University of Virginia Library

ADDRESSES ON THE FOURTH DAY

INVOCATION BY THE REVEREND GEORGE LAURENS PETRIE, D.D., OF CHARLOTTESVILLE,
VA.

O God of Truth and Grace; the Truth through which freedom comes,
the Grace to which alone and ever we must look for help.

The years that are past are rendered illustrious by Thy mercies. The
paths we have trodden have opened to our advancing steps, and have given
new visions of Thy greatness and Thy glory, new experiences of Thy wisdom
and Thy love. As we look back through the vista of the past we are grateful
for Thy mercies. As we look forward to the coming years we are cheered by
hope.

We thank Thee for the prevision which planned this great Institution;
for the wisdom which laid its foundations; for the skill which reared its
walls; for the resoluteness which marked its construction; for the noble
purpose which threw wide open its doors for its splendid educational
career.

We thank Thee that by Thy kind providence this Institution not only
has made real the great ideal of its honored founder, but in its development
and growth and achievement has surpassed even his beautiful dream.

As we look back through all Thy protecting care during these one hundred
years we are made profoundly grateful for the wonderful career and
extraordinary record of this University.

By Thy blessing it has been a Fountain of knowledge, where many
have refreshed themselves; a School of Training where many have been
fitted for life work; an Academy in the shades of which many have gathered
about its great teachers and have been enriched by their wisdom.

In Thy leading, to it youths have come in the glow of life's morning.
From it they have gone forth men, qualified and incited to do great deeds
and achieve great results. By Thy favor this Benign Mother has sent her
sons out from these sacred scenes with benefits and blessings from her hand
and heart.

They in turn by their successful and brilliant careers have rendered yet
more illustrious their Alma Mater.

Looking toward the future we invoke for this honored and beloved
University divine guidance. May all that has proved good in the past be
preserved. May all that is good in the keeping of the future be bestowed in
great fulness on this Institution.

May it ever stand for highest ideals, for accurate and extensive scholarship,
for truth and honor, for noblest character.

Bless the Board of Visitors with wisdom to guide its affairs. Bless the
Faculty that in every way they may meet their great responsibilities.

Bless the students of the past, present and future. May they as year
by year they go forth from this educational retreat, go forth in all the
glory of superb character to be an honor to the State, the Nation and the
World.

Bless all the great educational institutions that by their distinguished
representatives have conveyed their salutations and congratulations to
this University on this Centennial of its life and work.

In the great partnership of intellectual life and work may this high art
of teaching and learning attain its noblest reach and broadest culture.
May supreme human culture ever delight to sit humbly at the feet of Him
who is Truth and who by the Truth makes Free.

A CENTENNIAL ADDRESS

By President Edwin Anderson Alderman, D.C.L., LL.D., of the University of
Virginia

The Father of this University, whose name has been upon the lips of
so many during these days of commemoration, combined in his vivid personality
something of the insight of the prophet, the imagination of the artist,
and the engineer's passion for constructive detail. Like Kubla Khan in
Xanadu, he could here a stately culture-dome decree, but he had no satisfaction
until he had set down with a precise hand the specifications of the
dream structure looming in the eye of his mind, enumerated its concrete
tasks, and defined its immediate objectives. So clearly did he do this that
he has enrolled his name among those who cannot be passed by in any enumeration
of the educational reformers of the modern world.

As the culminating unit in the great national moulding force which he—
first of American educators—conceived education to be, he drew in one comprehensive
sweep a charter of University function. It was declared that the
task of the University was—

It may be doubted if any agent of society ever received general orders
more liberal and catholic than these as it adventured forth to enlighten and
elevate human thinking and increase human knowledge. Let us recall that
they were drawn up in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless,
the light from the sun of the democratic theory, then not high advanced
in the heavens, illuminates each separate syllable. Inherent in them may
be seen that interdependence of democracy and education which constitutes

the basis of modern society, and out of them alone might be deduced
the belief that in this secular world the highest optimism of mankind is embodied
in the democratic theory and given heart and substance by the
processes of education.

I fancy there is clear to all of you the curious, impressive likeness between
the scene of the world as it then lay before Jefferson's vision and the
scene of the world that our own eyes behold. The century was young then
as now. The slumbering injustice of ages had awakened and broken up the
settled forms of order and society only to develop its own special brand of
chaos, a vaster philosophy of force, and to meet its doom then as now before
the free and unconquerable spirit of man. A world in transition and confusion
had forgotten its high, unselfish emotions, succumbed to temporary
pessimism and disillusion, substituted personal and class aggrandizement
for patriotic passion, and, freed from the fierce stimulus of war, exhibited
lassitude and a tendency to turn from big issues to immediate economic
advantages. Then, as now, men felt that they beheld the end of an age and
the beginning of another epoch; and the new seminary of 1819, like the mature
mother of 1919, faced a convalescent world, fretful in its moods, let
down in its morale, dull in its thinking, commonplace in its ideals, waiting
irresolutely for guidance into right paths of peace and reconstruction. Then,
as always, in this troubled but advancing world, the saving remnant saw the
two great forces of permanent reconstruction—youth, unbound by tradition,
unbroken by war, undepressed by events, because sustained by the glorious
buoyancy that surrounds the morning of life, and, secondly, a new social
theory of intelligent coöperation for the common good supplanting dull
autocracy or benevolent despotism. Though thus alike in certain outward
external characteristics, the transformation of the daring Republican experiment
of the west during the passing of this century from a hope to a reality,
the growth of democracy from the status of a dogma to the status of a practical
governmental policy, the application of natural science through inventions
to human needs, inaugurating the most rapid and extensive industrial
revolution in all history, the advent of nationalism and its investment with
almost religious sanction, separate the eras by a gulf of political motive and
social purpose. It would seem to be a proper time to enquire if our University,
sent forth so confidently, instructed so minutely, and beholding so
clear a field of operation, has thus far played a just part in the drama of
democratic society? Has it met the specifications of the great educational
architect fairly and honestly? Let us not be tempted into mere boasting,
for it is the last word of vulgarity, but I do proudly claim that the University,
which forever hereafter you shall acclaim as your Alma Mater, has,
under tragic difficulties, fulfilled the law and satisfied the contract, and has,
therefore, a right to stand upright here to-day looking along the paths of the

The Academic Procession from the Rotunda to the Amphitheatre

new century with the vigor and purpose that come of an unclouded conscience
and a quiet spirit. Have the young men of successive generations
nourished here—twenty-two thousand in all—done their duty to the public
and kept their honor clean? I challenge the records of the nation's service in
all vocations, the rolls of the Senate, the Cabinet and diplomatic service,
the Governor's chair, the roster of the Army and Navy, for proof that they
have so lived and acted. This University has faced each crisis in the progress
of the national life from the period of raw confidence in its virile youth
to the portentous strength and moral dominance of the present most venerable
republic of the world, with the leadership suited to each crisis; and it
has made for itself institutionally in travail and self-examination a definite
spirit and an atmosphere compounded of intense individualism, democratic
sympathy, religious freedom, uncompromising integrity, distinction of
standards and austere toil. These are granite virtues, and a house built
upon them, let us thank God, is built upon a base that revolutionary storms
cannot disintegrate or waste away.

You and I, young men, have business with this University no less
solemn, significant, and fateful, than the work which Thomas Jefferson and
his associates found to do, and which has been carried on so faithfully by
great teachers and scholars of succeeding generations. It may be that we
shall not look upon their like again, for they were great democrats who
issued out of aristocracy, and our reliance must be, in this later age, upon
great aristocrats bred of democracy. But the University which they built
stands here still for us to perpetuate a symbol of deathless fecundity, institutionally
barely mature, its strength even now multiplied a hundred-fold,
its responsibility a thousand-fold. Here the nation, its wildernesses conquered,
its wealth piled up, its civilization composite of all mankind, its
surging society made over literally in industrial method and social aim,
beset with new perils and temptations, and awed by new grandeurs, seeks
direction toward an ideal of Americanism which shall somehow define
republican citizenship in terms of enduring value for all mankind. Yonder
throngs over wider lawns and greater spaces and through nobler edifices
at our bi-centennial, the great assize of your great grandchildren, asking
with appraising minds, and the old sentimental loyalties, what part their
University has played in the State and the nation and the world as the great
social theory out of which it was born, still further unfolded its purposes,
enlarged its implications, and strove toward its ultimate ascendancy. In
that far future, we shall be the past, and we shall be a worthy past in proportion
as we have served the present future. No past ever wins respectability,
much less reverence, in any other way. We shall serve the future worthily
in the degree in which we approach the majestic problem of human progress
with openness of mind, with clear knowledge that does not deceive itself,

with faith in trained men, and with sympathy for humanity erected into a
practical philosophy.

Liberalism, faith in God and man, sound and varied learning forever
pushing back the horizons of knowledge, human coöperation—these are the
cornerstones of the university of the future. Without them democracy
itself may become a tyranny more gross and rapacious than ever cursed
society and mere learning, as we ourselves have seen it, the sword of the
cruel and the selfish instead of the torch of him who seeks the truth.

I am aware that I seem to indicate a program of idealism so vast and
slow as to suggest the processes of geologic growth. I am aware, too, that
this program involves dealing with all grades and conditions of men, and
may seem to take not sufficient thought of the obvious and immediate, or to
yield brilliant and romantic results, but in its patient grandeur and resistless
strength, it is warp and woof of the mighty theory inherent in its logic and
necessary to its progress. Undoubtedly what the world most urgently and
constantly needs is unusual and capable individuals who are valuable to
life. I, for one, do not fear that education thus considered as a great socializing
force, slowly moulding national life into higher forms, will miss these
precious sports and rare individuals, and thus flatten out the surface of life
into amiable mediocrity. I rather believe that the stature of mankind is in
process of definite enlargement and that its giants will be giants still and
taller if less detached and lonely. The qualities of men must make such
differences in them forever as to preclude the fall of life to dull commonplaceness.
The liberalism which I have planted as the first cornerstone of
the University of the future, though far too comprehensive a creed to be
written out here, means essentially emancipation from the dead hand of any
authority that rests upon the human mind or spirit, to paralyze its energies
or weaken its ardor. It means protest against treating as if it were a mutiny
in a regiment the thinking of thinkers or the play of the conscience. John
Morley points out that, after all, respect for the dignity and worth of the
individual is its real root and while, like democracy itself, it is charged with
explosives, almost everything that is new in any age may be traced to its
hand. Thomas Jefferson was a greater liberal than John Morley. Those
who invoke his name as a static influence in modern life have never met the
man himself but only a wraith conjured up out of ignorance or misunderstanding.
They certainly do not understand the young Albemarle farmer-lawyer,
who at the age of twenty-two, stood tip-toe in the hall of the House
of Delegates, at Williamsburg, and listened with bated breath to the fierce
eloquence of Patrick Henry, and at the age of thirty-three, after giving the
world the Declaration of American Independence, appeared in the colonial
Capitol of the Old Dominion with four or five bills in his pocket which proposed
to revolutionize the existing social order and to inaugurate a new

economic, religious, and educational life in the Commonwealth. In letters
to Joseph Priestley and others, Jefferson thus set forth a plain philosophy of
belief in the orderly growth of human institutions unhindered by dull
conservatism:

"The Gothic idea that we were to look backwards instead of forwards
for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our
ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion and in learning,
is worthy of those bigots in religion and government, by whom it has been
recommended, and whose purposes it would answer. But it is not an idea
which this country will endure.

"When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries
in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward
with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no
doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than
our fathers were and they than the burners of witches.

"We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him
when a boy, as civilized society to remain under the regimen of their ancestors."

The World War, just ended, subjected the social theory, out of which
this University was born and to which it is dedicated, to a pitiless crossexamination
by the mind and spirit of mankind. What is the verdict? It is
generally agreed that this theory has accomplished more for the improvement
of human society than any other social scheme in history, that it is
nevertheless no patent social panacea and harbors many weaknesses. It
is agreed by some with alarm that it has greatly advanced its point of view
from a theory of the political rights of man to a theory of social and economic
fairness and even perfection. It is clear that it is triumphant, indeed
that it is about the only thing in the past century that has never stopped
advancing, despite the apparent collapse of 1914, from its faint beginnings as
small group cooperation for the protection of common rights to the emergence
of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the bravest and most reasonable
effort in all political history to rationalize world relations and to protect
all mankind against its deadliest enemy. However severe an indictment
may be brought against it as a perfect system, its defenders can safely put
the question—What better alternative do you offer? Did not the American,
the French, and the British democracies, under the great test, demonstrate
the essential spiritual validity at least of the doctrine and give proof that
its strength was grounded on the best there is in the nature of man?

The eighteenth century sought the answer to the question—What are
the rights of man? It was the age of Constitutions, Declarations, Revolutions.
The insistent query of the nineteenth century was—How are these
rights to be made available for the production of wealth? The twentieth

century, which most concerns us and which we must deal with, is grappling
with the problem—What is the duty of society in regard to the wealth which
it has created and the liberty which it inherited? Lord Bryce asserts that
the ideal of securing material conditions of comfort and well-being for
everybody, erected into a doctrine of humanitarianism, has so dominated
the minds of modern leaders as to endanger and obscure all other ideals and
especially the ideal of individual liberty. Men fear discomfort more than
tyranny and hardship more than autocrats. The great question of our time,
then, toward the solution of which universities must furnish right wisdom,
is to restore liberty conceived in the old American sense to the place it once
held in men's thoughts and yet to find somehow the golden mean between
the individualism which safeguards human freedom and the collectivism
which ensures social progress. Men will no longer love a government which
seems to them merely "anarchy plus the policeman," and they will not have
any government to love if it shall become a vast benevolent society preoccupied
principally with promoting material welfare.

The solid glory of this nation, or any nation, must, it would seem, finally
be determined by its ability to comprehend and readapt the theory and
practice of democracy as it reacts upon society in its progressive changes as
an eternal faith elastic enough to confront and strong enough to overcome
the changing forms of human error and injustice. As democracy thus
redefines itself, education, as its foremost policy, must redefine itself, and the
University as the chief servant of education must re-examine and re-relate
its power to the life about it.

Do not imagine that I shall here seek to define an American University
in any rigid terms. Experience has been called the best definer, and the
pressure of social situations the logical moulder. For us Jefferson's educational
specifications stand as steadfast in their field as his other great Charter
in the field of political liberty, needing only to be expanded to meet the
needs of a world society made into one organic unit by the rise of new scientific
inventions and economic laws, the advent of new professions, the call of
new knowledges, the implications of that great modern outlook which proclaims
that the community must seek to obtain for all of its children what
the wisest parent desires for his own child.

I dare to declare to you, young gentlemen, my belief that the future of
this University will not be unworthy of its past. The century that lies
before us with its unimagined wealth of new truth and new aspirations and
new entanglements will behold the University of Virginia, clothed in greater
strength and beauty, standing, as of old, at the northern gateway of the
South, embodying in its physical form and spiritual essence something of the
note of romanticism, with its central quality of exaltation of personality,
its deep loyalties and that balancing power of conservatism peculiar to the

region out of which it sprang. Power to interpret the distinct sections of
American life to each other will reside in it, and out of it will issue into the
mighty national stream the values of old Americanism and the best inheritances
of the English consciousness, moulding the individual man into dignity
of life and skilled usefulness, and yet working toward a larger collective
future, where every man may seek to earn a power to use and a dignity to
cherish.

As a Fortress of truth hardly won, I behold it undertaking to assemble
and preserve the bequests of civilization in its museums, libraries, and
laboratories. As a Workshop, it will be busy seeking to liberate the mind
and spirit of men and women by acquiring through honest work the truth
that exists and winning through discovery the truth that lures, while through
wise selective processes, it will sift the masses of young scholars and craftsmen
within its walls for talent and genius. This is its daily, primary, elemental
task. In this Workshop scholarship is the product sought for and
the power to adjust the mind to the greater issue as it arises, the end aimed
at. As a Dynamo I perceive it sending its force through all the avenues of
life in such fashion as to touch and mould the sources of public opinion, thus
realizing Fichte's dream of a University as a place from which, as from the
spiritual heart of a community, a current of life energy might be poured
through all of its members. As a Commander-in-Chief in the great warfare
against incompetence, it will seek to coördinate the whole daring process of
public education—elementary, secondary, cultural, and vocational—into
one unified servant of the State, in accordance with Edmund Burke's noble
conception of the relation between the State and the University as "a
partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every
virtue and in all perfection, and, since such a partnership cannot be attained
in one generation, a partnership between all those who are living and those
who are dead and those who are unborn." As a Watch-tower, it shall stand
upon its hill and strive to discern and comprehend the flow of life about
its base, so that it may furnish, through trained leadership, technical
guidance, liberal direction, and spiritual power to that life. As an Altar
and a Home, seated amid classical and peaceful scenes, where friendships
are made and convictions formed and youth emerges through self-expression
into manhood, it will contrive to distill an atmosphere to
which the creators of the new civilization may repair for quiet standards
of straight thinking, good taste, Christian living, clean honor, and
fidelity to trust. As a Lighthouse, it shall rise above the tempests of
the times, a beacon to those who voyage in darkness, a shelter to those
who have found the light, a luminous guide to juster and wiser paths of
action and life.

And now, finally, young gentlemen of the Class of 1921, may I recall to

you that you are in a very real sense a most fortunate group. You entered
here as a class when the University was a military camp, organized to train
you to become soldiers of your country then engaged in a great war in defense
of liberty and public right. You have served under the flag of
your country by land and sea and in the air. You reach your collegiate
climax amid the big emotions, tender memories, and high hopes of this
Centennial festival, and you pass out into a world sadly out of joint and
calling for brave and capable men to set it straight. I believe you are
men of such quality. I bear testimony that you have borne yourselves
handsomely in this University world. You are to take your part in your
country's life in a period of world-wide dramatic unrest, of definite conflict
between the old American individualism and the demands of new social
and industrial organization. To do your part well will test you to the utmost
in mind and character. The spirit of youth is the salvation of society.
Your University has affection for you and faith in you.