allow to dominate us in fuller or lesser degree. Life is an unceasing conflict for the mastery of these lower elements of our natures. We have freedom only in proportion as we triumph. No man has freedom who cannot prevail against the passions of his nature. Unsubdued, they will drag him from one embarrassment to another, until dignity is lost and life ends in debasement and in failure. Study the Apostle Paul's repeated analyses of this problem. No man ever analyzed it better; ever more triumphantly expressed the freedom to be won. "I bring my body," he writes, "into subjection. I forget the things that are behind. I press on toward the goal of my high calling." That is freedom; freedom in its relation to self.

Above everything else that I want you to be, I want you to be victorious and free. Recall the quiet but emphatic words addressed to us a few weeks ago by Elihu Root, testifying to the stirrings produced in him by the sight of our University company because he knew that in that company there were possible leaders of great and unrevealed powers. I feel this as I look at you this morning. Leadership, eminence, gloriously sound reputation, wide fame, all of these possibilities await and attend upon this graduating body. They will not come to you, however, unless, first, you have ambition already born in you. Ambition seldom comes to men late in life. It must be born early. It must press us on and on unceasingly, never satisfied with one attainment, always keeping a distant goal before our eyes, or it cannot speed our steps fast enough and directly enough to attain fame. I hope among you today there are great ambitions. I hope you may attain these ambitions, and what I have said today in word of counsel is meant to convince you that you cannot arrive at these ambitions except as your freedom is eternally guarded and preserved.*

* Commencement Address, May 11, 1921.

THE DREDGER

LAURA BELL EVERETT

"How many toiled to death that this might be?"
So asks the thoughtful one who stands
The Pyramids beside, in olden lands,
Lands great in all except humanity;

But when, beside our rivers flowing free,
You view these pyramids of stones and sands
Piled here because the search for gold commands,
With winged words you turn to question me:

"Has Attila's horse trod here, that nevermore
Shall grass blade grow upon the riverside?
When will all they who love the land implore
That laws shall check this monster, ere it ride,
A Juggernaut, our river-country o'er
In lust of gold that in these sands may hide?”

THE "NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY"

A REJOINDER

CHAS. B. LIPMAN

It is very easy to draw erroneous conclusions from perfectly good facts, and especially from what seem to be good facts. This, in the writer's opinion, has been done in Cram's Nemesis of Mediocrity, first published in 1917 and reprinted twice in successive years. It is my purpose here to review the essay critically so that those who may wish to hear the other side of the argument can do so. Mr. Cram's thesis is intended to show that democracy is a failure and particularly in respect of the paucity in leaders which it produces. Mr. Cram does not consider the bearings of democracy in man's evolution, and as a passing phase therein, whether it show "degradation" or not, but as the cause itself of man's “degradation." He believes that the tendency of democracy is not only to produce a "dead level" in humanity, but that such a process renders impossible the development of outstanding leaders, since the levelling process not only improves the masses and raises them to a certain level, but also deteriorates the unusually good intellect and drags it down to the general level. In support of this claim, Mr. Cram cites what he regards as the general dearth of leaders "in any category of life, issuing out of any nation."

While thus Mr. Cram speaks of leaders in general, he seems to have ever before him the question of leaders

in the military and diplomatic mêlée in whose agonizing clutches we have been writhing during the past five or six years. Nevertheless, we may consider the subject as Mr. Cram intends to do, in general, as well as in the specific phase to which I have just adverted. Speaking of the situation in the early part of the war, Mr. Cram says: "Potential reputations break down and are forgotten in Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Galicia, Roumania, the Trentino, the Carso, Champagne, the Argonne; on the North Sea, in the Channel, through the Mediterranean." But can Mr. Cram cite any war in which many "potential reputations" did not break down before a great general was developed? Has he fogotten to take just a few examples of the many which might be cited from history, the campaigns of the Punic Wars, of the states allied against Napoleon, of the Hundred Years' War, and of many others, and the weary months of terror and agony that surrounded them before their great leaders began to appear on the brightening military horizon? Can he indeed cite any phase in human history in which many "potential reputations" were not required to break down in order to show emerging from their disintegrating remains the virile leaders for the task in hand? In fact, Mr. Cram admits in his postscript to the third printing of his essay that great military leaders have, at the proper moment, emerged from obscurity and saved the day, even in the greatest of our great wars whose first agonies prompted the bitter, pessimistic utterances under review. Parenthetically, one wonders, now that Mr. Cram's postscript is written, if leadership is not in his mind synonymous with success. The general lack of definition for the terms "leader" and "leadership" of which Mr. Cram's writing gives evidence, makes one wonder by what criteria he makes his judgments, and by what he establishes the right of his heroes to an appropriate niche in his "hall of fame." Reviewing Mr. Cram's list of great leaders in the Great War as

given in his postscript, I would venture the opinion that the power of a man to win in a game, no matter how friends, fortune, moral support, and other factors, besides his own ability, favor him, constitutes him a leader in Mr. Cram's interpretation of that term.

But Mr. Cram remarks (1917 and 1918), in an anticipatory vein, that fate is "whimsical" and may yet develop great military leaders in that war, "but," he adds, "there is little hope for a like mercy in statesmanship." Why? I would ask in reply to this dogmatism. In such matters nothing but experience can be followed as a safe guide to our judgments. And our experience certainly teaches us that great leaders arise in any field of human activity under the stimulus of similar forces, albeit we know not what those forces are. Not only are such leaders appearing today in the persons of Clémenceau, Lloyd George, and their colleagues, but we may lay a little flattering unction to our souls in hugging the belief that our present-day leaders are at least a whit less Machiavellian in their methods and aspirations than their predecessors. It is a curious quirk in Mr. Cram's mental or moral processes which appears to lead him to prize leadership above decency and to bemoan the nonexistence of a certain leader or leaders, no matter how Mephistophelian might be the basis of his leadership. To quote him, "noble or cynical, they were leaders, these men of a dead generation: Metternich, Cavour, Disraeli, Bismarck, Gladstone, Gambetta, Lincoln, and they have left few successors either to their glory or their infamy." Fine rhetoric that, but why shed bitter tears over the passing of leaders who with two, and possibly with only one, exception have led the world only into misery and strife by their intrigues and shady diplomacy? The world is today paying, oh! how dearly, in tears and human misery and in everything it loves for the dastardly machinations of those sombre "leaders" whose exit from the "stage" Mr. Cram mourns. The one