Evening star., 1915-02-25

la great deal with the simple. straight
forward, sturdy folk who inhabit them.
from them, and I doubt if they ever
learned anything from me. 1 do not
have to call upon my imagination to
realize the condition of those people or
\ their needs
| Il remember when I first met DIR.
| Frost I envied him. ! envy him now
because he is going straight at the
heart of one Of the most interesting
problems of American life. The only
thing that is worth while in human
| intercourse, after all, is to wake some
| body up. provided you wake them up
| to see the light. provided YOU wake
them up to see something that is worth
SEEING and to comprehend something
| that their spirits have not hitherto
comprehended.
There are colleges and colleges.
| have spent the greater part of my life
doing what is called teaching. but most
of the pupils of most Of our universi-
ties systematically resist being taught.
remember being somewhat comforted
and reassured some years ago. after
had taught for ten or fifteen years. by
being told by friend of mine at Yale
University who had taught for twenty.
that he had found that the human mind
had infinite resources for resisting the
introduction of knowledge.
Hungry to Learn.
But here is a college filled with
people hungry to learn. If 1 had any
thing that 1 thought was worth their
hearing I should love to address body
of people hungry to learn. I have never
done it yet. l have devoted the best
energies in me to, getting their atten--
ton; l have used every resource of
knowledge and of speech that ] was
master of to call their attention to the
hot l,o$ 7 foll yyaO oh i
worth talking about and worth know
ing about; and after having spent some
twenty-five years in that endeavor l
do not know how 1 could follow these
lines of least resistance. 1t would be
very novel experience to find that
they were waiting to hear what I had
to say. They are hungry because they
have only a vague sense of the great
that they know. those primitive regions
upon which nature had bestowed in
finite beauty, but where her life is in
its simplest terms.
Persons He Envies.
THE trouble about the world is that
there are SO many interesting things
to do that one hates to conf1ne himself
to one or two of them. 1 find myself
envying missionaries, envying en-
gineers-envying pioneers Of all sorts
closest possible contact the genuine
stufs whether of the animate or in
animate world. because they must
have the sense If they have any imag
ination at all of some way carrying
the great world upon their shoulders
and making it serviceable for man
kind.
so that. as I began by saying, I
have not come here to patronize this
cause. l have not come here to lend it
such support as it may get from the
office that 1 temporarily occupy. I have
other occasions before the American
people had put any burdens on me to
help DR.. Frost. II can, attract the at
tention of men. and thinking men and
women everywhere. and men with
means and men with energy to these
great and noble things that need to be
done and done well and done at once"
Hughes Lauds the Mountaineers.
In his opening remarks preliminary
to introducing President Frost of
Berea. Justice Hughes spoke at some
length of the 100000 people living
IN the mountainous country of the
southern Appalachians, which embraces
portions of eight states and where
some of these people, he said. are
strangely isolated.
They are he said, hearty folk,
brave. sinewy, self-reliant, simple yet
proud. who are enduring the hardships
of life in the mountains. There still
persist, in very large measure, the
conditions of a hundred or more years
ago. Almost without exception they
are native Americans, the descendants
of the frontiersmen; and there they
have been repeating, generation after
generation. the experiences of their
fathers, while north, south. east and
west prosper in a civilization of which
they have but a very faint intimation.
we always thrill to the stories Of
discovery. to the tales of the adven-
turous voyagers who approached the
shores of a new world. but. for many,
America is still an undiscovered coun-
try. For too many of us there is hope
less provincialism and an interest only
in those things with which we happen
to be Immediately concerned. We know