en and sure sense of honor," says Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard
University, "is the finest result of college life." The graduate who
has not acquired this keen and sure sense of honor, this thing that
stamps the gentleman, misses the best thing that a college education
can impart.

Your future, fortunate graduate, like a great block of pure white
marble, stands untouched before you. You hold the chisel and
mallet--your ability, your education--in your hands. There is
something in the block for you, and it lives in your ideal. Shall it
be angel or devil? What are your ideals, as you stand tiptoe on the
threshold of active life? Will you smite the block and shatter it into
an unshapely or hideous piece; or will you call out a statue of
usefulness, of grace and beauty, a statue which will tell the unborn
generations the story of a noble life?

Great advantages bring great responsibilities. You can not divorce
them. A liberal education greatly increases a man's obligations.
There is coupled with it a responsibility which you can not shirk
without paying the penalty in a shriveled soul, a stunted mentality, a
warped conscience, and a narrow field of usefulness. It is more of a
disgrace for a college graduate to grovel, to stoop to mean, low
practises, than for a man who has not had a liberal education. The
educated man has gotten a glimpse of power, of grander things, and he
is expected to look up, not down, to aspire, not to grovel.

We cannot help feeling that it is worse for a man to go wrong who has
had all the benefits of a liberal education, than it is for one who has
not had glimpses of higher things, who has not had similar advantages,
because where much is given, much is expected. The world has a right
to expect that wherever there is an educated, trained man people should
be able to say of him as Lincoln said of Walt Whitman, "There goes a
man."

The world has a right to expect that the graduate, having once faced
the light and felt its power, will not turn his back on it; that he
will not disgrace his _alma mater_ which has given him his superior
chance in life and opened wide for him the door of opportunity. It has
a right to expect that a man who has learned how to use skilfully the
tools of life, will be an artist and not an artisan; that he will not
stop growing. Society has a right to look to the collegian to be a
refining, uplifting force in his community, an inspiration to those who
have