a young man's powers as the elective system in study is designed to do, yet does not require that basis of intellectual accuracy which is essential to success in study. Here, also, is something in which a young man who can succeed knows that success may mean an opening for the work of his life. Thousands of men actually see his success with their own eyes; thousands more hear of it. If on graduation he applies for work, he is not the unknown quantity that a young graduate usually is. He has already been tried in times of stress and found not wanting. If, as sometimes happens, he has shown, not merely that he is always to be counted on, but that in the thick of things he is inspired and inspiring, he has marked himself as a leader of men. Besides, no man can thoroughly succeed in football who plays for himself alone. There are few more searching tests of men's motives and spirit. This is why class officers chosen from football

players are almost invariably good men. On the gridiron field their classmates learn who have self-control, courage, endurance, minds quick in emergencies, devotion to class and college, and who play to the grand stand, and unless they can be spectacular are of no use.

I dwell on football because its hold on | a college is often misunderstood by persons who think of it merely as a brutal, tricky, and sadly exaggerated pastime, and not, in spite of its evils, as a test of generalship, physical and moral prowess, quickness of body and mind; and because it is a good illustration of a vis‐ ible and practical purpose (crossing the enemy's goal line) fired by an ideal (the honor and glory of a college). The full strength of college feeling does not come to a man until years after his graduation; but he knows something of it when he "lines up" beside his old school enemy against an old school friend, who, at the parting of the ways, has chosen

another Alma Mater. As years go by, his love of college becomes second only to his love of country. The college becomes more and more a human being, for whom it is an honor to work, to live, and to die. Indeed, every man who has once taken her name is in some sense bound to work, to live, and to die for her. In business, in politics, in religion, in everything, it is she who cheers him, as he struggles to hold his standard high. Much modern teaching dwells on the development of self; yet he who devotes himself to the rounding out of his own powers may be good for nothing, whereas he who devotes himself to what he loves better than himself, and thus abandons much that looks good for him because he must do something else with his whole heart, must do it often in a romantic and what may seem a reckless loyalty, such a man achieves a power beyond the reach of the professional selfdeveloper. Education is not in a high

sense practical unless it has an ideal in it and round about it. I know the common talk that colleges unfit their students for those daily duties which might chafe a mind that has tasted intellectual joy. No college can make everybody unselfish and wise; yet among human powers for unselfishness and wisdom I know none like that of a healthy college. If by a practical life we mean such a life of service as is not merely endured but enjoyed, lived with enthusiasm, then surely the most unpractical people in the world are the men and women who put away their ideals as childish things.

"The light of a whole life dies

When love is done,"

a poet says; and though he means the love between man and woman, his verse would be more deeply true if "love" might take on the wider meaning of that faith and energy and courage and enthusiasm which light the dim and tortuous way. With this, no life while sense

remains can be crushed by drudgery or woe. Without it, a life of drudgery is a life of Egyptian darkness. "Where there is no vision the people perish."

The college helps her sons and daughters to keep alive the vision. She diffuses about them what Mr. Justice Holmes has called "an aroma of high feeling, not to be found or lost in science or Greek, not to be fixed, yet all-pervading." She shows, in steady brightness to the best, in flashing glimpses to the worst, the vision without which there is no life. She teaches her children not to shun drudgery but to do the work, and in doing it to know its higher end. The question whether a thing is everlasting truth or commonplace is often a question whether it has or has not a light in it. Homer, even when he tells us how Telemachus put on his clothes, is not commonplace. "I suppose," says Ruskin, "the passage in the Iliad which on the whole has excited most admira