Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/256

 student in Medicine, and still less perhaps with his fellow-under-graduates in Engineering. In each department knowledge is pursued as if the others had no existence, and thus one of the great liberalizing influences of University life is absent. It is this which should distinguish University culture from mere professional training, and this we have not in any true sense as a constant element in the influence of the University. Is there not wanting something in our organization which would help to unite the lives of all our undergraduates by some bond of common responsibility and common interest? On an occasion like the present we realize for a brief season something of what this fellow-ship means, and the University has for its students something of the influence of a felt reality. But how to make this influence a continuous influence in the life of our graduates and undergraduates, how to develop that sense of responsibility which attaches to membership in such an intellectual communion, is a problem to which as a University we have yet to address ourselves. I do not believe that we shall ever be able to reap the best fruits of a University culture until this consciousness of organic union has been established, and all are made to feel that they have an interest wider than that of their individual College, wider than that of the Faculty under which they are enrolled. I need not tell you how potent for good is the working of a sympathy thus widened and elevated, and how especially important in this land, unhappily too familiar with separation, is everything which tends to unite and harmonize. Without propounding any plan I place this subject before you in the hope that the consciousness of our need once truly awakened may lead to some earnest effort to supply it; nor with a rising culture, with well chosen and well-sifted materials to work upon, is it too much to expect that this hope will be in some measure realized. But the realization of the hope and of all the hopes which have been breached on your behalf from this chair will depend on the degree in which you, the graduates and undergraduates of this University, realize the responsibilities of the favoured position in which you stand. To some of you this occasion re-awakens the memory of the intellectual struggles of a bygone day; others we have just welcomed to their well-won honours, while yet others of you as you look forward along the course on which you have entered, feel your aspiration quickened by their example and achievement. On all of you, as representing the educated men and women of Western India, let me press the thought which is uppermost in my own heart to-day, of the high tasks, the solemn responsibilities which are laid upon you. The new birth of a nation cannot be accomplished without sacrifice and suffering,