Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Diversities of American Life by Charles Dudley Warner
page 20 of 21 (95%)
able to teach what the mass most needs to know--what the race needs for
its own good today, are industrial and manual training schools, with the
varied and practical discipline and arts of life which they impart.

What then? What of the 'modus vivendi' of the two races occupying the
same soil? As I said before, I do not know. Providence works slowly. Time
and patience only solve such enigmas. The impossible is not expected of
man, only that he shall do today the duty nearest to him. It is easy, you
say, for an outsider to preach waiting, patience, forbearance, sympathy,
helpfulness. Well, these are the important lessons we get out of history.
We struggle, and fume, and fret, and accomplish little in our brief hour,
but somehow the world gets on. Fortunately for us, we cannot do today the
work of tomorrow. All the gospel in the world can be boiled down into a
single precept. Do right now. I have observed that the boy who starts in
the morning with a determination to behave himself till bedtime, usually
gets through the day without a thrashing.

But of one thing I am sure. In the rush of industries, in the race
problem, it is more and more incumbent upon such institutions as the
University of the South to maintain the highest standard of pure
scholarship, to increase the number of men and women devoted to the
intellectual life. Long ago, in the middle of the seventeenth century,
John Ward of Stratford-on-Avon, clergyman and physician, wrote in his
diary: "The wealth of a nation depends upon its populousness, and its
populousness depends upon the liberty of conscience that is granted to
it, for this calls in strangers and promotes trading." Great is the
attraction of a benign climate and of a fruitful soil, but a greater
attraction is an intelligent people, that values the best things in life,
a society hospitable, companionable, instinct with intellectual life,
awake to the great ideas that make life interesting.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge