The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-06-25
COURIER TUESDAY JUNE 90 1907

l SH5O4ly upOu WildI lueu UT DoOhS OlLSI | us which strikes "a responsive note lwith our own ihnef, dimly formulated, lpeliefs and moral aspirations. The scourse of instruction we have received has had for it's primary aim the strik- ing of this responsive note, the evok- ing and strengthening of the best that Hay latent in us. The men who have taught us have aimed not merely to iimpart to us a certain amount of in- formation, but to stimulate our minds and our hearts to call us not only to our rightful heritage of power and efficiency but to a sincere appreciation of the beautiful and reverence of the good.
 In this training facts have not been of so much importance as principles and ideas. Thus it is, that, when at the end of our four yea& sojourn here we step from the comparative seclu- sion of the college community into the hurly burly of life and are con fronted with the real and sometimes depressing facts of life under which restless, eager humanity is struggling for fame, money, position, or whatever else may attract it, the great difference between our old and our new environ ment, so striklngly apparent is likely to make us feel somewhat unfitted for participation in that struggle. We are likely to feel the need of read justment. We may seem to be weight ed with load of fanciful theories Which we can never apply. Our whole mental attitude acquired in the four years of college life is imposslbly ideal.
 When this experience comes, as it probably will to most of us on our first sally into our new environment what are we to do? Must we give up this ideallsm of the university as a thing to fanciful for a practical world? !? Surely no. Let us at this time reflect long and deeply within ourselves and steadfastly determine, instead of abandoning it, to cling to it as the most precious of all the university's gifts to us. Of course we are to take our places in practical matter-of- fact world To have any effective power in that world, we must first of all possess an intelligent and sympa- thetic understanding of it's various kinds of men and women whose inter- ests in some measure or other will be ours. We must then be ready and eager to enter the fight, eager to live our lives among men as We find them, not feeling that our college training has imbued us with a superior quality too fine for rude contact with sordid world. Know men and know condi- tons by actual experience we must, but we cannot afford to be too docile in accepting the ordinary judgments of men or too easily moulded by the force of surrounding conditions. Even though our personal effect in altering those conditions may be but slight, we cannot afford merely to drift unthink- ing in their stream. We must be mas ters of them by virtue of our ideals concerning them. If our four years university training with it's persistent development of the ideal is to be worth anything to us, we must actually ap- 1 ply its ideal principles to the facts of our own lives. If we expect to live happy, useful, and truly successful lives, we must be In an ever increasing degree even greater idealists than the university has tended to make us. idealists not in the sense of fighters of windmills, but as keen, effective, champions in the cause of those ideals without which the rational thinking man cannot live.
 Why is 1t essential that we be ideal- ists? It is a stale and perhaps a too I pessimistic observation that Americans as a people are a-materialistic that their god is money and their he- roes the fortune favored who have Iamassed the greatest number of dol lars. Stripped of its exaggeratlon. how ever, this statement is somewhat true. We are strongly inclined to exagger- ate the importance of acquiring ma. terial wealth, not so much for It's own sake as for the fact that it represents achievement We Anglo-Saxons, as a race who have ever been fighters, are lovers of power, and the tendency is strong in us to devote our best energy Iof mind and body to the battle for wealth because the successful &C., cunulator of riches Is generally re- garded by his fellows as a strong man, as man who has demonstrated his right to a superior position among them. This fighting spirit which makes us battle for wealth Is by no means an unmitigated evil, if only we are masters of it. Unfortunately. however, there are many men to-day who have long since lost the mastery, who are chained body and soul by its influences, who have devoted them selves so wholly and so continuously to the struggle for money that little by little they have stifled every other thought or feeling which has not di- rectly contributed to this one aim. In their relations with their fellows they have become, callous, indifferent, and brutally selfish. Some men there are who have become 50 narrowed by the utter absorption in the pursuit of wealth that they look with contempt on mems devotion to any pursuit or possession of any interest other than that of money-gettlng.
 A man of this type should experience some difficulty in finding valid req son to offer to himself or to his fel-