FRUSTRA.

It is very hard for even the oldest head in these times of fierce commotion to settle down to the book and pen. The blood of youth is very hot, and when the bugle blows to war young men are stirred by the desire for great deeds. Not one year in the past half century have the history book and the poetry book and the philosophy book seemed more vain and idle.

Nations are being made and unmade. Young men are the inciters of revolution, and the stirrers-up of conflict. By them are the annals of war ennobled. It is in the very nature of human passions that the young men of the College should find nothing in life worth more than war.

Yet from our many presents rises the future; and the sum of time gives small account to individual components of years. A century is a short time in the records of the world, but a century will see the death of the oldest man who fought the wars. This year, and the strife which to us swallows up the year, will be but, a page of history, for the statistician and the biographer to prod into with an exact and impersonal finger.

There have been wars before, and brave men have died before. There has been disaster for those who fought, and anguish for those who remained. There has been defeat, and victory which is sometimes worth less than defeat.

Now what has come of these dead deeds? Not individual glory, nor lasting power to nations, nor a reversal of the immutable law of existence. Sometimes nothing more than a ruined inscription on a ruined monument, or the new thought of a philosopher, or the small poem of a great poet.

There are your books for you. They tell you what men have been. We are a character upon the written page which the moving finger writes. And when the living year has gone its way, not much will be left of all those who acted their brave part so well, save a short memory and a thought.

In this time we must keep hold of our prospective. Our culture, which is the total of man's thought during dark centuries of confusion and terror, remains beyond this war, beyond a hundred cycles of wars. When it is gone, there is nothing.