APPENDIX C.

ADDRESS OF HON. NEWTON D. BAKER, SECRETARY OF WAR, FIFTYSECOND ANNIVERSARY, GALLAUDET COLLEGE, PRESENTATION DAY, WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 1916.

Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Board of Directors, Young Ladies and Young Gentlemen of the Graduating Class:

I am often impressed with the fact that those things which we least expect are the things that most often happen. Twenty-seven years ago I was a student in the Episcopal High School of Virginia, over near Alexandria, and each year a strong and vigorous group of men from Gallaudet College used to come over and administer a more or less sound thrashing to the pride of our hearts, which in the fall was our football team, and in the spring was our baseball team. I never had seen Gallaudet College, but I have always nourished a kind of grievance against it, and I wondered if, in the whirligig of time, an opportunity would ever come for me to get even. [Laughter.] Now I find myself not only in a place where I can get even with you, but where you have actually been so injudicious and unwise as to invite me to come and get even. [Laughter and applause.] I have not made any recent inquiry, but as these are times of progress I hope you have reformed your habits and that you no longer defeat the Episcopal High School.

As a matter of fact, I do have a very happy recollection of those days, and I remember that even though I was then but a very small boy in knickerbockers I had impressed upon my youthful mind and imagination the fact that a mere disability of hearing was a thing that did not deprive life of its opportunities, and I had an example before me in the brave and successful endurance of your athletes, of the fact that the inner man is the thing that really counts in the building of a career in life.

Now, this afternoon I am specially interested in an idea, which is not addressed to you as people who do not hear, but as members of a community as wide as the Nation, having an equal interest, an equal opportunity, and an equal responsibility. You are about to leave this college. You have now matured yourselves and prepared yourselves and been prepared by your faculty to go out into life, and while we sat here on the stage young men came from some place back there and presented to you flowers-many of you and I thought that the symbol was a very fitting one, that as we enter upon the real responsibilities of life we are about to gather the flowers of our experience. You are about to go out into life. You will melt into the community. You will be found in places of industry and commerce. Careers of usefulness and happiness are open to you on every hand. In the city from which I came when I came to Washington there are two or three graduates of this very institution in the employ of

the city itself. One of them, Mr. Neillie, who may be known to some of you, is one of the most distinguished entomologists we have in Cleveland, and the man to whom that great city owes much of what has been preserved of the beauty of her parks. While just across the hall from my own office was the room in which David Friedman works, a young graduate of this institution, employed by that city as a chemist, testing the quality of the cement that goes into the various building enterprises of that city, relied upon, a trusted, competent, and responsible public officer.

May I add just one word of personal reminiscence about David. I discovered shortly after I became mayor of Cleveland that among my unsuspected powers was the power of marrying people, and the way I discovered it was that before I had been many days in office David Friedman came quite blushingly to ask me to marry him. So that I did perform the marriage ceremony for a former graduate of this institution, now a highly trusted officer of that great city.

This, however, is merely to get rid of the superficial aspect of our relation this afternoon. You are graduating, or being presented for degrees. You are going out into life where there will be no class distinctions that will separate you from your fellows. The whole process of civilization, as a matter of fact, is a process for the removal of artificial distinctions. It is said of firearms, for instance, that they have made all men the same size. It used to be that the man who was 6 feet or 7 feet tall, and strong of arms and legs, was not only the biggest man in the community but the chief of the community. But now, since the leveling effect of the removal of artificial distinction by the introduction of these modern equalizers of strength, we estimate men very much more by the size of their heads and the quality of their hearts than by the mere gross size of their stature. [Applause.]

So as you go back into your life you will find class distinctions constantly being removed. You will find that there will settle down upon you, wherever you may be, whether teaching or preaching, working in industry or commerce, whether at a profession or at a trade, you will find that your place in life, working through whatever instrumentalities are available to you, that your place in life will be like that of all your other fellow citizens, and your success and happiness in life, just as theirs, will depend not upon the particular avenue through which your soul is susceptible of address, not upon whether you get your relations with life through the ear or the eye. Whether the spoken word or the printed word carries the message will be a matter of diminishing and minor importance. But the message that you get and the quality of the reception you give it, what response you make to the stimuli of life, will be the thing measuring not only your own happiness and success, but the worthiness of your contribution to your age and generation.

Now, this modern time is a particularly fruitful time for us to reflect upon large subjects. This is the most disturbed era that the world has ever known. There has never been, since the days of Noah and the great flood, so much destruction upon the face of the earth. I imagine that if any hundred years of destruction and war were compressed into a single period of two years it would still be less destructive, less wasteful, with less misery and less suffering than the last two years' history of the world has shown. And that has

had these two effects, I think: It has first demonstrated to mankind all the world over the extent to which we are related to one another and depend upon one another. Individualism has had and is having the shock of its existence in this great conflict. If we were to go to-day to any country in Europe we would find that that universality of demand for sacrifice and the assumption of responsibility are the things that characterize the life of that nation. Every man and every woman, whether in Germany or in France or in England, is beginning to feel a sense of responsibility for his part in the preservation of the national destiny. In every one of those countries women are doing the work of men who are at the front, and little children are being taught that the welfare of the state can even be made to rest upon their infant shoulders and their untrained hands. So that, all over Europe, the sense of responsibility for national welfare, the universality of the belief in social preservation, is the lesson that is being taught.

And then it has had this other effect. Over there and, to some extent, over here, prior to the breaking out of this war, there was a certain international light-mindedness that characterized the whole face of the earth. We had made enormous and rapid progress in the development of mechanical arts and inventions. The struggle for existence against the forces of nature had been made much easier to man than it used to be. It was very much easier to get the earth to yield a bushel of wheat by the mechanical processes that Cyrus McCormick and all the other agricultural implement inventors had devised than it used to be in the old-fashioned days when the sower went out to scatter the seed on the ground and let chance take care of the increase. There was enormous amplification of the resources available for man, and we had ceased, I think, to feel the seriousness of life quite so much as we used to feel it when life was a harder struggle than it had come to be, and as a consequence of that, both abroad and here, I think we may say that there was a certain light-mindedness as a characteristic of our modern civilization.

Perhaps I can illustrate to you what I mean by asking you in your minds to compare any newspaper printed in 1913 with a newspaper printed in 1813. I do not know whether there were any newspapers in 1813, but, if there had been one, what would it have talked about? Would it have talked about murders and suicides and divorce scandals? Would it have talked quite so much about baseball, the stock markets, and the things that modern newspapers used to talk about so exclusively? I think not. I think a newspaper in 1813 would have pictured as its chief impulse the aspiration of a new people on a new continent for the development of a new kind of liberty and freedom in the world. It would have been frequent in its assertion of the fact that an experiment was being tried on American soil, an experiment of the greatest importance in the history of the world-that an attempt was being made for the first time in human history actually to work out conditions under which democracy could have a trial, and it would have been very solicitous for the welfare of that experiment. It would have been tremendously concerned to cultivate and preserve what we have since come to know as that spontaneous upward tendency that is the distinguishing characteristic of American

America

Well, our experiment got pretty well established. became an established and accepted ideal in the world, and then riches came upon us, and strength such that we no longer had to consider defense either against others or against adversities of our own, and as a consequence we acquired light-mindedness, and then all of a sudden we awoke to a new realization about America. We had spent a lot of time breaking down artificial distinctions. We had equalized the stature of men perhaps by the introduction of firearms. We had multiplied the conveniences of life and enormously increased the capacity of man to triumph over nature. But we had allowed a great lot of other artificial distinctions to be created among us. When we began to survey ourselves, we found that instead of women living in their homes and taking care of their family affairs and their children, something over six millions of them were earning their own livings in factories and workshops. We learned that very little babies, 4 and 5 years old, in tenement houses in our great cities, were having their baby fingers taught to weave paper flowers at 2 and 3 cents a dozen, not as a game, not as something to amuse them and while away the time, but as a means of acquiring the very necessaries, the simple necessaries of life.

We awoke to a realization that we were neglecting the greatest of our natural resources-building great dams, as was referred to here, wise project though it is, irrigating those tracts of desert, building railroads, and inventing wireless telegraphs and erecting telephone lines, giving the world by electricity, as Lowell says, one nervous system-but devitalizing, enervating and destroying the human power in our society, taking away from women the opportunity to raise their families under circumstances that make the families strong men and women, and taking away from children the privilege of youth, the opportunity of education, coining them into cloth and merchandise that left them with dwarfed and unnatural bodies, and left the product of their toil a momentary increase in the sum of our wealth.

When that realization came upon us, we found that America needed preparedness; not cannon, nor powder, not so much armies and navies, but men and women with a chance, with opportunity. It needed a redressing of the soul of this country of ours, a redistribution of the things that make for a national life, a reorganization of the relations between men engaged in industrial and commercial pursuits. And now all over America there is this emotional outburst for preparedness. And it is not military. It is not taking that turn. Young men are going to Plattsburg and engaging in drilling, but when they come away and you ask them what they learned at Plattsburg, none of them ever tells you that he learned how to keep step or how to sleep in a tent. They tell you that they learned how to idealize America and live a higher ideal of it. In the homes of this country everywhere this emotional demand for preparedness is being transmuted into a demand for a higher form of justice in our social and economic relations.

You young men and young women are going out into life. Some of you, perhaps, will teach other young men and young women. The clay will be brought to you as to a potter's wheel, and when

you have finished with it a vessel will have been constructed, beautiful if you are an artist, having the capacity for happiness and usefulness if your touch gives that capacity. Others of you will be engaged in professional and industrial pursuits. But all of you will be something more than cogs in wheels. Each of you will be a citizen, with a citizen's weight in the making and expression of public opinion. Each of you will be a part of America. When our nation comes to be weighed in the balance (and if the time should ever come, which God forbid, when America is really to be brought to the test as our sister nations in Europe have been brought), whether we triumph or whether we fail, whether we persist with this glorious experiment or whether we are overcome by the weaknesses of our own creation will depend upon the vigor of the intellect and character of the aggregate of our people. Each of us, however insignificant our station, however obscure our general relations, however small we may think ourselves as bricks to build a nation of, will yet contribute our strength or weakness to America.

And so this afternoon, as you are presented for degrees, as you have reached the time when flowers are presented to you, as you are about to go out now and become a part of the life of this great community, I want to congratulate our country that you will come into this citizenship as young men and young women who have already triumphed over a very great obstacle, who have shown the courage to attack life when you did not have quite an even start with other people young men and young women who have done the thing under harder conditions than most boys and girls have had to do it-and therefore by the very necessity of the case bringing a firmer grip on life, and a more serious purpose than the casual youth brings who has been through collegiate experience. And I want to congratulate you that having thus completed your collegiate experience, you start out with flowers in your hands, and the realization that the habit of cheerfulness and persistence in that indomitable courage which has already enabled each of you to do so much will enable you to make of life itself a garden in which you may continue to gather flowers of happiness to yourselves and usefulness to your fellow men and your country. [Applause.]