The Voice of the Scholar

THE greatest need of popular government is the University. The greatest need of higher education is Democracy. The scholar and the man must work together. The free man must be a scholar. The scholar must be a man.

It is not the necessary function of Democracy to do anything very well. There is nothing in collective effort which insures right action. Its function is to develop intelligence and patriotism through doing for ourselves all things possible which concern us individually or collectively. To take responsibility is the surest way to rise to it, but the time may be long and errors may be costly. Courage and willingness do not guarantee success. Exact knowledge and thorough training are essential to right results. In these regards, Democracy is, in the nature of things, deficient. These the University must contribute. Government by the people needs its trained and educated men more than any other kind of government; for while monarchy seeks far and wide for strong men and wise to be used as its tools, strength and wisdom are the daily life of successful Democracy. But Democracy is always prone to undervalue wise men, and imagines vainly that it can get along well enough without their help.

On the other hand the University needs the people. In their wants and their uplifting it finds the best reason for its existence. “ The bath of the people,” which Lincoln said was good for public men, is essential to the University. It keeps it in touch with life. It holds it to humanity.

Those who regard higher education as a social ornament, valueless except as a badge for the delight of its possessor, and those who regard culture as the private perquisite of the elect few, are alike in the wrong. The presence of men of culture and training raises the value of everything about them. It insures the success of enterprise, the safety of person and property, the contact with righteousness of thought and action which is the mainspring of right thought and right deed in the future.

Moreover if clear thinking with clean living is good for the elect few, it is equally good for the mutable many. Culture not only raises the man above the mass, it turns the masses into men. That the multitude may imagine themselves men before they hold a man’s grasp on life is the grievous danger of Democracy. Here again the University plays its part, teaching the relative value of ideals. Under its criticism men learn that good results are better than good intentions, and that they demand a far higher order of skill and courage.

I heard a man say the other day that the university men were not on his side of a certain question. In fact, he said, the college men are always on the contrary side of every question. This is probably true in the sense he meant; for it is the province of college men to judge intentions and pretenses by ultimate results. When the final end, according to the experience of human wisdom, is sure to be bad, wise men must oppose the beginning. The Universities have many times stood in opposition to the popular feeling of the time, but they have rarely found condemnation in the final verdict of history. Only he who has studied the affairs of men critically, impartially, coldly, can discover the real trend of forces in the movements of to-day. This the University has means to do. It does not carry elections. It has seldom tried to do so, for the results of an election play a very small part in the evolution of Democracy : not to carry elections, but rather to carry wisdom to the people ; that is something worth doing. The words of experience which are wasted in the noise of the hustings become potent as the tumult passes by.

The people suffer many ills in our social order, for most of which they only are responsible. Because men are not wise, they know not what to do. In ignorance and weakness they find themselves the sport of Fate, the flotsam of “manifest destiny,” the victims of evils that wisdom and virtue instinctively avoid.

Next to knowing what to do is the willingness to believe that some one else possesses this knowledge. Skepticism as to the existence of skill and intolerance toward the possessor of knowledge are common features of Democracy. This is its vulgar side, the disposition to do mean things in a mean way, doubting that there exist any better things or better ways of doing them. Through this kind of vulgarity, the average American is his own physician, healing himself with drugs of which he does not even know the name. As a result, he suffers half his life from self-inflicted poisoning. The American is his own architect, and for this reason our cities are filled with buildings in which nightmares might house, were it not for their fresh paint and smart ornamentation. The American is his own statesman, following his own impulses, guided by his own prejudices. Thus he fills the land of the free with oppression and injustice. When he can no longer shut his eyes to the misery he has wrought he falls back on his good intentions, casting the blame for his blunders on impersonal destiny.

The sense of personal responsibility and personal adequacy, which Democracy gives, is of vital importance in the development of man. But it has its bad side as well as its good. It is the function of the University to struggle against the bad, day and night, in season and out of season, to convert it into the other. That vulgarity is free to express itself in our system does not exalt vulgarity. In the long run, vulgarity finds its surest cure in freedom.

The people at large even yet do not understand nor value knowledge and power. Only those who know well and see clearly can do well. Knowledge does not flatter or coddle, and men take to that which pleases them. The fact that the majority do not believe in knowledge is the reason why the University must always be in opposition to prevailing sentiment and current action. “ When were the good and true ever in the majority ? ” There are not many of those who speak and write on public affairs who really care for what is just. The interest of most men lies in the success of the “ cause.” But the cause, whatever it may be, is only an incident in intellectual awakening, a mere episode in social development. It is in the actual truth that the public weal is bound up. No honest or worthy cause appeals to the self-pity of those it addresses. All calls to the weakness, or vanity, or prejudice, or passion of men are dishonest. All dishonesty results in evil. Virtue that can last rests on growing honesty and growing wisdom. Because the University stands for the free search for truth, its influence must be opposed to that of passion and prejudice. It must be above the heats of the hour, and therefore in some degree antagonistic to them. Thus, those who strive on the sands of the arena find the University distant and cold. This again is its danger, that it shall be cold and distant. Never to “ vex at the land’s ridiculous miserie ” was an old ideal of the University. It is an ideal long cherished in the great Universities of England. But it was never a worthy ideal. To exist for the needs of the people is a mission worthy of Oxford or of Harvard or of Berlin. It is the final, highest function of all the glorious brotherhood of plain life and high thought.

To keep up wisdom among men is the natural function of the University. The need of the times is not of men to die for the right, but of men to live for it. Not of men to oppose popular feeling, nor even to rouse the public conscience. Better than this, is to train the public thought. What we want is not a revival of zeal, not even for the cause of righteousness. It is rather a revival of wisdom. This is followed by no chill nor backsliding, while zeal, however well-meaning, is subject to ebbs and flows.

I heard a very rich man say not long ago that he had no faith in higher education. “ Nine college men out of every ten,” he said, “ build up a wall between themselves and life.” By life, he seemed to mean the business of making money. If this be life, the statement may be true ; but judged even by this standard, we must believe that the college men who thrust themselves upon his notice were not typical of their kind. Some people look upon men as useful only as they can use them. The rest are merely competing organisms, poor beggars who ought to be got under ground as soon as possible, to “ save the cost of their keep.” But it is not true that most college men build up a wall between themselves and life. If true in any individual case, it is because the man was not worth educating, or because the education was itself spurious. For higher education cannot make a man where manhood did not exist before. It can only take a man already created, and raise him to higher effectiveness. Moreover, there are frauds and imitations in education as well as anywhere else, and misfit articles are thrown on the market, cheap, every day. It is said that “ our schools which teach young people to talk do not teach them how to live.” This would mean that some schools are shams, not giving real education. But it is not by mistakes and misfits that higher education is to be judged. It is by its finished and adapted product. In every walk in life the higher education works to the benefit of humanity. The man who knows one thing well can do it well. His presence in life is a help to his neighbor. He does not enter into competition, but into elevation. He makes the business of living respectable.

In the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1899, Dr. William DeWitt Hyde has given a striking account of the value of the life-work of a single scholar, the honored President of Harvard.

“ No one, ” says Dr. Hyde, “ can begin to measure the gain to civilization and human happiness his services have wrought. . . . His leadership has doubled the rate of educational advance not in Harvard alone, but throughout the United States. He has sought to extend the helping hand of sympathy and appreciation to every struggling capacity in the humblest grammar grade; to stimulate it into joyous blossoming under the sunshine of congenial studies throughout the secondary years ; to bring it to a sturdy and sound maturity in the atmosphere of liberty in college life ; and finally, by stern selection and thorough specialization, to gather a harvest of experts in all the higher walks of life, on whose skill, knowledge, integrity, and self-sacrifice their less trained fellows can implicitly rely for higher instruction, professional counsel, and public leadership. In consequence of these comprehensive reforms, we see the first beginnings of a rational and universal church, not separate from existing sects, but permeating all ; property rights in all their subtle forms are more secure and well defined; hundreds of persons are alive to-day who under physicians of inferior training would have died long ago ; thousands of college students have had quickened within them a keen intellectual interest, an earnest spiritual purpose, a ‘ personal power in action under responsibility,’ who under the old regime would have remained listless and indifferent; tens of thousands of boys and girls in secondary schools can expand their hearts and minds with science and history and the languages of other lands, who but for President Eliot would have been doomed to the monotonous treadmill of formal studies for which they have no aptitude or taste; and, as the years go by, hundreds of thousands of the children of the poor, in the precious tender years before their early drafting into lives of drudgery and toil, in place of the dry husks of superfluous arithmetic, the thrice-threshed straw of unessential grammar, and the innutritious shells of unrememberable geographical details, will get some brief glimpse of the wondrous loveliness of Nature and her laws, some slight touch of inspiration from the words and deeds of the world’s wisest and bravest men, to carry with them as a heritage to brighten their future humble homes and gladden all their after-lives. In such ‘ good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,’ has there been given to this great educational reformer, in return for thirty years of generous and steadfast service of his University, his fellow men, his country, and his God, what, in true Puritan simplicity, he calls ‘ that finest luxury, to do some perpetual good in this world.’ ”

Not long since one of our writers expressed regret at the numbers of young men sent forth each year from the Universities to swell the educated proletariat of America. His assumption is that each is to scramble for his living, struggling with his competitors, dissatisfied because his ambitions far outrun every possible achievement. The very reverse of this is the fact in America, whatever may be the case elsewhere, as, for instance, in the “ bedridden officialism of France.” The man of character who is educated aright finds very soon his place in our community. Before he came he may not have been wanted, but once in his position, everybody seems looking for him. The college men of America need no help and no pity from any source. They can take care of themselves, and they can take care of others. To them, as to Emerson, “ America means opportunity,” and there are more opportunities to-day than ever before to the man who is able to grasp them. But to grasp the greater opportunities, the first essential is not to despise the small ones. An education that turns a man away from any honest work, however humble, that lies in the line of duty, is not sound education. That some education is unsound, and some men are unmanly, in nowise shows that real training does not strengthen real men.

Each year, it is true, makes higher demands. There are not so many things worth having to be had for the simple asking. This is because the nation is growing more critical. It is beginning to demand fitness, not alone mere willingness. The opportunities it has to offer are falling into the hands of trained men, and these men demand still higher training from those who are to be their successors.

A skilled engineer will not choose as his assistant and successor a man who knows wheels and engines only by rule of thumb. An educated chemist will not make way for a druggist’s clerk, nor a graduate of West Point for a politician’s parasite, whose military training was gained as elevator boy or as driver of a beer wagon. Training counts alike in all walks of life, in a Democracy not less than in an empire. As the people come to understand the reality of knowledge, so will they learn to appreciate its worth.

Another very rich man doubts the value of college education; at the same time he places the highest estimate on applied chemistry, because through the skill of the chemist employed in his steel manufactory he laid the foundations of his own wealth. But applied chemistry rests on the broader chemistry not yet applied, and is a part of higher knowledge. To train chemists is likewise a part of the higher education. Higher education consists no longer, as many seem to suppose, in writing Latin verses and in reading mythology in Greek. These things have their place, and a great place in the history of culture, but it is to “ Greek-minded men and Roman-minded men ” that they belong. They form no longer the sole avenue by which the goal of the scholar can be reached.

The keynote of the modern University is its usefulness. Its help is no longer limited to one kind of man or to one kind of ability, cramping or excluding all others. It welcomes “ every ray of varied genius to its hospitable halls.” It is its highest pride that no man who brings to its classrooms brains and courage is ever turned away unhelped.

Because of this broadening of university ideals, there are ten college students in our country to-day where there was one twenty years ago. For this reason, the same twenty years have witnessed a marvelous expansion in all Universities where generous ideals have found lodgment.

Where the old notion that all culture runs in a single groove still obtains; where it is attempted to train all men by one process, whatever this process be, there is no growth in numbers, no extension of influence, no sign of greater abundance of life. Just in proportion as constructive individualism in education has been a guiding principle have our Universities grown in numbers and in influence. In this proportion and for this reason have they deserved to grow. For this reason James Bryce declares that of all results of Democracy, the American University offers the largest promise for the future.

The scholar in the true sense is the man or woman for whom the schools have done their best. The scholar knows some one thing thoroughly, and can carry his knowledge into action. With this, he must have such knowledge of related subjects and of human life as will throw this special knowledge into proper perspective. Anything less than this is not scholarship. The man with knowledge and no perspective is a crank, a disturber of the peace, who needs a guardian to make his knowledge useful. The man who has common sense, but no special training, may be a fair citizen, but he can exert little influence that makes for progress. There may be a wisdom not of books, but it can be won by no easy process. To gain wisdom or skill, in school or out, is education. To do anything well requires special knowledge, and this is scholarship whether attained in the University or in the school of life. It is the man who knows that has the right to speak.

That the monarchy needs the University has been recognized ever since culture began. The Universities of Europe were founded by the great kings ; the wiser the king the more he felt the need of scholars as his helpers. So Alfred founded Oxford, and Charlemagne the University of Paris, while the founder of the University of Berlin well deserved the name of “ Great,” even though it were for nothing else. In the darkest days of Holland, William the Silent erected the University of Leyden. He needed it in his struggle against Spain. He needed it in the warfare for independence. A University breeds free men, men whom physical force cannot bind.

But the need of the monarchy for men of high culture and exact training is less than that of the Democracy. Under a monarchy such men must hold office. In a Democracy they must hold the people. They must form fixed points in the civic mass, units of intelligence, not to be bribed nor stampeded.

The presence of the king is not the essential feature of a monarchy. It is the absence of the people. Where the people are not consulted, it is not vital to the government that they be wise, nor even that wise men should be among them. In fact, they are more easily handled without this kind of obstruction. Therefore the tendency of the monarchy is to separate the men from the mass, as we might choose the sheep from among the goats. But in a Democracy, those who are ruled must also rule. They have no less need of individual wisdom, but they must have it diffused among themselves, not concentrated in a ruling class. Nothing can be done for a Democracy save what the people do for themselves. It is impossible to provide for it an educated oligarchy. Its public servants are of its own kind. They must be its agents or its attorneys, in no sense its rulers, not often even its leaders. For the most part, therefore, the wisest men in the Democracy will not be in office. The voice of wisdom should rise from the body of the people to the throne of power. When a Democracy needs a leader in the seat of authority, it is because it has in one fashion or other gone out of its way. Going out of its way, it has come to a crisis. The cause of every crisis, in a Democracy, is a mistake of one sort or another. A crisis arises with a question of right and wrong. Such a question never becomes a burning one unless the popular feeling has somewhere gone wrong and worked itself out in wrong action.

When this is the case, it is the scholar’s business to know it. He is the sensitive barometer who feels first the lowered pressure of rejected duty, the first warning of the coming storm. The warning he gives, his neighbors will not receive with favor. He will not receive a 舠 donation party,” nor a vote of thanks, nor a new pair of boots for giving it expression, but it is his business to speak, and he cannot remain a scholar if he takes refuge in silence. Dr. Norman Bridge has well expressed a similar thought in these words: —

“ The mere fact that one or two men in a hundred are known to be uninfluenced by the clamors of any rabble, good or bad, is to any community a force of unspeakable value. The excitable ones know well that the fiftieth man must be met and conciliated or overcome in any hot-headed movement. He is a factor as a voter and a citizen that cannot be ignored, and he exercises a wholesome, regulating, and modifying, often repressive influence on the hasty tendencies of the crowd. The thieves of the public treasury, of all classes and shades, are afraid of him. Even one forceful man in a hundred thousand may have an amazing influence on public affairs, if he has the time and inclination to devote to disinterested care of the public interests. There are a few such men in each of our large cities. In one of the large centres of the East a wealthy man of leisure was for many years a terror to the hot-headed and to the filchers of the public, and solely because he gave himself to the task, and they knew they would have to meet him at every turn. This one man in the multitude may be called a croaker or a fossil, but often he is the sole force that is able to check the rising of the mob or the stampede of the army, or to compel men to stop and think before taking action that may be hasty or regrettable.”

The scholar will not go far out of his way in matters of this kind. Because his knowledge is intense, it must correspondingly be narrow. The tendencies to good and evil in our social condition are so varied and so intertangled that those who trace out the relations of one set of combinations must perforce neglect the others. The scholar who raises his voice against unjust or unwise taxation may be silent on the question of misapplied charity. The scholar who becomes an authority on the purity of water cannot be an equal judge of the purity of elections. The expert on electricity is not necessarily the best judge of ghost stories. He may be so, but we cannot expect it. Each must do his own part in his own way in his own section of the field of knowledge. Each must say his own word as his own truth comes to him, though he know that his own times may let it pass unheeded, and though he know that his voice may be overborne by the louder tones of mere pretenders to knowledge. For it is one of the conditions of Democracy that wisdom and its counterfeit go along together side by side. There can be no tag or label to mark one from the other, and the people would not heed it if there were. We can only know wisdom from imposture by its results, or by the test of our own wisdom. The government cannot brand a Keeley, lest the public mistake him for a Faraday, A Tesla and a Helmholtz pass as great alike, and in the public mind he is greatest whose name is oftenest in the daily newspapers. All this is well. It is better for men to choose the voice of wisdom for themselves rather than to have it infallibly pointed out to them by the government. For the seat of wisdom is in the individual soul, and it grows through individual effort.

The scholar is silent for the most part in the rush and hurry of the world. When he has no reason for speaking he reserves his strength for his own due season and his own line of action. But he must be free to speak when needs arise. He cannot breathe in confined air, and his speech or his silence must be at his own will, subject to his own conscience and to the demands of truth.

In our days men talk too much, in the papers, in the magazines, in the open atmosphere. They fill the literary air with vain shoutings. But there can never be too clear or too frequent statements of the results of real knowledge. The old elementary truths of justice and humanity need to be recalled to us day after day, while on the other hand, the discoveries of science give us every day better tools and surer command over the forces of Nature. The voice of the oldest and the newest must together somehow reach our ears, if our actions are to be righteous and our enterprises successful.

To the scholar we must look for this. Only he who knows for himself some truth which rests on the foundations of the Universe has a right to the name of scholar. And the scholar will speak when the time comes for speaking. Whatever our creeds and conventions, he will break through them with the truth. He can never afford to do less, if the truth he utters be really his own and the outcome of his own contact with the powers that never lie. No authority can bend him to silence ; no title can bribe him ; no force can close his mouth. He must, if need be, have the spirit of the martyr. He must consider, not the consequences to himself, to his business, to society, — only the demands of truth.

That the scholar must speak, again emphasizes his need of common sense. Common sense is that instinct which throws all knowledge into right perspective. It rests on sound habits of orientation. He who knows where the sun rises never fails to make out all the other points of the compass. This power the schools alone cannot give. They can strengthen it, but they cannot create it, and they must not take it away. It is the foundation of all true culture, for science is only enlightened common sense.

As a part of common sense, the scholar must distinguish his truth from his opinions. He must not mistake for the eternal verity his own prejudice, his own ambition, or his own desire. For he is human on all his human sides, and is subject to temptations that master other men. He is in better form to resist, no doubt, but that does not insure immunity. Moreover, his truth may be only half truth at the best, and the other half truths may seem to contradict it. To know a half truth from a whole one is the part of common sense, but common sense is a possession still more rare than learning. When scholars forget, their voices arise in discord, and this discord casts discredit over knowledge. When half truths are set off one against another, we may find displayed all the vulgarity of intolerance in quarters where intolerance should be unknown. All this should teach the scholar modesty. It should warn him of the need of charity, but it should not silence his voice.

He must speak, he will speak, and it is for the safety of Democracy that sooner or later his word is triumphant. The final outcome of all action rests with the educated man. Not all the politicians of all the parties in all the republics have secured so many final victories in thought and action as the Universities.

I read lately an attempt to show that the scholar or the clergyman should never write or speak on any public or passing question, lest he expose himself to criticism, or find his personality tumbled about in the dust of the political arena. The clergyman devotes his life to the study of moral questions in the light of religion. The scholar devotes himself to the study of truth wherever found and to the ways by which truth may be available to men. If the scholar and the clergyman are to be silent on questions of vital interest to men, who indeed is to speak ? Is it the politician of the day, a mere echo without an idea of his own ? Is it the man of money who may have an axe to grind in every movement in public affairs, or who again may be seeking undisturbed possession of that which justice would place in other hands ? Is it the popular agitator to whom the social order is one long fit of hysteria? Must we confine all public utterance to those whose passions are excited or whose interests are touched ? Shall Emerson and Lowell, Theodore Parker and Phillips Brooks, Eliot and Butler, be silent when the fighting editor speaks ?

The scholar should be above all influences of passion or profit. He should speak for the clear, hard, unyielding, unflattering, unpitying truth. If he enters the arena, he must as a man take his chances with the rest. His thoughts must be his only weapon. Passion, rhetoric, satire, these are arms for weaker men to use, not for the scholar. His only sword is the truth. His personal credentials may be challenged. He will meet the scorn of men who do not know the truth when they see it, and to whom thought seems but a puny weapon. More than this, he will meet, as adversaries, scholars, real or pretended, men who see the truth from a single side, or who have never seen it at all, yet feign to be its defenders.

As to all this, the scholar must be patient. If he is right, the ages will find him out. If he is wrong, the fault is with his own weakness, not with truth. He must be loyal to the best he knows, caring no more for majorities than the stars do, unshaken by feeling, by tradition, or by fear. The voice of a clamorous mob on the one hand is no more to him than the dictum of a pope or a king, or all antiquity. Nor is it less; for these are matters not to be taken in evidence when the scholar makes his final decision.

The rabble of to-day which the scholar has to face is not the rabble of yesterday. The axe and the fagot, the club and the paving-stone, have as means of argument gone out of date. The weapon of the mob of to-day is mud. When a scholar stands for unwelcome truth, the answer of the day is personal abuse. To a man the rabble cannot understand are ascribed all the vulgar motives of the rabble. His words and his teachings are distorted and vulgarized until the multitude recognize them as brought down to their own level.

In this gloomy outlook two facts may console the scholar. To Truth’s marble statue mud will never cling. Men without brains have no permanent influence. A little patience and the storm will pass by. When the air clears, with Emerson the scholar shall again behold above him, 舠 the gods sitting on their thrones, they alone and he alone.”

We say sometimes that certain scholars have the right to be heard. But one thing can give this right, and that is the value of what they have to say. This may be judged by the soundness of their lives and the breadth of their previous experiences. This right must be won by merit, not claimed as a privilege. The duty to proclaim truth belongs to him who has shown that he knows Truth when he sees her, and that he knows how to find her when he does not see her. It cannot exist in full degree for men without experience in life, for men who live in a visionary world, for men whose ready eloquence takes the place of science. The youth’s fitness to speak usually dates from the period when he makes the discovery that he is not yet ready. It is not the fear of the public, of the press, of the rich, or of the poor, that should deter a young man from rash speaking. It is the fear that he may not tell the truth, the fear that he may mislead others or bring reproach on himself or on his colleagues by undue proclamation of his own crudity. The Universities of the world have shown that they fear neither man nor devil, if a struggle for principle is on. But this they do fear, that in the multiplicity of speech and writing for which they are held responsible the truth shall be lost in the heat of controversy or concealed in meshes of eloquence. The University must stand for infinite patience and the calm discussion of the ideas and ideals which it must leave to men of action to frame into deeds. The passionate appeal is not part of its function. That politics may not creep into the University, it is necessary that men of the University shall not plunge into politics. This is not because the University is afraid of reprisals. The politicians of the hour cannot hurt it much. It is rather that the University fears degeneration within itself if its energies are turned largely into temporary or “ timely ” ends.

The function of the University in affairs of the day must be essentially judicial. This does not mean that the scholar should be silent in times of moral issues. Now and then it is his duty to take the great bull of Public Opinion by the horns, regardless of results to himself or his associates. All honor to the scholar who recognizes the moment of decision and seizes it regardless of what follows to himself or others. But such moments come not every day, and the small battles of society must be fought by men of action who enroll themselves under banners which flutter for the hour.

David Starr Jordan.