war, the path of emancipation, and the constitutional equality of all citizens, his country followed fast to union, peace, and prosperity. The public service of this scholar was not less than that of any of his predecessors or any of his contemporaries. Criticize him as you will, mark every shadow you can find, "Though round his base the rolling clouds are spread, It would indeed be a sorrowful confession for this day and this assembly, to own that experience proves the air of the college to be suffocating to generous thought and heroic action. Here it would be especially unjust, for what son of this college does not proudly remember that when, in the Revolution, Rhode Island was the seat of war, the college boys left the recitation room for the field, and the college became a soldiers' barrack and hospital? And what son of any college in the land, what educated American, does not recall with grateful pride that legion of college youth in our own day—“Integer vitæ scelerisque purus”—who were not cowards or sybarites because they were scholars, but whose consecration to the cause of country and man vindicated the words of John Milton, "A complete and generous education is that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war"? That is the praise of the American scholar. The glory of this day and of this commencement season is that the pioneers, the courageous and independent leaders in public affairs, the great apostles of religious and civil liberty, have been, in large part, educated men, sustained by the sympathy of the educated. class. But this is not true of the past alone. As educated America was the constructive power, so it is still the true conservative force of the Republic. It is decried as priggish and theoretical. But so Richard Henry Lee condemned the Constitution as the work of visionaries. They are always called visionaries who hold that morality is stronger than a majority. Goldwin Smith says that Cobden felt that at heart England was a gentleman and not a bully. So thinks the educated American of his own country. He has faith enough in the people to appeal to them against themselves, for he knows that the cardinal condition of popular government is the ability of the people to see and correct their own errors. In a Republic, as the majority must control action, the majority tends constantly to usurp control of opinion. Its decree is accepted as the standard of right and wrong. To differ is grotesque and eccentric. To protest is preposterous. To defy is incendiary and revolutionary. But just here interposes educated intelligence, and asserts the worth of self-reliance and the power of the individual. Gathering the wisdom of ages as into a sheaf of sunbeams, it shows that progress springs from the minority, and that if it will but stand fast, time will give it victory. It is the educated voice of the country which teaches patience in politics and strengthens the conscience of the individual citizen by showing that servility to a majority is as degrading as servility to a Sultan or a Grand Lama. Emerson said that of all his friends he honored none more than a quiet old Quaker lady who, if she said yea and the whole world said nay, still said yea. One of the pleasantest stories of Garfield is that of his speech to his constituents in which he quaintly vindicated his own independence. "I would do anything to win your regard," he said, "but there is one man whose good opinion I must have above all, and without whose approval I can do nothing. That is the man with whom I get up every morning and go to bed every night, whose thoughts are my thoughts, whose prayers are my prayers; I cannot buy your confidence at the cost of his respect." Never was the scholarly Garfield so truly a man, so patriotically an American, and his constituents were prouder than ever of their representative who complimented them by asserting his own manhood. It is the same voice which exposes the sophists who mislead the mob and pitilessly scourges the demagogues who flatter it. "All men know more than any man," haughtily shout the larger and lesser Talleyrands. That is a French epigram, replies the scholar, but not a general truth. A crowd is not wiser than the wisest man in it. For the purposes of the voyage the crew does not know more than the master of the ship. The Boston town meeting was not more sagacious than Sam Adams. "Vox populi vox Dei," screams the foaming rhetoric of the stump; the voice of the people is the voice of God. The voice of the people in London, says history, declared against street lamps and denounced inoculation as wanton wickedness. The voice of the people in Paris demanded the head of Charlotte Corday. The voice of the people in Jerusalem cried, "Away with Him! crucify Him! crucify Him!" "God is on the side of the strongest battalions," sneers the party swindler who buys a majority with money or place. On the contrary, answers the cool critic, reading history and interpreting its lessons, God was with Leonidas, and not with Xerxes. He was with the exile John Robinson at Leyden, not with Laud and the hierarchy at Westminster. Despite Napoleon even battles are not sums in arithmetic. Strange that a general, half of whose success was due to a sentiment, the glory of France, which welded his army into a thunderbolt, and still burns for us in the fervid song of Béranger, should have supposed that it is numbers and not conviction and enthusiasm which win the final victory. The career of no man in our time illustrates this truth more signally than Garibaldi's. He was the symbol of the sentiment which the wise Cavour molded into a nation, and he will be always canonized more universally than any other Italian patriot, because no other represents so purely and simply to the national imagination the Italian ideal of patriotic devotion. His enthusiasm of conviction made no calculation of defeat, because while he could be baffled, he could not be beaten. It was a stream flowing from a mountain height, which might be delayed or diverted, but knew instinctively that it must reach the sea. “Italia fará da se." Garibaldi was that faith incarnate, and the prophecy is fulfilled. Italy, more proud than stricken, bears his bust to the capitol, and there the eloquent marble will say, while Rome endures, that one man with God, with country, with duty and conscience, is at last the majority. But, still further, it is educated citizenship which, while defining the rightful limitation of the power of the majority, is most loyal to its legitimate authority, and foremost always in rescuing it from the treachery of political peddlers and parasites. The rural statesmen who founded the Republic saw in vision a homogeneous and intelligent community, the peace and prosperity and intelligence of the State reflected in the virtue and wisdom of the government. But is this our actual America or a glimpse of Arcadia? Is this the United States or Plato's Republic or Harrington's Oceana or Sir Thomas More's Utopia? What are the political maxims of the hour? In Rome, do as the Romans do? Fight fire with fire. Beat the devil with his own weapons. Take men as they are, and don't affect superior goodness. Beware of the politics of the moon and of Sunday-school statesmanship. This is our current political wisdom and the results are familiar. "This is a nasty State," cries the eager partizan, "and I hope we have done nasty work enough to carry it." "The conduct of the opposition," says another, "was infamous. They resorted to every kind of base and contemptible means, and, thank God, we have beaten them at their own game." The majority is overthrown by the political machinery intended to secure its will. The machinery is oiled by corruption and grinds the honest majority to powder. And it is educated citizenship, the wisdom and energy of men who are classed as prigs, pedants, and impracticables, which is first and most. efficient in breaking the machinery and releasing the majority. It was this which rescued New York from Tweed, and which everywhere challenges and demolishes a Tweed tyranny by whatever name it may be known. Every year at the college commencement the American scholar is exhorted to do his duty. But every newspaper proves that he is doing it. For he is the most practical politician who shows his fellow citizens, as the wise old sailor told his shipmates, that "God has somehow sc fixed the world that a man can afford to do about right." Take from the country at this moment the educated power, which is contemned as romantic and sentimental, and you would take from the army its general, from the ship its compass, from national action its moral mainspring. It is not the demagogue and the shouting rabble; it is the people. heeding the word of the thinker and the lesson of experience, which secures the welfare of the American republic and enlarges human liberty. If American scholarship is not in place, it is in power. If it does not carry the election to-day, it determines the policy of to-morrow. Calm, patient, confident, heroic, in our busy and material life it perpetually vindicates the truth that the things which are unseen are eternal. So in the cloudless midsummer sky serenely shines the moon, while the tumultuous ocean rolls and murmurs beneath, the type of illimitable and unbridled power; but, resistlessly marshaled by celestial laws, all the wild waters, heaving from pole to pole, rise and recede, obedient to the mild queen of heaven. Brethren of Brown, we have come hither as our fathers came, as our children will come, to renew our observation of that celestial law; and here, upon the old altar of fervid faith and boundless anticipation, let us pledge ourselves once more that, as the courage and energy of educated men fired the morning gun and led the contest of the Revolution, founded and framed the Union and, purifying it as with fire, have maintained the national life to this hour, so, day by day, we will do our part to lift America above the slough of mercenary politics and the cunning snares of trade, steadily forward toward the shining heights. which the hopes of its nativity foretold. § 94 BIG BLUNDERS By Thomas Dewitt Talmage LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-The man who never made a blunder has not yet been born. If he had been he would have died right away. The first blunder was born in Paradise, and it has had a large family of chil (Lecture by T. DeWitt Talmage, clergyman, editor, pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., for thirty years (born in Bound Brook, N. J., January 7, 1832; died in Washington, April 13, 1902), delivered in many lyceum courses during Dr. Talmage's long career as a lecturer. This was the most popular of his various platform discourses.) dren. Agricultural blunders, commercial blunders, literary blunders, mechanical blunders, artistic blunders, ecclesiastical blunders, moral blunders, and blunders of all sorts; but an ordinary blunder will not attract my attention. It must be large at the girth and great in stature. In other words, it must be a big blunder. Blunder the first: Multiplicity of occupations. I have a friend who is a very good painter, and a very good poet, and a very good speaker, and he can do a half dozen things well, but he is the exception. The general rule is that a man can do only one thing well. Perhaps there are two things to do. First, find your sphere; secondly, keep it. The general rule is, masons, stick to your trowel; carpenters, stick to your plane; lawyers, stick to your brief; ministers, stick to your pulpit, and don't go off lecturing. [Laughter.] Fireman, if you please, one locomotive at a time; navigator, one ship; professor, one department. The mighty men of all professions were men of one occupation. Thorwaldsen at sculpture, Irving at literature, Rothschild at banking, Forrest at acting, Brunel at engineering, Ross at navigation, "Punch" at joking. Sometimes a man is prepared by Providence through a variety of occupations for some great mission. Hugh Miller must climb up to his high work through the quarries of Cromarty. And sometimes a man gets prepared for his work through sheer trouble. He goes from misfortune to misfortune, and from disaster to disaster, and from persecution to persecution, until he is ready to graduate from the University of Hard Knocks. I know the old poets used to say that a man got inspiration by sleeping on Mount Parnassus. That is absurd. That is not the way men get inspiration. It is not the man on the mountain, but the mountain on the man, and the effort to throw it off that brings men to the position for which God intended them. But the general rule is that by the time thirty years of age is reached the occupation is thoroughly decided, and there will be success in that direction if it be thoroughly followed. It does not make much difference what you do, so far as the mere item of success is concerned, if you only do it. Brandreth can make a fortune at pills, Adams by expressage, Cooper by manufacturing glue, Genin by selling hats, contractors by manufacturing shoddy, merchants by putting sand in sugar, beet juice in vinegar, chicory in coffee, and lard in butter. One of the costliest dwellings in Philadelphia was built out of eggs. Palaces have been built out of spools, out of toothache drops, out of hides, out of pigs' feet, out of pickles, out of tooth-brushes, out of hose,-h-o-s-e and h-o-e-s, out of fine-tooth combs, out of water, out of birds, out of bones, out of shells, out of steam, out of thunder and lightning. The difference between conditions in life is not so much a difference in the fruitfulness of occupations as it is a difference in the endowment |