Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace AssociationIntercollegiate Peace Association
History
Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association
Intercollegiate Peace Association
Peace; War
The cost of maintaining these battleships during the fiscal year of
1910, though many were in commission but a small part of the year,
amounted to no less than $33,000,000. The amount which all the
colleges and universities in this country received in tuition fees in
1911 was only $20,000,000; and the entire income received both from
fees and productive funds was only about $34,000,000. In other words,
when one takes into account the depreciation of the battleship or
armored cruiser, the entire cost of the thirty-eight battleships for a
single year is greater than the administration of the entire American
system of higher education.
Is it not painfully manifest that the cost of war constitutes a mighty
argument for the economic mind of the student?
Moreover, I am inclined to believe that the very difficulties
belonging to the triumph of our great cause constitute ground for its
closer relationship to the college man. The college man wishes, as
well as needs, a hard job. The easy task, the rosy opportunity, makes
no appeal. He is like Garibaldi's soldiers, who, when the choice was
once offered them by the commander to surrender to ease and safety,
chose hardship and peril. The Boxer revolution in China was followed
by hundreds of applications from college men and women to be sent
forth to China to take the place of the martyrs. The difficulties in
the progress of the great cause are of every sort and condition.
Industrial narrowness and commercial greed, military and political
ambitions, sectional zeal, national jealousy, the sensitiveness of
each nation in matters of national honor, the glamour of the good and
the beautiful under the sentiment of patriotism, the historic honor
attending death for one's country, the ease of creating war scares
among the people, the looseness of the organization of the higher
forces of the world--all these conditions and more pile up into a
Pelion on Ossa as a part of the difficulties standing in the progress
of our great movement. But such difficulties inspire rather than
deter. The student says, "I will; therefore I can." He also says, "I
can; therefore I will." He knows that the forces fighting for him are
more than those that fight against him, strong as these are. Man in
his noblest relationships, the songs of the poet (the best
interpreter, from Homer and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred
Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision
of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of
logic--all these and more are to him inspirations, and strengthen him
in his great quest. He is a knight of the Holy Grail that is filled
from the river of the water of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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