Page 68 - 1938

COMMENCEMENT 1937
Last June eleventh, fifteen girls filed up on the flower massed stage of the auditorium. An opening prayer was said hy Dr. Moment and was followed by a hymn. After this, Roswell Grey Ham, President-elect of Mount Holyoke, was introduced and gave a most interesting address. Then Miss Hartridge spoke to the graduating class in these words:
Members of the Graduating Class:
You are supposed by some to stand today at the beginning of your lives. Life would, then, commence for you, not at birth, and not at forty, but at Commencement. Whether this be true or false in your eyes, the outlook for you, if we are to believe even a small portion of what we read, seems poor. Even if, though just starting out, you chance to want security, it does not appear likely that you will have it. I think that some of you will want it, for the financial uncertainty of the past few years has, perhaps, made you realize that insecurity of this kind which interferes with your plans and worries your parents, is unwelcome.
To anyone who has studied history even a little, however, it is difficult to find a period when the world was not for many people a place of confusion, struggle, and possi­ ble disaster. And we do not have to be students of economics to know that more than three-quarters of the population of any country has never known anything but insecurity.
Though the Renaissance brought a surface of brilliant culture, beneath that surface there was every kind of brutality. And in so-called modern times for four hundred years from the terrible religious struggles of the sixteenth century, through the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution; through the contests to settle questions of succession in seven countries and through Napoleon’s exploits all over Europe, with almost count­ less lesser wars and rebellions; through the Crimean War and the struggles of Prussia with Denmark, with France, with Bohemia, we come to our own century. I do not need to remind you what that has brought to the world—a war so great that almost every na­ tion took part in it and that caused more deaths than all other wars combined, a revolu­ tion in Russia that destroyed almost its entire upper and middle classes, an Italian and a German revolution, all leading to dictatorships, and now the present debacle in Spain.
We Americans in our early days had an insecure time between the patriotic Indians and the bigoted Pilgrims. During our Revolution there were cold and meagre days for many; the Pioneers, defeated often by distance and desert, by drought and grasshoppers,
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