_Class of '88._
Gentlemen of the Committee, and friends, teachers and classmates: With
what unbounded pleasure we greet you this evening; our task is
accomplished, the goal is won. After the labors of the past seven
months, assisted by the kindly interest of the Committee, and
encouraged by the earnest and untiring efforts of our teachers, we
have at last mastered that wonderful art, stenography, which will
enable us to go forth from here, possessing an accomplishment the
benefits of which are many. This art, the outgrowth of one great mind,
that of Mr. Isaac Pitman, is of the utmost importance to the members
of the press, of the legal profession, and the business man, as well
as in all branches of literary work. Ordinarily, we hear words, but
this science enables us to use them; thus they actually assume another
form, as it were, and are deeply impressed on our minds and thus
ineradicably memorized. My classmates, we meet to-night to prove that
patient effort on the part of teacher and pupil has not been in vain;
that our busy Winter has left us rich in knowledge of this noble art,
and that, though oftentimes discouraged in our progress through the
alphabet forward through the intricacies of dots and dashes, hooks
and circles, and outlines dark and light, over these apparently
insurmountable barriers we have reached the height on which our hopes
and our ambitions had been centered during our daily pilgrimage toward
it. So has it been with typewriting. At first we made many mistakes,
such as making an interrogation mark where the period was necessary,
thus questioning Mr. Jones' or Mr. Smith's right to his name
instead of asserting the fact; or striking a letter instead of the
space-board, and vice versa. The result left the astonished beholder
in doubt whether the word produced were a representative of the
Chinese or the Choctaw language. But now we have overcome these
difficulties. Sustained by the kind encouragement of our teacher we
have struggled bravely until we are enabled to write on the machine
readily, and with rapidity, from dictation, and our vernacular can now
be recognized as English, without any difficulty. We sincerely hope
that the exercises of the evening may interest you and may show our
appreciation of the instruction and innumerable benefits which have
been conferred upon us by this Society. We are now prepared to take
our place in the rank and file of the world's army of workers. The
elevating and benevolent influence of stenography and typewriting
in the life of women is becoming more and more recognized. What the
sewing machine is to the needle, shorthand is to the pen, and, in the
great future, the world shall see and acknowledge the vast importance
of this economizer of time and labor.
Yes, another forty of us are ready to use these servants of hand and
pen which the generosity of this Society has placed at our disposal,
and we hope to do so worthily. May we, by our subsequent efforts and
future progress, show that none of us will bring reproach on the noble
art which we have adopted, or on the Institution to which we shall owe
our future success and our chosen profession. Rather let us help to
prove its value in the different branches to which we may be called.