am going to
respond to the chairman's call by speaking exactly as I feel.

I am not an alumnus of the College. I have not even a degree from the
Scientific School, in which I did some study forty years ago. I have
no right to vote for Overseers, and I have never felt until to-day as
if I were a child of the house of Harvard in the fullest sense.
Harvard is many things in one--a school, a forcing house for thought,
and also a social club; and the club aspect is so strong, the family
tie so close and subtle among our Bachelors of Arts that all of us here
who are in my plight, no matter how long we may have lived here, always
feel a little like outsiders on Commencement day. We have no class to
walk with, and we often stay away from the procession. It may be
foolish, but it is a fact. I don't believe that my dear friends
Shaler, Hollis, Lanman, or Royce ever have felt quite as happy or as
much at home as my friend Barrett Wendell feels upon a day like this.

I wish to use my present privilege to say a word for these outsiders
with whom I belong. Many years ago there was one of them from Canada
here--a man with a high-pitched voice, who could n't fully agree with
all the points of my philosophy. At a lecture one day, when I was in
the full flood of my eloquence, his voice rose above mine, exclaiming:
"But, doctor, doctor! to be serious for a moment . . . ," in so sincere
a tone that the whole room burst out laughing. I want you now to be
serious for a moment while I say my little say. We are glorifying
ourselves to-day, and whenever the name of Harvard is emphatically
uttered on such days, frantic cheers go up. There are days for
affection, when pure sentiment and loyalty come rightly to the fore.
But behind our mere animal feeling for old schoolmates and the Yard and
the bell, and Memorial and the clubs and the river and the Soldiers'
Field, there must be something deeper and more rational. There ought
at any rate to be some possible ground in reason for one's boiling over
with joy that one is a son of Harvard, and was not, by some unspeakably
horrible accident of birth, predestined to graduate at Yale or at
Cornell.

Any college can foster club loyalty of that sort. The only rational
ground for pre-eminent admiration of any single college would be its
pre-eminent spiritual tone. But to be a college man in the mere
clubhouse sense--I care not of what college--affords no guarantee of
real superiority in spi