[Footnote 12: A commencement address, reprinted from _The Spirit of
Indiana_, by William Lowe Bryan. Copyright, 1917, by the Indiana University
Bookstore. By permission of the author and of the publishers.]
Young ladies and gentlemen, your chief interest at present, as I suppose,
is in the occupations which you are about to follow. What I have to say
falls in line with that interest.
In the outset, I beg to remind you that every important occupation has been
made what it is by a guild--by an ancient guild whose history stretches
back in direct or indirect succession to the farthest antiquity. Every such
historic guild of artisans, scholars, lawyers, prophets, what not, rose,
one may be sure, to meet some deep social necessity. In every generation
those necessities were present demanding each the service of its share of
the population, demanding each the perpetuation of its guild. And because
in the historic arts and crafts and professions mankind has spent in every
generation all that it had of drudgery or of genius, it has won in _them_
its whole estate. The steel mill, the battleship, the court of justice, the
university--these and the like of them are not accidents, nor miracles of
individual invention, nor products of the vague longings and gropings of
society in general. They are each the product of a brotherhood, of
generations working to meet one social necessity, of an apostolic
succession of masters living in the service of one ideal. And so it is
these brotherhoods of labor, it is these grim brotherhoods covered with
grime and scars, that stand before you to-day inviting you to initiation.
The fact that an occupation can teach its far-brought wisdom to the men of
each generation makes civilization and progress possible. But this on one
condition, that many of the people and some of the best of them shall be
able to make that occupation their life business.
The law is not in a country when you have imported Blackstone's
Commentaries and the Statutes of Parliament. The law is in a country in the
persons of such lawyers as are there. It is there in John Marshall.
Religion is not in a country because we have built a church and furnished
it with cushions to sleep on once a week. It is there in Bishop Brooks and
Mr. Moody and the Salvation Army.
The steel business is not in Pittsburgh in an industrial museum where the
public may gad about on holidays. It is there in the men who earn their
living by knowing a little better each year how to make armor-plate.
All this ought to be a matter of course. But there are many who think that
science and art can be made to serve us at a cheaper price, that these
stern guilds will give up their secret treasures in extension lectures and
chautauqua clubs and twenty minutes a week in the public schools. History
will show, I think, that this is not true, that no art and no sort of
learning was ever vitally present among a people unless it was there as a
living occupation.
Learning has come to us in this sense only within the last quarter-century.
We were busy at other things before that. Our fathers were doing--as every
people must--what they had to do. They had to live, to establish a
government, and to maintain their fundamental faiths. They bent themselves
to these tasks with the energy of our breed. And the tasks have shaped our
national history and character. They gave us the Declaration of
Independence and the American farmer who takes for granted that its
principles are true. They gave us Chicago, the Amazon who stands yonder
with _I will_ written upon her shield and a throng of men who are fit to
serve her will. They gave us a Civil War--men who could fight it and
afterwards live together in peace. They gave us industry, law, democracy.
But not science, not art. These were not wholly absent, but they were
guests. They were here in the persons of a few men who in spite of all
difficulties did work at them as a life business.
In this far western village, for example, we had two men who brought here
the old English classical learning, two who more than fifty years ago had
been trained in the universities of Europe, and one whom the radical
instinct which set science going in the first place, called from a village
academy into membership in the international guild of scholars. What these
men did for sound learning and what they did through their pupils to uplift
every occupation in the State, it is wholly beyond our power to measure.
But one thing they could not do. They could not furnish to society more men
who should devote themselves to learning than society would furnish a
living for. And the bare fact is that there was a living for very few such
men in America in the days before the war. Within the past quarter-century
there has been a change in this respect so great that none fails to see it.
The millions that we have spent upon universities and high schools, the
vast plant of buildings and libraries and laboratories, fill the public eye
with amazement. But all this is the husk of what has happened. The real
thing is that these millions, this vast plant, these thousands of
_positions_ demanding trained men, have brought to life upon this ground
the guild of scholars. We do not need any more to exhort men to become
scholars. The spirit which was in Thales and Copernicus, in Agassiz and
Kirkwood, calls to the Hoosier farmboy in its own voice, and shows him a
clear path by which, if he is fit, he may join their great company.
And, if I am not mistaken, Art, which has also been a guest, is ready at
last to become a citizen. Why should it not? What is lacking? Yonder are
the works of art and the men who know. Here are the youths some share of
whom must by right belong to the service of Art. And here are the millions
which go to support men in every molehole of scientific research and other
millions spent stupidly and wantonly for whatever the shopkeepers tell us
is beautiful. We could not create these potential forces that make for art.
But if it is true that they are here, we can organize them, as David Starr
Jordan and the like of him less than twenty years ago organized the forces
that make for science. We can make a path through the school and the
university along which all the children of the State may go as far as they
will and along which those who are fit may enter the artist's life.
"The mission of society," says Geddes, "is to bring to bloom as many sorts
of genius as possible." And this it can do only when each sort of genius
has the chance to choose freely its own life occupation.
Here, as I think, is the program for our educational system--to make plain
highways from every corner of the State to every occupation which history
has proved good.