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called the Southern conservatism in respect to beliefs and certain social
problems, may have a very important part to play in the development of
the life of the Republic.

I shall not be misunderstood here, where the claims of the higher life
are insisted on and the necessity of pure, accurate scholarship is
recognized, in saying that this expectation in regard to the South
depends upon the cultivation and diffusion of the highest scholarship in
all its historic consciousness and critical precision. This sort of
scholarship, of widely apprehending intellectual activity, keeping step
with modern ideas so far as they are historically grounded, is of the
first importance. Everywhere indeed, in our industrial age,--in a society
inclined to materialism, scholarship, pure and simple scholarship for its
own sake, no less in Ohio than in Tennessee, is the thing to be insisted
on. If I may refer to an institution, which used to be midway between the
North and the South, and which I may speak of without suspicion of bias,
an institution where the studies of metaphysics, the philosophy of
history, the classics and pure science are as much insisted on as the
study of applied sciences, the College of New Jersey at Princeton, the
question in regard to a candidate for a professorship or instructorship,
is not whether he was born North or South, whether he served in one army
or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or a
Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to, but is he a scholar
and has he a high character? There is no provincialism in scholarship.

We are not now considering the matter of the agreeableness of one society
or another, whether life is on the whole pleasanter in certain conditions
at the North or at the South, whether there is not a charm sometimes in
isolation and even in provincialism. It is a fair question to ask, what
effect upon individual lives and character is produced by an industrial
and commercial spirit, and by one less restless and more domestic. But
the South is now face to face with certain problems which relate her,
inevitably, to the moving forces of the world. One of these is the
development of her natural resources and the change and diversity of her
industries. On the industrial side there is pressing need of institutions
of technology, of schools of applied science, for the diffusion of
technical information and skill in regard to mining and manufacturing,
and