United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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12 VOX ‘You!’ said the Caterpillar contemptuously. ‘Who are you? Which brought them back again to the beginning of the con¬ versation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said very gravely, ‘I think you ought to tell me who you are first.’ ‘Why?’ said the Caterpillar. Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any very good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away. ‘Come back!’ the Caterpillar called after her. ‘I’ve something important to say.’ This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again. ‘Keep your temper,’ said the Caterpillar. ‘Is that all?’ said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could. ‘No,’ said the Caterpillar. Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hear¬ ing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking; but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, ‘So you think you’re changed, do you?’ ” As I look at you I ask the Caterpillar’s question, “So you think you’re changed, do you?” and I entertain the hope that the mere fact of continuing life on this earth should enable you always to answer the Caterpillar ' s question with an exultant and not a sad affirmative. In entertaining this hope I may be going dead against fundamental psy¬ chological laws. It rarely seems possible, for instance, to make “one kind of a dog into another kind of a dog.” Yet I venture the surmise as I face you tonight: that if you ponder the topics I listed in the beginning, as you ponder, you will change, and (here I give away the fact that I am not a complete skeptic; Anatole France tells us that final skepticism im¬ plies absolute silence) you will change for the better. In other words, in talking to you in the attempt to open up these topics for you to-night, I hope to do you good. As some of you know, the phrase “our prematurely afflicted cen¬ tury” comes from Thomas Hardy. It has its setting in one of the few really noble pronouncements in contemporary literature; Hardy’s “Apology” prefaced to “Late Lyrics and Earlier.” Look for a moment at this young century we once so gayly and blatantly called Canada ' s. After all, you are of the few. You, about to graduate, are of the super-privileged classes. Yours is the rather special responsibility of seeing what is to be seen, of doing what is to be done. You know what we assume to be the special responsibility of the good swimmer in the crowd watching a drowning man struggling in mid stream. It is simply the special degree of responsibility bred out of superior knowledge and capacity. After four years at College, unless you have been fools, first, in coming, and then in staying, you possess superior knowledge and capacity. Well, look at your young century. Look at your world of 1931. I don’t mean your pretty world of 1931 just now

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vox 11 An Address to a Graduating Class By Professor A. L. Phelps If a speaker informed you at the beginning of a twenty-minute ad¬ dress that he was going to talk about Our Prematurely Afflicted Cen¬ tury, The Story of the World, The Challenge of the Tragic, The Achievement of Culture, and The Basis of Faith, what in the world would you expect of him? The coloured balloons of rhetoric, I im¬ agine. Let us see. But first let me make the appropriate gesture towards the occasion. Dear Would-be Graduates at this Farewell: You are about to go out into this hot and silly world. After four years of more or less honest, more or less thoughtless, more or less arduous labours you are about to leave us to join that band of University Graduates who, sometimes doing other things, play poker or golf or bridge or gradually fill up the ranks of the unemployed and the University Women’s Clubs throughout the land. You are about to draw a line between one part of your lives and another part. You are about to leave a way of life to which you will look back with an increasing appreciation of its bright innocence, its unsullied and untaught irresponsibility. After to-night you will change. Inevitably something happens to you as Time draws the line for you between youth and the beginnings of maturity. But it is time to read from “Alice in Wonderland.” As I read, think of me as the Caterpillar and of yourselves, taken individually and collectively, as Alice. If you like, let Alice’s this morning” be your freshman period of four years ago. “The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence. At last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a sleepy voice. Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least, I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’ What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’ ‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see. ' I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar. ‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’ ‘It isn’t,’ said the Caterpillar. ‘Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,’ said Alice; ‘but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?’ Not a bit,’ said the Caterpillar. ‘Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,’ said Alice; ‘all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.’

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vox 13 but your other world, the world you realize when you permit Job and the New Testament to sensitize you away from the habit of sucking soporifics out of Pollyanna and the worst parts of Browning. Let me be rashly concrete, assuming for a moment what not one half of one per cent of us does really assume, that modern warfare is a thoroughly wasteful and bad thing. You have on your hands then, for instance, the huge joke that in 1921, three years after the war to end war, the United States of America established her Citizens’ Military Training Camps which now proudly enroll, as the U.S. Assistant Secretary for War said last week, tens upon tens of thousands of the best young life of the American nation under twenty-four years of age. You know, or may know, if you choose to acquaint yourselves with the facts, that life on this planet today is amazingly interwoven and interdependent and that its underlying conditioning basis is commercial and military. This world today is not even in the careful hands of greedy but shrewd financiers, not even in the smooth and gentlemanly hands of far-seeing, self-seeking old-world diplomatists, certainly not even in the immaculate hands of the Church. The world today is simply a powder magazine for any lunatic’s match, the League of Nations being at best, no more than a sort of private police agency trying to forestall the lunatic. And if you think to fence yourself within a little place of peace, to cultivate your garden with Candide, you cannot even do that because at any moment, metaphorically or actually, a poison gas bomb may make ugly ravage among your flowers. The waste which is potential in all ignorance, stupidity, selfish acquisitiveness and anaemic or robust lusts may at any moment break into widespread expression and apall us all. I protest that this sounds merely rhetorical only to those who do not realize its truth. Henry W. Nevinson in the current issue of an English journal points my comment thus: “By Article 8 of the Versailles Treaty, Germany pledged her¬ self to disarm almost entirely, provided only that the other nations, her former enemies, disarmed in proportion. England has to some ex¬ tent reduced both her fleet and her army. For a time she reduced her air force, too. But no other nation has made the slightest attempt at reduction, much less disarmament. On the contrary, France, Italy and Poland are far more powerful in armaments than at the date of the Treaty. I have attended many Disarmament Conferences and seen they were all shams, because each nation was only anxious not to limit or reduce its own forces. More absurd still have been the Conferences to humanize war by laying down rules in the interests of mercy. It was as though two farmers who had been accustomed to burn each other’s ricks for years met together and agreed to use none but safety matches in future. I have known war for nearly forty years, and I have never known a war which was not eloquently supported by kings, rulers, and clergy, or in which men who refused to fight or spoke against the war were not persecuted with the utmost violence. Those who remember the “Pro-Boers” in the South African War or the “Con¬ scientious Objectors” in the Great War will understand. Nor do I