You will need to be constantly on your guard to resist the attack of
this germ. After you graduate and go out into the world, powerful
influences will be operative in your life, tending to deteriorate your
standards, lower your ideals, and encoarsen you generally.

When you plunge into the swim of things, you will be constantly thrown
into contact with those of lower ideals, who are actuated only by
sordid, selfish aims. Then dies the man, the woman in you, unless you
are made of superior stuff.

What a contrast that high and noble thing which the college diploma
stands for presents to that which many owners of the diploma stand for
a quarter of a century later! It is often difficult to recognize any
relationship between the two.

American-Indian graduates, who are so transformed by the inspiring,
uplifting influences of the schools and colleges which are educating
them that they are scarcely recognizable by their own tribes when they
return home, very quickly begin to change under the deteriorating
influences operating upon them when they leave college. They soon
begin to shed their polish, their fine manners, their improved
language, and general culture; the Indian blanket replaces their modern
dress, and they gradually drift back into their former barbarism. They
become Indians again.

The influences that will surround you when you leave college or your
special training school will be as potent to drag you down as those
that cause the young Indian to revert to barbarism. The shock you will
receive in dropping from the atmosphere of high ideals and beautiful
promise in which you have lived for four years to that of a very
practical, cold, sordid materiality will be a severe test to your
character, your manhood.

But the graduate whose training, whose education counts for anything
ought to be able to resist the shock, to withstand all temptations.

The educated man ought to be able to do something better, something
higher than merely to put money in his purse. Money-making can not
compare with man-making. There is something infinitely better than to
be a millionaire of money, and that is to be a millionaire of brains,
of culture, of helpfulness to one's fellows, a millionaire of
character--a gentleman.

Whatever degrees you carry from school or college, whatever distinction
you may acquire in your career, no title will ever mean quite so much,
will ever be quite so noble, as that of gentleman.

"A ke