Fifty-eighth Annual Commencement

FIFTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT It Was Held in University Hall at 10 O'clock Yesterday Morning

The Oration Was Delivered by the Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D., of Columbus, Ohio -- The Scene Was An Inspiring and Beautiful One

Yesterday the exercises of the fifty-eighth commencement of the University of Michigan were held. The large auditorium of University hall was crowded, even the aisles were filled, with friends and relatives who had come to see the degrees conferred.

At 9:30, the procession of the graduating class, headed by President Angell, the faculty and regents, was formed on the diagonal walk of the campus. The gathering made a most imposing appearance as they moved slowly down the street, marching to the music of the U. of M. band, and entered the main door of University hall.

The graduates of each department except the law wore cap and gown, with different colored tassels to distinguish one department from another.

The law students appeared in varied attire, some in frock coats and light trousers while others wore quite extreme negligee apparel.

At 10 o'clock the vast assemblage were seated. On the platform were the members of the faculty, the board of regents, many prominent alumni, and the orator of the day. After a voluntary on the organ by Prof. Renwick, Pres. Angell made a most impressive prayer, invoking divine blessing upon the young men and women who were about to enter upon their life work and to face the serious problems which would be theirs to solve. He then introduced the Rev. Washington Gladden, D. D., of Columbus, O., who delivered the address. Dr. Gladden is the possessor of a powerful voice, which enabled him to make himself heard distinctly in any part of the hall. He is a masterful speaker and held the attention of his audience throughout his entire discourse. Dr. Gladden's oration took up over 3,000 words. It was a masterpiece of word painting. In part Dr. Gladden said:

It is the merest commonplace to say that the future rests with the young men and women who are now getting their training for life.

A great work of reconstruction, social, industrial, political, ecclesiastical has got to be done and the forces by which it is to be wrought will be found in the minds and the lives of these young men and women.

Their great need is wisdom. Wisdom is more than knowing, it is knowing how. It is the practical quality. It is knowing how to live. What, then, is the end of existence? It may seem a sort of identical proposition but it is true to say that one business in life is simply to live. We are here to live; we have no other calling. Not to vegetate, but to live; to live as men; to complete out manhood. Living, for a man, implies knowing and enjoying and loving and doing: it connotes a mind that is alive, and sensibilities that are alive, and affections that are alive, and a will that is alive - a whole man, vital in every part, each faculty fulfilling its function.

But life is far from being an individual possession. For the human personality, whom we wrongly name an individual, finds its life only in vital union with other lives. To live is not to separate ourselves from our fellows but to unite with them in multiform ministries of giving and receiving. A man might maintain his physical life for years in solitude, but all that is distinctive of his manhood would drop away if he were isolated: speech would be lost, thought would be paralyzed, love would be atrophied. Even if the race could be propagated by some autochthonous method, all that we now understand by the life of a man would dissappear with the rupture of the social bond.

We are not, however, autochthonous; the fact of parentage confronts us on the threshold of life; there is a society of three, at any rate - father, mother and child - involved in the very existence of every one of us. And this small natural group, to which, in the narrower sense, our life is due, is bound no less really, if somewhat less obviously, to the entire social order in the midst of which we live. This organic relation of parts to the whole is the fundamental fact of our lives. Our business is life, and we live in relations. Each has a function to fulfill, and we behave as moral beings when each discerns the function which belongs to him and by his free choice fulfills it. When functions are performed by moral beings we call them duties. And the simple truth which emerges from this discussion is that the fundamental fact of our social and civic life is duty. The one thing needful to healthful social life is that each one should play his part, fulfill his function, do his duty. If any other thought is emphasized more than this in our political and social theories, there will be trouble and confusion, sooner or later; for it is our ruling ideas which make or mar our social structure.

It is evident that any political society in which this principle was made regnant through the habitual thought and action of its citizens would be the abode of order and peace and universal welfare. We should see in it a social organism living according to its law,- living healthily, therefore, and prosperously.

We are not acquainted with any such community, nor even with any community in which the principle we are considering is recognized as the regnant principle of the life of the commonwealth. When American men and women think about their relation to political society the idea to which their minds go most directly is not duty but something very different. It is of these political rights that they think, first and oftenest. The whole tenor of our political discussion makes this fact central. The document which is for us the summation of political wisdom declares that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights. The right to vote, the right to hold office, the right to bear arms, the right of self defense, these are the phrases which convey our conceptions of what is essential in citizenship.

The influence of this conception is found outside of politics. It is likely to affect the entire social attitude of the man who entertains it. He learns to think of this as a country where man has a right to do what is for his own advantage, and to divest himself of all responsibility for the order and welfare of the community in which he lives. If society rests primarily on rights this is a logical conclusion. Under this conception we find industrial classes waging destructive wars for the maintenance of their respective rights, and even into the family the notion is creeping; we have been invited to conceive of this primordial society as based on rights and have learned to discuss women's rights and men's rights and children's rights in such a way as to obscure the real bond which makes the household one. It is a sad day in any household when the disposition of the individual members to emphasize their rights begins to be manifest.

It is by realizing what must be the consequences of making rights rather than duties central in the family relation that we are able to understand what is actually going on in the larger social organism which we call the state. The constructive principle of the one society is the same as that of the other; life is the law of both, and the parts or rather members of any living thing are not contending for their rights, they are performing their functions; they are doing their duties. The same morbid conditions which would be found in the human body if the various organs, instead of performing their functions, began to make it their concern to get out of the general circulation as much as they could for themselves; the same morbid conditions which would appear in the family if each member thereof put rights above duties, must appear in the commonwealth when the thought which is uppermost in the minds of its citizens is a thought of rights rather than of duties.

Let us see what this theory logically comes to. No citizen possesses the right to vote. A right is something personal to ones self, something that one can do with as one pleases. No right to vote involves the right to refuse to vote. It is also generally understood to involve the right to vote so as to secure personal advantage. That conception easily makes room for the idea that the voter has a right to sell his vote. May not a man do what he will with his own?

Much the same thing can be said of office holding. The natural result of emphasizing the right has been to convey the idea that the office which a man holds is his to use for his own aggrandizement. The whole spoils system rests on that idea. These are the logical results of emphasizing rights and liberties as the central elements of citizenship.

Suppose now that the logic of life had been followed. Suppose that the idea of duty had been made the central idea of our common life, from the beginning. Suppose that we had been to the habit of speaking of the elective responsibility instead of the elective franchise, and of thinking of voting as a duty owed by us to the commonwealth and not as a right claimed by us from the commonwealth. Such a habit of thinking would have compelled us to approach the whole subject in a different spirit. A citizen to whom voting is a duty is in an entirely different state of mind from one to whom voting is a right. The one must be in a social temper; he is considering the interests of those to whom his duties are due. The other may be in an entirely unsocial temper; he is considering his own interests. Conceive how radically changed would be the moral attitude of the great mass of American citizens, if the emphasis of their thinking could be shifted from their rights to their duties.

What is most needed in this democracy is a radical change in our voting ideas concerning the foundations of citizenship. It is idle to imagine that change in our governmental machinery or in the organization of our industries will bring us peace; the trouble lies deeper in our primary conception. What we have got to have, if we want the true democracy, is a different kind of men and women, - men and women to whom duties are more than rights and service dearer than privilege.

It is for you and those who will stand with you to lift up the banner of the new democracy which differs from the old as the Popernican astronomy differs from the Ptolemaic; to discern its divine meaning, and believe in it, and bear witness to it, and live to lead men into its larger freedom. Good would it be, when the clock of this country shall strike high noon, to stand with those of you who will then survive and look back upon what has been won for humanity, upon what you will have helped to win. We shall not all be there, but in that glory you will not forget this day, and there will be something of our lives, I trust, in the hearts that throb to the music of that millennial song.