[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at
Cambridge, Mass., June 28, 1876. Mr. Lowell, as President of the
Alumni Association, occupied the chair.]
BRETHREN:--Though perhaps there be nothing in a hundredth year
to make it more emphatic than those years which precede it and which
follow it, and though the celebration of centennials be a superstitious
survival from the time when to count ten upon the fingers was a great
achievement in arithmetic, and to find the square of that number carried
with it something of the awe and solemnity which invests the higher
mathematics to us of the laity, yet I think no wise man can be
indifferent to any sentiment which so profoundly and powerfully affects
the imagination of the mass of his fellows. The common consent of
civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration
of great events as leaving an interval spacious enough to be impressive,
and having a roundness of completion in its period. We, the youngest of
nations, the centuries to us are not yet grown so cheap and commonplace
as to Napoleon when he saw forty of them looking in undisguised
admiration upon his army, bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my
own part I think the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear without
calling in thirty-nine others to its assistance. [Applause.]
It is quite true that a hundred years are but as a day in the life of a
nation, are but as a tick of the clock to the long-drawn æons in which
this planet hardened itself for the habitation of man, and man
accommodated himself to his habitation; but they are all we have, and we
must make the best of them. Perhaps, after all, it is no such great
misfortune to be young, especially if we are conscious at the time that
youth means opportunity, and not accomplishment. I think that, after
all, when we look back upon a hundred years through which the country
has passed, the vista is not so disheartening as to the indigestive
fancy it might at first appear. If we have lost something of that
Arcadian simplicity which the French travellers of a hundred years ago
found here,--perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of
their impenetrability by the English tongue,--we have lost something
also of that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials
as of barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true
advancement. It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to
show some of that talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom
of the race to which most of us belong. [Laughter and applause.] Even
the Fourth-of-July oration is edging round into a lecture on our
national shortcomings, and the proud eagle himself is beginning to have
no little misgiving at the amplitude between the tips of his wings.
[Laughter.]
But while it may be admitted that our government was more decorously
administered one hundred years ago, if our national housekeeping of
to-day is further removed from honest business principles, and therefore
is more costly, both morally and financially, than that of any other
Christian nation, it is no less true that the hundredth year of our
existence finds us in the mass very greatly advanced in the refinement
and culture and comfort that are most operative in making a country
civilized and in keeping it so. [Applause.] When we talk of decline of
public and private virtue I think that we forget that that better former
day was a day of small communities and of uneasy locomotion, when public
opinion acted more directly and more sharply, was brought to bear more
convincingly upon the individual than is possible now. But grant that
though the dread of what is said and thought be but a poor substitute
and makeshift for conscience,--that austere and sleepless safeguard of
character, which, if not an instinct, acquires all the attributes of an
instinct, and whose repeated warnings make duty at least an unconscious
habitude,--after all, this outside substitute is the strongest motive
for well-doing in the majority of our race, and men of thought and
culture should waste no opportunity to reinforce it by frankness in
speaking out invidious truths, by reproof and by warning. I, for one,
greatly doubt whether our national standard of right and wrong has been
really so much debased as we are sometimes tempted to think [applause];
and whether the soft money of a sentimental sort of promises to pay has
altogether driven out the sterling coin of upright purpose and
self-denying fulfilment. [Applause.] I could wish that this belief,
almost, provided it did not mislead us into prophesying smooth things,
were more general among our cultivated class; for the very acceptance of
such a belief tends in large measure toward its accomplishment. No finer
sentence has come down to us from antiquity, no higher witness was ever
borne to the quality of a nation, than in that signal of Nelson's:
"England expects every man to do his duty." [Applause.]
Brethren, I thought on this occasion of the centennial celebration of
our independence it was fit that some expression should go forth from us
that should in some measure give contradiction to the impression that
the graduates of Harvard College take a pessimistic view of their
country and its institutions. [Applause.] Certainly I know that it is
not true, and I wish to have that sentiment expressed here. Our college
takes no official part in celebrating the nation's first completed
century; she who is already half-way through her third has become too
grave for these youthful elations. [Laughter.] But she does not forget
that in Samuel and John Adams, Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and John
Hancock, she did her full share toward making such a commemoration
possible. [Applause.] As in 1776, so in 1876, we have sent John Adams to
represent us at Philadelphia, and, perhaps with some prescience of what
the next century is to effect, we have sent with him Madame Boylston as
his colleague [applause]; and it may be that Alma Mater in this has
possibly shown a little feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress
that she is made her deputy. [Laughter and applause.] And in the hundred
years since we asserted for ourselves a separate place and proper name
among the nations, our college has been no palsied or atrophied limb in
the national organization. To the jurisprudence, to the legislation, the
diplomacy, the science, the literature, the art of the country, her
contribution has certainly not fallen short of its due proportion. Our
triennial catalogue is hung thick with our trophies from many fields. I
may say in parenthesis, gentlemen, brethren of the alumni, that I am
glad the July number of the "North American Review" is not yet
published. In the January number there was so disheartening a report of
everything--I am glad to say our religion is excepted, we have grown
perhaps in grace--but we had no science, we had none of this and none of
the other.
Brethren, we whom these dumb faces on the wall make in imagination the
contemporaries of eight generations of men, let us remember, and let us
inculcate on those who are to fill the places that so soon shall know us
no more, let us remember, I say, that if man seem to survive himself and
to be mutely perpetuated in these fragile semblances, it is only the
stamp of the soul that is eternally operative; it is only the image of
ourselves that we have left in some sphere of intellectual or moral
achievement, that is indelible, that becomes a part of the memory of
mankind, reproductive and beneficent, inspiring and admonitory.
But, brethren, as Charles Lamb said of Coleridge's motto, _Sermoni
propriori_, this is more proper for a sermon than for a dinner-table.
But birthdays, after all, gentlemen, are serious things; and as the
chance of many more of them becomes precarious, and the approaching
birthday of the nation begets in all of us, I should hope, something of
a grave and meditative mood, it would be an indecorum to break in upon
it too suddenly with the licensed levity of festival. You are waiting to
hear other voices, and I trust my example of gravity may act rather as a
warning than as precedent to those who are to follow me.
Brethren, at our table there is always one toast, that by custom and
propriety takes precedence of all others. It is, I admit, rather an
arduous task to pay the most many-sided man a different compliment year
after year, and the President of the University must pardon me for
saying that he gives a good deal of trouble to the President of the
Alumni, as he is apt to do in the case of inefficient persons generally.
[Laughter and applause.] One eminent quality, however, I can illustrate
in a familiar Latin quotation, which, with your permission, I will put
in two ways, thus securing, I should hope, the understanding of the
older and younger among you: "_Justum et tenacem propositi virum_." [Mr.
Lowell evoked considerable laughter by pronouncing the Latin according
to the continental method.] I give you the health of President Eliot.
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