Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... XII PRESIDENT ELIOT For half a century President Eliot was one of the great personal figures in American life. He was known to every man in America and to many people in Europe. Everyone has an interest in such a character; especially in America, where men are too much alike and great individuals are a rarity. Every one of us bears a relation of some sort to any great character who has lived in the immediate past. This must be my excuse for setting down a few remarks and hair-brained reminiscences which recall President Eliot to my mind. Many of them are, perhaps, links in my own history rather than in his. There is another good reason for writing about Eliot. He was not a political figure, nor an artist, nor a thinker: he was the embodiment of a mood of the American people, a sincere, important, and yet passing mood: and he belongs to a class of men who fill a great place in the public eye and are suddenly and ungratefully forgotten;--the class of worthies. Twenty-five years from now, young men will be shamelessly asking, "Who was President Eliot?" And therefore many monographs and sketches of him ought to be written at once. Eliot's prominence is connected with the rise of the new education, that system or that blind battling for light, which began in America during the seventies, when the opinion prevailed that the commercial growth of the United States, --our growth in population and in wealth, --'compelled the pulling down of the old buildings and old curricula, and the making of all things anew. I have heard William James say, "Yes, yes, we must have large things first, size first; the rest will come." This was the unspoken philosophy, the inner compelling, dumb thought of the epoch; and Eliot, when he was chosen President of Harvard...