A people with an ardent spirit and with genius like ours is necessarily a well-balanced and harmonious one. The Government understands the enormous historic importance of Universities, has a respect for their noble traditions and wishes to raise them to the heights of modern exigencies. All this cannot be done at once, as everything cannot be accomplished in six months. All that we are doing at present is to clear the ground from all the débris which the rotten political caste has left us as a said inheritance. (Applause.) How could a Government composed of former soldiers ever disparage Universities? It would not only be absurd but criminal! From the Universities have come out by the thousands volunteers and by tens of thousands those magnificent warriors who used to assault the enemy’s trenches with a superb contempt of death. They are our comrades whose memory we bear engraved in our hearts. You will write their names on your gates of bronze, but their memory will be more imperishably engraved in our spirit. We cannot forget them, as we cannot forget that out of the Universities came by thousands the “black shirts,” those “black shirts” who, at a given moment, put an end to the inglorious vicissitudes of Italian politics, who took by the throat with strong fingers all the old profiteers who appeared, to the exuberant impatience of the new Italian generations, always the more inadequate for their paralysing decrepitude. (Applause.) Well, so long as there are Universities in Italy—and there certainly will be for a long time—and so long as there are young men to attend these Universities and to become acquainted with the history of yesterday, thus preparing the history of to-morrow, so long as there are such young men, the doors of the past are definitely shut. I guarantee it formally! But I add further that _so long as these young men and these Universities exist, the Nation cannot perish and it cannot become a slave, because Universities smash fetters without forging new ones_. (Applause.) If to-morrow it were again necessary, either for causes arising within or without the frontiers, to sound again the trumpet of war, I am sure that the Universities would again empty themselves to re-populate the trenches. (Loud applause.) And now that you have rejuvenated me by twenty years, I would like to sing with you the “Gaudeamus Igitur.” After all, Lorenzino dei Medici was right when he sang: “How beautiful is youth!” Well, my young friends, there can never be for us as individuals the certainty of the morrow, but there is the supreme and magnificent certainty of the morrow for us as a nation and as a people.