month overworked, broken-down men who need rest but cannot enjoy it, because although disease has made a vacuity of pursuit, there is nothing to fill the abhorred vacuum. They neither ride, nor shoot, nor fish, nor read in a true sense. They are like a slave who has found a great jewel. They have got the longed-for diamond of leisure, and know not how to wear it, and cannot sell it. They are forbidden to work, and no man ever taught them play of body or mind. They have won the battle of life as they intended to fight it, and the victory is like those of Pyrrhus. That inexorable creditor, Nature, is at their door and cries, "Pay me that thou owest." And they have not wherewithal to pay.

So much for college education from the hard, practical, material point of view. Even a Gradgrind must be satisfied with the picture. But if we pass from what strictly pertains to success in lffe to higher influences, we enter a region in which we cannot expect Gradgrind to follow us. Love of study for its own sake, shared by the sympathy of others, fostered by congenial surroundings and the interchange of thought, incited by emulation, humanizes our coarser nature, broadens our range of thought, opens to us wider views of life. By it, too, are created friendships which are not of to-day or to-morrow, nor yet of this world. Leaders of modern critical thought have branded Macaulay as a Philistine, yet surely it was no Philistine who, speaking of "the feeling which a man of liberal education naturally entertains towards the great minds of former ages," said, in words which even you can bear to hear repeated, "The debt which he owes to them is incalculable. They have guided him to truth. They have filled his mind with noble and graceful images. They have stood by him in all vicissitudes—comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude. These friendships are exposed to no danger from the occurrences by which other attachments are weakened or dissolved. Time glides by; fortune is inconstant; tempers are soured; bonds which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered by interest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause can affect the silent concourse which we hold with the highest of human intellects. That placid intercourse is disturbed by no jealousies or resentments. These are the old friends who are never seen with new faces; who are the same in wealth and poverty, in glory and in obscurity. With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change."

It may well be that much of this is little felt in the heyday of life and while one is pressing on in the race to the front; but life is not all made up of health, of strife, of victory, and at every interval of enforced inaction, and still more when the lengthening shadows of age stretch along our path, then these friends come to us, as it were from a far country, and bring us that peace which the world cannot give.

The Promotion of Friendly Intercourse among Scholars was, your records tell us, the object for which your Society was founded. But we are also told, more by tradition than by record, that the young men of William and Mary College, scarce more than two score in number, who early in the year 1776 formed this Society, deemed that beyond this end their mission was to bring together into some sort of Union those colonies which were just then about to burst into independence. How far or long they worked together cannot be known, for most of them were at once hurried into active life, and their college dreams were to be turned into realities through such trials and with such ultimate success as none of them could then have possibly foreseen. In those trials and that success some of them grandly bore their share, and their names are part of the history of our country. It has so happened—and it could not have been otherwise— that your Society has never as a body gone beyond the object of its creation. But its several Chapters, now nineteen in number and connected with as many colleges, have, from first to last and for more than a century, sent forth men of whom their country is not less proud for their other claims to distinction than are you for their scholarship. And even as no power of speech can add to the wealth of thought suggested by the names inscribed on the walls of this Memorial Hall, of those of Harvard University who so loved their country that they gave up their lives at her call, so no feeble words from a stranger in your ranks can add to the memories invoked by the names of those who appear upon your rolls. And as to you, as with recurring years you come together at your former home, whatever may have been to you the changes and chances of this mortal life, they are all forgotten in the memories and associations of those other days, and you find that the friendly intercourse among scholars which began here in your early manhood then begot habits of thought and feeling which have since, even in a generation prone to ignore the past in its worship of the present, grown with your growth and strengthened with your strength.