Gentlemen, you have chosen as your life work a profession that I believe to be indispensable to human welfare—­one of enviable tradition and honor and with standing and reputation in the community that set it apart, in some degree from all others.  And while I would not have you neglect the material success that it may bring you, I would urge you to expect this as a result rather than strive for it as an immediate end.  I would have you labor to maintain and develop the special knowledge that you have gained in this institution, to hold up the standard of courtesy and helpfulness under which you can best do public service, confident that if you do these things, business standing and financial success will also be added unto you.

HOW THE COMMUNITY EDUCATES ITSELF[15]

[15] Read before the American Library Association, Asbury Park,
N.J., June 27, 1916.

In endeavoring to distinguish between self-education and education by others, one meets with considerable difficulty.  If a boy reads Mill’s “Political Economy’” he is surely educating himself; but if after reading each chapter he visits a class and answers certain questions propounded for the purpose of ascertaining whether he has read it at all, or has read it understandingly, then we are accustomed to transfer the credit for the educative process to the questioner, and say that the boy has been educated at school or college.  As a matter of fact, I think most of us are self-educated.  Not only is most of what an adult knows and can do, acquired outside of school, but in most of what he learned even there he was self-taught.  His so-called teachers assigned tasks to him and saw that he performed them.  If he did not, they subjected him to discipline.  Once or twice in a lifetime most of us have run up against a real teacher—­a man or a woman that really played a major part in shaping our minds as they now are—­our stock of knowledge, our ways of thought, our methods of doing things.  These men have stood and are still standing (though they may have joined the great majority long ago) athwart the stream of sensation as it passes through us, and are determining what part shall be stored up, and where; what kind of action shall ultimately result from it.  The influence of a good teacher spreads farther and lasts longer than that of any other man.  If his words have been recorded in books it may reach across the seas and down the ages.

There is another reason why the distinction between school education and self-education breaks down.  If the boy with whom we began had any teacher at all it was John Stuart Mill, and this man was his teacher whether or not his reading of the book was prescribed and tested in a class-room.  I would not have you think that I would abolish schools and colleges.  I wish we had more of the right kind, but the chief factor in educative acquirement will still be the pupil.