Butler Alumnal Quarterly (1925)

Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Butler Alumnal Quarterly University Special Collections 1925 Butler Alumnal Quarterly (1925) Butler University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/bualumnalquarterly Part of the Other History Commons Recommended Citation Butler University, "Butler Alumnal Quarterly (1925)" (1925). Butler Alumnal Quarterly. 13. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/bualumnalquarterly/13 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the University Special Collections at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Butler Alumnal Quarterly by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. V i THE BUTLER ALUMNAL QUARTERLY u ^i ^u I H iBailofliniYersi APRIL, 1925 INDIANAPOLIS Entered as second-class matter March 26, 1912, at the post office at Indianapolis, Ind., under the Act of March 3, 1879. CONTENTS THE FOUNDERS' DAY ADDRESS Dr. Charles H. Judd DINNER SPEECHES Professor Johnson and Dr. Judd AN EARLY FOUNDER'S DAY SONG Lee Burns ANCIENT LIGHTS Meredith Nicholson TRIBUTE TO CATHARINE MERRILL Dr. Harvey W. Wiley COLLEGE NEWS— Editorial From the City Office Athletics Butler in Chicago Butler Publications Commencement Program Faculty Notes Alumni Mention Marriages Births Deaths Our Correspondence — Butler Alumnal Quarterly Vol. XIV INDIANAPOLIS, IND., APRIL, 1925 No. 1 Founders' Day THE ADDRESS By Charles Hubbard Judd Head of Department of Education, University of CMcago. A NEW HUMANISM SUITED TO MODERN CONDITIONS There is a passage in one of Walter Page's letters which puts very vividly the theme which I wish to discuss today. Mr. Page, writing as the American ambassador to the British Court, describes to President Wilson a royal dinner given by England to the King of Denmark and in the course of his description comments on the difference between the American attitude toward ceremonial and the attitude of the typical Englishman. He says: This whole royal game is most interesting. Lloyd George and H. H. Asquith and John Morley were there, all in white knee breeches of silk and swords and most gaudy coats these that are the radicals of the Kingdom, in literature and in action. Veterans of Indian and South African wars stood on either side of every door and of every stairway, dressed as Sir Walter Raleigh dressed, like so many statues, never blink- ing an eye. Whether it's the court, or the honors and the orders and all the social and imperial spoils that keep the illusion up, or whether it is the Old World inability to change anything, you can't ever quite decide. In Defoe's time they put pots of herbs on the desks of every court in London to keep the plague off. The pots of herbs are yet put on every desk in every court room in London. 4 Butler Alumnal Quarterly Do they keep all these outworn things because they are in- capable of changing anything, or do these outworn burdens keep them from becoming able to change anything? I dare- say it works both ways. Every venerable ruin, every outworn custom, makes the King more secure; and the King gives veneration to every ruin and keeps respect for every outworn custom. Praise God for the Atlantic Ocean! It is the geographical foundation of our liberties. Yet, as I've often written, there are men here, real men, ruling men, mighty men, and a vigor- ous stock. There are not lacking on this side of the Atlantic those who are full of reverence for the past and its stately inheritances. They look askance on the innovations which have come with modern life and think of our busy civilization as materialistic and shallow. There are those who would have us hold the schools and[jj^|fl§^tgMet|fe^t|lji^^|rrt^^^j^gaditions which "^' came to us from Ji ^' - '• Greek and prai? tion. tj(§pStJ^Mftl(5\JaetllS3 aRdrSJgMfeJsOWKlJiatKMaracterized the schools of 1870 and point with sorrow to the flippant attitude of youth in our own day. Is Walter Page right? Is the Atlantic Ocean the limit be- yond which the Old World civilization cannot pass? Are we to build up on the western continent a new type of life and a new type of thought? Certainly, if he is right, it behooves us to give careful heed to the duty of erecting this new kind of liberty in thought and national life. Let us consider one or two examples of American modes of life which are completely released from the restraints of European historical tradition. Think, if you will, first, of the contrast between our attitude and that of the older nations toward the matter of land ownership. In Europe, land has been traditionally the exclusive possession of the aristocracy. As far back as the days of Roman supremacy, we read that the freedmen demanded land and found their demands refused by the aristocrats who held all the land there was by right of http://www.archive.org/details/butleralumnalqua14butl Founders' Day 5 prior claim. When the freedmen became too insistent the Romans of the older families sent them away to regions where barbarians could be conquered to make place for newcomers. The freedmen of Rome, following the example against which they had protested in Italy, set up baronies in middle Europe and bound the serfs to the soil. Land ownership thus came to be once more in the new territories conquered by the Romans—the exclusive privilege of the few. It is not in place here to trace the peasant wars and the rebellions of the serfs by which human nature has attempted again and again to break the chains of tradition. The history of Europe is a series of efforts to settle disputes about who shall own the soil. Nor are the struggles over. In Russia and in Ireland political and social issues center around the problem of land ownership. In Middle Europe one sees the issues emerge in the demands of nations, as well as indi- viduals, that they shall be allowed space for expansion—room in the sun. To a group of American young people this battle for space in which to stand is well-nigh incomprehensible. They have no notion of a crowded continent. The broad reaches of the public domain have for generations offered to the enterprising American homesteader opportunity to go west and north and south and take enough of the soil to absorb all of the frontiersman's energy and afford the frontiersman's family a place in the sun. Not only so, but vast numbers of those who see the hopelessness of the struggle in Europe have come to this Western World where land is plentiful and almost free, and have made of the Atlantic Ocean a pathway to new forms of liberty for themselves and their children. There are subtler ways in which Walter Page's geographical foundation of our liberties has separated us from Europe. The American student who went to a German University thirty years ago adapted himself as all good Americans should to the customs of the land in which he sojourned. It never seemed quite natural, however, to take off one's hat in solemn # 6 Butler Alumnal Quarterly formality whenever one met a student acquaintance. This excess of courtesy seemed to our American student, at least unnecessary. I recall one painful occasion when an untamed American, quite fresh from the wilds of Michigan, took liberties with an assistant in one of the laboratories by slapping him on the back. The rest of us held a conference on what was to be done about this breach, not only of manners but of all friendly relations. I was delegated, I recall, to carry out the decision of that conference, and I went and brazenly told the slapped assistant that American students regularly adopted this method of greeting their favorite instructors. The humor of the situation is not merely that we were able to concoct that American lie—the greater humor is that the assistant believed it. To the European mind almost anything is possible after one crosses the Atlantic foundation of our informal liberties. If we, in this country, have learned to take land whenever we want it, and, if we take off our hats less frequently than do the Europeans, it still remains true that we are anchored to the past in many ways. We owe to Europe, modern and ancient, a debt of which every generation is reminded by the necessity of learning the conjugation of amo and of studying the thrilling story of the French Revolution. During the last decade, the lesson of our connection with the swarming civili- zations of the Old World has been branded into our thinking so deeply that we shall not soon forget it. I am not going to advocate any repudiation of our debts to Europe. We owe much to the thinking of Socrates and Euclid and Descartes and Newton and Helmholtz. We have drawn in literature a priceless inheritance from Virgil and Goethe and Shakespeare. I might name a host of others in art and technical invention whose names and works fill our world on both sides of the Atlantic. I make full and unstinted acknowl- edgment of our obligation to all of these for what we are today in our intellectual lives and in our economic and political institutions. Founders' Day 7 I am here to say with Walter Page that on this side of the Atlantic we have a new duty in education and in life—the duty of organizing an absolutely new humanism. But is not my term humanism borrowed from Europe? The very name of that which I am discussing betrays my dependence on the past.

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