teachers face. It knows how great is their responsibility. But if you ask, "To whom are they responsible?" it will not say, "To me." Out of its Out of its own experience in like relations it knows better than that.

us.

Are we responsible to our alumni? No. Rather are they responsible to We have spent ourselves in trying to reveal to them the way of highminded, intelligent living. Through us, in some measure, they have had the best of life's opportunities. We have a right to an accounting of what they have done with it. That accounting would reveal the success or failure of our work. If graduates are uneducated, then we are nothing.

But in many external ways the American college has confused its graduates. Not only has it asked for help; it has also sought for favor. Often, and in many ways quite unworthy of itself, it has appealed to selfish and silly loyalties, to provincial and stupid prejudices. And for this "we" have had to pay. We who are in charge of learning have often craved the favor of men who do not care for learning, and the result is that at times the strain of labor under the hostile scrutiny of thousands of angry, uncomprehending eyes becomes almost unbearable.

But, on the other hand, let it be said that, in terms of its possibilities, the relation of the graduate to his college is one of the finest things in our American social life. It can take up and gather together thousands of men into a common devotion to things high and fine as no other institutional relationship can dream of doing. It may become, and I think is more and more tending to become, a genuine community of learned living. In

that community the alumni will not hold us responsible to them. Rather, in the attempt at mutual understanding and coöperation they will give to us the help which they have to give, and we will share with them the responsibility which is ours to share.

Are we responsible to trustees? Legally we are; in more essential ways we are not. Legally, the trustees are the chartered body, possessed of all the rights which the commonwealth bestows. bestows. Legally, “we” are the servants of the trustees; we are engaged by them and paid by them; we may be dismissed by them, and in matters of policy and procedure we may be overruled by them. And yet this legal relationship is a superficial one. A college in which teachers were "dismissed" would be a sorry thing. A college in which faculty and president were overruled on academic issues would be something other than an institution of learning.

And here it is well to remember that the granting of rights to boards of trustees as we now have them rests upon a historical confusion. The men first commissioned by states to establish universities and to care for learning were groups of scholars, and the rights and duties assigned to them were the rights and duties of scholarship. Only gradually has there grown up behind these the second group the board of property-holders and business managers. Legally, the powers formerly granted to scholars belong now to the "legal" board. But essentially they do not. If boards of trustees, as we now have them, were to claim in actual fact and procedure the rights and privileges granted to those in charge of scholarship, it would be inevitable that such boards

should be abolished. In an age of material growth those boards have an exceedingly important secondary task to do; but the trustees who understand their task know that it is secondary rather than primary. They know that scholarship may never be made subservient to the material forces by which it is sustained.

If it should happen, as sometimes it has happened, that scholars are summoned before boards of trustees to give account of their study and teaching, then the time for revolt would have come. "We" are not in that sense responsible to trustees. Whatever their individual qualifications, trustees are not, as such, scholars. They have not the right, nor do those among them who understand claim the right, to pass upon matters of scholarship. In the last resort their task is to see to it that education is placed in the charge of men who are competent to manage it and who are therefore not responsible to them. To be a good trustee requires a high degree of imagination, a stalwart confidence in the ability of learning to care for itself. He is a wise trustee who does not take his work too solemnly.

But are we not responsible to the state? It gives us legal being and authority. May it, then, judge our work? Certainly not in any except a very narrow sense. The state makes us and it may destroy us; but if it makes us at all, it must make us free. No state is safe, either for itself or for its people, unless its basic principles as well as its customary procedure are open to the free and unhindered criticism of its citizens. And in this sense our scholars and teachers are foremost in the work of critical understanding. Every free people knows that its

state is an instrument of its will which must be constantly studied and examined, which must be kept true and made ever more true to the purpose which it serves. It follows that no free people will allow its state to restrain its scholars and teachers.

§ 3

In the first of our second group of answers we find the academic teacher at his worst. In it his mind and his disposition both seem at times to suffer collapse. It is the answer of stark and blatant individualism.

In the mind there is a bad argument. It says, "Since I am not responsible to student or parent, to church or donor, to public or graduate, to trustee or state, then I am responsible to no one outside myself; I am responsible to myself alone.” It is a bad argument for two reasons. First, it may be that our list is not complete; there may be other objects which have claim to our regard. But, second, even if there were not, the conclusion would not follow. The phrase "responsible to myself" is a very bad phrase. Responsibility is an external relation. If there is no one or nothing outside myself to which I can be responsible, then the term responsibility does not apply to me. If I am responsible, then there is something other than myself to which I acknowledge, or ought to acknowledge, my responsibility. In the ordinary use of terms I cannot be responsible to myself.

And in the realm of the disposition the situation is even worse. Here men sometimes swagger and are defiant. They challenge you to show them any one to whose judgment they must conform. They are hard and

even un

opinionated, sometimes pleasant and objectionable in insistence on their rights and liberties. Now and then you find one who is much more interested in the freedom and ultimacy of his own thinking than in the corresponding rights of other men. These men speak of being captains of their souls and masters of their fates. Such teachers and scholars are not helpful in present day American life. We have, without such teaching, quite enough of the aggressiveness and self-assertiveness of a partly educated, externally successful people. It ill becomes our scholars to insist upon their own selfsufficiency. Scholars as well as other men do owe allegiance; they are responsible. And the question still remains to puzzle us, To whom are they responsible?

There are, I think, two relationships in which the scholar feels and acknowledges responsibility. The first and lesser of these is the relation to other teachers and scholars, to other seekers after the truth. The second and greater responsibility is that which "we" feel and acknowledge toward the truth itself. In these two, so far as an answer to our question is possible at all, the answer will, I think, be found.

The lesser responsibility is immediate and certain. Every scholar has regard for the judgment of other scholars. There is a fellowship of learning in which all alike are enrolled, an enterprise of learning in which all are engaged. And in this enterprise each worker is responsible to his fellowworkers. What he may do depends upon what they have done. Upon what he does they try to build. And as they build, sooner or later they

find him out. If his work is straight and true, it stands their test; if it is weak and false, they put him aside as one who has failed them in the common task. Within the fellowship of scholars each scholar is responsible.

But the second responsibility, though more remote, is still more urgent and compelling. As against the truth which scholars have there is the truth for which they strive, which never is achieved. It is in terms of this that final judgment must be given. In terms of this each man must wait assessment of his work, the measuring of the value of the thinking he has done. What have you done for truth? for knowledge? is the major question. Here is, I think, our real responsibility.

But is this truth a something other than ourselves, a something apart to which we may acknowledge our responsibility? I think it is. I think that thinking means that somehow in the very nature of the world itself there is a meaning which we seek, a meaning which is there whether we find it there or not. That meaning is the final standard of our work, the measure of all we do or hope to do or fail to do. To it we are responsible.

This meaning, which we do not fully know as yet, which we can never fully know, is not an easy thing to talk about. Just so the beauty which men have not seen, but yearn to see, the goodness which no man can reach, but which mankind must ever strive to gain, the end toward which he makes his way-these final ends elude our grasp. And yet they are in some sense real; they are outside ourselves; and being real and being what they are, they are our masters. To them we owe allegiance. To what

they are we pay regard. In them we seek right judgment of ourselves. To them we are responsible.

$4

Through all this paper there has run, I fear, a certain seeming arrogance. Has it been assumed that "we" are not as other men are? Are Are scholars a special class free from the bonds which bind the common run of men? Are we peculiar? Do faculty and president really differ from the guardian of the corner of the street? No and yes.

Scholars and other artists are favored of fate. They are the fortunate ones of human circumstance in that they work with love of what they do. Over against them are the artisans whose work is done not for itself, but for the sake of pay or something else external to the work itself. And out of these two groups there come two different kinds, two different measures of responsibility.

But we have made the line too sharp. All men are artists in some region of their living-the regions where they really live. Life is essentially an art. Policeman or professor, all men are doing acts for which they are not paid, for which no pay is possible. Men smile or frown, have faith and courage or fail to have them, love fineness, order, meaning, fitness, reverence, friendliness, fairness, or fail to value them. And in this world of things we care about, policemen and scholars are alike in their responsibilities. Each feels a sense of kinship with the other men who share his values, a sense of the necessity of "playing the game" with them. And all together are alike submissive to

the world whose values master them,

the world they serve. the world they serve. For every man this is the field of conscience, of freedom, of worship, of final values.

But with respect to work, men fall apart, as we have said. For most of us work is for pay. And if the pay were stopped, the work would stop as well. To workers in this field some one has said, "If you will do this thing you do not wish to do, then I will give you something which you want." So is a bargain made. And when this offer is accepted, one takes responsibility in a special sense. One has agreed that, for a consideration, he will do the will of some one else. It is agreed that he who gives the pay shall say what he wants done and how it shall be done, and we who take the hire must give regard to what he says. The bargain is that we shall be, so long as we are in it, responsible to him who pays the wages.

But, with respect to work, scholars and other artists are a special, fortunate class. They work, but no one tells them how it must be done. Even in their work they have the greatest blessing which a man can have freedom to do the thing that seems to him worth doing. And they must be responsible not to the men who pay them, but only to the causes they choose and to the men who work beside them. Their work and worship coincide.

To be a scholar or an artist is to work directly for the things you care about. Such men do not escape responsibility; rather they welcome it and will not give it up. Their duty is to care about the things for which they work-and, if a conflict comes to care for nothing else.

with all the good things, bad things, and silly things that have happened to me in my fifty wonderful years, I thought memoirs ought to be locked in a box, a Pandora's box, labeled "Do not open." Despite my pleasure in books like Lord Frederick Hamilton's "Vanished Pomps of Yesterday" and Dr. Rainsford's recollections of St. George's Parish, many of the rows of volumes labeled autobiography and memoirs seemed to me monuments to human self-indulgence and vanity. Such folly would never be mine. Then I began remembering "like anything," as the children say, and then I began to tinker with the idea of writing a note-book out for my grandchildren, little Bordie and Howland Russell. Now that the old house I lived in at 615 Fifth Avenue has been torn down, and the great steel bones of a sky-scraper rest in the cavern that used to be my Grandfather Jaffray's cellar, there must be some way, if it is only with pencil and paper, to give the children a share of the old, old New York and the castle that was an Englishman's home when "Grannie" was a little girl. You can see how easily I was lost: the children were just my excuses. I have n't the least illusion

that makes me write down what I think about things. It's much more that I have been happy, and sometimes I think people would rather hear about happiness than cleverness. I am no writer, and all sorts of people will say I did n't really understand everything that happened to me; but I think nobody can deny that I have always had through sheer luck what T, a lifelong friend, calls a "box-seat at the America of my times."

The first thing I remember at all is a sort of box-seat. My mother was holding me up at a window in Brighton, England, so that I could see the Tenth Hussars, giddy in their blue coats, riding coats, riding by in by in the street below. I beat my hands against the cold window-pane and danced on the air. "The Campbells are coming, hooray! hooray! The Campbells are coming, hooray! hooray!" Even today I get the most marvelous tinkle and tingle down my spine when I hear that tune, and enough memories to make a durbar romp by in my mindTenth Hussars at Brighton, parades in Egypt, in Bermuda, in London, General Pershing leading the American troops under the Arc d'Triomphe in Paris, banquets and celebrations num