ss we expected;
or that we have neglected to cultivate the powers and tastes that can
make life enjoyable. We come to know, to use a truism, that a person's
highest satisfaction depends not upon his exterior acquisitions, but upon
what he himself is. There is no escape from this conclusion. The physical
satisfactions are limited and fallacious, the intellectual and moral
satisfactions are unlimited. In the last analysis, a man has to live with
himself, to be his own companion, and in the last resort the question is,
what can he get out of himself. In the end, his life is worth just what
he has become. And I need not say that the mistake commonly made is as to
relative values,--that the things of sense are as important as the things
of the mind. You make that mistake when you devote your best energies to
your possession of material substance, and neglect the enlargement, the
training, the enrichment of the mind. You make the same mistake in a less
degree, when you bend to the popular ignorance and conceit so far as to
direct your college education to sordid ends. The certain end of yielding
to this so-called practical spirit was expressed by a member of a
Northern State legislature who said, "We don't want colleges, we want
workshops." It was expressed in another way by a representative of the
lower house in Washington who said, "The average ignorance of the country
has a right to be represented here." It is not for me to say whether it
is represented there. Naturally, I say, we ought by the time of middle
life to come to a conception of what sort of things are of most value. By
analogy, in the continual growth of the Republic, we ought to have a
perception of what we have accomplished and acquired, and some clear view
of our tendencies. We take justifiable pride in the glittering figures of
our extension of territory, our numerical growth, in the increase of
wealth, and in our rise to the potential position of almost the first
nation in the world. A more pertinent inquiry is, what sort of people
have we become? What are we intellectually and morally? For after all the
man is the thing, the production of the right sort of men and women is
all that gives a nation value. When I read of the establishment of a
great industrial centre in which twenty thousand people are employed in
the increase of the amount of steel in the world, before I decide whether
it would be a good thing for the Republic to create another industrial
cit