Young to the Young

In a chapel not far from the spot where a few months prior he had laid the cornerstone of a $600,000 men's dormitory. Owen D. Young, president of the St. Lawrence University corporation, bestowed degrees on 25 graduates of the summer school, including his affianced son, Philip, last week. Partly because he attended St. Lawrence, partly also because he had in mind some more of his occasional observations on the spirit and needs of his day, Mr. Young accompanied the degrees with a speech in which he was obviously at pains to get away from the standard thing in Advice to Young People. Instead of maxims about hard work and ambition, he propounded a self-examination designed to encourage the students to "go on with the great business of developing yourselves."

The Young examination:

"i) Have you enlarged your knowledge of obligations and increased your capacity to perform them?

"2) Have you developed your intuitions and made more sensitive your emotions?

"3) Have you discovered your mental aptitude?

"4) Have you learned enough about the machinery of society and its history to enable you to apply your gifts effectively?

"5) Have you acquired adequate skill in communication with others?"

Comments by Examiner Young:

"Failure on the first question means failure altogether. If you have not developed your understanding ... of obligation . . . then your intuitions . . . your aptitudes, your knowledge of institutions, your language will not save you from failure. ... I mean (by intuitions) that whole area which underlies our ordinary mental machinery.

''Sensitiveness outside of the field of the mental operation is a magnificent substratum ... on which to build a developed mind. Have you been engaged in that most important job of research . . . the discovery of what you are best fitted to do? If you fail to plot your course . . . one day you will be wrecked and cast ashore. If your gift lies in the field of sciences, have you learned enough about the fundamentals of mathematics and physics? . . . As one enlarges his capacity to make himself understood ... he opens up to that extent his opportunity for usefulness.

"Let us speak of public obligations. . . . Political parties throughout the world have a habit of treating lightly the obligations . . . entered into by their government.

"Whether a person or country should undertake obligations is debatable. Whether they should perform them . . . is not."

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