THE UNIVERSITY REVIEW.
COMMENCEMENT NUMBER, JUNE, 1884.
THE WAY OF SALVATION.
MASTER'S ORATION.—BY FLORENCE E. FINCH.
THE way of salvation lies along the path of tolerance. It is salvation from the clashing of class hatreds, from a fierce and angry contest between the old and the new. For life in America on one hand, is moving rapidly along toward old-world, ocean-wide distinctions between its classes, and, on the other, the spirit of liberty, the spirit of freedom, the spirit that demands a new order of things is moving just as rapidly. If both go on as they are going now collision is inevitable. For there is a deep and growing hatred, growing deeper and bitterer, between those who represent the two opposing principles, complacent faith in the present system and indignant protest against its results. And the contest will be all the fiercer and hotter because the United States, for all its fair promises of liberty, equality and prosperity for all, gives prosperity only to the few, belies liberty, and denies equality.
That is a hackneyed saying about the rich growing richer and the poor poorer. But, unfortunately, the more hackneyed it becomes the more closely it is packed with truth. In every city in the United States poverty and misery on one side, riches and luxury on the other, elbow each other along and fight inch by inch for each other's territory. In New York City, for instance, it takes but a few minutes' ride to go from the dirt heaps, the moral filth, the squalor, the vice and the wretchedness of the Hester street and Water street regions out into the broad and shining magnificence of the streets in the Forties and the Fifties. In Boston it is but a step
from the dark, hideous, noisome North End, or the South Cove, swarming with vice, children and misery, to the beauty, elegance and rich comfort of Beacon street and the Back Bay region. In all this beautiful country, where the conditions of life are simpler and living is easier and pleasanter than it is in any other place on the face of the globe, you can go to no city or town that you will not find heart-breaking poverty, misery untold, ignorance and wretchedness close clamoring upon the heels of wealth and leisure and elegance. After you have seen and admired well fed comfort and silken clad luxury, you have only to turn around to see men, women and children by the thousand, held in such close embrace of poverty and ignorance that virtue is impossible, intelligence not to be dreamed of, and anything more than the life of the lowest animal united with the worst instincts of the lowest human not even imaginable. Now, I say that any system of civilization in which such contrasts of luxury and wretchedness are inevitable results is a stupendous lie. It is all a sham that promises great things, even while it is robbing honest labor with one hand and with the other pauperizing it with charities and State gifts. We can judge of systems only by their results, and we have but to look candidly at the condition of one half the people in these United States to be convinced that in ours there is poison. It will not do to say that the conditions of life are free with us, and that it is a question only of the survival of the fittest. It is not true. With our present