living or even make money. You are bound besides to make medicine. For
all that the forefathers have done for us we in this generation must
make return by a broadening of their medical views for the benefit of
posterity. If you were graduates of some fourth-rate proprietary
medical school, perhaps it would be sufficient if you succeeded in
making your living out of your profession. Perhaps even your teachers
would then be quite satisfied with you. No such meagre accomplishment
can possibly satisfy those who are sending you out to-day. Above all,
you must remember that your education is not for yourself, but for the
benefit of others as well. If, somehow, its influence becomes narrowed
so as only to affect yourself and your intimate friends then it is
essentially a failure. You must not only live your lives for
yourselves, but so that at the end of them the community shall have
been benefited and medicine {399} and its beneficent mission to
mankind shall be broader and more significant because you have lived.
With this message, then, I welcome you as brother physicians and bid
you God-speed in your professional work.
{400}
{401}
THE COLLEGE MAN IN LIFE
{402}
"Non scholae sed vitae discimus."
--Seneca, _Epist._, 106.
[We learn for life not for school.]
"Nec si non obstatur, propterea etiam permittitur."
--Cicero, _Philip_., xiii, 6.
[And because a thing is not forbidden that does not make
it permissible.]
"Ubicunque homo est ibi beneficio locus est."
--Seneca, _De Vita Beata_, 24.
[Wherever man is there is room to do good.]
"Then let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or
ill-defined. At present, when we speak in terms of praise or blame
about the bringing up of each person, we call one man educated and
another uneducated, although the uneducated man may sometimes be
very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a
captain of a ship, and the like. For we are not speaking of
education in this sense of the word, but of that other education in
virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the
ideal perfection of citizenship and teaches him how rightly to rule
and how to obey. This is the only training, which upon our view
would be characterized as education; that other sort of training,
which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere
cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and
illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all. But let
us not quarrel with one another about the name, provided that the
proposition which has just been granted hold good: to wit, that
those who are rightly educated generally become good men. Neither
must we cast a slight upon education, which is the first and fairest
thing that the best of men can ever have, and which, though liable
to take a wrong direction, is capable of reformation. And this work
of reformation is the great business of every man while he
lives."
--Plato, _Laws_ (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 174. Scribner, 1902.
{403}
THE COLLEGE MAN IN LIFE [Footnote 26]
[Footnote 26: This was the address to the graduates at
Boston College, June 29, 1910]
Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: The custom is, I fear, for the
orator who addresses the graduating class to talk over the heads of
those who have received their degree to the larger audience who are
assembled for the academic function. Now, that I do not propose to do.
What I have to say is to you. My message is meant entirely for you.
Since your friends are present I have to raise my voice so that they
shall hear what I have to say, but I consider that they are here only
on sufferance and that I am here to say whatever I can that may mean
something for you in the careers that are opening up to you. Now, I am
not of those who think that the main purpose of the eld is to give
advice to the young. Man is so fashioned that he wants to get his own
experience for himself. It is true that "only fools learn by their own
experience," wise men learn by that of others. But then we have divine
warrant for saying that there used to be a goodly proportion of fools
in the world and human experience agrees in our own time that not all
the fools are dead yet. Our advice may not be taken in all its
literalness; that would be too much to {404} expect, but it has become
an academic custom to give it, in the hope that it will be a landmark,
perhaps an incentive, it may be a warning, surely some time a precious
memory in the time to come. Few men who ever lived were less likely to
think that their advice might mean very much than dear old Bobbie
Burns, to whom one of your number referred, and yet some time I hope
that in some serious mood you'll read and think well on the poetic
epistle of advice to his youthful friend. There are some lines at the
beginning of it that have haunted me at times these many years when I
have been asked to address studious youth at the commencement, as our
term for the occasion so well declares, of their real education in the
post-graduate courses of that University of Hard Knocks which
valedictorians at this season of the year are so prone to call the
cold, cold world. The Scottish ploughman bard said in the choice
English he could so well assume on occasion:
"I long hae tho't, my youthful friend,
A something to hae sent you.
Though it may serve no ither end
Than as a kind memento;
But how the subject theme may gang.
Let time and chance determine;
Perhaps it may turn out a sang
Perhaps turn out a sermon."
One thing is sure, whatever I shall say to you shall not be a song,
though, alas! addresses {405} of advice are prone to sound like
sermons. Yet the sermon, after all, in the old Latin word _sermo_ is
only a discourse, and I am going to make mine as brief as possible. It
shall, I hope, serve to round out some of the things that you
yourselves have been saying with regard to Catholics and social works
and, above all. Catholic college men in social works.
We are rightly getting to estimate the value of a man in our time in
terms of what he accomplishes for others much more than for himself.
Almost any one who devotes himself with sufficient exclusiveness to
the business of helping himself will make a success of it, though some
may doubt of the value of that success. What is difficult above all in
our time, when the spirit of individualism is so rampant, is to make a
success of helpfulness for others while making life flow on with
reasonable smoothness for one's self. I do not hope to be able to
impart to you the precious secret of how surely to do this, but
something that I may say may be helpful to you in leading a larger
than a mere selfish life, so that when the end shall come, as come it
must, though one would never suspect it from the ways of men, the
world will be a little better at least because you have lived.
Education has become the fetish of the day and the shibboleth by which
the Philistine is recognized from the chosen people of culture and
refinement. Popular education has become the {406} watchword of the
time, and all things are fondly hoped for and confidently promised in
its name. We are somewhat in doubt as to the mode of education that
will be surely effective for all good and we are not quite certain as
to how the results are exactly to be obtained, but education is to
make the world better; to get rid gradually, yet inevitably, of the
evil that is in it; to lift men up to the higher plane of knowledge
where selfishness is at least not supposed to exist, or surely to be
greatly minimized, where crime, of course, shall disappear, and where
even the minor evils so hide their diminished heads that the
millennium can not be far distant. It is true that some of these
glorious promises seem long in fulfilment to those who are a little
sceptical of the influence of particular forms of education that are
now popular, but, of course, the response to that is, that so far we
have not had the time to have the full benefit of education exert
itself.
At the end of the eighteenth century the Encyclopedists in France, in
their great campaign for the diffusion of information among the people
and the spread of what they were pleased to call education, though
some of us are prone to think that they hopelessly confused the
distinction between education for power and education for information,
confidently promised that when men knew enough, poverty, of course,
would disappear and in its train would go all the attendant evils,
{407} vice and crime and immorality, and with them, of course,
unhappiness would disappear from the world. That is considerably over
a century now, but we have not found it advisable as yet to do away
with courts of law, nor jails, nor policemen, nor any of the mechanism
of the law for the suppression of crime and immorality. Indeed, there
are those who are unkind enough to say, that we now have to make use
of more means than ever in proportion to the population for the
suppression of vice and crime, and that they are more emphatically
demanded even than at the time of the Encyclopedists. As for
unhappiness and poverty, recent investigations in our large cities
show so large a proportion of people willing yet unable to obtain a
decent living wage, that it is quite startling. Our insane asylums are
growing much more rapidly than the population, and not a few of the
inmates are there because of immorality. Suicide is on the increase
faster than the population and unfortunately the greatest increase is
noted in the younger years. It is between fifteen and twenty-five that
suicides are multiplying.
Of course the answer to this is, that education is not as yet carried
to that extent among the great mass of people which would enable it to
have its full beneficial effects. Our common school education is not
enough to bring people under the beneficent influence of this great
civilizing factor for the development of mankind. {408} Educators
would urge that it is the higher education which serves to obliterate
the ills that human flesh is heir to, moral as well as physical, as
far, of course, as that is possible in so imperfect a world as this.
If we could but extend the advantages of the higher education, of
college and university training to the majority of the people, then
say the advocates of education as a panacea for human ills, we would
surely have that approach to the millennium which intellectual
development by the diffusion of information can and must give.
It is worth while analyzing that proposition a little and applying it
to present-day conditions as we know them. After all we have been
turning out a large number of those who have had the benefit of the
higher education from our colleges and universities during the last
generation or so. They have gone out by the thousand to influence
their fellows and presumably to be shining lights for profound
improvement of life, striking examples that surely will prove an
incentive and a source of emulation to others to do the right, avoid
the wrong, be helpful instead of selfish and, in general, show the
world how much education means for the happiness of all. There is a
slang expression familiar in New York just now that you in New England
may not know, for I understand that even the owls near Boston do not
say "to-whit-to-whoo" but "to-whit-to-whoom," that may be quoted here:
"Some men are born good, {409} some make good and some are caught with
the goods on them." Not all of the graduates of colleges and
universities were born good, of course. I wonder what we shall find
with regard to the other two phases of existence. There are not a few
who are critically perverse enough to say that, while many have made
good, too many have been caught with the goods on them.
Let us take the subject that is so strikingly brought before us in our
everyday life in recent years, the question of political corruption.
Of course it is to be presumed that it is the non-college men who are
both corruptors and corrupted. It is, of course, just as confidently
to be presumed, on the other hand, that it is the college men who are
the forerunners in all the exposures of recent years. Alas! for human
nature, it is just the contrary. The leaders in big corruption, the
mainstays of what has come to be called "big political business," have
nearly all been college men. This has been true in California, in
Missouri, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in Illinois. It would be easy
to add other states, but I am only mentioning those where
investigations are not yet forgotten, though we American people have
cultivated a really marvellous power of forgetting. The states are
sufficiently far apart from one another to make it very clear that the
condition is not limited to a particular locality but is practically
universal. In recent years we have been getting closer to the {410}
man higher up. In a great many of the cases, I should say in a
majority of them, he has proved to be a university man, and if not,
then university men have been his right hands in the accomplishment of
evil. The boards of directors of corporations, life insurance, fire
insurance, railroads, great industries and manufactures, even banks,
who have known that laws were being violated and who have not cared
because it was money in their pockets, have in many cases, perhaps
even in the majority of cases, been college men. Certainly college
graduates have not proved to be the little leaven that would leaven
the whole mass for righteousness.
In the even more dangerous evils of our time that have risked the very
existence of democratic government, in the imposition on the people by
the privileged classes of indirect taxes and tariffs that make life
hard for the poor, but add largely to the wealth of the rich, college
men have only too often been the active agents. Without their active
co-operation certainly these crying injustices to the poor would never
have been accomplished. They have often been adding useless millions
to useless millions simply for the game; not caring how much the poor
had to suffer. They have been accumulating at the expense of the
working classes what Governor Hughes of New York so well called, not
long since, a corruption fund for their children. They have been the
prime factors in many agencies {411} for evil and they have not been
the guardians of the rights of others, the weaker ones, that we have a
right to expect of them. In the awful evils that have been exposed as
a consequence of the fellow-servant doctrine and the contributory
negligence principle at law, which have been the root of so much
suffering in the world, college men have not helped to point out evils
and organized for the solution of them, though they have been closely
in contact with all the problems of them as judges, lawyers, directors
of railroad companies, and industrial concerns. In general, while they
have been in a position to know and alleviate some of the worst ills
of our social system, they have done very little. They helped to bind
fetters. It is men of much lower social station and education who have
awakened us.
The investigations of recent years as to the condition of wage-earners
have shown us many unfortunate evils. It was known that one in four of
the population in London was living in dire poverty and this was
thought to be due to the special circumstances in London. An
investigation of York in England showed, however, that smaller towns,
even cathedral towns, that were supposed to be almost without poverty,
were hot-beds of it and were nearly as bad as London. Then, we took
the flattering unction to our souls that these were altogether foreign
conditions. Such investigations as we could make in New York, however,
showed that we were little if any {412} better than the reports from
England and Germany revealed abroad. Then it was said that the large
city, that brood-oven of vice and misery, was responsible. Pittsburg,
for instance, set up the claim that while great fortunes were made
there the workmen were paid better wages than any place else in the
world. Alas for the fallibility of human judgment in social affairs!
The Pittsburg Survey was made and it was found that while a few of the
better-class workmen were paid very well, the great mass of the
workmen were awfully underpaid, and it was impossible for the majority
of them to live decently on what they received. Further investigations
into industrial conditions have only emphasized the conclusions
obtained from the Survey.
Human life has become very cheap in this country. A prominent
clergyman said not very long ago that it was safer to be a murderer in
the United States than a brakeman. The expression is true if the
proportion of brakemen who lose their lives to murderers who lose
theirs in this country is taken. We are careless of the lives of the
honest workman, and sentimentally over-careful of the lives and
comfort of the criminal. Every now and then there are inevitable
reactions against this laxity of the law, and as a consequence, while
Canada has no lynchings and there are none in England, while peoples
of our stock have no need to appeal to force, we lynch many more than
we execute in this {413} country. The leaders of many of the mobs, as
the directors of the industrial companies who knowingly allow the
waste of life to go on, have had the benefit of our American
education, such as it is. Educated people are responsible for things
that are and unless they meet their responsibilities there will be no
improvement.
Some of these abuses have risen to a climax. Not long ago a story was
told that illustrates, as it seems to me, some present-day feelings
very well. A great steel company having a contract for a bridge in the
Far East, was rushing the last steel beams for the completion of the
contract. America is noted for its marvellous power to do work rapidly
that other countries take time for. There was a heavy penalty attached
if they did not complete the contract on time. A fast steamer was
waiting in New York harbor all ready to take this last consignment out
with it. A special train was standing in the yards of the steel plant,
to be rushed to New York just as soon as the beams were completed. In
the midst of all the hurry and bustle a workman got his foot caught in
the huge crane which transports the immense beams from one portion of
the plant to the other. An examination of the manner in which he was
caught showed clearly that he could not be released without taking the
crane apart. That would mean that thirty-six hours would have to be
spent in the mechanical handling of that crane. If that were done it
would be {414} quite impossible to make the shipment on time, so
closely was the period of completion calculated. Not only was there a
heavy money penalty, but there would be a decided loss of American
prestige.
The workman who was caught was only a foreigner. He was only getting
$1.25 a day. Just one thing was to be done evidently, because that
steamer had to sail on time and that freight train had to get out the
next morning. The other foreign workmen were put out of the shops,
only the confidential men were left, an ambulance was summoned; as it
appeared in sight the crane was run over the portion of the foot that
was caught, the man was removed to the care of the surgeon, his wound
was dressed at the hospital, the contract was completed on time and
American enterprise and power to do things faster than all the world
was vindicated.
We are making money. In the meantime the directors of companies under
whom such things are done are mainly college men. Whether they feel it
or not they are personally responsible for everything that happens in
their business, for it is their business by which human life is
sacrificed or human suffering increased, or human morality
deteriorated. Probably the majority of the stockholders in the
companies are college men. Some of them are college women. They are
deriving incomes from forms of injustice, from conditions that cause
human suffering that {415} might be avoided. They are, whether they
know it or not, committing one of the crimes that calls to heaven for
vengeance--defrauding laborers of their wages; because to pay a man
less than a decent living wage is to defraud that laborer of his
wages. No man has a right to go into the labor market and buy labor as
cheaply as he can. Men must live, they must support their families,
and to compel them to take less than a decent living wage is to hold
them in slavery. Every man who derives an income from such sources
must know whether there is injustice at work or not in whatever he
benefits by. It is easy to plead ignorance, but the ignorance is no
justification. When we take money from something we must know that
that money has no taint of injustice about it. There is a startling
passage in the Scriptures that I have often thought should be repeated
more frequently in our time. It is, "From the sins we know not of, O
Lord deliver us."
There are many things that are done for the educated rich in our time,
things that are full of injustice, yet from which the rich derive
great benefits for which they will be held responsible. I cannot see
it else. We hear much in our time of the stewardship of wealth, of the
fact that if a man has much more money than others he is bound thereby
to do more good with it, just inasmuch as he has superfluous means
must he accomplish not only actually more but {416} proportionately
more than those who are less wealthy around him. What is true thus of
material wealth is even truer of intellectual wealth. The man who has
more education than his neighbors is bound thereby to be helpful to
his neighbors, to uplift them--how much one hesitates to use that
much-abused word,--to help solve their problems, to make life happier
for them; he is bound to use his faculties, God-given as they are and
developed by intellectual opportunities, not for himself alone, but
for all those around him.
Unfortunately recent generations of college men have not taken this
responsibility seriously, or have not seen the duty that lay before
them and the burden imposed on them by the very necessity of
conditions. As a consequence they have often been leaders in evil.
They have almost invariably been protagonists of selfishness and of
individualism. So long as they have gotten much out of life they have
not cared whether others have had the paths for even reasonable
happiness and some opportunities in life made smooth. Only too often
they have been a stumbling block in the road for others less educated
than they. They have been the men higher up, the bribers who are ever
so much worse than the bribed, the company directors who have turned
aside and seen evil and injustice and pretended in smug propriety that
it was no affair of theirs, or perhaps have said in
self-justification--and such self-justification!--that if they did not
do it {417} others would; the wealthy men who have used every means to
get around the law to oppress the poor, to add useless wealth to
useless wealth at the cost of others, even at the risk of subverting
liberty, overturning government and ruining this latest experiment in
democracy. I am not a muckraker, but we cannot hide from ourselves and
we must not miss the real meaning of the events in the life around us
as it really is.
When I think of the situation I am prone to compare with it other
generations of college men and what they accomplished. History is not
worth while if it tells us only of the past. It is of no more value
than any other story, real or fictitious. History is significant only
when the lessons of the past are valuable to the present. We are prone
to think of education as influencing deeply only recent generations.
Let me try and tell you briefly the story of some generations of
college men who accomplished things that it will be worth while for us
to consider to-day.