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McCormack, Thomas

Joseph

"Beyond good and evil"

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McCorioack, Thomas Joseph, 1865-1932,

"Beyond good anci evil"; address by T. J. i4sUoriaack at the High school conference » Friday morning, Nov. 23, 1923. 13 p« 23 cm.

"Address before the English section of the State high school conference. University of Illinois, Chair5)aign, 111,"

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V

"Beyond Good and EviF'

ADDRESS BY

T. J. McCORMACK

AT THE HIGH SCHOOL CONFERENCE FRIDAY MORNING, NOV. 23, 1923

^'Beyond Good and Evil

*'Cotrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vacatur/'

— ^Tacitus, Germania, 19.

While I was in New York last summer, my mother took me to a matinee performance of Mr. Ziegfeld's Follies. One of the many scenes of that acknowledged triumph of the American stage was a burlesque of the Black Crock — a ballet extravaganza of the late sixties

to which my mother told me she had gone with my father in 1870, but which to the simple minds of that remote epoch was so daring that during the whole performance she kept her eyes averted from the stage. Mr. Ziegfeld's purpose appeared to be to exhibit the vast aesthetic gap which sq>arated the ethical mentaUty of 1870 from that of 19^* I'h^ participants in the Black Crook wore the semblance of cloAes ; in the presentation of Mr. Ziegf eld the covering was talcum powder. The audience was composed largely of women and children, who enjoyed hugely this effective caricature of primitive American standards of dramatic sartorial art. Mr. Ziegfeld had succeeded. The aesthetic gap yawned; but the ethical fissure also gasped for breath.

Mr. Belasco was in the audience, and as a dignitary to whom a^

most divine honors are paid by contemporary taste, (both Homer and Virgil agree that divinity cannot escape recognition), was soon dis- covered and constrained to make a speech. He concluded his eulogy of the performance with the remark that all the world now came to New York for ideas and that the sons of Pan from every capital of Europe with one accord now bowed low their heads in reverent hom- age to the mteUect of Mr. Zi^eld. Unwittingly I felt on holy ground, and the impulse to take off at least one's shoes in partial imi- tation of the performers came over one irresistibly.

But the incongruousness of the words "ideas*' and "intellect" with the ultra-sensual setting of the play jarred and gravelled me; and that night, haunted by the dissonance and thanking Mr. Belasco for his unguarded gesture, I went for solace to the master — to the msm who had devoted his incomparable genius and life to convincing the world

Address before the English section of the State High School Conference, University ^ lUbMK riHWBgilgn, nL. MP. 23, IMS.

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that there was a clift'erencc between the things of sense and the things of reason — and I read again parts of The Republic of Plato. At once the light streamed. The passage is as follows :*

"Not long ago the Hellenes were of the opinion, which is still generally received among the barbarians, that the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and improper ; and when first the Cretans and then the Lacedaemonians introduced the cus- tom, the wits of that day might equally have ridiculed the innovation — but when experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far better than to cover them up, and the ludicrous effect to the outward eye vanished before the bet- ter principle which reason asserted, then the man was per- ceived to be a fool who directs the shafts of his ridicule at any other sight but that of folly and vice, or seriously in- clines to weigh the beautiful by any other standard but that of the good*^

I have cited this passage from The Republic not in approval of pagan practices nor in justification of Mr. Ziegfeld's aestheticism (which presents perplexing problems of its own), but as an illustra- tion of what is the central and significant factor of all judgments of life. That man is a "fool who directs the sluifts of his ridicule at any other sight but that of folly and vice, or seriously inclines to weigh tiie beautiful by any other standard but that of the good". We are here at the core of the matter. The supreme judgment of life is the ethical judgment, and that judgment overtops ineffably every other expression of existence, whether of the aesthetic sense or the intellect, whether of the will or the controlled desire. But mark the rare re- straint and balance of the dictum. Stress no aspect to the breakii^ Doint. Select the critical, the dominant feature. Ethics is a question not of accidents, but of essentials. It is not a question of clothes or of eating and drinking. Life is complex, not simple; it is qualitative as well as quantitative ; it is not all volume and area ; it is also texture and intensity; no part or aspect of it should be permitted to shroud the rest; proportion, measure, concord, are the things needful. But fundamental to all ethical judgment (and throu|;hout the entire con- text we hear its clarion note ring) is the requirement of mtellectual charity, which says: "Understand and you may forgive".

Plato would have forgiven Mr. Zi^feld b^use he would have understood. No goat-footed satyr could tmhin^ his even-balanced soul. ^ He would BXgae, but he would never rail. He preferred to explain. This is the attitude of culture, or, if you will, of science, which seeks origins and perspectives, which is detached, which is im- personal, which looks at everything from every angle, which vaults from stage to gallery and from gallery to stage, which looks from within and from without, before and after* It is the human view,

*Plato Th0 RepubKe, Jowett Translation.

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the view of sympathy, the view which Shakespeare takes when his fancy plays over the glassy essence of man, and which every artist takes when he cwiverts the inward reason into the outward form. This is the first criterion— intellectual charity. It belongs to the

spectator, •

But miderstanding and forgiving are only the beginning — only the intellectual and emotional adjustment that precedes construction. Life must not be allowed first to rot, even to the accompaniment of

melody and rhetoric, simply for the delight of subjecting it to intel- lectual scrutiny, and then of delivering it over to the all-high pardoner for absolution. Human life is a construction, itself a piece of art, of ethical art, and not a piece of jetsam tossing aimlessly about on the surging ocean of sense. And this means that it has ends, purposes, goals. We may differ as to what these purposes are; but we must admit that they exist; the most arrant decadent, the rankest impurist adopts goals. Man is a purpose-forming animal, a creature that sets up ends. This is another of his distinguishing characteristics : by their ends ye shall know them. And this trait is only another aspect of his rationality. Human life is a creation — a creation of reason; without plan, it ims no n^aning.

What this purpose was, Plato was never in doubt. It was the good, as distinguished from the evil life. The precise definition of good is secondary — the big thing is to admit that it is the end of life; here the head-hunter of Borneo and our beloved but benighted Mr. Bryan are at one. What the plan for securing the end was, Plato also never doubtexi ; it was ethical education. All education, as aiming to incorporate in the individual the essential values of life, must have the ethical tinge. Fair thinking is the beginning of fair conduct; fair feeling, of fair words ; and conduct and words are the only recogniz- able symbols of the soul. Let us give heed therefore to our thinking and feeling. We educators actually create souls, or at least watch the process of their creation ; and hence have some control over the ingredients that enter their composition.

Some such considerations as these doubtle:^.- led Plato to the drastic step which has been the despair of his admirers. It is possible that his tremendous vision, which caught glimpses of the laboratory of Satan as well as that of the Lord, saw Mr. Ziegfeld already in the making, and that being unable to crack the mould into which the moulten liquid was poured, he sought at least to destroy the stage on which the great apostle of incandescence was to operate. In other words, Plato, himself a poet, banished poets, and especially dramatic poets, from his ideal state. He banished himself, as it were ; surely this was abnegation. But note again the magnificent restraint, and the saving beauty of his interdict. He banished the poets not because the actors in the plays wore clothes or wore no clothes, not because they glorified Bacchus or exalted Venus, but because they represented

"folly and vice", because they represented untruth, because they un- duly exalted the things of sense, because they mistook a seeming beauty for the real beauty, because they travestied and did not create reality.

Plato evidently was living at the beginning of a period of decad- ence, and we must interpret his anomalous Puritanic attitude as that of provisional revolt against the increasing sensualization of his age, The Puritan has existed at all periods of history. He is merely the exaggerated vehicle of protest against the camaUzation of life. Like the decadent and the individualist, he is a pendulum that has got caught at one end of its oscillation and has never returned. But Plato's thought was clear, and its logical development easily enables us by his own criteria to save the very forms of art that he rejected. But before^ we save them, let us be sincere and admit the main contention. Down in our hearts we know the truth. We do becmne what we read ; we are transformed into that which we hear and see. The images of the eye and the ear enfold dynamic elements ; there is a compulsion to action, to imitation in every artistic stimulation of sense. This is a cofnmonplace of ethical history. Cicero and vSeneca dwelt on it; while the early Christian Fathers developed it in all its late Pagan horrors. There is a rumor in New York that even the stage-hands are corrupted by the new drama. Should this be true, we may lode forward to another, Platonic amendment to the Constitution.

But w^e are straying from the essence of the doctrine. Plato's goal was the life of truth, and truth is a human creation growing out of ethical needs. Reality is what ought to be, not what is. The en- emy is sense — sense imtransfigured by reason. The life of sense is the life of the animal, with all its immediacy; incoherent, unorganized, chaotic, with no before or after. The life of man is the life of order, the Hfe of control, the life of purpose, the life of the idea and the ideal, born of the past and avid of the future. All other life is un- human. Where the idea is lacking, there art, and science, and phil- osophy are lacking, and existence sinks to the animal level. The char- acteristic of man is thought. The machinery of thought is the id«i, the universal. The vestment of thought is language. Philosophy, art, science, literature, all are simply species of one great genus — expres- sion. And expression is the daughter of reason, not of sense. *'Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter". Let Phidias carve and Sappho sing; but fairer than the fairest form ever carved, fairer than the most exquisite musical note ever uttered is the rapturous vision of Beauty herself, clear and unalloyed, absolute, simple and everlasting. Approximation to this ideal in conduct and expression, and not the ravishment of the senses, is the really human life, the only hfe worth living.

With Plato the idea is not simply a desiccated abstraction; the

ideal is more than an unattainable limit. Both grew out of life and

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are the incarnation of ethical experience. The goal is always the good life. All the warp of human existence is shot thiot^ w/k the eti^cal

woof ; it is impossible to disentangle them. Wfai^ might to be always

transcends what is. It is the standard and touchstone by which we test our loyalty to our higher selves. In every human life, however low, the ideal is triumphant, some great desire transfigures the inward c^stOice. We never attain the vision, the dream which we set, but the dream is always cherished as the ultimate reality. "What", says Tasao in Leopardi's Dialogue,* "a dream in exchange for truth!" "Yes", replied the spirit, "between knowing the truth and the dream there is only this difference, that the dream is always and many times sweeter and more beautiful than the truth can ever be. Indeed I know a case of one who, when his lady has appeared to him in a kindly dream, the whole next day he avoids meeting her and seeing her, be- cause he knows that the real lady cannot compare with the dream image, and that reality, dispelling the illusion from his mind, would deprive him of the extraordinary delight the dream gave". This ex- plains perhaps why so many of us hesitate to make the great decision ; why the glorious freedom of fancy is preferable to the slavery of reality. Dante, some heartless skeptic has claimed, never saw Beatrice, nor Petrarch, Laura ; and the glories of much of Italian literature have been attributed to this great disjunction. The fact is that the great and the most beautiful part of life is vicarious. We Kve largely by proxy, take our sunshine from others, and suffer, not one, but a tihou- sand luminaries to irradiate us. We are moons, not stars. This is the great economy of literature, art and science. In no other way can we compass life and the universe. They abbreviate infinity for us, and give us immcMtality in the passing moment.

The world is intelligible, can be understood; and literature, like science, is one of the forms, one of the devices by which life and expe- rience are brought to understanding. There is a logic in life, a ra- tional thread in all experience, categories even in love and sensibility. We feel it, recognize it, magnificently and joyously, when Shakespeare poises and strikes, when Wordsworth rolls to light scwne recondite emotion, or Keats unwraps some flashing thought at the end of a fault-, less sonnet. The thing that haunted us for years, that b^^ed for utterance for generations, appears, intelligible and glorious. It is dis- covery, revelation. It is exactly what Kepler did when he unriddled the complexity of the heavens, or Galileo when he untangled the skein.-, of earthly motion, or Darwin when he imprisoned in a word the pro- cess of unfolding life. We see it when the forms of Rodin sprii^ from the shapeless marble. It is the epiphany of the idea — ^the same in every field of human thought and expression.

But note that both the origin and the end in a sense is always ethical, either good or bad — ^not through intention or preconception,

*Quot. from G. G«ntik "theory of Mind as Pure Arf* (Eng. Tiant.. MacmillMi, im — page xtty.

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but through compulsion, through the sheer necessity of social logic. Every work of art presupposes an audience, and wherever there is an audience, wherever there is a man, there is an ethical reaction. When- ever we communicate, whether we speak through a painting, a sonnet, or an algebraic equation, we teU something beautiful, something ethical in varying or vanishing degree. The Venus de Milo is at one end and the tensors of Einstein at the other. Between them is the spirit of man, a unit, harmonious, indiscerptible.

It is not a question of a lesson, a thesis ; it is a question of an idea, of a rational, a human construction. Art, call it what you will — an intuition, a description, the formulation of a possible experience, the construction of a type, a symbol — always is the discovery of a univer- sal, told to a listening world. Shelley heard it in the song of the lark, and Leonardo da Vinci, brush in hand, waited for it for days in the Convent of the Graces.* We cannot circumvent, cannot debase the eternal human. All expression concludes, all art, all literature infers, develops an idea — not to preconceived conclusions, but to its own natural conclusion. The emotions, the sentiments, even disease, have their sequence; and the developments of art never violate its law. Putrefaction itself has its process, which the true artist always re- spects. This is the second criterion : consistency, harmony, or the nat- ural logic of the natural process. It belongs to the object, to the sub- ject-matter. "Main Street" fails to meet it ; "Madame Bovary" does. Zola is often superior to Booth Tarkington, not because he is always rotten, but because he is sometimes right. It is this that makes "Hamlet" superior to "War and Peace". And this is why Dante placed Plato in the First Circle of Limbo. Dante was unacquainted witii Air. Zi^feld.

I am conscious that to those wlio would arrest the process of time, and petrify the fleeting forms of sense, this view affords little solace. "To seek to persuade a man that misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but is another misfor- tune", said the Spanish poet?* But truth is inexorable, and pain is the inevitable price of the revision of ideas.

Furthermore, if you will consult the great and most recent au- thority on aesthetics, Benedetto Croce,** a delightful author, you will find that I am in error. The theory I have been expounding is intel- lectualism, and intellectualism today is discredited. Intellectualtsm gives only light, the cold light of the physicist, but we of today want warmth — the warmth tliat spring> from envi. -aging and embracing concrete beauties, from feeling concrete truths, from doing concrete acts. Not discernment, but glow, is the criterion.

•"The artist paints with his brains and not with his hands", said Michael Aogelo. *Calderon, quoted by De Unamano, "The Tragic Sense of Life" (MacmiUan, 1921). ♦•Benedetto Croce--"Aesthetic as Science of Expression, etc." (E^. trans., Bfac- millan).

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But human glow also has its logic and involves interpretation. Andy again, no theory, no view exhausts reality. Each presets its own ragged facet of the truth.

"Life like a dome of many-colored glass Stains the white radiance of eternity".

And so the absolute truth that represents life in its int^^ty must be broken up, diffracted by the prism which is man. Let us therefore look at the other facets, the other diffractions today so popular.

One group of them is as old as the beast in man, as old as ani- mality. It has its poetry, its prose, its music and its art The facts behind its interpretations, if tlut noble word can stand the strain, reek

with antiquity ; only lack of knowledge sees in them novelty, discovers in them new sensibilities, welcomes in them new emergents. They lurked in the thickets of the Ganges long before Buddha's time, peeped from the Congo Bush when \^asco da Gama turned the Cape, and v^ere the commonplaces of the Mediterranean shores when x\ristotle was tutoring Alexander the Great. Halsted Street and the Bowery know them. Only ignorant decadence can give them a modem habita- tion and a name. They are worthy only of a word. Let us simply mention them and pass them by.

But there is another facet of the truth of life that has had a dif- ferent, a truly human origin and has sprung from the most precious

sources of our humanity.

Urbamfatem habeo, et facto quod volo, "I am a gentleman juid do what I list'', said St. Augustine in his salad days. ''Papa supra ffram- maticam", said the witty pope who forgot his genders: "No rules of

grammar for the Bishop of Rome'' ! The motto of Rabelais was : ''Fais ce que voukh-as'\ *'Do as thou wilt'". Society was made for man, not man for society. Everywhere for thousands of years we hear the piteous hungering cry of individualism, the cry of the soul's revolt, the demand for tiie freedom and release of the spirit from the shackles of convention and the tryanny of dead standards, for the recognition of self-hood. It appears in politics, in philosophy, in literature. It takes a hundred forms, contradictory, paradoxical, running into one another and representing the most opposite extremes. It is the age- long history of Romanticism, of immoralism, of sentimentalism, of in- dividualism, of the philosophy of despair. It meant the Renaissance and the Reformation ; it also meant the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition. Each claims to have saved the individual.

Let us admit provisionally that all these yearnings contain ele- ments of truth. Let us listen charitably to the egptist and the decad- ent ; they may be warning-s^ptis that we have over-socialized the world and that society is the new tjrrant. Let us heed the sjnmbolist and the instrumentist ; like the chicken picking in a heap of gravel they may have swallowed a pearl. But above all, let us give heed to that new

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and powerful voice calling in the wilderness which says that science is a will o' the wisp and that in our foolish search for the Holy Grail of absolute truth, humanity has lost its soul. Here is the new batde- ground and the battle will take many forms. Most of the disputants know neither side. But there is truth and beauty even in what is sup- posed to be obscurantism. You have admired, and ihe fashion of the generation just passed caused us all to admire, the Russian revolt of the spirit— in its nihilism, its anarchic disconnectedness, its primitive- ness, its lack of anchorage in the past, its unhistorcal character. But there is another revolt that walks backwards to the future with its eyes on the past. It is a new and more powerful form of R<Mnanticism. Its sweetest cry comes from "the only country of Europe that has not yet lost its soul"— from Spain— and its most eloquent exponent has made a real contribution to the formula of life. Let me quote from the beautiful book of Miguel de Unamuno, just now given to the Eng- lish speaking public, "The Tragic Sttise of Life".*

"The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be found the explanation of what is usually said about us — ^namely, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Ktiltur — , or in other words, that we refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to morality or ethics."

"Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills ; but I know too that everyone who %hts for any ideal whatever, although his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. The march, as ever, is toward the future, and he who marches is getting there, even though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the bet- ter way! ....

"I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I be- lieve that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has per- force passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and

•"The Tngk Sense of Life" (Macmillan, London, 1921, Eng. trans.)

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the Revolution— learning from them, yes, but without allow- ing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring of the Middle Ages".

"But the truth is that my work— I was going to say my mission— is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and every- where, faith in affirmation, faith in nation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the ^e of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the Hfe of inquietude and passionate desire."

"Will this work be efficacious? Did Don Quixote be- lieve in the immediate efficacy of his work? It is very doubt- ful. What did it matter to him so long as thus he lived and immortahzed himself? And he must have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his work would have another and a higher efficacy, and that it would ferment in the minds of sUl those who in a pious spirit read of his exploits".

"And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I an- swer, he has left himself ; and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all the theories and philosophies. Other people have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any Critique of Pure Reason.**

"And for what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for Mar-

gierite, who is the people; not for Helen, who is Kultur. e fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives". And Unamuno adds : "Do you not hear the laughter of God?".

*

These are mighty passages. Read the work itself. Drop for a few hours Sherwood Anderson, Joseph Hergesheimer, Theodou^ Dreiser and the aimless maunderings of the new animalists, and bathe your superheated skins and scattered brains in the fresh watei^ of a pure soul, who also believes in the individual, in the "man o! flesh and bone; in the man who is bom, suffers and dies— above all, who dies". It will enlarge your horizon, mellow your intellect, anil above all, give you that intellectual charity without which the life of man and the life especially of the teacher is in vain.

But have a care. This man is opposed to your sensual civiliza- tion, your love of applied science, the material comforts which you

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worship. "Let others invent", he cries out; "we are content to have crated a soul". It is a new Romanticism without the pedantry of the old, of which everywhere there are signs and which is secicing to find a rational basis for the stirrings of the spirit that now find

expression only in the pathological orgies of unreason over all the face of the globe. Gilbert K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are its most popular representatives today. Something is lacking in contemporary thought that explains these men — ^something that the current attitudes in science and philosophy have not satisfied. There is a new battle on. The spirit of true science and the spirit of true philosophy have not percolated to the people. The people today are led by false prophets. Science works apart in its laboratories, and philosophy lives with its pet owls and bats in its ivory towers. Neither has fecundated the life of the people. Never in the history of the modern world has science been so lavish in the production of its marvels, yet never has the spirit of its quest been so rare or so meagrely present in the workings of the popular mind. We seem to be confronted, even in the case of so-called educated people and certified university grad- uates, with a phenomenon of arrested mentality and lack of true in- tellectual interest unparalleled in enlightened history. In education, technical thought has failed, and the enemy for years has loudly pro- claimed the bankruptcy of science and sought for the salvation of the individual in unreason, in animalism and in decadence.

The hope lies in a new literature and in the teachers of the old. Thought is forged in the workshop of the thinker. The ideas that con- trol progress are shaped in the brain of the scientist, the metaphysician, the sociologist, the saint. Literature translates them, literature ener- gizes them : through literature they filter to the people, and enter their intellectual fibre. Dante is the philosophy of the Middle Ages. Vol- taire popularized Newton. The German writers of the Eighteenth Century translated Euler to his people. The men of letters of the same day carried to the nations the theories of the natural philosophers, and of the social and political thinkers, and produced the Enlighten- ment and the Revolution. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Turgot, Condorcet and the rest were all inspirers of literary expression. Lessing and Winckelmann interpreted the thought of Leibnitz and Wolf ; Goetiie and Schiller translated Kant and Fichte ; Hegel created Prussia. Nor should we forget the great names of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who translated themselves, who are models of direct and unmediated m- fluence, and who fecundated for good or evil the feeling and conduct of a world. Nor Taine who produced a whole generation of novelists. Nor modem psychol(^, which from Fechner to Freud has colored the thought of an army of writers. Trace the analysis step by step of the dissolution of personality, as studied in the hospitals of Paris, Vienna and Berlin, and you have the clue to the early pathological drama and the pathological novel. Behind every literary work, con- scious or unconscious, there is a theory, a contemporary system of

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thought, vaguely struggling for utterance — a theology, a philosophy, a science, an etliical or social demand. Literature is always in the best and noblest soise of the word a popularization of sdieaoe.

But the process today is slow, lamentably slow. How can we accelerate it? The imps of darkness are upon us; the brood of Cali- ban is loosed; the wand of Prospero is sunken.

The hope lies with you and with those who labor for you. First set your own house in order. You cannot teach unless you know, know enthusiastically. Saturate yourself with the best that has been thought in the world. Go to the thinkers, to the fountain-heads for your food, not to the epigoni. Do not hanker after the Baals of animalism. Stop doing sums in arithmetic Eschew bureaus of edu- cational research ; let ti^e moles tunnel their own burrows ; but do you seek the light. Beg someone to compile for you an anthology of ideas, some series of classics of the soul's quest. The works of the thinkers are filled with the richest literature — literature to which the heart of the young will jtunp with Dionysiac joy«

Above all hold high your allegiance to the past. The past is the major part of us, and the font of the future. We are the accumu- lations of our ancestors, reservoirs of the thoughts and acts of our forefathers. We are highly charged storage-batteries, where memory is the potential energy. Education is the charging of these batteries ; and expression, conduct, is the kinetic release. The study of the past is the study of the richer part of ourselves; it gives us the concepts of growth, of origins ; it gives us perspective, outlook, charity ; it gives us standards; it is the condition of all judgment, taste and tact, and the foundation of all spiritual loyalty. "So act", says the Chinese maxina, "that your ancestors shall be proud of you". Here lies the esoteric source of all political, social and intellectual authority. Here lies the well-spruig also of all ideals. So far as educati<m is concerned, we are ninety-nine percent past and only one percent present; ninety- nine percent Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, and only one percent Literary Digest. Shall we sell our magnificent birthright for a mess of red pottage?

Remember, finally, that the language of which ytm are the chosen guardians is the memory of the race, and that buried in it is the whole spiritual capital of humanity. It is a sacred guardianship; it means the earthly immortality of our youth.

And so, in the words of my new-found Spanish friend, I conclude : "May God deny you peace, but grant you glory !"