Page:The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University p27.jpg

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The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University.
27

the work of displaying,—of making the Museum in the future more and more, as time goes on, an active force in education. In that way we hope that it will supplement the work that is done at Harvard, and we look with the greater rejoicing upon the work which Harvard is doing now to supplement our own, in that spirit of co-operation of which I have spoken, with the desire not to run parallel lines of rivalry or of emulation, but each doing its part as best it can, each suiting its work to the work of the other, so that the two institutions may henceforth go forward as two parts of one whole.

And so it is aside from the work that we know that the Germanic Museum will do for Harvard that we welcome the more its existence with the prospects—so brilliant at present—of its rapid growth and development in the future, because it will be just another instance of that co-operation. With its superb collection of casts and reproductions now in hand and still to come, it will save us the necessity of representing Germanic—or, let me say in this case, German—art as extensively as we should otherwise have felt it necessary to do. We can refer our students now to the Germanic Museum of Harvard College, and we shall have so much of our resources to put into other fields of work where Harvard is not strong and where she may naturally look to the Museum of Fine Arts for aid in supplementing her own work.

So that I look forward with joy and with hope to the constant growth of this spirit of co-operation between the two institutions; and as we go on, in Boston, preparing larger and larger collections of works of art of all ages open to the students here, so, in Cambridge, the community will be educated to a greater appreciation of the meaning of those works of art, of the part they should play in the life of the community, and of the educational value which they have to every young man who looks toward the higher ideals of life in this country.

It is, however not of the Museum of Fine Arts that I am called upon to speak this afternoon. It is not that which is in our thoughts, but the celebration of the opening of the Germanic Museum here and what it means to the University and to the community, and I should like to say a word about that.

When Dean Stanley was in this country, he delivered an ad-