TO THE CLASS OF '14

Men here at college have a goal ahead, a moment so far in the future that it is hard to imagine,--twenty-fifth reunion. They wonder who they will be, what they will have done, what their class-mates will be like. They feel that that moment, those few days when they will gather here again, will show them the substance of which their class is made. Today, class of 1914, that moment is yours. Men here now can only hope that they will see in themselves twenty-five years hence the strength they see in you.

You have men of distinction within your ranks, ten or fifteen who have risen high. You have a right to be proud of them. But you have a better right to be proud of the larger body of your class who, without any claim to fame or fortune, have faced and fought through two of the greatest national crises in America's history. Those men, dragged from their first jobs into a mass murder three thousand miles away, brought back to meet a hysterical nation who thought its future was its bankroll, forced to sit helplessly by and watch their financial underpinnings swept away, of those men who are now trying to restore and rebuild, each in his own way, you can be proud.

Your courage to face an erratic world will give us courage to face a world which may be worse.