lines towards its unknown end. I say to myself to-day, that all this wonder is the work of such patient, accurate, keen, just, and fearless spirits as Daniel Richardson.

The memorial will be entered upon the records of the Court as moved, and as a mark of respect to the deceased the Court will now adjourn.

THE USE OF COLLEGES.

SPEECH AT A DINNER OF THE ALUMNI OF YALE UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, FEBRUARY 3, 1891.

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:

AT every feast it is well to have a skeleton. At every gathering of the elect, the doubting spirit must be allowed to ask his question. In these days all the old assumptions are being retried by the test of actuality, and at a feast in honor of a college, at a gathering of the elect of Yale, the question will arise, What is the use of colleges, after all?

A question not to be answered without reflection, and one which trenches on the doubts sometimes expressed by extremists whether our civilization is a success. We have made famine and pestilence less likely, it is true, and we have multiplied the number of human beings upon the earth; but I own I see no clear advantage in the latter fact; and on the other hand, I doubt whether men generally are as happy as they were in earlier days with all their dangers, and whether the earth has not lost rather than gained in charm.

Nevertheless, we all believe in civilization, and probably most of us believe that colleges are among its fairest flowers. Why? Not surely as collections of schoolmasters teaching others to be schoolmasters, that they

may teach yet others, and so ad infinitum; not, I venture to think, mainly as teaching the first steps toward practical success in life, but, if practical knowledge is what we mean by useful knowledge, I would rather say as preserving, discovering, and imparting useless knowledge, and thus as the concrete image of what makes

man man.

Somebody once said to me, "After all, religion is the only interesting thing," and I think it is true if you take the word a little broadly, and include under it the passionate curiosity as well as the passionate awe which we feel in face of the mystery of the universe. This curiosity is the most human appetite we have. We alone of living beings yearn to get a little nearer and ever a little nearer toward the unseen ocean into which pours the stream of things, - toward the reality of the phantasmagoria which dance before our eyes for threescore years and ten.

This endless aerial pursuit is our fate, as truly as to bear offspring or to toil for bread. This passion is as genuine and self-justifying as any other. The satisfaction of it is as truly an end in itself as self-preservation. I do not believe that the justification of science and philosophy is to be found in improved machinery and good conduct. Science and philosophy are themselves necessaries of life. By producing them, civilization sufficiently accounts for itself, if it were not absurd to call the inevitable to account.

cloisters of philosophy, are

There are trained the mar

Harvard and Yale, as keepers of the sacred fire. tyrs of the future, the pale acolytes of science. There are gathered those who believe that thoughts are mightier

than things. There are the strongholds of ideals more remote and vast than fortune. There is kept alive the faith which sets men to a task of which they shall not see the end, and which perhaps may be unaccomplished when the last of the race shall die. There is believed the idealist's creed, which even sceptics may share, that the world cannot mean less than the farthest-reaching thought, cannot be less worthy of reverence than the loftiest aspiration, of man, who is but a part of it, but a leaf of the unimaginable tree.

It is because I believe that creed that I hope that the two colleges, to both of which I owe a great debt, long may keep the belief of their high import, and long may urge one another in generous rivalry to be and to do all that universities may be and do.

WILLIAM ALLEN,

ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT OF

MASSACHUSETTS.

ANSWER TO RESOLUTIONS OF THE BAR, GREENFIELD, SEPTEMBER 15, 1891.

GENTLEMEN OF THE BAR:

WHEN I heard the sudden news of our associate's death, my second thought was that the Commonwealth had lost a judge not to be replaced, — my first was that I had lost a friend.

The Judges of this Court are thrown so much and so closely together by their work that they are intimate with one another perforce; and to be intimate with William Allen was necessarily to love and admire him. The bar found him very silent upon the bench. He was not so in the consultation room. There he expressed himself freely, and at times, notwithstanding his quiet manner, with the warmth of a hearty and somewhat impulsive temperament, so that there was no question that we knew not only his opinions, but the man behind them.

He seemed to me a typical New Englander, both in character and in ways of thinking; a characteristic product of one of those inland towns which have been our glory, — centres large enough to have a society and a cul