New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1875-06-17
THE JUNE COMMENCEMENTs.

v
OH us from all parts of the country, and we
are heartily sorry we cannot make room 1or
all of them. Many readers no doubt turn over
the page with a good humored smile, but to
the young A. B. and his friends it Is the most
interesting of all reading. Nothing in Horace
or old Homer ever so thrilled his blood or
fired his imagination as the first sight OF his
own name in print. 1t is the fOretaste of the
fame of which he is so sure for he
easily forecasts the day OF great
achievement, when college and college tn
umphs will seem small and puerile mat
ters to him. Meantime. these pleasant
June days are given up to him, and to his
boyish cry of onset as he leaves school and enters
into manhood. The air is full of the music OF
village bands and old college songs, and cere-
monies over buried textbooks or planted
class oaks, and profound speeches on politics,
philosophy, and religion. The gallant boys at
tack the knotty problems which the world has
grown gray in solving, and unravel them in a
half hours debate. They wear their new man
hood consciously, too, as bride does her
wedding vail, with keen sense of its re-
sponsibilities and meaning. Cynical mid
dle-aged people find this all tiresome
enough and vote the cOnceited young fellows
bores. But middle age generally clears these
crude speculatiOns on God and Science and
Philosophy out of mans mind only to fill it
with spcculatiOns on money getting, and takes
the cOnceit out of him by rough knocks and
snubs and defeats, which leave him sore and
humbled, 80 that the lad has the best OF 1t
after all. Don't begrudge him at least the
glory of his college crown. 1t will only need
a day or two outside to show him that he has
lust entered school where hard circumstance,
temptation, hunger of soul and body, runous
Right and successful Wrong arc the lessons to
be mastered, rather than printed logarithms
AMI pretty histories of dead gods and goddesses.
Our sympathies in these Commencement days,
We confess, go out toward the boys who did
not carry off the honOrs: the slOw-gOing me-
dunn fellows, who take but laggardly to their
books, and have found no pearl of eloqucnce
under their tongues. They have made up their
minds by this time to their own inferior place
in the world, and are quite ready to write
themselves down earthen pitchers, and that
of very poor quality. The pleasantcst OF all
discoveries il before them, that of them
selves, and of the fact that a shrewd judg-
ment, kind heart, self-control, and sound
integrity, strike heavy blows for man in the
world and make solid standing room for him
sooner than any brilIiancy of intellect.
The most noticeable feature in College Com
movements to an outside observer Is that
with each year the student betrays less and
less of this bOyish freshness, cOnceit, ignorance
of the world, which has both its absurdity and
its charm. The change is due, doubtless,
partly to the introduction into the ordinary
curriculum of studies which, twenty years ago,
were assuredly not held as scholastic. The
old, purely classical training lifted boy out
of the every day current around him, whether
TO higher levels OF not is Of no importance
here. He came back to the business of life
with his thoughts literally alienated, keyed,
and led by foreign ideas. Cato and Plato he
knew Gf he had done his duty much
more Familiarity than he did the grocer
next door, OF his habits and modes
of thought For months he was out of
keeping with the world through which he
had to rub his way: never at any ordinary
moment of the day found himself master of
the occasion.
Nowadays, the lad on leaving college
finds the thinking world busted with the
very matters of which he has been learn
ing the rudiments-natural history, living lam
gllages, the laws of matter, science, and
mathematics in their technical applications.
Plato and Cato live forever in the libraries,
but the fish that swims, and the air he breathes,
and mechanical forces, are eternal in another
fashion, and renew themselves every day in
the rivers and woods and the street outside
and the factories next door. Another evident
reason for the lack Of the old bOyishness in
college lads is the introduction of physical
training, boating, ETC., into the colleges, and
the outside associations which these involve.
A writer in a Pittsburgh paper lately COM
planned that this change, with the consequent
expense entaied by clubs, &C., had rendered
a cheap education well nigh impossible, even
in the small Western colleges which were
founded especially for the benefit of lads of linz
tied income; while to pass through course in
any of the great universities of the East entails
an outlay only possible to a man of wealth, or
a modification and sense of disgrace intOl-
cradle to u boy.
We are aware that there is a large measure
Of truth in this accusation. The evil lies back
of the college, however. in the previous home
life of the lads. Twenty years ago the son of
a Western farmer, who worked in the hay
field i'm Summer to earn money for his
Winter schooling, and plOwed and dug and
taught his way through college, was not likely
to indulge i'm expensive clubs.