Upon the whole, there is one reason why endowments are not given now as they were in old days, when they founded abbeys, colleges, and all kinds of things of that description, with such success as we know.  All that has changed now.  Why that has decayed away may in part be that people have become doubtful that colleges are now the real sources of that which I call wisdom, whether they are anything more—­anything much more—­than a cultivating of man in the specific arts.  In fact, there has been a suspicion of that kind in the world for a long time.  (A laugh.) That is an old saying, an old proverb, “An ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy.” (Laughter.) There is a suspicion that a man is perhaps not nearly so wise as he looks, or because he has poured out speech so copiously. (Laughter.)

When the seven free Arts on which the old Universities were based came to be modified a little, in order to be convenient for or to promote the wants of modern society—­though, perhaps, some of them are obsolete enough even yet for some of us—­there arose a feeling that mere vocality, mere culture of speech, if that is what comes out of a man, though he may be a great speaker, an eloquent orator, yet there is no real substance there—­if that is what was required and aimed at by the man himself, and by the community that set him upon becoming a learned man.  Maid-servants, I hear people complaining, are getting instructed in the “ologies,” and so on, and are apparently totally ignorant of brewing, boiling, and baking (laughter); above all things, not taught what is necessary to be known, from the highest to the lowest—­strict obedience, humility, and correct moral conduct.  Oh, it is a dismal chapter, all that, if one went into it!

What has been done by rushing after fine speech?  I have written down some very fierce things about that, perhaps considerably more emphatic than I would wish them to be now; but they are deeply my conviction.  (Hear, hear.) There is very great necessity indeed of getting a little more silent than we are.  It seems to me the finest nations of the world—­the English and the American—­are going all away into wind and tongue. (Applause and laughter.) But it will appear sufficiently tragical by-and-bye, long after I am away out of it.  Silence is the eternal duty of a man.  He wont get to any real understanding of what is complex, and, what is more than any other, pertinent to his interests, without maintaining silence.  “Watch the tongue,” is a very old precept, and a most true one.  I do not want to discourage any of you from your Demosthenes, and your studies of the niceties of language, and all that.  Believe me, I value that as much as any of you.  I consider it a very graceful thing, and a proper thing, for every human creature to know what the implement which he uses in communicating his thoughts is, and how to make the very utmost of it.  I want you to study Demosthenes, and know all his excellencies.  At the same time, I must say that speech does not seem to me, on the whole, to have turned to any good account.