Shall we then turn and lay the blame upon our college? The college is what we make it. Its ideals are our demands. If we demand only that it copy the man's college, teaching us what is good for him, nothing more, then we must not complain if the practical side of our woman's life is a failure, 5 or at best successful only through a dearly bought experience, as hard and as costly for those we love as for ourselves.

Is it not then for us, as graduates of Radcliffe, as wives and mothers, as women, to demand that Radcliffe shall be 10 something more than a man's college, that she shall study the needs and purposes of those entrusted to her, ever remembering that man's work never is and never can be woman's work?

II.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.

Address at the Dinner of the Harvard Alumni.1

Cambridge, Mass., June 24, 1896.

[Harvard University conferred the degree of A. M. on Mr. Washing- 15 ton at its Commencement, June 24, 1896. At the dinner of the Alumni, which takes place shortly after the completion of the exercises in Sanders Theatre, it is customary to call upon the recipients of the honorary degree to speak.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: It would in some 20 measure relieve my embarrassment if I could, even in a slight degree, feel myself worthy of the great honor which you do me to-day. Why you have called me from the Black

1 Reprinted, by permission, from Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington. Copyright 1901, by Doubleday, Page & Co.

Belt of the South, from among my humble people, to share in the honors of this occasion, is not for me to explain; and yet it may not be inappropriate for me to suggest that it seems to me that one of the most vital questions that touches 5 our American life, is how to bring the strong, wealthy and learned into helpful touch with the poorest, most ignorant, and humble, and at the same time, make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other. How shall we make the mansions on yon Beacon Street feel and Io see the need of the spirits in the lowliest cabin in Alabama cotton fields or Louisiana sugar bottoms? This problem Harvard University is solving, not by bringing itself down, but by bringing the masses up.

If through me, an humble representative, seven millions 15 of my people in the South might be permitted to send a message to Harvard - Harvard that offered up on death's altar young Shaw, and Russell, and Lowell and scores of others, that we might have a free and united country, that message would be, "Tell them that the sacrifice was not in 20 vain. Tell them that by the way of the shop, the field, the skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy, by way of industrial school and college, we are coming. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up. Often through oppression, unjust discrimination and prejudice, but through them 25 all we are coming up, and with proper habits, intelligence and property, there is no power on earth that can permanently stay our progress."

If my life in the past has meant anything in the lifting up of my people and the bringing about of better relations be30 tween your race and mine, I assure you from this day it will mean doubly more. In the economy of God, there is but one standard by which an individual can succeed — there is but one for a race. This country demands that every race measure itself by the American standard. By it a race must 35 rise or fall, succeed or fail, and in the last analysis mere sentiment counts for little. During the next half century

and more, my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible. We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skill; our ability to compete, to succeed in 5 commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet small, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all. This, this is the passport to all that is best in the life of our Republic, and the Negro must possess it, or be debarred.

ΙΟ

While we are thus being tested, I beg of you to remember that wherever our life touches yours, we help or hinder. Wherever your life touches ours, you make us stronger or weaker. No member of your race in any part of our country can harm the meanest member of mine, without the 15 proudest and bluest blood in Massachusetts being degraded. When Mississippi commits crime, New England commits crime, and in so much, lowers the standard of your civilization. There is no escape — man drags man down, or man lifts man up.

20

In working out our destiny, while the main burden and center of activity must be with us, we shall need, in a large measure in the years that are to come, as we have in the past, the help, the encouragement, the guidance that the strong can give the weak. Thus helped, we of both races in 25 the South, soon shall throw off the shackles of racial and sectional prejudice and rise as Harvard University has risen and as we all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness and selfishness, into that atmosphere, that pure sunshine, where it will be our highest ambition to serve 30 MAN, our brother, regardless of race or previous condition.

III.

J. R. LOWELL.

Our Literature.1

Response to a toast at the banquet in New York, April 30, 1889, given in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of Washington's inauguration.

A needful frugality, benignant alike to both the participants in human utterance, has limited the allowance of each speaker this evening to ten minutes. Cut in thicker slices, our little loaf of time would not suffice for all. This seems 5 a meagre ration, but if we give to our life the Psalmist's measure of seventy years, and bear in mind the population of the globe, a little ciphering will show that no single man. and brother is entitled even to so large a share of our attention as this. Moreover, how few are the men in any gen10 eration who could not deliver the message with which their good or evil genius has charged them in less than the sixth part of an hour.

On an occasion like this, a speaker lies more than usually open to the temptation of seeking the acceptable rather than 15 the judicial word. And yet it is inevitable that public anniversaries, like those of private persons, should suggest self-criticism as well as self-satisfaction. I shall not listen

for such suggestions, though I may not altogether conceal that I am conscious of them. I am to speak for literature, 20 and of our own as forming now a recognized part of it. This is not the place for critical balancing of what we have done or left undone in this field. An exaggerated estimate, and that indiscriminateness of praise which implies a fear to speak the truth, would be unworthy of myself or of you.

1 Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. from Lowell's Prose Works, VI, p. 222.

I might indeed read over a list of names now, alas, carven on headstones, since it would be invidious to speak of the living. But the list would be short, and I could call few of the names great as the impartial years measure greatness. I shall prefer to assume that American literature was not worth speaking for at all if it were not quite able to speak for itself, as all others are expected to do.

5

I think this a commemoration in which it is peculiarly fitting that literature should take part. For we are celebrating to-day our true birthday as a nation, the day when our 10 consciousness of wider interests and larger possibilities began. All that went before was birth-throes. The day also recalls us to a sense of something to which we are too indifferent. I mean that historic continuity, which, as a factor in moulding national individuality, is not only power- 15 ful in itself, but cumulative in its operation. In one of these literature finds the soil, and in the other the climate, it needs. Without the stimulus of a national consciousness, no literature could have come into being; under the conditions in which we then were, none that was not parasitic 20 and dependent. Without the continuity which slowly incorporates that consciousness in the general life and thought, no literature could have acquired strength to detach itself and begin a life of its own. And here another thought suggested by the day comes to my mind. Since that pre- 25 cious and persuasive quality, style, may be exemplified as truly in a life as in a work of art, may not the character of the great man whose memory decorates this and all our days, in its dignity, its strength, its calm of passion restrained, its inviolable reserves, furnish a lesson which our literature 30 may study to great advantage? And not our literature alone.

Scarcely had we become a nation when the only part of the Old World whose language we understood began to ask in various tones of despondency where was our litera- 35 ture. We could not improvise Virgils, or Miltons, though