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stability to thirteen great American industries which together employ eight per cent of all the wage earners engaged in manufacturing in the United States. The proof of this statement is a monument of patriotism, aere perennius.

It must, however, be stated that many of the men who are now trained in technical science for the uses of industry come into action with but a narrow vision, the result of over-specialization and an apparent atrophy of the power of effective generalization. My point can perhaps best be suggested by calling attention to the fact that proportionately few of the thousands of men who now for almost a generation have gone forth from our colleges into the world with a special equipment in technical science have attained to supreme leadership in industry, though many of them are employed in industry in subordinate capacities. In making this statement I am not unmindful of the conspicuous exceptions, chiefly in the ranks of the engineers and metallurgists. The immediate advantage of a special equipment is great in that it enables a man to arrive at economic independence earlier than his untrained fellows, but I sometimes question whether he does not pay too high a price for that desideratum, and whether the lack of a broader training in such men does not deprive the country of some potential leaders in industry. We need such men as we get, they do their assigned work honestly and efficiently, but we need more the qualities of leadership which are more generally bred by what is called cultural education.

It must be recognized also that the influence of cultural education as we have had it has not yet been directly favourable to industry, though, as I shall attempt to show, it is indirectly favourable. The colleges of a generation ago still shut out the bright light of social evolution from their cloisters. They held that learning was valuable in itself and not necessarily in proportion as one could make use of it. Without pausing to discuss the fact that in the revolution of this opinion it is now proposed that the learning imparted in the colleges shall consist entirely of the vocationally useful, so that we are threatened with a new educational opinion fraught with as much exaggeration as was the old (illustrating the working of that despotism which John Stuart Mill feared in all proposals for general State education as a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another),

I pass on to the effect of the old scholasticism upon the youth of today, which I believe is turning more and more of our most desirable young men towards an industrial career. I venture to adopt here a lucid statement by a modern English scholar, and an eminent classical scholar at that:

"It is against preponderant intellectualism with its attendant egotism that the present generation instinctively reacts. Amazingly clever though it is, it has felt itself somehow sterile in motive power. It desires to feel afresh, even that it may think anew. It asks to be born again. I do not know whether I am singular in my experience, but what has most impressed me in the young is their extreme old age, their hoary wisdom. The youth of the past was in love with ideas, drunk with ideals, avid of analysis: the youth of today sees life steadily and sees it whole. Above all it craves for action and only for such thinking as is immediately translatable into action."

It is in truth action which the youth of today craves. As he comes out of college, where can he find action? Not, like Gibbon, in past history, but in making history. The tradition of the young Southern man has always suggested politics as the highest expression of intelligent action. From the day when every man who could wear spurs was a soldier until we enter the latest world, the premier place in a gentleman's ambition has been supremacy in the artistry of political government, but with the realization of democracy we have seen that ambition decay in many generous breasts, though, due to our peculiar civilization, it has persisted longest with the Southern man. Under democracy the politician exercises only the forms of power. He may grimace his own emotions but it must be behind a mask of convention, like a Greek player. Time was when the productive population was the slave of the political governor; time is when the politician has become the slave of the great god Demos; the positions are reversed; the industrial Revolution has shifted the roles of Caliban and Ariel. Lacking politics, the trend of the college environment has been toward the traditional careers in the so-called learned professions. The greatest of these, meas

ured by its attraction, the law, has held its place by adapting itself to changed conditions: it is honoured as it always was, but the lawyer labours now in the service not of princes and of governors, but to guide through pathless forests the policy of incarnate Industry. It is coming to pass that a youth looking out on life sees this and determines, if he may have the election, he would rather be the man who does things than the man who advises the man who does things, and that is the election for industry in preference to the law.

Such men are welcome in industry and when they have the qualifications for success may count on such success as is attainable in industry today. They may not expect a primrose path. The apprenticeship is long, exacting and frugal, and in the present state of public opinion with respect to corporate enterprise, diligence, like that of the Good Apprentice in Hogarth's pictures, is not rewarded by the assurance of ultimate affluence and universal respect. If they want to make a fortune these men had better turn at once to selling merchandise. They may not expect always to live and to work in the comfortable places of the earth. They must associate chiefly with men with whom they may have the largest human but small intellectual sympathy. As they rise to places of authority they may expect not only to do their duty under serious public difficulty but to have their most sincere motives misunderstood and traduced. They must be ready always to take the consequences of saying no. "Patriots," said the experienced Sir Robert Walpole, "are easily raised. I have myself raised many a one. "Tis but to refuse an unreasonable request and up springs a patriot." They must bear heavy responsibility without sympathy and realize that failure is a crime. for which good intention is seldom an acceptable excuse. They will find, as Cardinal Newman did, that men are influenced more by type of personality than by argument, however logical; that the loyalty of General Lee's army was due more to that indefinable personal attribute which makes a leader than to anything intellectual: that Southern men can be lead anywhere but are driven only by superior force. They will find that much of their work will be in an atmosphere of unreasoning prejudice. They will encounter much meanness in human nature and some injus

tice: but if they persist and hold hard to their ideals and do succeed they will know the greatest of all satisfactions, the consciousness of work well done. They will know, too, that that work has not been in the closet, has not been theoretical and indirect in its effect, but positive and part of the motive power of the age: and so, in proportion as it is sincere and enlightened and progressive, useful and noble in the highest sense. They will know that they have been producers, adding to the economic store of humanity, shaping directly the welfare of thousands of their fellow men who are struggling upward: that they have been leaders of society and not its mere servants who live by their wits upon the needs or the pleasures of the workers. They may not achieve the laurel crown of fame and write their names large on the enduring page of history, but they will have made the kinds of friends who are made only among those with whom one has shared tribulations, dangers, triumphs and escapes. They will have few illusions, but deep convictions. They will have given the world more than they have taken from it, but they will have taken and held some thing which is supreme in the heart of man. When Alexander the Great was asked what he reserved for himself, so liberal were his gifts, he said: "Hope, that is the true inheritance of all that resolve upon great enterprises.'

No one could express more convincingly the sentiment of progress, and progress is the ideal of American industry.

The place of Industry in modern life can, then, be made as honourable as it is beyond all peradventure supremely useful. It is worth the best a man can give who would serve his age and leave to his children an inspiration in his career.

RECOLLECTIONS OF JOHN L. WILLIAMS.

BY FRANCIS H. SMITH.

I thank you, Mr. Editor, for asking me to tell you something about my classmate and life-long friend, John Langbourne Williams. You have already printed an excellent biographical sketch of him, but you rightly think that a fine character, like everything else fine and great, must be looked at from more than one standpoint.

course.

My friendship for him began in the classroom sixty-six years ago. Our closest association was in a very small company, which met at night with the professor of mathematics in his private office, to study what was then called mixed mathematics, or more grandiloquently, celestial mechanics. Archdeacon Pratt wrote our text-book, but our professor added greatly to our Our limited mathematical powers were taxed to the utmost. The difficulty of the subject to us beginners, the beauty and variety of the analysis and the call upon all our mental powers, imagination, attention and reason-left no rival for it in our young minds save what we called the Senior Greek. Mr. Williams, a short time since, gave me his student note book in this class. It was deposited at his request in the revolving bookcase that bears his name, on the Library floor. In glancing over its pages, vivid memories of the happy days of student life were stirred, and increased respect for the thoroughness of our teacher. If any one looks at the book now, he will doubtless be amused to note that in after life the vacant pages of the book were devoted not to mathematical records, but to philosophic and pious meditations.

Very soon came the time for our separation, some of us to take the chair of the teacher, and he, with others, to enter upon what it is the strange fashion in school advertisements to call, "the business of life." From our academic seclusion, we watched the struggles of our friends among the billows of fortune, not with the selfish joy which Lucretius speaks of, but with sorrow for their trials and exultation for their triumphs. We saw Mr. Williams, after a severe apprenticeship, rising to