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Kansas University Weekly.
dus there would be of everything worth while in the world—friendship, love, magnanimity, heroism,beauty, art,music literature and religion. Why,the world would not be a decent place for a pig to live in.
And when you have secured your million bv this disagreeable process, what you have secured is such a winged thing. The swrecked millionaires along the streets of New York are thicker than the cobble stones today. It is a long fall from Fifth avenue to Third, and the man who takes that drop is usually found crippled for life or killed outright.
Ninety out of a hundred, I said, must reach wealth in the way I have described. In the other ten cases it either comes by luck, which is a dangerous thing, or it comes by crimes and wrongs, or it comes as the result of some special genius or gift—comes as the reward of real and extraordinary benefits conferred on mankind. And however it may be acquired, wealth is a fearful responsibility and a fearful care and a fearful temptation. It is so likely to make a man hard on the outside and saw-dusty within! It is so apt to eat up the whole man, body, mind and soul! Life is in danger of becoming such a poor and pitiful thing! A man is so likely to become a coward! There was a man in Kansas who committed suicide because he could not bear the loss of a little of a large fortune.
Not many of you want to become millionaires really, and there are fewer who are willing to give the price.
Opinions differ, as I said before, but it seems to me that you are not the more likely to become millionaires because you are liberally educated. Liberal education will, indeed add to your capacity to heap up money, but I am inclined to think it will diminish your desire to do so.
Liberal education then, I conclude, is a good thing from the bread and butter point of view.
But the most valuable thing to be had cut of four years of liberal studies has no direct use either in earning a living or in getting rich, or in any so-called practical way. I say direct use, for I think it has an indirect use, if not in getting rich, certainly in securing and maintaining a place in the world. If
you do your work rightly here, you come out with warmer affections, keener sensibilities, and higher aspirations; you come out with the seeing eye and the feeling heart; you come out with the mind stored and the imagination enkindled. Go into any of the great collections of pictures such as the Columbian art gallery; there you will catch glimpses of all ages, climes and races; all classes and conditions of men; glimpses of the world caught by the eye of trained seers; the world with all its stir and rest, its gladness and pathos, its sweetness and its ferocity. There you may storm or shine with nature, and sing or laugh or weep with men. You may stand on the summit of Sinai and gaze down through the crystal sea of air to the peace of the valley below; or you may join the tossing sailor in his battle with the storm; or you may stand, pensive and alone, in the snowy field, by the silent forest, and watch the bleak moon break through the flying clouds. You may sorrow with the broken-hearted peasant as he sits by his dead wife's bedside, staring into the falling shadows of the night which will never in this world lift for him; or you may join the revelers at some wayside inn. There you may see the rosy baby in his mother's arms, the adventurous lad scaling the cliff, the youthful soldier parting from his his love, the valiant veteran dead on the battlefield. You may explore a thousand lovely nooks of beautiful earth, or you may lose yourself in old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.
All this you may do if you do not try to make a catalogue or critic of yourself, but simply take what is before you and enjoy it as a layman should. And when for a week you have thus gazed through artists' eyes, you come out into the world, and everywhere you turn you see pictures, real pictures, which you never saw before and never would have seen.
Now, you come out of college as you come out of that gallery, quickened in sense and in sympathy. You have gained fellowship and communion with nature, fellowship, communion and sympathy with the world that is gone; fellowship, communion and sympathy with mankind of today. In a word, you have gained life, and life is more than meat.
Liberal education, true culture, keeps alive the best part of man's being—the power of emotion, the power to feel. Men dread to grow old. What is it really to grow old, except to lose this capacity for emotion—to lose enthusiasm and aspirations, to lose our sympathy with nature and with men? Frederick Robertson was still young, at least in spirit, when he found himself alone in that solitary valley of the Alps, without a guide, and a thunderstorm coming on. "I wish I could explain," he writes, "how every circumstance combined to produce the same feeling and ministered to unity of impression; the slow, wild wreathing of vapors round the peaks, concealing their summits and imparting in semblance their own motion, till each dark mountain form seemed to be mysterious and alive; the eagle like plunge of the bearded vulture of the Alps; the wild, shrill cries of other mountain birds, startling the solitude and silence—till the blue lightning streamed at last, and the shattering thunder crashed as if the mountains must give way; and then came the feelings which in their fulness man can feel but once in life—mingled sensations of awe and triumph and defiance of danger; pride, rapture, contempt of pain, humbleness and intense repose, as if all the strife and struggle of the elements were only uttering the unrest of man's bosom; so that in all such scenes there is a feeling of relief, and he is tempted to cry out in exultation. 'There, there, all this was in my heart and it was neyer said out until now.'"
Now a man whose spirit had grown old would have felt nothing, under such circumstances, but the dampness of his clothes. The power to feel is youth and culture preserves it. Let us husband, not waste, the precious oil of emotion and sympathy given us by nature, and without which the machinery of life so soon begins to grate and rasp and jar. Restrain but cultivate your feelings. Avoid debauch. Preserve your your power to admire, to love, to venerate. Avoid the corroding influence of cynicism and distrust
Liberal education will furnish you with sources of enjoyment and consola-