Yet we must not make shop one thing and life another; and since we must not make life shop, we must make shop life. Into everything we do we must try to put leaven. If asked for what college stands beyond all else, I should be tempted to say, "For the high meaning of the everyday act and the everyday life; for the beauty of work, of unselfish devoted work, with ambition to do the appointed task." If a higher task comes, take it as you took the lower - always with scrupulous fidelity and with that touch of something beyond mere accuracy which makes fidelity heroic. I have seen men and women filling subordinate positions with this kind of heroismmen and women whose lives, shut close as it seemed on every side, would have been arid as the sand if, in their hearts, they had not said, like Mercy in "The Pilgrim's Progress," "I purpose never to have a clog to my soul."

I

say all this because there was never

greater need of that fidelity whereby the drudgery of daily life becomes transfigured. "Much of my life," said President Eliot once," is what many persons would call drudgery. Within a few days I have gone through the entire salary list of the instructors and assistants in the university; and I do it every year." No one knows better than he that the president of a college or the president of a country is more slave than king, and that nowadays a king is a kind of slave. Success does not and cannot mean escape from work.

Yet on every side we see men demanding a full share of the luxuries of life and a decrease of its labor. Eight hours of eager unremitting work may be enough for a mechanic or for a common laborer; but how many give even that? How a little or a good deal is shaved off each end of the day and off both sides of the middle! how languidly and perfunctorily the task is done! Street laborers, elbow to elbow, feebly lift their picks a few

inches above the surface of the earth and trust the fall to the force of gravity; washerwomen charge you by the hour for eating copious and frequent meals in your kitchen; carpenters light their pipes over your sawdust and shavings and chat pleasantly at your expense with whoever passes by. "Less work for more money!" is the constant cry; and if the cost of living increases (as it must when everybody does less work for more money), less work and more money still. I have known a man hauling stone to leave a block in a crooked woods road where it wrecked the next carriage, because five o'clock had come and nothing (with an oath) should make him work after five o'clock. Charles Dudley Warner prophesies that, when labor gets to be ten dollars a day, the workmen will not come at all"they will send their cards." Everywhere men proceed on the assumption that the ideal life is not to work at all and to be paid hand

somely for not working. Yet there is no more elusive happiness than the happiness of not working. He who takes labor as self-respecting service which yields daily bread to him and his and which makes his life worth something is happy in his work and wants to do all the work he can; he who takes it as a necessary evil is never happy in or out of it and is of small use in the world:

"He is a swinward, but I think

No swinward of the best;

For much he recketh of his swink
And carketh for his rest."

The college man or woman should learn that in an earnest world no loafer counts. One of the most industrious and useful men I know has had no fixed occupation; but he wastes less time than most professional men, and much less than most so-called laboring men. "It is only the laboring classes," some one has said, "who can afford an eight-hour day." He who goes to his work with the

right spirit will soon find more work. His usefulness makes him known; and he is unexpectedly called on for many kinds of service. "That's a good man," says Hawkins of Scott in Mr. Kipling's "William the Conqueror." "If all goes well, I shall work him hard." "This," the author adds, "was Jim Hawkins's notion of the highest compliment one human being could pay another." Not one of us has an excuse for becoming what Homer calls an ἄχθος αρούρης, a dead weight on the earth. Every college man or woman is in honor bound to be not disobedient to the heavenly vision, and, in the light of that vision, to lead a life of work.

But what of marriage? It was of proposed or suggested marriage that Mercy in "The Pilgrim's Progress" said what I have quoted not of marriage in general, but of marriage with an alert, self-seeking, unprincipled man, like some of the so-called "hustlers" of to-day.