clad itself in indifference to the bugles sounding the advance. If it does this, it cannot but engender the counterirritant of pseudo-radicalism. At the root of spurious conservatism is thought decayed; at that of pseudo-radicalism thought immature. Thought to keep fresh and to ripen is the mission of the university. Its hands are on the pulse of the age. It must detect the slackened beat of senility and apply its corrective as well as the intermittent throb of fevered impatience and administer the sedative. The hand on the dial of time can neither be arrested nor quickened in its steady progress. Pernicious conservatism would fain attempt the former; destructive radicalism is bent upon the latter. The scholar's influence must be for healthy growth. All half-truths, be they dear to the conservative or moulded by the radical, it is for it pitilessly to expose.
And have we not today a surfeit of half-truths urged by both conservatives and radicals as the cure-all for all our ills, social, financial or religious? Here is the opportunity of the American university. Shall we be silent when on the one hand conservatism makes of competition a fetich and radicalism would ignore the element of human freedom? Shall no better light be had on government and its functions than that peddled about in the catchwords Paternalism or Self-government? Is conservatism not exposing for food rotten over-ripe fruit when it hucksters its insistence that government is only an umpire in a fight which is said to be between equals but which is not between equals? Is radicalism not crying out ware that is but half made when it lures us to buy its toy, no government at all, or all by government? Is the doctrine of rights so glib on tongue of conservative and radical not also a half-truth? Every right, be it of property, of labor, or of what else, is pillared upon a duty. Shall this be ignored? Who shall speak the liberating and therefore the conciliating word of the full truth, if not he who is searching for it, who knows how to discriminate between the petrifaction of a former truth outstripped in the fuller life of today, and the hot-house exotic parading as truth as though it was the naturally blown flower—and will have none of either? The university
