University of Virginia Library

IMMORTAL YOUTH

By John Bassett Moore, LL.D., of Columbia University

We celebrate to-day the first hundred years of the immortal youth of
the University of Virginia. While a university may gather years, it should
never grow old. Neither with its name nor with its work should the thought
of death or of feebleness be associated. So far as it is subject to the influence
of mortality, the things that pass away should be regarded not as lost but
merely as fructifying the soil for a richer and more abundant harvest. Thus
it is that in the highest sense death is swallowed up in victory, and that, so
far as concerns the university, we should conceive of the flight of years as a
perpetual resurrection to a new, a higher and more useful existence.

Approaching the hundredth anniversary of the University of Virginia
in this spirit, we look not only to the numbered past but also to the boundless
future. As we halt for retrospection, our minds are filled with fond and
grateful recollections; and if we say, in the words of a great orator, that the
past at least is secure, we repeat his words in no spirit of despondency. On
the contrary, surveying what has gone before, we feel the spell of the immortality
which we ascribe to our Alma Mater. We think of the devoted men
who in our youth sought to light us along the path of life and to point us
toward the high destiny which by our own efforts we might achieve. They
loom before us as the sages, the wise and pious mentors, of our earlier years,
who explored the past in order that they might furnish us with the lessons
of its experience. We recall them as men of ripe learning, of exemplary
character and of lofty purpose, who lived not in order that they might glorify
themselves but in order that the world might be better for their having
lived in it.

Nor, when we recur to recollections such as these, are we stirred merely
by the associations of sentiment. We are concerned with the very substance
of things, with the vital essence of the university's life and power. To-day
we witness the widespread appropriation, by many and varied non-academic
vocations, of the professorial title; but, although this may be regarded as a

recognition of the title's past renown, it does not contribute to its present
prestige. Meanwhile, in the promiscuous strut of titular distinctions, which,
by enabling the wearer perchance to gain an undeserved credit, may occasionally
serve even as a cloak for imposture, the bewildered public is too
prone to lose sight of the dignity and importance of the function of the
teacher. Who should not be proud to think of himself simply in this character?
To be a teacher of men not only is one of the noblest, but is one of
the most responsible and most sacred of all callings. For the teacher may
justly feel that, while he lives for the present, the knowledge he imparts,
and the principles which he inculcates, are the things by which the future of
the world is to be shaped.

Therefore, while I have spoken of the masters who filled the chairs of
this university in my own youth, I wish also to pay my tribute to the devoted
men who are upholding the traditions and carrying forward the task
of the university to-day. Their lot has not been an easy one. It may,
indeed, be said that the quick changes and wide fluctuations in our later
economic life have been felt in the universities with special severity. Moreover,
the spirit of competition has invaded even the academic sphere. Methods
formerly adequate have had to yield to new demands. Changes in
organization have proved to be requisite; and fortunate was the University
of Virginia, when, the easy democracy of its earlier administration succumbing
to the exigencies of the times, it secured, as its executive head, one who
combined, in so large a measure as its first president has done, the qualities
of character, patience, wise foresight and real eloquence. He and the loyal
men gathered about him have borne their burden and performed their task
in a manner worthy of their predecessors, and in a devout spirit of self-forgetfulness
that entitles them to the eternal gratitude of the commonwealth.
No provision that could be made, for them and for their successors
in office, either by the state or by private benefaction, could exceed
the measure of their merit or the just reward of their efforts to maintain,
to perpetuate and to advance the cause of sound learning and public
service.

I have referred to the life of the university as one of immortal youth.
This necessarily implies that the university must be progressive. No man,
no state, no nation can stand still and maintain its place in the world; nor
does any man, any state or any nation deserve to hold its place in the world
that is content with what has been achieved. Mere contentment with the
past, no matter where we find it, means decay; the so-called happiness that
springs from placid satisfaction with things as they are, or with exaggerated
worship of things as they have been, is essentially spurious and is not a
blessing but an evil. Man was born to labor. For this purpose he possesses
his faculties, and if he hides them or permits them to remain unused he justly

incurs the sentence cast upon the unfaithful steward who lost not only the
opportunity for profit but even his original store.

As perpetual vigilance is the price of liberty, so perpetual struggle for
higher and better things is the price that must be paid for the immortality
of the university. But, in striving for immortality, what are the things for
which the university should stand before the world?

I have mentioned the word "liberty." Like all things else, this is a
relative concept. All mundane things are subject to human conditions; and,
in spite of all efforts to formulate precise definitions, we are never able to
find one that is permanently satisfactory. Nevertheless, there is such a thing
as liberty, of the absence of which, if we lack it, we very quickly become
conscious. In its essence, liberty means freedom of self-development, and
this freedom is to be allowed as far as the absolute safety of society will
permit individuals to determine for themselves what they will or will not do.
The university should, therefore, stand for liberty, meaning the widest
possible freedom of thought and of action. By no statesman or philosopher
has this principle been more luminously expounded or more clearly exemplified
than by the founder of the University of Virginia. Perhaps one may
say that if he had been called upon to designate the one great principle to
the inculcation of which the institution which he had founded should
through all future time be devoted, he would have designated the principle
of human liberty.

This necessarily leads us to another thought, and that is the principle
of toleration. To-day we are living in a world still racked by the passions
resulting from a great war. Human beings, instead of loving one another,
have been fighting and killing one another. This is a condition into which
the world, as long as we have known it, has from time to time fallen; and at
such junctures, confidence being supplanted with suspicion, there is a tendency
to regard differences of opinion as a menace and as something to be
suppressed. We should ever be on our guard against this tendency, alike in
society, in politics and in religion. To-day our eyes and ears are constantly
assailed with wholesale attacks upon persons of a particular faith or a
particular creed, attacks which, if not inspired by passionate excitement,
would be regarded as purely wanton. Such things can only be deplored as
manifestations of human traits which fortunately are manifested chiefly
under abnormal conditions.

In antithesis to the principle of toleration, I venture to mention another
word which has come to be characterized by base associations. I refer to
what is now popularly known as "propaganda" signifying in effect the
systematic dissemination of falsehoods or perversions for political, commercial
or other selfish purposes. The world is to-day rife with this sort of
activity, which is by no means confined to the perpetuation of bitterness by

and between nations that lately were enemies. Stimulated by the war into
abnormal activity, and now practiced more or less by all against all, it seeks,
with frenzied and unscrupulous zeal, in an atmosphere of universal suspicion,
to permeate all the relations of life and to create and foster ill-will
among all nations, including even those supposed to be friendly. Scarcely
can one attend to-day a gathering for the discussion of public questions,
without being treated to the pernicious productions of this vicious system,
which, finding their way into the press and into books ostensibly genuine, are
glibly rehearsed by persons whose position and profession should cause them
to exhibit a greater sense of care and of responsibility.

A university, as a seat of learning, should set its face against such
methods. One of the chief glories of the university is the fact that it is a
place devoted to the search for truth. A great philosopher, whom I read in
my student days, declared that, if the truth were placed on the one hand and
the search for truth on the other, and he were asked to choose between them,
he would take the search for truth as the sublime quest of his life. Such is
the spirit of aspiration, such the insatiate longing for what is true, beautiful
and sincere, that must animate the university, if it is to justify the attribution
to it of the thought of immortality.

The word propaganda has, however, been associated in times past with
a type of thought and of action altogether different from that which has
lately made it repulsive. Some years ago, in the city of Buenos Aires, I saw
a volume which one could not touch without feeling deeply moved. It was
a copy of a translation of the Bible, into a dialect of the Misiones territory,
by some of the fathers, agents of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, who
bore Christianity to the aborigines of that them remote and almost impenetrable
region. Not only did they make the translation, but they printed it
in the wilderness at a place even the site of which is to-day unknown. This
they did to save men. In their holy zeal to carry salvation, according to
their belief, to unknown lands, they shrank neither from peril nor from
sacrifice. As we think of their helpless separation from the haunts of civilized
life, of their self-denial and their days and nights of solitary toil, we are
lost in admiration of the men who wrought such a token of their faith and of
their love for their fellow-beings. Could there be a more inspiring example
for those who accept a teacher's sacred trust?

There is still another thought that rises in the mind in connection with
the University of Virginia and its future. We are accustomed to think, and
are, as I believe, justified in thinking of the University of Virginia as the
first real American university; but it cannot be affirmed that this claim has
been universally conceded; and it is proper to say that the claim rested not so
much upon assumed superiority of instruction as upon the exemplification
in the university's curriculum of the principle of freedom of individual

choice and the pursuit of studies along the lines of one's individual preferences
and aptitudes. Up to a comparatively recent time, however, the
University of Virginia was universally admitted to be the first university of
the South. This position it can hardly expect to hold in the future in the
same uncontested sense as in the past. Other universities have sprung up
in the South, and, receiving generous support from public and from private
benefaction, have developed an active and robust life and have come to
figure as vigorous rivals.

Nevertheless, the University of Virginia to-day educates within its
halls students from all quarters of the globe, and I love to think of it not only
as a State institution but as an institution which is to fill a distinctive place
in the life of the nation and of the world. For the discharge of this exalted
function it needs vastly increased resources; but it also possesses an inestimable
advantage which mere material accessions cannot give, and that is the
influence of its memories and traditions, and of its association with the name
and fame of its founder, the great apostle of modern democracy.

On an occasion such as this, when we bring to the shrine of our Alma
Mater our inmost thoughts, an expression of personal feeling may not be
out of place. In my childhood there were two names which I was taught
peculiarly to revere. These were the names of Washington and Jefferson;
one the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the other the chief
architect of the nation. Subsequently it fell to my lot for a number of years
to occupy a public office from which, whenever I looked out of the window, I
saw the Washington monument and the ever-moving current of the Potomac;
and as I gazed upon the silent memorial pointing to the sky, and
dwelt upon the character, the wisdom, the self-control of the first President
of the first American republic, I wondered whether the time might not come
when the world, recalling, in the words of Poe, "the glory that was Greece
and the grandeur that was Rome," might say that in the nation whose independence
Jefferson declared and Washington established that glory and
that grandeur were combined and magnified. And then, as I gazed upon the
ever-moving, ever-widening stream, under the everchanging skies, it seemed
to typify the endless flow of the life of the nation, finding its way to the ocean
and permeating the farthest reaches of the boundless sea of human endeavor.
So let us think of the immortal youth of the University of Virginia, ever
flowing on, ever broadening, and permeating the intellectual and moral life
of the world.

In the ceaseless, endless flow of its intellectual and moral influence, the
university both conserves and creates. Tennyson spoke of his generation as
"the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time." In a sense no saying
could be more fallacious or more misleading. As he who would be first in the
Kingdom of Heaven must become the servant of all, so the first requisite of

knowledge is a spirit of humility, such as renders us willing to learn. The
potentialities of heirship are severely limited by human conditions. We all
begin life in the same helpless way, dependent on others for existence and
physically and mentally groping about. But, as we grow older, and become
more self-conscious, we are perhaps not over-respectful of the wisdom of the
aged. Indeed, even if it be liberally conceded that we know the causes that
previously produced certain ill-effects, we are disposed to believe that their
similar operation may be averted in the present instance; and, obedient to
our possibly uninstructed impulses, we proceed to try our own conceptions
of what is wise and expedient. The assumption, then, that we are the heirs
of all the ages, representing the farthest human advance, should not be
unduly encouraged. Such an attitude is essentially hazardous, and, if inadvertently
indulged, tends recurrently to subject the world to the loss of a
large part of its garnered treasures.

For the prevention of such loss, we look to our seats of learning. While
the university conserves the teachings of the past, it also uses them for the
profit of posterity. In its quiet halls of study and reflection, overconfidence
is chastened, so that uninformed aggressiveness may neither mar the present
nor embarrass the future. The impulses of youth are refined and wisely
directed. The mind is fertilized. Ideals are raised. Ambition is stimulated;
and in endless train there issues from the gates the eager procession of intelligent
builders by whom institutions are competently fashioned. Society
and the state are the gainers; life itself is dignified and ennobled. Rejoicing,
then, in our university as the perpetual dispenser of priceless benefits, let us
strive to maintain and strengthen it with all the resources at our command,
placing above its portals the words, "Conserver of the Past, Creator of the
Future."