¶You, men and women, you who have had the advantages of a college training are not to be excused if you fail to do, not as well as, but more than the average man outside who has not had your advantages. Every now and then I meet (at least I meet him in the East and I dare say he is to be found here) the man who having gone through college feels that somehow that confers upon him a special distinction which relieves him from the necessity of showing himself as good as his fellows. I see you recognize the type. That man is not only a curse to the community, and incidentally to himself, but he is a curse to the cause of academic education, the college and university training, because by his insistence he serves as an excuse for those who like to denounce such education. ¶Your education, your training, will not confer on you one privilege in the way of excusing you from effort or from work. All it can do, and what it should do, is to make you a little better fitted for such effort, for such work; and I do not care whether that is in business, politics, in no matter what branch of endeavor, all it can do is by the training you have received, by the advantages you have received, to fit you to do a little better than the average man that you meet. ¶It is incumbent upon you to show that the training has had that effect. It ought to enable you to do a little better for yourselves, and if you have in you souls capable of a thrill of generous emotion, souls capable of understanding what you owe to your training, to your alma mater, to the past and the present that have given you all that you have—if you have such souls it ought to make you doubly bent upon disinterested work for the State and the Nation.[22] ¶Education may not make a man a good citizen, but most certainly ignorance tends to prevent his being a good citizen. Washington was far too much of a patriot, had far too much love for his fellow citizen to try to teach them that they could govern themselves unless they could develop a sound and enlightened public opinion. No nation can permanently retain free government unless it can retain a high average of citizenship, and there can be no such high average of citizenship without a high average of education, using the word in its broadest and truest sense to include the things of the soul as well as the things of the mind. ¶School education can never supplant or take the place of self-education, still less can it in any way take the place of those rugged and manly qualities which we group under the name of character; but it can be of enormous use in supplementing both. It is a source of just pride to every American that our people have so consistently acted in accordance with Washington’s principles of promoting institutions for the diffusion of knowledge. There is nothing dearer to our hearts than our public school system, by which free primary education is provided for every one within our borders.