something new and strange--I do not mean the conservatism that refuses to
try anything simply because it is new, and prefers to energetic life the
stagnation that inevitably leads to decay. Isolation from the great
historic stream of thought and agitation is stagnation. While this is
true, and always has been true in history, it is also true, in regard to
the beneficent diversity of American life, which is composed of so many
elements and forces, as I have often thought and said, that what has been
called the Southern conservatism in respect to beliefs and certain social
problems, may have a very important part to play in the development of
the life of the Republic.

I shall not be misunderstood here, where the claims of the higher life
are insisted on and the necessity of pure, accurate scholarship is
recognized, in saying that this expectation in regard to the South
depends upon the cultivation and diffusion of the highest scholarship in
all its historic consciousness and critical precision. This sort of
scholarship, of widely apprehending intellectual activity, keeping step
with modern ideas so far as they are historically grounded, is of the
first importance. Everywhere indeed, in our industrial age,--in a society
inclined to materialism, scholarship, pure and simple scholarship for its
own sake, no less in Ohio than in Tennessee, is the thing to be insisted
on. If I may refer to an institution, which used to be midway between the
North and the South, and which I may speak of without suspicion of bias,
an institution where the studies of metaphysics, the philosophy of
history, the classics and pure science are as much insisted on as the
study of applied sciences, the College of New Jersey at Princeton, the
question in regard to a candidate for a professorship or instructorship,
is not whether he was born North or South, whether he served in one army
or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or a
Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to, but is he a scholar