at better former
day was a day of small communities and of uneasy locomotion, when public
opinion acted more directly and more sharply, was brought to bear more
convincingly upon the individual than is possible now. But grant that
though the dread of what is said and thought be but a poor substitute
and makeshift for conscience,--that austere and sleepless safeguard of
character, which, if not an instinct, acquires all the attributes of an
instinct, and whose repeated warnings make duty at least an unconscious
habitude,--after all, this outside substitute is the strongest motive
for well-doing in the majority of our race, and men of thought and
culture should waste no opportunity to reinforce it by frankness in
speaking out invidious truths, by reproof and by warning. I, for one,
greatly doubt whether our national standard of right and wrong has been
really so much debased as we are sometimes tempted to think [applause];
and whether the soft money of a sentimental sort of promises to pay has
altogether driven out the sterling coin of upright purpose and
self-denying fulfilment. [Applause.] I could wish that this belief,
almost, provided it did not mislead us into prophesying smooth things,
were more general among our cultivated class; for the very acceptance of
such a belief tends in large measure toward its accomplishment. No finer
sentence has come down to us from antiquity, no higher witness was ever
borne to the quality of a nation, than in that signal of Nelson's:
"England expects every man to do his duty." [Applause.]

Brethren, I thought on this occasion of the centennial celebration of
our independence it was fit that some expression should go forth from us
that should in some measure give contradiction to the impression that
the graduates of Harvard College take a pessimistic view of their
country and its institutions. [Applause.] Certainly I know that it is
not true, and I wish to have that sentiment expressed here. Our college
takes no official part in celebrating the nation's first completed
century; she who is already half-way through her third has become too
grave for these youthful elations. [Laughter.] But she does not forget
that in Samuel and John Adams, Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and John
Hancock, she did her full share toward making such a commemoration
possible. [Applause.] As in 1776, so in 1876, we have sent John Adams to
represent us at Philadelphia, and, perhaps with some prescience of what
the n