Chapter III: Part 3

Just now we are hearing a great deal about the benefits of discipline. I think what the speakers are really talking about, though they don't recognize it themselves, is the benefit of the state of mind which accepts and welcomes discipline. We are not, even as the result of the war, a disciplined people in the sense that Germany is, or was, and we can thank God for it. We shall never want in this country a general subordination of the individual will and initiative to external control. Discipline is a means and not an end. If discipline, as such, externally imposed, were so important a factor in success as many people seem to think to-day, we could look through a list of ex-enlisted men in the army and navy--I mean the men enlisted and discharged during peace time--and find a relatively large number who made conspicuously good records after returning to civil life. As a matter of fact, we find nothing of the kind.

What we do find is that not a few enlisted men who chose the army or the navy as their permanent career have won commissions and made fine records. There were no better general officers in the war than men like Harbord of our army and Robertson of the British, both of whom rose from the ranks. But isn't it fair to say that the discipline imposed on these men was accepted gladly and accepted in the terms of their fundamental interest, and that these men are not really exceptions to what I have said?

I venture to predict that there will be a very different record to tell as to the success in civil life of those men now leaving the Army, who, because they believed in the cause and wished to participate to the full in the great enterprise, gladly submitted themselves to the discipline for the purpose of increasing their efficiency.

In a month or so you can teach an enthusiastic man, who is fired by a big idea, all the discipline he needs for carrying out his duties and profiting by his opportunities, but you can't reverse the process and incite enthusiasms as a result of the application of discipline.

Don't think that I want to minimize the merits of military discipline for military purposes. Of course, coordination and subordination are absolutely necessary in the handling of large bodies of men. Even the men in France who deserted to the front, as many of them did, no matter how much we may sympathize with their desire to get into the game, had to be disciplined. Someone had to stay behind and see to the supplies. The point we are discussing is the carrying over of this principle of military discipline intact into civilian life. So far as discipline brings about regularity of life, of exercise, so long as it ministers to alertness, we can use it, but as between discipline on the one hand, and initiative and team play on the other, to meet our academic or our national needs, I am for initiative and team play.

Please don't misunderstand me. By reducing the present emphasis on external discipline, after childhood has been passed, I don't mean a lowering of standards. External discipline, it seems to me, is often really imposed as a substitute for high standards; something supposed to be just as good and more easy to keep in stock. The standards of the worth-while organization, and these are the outward expression of its aims, its ideals, ought to be high enough and intelligently enough administered to make sure that the men and women who are unable to provide their own discipline, should in the general interest be painlessly but promptly removed from the group.

Here is a _credo_ for the American people, from the pen of a regular army officer. It's a pretty good one for an American University: "To foster individual talent, imagination and initiative, to couple with this a high degree of cooperation, and to subject these to a not too minute direction; the whole vitalized by a supreme purpose, which serves as the magic key to unlock the upper strata of the energies of men."

* * * * *

Finally, let me try to apply these lessons to you young men and women of the graduating class.

Keep in good physical shape. Overwork is usually a combination of bad air, bad feeding, and lack of exercise and sleep. See that you don't go stale. If you lack the zest of life, find out what the trouble is; whether it is your teeth or your liver or your soul. Picture to yourself what Theodore Roosevelt got out of life.

Be honest with yourself. Do your own thinking and do it straight. This, strangely enough, is perhaps the thing which you will find hardest to do after the undergraduate atmosphere. A student body is, or at any rate was before the war, the most convention ridden group of which I have any knowledge. I am all for conventions, because they save a great deal of time and worry, but only so far as we recognize them as conventions and do not exalt them into principles or philosophical truths. Remember that the public opinion of America is an infinitely more important thing to the world than ever before, and that you are each to be a part of it.

Keep your intellectual interests and your interest in your _alma mater_, not in her athletics and her fraternities alone. Remember that as alumni of this University you are citizens of no mean city. Recruit men and women whom she ought to have and who ought to have her, remembering that the danger to this country from the inside, and it is no inconsiderable danger, is mainly due to the misdirected zeal of sincere people who lack knowledge and background. Take for example the employer who can't see beyond the point of telling his men to "take it or leave it," and the workman whose sense of real or fancied injustice has brought him to what with our children we know as the kicking and biting stage. It is too late to do much with the present adult generation except by main strength and awkwardness, but a recruit for higher education from either of these groups is a good national investment.

Keep your human contacts. Don't be a "glad-hander" but do at least your share. It takes two to make and keep alive a friendship, just as it does a quarrel. There is something worth while in everyone. Give yourself a chance to find what it is. Practice following and, as the chance comes to you, practice leading, but above all, practice team play. Keep yourself ready to take the next step, whatever it may be. There is a story of Marshal Joffre, of which I can at least say that it is good enough to be true. After the first battle of the Marne some enthusiast was proclaiming him as a second Napoleon and laying it on pretty thick. The old gentleman stood it as long as he could and then said: "No, Napoleon would have known what to do next, and I don't."

Keep your enthusiasms and your ideals. In other words, keep your youth. In choosing your life work, get into something in which the policy and practice are such that you can throw your whole soul into the job. Don't take yourself seriously, but take your opportunities for usefulness seriously. Find out the callings in which America is short. There are plenty of them, as the war has shown. Think over whether it isn't possible for you to be one of the men or one of the women who, from your training and momentum and vision, will be selected ten or fifteen or twenty years hence, to take on some important job, with the nation as your client, as the one person best qualified to fill it.

We no longer have to prove that it pays to know, to really know almost anything that is worth while. It pays in money, if that is what one wants; it pays in the more enduring satisfactions of life, in the pleasure that comes from exact knowledge and intellectual pioneering, in the almost unique joy of creation without the responsibilities of possession, and in the feeling of individual readiness to be of use in meeting the problems which the years allotted to your generation will surely bring forth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: Commencement address delivered at the University of Michigan, June 26, 1919.]

+-----------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Typographical error corrected in the text: | | | | Page 52 centerdness changed to centeredness | +-----------------------------------------------+