ery
generation all that it had of drudgery or of genius, it has won in _them_
its whole estate. The steel mill, the battleship, the court of justice, the
university--these and the like of them are not accidents, nor miracles of
individual invention, nor products of the vague longings and gropings of
society in general. They are each the product of a brotherhood, of
generations working to meet one social necessity, of an apostolic
succession of masters living in the service of one ideal. And so it is
these brotherhoods of labor, it is these grim brotherhoods covered with
grime and scars, that stand before you to-day inviting you to initiation.

The fact that an occupation can teach its far-brought wisdom to the men of
each generation makes civilization and progress possible. But this on one
condition, that many of the people and some of the best of them shall be
able to make that occupation their life business.

The law is not in a country when you have imported Blackstone's
Commentaries and the Statutes of Parliament. The law is in a country in the
persons of such lawyers as are there. It is there in John Marshall.

Religion is not in a country because we have built a church and furnished
it with cushions to sleep on once a week. It is there in Bishop Brooks and
Mr. Moody and the Salvation Army.

The steel business is not in Pittsburgh in an industrial museum where the
public may gad about on holidays. It is there in the men who earn their
living by knowing a little better each year how to make armor-plate.

All this ought to be a matter of course. But there are many who think that
science and art can be made to serve us at a cheaper price, that these
stern guilds will give up their secret treasures in extension lectures and
chautauqua clubs and twenty minutes a week in the public schools. History
will show, I think, that this is not true, that no art and no sort of
learning was ever vitally present among a people unless it was there as a
living occupation.

Learning has come to us in this sense only within the last quarter-century.
We were busy at other things before that. Our fathers were doing--as every
people must--what they had to do. They had to live, to establish a
government, and to maintain their fundamental faiths. They bent themselves
to these tasks with the energy of our breed. And the tasks have shaped our
national history and character. They gave us the Declaration of
Independence and the American far