leave it," and the
workman whose sense of real or fancied injustice has brought him to what
with our children we know as the kicking and biting stage. It is too
late to do much with the present adult generation except by main
strength and awkwardness, but a recruit for higher education from either
of these groups is a good national investment.

Keep your human contacts. Don't be a "glad-hander" but do at least your
share. It takes two to make and keep alive a friendship, just as it does
a quarrel. There is something worth while in everyone. Give yourself a
chance to find what it is. Practice following and, as the chance comes
to you, practice leading, but above all, practice team play. Keep
yourself ready to take the next step, whatever it may be. There is a
story of Marshal Joffre, of which I can at least say that it is good
enough to be true. After the first battle of the Marne some enthusiast
was proclaiming him as a second Napoleon and laying it on pretty thick.
The old gentleman stood it as long as he could and then said: "No,
Napoleon would have known what to do next, and I don't."

Keep your enthusiasms and your ideals. In other words, keep your youth.
In choosing your life work, get into something in which the policy and
practice are such that you can throw your whole soul into the job. Don't
take yourself seriously, but take your opportunities for usefulness
seriously. Find out the callings in which America is short. There are
plenty of them, as the war has shown. Think over whether it isn't
possible for you to be one of the men or one of the women who, from your
training and momentum and vision, will be selected ten or fifteen or
twenty years hence, to take on some important job, with the nation as
your client, as the one person best qualified to fill it.

We no longer have to prove that it pays to know, to really know almost
anything that is worth while. It pays in money, if that is what one
wants; it pays in the more enduring satisfactions of life, in the
pleasure that comes from exact knowledge and intellectual pioneering, in
the almost unique joy of creation without the responsibilities of
possession, and in the feeling of individual readiness to be of use in
meeting the problems which the years allotted to your generation will
surely bring forth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: Commencement address delivered at the University of
Michigan, June 26, 1919.]

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