Page 74 - 1932 Hartridge

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This is the world into which we, your elders, are celebrating your eu' trance.
I hope that you will not like it, that you will marvel, as normal young people should, at the incompetence and the supineness of your predecessors, and that you will set to work at once to right our mistakes.
We have, apparently, thought only of our individual pleasure, our suc' cess, our happiness and ease, not at all of the resulting chaos that we are leaving to our children.
Of what will you think?
Think what you will of us, but set your world to rights. You have a mag' nificent struggle before you. It will call for all your powers—for all the powers of the best of your generation—but it is the kind of struggle that makes for strength in a nation. Do not submit to paying tribute to the ignorant and the base.
Perhaps you remember the letter that a few of the Old Boys of Clifton wrote to their school and perhaps you will recognize actively “that our exist' ence is more than an individual existence; that we live in a world of mutual influence, of interest concentrated on self and also of interest directed to the service of others; further still, that ‘there is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life,’ beyond pleasure, beyond success, and beyond happiness. These are good, hut they can neither guide us nor in the long run satisfy us.”
Members of the Graduating Class, I wish you victory in your struggle, for your own sakes as well as for your country’s sake.
After all was over, everyone was running around in such a state of combined happiness and sadness that no one said good'bye to anyone she wanted to, and we all left the victorious seniors with a vague feeling of loneliness.
The members of the graduating class were: Mary Alison, Marcia Conger, Janet Creighton, Althea Crow, Daphne Doane, Lucy Eliot, Ruth Forbes, Margaret Guthrie, Peggy Lawrence, Mary Aileen Lenk, Betty Lester, Marion O’Neil, June Ransome, Marion Robbie, Mary Robinson, Mary Sargent, Dorothy Spalding, Mary Stevenson,
Lucy Van Boskerck, Betty Warner, Margaret Whedon, and Margaret Wodtke. M. W. T., ’33.
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