in the average single class of to-day. And in the meanwhile what have her alumni done for the Alma Mater? In 1853, when my apprenticeship began, the accumulated endowment of the more than two centuries which preceded amounted to less than one million of dollars; the gifts and bequests of the forty-two years covered by my apprenticeship and travels have added to the one million over ten millions. And this, we were taught, was the "rag-gathering age" of a "trivial, jeering, withered, unbelieving generation—at least, it gave.
Thus, as I stand here to-day in the high places of the University and try to speak of the lessons and the theories of life which my travels have taught me,—as I pause for a brief space by the well-remembered college steps which more than forty classes have since gone up and descended, and, while doing so, look back over the long vista of probation, my impulse is to bear witness to the greatness and splendor, not to the decadence and meanness, of the age of which I have been a part. My eyes, too, have seen great men accomplishing great results,—I have lived and done journeyman work in a time than which none history records have been more steadfast and faithful in labor, more generous in gift or more fruitful in results; none so beneficent, none so philanthropic, none more heroic of purpose, none more romantic in act.
More than thirty years ago, while those cannon of Gettysburg were booming in my ears, sounding the diapason of that desperate onslaught to which I have already referred, there came up in my memory these lines from the "Samson Agonistes":—
"All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th' unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion will in place
Bear witness gloriously."
These lines, I say, I repeated over and over to myself, somewhat mechanically I suppose, in the dust and heat and crash of that July day. I was young then; I am young no longer. But, now as then, those verses from Milton's triumphant choral chant bring to me, clad in seventeenth-
