Commencement Oration.

BY HON. CUSHMAN K. DAVIS.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

In 1857 a class of thirty-five young men was graduated from this University into the great school of life, and one of that class stands here to tell a few things that the years have taught him.

There was then little indication that the future would be perturbed by any extraordinary agitations. It promised to be an era of repose. Political controversies there were, but that they bore in their depths the tempests of revolution and battle no one imagined.

A generation in time has since passed, and how the world has changed. Italy, "the Niobe of nations," has found her lost nationality, and has ceased to mourn. Spain has been a republic. The harlequin emperor of the French vanished at Sedan, and a republic grew upon the ruins of his empire. The map of Germany has been remade. A portentous revolution has been at work in Russian society; a vast ferment which aliens cannot understand, and which seems like one of those mysterious agitations of other times, which impelled whole nations to slowly traverse many degrees of longitude, and to bring low the most stable political institutions. We then thought our own country to be an edifice nearly completed, but we now know that we were admiring only its foundations. Time has builded it beyond any conception then entertained. Slavery, the most powerful and crushing social and political conception since feudalism, vanished like Armida's palace, with all its grandeurs, sins and seductions. The greatest war ever waged by civilized man broke upon us almost without warning, spent its force and passed away, leaving our dear country

stronger, better, wiser than before. The iron trail of civilization has effaced the trail of the savage across the continent. Inventions, bounteous and miraculous, have extended commerce, sweetened life, planted exotic luxuries. in desert places; and, working politically by the instantaneous change of thought, in the joint debate of telegraphy, by conferences made possible by a few hours of travel from remotest places, have done away forever with that sectional element which was formerly so narrow, selfish and parochial as to threaten our very existence.

All this has come to pass in less than thirty years. The members of that class in all this played their parts. Many of them survive. Some of them have passed away, and among these are they who lie in the impregnable ranks of death on Southern ground, whom no martial music wakes again, or the tread of hostile armies in the least disturbs or even makes to dream.

But this you will say is commonplace, and why is it recited? I do it because, in history, every moment is critical and revolutionary, and the injunctions of social and political duty are upon us continuously. We live by education too much in the past. We bow before a shrine from which the god has departed. We look back and say, those were the times of endeavor; those were the times when fame bestowed her coronets; it was then that great purposes were fruitful to the men who entertained them. Of the present, we mourn that it is barren, and that our lives are cast in moveless years. Standing upon a mountain top of our own, everything seems desolate. We look afar to the peaks which former generations have scaled, and they seem, standing luminous and glorious in the distance, nearer the heavens than we. All their arid commonplaces are invisible, and we forget that we also stand upon a pinnacle, towards which the men of times to come will turn repiningly, even as we do now.

We must not fail to grasp firmly the fact that every period in history, every moment of time is revolutionary.

It is not merely progressive. The revolution may be progressive, or it may retrograde. There is no optimism so delusive as that which views humanity going with predestinate march up an inclined plane. History is full of annihilated nationalities, whose art has become burlesque, whose literature has sunk to puerilities, whose massive edifices of learning, built apparently for eternity, have changed to mists, and rolled away like vanished clouds. There are long tracts of historical desolation-long arctic nights in time-where the explorer finds some ancient institution, like a ship in polar seas, fixed fast in a frozen ocean, filled with its dead. And the problem of our time, as it has been of all time past, is to master the forces which dismember states and institutions. True religions take care of themselves. There is something of divine immortality in them. But the social creation is not thus. Man creates it; he must take care to preserve it, and herein lies the true value of education. Auguste Comte spoke the wisest of words when he said that, "all knowledge has prevision for its object." Education, like capital, is valuable for the interest it bears-for the dividends it declares. When it ceases to do this it becomes frightfully bankrupt. Great men are simply the trustees of a fund for investment and accumulation, to be applied daily as the profits are realized. The parable of the talents has a profound social and political significance. It means duty to be performed with profit.

It seems ungracious to say that one must unlearn-or rather cease to have much confidence in-much that he has acquired in the process called education, before he can become of real use in the great concerns of life. Of course knowledge is power-we all know that—but mere knowledge is not power, it is simply possibility. Action is power, and its highest manifestation is action with knowledge. But these are not convertible terms.

The modern processes of education are doubtless excellent, and are improving. They are faulty in the as

sumption that the world is ruled mainly by talk, in the face of the fact that the American Congress has become a great national palaver, in the midst of which not one-tenth of the necessary business is done. One of the most alarm ing signs of the times is the oratorical contests fostered by many colleges.

Any one who has been a student, and who has, for thirty years, looked closely into that wonderful thing called life, and has felt its stern reversals of hope, cannot suppress the wish that the schools would deal more with the visibly impending situations which lower on the edge of every horizon of time-with the ta mellonta concerning which some Greek author speculated. This wish may not be a wise one. Possibly its realization would introduce too much contention into that calm region of youth, whose days, as we look back upon them from middle life, are such golden days. Never were there such skies, such risings and settings of the sun, such nights when as the abysses of the heavens opened, "unbruised youth" went dreaming through infinite space, of love, of immortality, of deeds to be done, of a life which alas! comes to no man, and yet of which each generation dreams the fond old dream again. But I do persist in this wish, because it seems to me of the highest importance that the young men of this country be made more immediately influential in those great issues, which each moment press upon all society.

Much time is lost, in our early years, in freeing ourselves from the persistent delusion, that we have but to draw from what we have learned in our school days, and from books, the solutions of the questions with which we must deal. Nothing can be more erroneous. There was never yet a political or social precedent which exactly fitted and controlled a present question. You may draw, from all the depths of learning, examples which, in print, seem duplicates of an impending situation, and, in proportion as you attempt to shape the pres

ent to it, you will fail miserably. A difference in faith or dogma, the influence of luxury, the freedom of conscience and discussion, the speed with which thought is transmitted and space is traversed, thus bringing to bear instantly the judgment of millions upon the point of action, instead of working slowly outward from great cities as in the ancient times, which now in a day sometimes interposes a veto of more than tribunitian power, all these disvalue the rigid precedents which we have learned by rote. Statesmanship has ceased to be autocratic, and all reform now consists in combinations, by many men, of examples with new elements, which are constantly evolved from the analysis to which all human institutions are daily subjected. It is the condition of development, in our day, that all this should be so, and this explains why foundations, intended to be unalterable, do, from the moment they are laid, begin to contract or to expand as needed. Take a most striking example, the Constitution of the United States. It is juristic orthodoxy to declare that it was perfect in its origin, and that it has not changed, except by formal amendment. But the fact is otherwise. It was very imperfect; slavery was recognized in it, but was swept away by a repealing method not prescribed by that instrument, and the repeal was made valid by the fiction of acquiescence after the fact. The powers of the states were left so undefined, in the anxiety to secure the adoption of that Constitution, that, among its framers, immediately arose two schools of construction, whose disputes were only ended by the conclusion of war. In this respect judicial construction, sometimes interpolating by decision, and at other times by permitting legislative enactments to evade its prohibitions, under the overpowering repealing or amending forces of national necessity, has so changed that great charter, in many of its features, as to make them unrecognizable by the men who framed it, and it would be denounced by many of them. What would Jefferson say to the national banking system, to the grants of