Central Manual Training High School - Record Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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Whatever little unpleasantnesses may have arisen in the course of our association together for a common purpose we hope are forgotten by you as we know they are by ourselves. Few schools are so fortunate as ours in the possession of men of special fitness and equipment. The consciousness of your personal integrity, your devotion to your daily duty, has been for us the most valuable result of our whole training. It is this example of the wholesome and unremitting routine of your labor that makes operative whatever ability may have developed in us as students- a reflection which brings to what I wish specifically to say-that the morale of our school unseen as it may be is nevertheless quite as valuable to us as the special knowledge that has been expended in our education as such. - I have said that there exists on our part a valid obligation to you. lt is this, that in our future career, we must show that we have not only benefited by the definite training received at your hands, a duty which naturally arises in the course of such association as ours, but we are under the further ob- ligation of developing in our own character the sterling qualities of faithful performance of public duty which exist in yours. We thank you gentlemen, and bid you farewell. Classmates : As it is inevitable that every phase of growth shall have its terms so it is in the nature of things that we to-day see the close of that association in which for three years our destinies have been so closely bound together. Each of us with a common motive has striven to develop whatever poten- tialities of intelligence and intellect we possess. At last, however. the ties that have bound us together must be severed. As we look from the vantage point of to-day and review the course of our previous three years of effort, we may be conscious that at times we have been engaged in a struggle that re- quired all of our native ability and all of our capacity for persistence to enable us to succeed. At the present moment the consciousness of that success is a cause of congratulation to us, an augury, let us feel sure, of future determination and an inspiration to strengthen our hands for whatever struggles may come. ' lo

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direction and guidance from without. It is therefore much to your credit that often in the face of most discouraging conditions you have so ably fulfilled the high duty imposed upon you by your fel- low citizens of a great community. I Such devotion to the public welfare can be accomplished only by personal sacrifice of time and energy and your own affairs. The trained judgment you have devoted to the affairs of our Alma Mater, is something for which we shall be still more grateful when we finally come to understand what such devotion really implies. It is a consideration of this kind, a sense of your high public spirit and unselfish intent that gives us reason to congratulate ourselves on having been under the guidance of men like yourselves. On behalf of the class, I wish to thank you for all you have done in the cause of public education and specifically, for your efforts in the interests of our Alma Mater. Farewell. I Gentlemen of the Faculty: Q For you the exercises of to-day are but the repetition of an event which no doubt has become a matter of course. For us it is the culmination of the most important, the formative period of our lives. It has been almost altogether through your unceasing efforts that we have arrived at this stage of our journeyg we know that the best part of your lives has been spent in preparation and in the acquisition of experience in order to help us build the house of our future on a rock and not on shift- ing sands of uncertain or merely tentative methods. In giving us the fruits of this preparation you have not been as usurers but you have acted generously, devotedly, without avarice and without stint. It is because of this fact that there exists on our part a valid obligation to you. We have not felt, as is often the case in other schools, that there exists a great gap between you and us. In our struggles and difficulties we have known you not as taskmasters whose inviolate rules we might not transgress, and whose criticism we regarded with sullen discomfort but rather have we come to regard you in light of faithful and thoughtful friends whose rigor, when it has existed, was altogether for our own good. - ' , 71

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That future will undoubtedly be different, vastly different in many respects, but let us not look forward to it with a wavering of faith. Let us remember the obligations we owe to our training, if courage is demanded, let us feel that we possess our need. When we come now to that parting which shall finally separate us as a class, most of us realize I fancy that it is the smaller, the less perceptible ties that are really the strongest, the least easy of all to dissever. In the three years that have gone by we have formed little acquaintanceships which later have been intensified and transformed into closer relati0H Of firm and Steadfast friends. These are the things that are the 'hardest to give up. It is the characteristic of our common human nature that the freshness of such friendships, will in the coming time fade away and be forgotten. It is but natural that new activities and new relations in life will bring new interests and new associations, this, how- ever, need not in any degree mar the strength of the sentiment which unites us to-day. Although at this time we are to separate as a class, for some of us the occasion is not by any means the end of our student years. The methods of scholarship to which we have been subjected and the habits of systematic study which even the least stuclious of us has to some extent acquired, will later on be of inestimable value to us. An investigation of the record of the graduates of our school in advanced institutions of learning, is one which gives us a just pride and ought to constitute for us, as you have already been told, a special obligation to maintain abroad the high repute of our Alma Mater. If after to-day our class shall separate as a class, let not its spirit, the spirit of comradeship for better things and higher purposes, depart from our lives, let not this spirit cease to be operative as one of our basic motives, Rather let it continue to operate in its full strength, when we shall assemble again in the years to come let that spirit and ambition show the fruitions of an accomplished purpose in life. Let us endeavor to be not like 73