Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace AssociationIntercollegiate Peace Association
History
Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association
Intercollegiate Peace Association
Peace; War
This appeal to the idealism of youth is founded upon the psychological
fact that it is the ideals of life that determine the conduct of life.
It is ideals that rule the world; hence the importance of right ideals
based upon a comprehensive understanding of the real nature and
deepest implications of human fellowship. The alleged impracticability
is not in the ideal but in the difficulty of making the ideal such a
dominant part of our being that it shall consistently direct our
activities under every circumstance. One of the essential conditions
of human progress is the conviction that such ideals are vital to the
highest attainments and that these should be the aim of all our
strivings. Unfortunately such a standard of life is far from being
realized. Policy rules largely in the world of practical life; either
high ideals are considered impracticable, or there is no attempt to
enforce consistency between belief and practice.
Mindful of the further fact that the ideals and habits of thought and
action that prevail in mature life are those that are formed in youth,
the Intercollegiate Peace Association turns to the young manhood of
the undergraduate for its field of operations. The aim is to give such
a firm mold to the ideals of the undergraduate that they shall for all
time shape his activities to the end of righteous conduct in all
international dealings. In particular, the aim is to cultivate in the
young men of our colleges and universities such sentiments and
standards of conduct as will insure their devotion to the furtherance
of international peace through arbitration and other methods of
pacific settlement rather than by battleships--standards of conduct
based upon the fundamental truth that conflicts between men, and
therefore principles of right and justice, can be rightly settled only
through the mediation of mind, and that every effort to settle them by
force is not only illogical, a psychological impossibility, but is the
way of the brute, not the way of man, whose nature touches the divine.
All the more important must this work with the undergraduate be
considered when we reflect that it is the young men in our colleges
and universities to-day who will mold the public opinion and the
national and international policy of the next generation; for it is
such young men as these that will control the pulpit and the press,
the legislation and the diplomacy of the future. It is this fact that
gives such peculiar importance to the work of the Intercollegiate
Peace Association. To quote from the report of the secretary for 1912:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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