Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/250

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  • rior privileges, impart to others; if you have an

insight into principles of conduct, stand for them; if you have a trained eye and a deft hand, use your skill. Externalize the powers of your being; find outward expression for your inward thought.

Thank God for a courageous man, a true Anglo-Saxon man, a man whose convictions are deeply rooted, and who guards them as his very life. Heroes, philanthropists, and martyrs are his exemplars. He has a work to do, and he enters upon it as his fathers battled for the right. The sensualist, the dreamer, and the fatalist lie supine, are lulled by the summer breeze, and gaze upon the drifting panorama of clouds with playful imagination. The man of duty marches forth and takes the fixed stars for his guide.

The educated young man of to-day has every reason to thank the stars under which he was born. Behind him is the teaching of the civilized world—the poetry and art of Greece, the laws and institutions of Rome, the growth of Christianity, the Mediæval commingling of forces and evolution of rare products, the Renaissance, the religious and political emancipation, invention, science, art, poetry, and philosophy. Behind him is the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, its courage and deeds of valor, its profound earnestness, its stern ideals. Behind him is Puritan New England and liberty. Around him lies the new land of promise with its natural blessings of air, sun, mountains, and plains, with its mineral wealth and industrial possibility, with its people of pride, energy, intelligence, and high enthusiasm. Before him lie the development of a great and unique civilization, a wonder of material prog-