The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1898-09-04
Wake Forest College.
(Staff Correspondence

ter him. 1t might be said with almost
equal truth, Let me make the traditions
of a college and | care not who prescribc-
it's course of instruction" What its songs
are to a people, the traditions of a col
lege are to the students. Both are invisi
BILE influences that mould character ant
control conduct.
There has been, and is, belief widely
prevalent in this country that you eau
build n college as you would a machine
shop, or summer hotel on the beach
that all that is needful is to put vi
buildings, with blackboarls in the rooms
and globes and maps, chemicals, cruel
bles, microscopes and electric batteries
then employ lot of men who know
Latin. Greek, Mathematics, Chemistry
Physics, and distribute them properly
among the blackboards and maps and
microscopes; endow the institution with
funds enough TO pay their salaries; get
several hundred young men 0he more
the BETTER To 90 and sit in the rooms
with the professors and the apparatus
and await developments. Then you have
Il college. Not So
The desire that every alumnus has 10
sead his son to be educated ut his OLD
alma mater is not foolish one. A col
lege can not know properly how to edu-
cate until it has educated one or two
generations; ii must wait until 1t has
accumulated that rich detritus of tradl-
ton and experience in which character
may grow ripe and well rounded. There
is no oasis in all the worlds waste places
like the old college campus, green under
the branches of immemoial trees, where
generations of college boys have worked
and dreamed, the buildings toned to
subdued hues by wind and weather, in
their halls the portraits of the men who
have in church and State, in field and
market. borne eloquent testimony to
their alma mater. We must have new
colleges of course; only it is Il pity they
cannot be built fifty years old.
= i -
Wake Forest college was founded in
1884, or rather it began work in that
year as Wake Forest Institute" It's
history since has been largely the histo-
ry of the Baptist denomination in North
Carolina, just as its history and the his
tory Of four or five other fine old seats
of learning record the growth of culture
and enlightenment in the State. Through
All It's yeiIS III StEuSSIts IL HAS iltuidStut
somehow, to force itself upward, broad
ening its course of instruction, holding
to the high ideals of early years, roofing
itself more and more firmly in pubic es-
TEEN and doing, withal, a work distinc-
tive and far-reaching in its beneficencc.
Its years of struggle are not over, be-
cause its years of growth are not in the
past, but. true TO its history, it is enter
ing. nay has already entered, on wider
fields.
The power that the college has shown
of adapting itself to circumstances.
changing with changing needs, nj
ways wanting larger funds than
it had, yet clinging somehow
to the crevices and hooks in the
granite face of hard conditions, finding
the material for its sustenance and do
ing, i'll some way, what was needful for
it to do, this power has been marvellous.
1t has given Wake Forest college IFS
character-a character embodied in the
notices of its two literary societies: an
veniam Viam ant Faciam" and "Esse-
guam Videri Malo."
The institution has never been starry
ed. 1t is hardy, not stunted. Its fibre
is solid, its expansion has been slow but
steady and natural. Its life history has
not been cut into by any radical changes
or sharp departures. Its record is I'M
broken. 1t may have made mistakes,
but if So they have left no scars There
have been no steps backward. Stand
ing in front of the one old building in
which its work began, and looking north
and south at the other buildings that have
come one by one TO cluster round it, the
life history Of Wake Forest college lies
bare before you. The old building is
still the centre of college life fifty tyri-
flying the continued dominance of that
wise first ideal that has only needed to be
amplified and worked out in detail but
never to be changed. The child was tru-
~ father to the man.
Wake Forest is an excellent instance
of those small colleges of the country
that have gone on, year after year, truly
educating, content to remain where first
established, satisfied with scholarly
quiet and with no longing to get nearer
to city noise and advantages" 1t is be-
ginning to slowly dawn on the public con.
seriousness that possibly, after all, these
small institutions with two or three hun
dred students. little money and much
culture are quite as good places to edu-
cate young man as the great university
with its thousands of students, hundreds
OF professors, and tendency to mechani-
caliy chop off every man the same length.
mere are some among us, even, who will
admit that prospect of green hills and
shady by paths is as desirable for the
cultivation Of the mind as a panorama
of chimney tops or the whirr of trolley
cars.
Wake Forest at this season
is an exceedingly beautiful place, situa-
ted as ii is in gently rolling country,
every harsh outline sOftened with the
full growth Of late summer. 1t is lmpos-
sible not to envy the young men who
are coming here now for the first time
when one runs over what four years at
the college will mean TO them in the
way of mental growth keying up the in
tellect to high thinking and close per-
ception.
Wake Forest is one of the most Greek
of institutiOns-not in the sense that any
special emphasis is laid upon the study