in the establishment and maintenance of a State University into which by selective processes the former students of common schools, grammar schools and high schools finally enter. The word "university" is etymologically so comprehensive as to be exclusive. There can be but one State University. There may be and are many State schools and colleges, but I repeat, there can be and there is but one State University. Here in these halls of learning ripens into fruitage the central culture of heart and mind of this wonderful Texas State. Here, away from the turmoil of the city, and yet close enough to feel the heart-throbs of rugged life, is the hope of a continuous and progressive democracy-the promise of a harmonious development of the people's reign, subject only to the merited favor of Almighty God.

Young men and young women, the real issue of American civic and political life is the demand for men and women—the right kind of men and women. All other issues are subordinate to this basilar requirement for a standard of citizenship. The very existence of this giant Republic must rest on you. The cry of help is in the air. The call is to you to help maintain government for man, not for Mammon; for the many, not for the few; to elevate the masses, to aid all who toil and strive and suffer, to lift your own nation to the heights of her divinest opportunities. Men who think, men who see, men who venture all for right, mental heroes and moral warriors, they are the priceless treasures of a freeman's nation; they are today the nation's need. Character, the stamp of God, the fairest flower of education, the child of doing and bearing, of serving and suffering, of pain and weariness, of living and dying-men of character, women of character, are the supreme world-need.

The world wants you and the world needs you. Be not dismayed; there is room for all and a place for all. Honest work and sober life find always comfortable existence and often wealth and honor. Go out, young men, go out young women, from this nourishing home not as priests of pessimism and apostles of despair, but with your foreheads lifted to the first kisses of the morning's earliest sun, your hearts filled with the songs of the singers; your mouths crying out it is well with your soul, your

faith unshaken in the onward and upward march of the children. of men; truth reigns and God is on His throne!

When the men of America are truly educated, when they think true, act true, fight true, when they feel another's woe and share another's sorrow, when they know the injury to one to be the injury to all, when they feel the full honor of being Americans (when you feel the full honor of being Texans), when they lay their best selves a willing sacrifice upon the altar of a common country, when they live pure lives that through them the nation may be pure, then Old Glory and the flag of the Lone Star, emblems of National and State purity as well as majesty, floating under heaven's vast dome, will reflect a new beauty each star will brighter be with hope anew and every stripe will ruddier be, signaling the fresh warm blood of Americans all, ready to gush forth in sacrificial streams to defend the honor and maintain the just prestige of these, our beloved symbols of stainless sovereignty.

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE, GALVESTON, MAY 30, 1903.

WILLIAM KEILLER, L. R. C. P. AND S. (ED.), F. R. C. S. (ED.),

PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Graduating Classes:

In name of the men and women trained to do battle with disease in all its forms, I extend to you a hearty welcome to our ranks. You are to be congratulated on becoming pharmacists and nurses after two years and physicians after four years of hard work and study passing the successive tests of fitness to which we have subjected you and acquiring sufficient groundwork of knowledge to begin your life work. May you pursue that life work ever humbly, striving after greater knowledge, and though graduates, students to the last. The ladies of the John Sealy Hospital School of Nursing know well the high estimate I have formed of their profession. Those who are fond of talking of the good old times and contrasting them with present degeneracy, who regard the world as going rapidly from bad to worse, and who try to persuade us that the Devil

reigns and creation is a failure, must be very willfully blind to many things, and, among others, to the immeasureable advances in the provisions for the care of the sick made the past twenty or twenty-five years. Our hospitals are no longer hideous and revolting; rather are they ideal in their surroundings and interior arrangements, veritable havens of rest from the care and turmoil of life, and each ward is a true refuge for the sick or injured. Operations have lost their terrors, the operating room is an embodiment of light, cleanliness, and enlightened thought and effort, and is entered fearlessly by thousands to whom it brings health or comfort. Drugs can scarce be called nauseous any longer. No more do we find in the nurse a gossipy, drunken, ignorant Mrs. Gamp, but rather is she a ministering angel in the prettiest and most spotless of uniforms-the very sight of her a more healing medicine than the draught she administers.

As physicians and surgeons we are proud to say that in our college hospitals, at least, our very best work is done. It is best because we are most interested in our hospital cases. With skilled assistance we can study them thoroughly and do our very best for them because of their scientific interest and teaching value, as well as because they are suffering men and women appealing to us for relief; and the excellent work that is done is largely due to the high grade of women that assist in the capacity of nurses. Do you know the difference between a bachelor's den and the carefully appointed home with a true, good wife and mother at the head of it? I mean, of course, that type of wife and mother who is the strength of the nation-the woman to whom the words "wife" and "mother" convey the highest ideals of womanhood. As the well. appointed home differs from the bachelor's den or frontiersman's shanty, so does the well nursed ward differ from the best we doctors could make of it without the assistance of good women. Have you seen the neatness and order and comfort that our Southern women have, under efficient guidance, put into the colored wards? You will find here today Southern women overcoming prejudice and the bias of training and carrying the Spirit of Christ into their daily labors among the colored sick just because they are sick and require skilled attention. And our colored wards today are as neat and clean, the atmosphere morally and physically as pure, our medical

and surgical work as good, as in the white building, and all because of the influence of white women. Truly, the Spirit of Christ still lives in the land. Before the storm, not only because of the inadequacy of the building, but more because of the want of woman's directing hand and the lack of skilled nursing, it was heartbreaking to go into the colored ward and feel helpless to relieve the suffering humanity that sought refuge there. Today much of our best work is done in the new colored building, and nurses and doctors alike are proud of the cures that are wrought there, and we are reaping ourselves a rich harvest in valuable training. It is not yet rightly. understood by the community at large that our nurses in modern hospitals are our sisters, coming from the same social class as our doctors, belonging to the noble army of educated women who prefer work to dependence. Nursing is one of the educated professions open to educated women, and the best nurses in the country are University graduates. The well trained physician desires as his chief aid in the fight against disease the highly educated, thoroughly trained nurse. The present class of graduate nurses are not only to be congratulated on having received a thorough training and having borne themselves well through two years' arduous labor and high responsibility, having done well much difficult work requiring much endurance, self-denial and self-control, but they are further to be congratulated for having stood bravely by their superintendent, their alma mater and their sense of duty instead of having yielded to a false class sentiment and allowed themselves to be led blindly by a few hot-headed malcontents.

Nothing worth doing was ever yet easy, and no life worth living is without its difficulties. The wards of our hospital were never nursed before as they are today, and private patients have never before expressed themselves as so well satisfied, and that in spite of the fact that the nursing has for the past six months been nearly all done by freshman nurses. The Board of Managers of the hospital and the Medical Faculty look forward with confidence to an era of progress in the Training School commensurate with the progress in the Medical Department which shall win from the public and the medical profession ever increasing confidence and respect.

Much has been made possible by the Young Ladies' Hospital Aid Society, than which no society in the city does more efficient work,

and the hospital is ever becoming a greater power for good in the State and a brighter ornament to the memory of the man whose philanthropy built it, and whose family have rehabilitated it. But all is not one yet by a long way and we confidently look forward to the day when some other patriotic Texan will give us an up-to-date operating theater, a home fit for the housing of the daughters of Texans, themselves students of the University, who are nursing the sick in Sealy, and fitting themselves to bring comfort and skilled assistance to Texas homes, and such endowments and increased hospital facilities as shall put the Medical Department of the State University on a par with the great medical schools of America. To return to our nurses: You are leaving hospital for private nursing, a very different life from that to which you have been accustomed in the past two years, more pleasant in some respects, much more trying in others. Never was all your woman's tact needed as it will be in the life before you. Few days will pass that will not call into exercise much that is highest and best on your woman's nature, few that will not call for self-restraint, self-control, selfsuppression. In the homes of the well-to-do and wealthy the trained nurse has become a blessing to patient, doctor and family. The most devoted of wives and mothers are by no means the best nurses. They lack experience, precision in obedience to orders, the training to know what to do and how best to do it, and the perfect authority over the patient that is one of the characteristics of a successful nurse. Even their love for the sick one unfits the wife or mother for doing efficient nursing. With the trained nurse in the house the gravest operations may be undertaken, not so successfully, it is true, as in the well-equipped hospital, but still with a fair share of success. Diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, child-bearing, lose half their terrors, and the physician or surgeon feels that his orders will be obeyed with precision and all his efforts ably seconded by the best and most intelligent co-operation. You must go into the family prepared to take complete charge of the patient and to give as little trouble as may be compatible with the thorough performance of your duties. There are women posing as trained nurses who have prejudiced the public against the profession, being more trouble in a family than they are worth, who need more waiting on than two patients. That is not as it should be, and your thoughtfulness for