letter of the civil service laws, and he will respect, so far as practicable, the opinions of all concerned about the character and competency of public service. You will have the approval of all appointments. You will also have joint control with the Commissioner over the organization of divisions in the Education Department, and in the classifying and assignment of work. So you will exercise a large measure of control over the integrity, the responsiveness, and potentiality of the Department. But whatever you do you will do as a Board. The present members of the Board have never shown any disposition to do things which a Board as such. can not or should not do, and it is to be hoped that all future members will be guided by your excellent example. Administrative freedom is just as vital as legislative freedom, or judicial freedom, or teaching freedom, or any other kind of freedom. Within his sphere the Commissioner of Education is to be just as free as you are in yours, or as the Governor of the state is in his.

It is so not only because it is good policy that it should be so, but because the law arranges that it shall be so. The office which you have filled today finds its standing and its attributes in the law. Its beginnings go back an hundred years to a time when no other state thought of such an office. Long years ago it was made a judicial office. It construes the school laws and determines what acts are within or without the laws. Its determinations of such matters can not be called in question in the courts or in any other place. But as the Legislature may amend the laws so as to avoid or change the construction which the Commissioner might put upon them, so the Board of Regents may do the same as to all acts over which its legislative authority extends. Wholly apart from this, the office inherited much in the way of usage and tradition from its predecessors, the office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and that of Secretary of the Board of Regents. I fondly hope that in the last six years it has grown greater than either or both of those were. But it is far from its maximum of influence and its possibilities of accomplishment. There are no upper limits in such work as

ours.

I used to hear it said in Illinois, and I have heard it suggested here, that the Board might think differently in some ways about the standing and the independence of the executive office if satisfied that the present incumbent would live forever, or if it could be known what kind of a successor there would be. That is complimentary but unconvincing. The office of Commissioner of Educa

tion in New York is a great office, the office of greatest educational possibilities in the United States. Not at the expense of any man; not by the diminution of any other office; only by making it useful and influential, I am going to make it just as much greater as I can. That is to be done not by any self-aggrandizement, not by trying to make it a stepping-stone to something else, not by limiting and harassing other people, but by making the most of every other office, and by getting the most out of every individual in any way related to it. It is to be done by uplifting the Board of Regents; by giving the utmost freedom to each Assistant Commissioner, each Director, each Chief of Division, every worker in the Department no matter how high or how humble his station; and by rendering every possible service to every organization and every person in the state who has any interest about self-culture or any concern about general welfare.

You have the filling of this office. You have the shaping of the policies it is to follow. You have ample power to keep it from mistakes. That is enough. I am not to limit the growth of this office because of the possibility of your making a mistake when you elect another Commissioner of Education. The time might come when there would be even as much trouble about getting the right Regents, as the right Commissioner. The law provides that the Commissioner "may be elected without regard to the place of his residence, whether it be within or without the State of New York." I am proud to recall that that was put in so that I might be elected. It may possibly be of interest to you again. It is not likely that you will have to go outside of New York, but if there is need you may. You may go wherever you will in all the broad world. It implies the presumption of which I am not guilty, or the indifference with which you have never been charged, to doubt that you will find a greater man when the occasion comes. And whether there be comfort in it or not, I tell you that I am going to make the task just as difficult for you as I can. If I can raise the office of Commissioner of Education to a plane where the people will expect much of you, and will give you trouble if you do not search far and exercise soundly the free discretion which you have, when it is to be filled again, then one of the great ambitions of my life will have been attained.

We have a finely organized, even a unique, system of public education in New York. It is firmly established in the history, the expectations, the confidence, and the law of the state. It has great

possibilities. We have proved that we can work together to develop the possibilities of good rather than of evil that are in this system. We will go on working together. We have now passed the trial stages of this movement. We will go on with confidence and courage, without too much sentiment and without hesitation. We will have as little foolishness as possible, and there are too many of us to have any foolishness much prolonged. Of course, there will be mishaps and mistakes now and then, but we will try to accomplish so much that the mistakes will not be very conspicuous. We will help one another in leading all men and women in the state, and in all the states, to believe that the New York Education Department is without a peer. We will try to compel all men to see that the New York system of education holds out the equal chance to every one in the state, and also lifts the plane of intelligence and enlarges the free intellectual power of the mass, above any other system of education in the world.

THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE

President Thring, Gentlemen of the Board of Trustees, Ladies and Gentlemen, and, more particularly, you, Young Men and Women of the Class of 1910: This is a radiant scene. It is a scene which is almost peculiar to this country. There is no more fascinating spectacle than a college class on a Commencement morning in June, waiting for the degrees which they have earned in an American university. You have come from every walk in life; you are young and in ruddy health; you have minds that are keen and have been somewhat trained in one of the great schools of the land; you have hearts that are both sympathetic and courageous; you have ambitions that have been a little seasoned by rebuffs and are yet wholly undaunted; you are ready for work and looking for achievement. Therefore you arouse the interest and challenge the admiration of the world.

What is said to you, or about you, is not empty compliment. It may be impulsive, but it comes from substantial impulses. It is sincere. It flows from feelings which you will understand some day better than now. There is no one against you. All the world wishes you well. The full, free, open chance of American youth is yours. Good wishes and genuine hopes, quite as much as plaudits and presents and congratulations, are yours today.

But the world will not carry you upon its hands for long. You will have to assume the responsibilities of your own characters. You will have to make your own places. Your characters will have to advance against resistance: they will have to withstand assaults without much snivelling or wabbling. If they are of the kind that can do that, the places which you will make for yourselves will be both respectable and secure.

As you go down out of this Commencement hall you will turn your faces to a busy world; one that throbs with energy and spirit, in which the prizes are many and the competitions sharp; one in which the accidents do not count as much as some people think; one in which the trained, and seasoned, and genuine, and balanced, men and women will make the largest places and gather the most fruits. Your relatives and friends, certainly those who have had a part in your training, have little disposition to urge unwelcome preachments upon you, but they can not help wondering what the world contains for you.

Address at the commencement exercises of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, June 16, 1910.

The world sets up different standards of success, but by no one of them will you succeed in equal measure. A generation from now you will be at the full of mature development, and then you will be upon very different planes. No one can tell now which of you will be in the lead. Some of you will exert a greater influence and gain a richer share of the world's respect and rewards than others. Some of you will make more of life for yourselves and for all about you than others will, but we know that no one can now tell which of your number they will be.

My thought for you today is that God has created the world in equipoise, and that that life will become the richest, will reach the furthest and accomplish the most, which obeys the laws of the Almighty and stands in harmonious relations with a universal plan.

The sun and the planets and their moons, the star-suns and very likely the unseen planets and their satellites of other systems to a number and a distance where human vision, aided by mechanical devices and supported by the known laws of matter and by mathematical computations, fades into uncertainty and where human comprehension loses itself in chaos-all balance each other and hold to their courses in eternal and infinite space.

And with our own world, and with other worlds, the days and the seasons alternate steadily. Temperature and precipitation average alike. The tides rise and fall. So it has been always. The rivers run to the sea, but "unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." "The wind whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits." [Eccl. 1: 6-7] The soils are decaying as well as producing. The paths of nature run into themselves again. Matter moves in cycles and under the law of equipoise.

We know little of light, heat, sound, or electricity, but we seem to see that they move in cycles and seek their equilibrium.

And the great movements of matter, the great periodic forces of nature, seem to havé relations with the greatest phenomena in life. The turning of the earth upon its axis, the circuits of the earth about the sun and of the moon about the earth, seem to fix the periodicity of the most vital changes in the world's life.

It may safely be said that the application of the laws of periodicity and of equipoise has given us the most notable discoveries in all of the natural and physical sciences that have enriched the store of the world's information.

And as with matter and with motion and with life, so with thought. The history of our race, which has been made and written