12
THE BATTALION.
lions, our bewildering machinery of wheel within wheel, we
too often turn out degree men who are greduaies in every
tiling but that higher manhood, that sane mind in a healthy
body, which is certainly no less unnecessary now than form
erly. Similarly here, — whilst w r e, the teachers in name,have
been hammering away as best we know our duty, these boys
have learned more from him who had no class-room, no books,
no charts, no apparatus, no laboratory, than from all of us.
In saying this I am disparaging none of my efficient and
faithful colleagues. We have been the instructors, President
Ross, with his winning affability, his accessibility to the
humblest, his unique knowledge cf men, his contempt for
meanness and ready word of encouragement for noble though
rude and plodding effort, his chivalrous regard for truth and
virtue in others, his pure lips from which none of us ever
heard an oath—President Ross has been the educator. We
have impressed upon these young men truths with more or
less success as those truths came to us through a more or less
misty scientific atmosphere, we have expenmented before
them in things which wi 11 ever he more or less abstruse; he,
on the contrary, brought with him to the Institution some
•eight years ago a maturity of greatness achieved in depart
ments which to the young mind are fields of romance, and he
has proven himself every whit the hero before them in his
administration of their affairs. I mean that the chivalrous
defender of southern rights and southern honor, of whom
these youth had read in history and heard in forensic debate,
lost for them none of his laurels as he stood before them in
propria persona. I mean that the personality of such men as
Ross and Gordon and Lee is to our young men a constant de
nial of the assertion that a great cause such as theirs was
ever “lost”: I mean that such men make others like them
by contact; that growing, ambitious, developing jmuth con
ceive nobler ideals and formulate more dignified life-plans by
association with those who, like President Ross, possessed