Page 71 - Hartridge 1934

mpgrat i Mlor^ COMMENCEMENT— 193 3
Thursday, June eighth, nineteen hundred and thirty-three brought for the twenty- one girls who were to receive their diplomas a memorable day. In the morning the hall was thronged for the commencement exercises.
Dr. Moment began with a prayer and then introduced the speaker. Miss C. Mildred Thompson, Dean of Vassar College. After Miss Thompson’s interesting speech Miss Hartridge addressed the graduating class with these words:
Members of the Class of 1933:
We cannot believe that at your age you can realize in what a time or in what a world you are living. For, ever since you were old enough to give any thought to mat­ ters outside of yourselves, it has been a commonplace to you that incomes are decreasing,
that money is scarce, that millions of men, women and children are homeless, ill-clad, hungry—lacking in all things.
To those who have had a longer experience of life it is not a commonplace; and to those who have lived half a century or more and have themselves known the ebb and flow of prosperity so-called, it is an amazing, a humiliating, an almost incredible fact that in a world of plenty there is such dire want, that in the most advanced period of science
and of agricultural knowledge there is such maladjustment, such bewilderment, such appalling insecurity for both old and young.
Because it is a commonplace to you that men can voyage by air as easily as by land or sea, that you can hear voices on the other side of the earth as easily as you hear a voice in the next room, how or why these things can be concern you no more than the flight of the birds or the sound of the wind in the trees. How then can we hope that you will do more than accept as natural the spectacle of a world out of joint, that you will regard as less than inevitable the misery of others, that you will not take it for granted
that prosperity and depression must alternate as do sunshine and rain, that you will have more concern for suffering than has the ant, more forethought for yourselves than has the grasshopper?
But, if we cannot hope for more than this, it is a serious indictment of our system of education. If we cannot make your generation realize that it is a futile gesture to fill barns with bountiful crops, and warehouses with record factory outputs while millions have not the money with which to buy food or clothing; if your generation cannot work
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