§ 67

WELCOME TO THE ALUMNI

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

(Speech as president of the day, at the annual dinner of the Harvard Alumni Association in Cambridge, July 19, 1860.)

BROTHERS, by the side of her who is mother of us all, and FRIENDS, whom she welcomes as her own children: The older sons of our common parent who should have greeted you from this chair of office, being for different reasons absent, it has become my duty to half fill the place of these honored, but truant, children to the best of my ability-a most grateful office, so far as the expression of kind feeling is concerned; an undesired duty, if I look to the comparisons you must draw between the government of the association existing de jure, and its government de facto. Your President [Robert C. Winthrop] so graces every assembly which he visits, by his presence, his dignity, his suavity, his art of ruling, whether it be the council of a nation, the legislature of a State, or the lively democracy of a dinnertable, that when he enters a meeting like this, it seems as if the chairs stood back of their own will to let him pass to the head of the board, and the table itself, that most intelligent of quadrupeds, the half reasoning mahogany, tipped him a spontaneous welcome to its highest seat, and of itself rapped the assembly to order. [Applause.]

Your first Vice-President [Charles Francis Adams], whose name and growing fame you know so much better than his bodily presentment, has not been able to gratify your eyes and ears by showing you the lineaments and stirring you with the tones inherited from men who made their country or shaped its destinies. [Applause.] You and I have no choice therefore, and I must submit to stand in this place of eminence as a speaker, instead of sitting a happy listener with my friends and classmates on the broader platform beneath. Through my lips must flow the gracious welcome of this auspicious day, which brings us all together in this family temple under the benignant smile of our household divinities, around the ancient altar fragrant with the incense of our grateful memories.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. Poet and essayist. Born at Cambridge, Mass., August 29, 1809; died at Boston, October 7, 1894; graduated at Harvard in 1829; Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College, 1831-1841; practised medicine in Boston, 184147; Professor of Anatomy at Harvard, 1847-1882.

This festival is always a joyous occasion. It resembles a scattered family without making any distinction except that which age establishes, an aristocracy of silver hairs which all inherit in their turn, and none is too eager to anticipate. In the great world outside there are and must be differences of lot and position; one has been fortunate, another, toiling as nobly perhaps, has fallen in with adverse current; one has become famous, his name stars in great letters from the handbills of the drama of his generation; another lurks in small type among the supernumeraries. But here we stand in one unbroken row of brotherhood. No symbol establishes a hierarchy that divides one from another; every name which has passed into our golden book, the triennial catalogue, is illuminated and emblazoned in our remembrance and affection with the purple and sunshine of our common Mother's hallowed past and hopeful future.

We have at this time a two-fold reason for welcoming the return of our day of festive meeting. The old chair of office, against whose uneasy knobs have rested so many well-compacted spines, whose uncushioned arms have embraced so many stately forms, over whose inheritance of cares and toils have ached so many ample brows, is filled once more with a goodly armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity. The President never dies. Our precious Mother must not be left too long a widow, for the most urgent of reasons. We talk so much about her maternity that we are apt to overlook the fact that a responsible Father is as necessary to the good name of a well-ordered college as to that of a well-regulated household. As children of the College, our thoughts naturally center on the fact that she has this day put off the weeds of her nominal widowhood, and stands before us radiant in the adornment of her new espousals. You will not murmur, that, without debating questions of precedence, we turn our eyes upon the new head of the family, to whom our younger brothers are to look as their guide and counselor as we hope and trust through many long and prosperous years.

Brothers of the Association of the Alumini! Our own existence as a society is so bound up with that of the College whose seal is upon our foreheads, that every blessing we invoke on our parent's head returns like the dew from Heaven upon our own. So closely is the welfare of our beloved Mother knitted to that of her chief counselor and official consort, that in honoring him we honor her under whose roof we are gathered, at whose breast we have been nurtured, whose fair fame is our glory, whose prosperity is our success, whose lease of long life is the charter of our own perpetuity.

I propose the health of the President of Harvard University: We greet our brother as the happy father of a long line of future alumni.

§ 68

WELCOME TO PRINCE HENRY OF PRUSSIA

By Charles W. Eliot

(Delivered at a Complimentary Dinner given to the Prince by the city of Boston, March 6, 1902.)

MR. MAYOR, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, GOVERNOR CRANE: The nation's guests-Boston's this evening-have just had some momentary glimpses of the extemporized American cities, of the prairies and the Alleghenies, of some great rivers and lakes, and of prodigious Niagara; and so they have perhaps some vision of the large scale of our country, although they have run over not more than one-thirtieth of its area. But now they have come to little Massachusetts, lying on the extreme eastern seacoast -by comparison a minute commonwealth, with a rough climate and a poor soil.

It has no grand scenery to exhibit, no stately castles, churches or palaces come down through centuries, such as Europe offers, and for at least two generations it has been quite unable to compete with the fertile fields of the West in producing its own food supplies. What has Massachusetts to show them, or any intelligent European visitors? Only the fruitage-social, industrial and governmental-of the oldest and most prosperous democracy in the world.

For two hundred and eighty years this little commonwealth has been developing in freedom, with no class legislation, feudal system, dominant church, or standing army to hinder or restrain it. The period of development has been long enough to show what the issues of democracy are likely to be; and it must be interesting for cultivated men brought up under another régime to observe that human nature turns out to be much the same thing under a democratic form of government as under the earlier forms, and that the fundamental motives and objects of mankind remain almost unchanged amid external conditions somewhat novel.

Democracy has not discovered or created a new human nature; it has only modified a little the familiar article. The domestic affections, and loyalty to tribe, clan, race or nation still rule mankind. The family motive remains supreme.

CHARLES W. ELIOT. Born at Boston, Mass., March 20, 1834; graduated from Harvard, 1853; Professor of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1865-69; President of Harvard University, 1869-1909.

It is an accepted fact that the character of each civilized nation is well exhibited in its universities. Now Harvard University has been largely governed for two hundred and fifty years by a body of seven men called the Corporation. Every member of that Corporation which received your royal highness this afternoon at Cambridge is descended from a family stock which has been serviceable in Massachusetts for at least seven generations.

More than one hundred years ago Washington was asked to describe all the high officers in the American army of that day who might be thought of for the chief command. He gave his highest praise to Maj.Gen. Lincoln of Massachusetts, saying of him that he was "sensible, brave and honest." There are Massachusetts Lincolns to-day to whom these words exactly apply.

The democracy preserves and uses sound old families; it also utilizes strong blood from foreign sources. Thus, in the second governing board of Harvard University-the Overseers-a French Bonaparte, a member of the Roman Catholic Church, sits beside a Scotch farmer's son, Presbyterian by birth and education, now become the leader in every sense of the most famous Puritan church in Boston. The democracy also promotes human beings of remarkable natural gifts who appear as sudden outbursts of personal power, without prediction or announcement through family merit. It is the social mobility of a democracy which enables it to give immediate place to personal merit, whether inherited or not, and also silently to drop unserviceable descendants of earlier meritorious generations.

Democracy, then, is only a further unfolding of multitudinous human nature, which is essentially stable. It does not mean the abolition of leadership, or an averaged population, or a dead-level of society. Like monarchical and aristocratic forms of government, it means a potent influence for those who prove capable of exerting it, and a highly-diversified society on many shifting levels, determined in liberty, and perpetually exchanging members up and down. It means sensuous luxury for those who want it, and can afford to pay for it; and for the wise rich it provides the fine luxury of promoting public objects by well-considered giving.

Since all the world seems tending toward this somewhat formidable democracy, it is encouraging to see what the result of two hundred and eighty years of democratic experience has been in this peaceful and prosperous Massachusetts. Democracy has proved here to be a safe social order-safe for the property of individuals, safe for the finer arts of living, safe for diffused public happiness and well-being.

We remember gratefully in this presence that a strong root of Massa

chusetts liberty and prosperity was the German Protestantism of four centuries ago, and that another and fresher root of well-being for every manufacturing people, like the people of Massachusetts, has been German applied science during the past fifty years. We hope as your royal highness goes homeward-bound across the restless Atlantic-type of the rough "sea of storm-engendering liberty"-you may cherish a cheerful remembrance of barren but rich, strenuous but peaceful, free but selfcontrolled Massachusetts.

§ 69

WELCOME TO "THE WHEELOCK SUCCESSION"

By William Jewett Tucker

(Delivered at the inauguration of President Ernest Fox Nichols of Dartmouth College, October 14, 1909. From a record of the proceedings, published by the college.)

PRESIDENT NICHOLS, I am permitted by the courtesy of the trustees to introduce you at this point to a somewhat peculiar, because personal, succession, into which each president of the College enters upon his induction into office. The charter of Dartmouth, unlike that of any college of its time so far as I know, was written in personal terms. It recognizes throughout the agency of one man in the events leading up to and including the founding of the College. And in acknowledgment of this unique fact it conferred upon this man-founder and first president-some rather unusual powers, among which was the power to appoint his immediate successor. Of course this power of appointment ceased with its first use, but the idea of a succession in honor of the founder, suggested by the charter, was perpetuated; so that it has come about that the presidents of Dartmouth are known, at least to themselves, as also the successors of Wheelock, a distinction which I am quite sure that you will appreciate more and more. For Eleazar Wheelock was the type of the man the impulse of whose life runs on in men, creating as it goes a natural succession: a man whose power of initiative is evidenced by the fact that at sixty he was able to found this College in the wilderness: a scholar by the best standards of his time,

WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER. Born at Griswold, Conn., July 13, 1839; graduated from Dartmouth, 1861; Andover Theological Seminary, 1866; ordained in the Congregational ministry, 1867; Pastor Franklin Street Church, Manchester, N. H., 1867-75; Madison Square Presbyterian Church, New York, 1875-79; Professor of Rhetoric in the Andover Theological Seminary, 1879-93; President of Dartmouth College, 1893-1909.