only{425}75 of whom do not owe their position directly or solely to the accident of birth. Even about half of this seventy-five can only be selected from the hereditary nobility of Scotland and of Ireland. In the Middle Ages it was quite different. Until the reformation so-called the Lords Spiritual formed a majority of the House of Lords. They consisted not only of the bishops but of the abbots and priors of monasteries and the masters of the various religious and knightly orders. This upper chamber of the olden time was elected in the best possible sense of the word. They were usually men who had risen from the ranks of the people and who had been chosen because of their unselfishness to be heads of religious houses and religious orders. There were abuses by which some of these Lords Spiritual obtained their places by what we now call pull, but the great majority of them were selected for their virtues, and because they had shown their power to rule over themselves had been chosen to rule over others.
They were men who could own nothing for themselves and families, and in whom every motive, human and divine, appealed to make life as happy as possible for others. They were all of them university men. Compare for a moment the present House of Lords with that House of Lords and you will see the difference between the old time and the present. No wonder England was merry England, no wonder historian{426}after historian has declared that the people were happier at this time than they have ever been before or since, no wonder men had leisure to make great monuments of genius in architecture, in the arts and in literature. No wonder the universities, in the form in which they have been useful to mankind ever since, were organized in this century; no wonder all our rights and liberties come to us. Great generations of the university men nobly did their work.
Young men, you are graduating from a college that is literally a lineal descendant of those old-time universities. You have had the training of heart and of will as well as of mind that was given to these students of the olden times. You have been taught that the end of life is not self, but that life shall mean something for others as well as yourself, that every action shall be looked at from the standpoint of what it means for others as well as for yourselves, and that you shall never do anything that will even remotely injure others.
You are not only going to lead honest but honorable lives. You are going to be true to yourselves first, but absolutely faithful to others. They are telling a story in New York now that, perhaps, some of you have heard. It is of the young man who had graduated at the head of his class at the high school and delighted his old father's heart. He kept up the good work, and came out first in his class at college. Then, when{427}he led a large class at the law school, you can understand how proud the old gentleman was. Tom came home to practise law in a long-established firm where there was an opening for him. Some six months later he said, one day, to his father, "Well, I made $10,000 to-day," and the old gentleman said, "Well, Tom, that is a good deal of money to make. I hope you made it honestly." The young man lifted his head and said, "You can be sure that I would not make it dishonestly." "That is right," the old man said. "Tell us how it came about." Then Tom told how he knew that a trolley line was going to run out far from town and that he had secured an option on some property through which it was going to pass. "You know old Farmer Simpson out on the Plank Road?" he said. "His boys have left him and gone to the city; he cannot work his farm any longer himself, and he cannot hire men for it, and he wants to get rid of it. I got positive information yesterday through one of our clients that a trolley line is going out through that farm. When I went out to see the old man he knew me at once, spoke about you, and when I offered to try to sell the farm for him and suggested the advisability of signing an option on it to me at a definite figure, so that I may be able to close the price with any one who wanted it, he signed at once at a ridiculously low figure because, though, as he said, he did not care to sign the papers for lawyer folk,{428}he knew I was different. I have got the farm at so low a price that $10,000 is the smallest profit I can look for. I think I will get that profit out of the company for the right of way, and then I will have the rest of the farm for myself. It will make a mighty nice country place."
Then there was a pause. The old gentleman did not lighten up any over the story, as Tom seemed to think he would. After a minute's silence the old man said, "Well, Tom, that was not what I sent you to college and law school for, to come out here and take advantage of my old neighbors. I thought that you would be helpful to us all, and that there would be more of happiness in the world because of your education. You may call that transaction honest, and perhaps it is legal, but I know that it is dishonorable. Tom, if you don't give Farmer Simpson back his option I do not think I want you to live here with me any more. Somehow I couldn't feel as if I could hold up my head if ever I passed Farmer Simpson and his wife, if you did. You may act as his attorney if you will and take a good fair fee for it, but you must not absorb all the profits just because the old man is in trouble and is glad to trust an old neighbor's son."
Of course Tom's father was dreadfully old-fashioned and out of date. Of course there are some people who will say that this sort of thing is quixotic. Now, this sort of thing is what higher education should mean, and does mean, in a{429}Catholic college. Your principles are not taught you for the sake of exercises of piety, nor attendance at religious duties. These you have got to do anyhow, but they are meant to inflow into every action of your life and to make the basic principle of them all, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
You are graduating from a Catholic college with high aims, you have had many advantages, more than are accorded usually in our time to men of your years in the training of heart and will as well as intellect, and much is expected of you. You are rich in real education and a stewardship of great intellectual and moral wealth is given over to you, and you must be better than others and be, above all, ever helpful to others. Your education was not given for your benefit, but for that of the community. Your neighbors are all round you. See that at the end of your life they shall all be happier because you have lived. If you do not do so you shall sadly disappoint the hopes of your teachers and, above all, you shall be false to the trust that has been confided to you.