me something intense and original, not
necessarily in point of wealth or extent, but in point of spiritual
quality. The founders have, as I said, triumphantly struck the
keynote, and laid the basis: the quality of what they have already
given is unique in character.

It rests with the officials of the present and future Stanford, it
rests with the devotion and sympathetic insight of the growing body of
graduates, to prolong the vision where the founders' vision terminated,
and to insure that all the succeeding steps, like the first steps,
shall single out this university more and more as the university of
quality peculiarly.

And what makes essential quality in a university? Years ago in New
England it was said that a log by the roadside with a student sitting
on one end of it, and Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end, was a
university. It is the quality of its men that makes the quality of a
university. You may have your buildings, you may create your
committees and boards and regulations, you may pile up your machinery
of discipline and perfect your methods of instruction, you may spend
money till no one can approach you; yet you will add nothing but one
more trivial specimen to the common herd of American colleges, unless
you send into all this organization some breath of life, by inoculating
it with a few men, at least, who are real geniuses. And if you once
have the geniuses, you can easily dispense with most of the
organization. Like a contagious disease, almost, spiritual life passes
from man to man by contact. Education in the long run is an affair
that works itself out between the individual student and his
opportunities. Methods of which we talk so much, play but a minor
part. Offer the opportunities, leave the student to his natural
reaction on them, and he will work out his personal destiny, be it a
high one or a low one. Above all things, offer the opportunity of
higher personal contacts. A university provides these anyhow within
the student body, for it attracts the more aspiring of the youth of the
country, and they befriend and elevate one another. But we are only
beginning in this country, with our extraordinary American reliance on
organization, to see that the alpha and omega in a university is the
tone of it, and that this tone is set by human personalities
exclusively. The world, in fact, is only beginning to see that the
wealth of a nation consists more than in anything else in the