Diversities of American Life | Page 5

They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view,
the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for
opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history
attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the
fear that we are losing the sense of the relative value of things in this
life.
Few persons come to middle life without some conception of these
relative values. It is in the heat and struggle that we fail to appreciate

what in the attainment will be most satisfactory to us. After it is over
we are apt to see that our possessions do not bring the happiness we
expected; or that we have neglected to cultivate the powers and tastes
that can make life enjoyable. We come to know, to use a truism, that a
person's highest satisfaction depends not upon his exterior acquisitions,
but upon what he himself is. There is no escape from this conclusion.
The physical satisfactions are limited and fallacious, the intellectual
and moral satisfactions are unlimited. In the last analysis, a man has to
live with himself, to be his own companion, and in the last resort the
question is, what can he get out of himself. In the end, his life is worth
just what he has become. And I need not say that the mistake
commonly made is as to relative values,--that the things of sense are as
important as the things of the mind. You make that mistake when you
devote your best energies to your possession of material substance, and
neglect the enlargement, the training, the enrichment of the mind. You
make the same mistake in a less degree, when you bend to the popular
ignorance and conceit so far as to direct your college education to
sordid ends. The certain end of yielding to this so-called practical spirit
was expressed by a member of a Northern State legislature who said,
"We don't want colleges, we want workshops." It was expressed in
another way by a representative of the lower house in Washington who
said, "The average ignorance of the country has a right to be
represented here." It is not for me to say whether it is represented there.
Naturally, I say, we ought by the time of middle life to come to a
conception of what sort of things are of most value. By analogy, in the
continual growth of the Republic, we ought to have a perception of
what we have accomplished and acquired, and some clear view of our
tendencies. We take justifiable pride in the glittering figures of our
extension of territory, our numerical growth, in the increase of wealth,
and in our rise to the potential position of almost the first nation in the
world. A more pertinent inquiry is, what sort of people have we
become? What are we intellectually and morally? For after all the man
is the thing, the production of the right sort of men and women is all
that gives a nation value. When I read of the establishment of a great
industrial centre in which twenty thousand people are employed in the
increase of the amount of steel in the world, before I decide whether it
would be a good thing for the Republic to create another industrial city

of the same sort, I want to know what sort of people the twenty
thousand are, how they live, what their morals are, what intellectual life
they have, what their enjoyment of life is, what they talk about and
think about, and what chance they have of getting into any higher life.
It does not seem to me a sufficient gain in this situation that we are
immensely increasing the amount of steel in the world, or that twenty
more people are enabled on account of this to indulge in an
unexampled, unintellectual luxury. We want more steel, no doubt, but
haven't we wit enough to get that and at the same time to increase
among the producers of it the number of men and women whose
horizons are extended, who are companionable, intelligent beings,
adding something to the intellectual and moral force upon which the
real progress of the Republic depends?
There is no place where I would choose to speak more plainly of our
national situation today than in the South, and at the University of the
South; in the South, because it is more plainly in a transition state, and
at the University of the South, because it is here and in similar
institutions that the question of the higher or lower plane of life in the
South is to be determined.
To a philosophical observer of the Republic, at the end of the hundred
years, I should say that the important facts are not its