[Speech of William M. Evarts at the Thanksgiving Jubilee of the Yale
Alumni, New York City, December 7, 1883. Chauncey M. Depew presided.
Mr. Evarts responded for the Alumni.]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ALUMNI:--I congratulate you,
Mr. President, on having such a noble, such a generous, such a patient,
such an appreciative body to preside over. I congratulate you,
gentlemen, on having a President who combines in himself in a marked
degree these two great traits of a presiding officer:--confidence in
himself [great laughter], and distrust of all who are to come after him.
[Laughter.] I remember forty years ago to have heard a Senator of the
United States, making a stump speech in a quiet town in Vermont, amuse
his audience with a story of a woodsawyer who had worked for him and who
had the habit of accompanying the movement of his saw with talking to
himself. He asked him one day why he did so. "Why," said he, "for two
reasons. The first is, that it is a great pleasure to hear a sensible
man talk, and the second is that it is a great pleasure to talk to a
sensible man." [Laughter.]
Now, sir, I have but one warning to give you. It is said of Mercutio,
the wittiest creation of Shakespeare, who is despatched very early in
the play, "My sore wound hath served its turn, although it were not as
deep as a well nor as wide as a church door." It is said that if
Shakespeare hadn't killed Mercutio early, Mercutio would have killed
him. If you [turning to the President] are to preside year after year or
to attempt it upon so high and brilliant and bold a key as you have
assumed here to-night, if you don't kill the Alumni dinners, the Alumni
dinners will kill you. [Great laughter.] Yale College, as represented by
its graduates, is not self-conceited nor obtrusive. It is true they have
always felt the magnificent compliment paid to the College by that
greatest of English thinkers and philosophers Lord Bacon, who said in a
famous passage, as you will recall: "Eating makes a full man, drinking a
ready man, but to be an Alumnus of Yale, a wise man." Yet we are modest
and even reverent toward the claims of other universities. We are
satisfied at the humble position which the French bishop took towards
that great berry, the strawberry. "Doubtless," said he, "God Almighty
might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but doubtless He has
not." [Laughter.] That is our opinion of Yale College. [Applause.]
Now, to be an Alumnus of Yale College, is the object of all those who
enter the college and the object after getting there is to get out.
Sometimes indeed, the four years are spent without that fortunate
result. I remember to have heard of the son of a somewhat conspicuous
gentleman who had desired to give his children the benefit of an
education such as Yale affords, who had spent four years there; but the
entire four years were spent as a member of the Freshman class.
[Laughter.] What a fortunate condition to be continually towering over
more and more of those who are competing with him in scholarship and for
distinction! I know of none greater unless some mode might be
discovered by which one could be a Senior for four years. There is
nothing in human affairs that could equal that happiness! [Laughter.]
Well, college life in my generation--and I certainly had a singular
reminder to-night from you, Mr. President, that I belonged to a
generation that has passed out of memory, for you have excited the
enthusiasm of this company only in the applause that you have drawn
from those who were graduated under Presidents Woolsey and Porter. What
are you to say for us who graduated under President Day? College life, I
was about to say, is a charming life. The best men, we may presume, are
collected from the community, placed under the happiest relations one to
another and under the happiest influences from above and around them.
The President of the college has spoken to you of the pleasing fact that
there is an endowment of seventy thousand dollars for fellowships. Well,
when I was in college, a very moderate endowment of five dollars
contributed by those who were associated as companions was a very good
endowment for good fellowship. [Laughter.] And now in looking at life as
it is, as we remember it in college and have seen it since, who is there
that would compare mere fellowship with good-fellowship? What is there
that is heartier, what sincerer, what more generous and what more just
than the relations of young men of a liberal spirit toward one another
in college? How many of us as we have gone on in life, prosperous, as we
may have been, with nothing to complain of as to our success or our
situation--how many of us have been disposed to repeat that lament of
Æneas where he was continually baffled in holding closer conversation
with his goddess-mother who was always carried off in a nimbus or her
accents lost in the whisper of the wind:--
"cur dextrae jungere dextram
Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"
Maybe in the good-fellowship of after-life, you, Mr. President, will not
hesitate to walk down Broadway with your arm over General Jackson's
shoulder and his about your waist, and then all the people shall cry
with applause: "See how Yale men love one another!"
You will observe, from this little classic allusion that I am on the
side of those who favor in the curriculum the maintenance of the learned
languages. For myself, whether an education in the classic languages and
in the classic literature should or should not be discarded from the
education of the noble youth of the country is the question whether it
is worth while in the advancing and strenuous life of modern times that
men should have a liberal education. For be sure that there is no trait
in that education that entitles it to the name of liberal more sure and
more valuable than this education in the literature, in the history, in
the language of the great men of the ages past. If any boy is put
through what is called a liberal education, and finds when he goes out
from it, that he is not on a level with those who understand and cherish
the Greek language and literature, he will find that he is mistaken in
wishing to dispense with that distinguishing trait.
I am able to give you a very interesting anecdote, as it seems to me, of
this very point, of how a great man, great in his power, great in his
fame, yet of an ingenuous and simple nature, may look at this
accomplishment. On my return from Europe, when I first visited it, upon
a public errand, while President Lincoln was at the height of his fame
from the assured although not completed success and triumph in the war,
and from the great transaction that had made him one of the famous men
for all ages--the emancipation of the slaves--I had occasion, in a
friendly meeting with him, to express a hope that he would find it in
his power after the cares of State were laid aside to visit Europe and
see the statesmen and great men there whose mouths were full of plaudits
for his assured accomplished fame. Said he: "You are very kind in
thinking I should meet with a reception so gratifying as you have
proposed, and I certainly should enjoy as much as any one the
acquisition and the observation that such a visit would give; but,"
added he, "as you know very well my early education was of the
narrowest, and in the society in which I should move I should be
constantly exposed in conversation to have a scrap of Greek or Latin
spoken that I should know nothing about." Certainly that was a very
peculiar statement to be made by this wonderful man, but it struck me at
the moment that his clear mind, his self-poised nature, recognized the
fact that his greatness and his fame did not lie in the direction of an
association with what he regarded as the accomplished men of society and
of public life brought.
I believe, therefore, that we will stand by the college while it stands
by the Greek and the Latin, and certainly as representatives of the
great mass of graduates we can now talk more of Greek and Latin as a
common accomplishment than the greatest genius and orators of ancient
times, Demosthenes or Cicero, could of English. [Laughter.]
There are many things, gentlemen, that if I were the President of this
association or the President of the University, I should say and expect
to be listened to, while saying it. But I confess that I have pretty
much exhausted, as I perceive, your patience and my own capacity. I am
now living for the reputation of making short speeches, and I am only
afraid that my life will not be long enough to succeed. But I promise
you that if I get a good forum and a good audience like this I will run
a short speech even if I run it into the mud. [Applause.]
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