-silvery surface of the lake. It
is, indeed, a memorable experience to have lectured at Chautauqua.

ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP

Any one who has traveled much about the country of recent years must have
been impressed by the growing uneasiness of mind among thoughtful men.
Whether in the smoking car, or the hotel corridor, or the college hall,
everywhere, if you meet them off their guard and stripped of the optimism
which we wear as a public convention, you will hear them saying in a kind
of sad amazement, "What is to be the end of it all?" They are alarmed at
the unsettlement of property and the difficulties that harass the man of
moderate means in making provision for the future; they are uneasy over
the breaking up of the old laws of decorum, if not of decency, and over
the unrestrained pursuit of excitement at any cost; they feel vaguely that
in the decay of religion the bases of society have been somehow weakened.
Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special
significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a
_tour de force_, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and
self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that
are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to
overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence.
Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. It is a more
complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem
correspondingly safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes
have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the
largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect
their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.

Only a year after the sinking of the _Titanic_ I was crossing the ocean,
and it befell by chance that on the anniversary of that disaster we passed
not very far from the spot where the proud ship lay buried beneath the
waves. The evening was calm, and on the lee deck a dance had been hastily
organized to take advantage of the benign weather. Almost alone I stood
for hours at the railing on the windward side, looking out over the
rippling water where the moon had laid upon it a broad street of gold.
Nothing could have been more peaceful; it was as if Nature were smiling
upon earth in sympathy with the strains of music and the sound of laughter
that reached me at intervals from th