committee! He is there, in the prisoner's pen, a convicted murderer and an unconvicted assassin, the last of his race, the bullies and bad men of the border, - a thing to be forgotten and put away forever from the sight of men. And I ask you, gentlemen, to put him away where he will not hear the voice of man nor children's laughter, nor see a woman's smile. Bury him with the bitter past, with the lawlessness that has gone that has gone, thank God- and which

must not return."

The district attorney sat down suddenly, and was conscious of nothing until the foreman pronounced the prisoner at the bar guilty of murder in the second degree.

Judge Truax leaned across his desk and said, simply, that it lay in his power to sentence the prisoner to not less than two years' confinement in the state penitentiary, or for the remainder of his life.

"Before I deliver sentence on you, Abner Barrow," he said with an old man's kind severity, "is there anything you have to say on your own behalf ?"

Barrow's face was white with the prison tan, and pinched and hollow-eyed and worn. When he spoke his voice had the huskiness which comes from non-use, and cracked and broke like a child's.

"I don't know, Judge," he said, "that I have anything to say in my own behalf. I guess what the gentleman said about me is all there is to say. I am a back number, I am out of date; I was a loafer and a blackguard. He told you I had no part or parcel in this city, or in this world; that I belonged to the past; that I ought to be dead. Now that's not so. I have just one thing that belongs to this city, and to this world—and to me; one thing that I couldn't take

to jail with me, and I'll have to leave behind me when I go back to it. I mean my wife. You, sir, remember her, sir, when I married her twelve years ago. She gave up everything a woman ought to have, to come to me. She thought she was going to be happy with me; that's why she come, I guess. Maybe she was happy for about two weeks. After that first two weeks her life, sir, was a hell, and I made it a hell. Respectable women wouldn't speak to her because she was my wife and she had no children. That was her life. She lived alone over the dance-hall, and sometimes when I was drunk I beat her.

"At the end of two years I killed Welsh, and they sent me to the pen for ten years, and she was free. She could have gone back to her folks and got a divorce if she'd wanted to, and never seen me again. It was an escape most women'd gone down on their knees and thanked their Maker for.

"But what did this woman do my wife, the woman I misused and beat and dragged down in the mud with me? She was too mighty proud to go back to her people, or to the friends who shook her when she was in trouble; and she sold out the place, and bought a ranch with the money, and worked it by herself, worked it day and night, until in ten years she had made herself an old woman, as you see she is to-day.

"And for what? To get me free again; to bring me things to eat in jail, and picture papers, and tobacco when she was living on bacon and potatoes, and drinking alkali water working to pay for a lawyer to fight for me to pay for the best lawyer.

"And what I want to ask of you, sir, is to let me have two years out of jail to show her how I feel about it. It's all

I've thought of when I was in jail, to be able to see her sitting in her own kitchen with her hands folded, and me working and sweating in the fields for her, working till every bone ached, trying to make it up to her.

It's too late! It's too late!

Give me a few years to work

"And I can't, I can't! Don't send me back for life! for her to show her what I feel here, what I never felt for her before. Look at her, gentlemen, look how worn she is, and poorly, and look at her hands, and you men must feel how I feel - I don't ask you for myself. I don't want to go free on my own account. My God! Judge, don't bury me alive, as that man asked you to. Give me this last chance. Let me prove that what I'm saying is true." Judge Truax looked at the papers on his desk for some seconds, and raised his head, coughing as he did so.

"It liesit lies at the discretion of this Court to sentence the prisoner to a term of imprisonment of two years, or for an indefinite period, or for life. Owing to on account of certain circumstances which were - have arisen this sentence is suspended. This Court stands adjourned."

PART THREE

PLATFORM PRACTICE

THE SPEECH OF FORMAL OCCASION

THE BENEFITS OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION From an address by the President to the students of Harvard University, at the announcement of Academic Distinctions, 1909

BY ABBOTT LAWRENCE LOWELL

THIS meeting is held not merely to honor the men who have won prizes, attained high rank, or achieved distinction in studies. In a larger sense it is a tribute paid by the University to the ideals of scholarship. It is a public confession of faith in the aims for which the University was established. We may, therefore, not inappropriately consider here the nature and significance of scholarship.

Without attempting an exhaustive catalogue of the benefits of education, we may note three distinct objects of college study. The first is the development of the mental powers with a view to their use in any subsequent career. In its broadest sense this may be called training for citizenship, for we must remember that good citizenship does not consist exclusively in rendering public service in political and philanthropic matters. It includes also conducting an industrial or professional career so as not to leave the public welfare out of sight.

Popular government is exacting. It implies that in some form every man shall voluntarily consecrate a part of his time and force to the state, and the better the citizen,

the greater the effort he will make. On the function of colleges in fitting men for citizenship and for active work, much emphasis has been laid of late. Yet it is not the only aim of college studies. Another object is cultivation of the mind, refinement of taste, a development of the qualities that distinguish the civilized man from the barbarian. Nor does the value of these things lie in personal satisfaction alone. There is a culture that is selfish and exclusive, that is self-centered and conceited. The intellectual snob is quite as repellant as any other. But this is true of the moral distortion of all good qualities. The culture that narrows the sympathies, instead of enlarging them, has surely missed the object that should give its chief worth and dignity. The culture that reveals beauty in all its forms, that refines the sensibilities, and expands the mental horizon, that, without a sense of superiority, desires to share these things with others, and makes the lives of all men better worth living, is like the glow of fire in a cold room. It is a form of social service of a high order.

A third benefit of college education is the contact it affords with the work of creative imagination. The highest type of scholar is the creative scholar, just as the highest type of citizen is the statesman. The greatest figures in history, as almost every one will admit, are the thinkers and the rulers of men. People will always differ in the relative value they ascribe to these two supreme forms of human power. But if one may indulge in apocalyptic visions, I should prefer in another world to be worthy of the friendship of Aristotle rather than of Alexander, of Shakespeare or Newton than of Napoleon or Frederick the Great. When I spoke of the benefit of college life in training for

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