United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: HAVE the very great honor tonight of de¬ livering the valedictory of the class you are toasting at this banquet, the class of 1943. It is more than an honor, it is a supreme privilege to speak for this particular class. Those of you who know the class of ’43 will agree that with¬ out doubt it is a paragon of all graduating classes. The more discerning of you will have realized before this that in this small group of men and women is caught up every possible virtue, every imaginable attribute, and every conceivable merit. United College has never seen before, nor will she see again such a model of perfection, such a consummate master¬ piece as she sees exemplified in this class of 1943. Now that we are all friends . . . Actually the class of ’43 is not an unusual class. We have our brilliant people, they who carry away the scholarships, who continually amaze—and embarrass—the rest of us with their keen and steady learning. I do not believe that we have any fanatics, either religious or political. We have duly sent our quota of men to worship at the shrine of The Manitoban. Members among us have won the usual awards and prizes. Some of us are minutely sensitive to crisis and defeat. Some among us are phil¬ osophers—members of that doughty clan who instead of crying over spilt milk would prob¬ ably console themselves with the thought that it was four-fifths water in any case. We are not an unusual class. No one of us has done anything great—no one of us has done anything particularly ridiculous—except at stunt night—on which occasions we took first prize. As was once said of another class, we have given the college several good laughs . . . one or two of which sit at the head table to¬ night. However, there is no hesitancy in describ¬ ing one accomplishment of the class of ’43 as unusual—that accomplishment was tq produce from our ranks a lady stick so completely charming, and a man who has mErcle so excep¬ tional a senior stick. Superficially, that is our class. Its com¬ ponents are a diverse lot, and I feel that at the present moment many of them are uneasy. They do not know what I am going to say about them. They do not wish to be included in any generalization of class opinion for they would feel misrepresented and they would feel embarrassed. Thus, while I am here this evening speaking to you for the one purpose of interpreting the class of ’43 for everyone here, for the college as a whole, indeed, for the whole of our society —for presumably our society has not only a stake but an interest in us—while I must inter¬ pret the class of ’43 for the members of that class of ’43, while this is my task, I think it will VALEDICT The Valedictory Address delivered by John H. Howes at the annual become evident that valedictories are actually personal things and that any attempt to assess individual opinion and consolidate it into mass opinion is impossible in a college class. I do not claim to speak for the entire class as such. It would be interesting to examine the trends in valedictories during the last quarter century. If allowances were made for com¬ pletely personal idiosyncrasy, these ' documents would form a pattern of thought of the young men and women of the times. It would be even more interesting to note the gradual shift in that pattern of thought from a light-hearted and even light-headed optimism in the twenties through a period of confusion, blurred outlines and bewilderment in the early thirties, de¬ veloping into a dead disillusionment as the decade ended. And now we see that the whole process has apparently culminated during the last few years in a hard core of cynicism. We have all felt it. We have all at some time or an¬ other felt the despair of a defeated idealism— when that fervent idealism of youth is crumpled by circumstance. But how much more power¬ ful is the result of such a process when the forces of pircumstance that defeat the natural buoyancy are world-wide convulsions—the great economic collapse and now this great war. It has been said almost too often to bear repetition that we are another lost generation, born in the aftermath of 1918, adolescent in the aftermath of 1929, and now adult in the midst of a fierce revolutionary war. A few of 12

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governments of these lands are now freed from Turkish rule. China has been riddled with foreign influence. Japan, the one Asiatic na¬ tion which remained absolutely independent, has done so at the price of accepting western methods in all the arts of peace and war. Asia has been the cradle not only of civil¬ ization itself, but of all the great religions. Out of Mesopotamia came the germs that developed into the three systems that now hold the whole western world. The first was Hebraism, which developed very early in Palestine. From Hebraism sprang the other two, first, Christian¬ ity, and, in 622 A.D., Mohammedanism. The latter from small beginnings at Mecca and Medina in the Arabian desert became the most war-like proselytizing religion of the world. In the Middle Ages it extended even to Spain. Today it numbers 175,000,000 followers in Asia and Africa alone. From the Aryan group in Asia as well as from the Semitic have come great religions. The Persians developed Zoroastrianism, based upon the principle of the conflict between good and evil; and the Hindus originated Brahman¬ ism and its outgrowth Buddhism, which be¬ tween them now numbers perhaps 250,000,000 people in Asia. From the yellow man, too, has sprung a great system, that which Confucius originated in the 5th century B.C. and which has been the religion of most of the Chinese ever since. The Western Invasion After Vasco de Gama discovered the ocean route around Africa to India in 1497-98, the bulk of the trade-traffic was carried by sailing vessels rather than by overland caravans. With¬ in 50 years the Portuguese navigators had pushed still farther, to China and Japan, and had established a line of trading posts which amounted to a coastal empire. In the first years of the 17th century Holland, England, and France had also their commercial companies in the far East. Just before the middle of the 18th century there began a 50 years’ duel between England and France for the supremacy of southern Asia, England at length coming out victorious. In the meantime Russia had started across Siberia in 1580 and within 80 years had obtained this largest slice of Asia to the Pacific Ocean and the Amur River, unopposed by the rest of Europe and weakly questioned by the Turk. In the 18th and 19th centuries American clipper ships from Salem, Boston, and Provid¬ ence did a flourishing trade in tea, coffee, ivory, spices, and fine fabrics, and it was an American, Commodore Perry, who opened the doors of Japan in 1854, after they had been closed to the western world for a century and a half. The war between China and Japan in 1894-95 resulted in the cession of Formosa, or Taiwan as the Japanese call it, and Pescadores to Japan, and the Russo-Japanese War resulted in the cession of the southern half of the island of Sakhalin to Japan in 1905, while Korea was annexed to the island empire in 1910. The Philippines were transferred to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War in 1898. In the last decade of the 19th century various attempts were made to shorten the distance between Europe and Asia. The Suez Canal was dug, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea so that ships could go through to the Indian Ocean without rounding Africa. Russia built railroads across Siberia and Cen¬ tral Asia, and Germany was busy with a pro¬ ject more momentous still, a railway from Ber¬ lin to Bagdad—and perhaps beyond. However, despite this long familiarity with the products of Asia, and this history of active commercial relations, the country and the peo¬ ple have remained unknown to us almost down to our own day. Mission aries going to India and China found people who had been doing things the same way for so many thousands of years that it was almost impossible to teach them any other way. Nor could the bustling West understand the viewpoint of people whose minds seemed to work to set grooves. (Continued on page 42) 11

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us have been too occupied with this conception. We have been too ready to seize upon it as an excuse for mental inertia. The majority, how¬ ever, have not. We do not in the least feel sorry for ourselves. We do not, under any conditions wish this explanation of our position to become an apology. It is true that these con¬ ditions have molded us, as the great dynamics of history have always profoundly influenced the youth of the world. Our modes of thinking ORY...I943 Grads’ Farewell, February 16, 1943, at the Royal Alexandra Hotel. have to a great extent been conditioned by these calamities and more particularly by the breakdown of values that accompanied them. We have cited these overwhelming in¬ fluences as factors that must be considered in any objective evaluation of our generation. But we have demanded that they must not be con¬ sidered as an excuse or an apology, but only as an explanation. Our attempts to explain our position are not successful. Criticism of our generation has not lessened. If anything the-war has intensified it. The men and women of this generation, especially those of the Universities and more especially those training in the liberal arts are under censure. It is said that they are de¬ structively minded, that their outlook is based upon the narrowest cynicism, that they believe in nothing and are therefore floundering aim¬ lessly without guide-post or guide-star, that they are selfish and defeatist, that no positive force sweeps them toward clearly-defined goals. What basis have the critics for statements such as these? The only possible answer to this is an analysis of ourselves. We must find the causes of our attitude, an attitude that has been interpreted so widely and variously as one of cynicism and non-belief. One of the prime contributors to our posi¬ tion is our inheritance of what has been var¬ iously called the “dissolution of faith” or “the breakdown of authority.” During the last cen¬ tury and this one industrialism has transformed the material world almost beyond measure. Distance has been whittled. Commercialism accompanied industrialism and together they produced urbanization. The great metropolitan areas, around which our economies are centred, arose. This was the beginning. The old physi¬ cal order c ollapsed and the new framework brought with it disorder and dislocation of old ways of life. Brutal war was followed by even more brutal war. Men could see little but chaos and confusion in their new civilization. It became increasingly difficult for them to reconcile the confusion of daily living with the idea of an abiding and omnipotent power flow¬ ing through all things. They no longer pos¬ sessed the sure and certain conviction that a supreme authority governed the universe, or if they retained the conviction, their conception of the supreme authority as a “literal” King, Father, Judge and Lawgiver, became unten¬ able. Men could no longer convince themselves that the supernatural had a place in the actual structure of the universe. With these pillars removed, their edifice of faith was shaken. Church authority broke down. It was complete¬ ly alienated from business and politics. Even in the family its power waned as the modern urban family developed. In art the religious sanction disappeared and “art for art’s sake” became the slogan. The men and women of the new generation have had the results of this trend of dissolution thrust upon them. When they inherit the new economic life, religion becomes not the central force to which all their activities are related but instead one aspect of an increasingly varied world of experience. For them the authoritar¬ ian beliefs of their fathers are unsatisfactory. They do not wish to break with these beliefs— indeed, they often passionately desire to cling to them—but the very conditions of their life dictate that they must break. The position for the individual is not a happy one. He feels the void. He feels the in¬ security of his position, for he must somehow resolve for himself new religious conceptions. The majestic ideal of service to an all-powerful Ruler of the Universe is no longer enough. It is within himself or within his fellowmen that he must find the answers he is seeking. Until that time he has few points to guide him and in some ways must indeed appear to be flound¬ ering. But it is no situation upon which to assess blame. 9 13 r