"
Young gentlemen, the Board of Visitors can have no
better wish for our common country than that your
future will fulfil the promise of the present.
ADDRESS BY MAJOR-GENERAL W. S. HANCOCK.
To me has been assigned the pleasant duty of welcoming
into the service as commissioned officers, the Graduates
of the Military Academy of to-day.
Although much time has elapsed since my graduation here,
and by contact with the rugged cares of life some of the
sharp edges of recollection may have become. dulled, yet
I have not lived long enough to have forgotten the joy
of that bright period. You only experience it to-day as
I have felt it before you.
I have had some experience of life since, and it might
be worth something to you were I to relate it. But youth
is self-confident and impatient, and you may at present
doubt the wisdom of listening to sermons which you can
learn at a later day.
You each feel that you have the world in a sling, and
that it would be wearisome to listen to the croakings
of the past, and especially from those into whose shoes
you soon expect to step. That is the rule of life. The
child growing into manhood, believes that its judgment
is better than the knowledge of its parents; and yet if
that experience was duly considered, and its unselfish
purposes believed in, many shoals would be avoided,
otherwise certain to be met with in the journey of life,
by the inexperienced but confident navigator.
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