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-19- convinced that racial discrimination is wrong, the struggle for right feeling is two-thirds won. And besides, feeling is as educable as thought. The person who has really entered into Rabbi Ben Ezra, or Burns on the fieldmouse, or Stephen Benet's John Brown's Body can never feel about old age, or four-footed things, or colored people, as he did before. And if his thought and feeling are affected, so surely will his action be. I have been reading lately a book by my fellow townsman, Thornton Wilder, The Ideas of March. I felt about his hero, Julius Caesar, as I felt long ago in reading Froude and Mommsen, that there is something not only fascinating but almost frightening in the man. That marvellous intelligence so permeated everything he did that the ablest statesmen and generals of his time, when they tried to oppose him, looked as you or I would look if we played chess against Capablanca. He was a great man of action, but he was so because his action embodied the precise and lucid mind that wrote the Gallic War, a mind that saw with the eye of an eagle every detail, saw them all in perspective, seized the essential as if by instinct, and conducted a campaign with the economy of a superb artist. And through it all there was so little sign of strain that Caesar almost seemed to be lounging through life. With that serene intelligence sitting on the inner throne, he was not only...

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Commence and Go Forth - University of Arkansas Commencement Speeches

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University of Arkansas