WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME?

By Charles Dudley Warner

Delivered before the Alumni of Hamilton College, Clinton, N. Y.,
Wednesday, June 26, 1872

Twenty-one years ago in this house I heard a voice calling me to ascend
the platform, and there to stand and deliver. The voice was the voice of
President North; the language was an excellent imitation of that used by
Cicero and Julius Caesar. I remember the flattering invitation--it is the
classic tag that clings to the graduate long after he has forgotten the
gender of the nouns that end in 'um--orator proximus', the grateful voice
said, 'ascendat, videlicet,' and so forth. To be proclaimed an orator,
and an ascending orator, in such a sonorous tongue, in the face of a
world waiting for orators, stirred one's blood like the herald's trumpet
when the lists are thrown open. Alas! for most of us, who crowded so
eagerly into the arena, it was the last appearance as orators on any
stage.

The facility of the world for swallowing up orators, and company after
company of educated young men, has been remarked. But it is almost
incredible to me now that the class of 1851, with its classic sympathies
and its many revolutionary ideas, disappeared in the flood of the world
so soon and so silently, causing scarcely a ripple in the smoothly
flowing stream. I suppose the phenomenon has been repeated for twenty
years. Do the young gentlemen at Hamilton, I wonder, still carry on their
ordinary conversation in the Latin tongue, and their familiar vacation
correspondence in the language of Aristophanes? I hope so. I hope they
are more proficient in such exercises than the young gentlemen of twenty