University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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country in his odd moments if the president would only tell him what there was going on now to keep a fellow from being bored to death. Or, if he was not possessed of this confident spirit of let Hinton do it, he may have been of that other type that has no reaction whatever to the sharp challenge of opportunity and the appeal for a critical decision. He may have been like the darkey who passed a factory as the whistles were blowing for the critical hour of dinner: Blow, blow, he said, with calm resignation to his fate ; Dinner time for some folks ; but ' tain ' t nothin ' but twelve o ' clock for me ! There is plenty of evidence that James was keenly alive to the oppor- tunities offered him : he had an honorable college career, and an after career that was an honor to the college; but if I knew nothing whatever of his record I could say with assurance two simple things about him, as I think I can about you or any other average college man: (1) he wants to enjoy his youth, and gratify the thirst for use that every muscle and pore of his growing body craves. Life thru a hundred keys of interest appeals to him, and above them all he holds a sort of fierce, invincible belief that he has the right to immediate happiness. There wasn ' t anybody here in 1795 but Doctor Ker and Hinton and the Davie poplar, but one of the first things the boy did was to write an essay on The Pleasures of College Life. But he also wrote one on The Uses of the Sun, and another on The Effect of Climate on Human Life. And that suggests the other thing that I would know I could say about him or any other young man coming to college: (2) He not only wants to enjoy to the full the youthful, physical life that is his only once; but also he wants to realize the more keenly felt, tho less clearly defined, passion for something of larger, freer use, mere deeply rooted, of more permanent satisfaction. Thru the eating, drinking, and sleeping of every day, the buttoning and unbuttoning routine of existence, this deeper life of the mind and spirit sends up signals of its hopes and dreams, asking for expression and liberation, and to get born thru him in great forms of useful work, science, or art. Every man feels that passion as really as he does the other. It is the eternal essence of his manhood. There is something in him of the prodigal, of Esau, and of Saul — the men who sold out for a price they could clutch — who swapped their star dust for com- mon clay ; there is something also of the prodigal and Paul — the men who claimed their birthright back, who came to themselves, and came back. Every young man ' s life is an unprecipitated solution of all biography :

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persons, infinitely confident, strong, lovable, ambitious — is what it is that has brought you here, away from the shops, the fields, the sea, the streets, where the vast majority of men of your age are making the grim struggle for success in the rough terms of actual life ; what it is that you have put your faith in that has led you to come and enlist for four precious years under this standard? It has -been one hundred and twenty-one years since Hinton James, the first student here, made the journey that each of you has just made. What he found here was chiefly, and I may say solely, the presiding pro- fessor. Dr. David Ker, who had been waiting for a month for the first student to come. When James finally arrived, I have no doubt that the president assembled him at once and gave him some excellent advice. Without any information whatever on the subject, I will venture to say what it was. He told him that he was at a critical time in his career, that he enjoyed opportunities not enjoyed by other young men; that the country was also in a peculiarly critical situation, and that it looked to the college men to save it ! All of which I take to be perfectly true. Every age is a critical age to a thing that has life, and especially so to a young man who feels the surge of abounding life in every limb. Seventeen ninety-five was a won- derfully critical year in the life of the University, of this country, and the world at large, and especially in the life of the youth Hinton James, as he came here asking the way of life. But not more wonderfully critical, I am sure, than the year 1916-17, to the world, to you, and to me. And so it has been always, and will be to every young man as he gathers up his strength and faces the world with it — to Cain, to Samuel, to Absalom, to David, to the young man who came to the Master by night, asking the true way to life — just as it has been to the unending procession of eager-hearted young men who have followed Hinton James thru these halls, and with the same question in their hearts, if not on their lips. I do not know what Hinton James thought of what the president said. Students here seem always to be normally hospitable toward listening to advice, and abnormally sensible about forgetting as much of it as they don ' t care for. Being a Freshman, James may have felt that the president needn ' t worry about the country (someone has said that a college ought to be a wonderfully wise place — that Freshmen bring such a lot of knowledge, and the Seniors never take any away) ; that he could look after the

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of Nero, Benedict Arnold, and Jess Willard ; but no less of Socrates, Shakespeare, Newton, Washington, Lincoln, Lee, Pasteur. Evei-y college man recognizes these two clear calls to him, and most men feel that in the ordinary life of every day there is a sharp contradic- tion between them : that there must be a surrender of one of them, that college life at best must be a compromise between one ' s youth and his maturity, what he is now and what he wants to be fifteen years from now — a truce between his happiness and his ambition. Now it is at this point, I think, that the college speaks its great word, and speaks the one that you have come to ask it to speak. You may think that you have come to ask it how to get into medicine, or how to make money, or how to make an N. C. sweater or a Phi Beta Kappa key, or how to be an engineer, or how to get into society — or any other of the thousand things that men work and die for. These are understandable motives for coming to college, and the college incidentally can respond to them all ; but it could not answer them successfully if there were no deeper motive behind them. The great question that you bring to the University today has a deeper center than a desire for either physical satisfaction or success in the world. It is the question that the young man came to the Master with — What shall I do to inherit life? — the larger, abundant life that will satisfy all of the finer passions of my life? The Master made this young man a fairly easy answer. He told him, for one thing, to play the game according to the rules laid down. The young man replied that he had always done that. Then the Master shifted the whole point of view to the heart of the mystery. He told him that the source of life is not a set of rules, a ceremonial, a doctrine, an organization ; but an attitude, an atmosphere, a life. And the answer of the university to your question — as the answer of the greatest of human institutions to the greatest of human questions — is the same as that of the Master. It answers, play the game according to the rules; but it, too, adds that this is only incidental. The education that it offers you is not in reality a mass of facts, a degree, a curriculum. Above and beyond all of that, it too is an attitude, an atmosphere, a way of life. It is the way of life based on the innate passion for the intelligent way of doing things. It is the intellectual way of life, and it declares that curiosity, the spirit of free inquiry, the passion to know, is as natural in a human being as the desire to breathe or to eat. It declares its faith in the controlling