Such is my purpose
to-day. "Wandering back to living boyhood," to the time when I first
simultaneously passed the Harvard threshold and the threshold of
responsible life, I propose to compare the ideals and actualities of the
present with the ideals, anticipations and dreams of a past now
somewhat remote.
To say that in life and in the order of life's events it is the
unexpected which is apt to occur, is a commonplace. That it has been so
in my own case, I shall presently show. Meanwhile, not least among the
unexpected things is my presence here to-day. If, when I entered Harvard
in 1853, it had been suggested that in 1913, I,--born of the New England
Sanhedrim, a Brahmin Yankee by blood, tradition and environment--had it
been suggested that I, being such, would sixty years later stand by
invitation here in Columbia before the faculty and students of the
University of South Carolina, I should under circumstances then existing
have pronounced the suggestion as beyond reasonable credence. Here,
however, I am; and here, from this as my rostrum, I propose to-day to
deliver a message,--such as it is.
And yet, though such a future outcome, if then foretold, would have
seemed scarcely possible of occurrence, there, after all, were certain
conditions which would have rendered the contingency even at that time
not only possible, but in accordance with the everlasting fitness of
things.
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