The Courier-Review.
17
ple of the state to flood it with books, every room as full as it can hold, except the room the students want for reading. I hope that the next act of the legislature of Kansas will be to appropriate a sum sufficient to provide this library with such an inflow of new literature, science, history, things above and things below, that you will feel that the life of this institution is assured, because it has a great, strong, vigorous heart beating in the midst of it. (Well I do not know exactly where that leads me to, but I will go on.)
There is a great deal of useless writing done in this age; a great deal of it. And people, even after they have found out that a book is worthless, still read on and on, and take up others, and so on all the time. Sometimes my heart aches for a great many things that I cannot help, but I have long ago given up the idea that the human race was to be lifted up bodily as a race by any divinely appointed elevator that was going up a story, stopping on the way to take up any who would get in. If we are to rise, we must do so as individuals; every man for himself, and every woman for herself. Now every boy and girl in Kansas who is educated becomes a center of power and influence in the state. With your education, with your training, your children are going to be educated and are going up a few stories higher. Now the great trouble with much of the work in these days is that there is not enough thinking done. What is wanted to help us out of the trouble are these three things:
First, we want kind hearts. A cold-hearted man is a burden to society. We want to love our neighbor as ourselves. We want that love that was characteristic of the Divine Being when he "so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that he might die for us." We want a love that will make us give our best for humanity and the world.
Second, we want knowledge. We have got to have knowledge. A people cannot walk well in the darkness; there can be no upward progress without light. Half of our troubles at the present day arise simply from the fact that we have paid no heed to the lessons that
we could have learned from past experiences. Periods of financial depression do not come by accident. The transferring of one system and one policy to another, the turning over of the government into new hands every few years does not cause the trouble, but the fact that the new men in power have not lived in the experiences that have passed, have never learned the lessons, but have got them to learn by experience, in that school in which fools and only fools will learn. We want to know the best way in which we may guide our steps in the future, and we can only do this by profiting by the lesson taught in the past.
Third, knowledge is of no account, and kind heart is of little account, without clear thinking. The man who gropes for a few little superficial data and then thinks he knows it all lacks common sense. There is a link between cause and effect. Nothing happens without a cause. People do not get angry without a cause. Legislatures are not to be rated as violating all the principles of honesty without a cause. If the people see that the legislature is representative of themselves and the legislature is dishonest, then the people are dishonest. There has been the greatest want of clear thinking during the last ten years, and the largest amount of foggy thinking and foggy talking on subjects of government, legislature, etc., than any age has yet seen. I am not talking about Kansas alone, but about the whole country. You may have clear skys here, and a pure atmosphere, and everyone of you may be a clear thinker for anything known to the contrary, but if so you are very different from the rest of the country. So much fogginess of thinking, and jumping at conclusions. Why, a man can settle the silver question after reading fifteen minutes! He hears one man curse the demonetization of silver, and swallows it. He hears another man say just the opposite, and by the time he has got the two notions in his head he does not really know what he does mean, or what he wants. Nothing is clear in his mind. First get kind hearts; second, get knowledge, but let clear thinking go with them.