“The conditions of this generation demand that we should be reminded that, beyond bodies to be clothed, and tastes to be cultivated, and wealth to be accumulated, there is in each one of us an intellect to be developed and, by means of it, truth to be discerned, which, beside all other undertakings to which the mind of man can bend itself, should forever be foremost and supreme. The gratification of our physical wants, and next to that the gratification of our personal vanity or ambition, may seem to many people at once the chief end of existence and the secret of the truest happiness. But there have been men who have neither sought nor cared for these things, who have found in learning for its own sake at once their sweetest rewards and their highest dignity. “The vocation of the scholar of our time becomes most plain. He is to take his stand and to make his protest. With a dignity and a resolution born of the greatness of his calling and his opportunity, he is to spurn that low estimate of his work and its result which measures them by what they have earned in money or can produce in dividends. Here, in his counting-room or his warehouse, sits the plutocrat who has amassed his millions, and who can forecast the fluctuations of the market with the unerring accuracy of an aneroid barometer. To such a one comes the professor from some modest seat of learning among the hills, minded to see his old classmate of other days, to grasp his hand again, and to learn, if it may be, how he fares. And the rich man looks down with a bland condescension upon the school-fellow who chose the company of his books rather than the companionship of the market-place, and as he notes, perhaps, his lean and Cassius-like outline, his seedy if not shabby garb, and his shy and rustic manner, smooths his own portly and well-clad person with complacency, and thanks his stars that he early took to trade. Poor fool! He does not perceive that his friend the professor has most accurately taken his measure, and that the clear and kindly eyes that look at him through those steel-bowed spectacles have seen with something of sadness, and something more of compassion, how the finer aspirations of earlier days have all been smothered and quenched! In an age which is impatient of any voice that will not cry, ‘Great is the god of railroads and syndicates, and greater yet are the apostles of ‘puts’ and ‘calls,’ of ‘corners’ and pools!’ we want a race of men who by their very existence shall be a standing protest against the reign of a coarse materialism and a deluge of greed and self-seeking.