Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: The custom is, I fear, for the orator who addresses the graduating class to talk over the heads of those who have received their degree to the larger audience who are assembled for the academic function. Now, that I do not propose to do. What I have to say is to you. My message is meant entirely for you. Since your friends are present I have to raise my voice so that they shall hear what I have to say, but I consider that they are here only on sufferance and that I am here to say whatever I can that may mean something for you in the careers that are opening up to you. Now, I am not of those who think that the main purpose of the eld is to give advice to the young. Man is so fashioned that he wants to get his own experience for himself. It is true that "only fools learn by their own experience," wise men learn by that of others. But then we have divine warrant for saying that there used to be a goodly proportion of fools in the world and human experience agrees in our own time that not all the fools are dead yet. Our advice may not be taken in all its literalness; that would be too much to {404} expect, but it has become an academic custom to give it, in the hope that it will be a landmark, perhaps an incentive, it may be a warning, surely some time a precious memory in the time to come. Few men who ever lived were less likely to think that their advice might mean very much than dear old Bobbie Burns, to whom one of your number referred, and yet some time I hope that in some serious mood you'll read and think well on the poetic epistle of advice to his youthful friend. There are some lines at the beginning of it that have haunted me at times these many years when I have been asked to address studious youth at the commencement, as our term for the occasion so well declares, of their real education in the post-graduate courses of that University of Hard Knocks which valedictorians at this season of the year are so prone to call the cold, cold world. The Scottish ploughman bard said in the choice English he could so well assume on occasion: "I long hae tho't, my youthful friend, A something to hae sent you. Though it may serve no ither end Than as a kind memento; But how the subject theme may gang. Let time and chance determine; Perhaps it may turn out a sang Perhaps turn out a sermon." One thing is sure, whatever I shall say to you shall not be a song, though, alas! addresses {405} of advice are prone to sound like sermons. Yet the sermon, after all, in the old Latin word _sermo_ is only a discourse, and I am going to make mine as brief as possible. It shall, I hope, serve to round out some of the things that you yourselves have been saying with regard to Catholics and social works and, above all. Catholic college men in social works.