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and the noblest of useful arts touching man's life at every point. This whole region which we serve in the next two generations will practically rebuild itself, in a physical sense, in the interest of greater dignity, common sense, comfort and beauty. It does seem as if an elementary duty rests upon us to assist and guide a great process of that sort. It has always seemed to me a singular and pathetic sort of thing that in this spot of beauty and architectural dignity no sort of instruction has been given in art. We are still under the obsession of superficial thought that art is a mere matter of luxury and elegance, and somehow conflicts with the practical and utilitarian. We must come to the conviction and embody it in reality that art is not such a thing, but rather the art of the history of civilization, and no man can know the life of the races who does not understand something of the work of those races which appeals to the eye and assist each student to materialize and make palpable and sunlit the forgotten past.

It is a great task, ladies and gentlemen, to build a great university suitable for the needs of a growing democracy. The help of all good men is needed, and I bespeak and plead for that help as one may well do charged with the direction of the life of such an institution; and now, asking pardon for the time consumed, I have the honor to present to you as our speaker today an American citizen of distinction and great usefulness uniting in a singular and complete way the charm and cultivation of the scholar with the directness and force of the man of affairs. He is at the head of a great industrial, commercial and economic force that lies very close to the welfare and prosperity of all the States of the South. His ambition is not a one-sided affair, concerning itself solely with the wealth of this great undertaking, but a stateman's burden concerning itself even more with the relation of that undertaking to the common welfare of all the people.

THE PLACE OF INDUSTRY IN MODERN LIFE.*

BY FAIRFAX HARRISON, PRESIDENT, SOUTHERN RAILWAY.

At the Paris Exposition of 1855 there were honourably inscribed on the buildings the names of men who had distinguished themselves not only in science but in industry. It was deemed a fit acknowledgment of the modern world to the place which industry has taken in it. There arose, however, a powerful voice of protest, that of Ernest Renan. "The mistake lies," he said, "not in proclaiming industry to be excellent and useful but in exalting it beyond measure and in attaching too much importance to perfecting its processes. * * * The useful does not ennoble that only ennobles which presupposes in man intellectual or moral worth. Virtue, genius, science when it is disinterested, and its only object is to satisfy the desire which leads man to penetrate the enigmas of the universe, military valour, holiness, all those things which correspond with the moral, intellectual or aesthetic needs of man, all these can ennoble. * * * But what is merely useful will never ennoble. * * Industry renders immense services to society but they are services which after all are repaid in money. To every one his own reward: to the man whose usefulness is of the earth earthy, wealth, happiness in the earthly meaning of the word, all earthly blessings; to genius, to virtue, to glory-nobleness."

This is an eloquent echo of the judgment upon industry which had been entertained by the Greeks, which has persisted through the ages, which found expression in the Eighteenth Century sneer at England as a "nation of shop-keepers," which we here in Virginia have exemplified in the opinion surviving even to this generation in rare back-waters of inheritance that it "ill becomes a gentleman to engage in trade." With the Greeks, as with our immediate forbears, many of the manifestations of industry wore a purely servile guise and were contemned as such, but modern civilization has the added burden of medieval feudalism persisting in its prejudices. When the sole discipline of civilization was direct force the highest achievement of a man of

*Founder's Day address delivered in Cabell Hall, April 13.

generous birth was in feats of arms, or in that mimic of warfare, the chase, and in such a society a contempt for the slow and painful production of the necessaries of civilization was a test of breeding. It is only in the present generation that we have seen a ruling class holding to the old traditions and yet sufficiently enlightened to appreciate that defensible political power

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must be built on a foundation of productive efficiency even if it is to be defended by destructive energy. I refer to modern Germany. In his soul despising the tradesman and the manufacturer, the junker has still had the wisdom to conceal his prejudice in order to promote his own opportunity for world-power on the shoulders of a wealth-producing population. In very truth the might of modern Germany, which in demonstration has made the whole world gasp when once its ruling class reverted to force, rests like the untried but well recognized might of the United

States of today, not upon a sovereignty of political acumen, not upon the wisdom of its intellectuals—make as they may their Aufruf an die Kulturwelt-not upon the play of artists upon the human soul, not even upon the genius of nationality, but upon the persistent unwearied accumulations of its organized artisans who are ever adding to the human store, in the field, in the mine, in the shop, or wherever else Industry flies its winding black flag.

But whatever may be the case of Germany, the United States, given over as it is to industrialism, is not consciously engaged in production merely for the sake of building power, nor even merely for the sake of money. We are a people steeped in idealism, crude as yet in the expression of it perhaps, with a strong appetite for emotional sensation maybe, but surely one who recognizes the motive force of some of our most recent acts of foreign policy must acknowledge that it was the most intense idealism which stirred the American people to go to war with Spain to "free" Cuba and thereby to assume heavy, new and undesired responsibilities; which prescribed a national standard of dealing with the still politically inept peoples of the Philippines as our ancestors demanded that the mother country should deal with the colonists of her own blood and political traditions; which treats with the partizan bandits of Mexico as though they were leaders of a free and self-governing people. These are policies which amaze the practical statesmen of the elder world, and yet those statesmen would fain persuade themselves that our industrialism has made of us hierophants of a sordid cult of the almighty dollar. Nor do we confine our idealism to foreign relations. If we were in fact merely venal in our industrialism we would doubtless shape our internal political policy to the practical and successful support of industry and not be adding year after year to the cost of production by legislation intended to promote the interest of the employee at the expense of the employer, but which in fact, except in the case of a single important industry, results usually in imposing upon the domestic consumer the added cost of our social service. If the consumer is not himself an employee he must be an idealist to assume without protest the additional cost of living which is involved in paying more for what one needs than it would cost if one was not of the increas

ing tribe of Abou ben Adhem. We are, indeed, a nation of idealists in national policy, internal as well as external.

Claiming, then, these expressions of our political policy as characteristic of our genius as a people, it is not too much to ask those who have not had contact with the actual leaders of American industry, nor first-hand appreciation of their motives and their problems, to accept as a fact that many of those men have in aspiration spiritual as well as sordid rewards and that their energy finds what is perhaps its most positive and satisfying expression in attaining that ideal of Industry which has ever been one of the chief ends of civilization, to wit: the conquest of Nature, bending her neck to the uses of man. In such a place as this in which I now stand it may fortify this assertion that I am able to say that I have seldom associated with an American of the true breed engaged in industry who has not been capable of thrilling to the prophecy of his own experience in the great chorus in the Antigone, which limns a deathless picture of the daring and moral victory of man in his contest with Nature.

It is not necessary to rehearse to a generation which has just witnessed the extension of the human voice across a continent the things which American industry has conceived and accomplished for civilization. The future archeologist, coming upon the foundations of long extinct by-product plants and once noisy railway terminals which had been exterminated by some mysterious and forgotten economic catastrophe, may remark, as Darwin did of the geological traces of the animal monsters which once swarmed in America, that, if Buffon had known of the lost Pachydermata of this continent, he might have said with a greater semblance of truth that the creative force of America had lost its power rather than that it had never possessed great vigor.

Industry is, then, not necessarily mere money grubbing. With all its stimulus to selfishness and for all that it has grown out of that system of individualism which our ancestors lauded and some among us are now beginning to apologize for, industry is daily. becoming more responsive to those moral and intellectual needs. of man which Renan admits are ennobling. Men who conduct the destinies of great and conspicuous industries, which affect the public interest immediately, are no longer cynical of their

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