The kingdom of knowledge is everywhere extending; but, like the kingdom of heaven, it cometh not with mere observation; it must be labored and contended for, as a day's wage or a prize. Let us earn our share in it, my hearers, as Washington earned his opportunities; as Franklin rose up through the slow stages of manual industry; as Lincoln grew to be our greatest and most far-seeing of modern statesmen. Above all, and as the clue to all that our brief existence in this universe of mystery may disclose, let us preserve our loftiest ideal!

"The glittering bait of Power obstructs the mass;
Around us weaves a thought we dimly feel,
As faint some moonlight shadow, flitting fast,
When the mild planet pearls our watery clouds,
And scarce reveals the light herself has made.
A thought is in the trees and seas and skies,
Speaks from young eyes, and throbs within the heart,—
Nameless, unfathomed, dark,-yet loving light.
This life the scholar loves; this life he breathes;
Without this life he could not tread the path
Of this low-falling world, to heaven the heir.
Make then his function saint-like and superb!
Be his the good to teach, more than the old;
Revolving new societies, new laws.
Where'er the face of things smiles or grows sad,
The scholar gleans,-his faithful eye profound
To read the secret in each thing he sees,—

To love, if not to know. For him the seas

They furrow with the sparkling keel of ships;
For him they iron o'er the land with flame,
And glass in lightning his projectile thought.
Life's logic suits to each the prize he draws,
In great or less proportions. Let him rise
So long as the race rises, and in him
Its wise perfecting skilled creation claim.*"'

F. B. Sanborn.

From The Wanderer, by Ellery Channing.

SPEECH OF MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE*

I am not insensible of the honor done me to-day by conferring upon me a title which represents, not something that I possess, but something which I should earnestly wish to possess, namely, an adequate acquaintance with the great majesty of the law. My thoughts in this connection go back to Deborah, the great Israelitess who governed her nation under a palm tree, to the Greek Antigone, whom Sophocles makes the interpreter of those laws which are not of to-day nor yesterday, and none can tell when first they came to being."

My gratification in this new honor is heightened by the fact that it is granted to me by an institution in which my own sex has an equal part and opportunity with its opposite. No pentup beneficence here dispenses with one hand what it refuses with the other. The ancients pictured the goddess of justice as wielding her scales with bandaged eyes. To my thinking, the bandage darkened one eye, and that eye should have looked toward us women, who are now exalted to sit with our brothers in heavenly places, that is, on college benches and at the high festivals of learning.

Your college, also, honored President and other magnates, is dedicated to the beauty of a liberal faith. For you, no cruel creed sets bounds to the divine mercy, but the redeeming power of love transcends the limits of the grave, and permeates eternity with its luminous presence. And I think I may say that it was rather through a quickened sense of what belongs to the Divine Nature than through the subtleties of human logic and learning that your emancipation from the fires of everlasting wrath was accomplished.

Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates this question," What is that good and noble principle in life which the law approves, and which is superior to pain or pleasure?" I think I may

• Delivered at the Commencement dinner, June 15, 1904.

answer, that principle is the respect for the universal right and good, which is safe-guarded by the institutions of society.

The law of civilized peoples, as I understand it, effects and maintains an enduring compromise between the force of individual impulse, and the ideal and necessary trend of human progress. These opposite powers, like other couplings in the world's economy, supplement each other, and each is necessary for the other's proper function. In this dynamic opposition, human law represents as well as it can the wisdom which sits above the vehemence of human desires and the inertia of human resistance, and which, having in view an end transcending individual passions and inclinations, leads ever in the direction of an immutable, supernal good.

In the attainment of this supreme object, humanity has a vested right in which no minor distinctions are properly recognizable. No barrier of race or sex should shut one within the safe fold of justice, leaving another without its pale of protection. In human right there exist no limits of arbitrary protection and dispossession. The recognition of this truth is the ideal object of all law, personal, national, and international. This view must appeal equally to the fathers and mothers of mankind. Where it is not entertained, acts of violence and rapacity will prevail, injury and revenge, attack and repulse.

We need not here review the inequalities of past administrations. The most cruel of these I hold to be the inequality of education, which for ages showed to the woman's mind the exterior aspect of learning, but reserved for the man the key to that inner sanctuary in which reside the deeper reasons of all that comes to pass. Standing within the walls of a co-educational college, I feel myself freed from the bonds and trammels of that ancient, inherited, enforced ignorance. I feel that the sunshine of the better day illuminates my brow even as it does that of my associate in this day's consecration. I hold human

* Hon. William Henry Moody, Secretary of the Navy.

reason to be of so divine a character that all will revere her decrees when all alike may behold them.

The presence in this place of a high functionary in our own government may naturally suggest to our minds the high part which our country is providentially called upon to play in the great drama of the world's history. It has been nobly enacted in the past may its record in days to come be yet brighter! While yet in our infancy, we subdued the pirates of Morocco, to whom European nations were content to pay a shameful tribute. We have given freedom to oppressed Cuba-we are laying in the Philippines the foundations of a free and civil society. Oh, that our flag might challenge the horror of the Turkish rule, and protect the helpless and harmless Armenians from outrage and massacre! A young man once asked of Christ, "Who is my neighbor?" and the answer was, in substance, "Whoever, in deadly peril, needs thy help." To-day, the world is one in its knowledge of what is taking place. The North Pole is our refrigerator, Egypt supplies our winter sun bath, and Asia Minor is not so far off but that the deeds of blood there wrought are as well known to us as the police records of our own society. Oh, that our ships might bear everywhere this pledge of one universal neighborhood! Oh, that they might show at their mast head the light of the better day, when the bloody crescent shall become the silver moon, reflecting the glory of a sun that shall no more go down!

So, I am happy in being your guest to-day, happy in being the recipient of a distinction which Tufts College surely bestows upon my aspirations, not upon my attainments. Those aspirations might seem of small avail, as the hours of my earthly day are indeed far spent, but my hope, like your charity, reaches beyond the limits of this brief pilgrimage, and I dare to read in the future the promise of good far above the utmost that we here have known.

SPEECH ON ALUMNI NIGHT FOR CLASS OF '64

It is a very trying position for a modest man to appear as the representative of an almost extinct species,—a dodo, as it were, of the decades about the middle of the last century. In order to avoid maundering in the confusion natural to such embarrassment, and so wasting your time, it is but prudent and polite to put down on paper what there may be to say as representative of the class of 1864. It was not a large class, as its ranks were depleted by the Civil War, and the time at which its members entered was unfavorable, owing to the shadow over business of the then approaching conflict. As a matter of fact,

it numbered just seven, the number of the Pleiades,—by that tie if in no other way associated with the famous galaxy of poets and philosophers which we survivors in the responsibility for Boston's literary productiveness are continually having held up to us to show our woful falling down. We were seven, and four of us have long been dead. The remaining three are no Big Three in any sense of the word, but most of us at all events have captured our bread and butter with tolerable regularity, and some of the pleasures and preferments of life and society.

Speaking for my classmates, I cannot see that either of them is much older than he was in the sixties, and if I can judge by my own feelings none of them feels any older; and yet siace our four years together at Tufts we must have passed through ten times four years of post-graduate existence. I look back on these four decades about as one does on a week that has passed. At the most it seems like an added college course, with ten years per class instead of one. As I remember, the first of the four decades since 1864 was very much like the ordinary Freshman's year-one of conceit, of freshness, of total misapprehension of one's relations to the world, of vaulting ambition in spite of severe checks, and complacent satisfaction