_President Jordan, and you, my Fellow-Citizens, and especially you,
my Fellow-college Men and Women_:
I thank you for your greeting, and I know you will not grudge my
saying, first of all, a special word of thanks to the men of the Grand
Army. It is a fine thing to have before a body of students men who by
their practice have rendered it unnecessary that they should preach;
for what we have to teach by precept, you, the men of ’61 to ’65,
have taught by deed, by action. I am proud as an American college man
myself to have seen the tablet outside within the court which shows
that this young university sent eighty-five of her sons to war when
the country called for them. I come from a college which boasts as its
proudest building that which stands to the memory of Harvard’s sons
who responded to the call of Lincoln when the hour of the Nation’s
danger was at hand. It will be a bad day for this country and a worse
day for all educative institutions in this country if ever such a call
is made, and the men of college training do not feel it peculiarly
incumbent upon them to respond.
President Jordan has been kind enough to allude to me as an old
friend. Mr. Jordan is too modest to say that he has long been not
only a friend, but a man to whom I have turned for advice and help,
before and since I became President. I am glad to have the chance of
acknowledging my obligations to him, and I am also glad that when I
ask you to strive toward productive scholarship, toward productive
citizenship, I can use the president of the university as an example.
Of course, in any of our American institutions of learning, even more
important than the production of scholarship is the production of
citizenship. That is the most important thing that any institution
of learning can produce. There are a great number of students who
can not and should not try, in after life, to lead a career of
scholarship, but no university can take high rank if it does not aim
at the production of, and succeed in producing, a certain number of
deep and thorough scholars—not scholars whose scholarship is of the
barren kind, but men of productive scholarship, men who do good work,
I trust great work, in the fields of literature, of art, of science,
in all their manifold activities. Here in California this Nation,
composite in its race stocks, speaking an Old World tongue, and with
an inherited Old World culture, has acquired an absolutely new domain.
I do not mean new only in the sense of additional territory like that
already possessed, I mean new in the sense of new surroundings, to
use the scientific phrase, of a new environment. Being new, I think
we have a right to look for a substantial achievement on the part
of your people along new lines. I do not mean the self-conscious
striving after newness, which is only too apt to breed eccentricity,
but I mean that those among you whose bent is toward scholarship as
a career should keep in mind the fact that such scholarship should
be productive, and should therefore aim at giving to the world some
addition to the world’s stock of what is useful or beautiful; and if
you work simply and naturally, taking advantage of your surroundings
as you find them, then in my belief a new mark will be made in
the history of intellectual achievement by our race. You of this
institution are blessed in its extraordinary physical beauty and
appropriateness of architecture and surroundings, with a suggestion of
what I might call the Americanized Greek. Such is your institution,
situated on the shores of this great ocean, built by a race which
has come steadily westward, which has come to where the Occident
looks west to the Orient, a race whose members here, fresh, vigorous,
have the boundless possibilities of the future brought to their very
doors in a sense that can not be possible for the members of the race
situated further east. Surely there will be some great outcome in the
way not merely of physical, but of moral and intellectual work worth
doing. I do not want you to turn out prigs; I do not want you to turn
out the self-conscious. I believe, with all my heart, in play. I want
you to play hard without encroaching on your work. I do, nevertheless,
think you ought to have at least the consciousness of the serious side
of what all this means, and of the necessity of effort, thrust upon
you, so that you may justify by your deeds in the future your training
and the extraordinary advantages under which that training has been
obtained.
America, the Republic of the United States, is of course in a
peculiar sense typical of the present age. We represent the fullest
development of the democratic spirit acting on the extraordinary
and highly complex industrial growth of the last half century. It
behooves us to justify by our acts the claims made for that political
and economic progress. We will never justify the existence of the
Republic by merely talking each Fourth of July about what the Republic
has done. If our homage is lip loyalty merely, the great deeds of
those who went before us, the great deeds of the times of Washington
and of the times of Lincoln, the great deeds of the men who won the
Revolution and founded the Nation, and of the men who preserved
it, who made it a Union and a free Republic, will simply arise to
shame us. We can honor our fathers and our fathers’ fathers only by
ourselves striving to rise level to their standard. There are plenty
of tendencies for evil in what we see round about us. Thank heaven,
there are an even greater number of tendencies for good, and one of
the things, Mr. Jordan, which it seems to me give this Nation cause
for hope is the national standard of ambition which makes it possible
to recognize with admiration and regard such work as the founding of
a university of this character. It speaks well for our Nation that
men and women should desire during their lives to devote the fortunes
which they were able to acquire or to inherit because of our system
of government, because of our social system, to objects so entirely
worthy and so entirely admirable as the foundation of a great seat
of learning such as this. All that we outsiders can do is to pay our
tribute of respect to the dead and to the living who have done such
good, and at least to make it evident that we appreciate to the full
what has been done.
I have spoken of scholarship; I want to go back to the question of
citizenship, a question affecting not merely the scholars among you,
not merely those who are hereafter to lead lives devoted to science,
to art, to productivity in literature. And when you take up science,
art, and literature, remember that one first-class bit of work is
better than one thousand fairly good bits of work; that as the years
roll on the man or the woman who has been able to make a masterpiece
with the pen, the brush, the pencil, in any way, has rendered a
service to the country such as not all his or her compeers who merely
do fairly good second-rate work can ever accomplish. Only a limited
number of us can ever become scholars or work successfully along the
lines I have spoken of, but we can all be good citizens. We can all
lead a life of action, a life of endeavor, a life that is to be judged
primarily by the effort, somewhat by the result, along the lines of
helping the growth of what is right and decent and generous and lofty
in our several communities, in the State, in the Nation.
You men and women who have had the advantages of a college training
are not to be excused if you fail to do, not as well as, but more than
the average man outside who has not had your advantages. Every now and
then I meet (at least I meet him in the East, and I dare say he is to
be found here) the man who, having gone through college, feels that
somehow that confers upon him a special distinction which relieves
him from the necessity of showing himself as good as his fellows.
I see you recognize the type. That man is not only a curse to the
community, and incidentally to himself, but he is a curse to the cause
of academic education, the college and university training, because by
his existence he serves as an excuse for those who like to denounce
such education. Your education, your training, will not confer on you
one privilege in the way of excusing you from effort or from work.
All it can do and what it should do, is to make you a little better
fitted for such effort, for such work; and I do not care whether that
is in business, politics, in no matter what branch of endeavor, all
it can do is by the training you have received, by the advantages you
have received, to fit you to do a little better than the average man
that you meet. It is incumbent upon you to show that the training
has had that effect. It ought to enable you to do a little better
for yourselves, and if you have in you souls capable of a thrill of
generous emotion, souls capable of understanding what you owe to your
training, to your alma mater, to the past and the present that have
given you all that you have—if you have such souls, it ought to make
you doubly bent upon disinterested work for the State and the Nation.
Such work can be done along many different lines. I want to-day,
here in California, to make a special appeal to all of you, and to
California as a whole, for work along a certain line—the line of
preserving your great natural advantages alike from the standpoint
of use and from the standpoint of beauty. If the students of this
institution have not by the mere fact of their surroundings learned
to appreciate beauty, then the fault is in you and not in the
surroundings. Here in California you have some of the great wonders
of the world. You have a singularly beautiful landscape, singularly
beautiful and singularly majestic scenery, and it should certainly be
your aim to try to preserve for those who are to come after you that
beauty, to try to keep unmarred that majesty. Closely entwined with
keeping unmarred the beauty of your scenery, of your great natural
attractions, is the question of making use of, not for the moment
merely, but for future time, of your great natural products. Yesterday
I saw for the first time a grove of your great trees, a grove which
it has taken the ages several thousands of years to build up; and
I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a
tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to
the valley of the Euphrates, which it has taken so many thousands
of years to build up, and which can be put to better use. That, you
may say, is not looking at the matter from the practical standpoint.
There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation
of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the
higher emotions in mankind. But, furthermore, I appeal to you from
the standpoint of use. A few big trees, of unusual size and beauty,
should be preserved for their own sake; but the forests as a whole
should be used for business purposes, only they should be used in a
way that will preserve them as permanent sources of national wealth.
In many parts of California the whole future welfare of the State
depends upon the way in which you are able to use your water supply;
and the preservation of the forests and the preservation of the use
of the water are inseparably connected. I believe we are past the
stage of national existence when we could look on complacently at the
individual who skinned the land and was content for the sake of three
years’ profit for himself to leave a desert for the children of those
who were to inherit the soil. I think we have passed that stage. We
should handle, and I think we now do handle, all problems such as
those of forestry and of the preservation and use of our waters from
the standpoint of the permanent interests of the home-maker in any
region—the man who comes in not to take what he can out of the soil
and leave, having exploited the country, but who comes to dwell
therein, to bring up his children, and to leave them a heritage in
the country not merely unimpaired, but if possible even improved.
That is the sensible view of civic obligation, and the policy of the
State and of the Nation should be shaped in that direction. It should
be shaped in the interest of the home-maker, the actual resident,
the man who is not only to be benefited himself, but whose children
and children’s children are to be benefited by what he has done.
California has for years, I am happy to say, taken a more sensible,
a more intelligent interest in forest preservation than any other
State. It early appointed a forest commission; later on some of the
functions of that commission were replaced by the Sierra Club, a club
which has done much on the Pacific Coast to perpetuate the spirit
of the explorer and the pioneer. Then I am happy to say a great
business interest showed an intelligent and far-sighted spirit which
is of happy augury, for the Redwood Manufacturers of San Francisco
were first among lumbermen’s associations to give assistance to the
cause of practical forestry. The study of the redwood which the
action of this association made possible was the pioneer study in the
co-operative work which is now being carried out between lumbermen
all over the United States and the Federal Bureau of Forestry. All of
this kind of work is peculiarly the kind of work in which we have a
right to expect not merely hearty co-operation from, but leadership in
college men trained in the universities of this Pacific Coast State;
for the forests of this State stand alone in the world. There are
none others like them anywhere. There are no other trees anywhere like
the giant Sequoias; nowhere else is there a more beautiful forest than
that which clothes the western slope of the Sierra. Very early your
forests attracted lumbermen from other States, and by the course of
timber land investments some of the best of the big tree groves were
threatened with destruction. Destruction came upon some of them, but
the women of California rose to the emergency through the California
Club, and later the Sempervirens Club took vigorous action. But the
Calaveras grove is not yet safe, and there should be no rest until
that safety is secured, by the action of private individuals, by the
action of the State, by the action of the Nation. The interest of
California in forest protection was shown even more effectively by the
purchase of the Big Basin Redwood Park, a superb forest property the
possession of which should be a source of just pride to all citizens
jealous of California’s good name.
I appeal to you, as I say, to protect these mighty trees, these
wonderful monuments of beauty. I appeal to you to protect them for
the sake of their beauty, but I also make the appeal just as strongly
on economic grounds; as I am well aware that in dealing with such
questions a far-sighted economic policy must be that to which alone
in the long run one can safely appeal. The interests of California
in forests depend directly of course upon the handling of her wood
and water supplies and the supply of material from the lumber woods
and the production of agricultural products on irrigated farms. The
great valleys which stretch through the State between the Sierra
Nevada and Coast Ranges must owe their future development as they owe
their present prosperity to irrigation. Whatever tends to destroy
the water supply of the Sacramento, the San Gabriel, and the other
valleys strikes vitally at the welfare of California. The welfare of
California depends in no small measure upon the preservation of water
for the purposes of irrigation in those beautiful and fertile valleys
which can not grow crops by rainfall alone. The forest cover upon the
drainage basins of streams used for irrigation purposes is of prime
importance to the interests of the entire State. Now keep in mind
that the whole object of forest protection is, as I have said again
and again, the making and maintaining of prosperous homes. I am not
advocating forest protection from the æsthetic standpoint only. I do
advocate the keeping of big trees, the great monarchs of the woods,
for the sake of their beauty, but I advocate the preservation and
wise use of the forests because I feel it essential to the interests
of the actual settlers. I am asking that the forests be used wisely
for the sake of the successors of the pioneers, for the sake of the
settlers who dwell on the land and by doing so extend the borders
of our civilization. I ask it for the sake of the man who makes his
farm in the woods, or lower down along the sides of the streams which
have their rise in the mountains. Every phase of the land policy of
the United States is, as it by right ought to be, directed to the
upbuilding of the home-maker. The one sure test of all public land
legislation should be: does it help to make and to keep prosperous
homes? If it does, the legislation is good. If it does not, the
legislation is bad. Any legislation which has a tendency to give
land in large tracts to people who will lease it out to tenants is
undesirable. We do not want ever to let our land policy be shaped so
as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to others. We want
to make the smaller men who, under such conditions would rent, actual
proprietors. We must shape our policy so that these men themselves
shall be the land owners, the makers of homes, the keepers of homes.
Certain of our land laws, however beneficent their purposes, have been
twisted into an improper use, so that there have grown up abuses under
them by which they tend to create a class of men who, under one color
and another, obtain large tracts of soil for speculative purposes, or
to rent out to others; and there should be now a thorough scrutiny
of our land laws with the object of so amending them as to do away
with the possibility of such abuses. If it was not for the national
irrigation act we would be about past the time when Uncle Sam could
give every man a farm. Comparatively little of our land is left which
is adapted to farming without irrigation. The home-maker on the public
land must hereafter, in the great majority of cases, have water for
irrigation, or the making of his home will fail. Let us keep that
fact before our minds. Do not misunderstand me when I have spoken
of the defects of our land laws. Our land laws have served a noble
purpose in the past and have become the models for other governments.
The homestead law has been a notable instrument for good. To establish
a family permanently upon a quarter section of land, or of course upon
a less quantity if it is irrigated land, is the best use to which it
can be put. The first need of any nation is intelligent and honest
citizens. Such can come only from honest and intelligent homes, and to
get the good citizenship we must get the good homes. It is absolutely
necessary that the remainder of our public land should be reserved for
the home-maker, and it is necessary in my judgment that there should
be a revision of the land laws and a cutting out of such provisions
from them as in actual practice under present conditions tend to make
possible the acquisition of large tracts for speculative purposes or
for the purpose of leasing to others.
Citizenship is the prime test in the welfare of the Nation; but we
need good laws; and above all we need good land laws throughout the
West. We want to see the free farmer own his home. The best of the
public lands are already in private hands, and yet the rate of their
disposal is steadily increasing. More than six million acres were
patented during the first three months of the present year. It is
time for us to see that our remaining public lands are saved for
the home-maker to the utmost limit of his possible use. I say this
to you of this university because we have a right to expect that
the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific Slope, the
Rocky Mountains and great plains States will take the lead in the
preservation and right use of the forests, in securing the right use
of the waters, and in seeing to it that our land policy is not twisted
from its original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change
when such change is necessary in the line of that purpose, the purpose
being to turn the public domain into farms each to be the property of
the man who actually tills it and makes his home on it.
Infinite are the possibilities for usefulness that lie before such a
body as that I am addressing. Work? Of course you will have to work.
I should be sorry for you if you did not have to work. Of course you
will have to work, and I envy you the fact that before you, before the
graduates of this university, lies the chance of lives to be spent in
hard labor for great and glorious and useful causes, hard labor for
the uplifting of your States of the Union, of all mankind.