THE CALL TO SERVICE
into wise and appropriate words. I see our various schools and colleges keeping their commencements with a single mind—the audiences all expecting the same address, and the speakers, however original, all delivering it. You expect, every graduating class expects, to be told what to do with education, now you have it; your school or college owes it to itself, you think, to confess in public the purpose for which it has trained you. I can almost hear the speakers, from ocean to ocean, responding in unison to this expectation in the graduates they face; the simultaneous eloquence is so inevitable that I can follow it almost word for word; in fact, I almost join in.
The speech they are delivering is known as the Call to Service. The substance of it is that educated men should be unselfish; that learning is a vain and dangerous luxury if it is only for ourselves; that the
[36]
