Charles W Baker High School - Lyre Yearbook (Baldwinsville, NY)

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THE SENIOR LYRE 11 DECLARATION—CLASS ORATION (ADAPTED) EDUCATION AND SERVICE Classmates:—For four years our little fleet has been riding in harbor ; to-day the anchors are weighed and slowly we drop to- gether down the tide. A few hours more and these clustering sails will be scattered and fading specks, each in its own horizon, strain- ing or drifting toward the goal. And now, as we still linger in the narrows side by side, the common school life grows foreign, and we turn from the insignificant and the petty to the thought of some worthy life principle, the vision of some high and comprehensive ideal which may waken, ’ere we part, our finest purpose and de- votion. Let us then for a little consider service as a motive and an aim, and its peculiar claims upon education. The world has ever been slow to recognize the beauty and the power of love. Ancient paganism bowing first to force of arms and then of brain has enthroned its successive ideals in warring Mars and intriguing Jupiter; humanity progressed indeed beneath its sway: they fought, and built, and sang, but selfishness was at its heart: along the streets of cultured Athens and barbaric Babylon alike, no hospital or asylum ever rose. That genius might philoso- phise at midnight feasts, the slaves of Greece perished uncounted in her mines. The worth of man as man was unknown ; individ- uals were lost in the moving mass, and if they fell the procession never paused. But paganism was spent, its1 mission achieved and at last, heralded by the song of “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men,” the revelation of love was flashed upon the world; supple- menting the independent spirit of the Teuton. Christianity has invested the individual with transcendent worth. For centuries the light, grown dim at times, has been gaining slowly on the darkness: hate has slain, but mercy has soothed and cruelty has been relieved by heroic sacrifice. To-day sacrifice is an unfrequented path no longer, the great- est men and women of the age are daily struggling along its thorny way. Think you then, that we. members of the partnership of men. who have been permitted to appropriate the best heart and brain of the century to interpret the autobiography of the earth and the message of the stars, to read the present in the light of the past and to forecast the morrow from the trend of to-day, we who have become, in the words of Emerson, “the favorites of heaven and earth,” think you we may clutch these gifts without a debt to yonder pallid clerk or grimy, dust-choked miner? Has the acci- dent of education dissolved the bond of brotherhood or sealed the fountains of sympathy and gratitude within us? Aye, were there no questions of duty from sheerest gratitude our life should shower into service. Scholarship is a trust, and woe to that steward who turns a miser. There are those to whom their education is a mere handicap in a race of self-advancement; its gifts of mental grasp and insight but so much capital whose investment concern them-

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10 THE SENIOR LYRE Mary Elizabeth, owns and operates the most properous candy fac- tory in Syracuse. Doris Garrett, our sweet little valedictorian, who entertained us at so many of our gatherings, what of her after graduation? She went to College, where she proved herself in scholarship, winning honors at Vassar. She had many aspirations as a new woman, but these floated away like the “famous castles in Spain,” all because of a new style which arrived from Paris. This required that every up-to-date young woman walk with a Kane. In Donald’s profes- sion, as a bacteriologist, Doris is an excellent helpmate, for here she can make use of her knowledge. The women’s movement has developed wonderfully in these twenty years. Many shy girls have become surprises to their friends. Fancy Avis Messick and Frances Johnson as prominent members of the New York City Suffrage League, leading a wom- an’s suffrage parade along Fifth Avenue! Catherine Mangan is the most prosperous of the girls. She owns a gum factory; with one year’s surplus from this, she has built the large church of St. Stanley. Esther said she would never change the H-a-r-r-i of her name but did not say she would always keep it Harrington. Since her college days we have heard of her again and again as one of the greatest orators in the world. Willard has become really famous because of his remarkable knowledge of English History. As professor of this subject he still prefers the young Queens. Marjorie Ulrich and Martha Reaves, whom we all knew to be very studious, have turned their thoughts to a good cause; they have gone to Germany as Red Cross nurses. Leo has become a geographical expert and has traveled extens- ively : but he still finds that his greatest interests center around Venitiza, or shall we give it the English pronunciation—Venetia? You are wondering about Helen. She proved very convincingly that year we graduated was leap year, for it was but three weeks after commencement that she captured our Class President, Ned, now the Hon. Edward P . Giddings. MARJORIE SHEA. CHARACTER SKETCHES Frances Johnson—Member Literary Club. Plans to make a contract with the Danderine Company to advertise their well-known product. Takes herself seriously. A philosopher. Says we are descended from monkeys. Faculty agrees with her—think some of us haven’t descended yet. Donald E. Kane—•‘Bullet”—Football Hero. Aids Soule and VanDenburg in target practice. Says you can’t be strong eater at Cholets—you soon get weak. Employed by contractors to test the wearing quality of certain South Side sidewalks. You know all about him, why bother the editors.

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12 THE SENIOR LYRE selves alone. A narrow, blighting thought! Such have entered into no higher realm of hope and action, and at the close they have but a finer incense to offer to their former idols. They have never caught the meaning of a liberal education ; like their brethren of the “short cut” they have become infected with a spirit of selfish- ness. If our education has not taught us that the unseen is more than the seen, the spiritual than the material, it has been of little worth. But our privileges here summon us as well to breadth in every calling; it is an old appeal, but always new; we are never to suffer our humanity to be smothered beneath bonds or briefs or outlines or reviews. If the aspirations be the highest, the sympathy will be broad. The proper pursuit of place or fortune is most laudable ; it is the end in view that gives character to the man and to his work. If place and fortune do not sway him, if they are made the means of wider service, they themselves become holy things. Such is the call to service, but mingled in it is the voice of our highest manhood. Here as everywhere in divine law there is per- fect harmony. The good of the many is the good of the one; sel- fishness is the direst curse to self, it is needless here to denounce that type of selfish education which the names of Goethe and Byron at once recall, were there any of us headed on a similar career ; their end has pointed too many a moral to require my indication. But there is certain proneness of culture to an assertive independ- ence and unlovely self-sufficiency, which is peculiarly prevalent in the school world and'against which we cannot too strenuously guard ; peculiarly prevalent, 1 say, for to the pride of intellect is added the pride of youth. Our earliest ideal is that of strength ; acquisition seems greater than self-denial, and strife than love. For a time this is well; we are in the chrysalis state. As one has said “Selfism is the armor of our growth”; but alas for him to whom the protecting shell be- comes a prison. It must be shattered ! To every strong spirit there comes a time when it must burst from the thraldom of self, must rise into the realm of devotion ; it is the evolution of true greatness, the passing from death unto life, and from that moment conquest shrivels into nothingness before the towering grandeur of sacrifice. Mr. Ruskin tells us that the feeling that pervades all the pic- tures of Turner is “the greatest of all feelings—an utter forgetful- ness of self.” Self-forgetfulness—it is that same sublime losing of self in the higher which we find in all lofty efforts, whether of art or oratory or literature or life ; in Raphael, the transfiguration light streaming upon him painting his immortal picture; in Shakespeare, “his eye in a fine frenzy rolling,” sinking himself in myriad types. No man can begin to know what is in him until he has given himself to the grappling of a mighty thought, until he has been floated out of the shallows of self on the flood-tide of broad and ben- eficent impulse. In the future now opening, in our highest, finest development, there must be this lifting out of self into that higher devotion to humanity, that which makes possible the sublime self-