Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/399



"Who breaks his birth's invidious bar And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star. Who makes by force his merit known And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mould a raiffhty state's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne : And moving up from higher to higher, Becomes on fortune's crowning slope The pillar of a people's hope, The centre of a World's desire."

Whatever be your occupation, you will find in it ample scope for all your energies. Your honest endeavour to master it and everything connected with it will open out for you a field of knowledge which is literally boundless. While thus aiming at complete mastery over the one thing which is to be your chief work in life, you should also endeavour to counteract the prejudicial influence of a narrow line of thought by acquiring a sound general knowledge of the leading subjects of human interest. "A man of the highest education knows something of every thing and every thing of something." It is by this combination alone that you can hope to become trustworthy leaders of public opinion in the great questions with which your generation will have to deal, or produce anything really great in any department of human thought. It is thus that great statesmen, great poets and great philosophers have attained their eminence.

In a University like ours, whose characteristic feature is its system of examinations, there is a danger, which such of you as adopt the profession of teaching should guard against, of subordinating learning to education. The teacher naturally directs every effort to secure the success of his pupils at the University examinations, and in training them for their battle with the examiner is in danger of sacrificing high learning and original research, and of leading the student to regard success in an examination as the chief aim of study. You will endeavour to correct these tendencies, to lead the student to value culture for its own sake as well as for what it brings, to despise mere position in University lists in comparison with his higher interests, and to look beyond the glittering and evanescent honours of a College, career to the requirements of after-life.

When the higher education is still in its infancy, we can scarcely look among you for the highest learning or for original research. But when your ranks are numbered by thousands, instead of hundreds,