THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC.

Address at the Centennial Anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard College, June 30, 1881. None of Mr. Phillips's literary addresses is more characteristic than this, and in none are there more passages parallel with his earlier utterances. His first address before a strictly academic audience was given at the Commencement of Williams College in 1852, before the Adelphi Society. "His subject," says a contemporary report, was the Duty of a Christian Scholar in a Republic. The morale of the address was this: that the Christian scholar should utter truth, and labor for right and God, though parties and creeds and institutions and constitutions might be damaged. His whole address was in the spirit of that senteuce of Emerson I am an endless seeker, with no past at my back.'"

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In 1855 Mr. Phillips spoke at the Commencement at Dartmouth College, before the United Literary Societies upon the Duties of Thoughtful Men to the Republic. A correspondent sums up the address as follows. "Mr. Phillips thought servility was the great danger of the American scholar, and that as the politician, the press. the pulpit, were faithless, we must place our hope upon the scholars of the country. In them Reform must find the strongest advocates and most efficient supporters. Scholars should leave the heights of contemplation, and come down into the every-day life of the people.”

In 1857 Mr. Phillips gave the Phi Beta Kappa address at Yale College on The Republican Scholar of Necessity an Agitator, and arraigned the cowardice of American scholarship. Substantially the same address was given the same year at the Commencement of Brown University, before the Philomenian and United Brothers' Society.

The sentences which follow and the notes appended to the present address were added by Mr. Phillips himself when it was brought out in pamphlet form by the publishers of this volume.

Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he had not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman competently wise in his mother dialect only. - MILTON.

I cannot but think as Aristotle (lib. 6) did of Thales and Anaxagoras, that they may be learned but not wise, or wise but not prudent, when they are ignorant of such things as are profitable to them. For suppose they know the wonders of Nature and the subtleties of metaphysics and operations mathematical, yet they cannot be prudent who spend themselves wholly upon unprofitable and ineffective contemplation.-JEREMY TAYLOR

The people, sir, are not always right.

The people, Mr. Grey, are not often wrong.

DISRAELI: Vivian Grey.

Chains are worse than bayonets. — DOUGLAS JERROLD.

Hadst thou known what freedom was, thou wouldst advise us to defend it not with swords but with axes. Satrap.

MR

- Spartans to the Great King's

R. PRESIDENT AND BROTHERS OF THE P. B. K.: A hundred years ago our society was planted, a slip from the older root in Virginia. The parent seed, tradition says, was French, - part of that conspiracy for free speech whose leaders prated democracy in the salons, while they carefully held on to the flesh-pots of society by crouching low to kings and their mistresses, and whose final object of assault was Christianity itself. Voltaire gave the watchword,

"Crush the wretch."
"Ecrasez l'infame."

No matter how much or how little truth there may be in the tradition; no matter what was the origin or what was the object of our society, if it had any special one,both are long since forgotten. We stand now simply a representative of free, brave, American scholarship. I emphasize American scholarship.

In one of those glowing, and as yet unequalled pictures which Everett drew for us, here and elsewhere, of Revolutionary scenes, I remember his saying, that the independence we then won, if taken in its literal and narrow sense, was of no interest and little value; but, construed in the fulness of its real meaning, it bound us to a distinctive American character and purpose, to a keen sense of large responsibility, and to a generous selfdevotion. It is under the shadow of such unquestioned authority that I use the term "American scholarship.”

Our society was, no doubt, to some extent, a protest against the sombre theology of New England, where, a hundred years ago, the atmosphere was black with sermons, and where religious speculation beat uselessly against the narrowest limits.

The first generation of Puritans - though Lowell does let Cromwell call them "a small colony of pinched fanatics" included some men, indeed not a few, worthy to walk close to Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane in my judgment the noblest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city, I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown, - but Vane dwells an arrow's flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato "all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand years;" so you can find in Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years of American civilization, with no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fénelon kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possible; like Carnot, he organized vic

tory; and Milton pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen preeminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serene faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other men we walk backward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying reverently, "Remember the temptation and the age." But Vane's ermine has no stain; no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in thought he stands abreast of our age, -like pure intellect, belongs to all time.

Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth heeding, "Young men, close your Byron, and open your Goethe." If my counsel had weight in these halls, I should say, "Young men, close your John Winthrop and Washington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir Harry Vane." The generation that knew Vane gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple pledge, — Veritas.

But the narrowness and poverty of colonial life soon starved out this element. Harvard was rededicated Christo et Ecclesiæ; and up to the middle of the last century, free thought in religion meant Charles Chauncy and the Brattle-Street Church protest, while free thought hardly existed anywhere else. But a single generation changed all this. A hundred years ago there were pulpits that led the popular movement; while outside of religion and of what called itself literature, industry and a jealous sense of personal freedom obeyed, in their rapid growth, the law of their natures. English common-sense and those municipal institutions born of the common law, and which had saved and sheltered it, grew inevitably too large for the eggshell of English dependence, and allowed it to drop off as naturally as the chick does when she is ready. There was no change of law, nothing that could properly be called revolu

tion, only noiseless growth, the seed bursting into flower, infancy becoming manhood. It was life in its omnipotence, rending whatever dead matter confined it. So have I seen the tiny weeds of a luxuriant Italian spring upheave the colossal foundations of the Caesars' palace, and leave it a mass of ruins.

But when the veil was withdrawn, what stood revealed astonished the world. It showed the undreamt power, the serene strength of simple manhood, free from the burden and restraint of absurd institutions in Church and State. The grandeur of this new Western constel lation gave courage to Europe, resulting in the French Revolution, the greatest, the most unmixed, the most unstained and wholly perfect blessing Europe has had in modern times, unless we may possibly except the Reformation and the invention of printing.

What precise effect that giant wave had when it struck our shore we can only guess. History is, for the most part, an idle amusement, the day-dream of pedants and triflers. The details of events, the actors' motives, and their relation to each other are buried with them. How impossible to learn the exact truth of what took place yesterday under your next neighbor's roof! Yet, we complacently argue and speculate about matters a thousand miles off, and a thousand years ago, as if we knew them. When I was a student here, my favorite study was history. The world and affairs have shown me that one half of history is loose conjecture, and much of the rest is the writer's opinion. But most men see facts,

Read me anything but history, for history must be false. - SIR ROBERT WALPOLE

The records of the past are not complete enough to enable the most dilligent historian to give a connected narrative in which there shall not be many parts resting on guesses or inferences or unauthenticated ruHe may guess himself, or he may report other people's guesses; but guesses there must be. -SPEDDING, Life of Bacon, vol. vi. p. 76.

mors.