been the frequent communications between the chapters of general fraternities extending into many colleges. The more distinguished students in each have become known to the others. The governing sense of common aims, and a common work, has been constantly reinforced in each toward the rest. A certain solidarity, of harmonious aspiration and of reciprocal interest, comes by degrees to be established among them. The time is certainly hastened in its approach when all the colleges scattered over the land will recognize themselves as only local constituent members of the real and great American University; which will have no single cathedral city, but the campus of the continent, for its seat, and which will be richer than in any renown derived from the past through the fame which it wins by training men for great utilities, noble offices. By training men, I have said; but the training of women, through similar methods, with an equal effect, is a part of the modern widened movement among American colleges, as important as the other which I have sketched, in close harmony with it, and assuming rapidly equal proportions. Newnham and Girton have lately surprised the English universities by the accurate and large learning imparted in them. Smith College and Amherst will have as well their friendly rivalries and eager competitions, and the vexed problem of coeducation may be held, I think, by the most exacting and fastidious critic, to have found in them its proper solution, unless Amherst and Northampton are farther from each other than they used to be when I was young. The final University which is thus magnificently arising among us will embrace in itself all such equipped and advancing schools, of training and culture, in any state, for either sex. Its vastness and opulence will have had no parallel among the comparatively restricted institutions across the sea, to which kings and prelates have made contribution. Its spires will shine from the sounding Atlantic onward to the ocean of Peace. Multitudinous associations, clinging more tenaciously than tentacles of ivy, will robe its far extending walls, as the pavements of its corridors are worn by the feet of successive generations. Its chiming bells, with musical triumph, will ring in the era of assured liberty, of popular intelligence with a refined and ripened culture, of thriving enterprise, and of Christian faith. So, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, and brothers of the fraternity, I join with you in gladness at the fact that the fifty years since this chapter was organized have seen it growing in strength and fame, keeping at least in equal advance with the college in which it is embosomed; and I join with you equally in the hope that when another half-century shall have passed it may have only an ampler power, a richer promise, a nobler fame. The traveler in Switzerland not unfrequently sees in the eastern sky what he takes to be a patch of cloud, fair but fleeting, white beneath the morning light, silently transfigured, as if charged from within by golden, chrysolite, opaline lusters, when the sun has passed the meridian. Its permanence gives it interpretation. It is not a cloud, but a mountain peak, solid as the earth from which it arises, though delicate in outline, and burning in the air like a translucent gem. This chapter which we love seemed to some, no doubt, in the days when the morning light lay on our path, a passing whirl of mist-laden air, hovering for a season in the sky of the college. It has kept its place, never expanding to large proportions, but growing more eminent and more variously lucent before our thought as the sun for us has descended in the west. I trust that it will be as permanent as the college, and will be constantly clothed upon with a more attractive and various charm, as the sun which is to mark the following centuries in the life of the college seeks its, as yet, unseen horizon. |