to-day three members of the Supreme Court of the United States: David Josiah Brewer, Henry Billings Brown, both of the class of 1856, and George Shiras, of the class of 1853. These men, all eminently worthy to hold the high position which they occupy, have been called upon to decide questions of the greatest importance, and their decisions have probably affected the policy of the country more positively and permanently than has any other distinctive Yale influence.

The great work of pacifying the Philippine Islands and bringing them under beneficial civil government and, let us hope, preparing them for selfgovernment under conditions most favorable to liberty, has very wisely been assigned to a distinguished graduate of Yale, Hon. William H. Taft, of the class of 1878. Judge Taft has done so well whatever he has undertaken to do, and has already so far succeeded in bringing order out of chaos in the Philippines, as to inspire the utmost confidence in his ultimate complete success, and to awaken a consciousness in the nation that he may, at some time, be called to fill a higher position than he has yet attained.

No graduate of Yale has ever been elected to the office of president of the United States, but the Yalensians will not complain so long as the country can have for its president a patriot and scholar like Theodore Roosevelt.

A very respectable number of Yale graduates have been senators and representatives in Congress. The representatives are too numerous to mention. Of the senators, it will be sufficient to name John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina; Truman Smith, Roger S. Baldwin, and Jabez W. Huntington, of Con

necticut; John Davis, Julius Rockwell, and Henry L. Dawes, of Massachusetts; John M. Clayton and Anthony Higgins, of Delaware; William M. Evarts and Chauncey M. Depew, of New York; George E. Badger, of North Carolina; Randall L. Gibson, of Louisiana; William Morris Stewart, of Nevada, and Frederick T. Dubois, of Idaho. All of these have exerted a positive influence on either the politics or the legislation of the country. Most of them have been men of commanding influence in the Senate, and I am glad to say in the language of another, "All of them have been honest and sincere, and in no instance have they betrayed the trust reposed in them."

Yale has furnished the country with a number of distinguished diplomats, of whom Eugene Schuyler, of the class of 1859, though not the most prominent or distinguished, was, I think, the most distinctly representative. Edwards Pierrepont, of the class of 1837, and Wayne MacVeagh and Andrew D. White, both of the class of 1853, are among the most distinguished of Yale representatives at foreign courts.

But the real history of a country is not the record of its great men either in war or in peace. It is rather an account of the development and progress of the people; and especially so in this country, where the people's will can govern and ultimately does govern, and where the wisest leaders, before they speak, listen for the voice of the people. The hope of the country is not in the astuteness and ability of its great men, but in the virtue, intelligence, and good sense of the great body of the people. An institution of learning whose influence, educational and ethical, has permeated the great mass of the people in all parts of the country, affecting alike

their ideas, their mode of thinking, their habits of life, their conceptions of public and private virtue, of patriotism and of religion, has impressed itself upon the character of the nation in a more permanent way and with more wide-reaching results than an institution whose chief glory is the development of a few party leaders.

Probably the man of real genius never owes his success entirely to his college. The greatest men of the world have not got their inspiration from the college curriculum nor the college faculty. Some men have been great without being trained at college, and some have been great in spite of being trained at college. The glory which has been shed on some colleges because eminent men have graduated there, is not to be despised; but it is largely accidental. Miami University did not make Benjamin Harrison; nor did Dartmouth make Daniel Webster; nor did Bowdoin make Nathaniel Hawthorne; nor did Yale make John C. Calhoun. These men would have been men of note no matter where they might be graduated. The spirit of man in them was a candle of the Lord, and they could not but shine.

Some of the economic teachings of Yale, like those of all the colleges, have been at variance with the prevailing policy of the country. On no important question of national policy has the influence of Yale been greater than on the financial question, which in one form or another has agitated the nation for many years and notably in the last two presidential elections. The sturdy fidelity to what the college regarded as sound principles, contributed in no small degree to the national verdict upon that question.

The attitude of Yale College as regards public affairs has generally been one of protest against impending mistakes and dangers, rather than one of effective advocacy of a positive policy of its own. The college has criticised, regulated, warned, rather than originated and led. It has never been intensely partisan, but its attitude has been a good deal like that of the late Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon. Dr. Bacon was a free trader, but he always voted the Whig or Republican ticket. He said he had been wanting for years to get a chance to vote the Democratic ticket, and so emphasize his views on the tariff; but the Democrats always did some foolish thing or other just before election that compelled him to vote against them. Yale has been a good deal like that. Voting one ticket while wanting to vote the other, because its conservative critical attitude led it to emphasize party errors that the more enthusiastic partisan, in his confidence in the general excellence of party policy, would have overlooked.

When the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed, Yale thundered against it in no doubtful manner; and Taylor, Silliman, Woolsey, Thacher, and others, fearlessly voiced her sentiments. The college was no less outspoken for freedom and union when both were endangered by the Great Rebellion. More than five hundred fifty of Yale's graduates, and two hundred of her students who were not graduates, enlisted as soldiers in the war for the Union.

The noble oration of Horace Bushnell at the Commemorative Celebration, July 26th, 1865, extols in fitting terms the patriotism of these soldiers and voices Yale's gratitude to them for their unselfish devotion to country and to freedom.

I can not even now, after the lapse of nearly forty years, recall the names of the men who died upon the battlefield, without an overpowering emotion which nothing but the events connected with the great struggle for union and liberty has the power to excite. Theodore Winthrop, of the class of 1848, James C. Rice of 1854, Edward F. Blake of 1858, Diodate C. Hannahs of 1859, Edward Carrington of 1859, Henry W. Camp of 1860, and my own classmates of 1857, Butler, Dutton, Griswold, Porter, Roberts, and I might well add Drake and Croxton, -it will be another Yale than this, and another country than ours when you and the hundred other scholars of Yale who died for the republic, and the six hundred who lived to see the end of the contest, are either forgotten or are not held in remembrance as the noblest of Yale's sons.

I pass on now to consider Yale's relation to the educational development of the country. Heredity of blood is much less complex than heredity of mind. Genealogical tables are sufficiently intricate but they are simplicity itself in comparison with tables of the mind's ancestry showing the forces which have operated to produce and invigorate it. No one can possibly estimate the results which come from the work of the successful teacher, in moulding the character and quickening the intellect of his students, because the influence of this work goes on, in future years, in widening circles that at last reach the limits of the country and even of the world. Without any doubt many of the men before me to-day owe something for what they are to the teaching and inspiration of the first President Dwight, who put his own impress on Yale College, and in no small degree