PREFACE
The larger part of the material in this book was originally used in a number of addresses given in various colleges and universities reaching from Yale and Cornell in the East to Stanford and the University of California in the West. It is here offered to a wider circle in the hope that these chapters may prove suggestive to college students and to those who are interested in having them make the best use of the bewildering array of opportunities awaiting them on the modern campus.
It was one of the shrewdest and kindliest observers of student life, himself a long-time resident of Cambridge and a genial friend of Harvard men, who said: “It is a never-failing delight to behold every autumn the hundreds of newcomers who then throng our streets, boys with smooth, unworn faces, full of the zest of their own being, taking the whole world as having been made for them, as indeed it was. Their visible self-confidence is well founded and has the facts on its side. The future is theirs to command, not ours; it belongs to them even more than they think it does, and this is undoubtedly saying a good deal.”
It is this joyous and confident company arrayed or about to be arrayed in “cap and gown” which the writer of these chapters would fain address. The academic costume and accent may speedily be replaced by the less picturesque garb and tone of the work-a-day world, but the advantage of special training, of accurate knowledge and of the larger outlook upon life attainable in any well-equipped university will give to the fortunate possessors of all this a significance for the life of the nation far beyond that belonging to an equal number of similarly endowed but untrained men.