Today I am bringing the particular greetings of a college once called King's to a sister once called Queen's on a century and a half of truly royal accomplishment. The names, the passing of the years, mark the difference in the two epochs of the then and the now. In the interval we have passed from one world to a wholly new one. Our thoughts are quite new and would seem strange indeed to the founders of this old College. Our very vocabulary contains a host of familiar words which would have meant nothing to them, for the things and the thoughts which they mark were then undiscovered or unrecognized. But across this great gap of one hundred and fifty short years-short in terms of years, but how great in terms of contrast!-across this great gap there is something real and vital and continuing which binds us to the beginning of this College and to the thoughts of the past and to the faith out of which this College sprang.

I like to think that what binds us to those early days is a common aspiration, an aspiration to know, to enjoy, and to advance the things of the spirit; and that the spirit, like the air we breathe, surrounds us on every side and makes our every act and doing possible and significant. It is this aspiration which raises men and the society of men above a hive of industrious and intelligent bees, or above a hill of intelligent and industrious ants. It is that aspiration which founded this College. It is that aspiration which nourishes it. It is that aspiration which will continue it for decades and for generations and centuries to come.

A college is primarily a home of the spirit, for the cultivation of the things of the spirit, and for the passing on of the spiritual tradition of the race from generation to generation. It may have other and passing purposes that are important, but that is its chief and dominating and continuing purpose, before which every other fades into insignificance. There is a notion abroad in the world, a notion which seems to me as unworthy as it is

shallow, that each newborn babe is at liberty to recreate the world for himself; that his own pleasures and pains and tendencies and instincts are to be given a value and a weight in excess of all the recorded achievement and experience and findings of the race. Surely that is what Mr. Arthur Balfour has described as a depraved view of education. The college, on the other hand, exists to hold before the zealous and eager youth the mirror of race experience, that he may see what manner of being he is; what forces and tendencies have produced him and the world in which he lives; what things have been tested and tried in the great laboratory of human experience; what things have been set aside by the sane and sagacious judgment of the race as untrue, unlawful, and of evil report; what things are acclaimed and loved and applauded as the basis of human thinking and human endeavor. This College, and every college which feels the blood of the spiritual life coursing through its veins, exists to that end and for that purpose. It is a fine and splendid thing that here on this red soil of middle Jersey there has been for a century and a half a group of earnest scholars carrying forward the spiritual tradition of the race. They have gone each his way, they have gone most of them to their long reward, but their service is marked in the lives of hundreds and thousands of youth who have carried from this hearthstone the inextinguishable fire of spiritual interest and spiritual ambition.

We are not today celebrating the end of anything. We have come only to what may be called a station, or perhaps as Xenophon would have had it a completed parasang, in the long march of the spiritual tradition. This College will not end with the completion of one hundred and fifty years of accomplishment. It will still gain from contemplation of its past and from this ceremony new strength and new inspiration for the limitless years that lie ahead and beyond. The lesson of education is a difficult and a dark one to learn. There seems to be

no end to the possibility and the capacity of human enterprise, of human intelligence, and of human aspiration. We may not measure it, we dare not attempt to measure it, in terms of quantity; we dare not attempt to describe it in terms of years, or of things that are weighed and counted and measured; for it eludes all these. We can only measure it in terms of human power-that power which has sound intelligence, guided by a fine and noble spirit and driven by a strong and earnest character-and of human service. That goal is the goal of this College, the goal of every college which gladly comes today to bring its word of congratulation and of greeting; and when our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren come back to these lawns and trees after another century and a half may they find the tradition not only unimpaired but strengthened. May they find this noble, constructive work still going on, and may they take note of the fact with what joy and satisfaction and confidence we have brought our greetings this morning to Rutgers College, once called Queen's, on the completion of its first century and a half of a worthy life and service to American citizenship and to American scholarship.

President DEMAREST: Queen's College, Rutgers College, always has had a characteristic life in common with what are commonly called the classical colleges, the small colleges, the liberal culture colleges-it has that sympathy and that service still enduring within these halls.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce the President of Amherst College, Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn.

ADDRESS

ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN, PH.D., LL.D.
President of Amherst College

MR. PRESIDENT: I bring to you today the greetings and congratulations of the "small old colleges of the East."