culture spreads broad sails. We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject, sure that any subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.

Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: "You think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind." Well, your technical school should enable you to make your bargain splendidly; but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain-a pretty poor place, possibly-in the whole policy of mankind. That is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with it.

We of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as Harvard. To many ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. In Edith Wyatt's exquisite book of Chicago sketches called Every One His Own Way, there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness, Richard Elliot and his feminine counterpart-feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. Possibly this type of culture may exist near Cambridge and Boston, there may be specimens there, for priggishness is just like painter's colic or any other trade-disease. But every good college makes its students immune against this malady, of which the microbe haunts the neighborhood-printed pages. It does so by its general tone being too hearty for the microbe's life. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains-under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. If a college, through the inferior human influences that have grown regnant there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for its social function stops; democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear.

"Tone," to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. By their tone are all things human either lost or saved. If

democracy is to be saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we, in turn must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. It ought to have the highest spreading power.

In our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have formidable competitors outside. McClure's Magazine, the American Magazine, Collier's Weekly and, in its fashion, the World's Work, constitute together a real popular university along this very line. It would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like these: "By the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in the United States. But the mission of raising the tone of democracy, which they had proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and for the clarification of their human sympathies and elevation of their human preferences, the people at large acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain private literary adventures, commonly designated in the market by the affectionate name of 'ten-cent magazines.""

Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this? Vague as the phrase of knowing a good man when you see him may be, diffuse and indefinite as one must leave its application, is there any other formula that describes so well the result at which our institutions ought to aim? If they do that, they do the best thing conceivable. If they fail to do it, they fail in very deed. It surely is a fine synthetic formula. If our faculties and graduates could once collectively come to realize it as the great underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less obscurely groping, a great clearness would be shed over many of their

problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system, it would embark upon a new career of strength.

THE RELATION BETWEEN A LIBERAL EDUCATION AND TRUE AMERICANISM1

HENRY CABOT LODGE

[For biographical note, see page 224. This selection was originally an oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University, June, 1892. The title then used, "True Americanism," has been here changed to one which indicates more clearly that the writer was discussing how a liberal education should be productive of a high type of Americanism.]

One of the best known and least read of Queen Anne's men is Sir Richard Steele. His good and evil fortune, his kind heart, his ready wit, his attractive but somewhat imperfect character, are all familiar to a large posterity with whom he has ever been popular. But his writings, in which he took so much simple pride, are, it is to be feared, largely unread. The book of quotations contains only two sentences of his writing, and one of these can hardly be called familiar. But the other fully deserves the adjective, for it is perhaps the finest compliment ever paid by a man to a woman. Steele wrote of Lady Elizabeth Hastings that "to love her was a liberal education," and thus rescued her forever from the oblivion of the British Peerage. He certainly did not mean by this that to love the Lady Elizabeth was as good as a knowledge of Latin and Greek, for that would have been no compliment at all, unless from Carlyle's friend Dryasdust, a very different personage from the gallant and impecunious husband of "Prue." No, Steele meant something very far removed from Latin and Greek, and everybody knows what he meant, even if one cannot put it readily into words.

To the mind of the eighteenth century, a liberal education entirely classical, if you please, so far as books went, meant the education which bred tolerance and good manners and courage,

1From Harvard Graduates' Magazine, vol. iii, p. 9. (September, 1892.) Reprinted by permission.

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which taught a man to love honor and truth and patriotism and all things of good report. Like the history of Sir John Froissart, it was the part of a liberal education "to encourage all valorous hearts and to show them honourable examples." Such, I think, we all believe a liberal education to be today, in its finest and best sense. But yet this is not all, nor are the fields of learning, which a great university opens to its students, all. Besides the liberal education of Steele and the ample page of knowledge which a university unrolls, there is still something more, and this something is the most important part.

Ordinarily we think of a college simply as a place where men receive their preliminary training for the learned professions, where they lay the foundations for a life of scientific or historical investigation, for classical scholarship, or for the study of modern languages or literature, and where they gather that general knowledge which constitutes the higher education, even if the student leaves learning behind him at the college gate to enter on a life of action or of business. Yet in reality these are but the details of a liberal education, and we do not want to lose sight of the city on account of the number of houses immediately around us.

but

The great function of a liberal education is to fit a man for the life about him, and to prepare him, whatever profession or pursuit he may follow, to be a useful citizen of the country which gave him birth. This is of vast importance in any country, in the United States it is of peculiar moment, because here every man has imposed upon him the duties of sovereignty, and in proportion to his capacity and his opportunities are the responsibilities of that sovereignty.

If a man is not a good citizen it boots little whether he is a learned Grecian or a sound Latinist. If he is out of sympathy with his country, his people, and his time, the last refinement and the highest accomplishments are of slight moment. But it is of the last importance that every man, and especially every educated man, in the United States, no matter what his profession or business, should be in sympathy with his country, with its history in the past, its needs in the present, and its aspirations for

the future. If he has this, all the rest will follow, and it is precisely at this point that there seems to be a real danger in our university life and in our liberal education. The peril, moreover, is none the less real because the wrong influence is subtle.

We are apt to gather here at the end of each college year in a kindly and very natural spirit of mutual admiration. Those of us who come from the busy outside world come to renew old memories, and to brighten, if only for a moment, the friendships which time and separation would darken and rust. We are in no mood for criticism. Yet it is perhaps as well not to let the mutual congratulations go too far, for we have the advantage of coming from without, and are not likely to mistake the atmosphere which gathers about a university for that of the world at large. A Lord Chancellor of England on one occasion at Oxford said that he had listened with delight to the general admiration which everyone had expressed for everybody else, and for the university in particular, and that he was glad to see the great advances that had come since his time, and to know that Oxford could boast that the tide of thought and civilization had risen in the university as high almost as that which flowed without the college walls. The sting of the satire lay as usual in its leaven of truth. The danger of every university lies in its losing touch with the world about it. This is bad anywhere. It is worse in a republic than anywhere else.

We must, however, be more definite again if we would reach any result. "Losing touch" is a vague expression, “lack of sympathy" is little better. It is not easy to put my meaning in one word, but perhaps to say that the first duty of an American university and its liberal education should be to make its students good Americans comes as near to it as anything. Still we must go a step further, for many persons are prone to sneer at the demand for Americanism, as if it meant merely a blatant and boastful Chauvinism, employed only for the baser political uses. There is always an attempt to treat it as if it were something like the utterances which Dickens satirized long ago in the persons of Jefferson Brick and Elijah Pogram. That was certainly neither an agreeable nor creditable form of national self-assertion. Yet