[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the "Autocrat," at the
Harvard Alumni Dinner, at Cambridge, June 25, 1884.]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ALUMNI:--Another day than
this has been consecrated to the memories of the war. On that day we
think not of the children of the university or the city, hardly, even,
of the children whom the State has lost, but of a mighty brotherhood
whose parent was our common country. To-day the college is the centre of
all our feeling, and if we refer to the war it is in connection with the
college, and not for its own sake that we do so. What then did the
college do to justify our speaking of the war now? She sent a few
gentlemen into the field, who died there becomingly. I know of nothing
more. The great forces which ensured the North success would have been
at work even if those men had been absent. Our means of raising money
and troops would not have been less, I dare say. The great qualities of
the race, too, would still have been there. The greatest qualities,
after all, are those of a man, not those of a gentleman, and neither
North nor South needed colleges to learn them.
And yet--and yet I think we all feel that, to us, at least, the war
would seem less beautiful and inspiring, if those few gentlemen had not
died as they did. Look at yonder portrait[7] and yonder bust[8] and tell
me if stories such as they commemorate do not add a glory to the bare
fact that the strongest legions prevailed. So it has been since wars
began. After history has done its best to fix men's thoughts upon
strategy and finance, their eyes have turned and rested on some single
romantic figure--some Sidney, some Falkland, some Wolfe, some Montcalm,
some Shaw. This is that little touch of the superfluous which is
necessary. Necessary as art is necessary, and knowledge which serves no
mechanical end. Superfluous only as glory is superfluous, or a bit of
red ribbon that a man would die to win.
It has been one merit of Harvard College that it has never quite sunk to
believing that its only function was to carry a body of specialists
through the first stage of their preparation. About these halls there
has always been an aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost in
science or Greek--not to be fixed, yet all-pervading. And the warrant of
Harvard College for writing the names of its dead graduates upon its
tablets is not in the mathematics, the chemistry, the political economy
which it taught them, but that, in ways not to be discovered, by
traditions not to be written down, it helped men of lofty natures to
make good their faculties. I hope and I believe that it will long give
such help to its children. I hope and I believe that long after our
tears for the dead have been forgotten, this monument to their memory
will still give such help to generations to whom it is only a symbol--a
symbol of man's destiny and power for duty, but a symbol also of that
something more by which duty is swallowed up in generosity, that
something more which led men like Shaw to toss life and hope like a
flower before the feet of their country and their cause. [Cheers.]
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