COMMENT

That method of more quickly and easily securing a higher education than would otherwise be possible, which we designate as "college", is not the inherent right of every man. It is a privilege which has been made available in our colleges by persevering effort and continuing self-sacrifice and generous benefactions, sometimes to the point of self impoverishment, on the part of numberless men, through long periods, as at Dartmouth for more than a century and a half. It is an invaluable privilege, rightfully to be claimed only by men who will cherish it and who have or will cultivate the ambition to realize the ideal for which it stands, namely that they may know the truth and do it.

If it seems a harsh saying or even inappropriate at this time to emphasize the point that not all men are entitled to the advantages of the higher education, still the importance of the fact requires the statement of it; and if any man here claims the privilege without intention of utilizing its benefits for his own intellectual advancement and for the benefit of society at large, he not only sells the patrimony. which might be his, for a mess of pottage, but he as truly denies to Dartmouth the opportunity of rendering to society the full service the college desires to render to it.

President Hopkins of Dartmouth as quoted in "The Dartmouth."