without being narrow. Even among the sound scholars,
the men who really knew, the isolated and insulated individual could
very rarely make much headway. It was the open-minded scholar, the maker
and keeper of friends, who got his chance, the scholar whose learning
was to him a living thing, not necessarily to be displayed in the market
place, and never for the sake of the display, but on the other hand
never wrapped in a napkin and buried in the earth.

Will the scholar, now that his practical worth has been tested and
proved, be content to slip back into relative obscurity; or will he, on
the other hand, be tempted too far into the limelight and thereby lose
those very qualities which gave him his value? Will he be satisfied with
positions of leadership rather than leadership itself, which may be a
very different thing? It is largely for you young men and young women of
the rising generation of scholars to say.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: An address delivered before the New York Delta of Phi Beta
Kappa at Columbia University upon the fiftieth anniversary of the
establishment of the Chapter, June 3, 1919.]

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?[3]

I am going to try to select three or four general fields in which we
Americans have had a chance to learn lessons of permanent value as the
result of our war experience. Then I shall try to apply these to what
seems to me the most typical specimen of the best in American life, a
great American University; and finally, I shall try to apply them to the
situation which faces you young men and women of the graduating class as
you step out to take your places in the world. And in so doing I'm going
to look deliberately on the bright side. There are troubles enough in
the world to worry and depress us, and we have to face them, but let us
face them with a confidence that is justified in the light of the
examples of man's endurance, of his courage, of his possibilities of
accomplishment, which it has been our privilege to witness within the
lifetime of this academic generation.

What have we learned? In the first place, we have learned that as a
nation we possess the power to see a big job through, and we possess it
because we have the qualities of youth--enthusiasm, learning capacity,
energy, elasticity, initiative--the pioneering spirit. We have the
shortcomings of youth also--impatience, superficiality, improvidence,
cock-sureness--but when the test came we managed to strengthen our