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been graduated, without a little preachment. Young men and women, you have now learned enough to cause you to fear a little. But fear not overmuch. You are reasonably prepared for work; hesitate not to go about it. There is a place for you, but you will have to go and win it. The rivalries will be sharp; but you have as much chance as any. Your salvation is to come through work. The world honors the man or woman who loves and honors work. It matters little what the work may be; take a step at a time and keep doing it all the time. You will always have knowledge and strength for the next step. Think not so much about the wages as about health and responsibility and the knowledge and skill for more and better work. You are not entitled to exact much yet. Make the best of whatever opens to you. Be prudent, but not overprudent. "A penny saved is a penny earned" is a maxim which is not true. In many a case the penny saved is a dollar lost, and it sometimes happens that it is public respect and fraternal regard lost. Do not stand aloof; certainly do not be a cynic; above all, do not get to be a freak. Keep step with the procession. It is a pretty good crowd and it is generally moving in the right direction. Have standards and stand by them. You can live by yourself and maintain your standards with little trouble, but then the standards will be of small account and you will make no more impression upon life than as though you had never lived. Reinforce yourself all the time. Accumulate a library. While you follow a business with devotion, seek recreation in literature, particularly in the literature of biography and history, that your lives may have more joy in them, that you may gain the inspiration that quickens action, that you may follow your business to the fullest measure of success and round out your years with the fullest regard of the people among whom you live. Be patient. Be patient. Keep steady. Bide your time. Success in the game will not come by a chance play, no matter how brilliant, so much as by uniform efficiency and unceasing persistence. It is remarkable how men and women go up or down according to the direction they take and the regularity with which they keep at it. If you have a fair foothold at forty, you will be a round success at sixty. Be tolerant, but have faith in things. Do not let your student habit of inquiry and investigation unsettle all the faith that you learned at your mother's knee. Believe in your village, your ward, your city, your state. Sustain a church and at least some of the philanthropic effort that sets rather heavily on one half of the world but ameliorates the hard situations of the other half. Act with a party; yell for a ticket; whoop it up for the flag. Withal, don't take your

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selves too seriously. You will count for more if you do not. things in sane perspective. Have a sense of humor in your outfit. Cultivate cheerfulness. Love sport, and play for all you are worth. Don't get to be one of the lunatics who work eighteen hours a day, recognize no Sundays, and never take a vacation. Submit to no coercion. Think out what is about right and stand by it. The others will eventually have to come to it. If you find you are in error, back out without attempting to disguise it; the farther on you go the more humiliation you will have. Be a good mixer. Give and take. Meet every obligation. On the basis of common decency make all the friends you can. Then you will carry the spirit of your university with you and do much to pay the debt which you will always owe her.

But be on the alert for special opportunities to help her. Assume not too conclusively that it must be in the conventional way. The unexpected will happen. Half a dozen years ago the richest man in the country became suddenly ill. In the absence of his regular physician he called in a young graduate of the Harvard School of Medicine and impulsively assured him that if he would get him out of that scrape he would pay any charge that he might make. The case was not serious to an educated man. The young man understood the difficulty and soon he wrought the needed cure. No bill was sent and in time it was asked for. The young physician reminded the multimillionaire of the promise. “Oh, yes," he said, "but I assumed, of course, that your charge would be within reason." The doctor's time had come. He said: shall make no charge, but I shall ask you to do something for me. The Harvard School of Medicine needs help. I would help her if I could. Under all the circumstances I feel warranted in asking you to look into the matter with a disposition to aid her justly, as you easily may." The old man said, "Would you like to bear a message to President Eliot?" "Yes." "Ask him to come and tell me all about it." In a week the man of wealth had given his pledge to the president of Harvard for a million when the balance should be raised, and in a month the five millons had been assured which have erected and equipped the finest plant for a medical college that is to be found in the wide, wide world.

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You may not accomplish all these things, but if you will aim at them, if you will put the training of this university to its logical use, I am sure that when the long shadows come they will bring ease and comfort and honor and that when it is all over there will be peace with the hereafter.

NEW YORK'S OBLIGATIONS TO HER HISTORY

AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, AT BUFFALO, SEPTEMBER 17, 1907

We are all geniuses, or copyists. If we were not we would be mere nothings and that would be simply unthinkable. Genius does great things, but it is rare. Very few of us have even a spark of it. If the fact pains us, the bruise is not without its balm. The responsibility of greatness is heavy and the appointments and accompaniments of it are often trying. Geniuses are not always comfortable persons to live with and if we may judge by appearances they do not uniformly have any too good a time of it themselves. Nor is it possible to be entirely confident that one is a genius until after he is dead. Indeed he may be misled himself. An architect may be so deceived that the new buildings within the zone of his influence will be much more original than artistic. An instructor in music in the schools may be so fascinated with his own verse and his own airs that the poor children have to go away from the schools to hear good music at all. There are museums of art which would be more impressive if they would substitute inexpensive copies of masterpieces for their more costly and commonplace originals. There need be no fear of discouraging true genius. It can not be helped by the commonplace. Only through exacting criticisms, indeed only through adversity and struggling, can it come into the possession of its own.

Essentially we are copyists. We do as other people do. In our dress, in our structures, in our food, in our reading and our thinking, even in our ambitions and undertakings we imitate other people. We are very dependent upon our contacts and associations. Character is hammered out upon the anvil of experience. Iron has one price in the ore, another in the pig, another in steel rails, another in razor blades, and yet another in cambric needles or watch springs. All depends upon the processes and the batterings it goes through. It is the same in the world's ratings of men and women. We absorb more than we initiate and doubtless the influences of which we are unthoughtful are deeper than those of which we are particularly reminded.

Association and imitation are natural, agreeable, logical, successful. Separateness is difficult, practically impossible, simulated

rather than real, unprofitable rather than productive. It is well to go into the crowd. No one need be ashamed of copying. It is better to stand for decency in the crowd, and generally we do; to be discriminating in the copying, and ordinarily we are. The common advance which we are bound to recognize proves that, at least since the flood, the majority has kept company with decency and progress. We show the best we have at the fairs and the expositions; we do the best we can when others are looking on; and we copy the attractive, the enduring, the ennobling. We accept those things which stir the self-consciousness which the Almighty has implanted in us. Genius is the instrument of God in the development of mankind, and conventionality is only the respect which intelligence has to pay to the thinking and the usage of the multitude. Our intuitions rest upon good footings; the sentiment of the crowd is almost unerring. It is certainly so where discussion is unrestrained, where there is responsibility for action, and where there is the possibility of free public opinion. There the worthless things are transitory and the best become the constants. There opportunity stands upon the shoulders of accomplishment and ambition mounts to the very peaks of possibility.

With peoples it is the same as with individuals. Where the conscience of mankind has opportunity and expression, the generations are progressive. There may be progress where there is a cleavage in society; where a monarch or an aristocracy determine the policies of the mass and do it with reasonably sound purposes and ordinarily sane thinking; where the inevitable greed of personal advantage and special privilege is held in check by the possibility of a revolution; but there is a nobler, truer, stronger and more rapid progress where all the people have the advantage of free discussion and steadying influences of responsibility, where there is interdependence between men and women of all conditions, and where all the thinking and all the ambitions and all the conditions of all the people are factors in determining the law and the policies, the opportunities and the ambitions, of the mass.

Where there is progress there is obligation to what has gone before. Things worth having seldom spring full-fledged and unexpectedly into being. The world's progress is predicated upon conscience and discussion and cooperation and ambition and selfdenial and sorrow. Every traveler who has added to our information, every scientist who has unlocked a new truth, every artist who has given us a more beautiful expression of form, every ministering angel who has quickened our sense of brotherhood by

extending succor to a suffering one, every missionary who has. carried the cross into the wilderness, every author who has aroused rational imagination or stirred harmless humor or enlarged logical reasoning, every orator who has quickened ambition, every statesman who has stood for the equality of right and the freedom of opportunity, every soldier who has laid down his life for liberty controlled by law, has placed every one of us under obligations to him.

It is so with each of us and equally so with our generation; it is so with our political society, with that closer union of mankind which is imperative to the moral well being of men and women who live together under free institutions. If each of us owes a debt to ennobling and inspiring example, then our generation rests under enduring obligations to other generations which have cleared the wilderness and subdued the soil; which have in battle decided what manner of institutions the country should have; which have written and interpreted and successfully applied humane and just laws; which have accomplished physical undertakings unexcelled by any people; which have erected all of the instrumentalities of intellectual culture known in any land; and have in not a few particulars gone before any people in any land in reaching toward the great ideal ends for which governments are established among

men.

The society which I have the honor to address needs no reminder that the history of New York is one of surpassing interest. Even if we make allowance for the patriotic fervor which the native children of the State must have in its career and look at it with the unbiased eye of the philosopher or the historian, we must know that it is a fascinating story. We can not treat much of details tonight but I am sure you will bear with me while I present some phases of the subject which I ought to be able to make of interest to you and which ought to deepen our sense of gratitude to the men and women gone before.

It was fortunate for many reasons that the territory of the State was first settled by Dutchmen. They came with the favor and the aid, and not with the opposition, of their government. They came from a people who were further advanced in the higher learning and in the diffusion of elemental knowledge, and in the arts and crafts and in maritime commerce, and in political freedom and in institutional development than any other nation in the world, not excepting Britain at that time. All this had not come at first hand from the forces which produced our modern civiliza

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