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Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World

who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning.

Before his eyes passed the shadows of mighty kings and warlike nobles of great masters of law and theology.

Through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by.

And he sees also the innumerable host of humble students, to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thralldom of the Middle Ages.

This was the most famous university of medieval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a new world to discover.

Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past.

At the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, plowmen, wood choppers and fisher folk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian haunted land,

were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West.

To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature means grim warfare.

And the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which were once theirs,

and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land.

To conquer the wilderness means to rest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our race.

The primeval conditions must be met by the primeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization.

In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture.

At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature.

...