When Dr. Alexander Mackintosh Butcher was elected to the presidency
of Pluribus University ten years ago, there was general agreement
that in selecting a man who was not only a distinguished educator but
an executive of marked business ability the trustees had done honor
to themselves and their university as well as to the new president.
For Dr. Butcher had that peculiar genius which would have made him as
successful in Wall Street or in a governor’s chair as in the classroom.
Every alumnus of Pluribus knows the story told of the young Alexander
Mackintosh Butcher, standing at the age of twenty-two at the threshold
of a career. Eager, energetic, with a brilliant scholastic record
behind him, it was difficult to decide into what profession he should
throw his powerful talents. To his beloved and aged president the young
man went for counsel. “My boy,” said the good old man, “remember that
no profession offers nobler opportunities for service to humanity
than that of education.” And what should he teach? “Philosophy is the
noblest study of man.” And a professor of philosophy the young Butcher
speedily became.
Those who were so fortunate as to study philosophy under him at
Pluribus will never forget how uncompromisingly he preached absolute
idealism, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, or how witheringly
he excoriated the mushroom philosophies which were springing up to
challenge the eternal verities. I have heard his old students remark
the secret anguish which must have been his when later, as president
of the university, he was compelled to entertain the famous Swiss
philosopher, Monsfilius, whose alluring empiricism was taking the
philosophic world by storm.
Dr. Butcher’s philosophic acuteness is only equaled by his political
rectitude. Indeed, it is as philosopher-politician that he holds the
unique place he does in our American life, injecting into the petty
issues of the political arena the immutable principles of Truth.
Early conscious of his duty as a man and a citizen, he joined the
historic party which had earned the eternal allegiance of the nation
by rescuing it from slavery. By faithful service to the chiefs of his
state organization, first under the powerful Flatt, and later under the
well-known Harnes, himself college-bred and a political philosopher of
no mean merit, the young Dr. Butcher worked his way up through ward
captain to the position of district leader. The practical example
of Dr. Butcher, the scholar and educator, leaving the peace of his
academic shades to carry the banner in the service of his party ideals
of Prosperity and Protection has been an inspiration to thousands
of educated men in these days of civic cowardice. When, three years
ago, his long and faithful services were rewarded by the honor of
second place on the Presidential ticket which swept the great states
of Mormonia and Green Mountain, there were none of his friends and
admirers who felt that the distinction was undeserved.
President Butcher is frequently called into the councils of the
party whenever there are resolutions to be drawn up or statements of
philosophic principle to be issued. He is in great demand also as
chairman of state conventions, which his rare academic distinction
lifts far above the usual level of such affairs. It was at one of
these conventions that he made the memorable speech in which he
drew the analogy between the immutability of Anglo-Saxon political
institutions and the multiplication table. To the applause of the keen
and hard-headed business men and lawyers who sat as delegates under
him, he scored with matchless satire the idea of progress in politics,
and demonstrated to their complete satisfaction that it was as absurd
to tinker with the fundamentals of our political system as it would be
to construct a new arithmetic. In such characteristic wisdom we have
the intellectual caliber of the man.
This brilliant and profound address came only as the fruit of a
lifetime of thought on political philosophy. President Butcher’s
treatise on “Why We Should Never Change Any Form of Government” has
been worth more to thoughtful men than thousands of sermons on civic
righteousness. No one who has ever heard President Butcher’s rotund
voice discuss in a public address “those ideas and practices which have
been tried and tested by a thousand years of experience” will ever
allow his mind to dwell again on the progressive and disintegrating
tendencies of the day, nor will he have the heart again to challenge on
any subject the “decent respect for the common opinions of mankind.”
President Butcher’s social philosophy is as sound as his political.
The flexibility of his mind is shown in the fact that, although an
immutabilist in politics, he is a staunch Darwinian in sociology.
Himself triumphantly fit, he never wearies of expressing his robust
contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth. His essay on “The
Insurrection of the Maladjusted” is already a classic in American
literature. The trenchant attack on modern social movements as the
impudent revolt of the unfit against those who, by their personal
merits and industry, have, like himself, achieved success, has been
a grateful bulwark to thousands who might otherwise have been swept
sentimentally from their moorings by those false guides who erect their
own weakness and failure into a criticism of society.
Dr. Butcher’s literary eminence has not only won him a chair in the
American Academy of All the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophies, but has
made him almost as well known abroad as at home. He has lectured
before the learned societies of Lisbon on “The American at Home,” and
he has a wide circle of acquaintances in every capital in Europe. Most
of the foreign universities have awarded him honorary degrees. In spite
of his stout Americanism, Dr. Butcher has one of the most cosmopolitan
of minds. His essay on “The Cosmopolitan Intellect” has been translated
into every civilized language. With his admired friend, Owen Griffith,
he has collaborated in the latter’s endeavor to beat the swords of
industrial exploitation into the ploughshares of universal peace. He
has served in numerous capacities on Griffith’s many peace boards and
foundations, and has advised him widely and well how to distribute his
millions so as to prevent the recurrence of war in future centuries.
Let it not be thought that, in recounting President Butcher’s public
life and services, I am minimizing his distinction as a university
administrator. As executive of one of the largest universities in
America, he has raised the position of college president to a dignity
surpassed by scarcely any office except President of the United States.
The splendid $125,000 mansion which President Butcher had the trustees
of Pluribus build for him on the heights overlooking the city, where
he entertains distinguished foreign guests with all the pomp worthy
of his high office, is the precise measure both of the majesty with
which he has endowed the hitherto relatively humble position, and the
appreciation of a grateful university. The relations between President
Butcher and the trustees of Pluribus have always been of the most
beautiful nature. The warm and profound intellectual sympathy which
he feels for the methods and practices of the financial and corporate
world, and the extensive personal affiliations he has formed with its
leaders, have made it possible to leave in his hands a large measure of
absolute authority. Huge endowments have made Pluribus under President
Butcher’s rule one of the wealthiest of our higher institutions of
learning. With a rare intuitive response to the spirit of the time, the
President has labored to make it the biggest and most comprehensive of
its kind. Already its schools are numbered by the dozens, its buildings
by the scores, its instructors by the hundreds, its students by the
thousands, its income by the millions, and its possessions by the tens
of millions.
None who have seen President Butcher in the commencement exercises
of Pluribus can ever forget the impressiveness of the spectacle. His
resemblance to Henry VIII is more marked now that he has donned the
crimson gown and flat hat of the famous English university which gave
him the degree of LL.D. Seated in a high-backed chair--the historic
chair of the first colonial president of Pluribus--surrounded by tier
upon tier of his retinue of the thousand professors of the university,
President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher presents the degrees, and in his
emphatic voice warns the five thousand graduates before him against
everything new, everything untried, everything untested.
Only one office could tempt President Butcher from his high estate. Yet
even those enthusiastic alumni and those devoted professors who long
to see him President of the United States have little hope of tempting
him from his duties to his alma mater. Having set his hand to the
plough, he must see Pluribus through her harvest season, and may God
prosper the work! So, beloved of all, alumni and instructors alike, the
idol of the undergraduates, a national oracle of Prosperity and Peace,
President Butcher passes to a green old age, a truly Olympian figure of
the time.