who are yet to come, and from whose lips we know will flow
happily chosen words that will burn and stir, and be remembered,
I am surprised at my own audacity in presuming to stand up
amongst the Websters and the Clays, the attic orators, the equals
of whom only the Pennsylvania State College turns out.
I must crave your indulgence for having already apparently
wandered so widely from my subject. In doing so I have but
been the unconscious imitator of a cross-roads would-be Cicero to
whom ’twas mine to listen in one of the wildest word-pyrotechnics
that ever greeted ear of man.
It was in that sister State, in which but to be born is to be
president, that speaker took that glorious bird of freedom, beneath
whose pinion we’ve licked the sturdy Briton, the swarthy sons of
Montezuma, the copper tinted friends who skulk amid our
Western hills and lift the hair of our hardy pioneers with the
very knives we’ve given them. Figuratively upon Atlantic’s
sand he,flung that eagle high aloft, and, as he soared away in the
wake of the descending sun, he took us all along and followed
him. Away into the West that feathered leader led us—over
that Appalachian ridge that rises the lone and solitary battlement
which the hamlet of Philadelphia has to protect it against being
swallowed by greedy Pittsburg—over that broad valley, the
tricklings from whose soil are carried to the gulf by the Missis
sippi route —across those great plateaus that are but wide
verandas to the Rockies’ piled-up architecture. High above that
cloud-crowned continental nucleus o’er which the doughty ‘ Path-
Finder’ blazed a trail—on, over the Sierras, those fissured,
canoned hills from which is dug the only metal that we may coin
as money, on and on, passing beyond the line of sun-kissed surf
that ceaseless beats upon the Golden Gate—on and on and on,
until, until, we lost the darned old bird.
Thus doth my theme but lead us far and wide, but still in
spite of our apparent fruitless chase we find we do not need to e’er
retrace a solitary step—we’re not obliged to go back home to seek
for our Alumni.
Geographically, we are übiquitous and omnipresent. There’s
scarce a State or Territory whose crops are made to grow or mill
wheels turn by act of Congress or Presidential message, in which
the Pennsylvania State College has not a son—a son of whom she
may be justly proud.
Broad as may appear this governmental fabric, remote as we
The Free Lance ,
[June,