Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1915-09-24

you must shut your ears and stee
your heart against sympathy and pity
and place no reliance upon anything
except the cold facts of what men have
done or failed to do.
Perhaps you would be profted by
an extract from a letter of inquiry
answered few weeks ago. 1t came
from one of the largest business corpo-
rations in the country and related to g
man who graduated in 1912. This let
ter says What we like to know in re-
gard to the young men coming with us
might be covered after fashion by the
following:
l. Trustworthiness and general char.
acter.
2. Alertness of mind.
3. Ability to plan ahead any work
they may undertake
4. Ability to put through what is
planned.
5. Tendency to get at the bottom of
things.
6. Ability to discriminate between the
essentials and non-essentials in
results of an experiment.
Z. Neatness and accuracy of work.
8. Executive ability.
9. Do people with whom he is thrown
in contact like him?
10. Better fitted for factory or labo-
ratory position?
IL. For routine work or research?
II. Has he been selected by his fell
low students for positions of prom
inence in college affairs?'
'1t seems to me that this letter is un-
usually discriminating. 1t seeks all the
facts, but the corporation evidently
proposes to go little beneath the sur
face of the record. There is an attempt
to discover the promise of the man, a
promise which his performances in stu
dent days did not in all respects indicate.
There is something more than the bare
figures of the record after all. A man
may be learning method while the crea-
tions of hand, judged by absolute
standards, present sorry picture.
There is such a thing as feeling and
cropping after powers, which elude one
through many sad failure, but which
he finally grips firm in some great day
of triumph. Paul, the apostle of the
freedom of the spirit, had a consistent
record of some forty years as a bigoted
and narrow Pharisee. Francis Xavier
spent his youth in unseemly excesses
and turned in day to the severest rig
ors of abstinence. Charles James Fox
was a registering gambler and became
the most far-seeing English statesman
of his day. James Russell Lowell was
justly disciplined by Harvard College
and lived to be one of its most bonored
sons and one of the noblest and useful
Americans. Instances crowd the pages
of biography, and the shrewd man Of
the world who will never make a trial
of man who has stained his escutcheon
can be proved in error from innumera-
BILE instances.
"a mans record may be significant,
but there is such a thing as breaking
the record, as getting away from
moods that have kept one untrue to
his better self and breaking habits
that have fastened on one in per-
iods of depression and carelessness. A
record exists only to be broken; it is
mark to go beyond, and it serves its
purpose only as challenge to do better.
The growth of a man is not by accre-
tion, by taking on little more of the
same quality and constituency year
after year. New motives come into
view, new ideals and ambitions. From
other lives we catch altogether differ
ent notions of the possibilities of man
lood, the things that are worth while,
The real values of life and the methods
leedful to attain them. A college edu
,ation is not to add a certain quantity
If knowledge of subjects already pur-
sued, or. even to introduce one to new
ields in much the same way and to the
same end as one has been brought to
1ther subjects before 1t is rather to
start new forces to working and to
awaken new powers by means of wider
visions and loftier ideals The principal
goal of education in its advanced stages
IS the cultivation of the will. 1t is the
development of personality We are af-
ter, the making of men and women who
not only have power to break with their
1Wn mast but To helm the world To hreak