_Mr. Mayor, People of Durham, and Undergraduates and Graduates of
Trinity College_:
I know that the citizens of Durham will not begrudge my making a
special address to the representatives of a great typical Southern
college, which, because it is a typical Southern college, is a typical
American college. In speaking to-day to you undergraduates and
graduates of Trinity (and when I speak to the graduates of Trinity, I
speak to both the United States Senators of North Carolina—a pretty
good showing for one college—) I speak not only to you, but through you
to the college men of the South. I have been more impressed than I can
well express by the first article in the constitution of Trinity—the
article that sets forth the aims of the college. Not for your sake (for
you are familiar with it), but for the sake of all college men, North
and South, I am going to read that article:
“The aims of Trinity College are to assert a faith in the eternal union
of knowledge and religion set forth in the teachings and character
of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; to advance learning in all lines of
truth; to defend scholarship against all false notions and ideals; to
develop a Christian love of freedom and truth; to educate a sincere
spirit of tolerance; to discourage all partisan and sectarian strife,
and to render the largest permanent service to the individual, the
State, the Nation, and the Church. Unto these ends shall the affairs of
this college always be administered.”
I know of no other college which has so nobly set forth as the object
of its being the principles to which every college should be devoted,
in whatever portion of this Union it may be placed. You stand for all
those things for which the scholar must stand if he is to render real
and lasting service to the state. You stand for academic freedom, for
the right of private judgment, for the duty, more incumbent upon the
scholar than upon any other man, to tell the truth as he sees it, to
claim for himself and give to others the largest liberty in seeking
after the truth. There must be no coercion of opinion if collegiate
training is to bring forth its full fruit. You men of this college, you
men throughout the South, who have had collegiate training, you men
throughout the Union, who have had collegiate training, bear a peculiar
burden of responsibility. I want you to have a good time, and I believe
you do. I believe in play with all my heart. Play when you play, but
work when you work; and remember that your having gone through college
does not so much confer a special privilege as it imposes a special
obligation on you. We have a right to expect a special quality of
leadership from the men to whom much has been given in the way of a
collegiate education. You are not entitled to any special privilege,
but you are entitled to be held to a peculiar accountability; you have
earned the right to be held peculiarly responsible for what you do.
Each one of you, if he is worth his salt, wishes, when he graduates, to
pay some portion of the debt due to his alma mater. You have received
from her, during your years of attendance in her halls, certain
privileges in the way of scholarship, in the way of companionship,
which makes it incumbent upon you to repay what you have been given.
You can not repay that to the college save in one way: by the quality
of your citizenship as displayed in the actual affairs of life you can
make it an honor to the college to have sent you forth into the great
world. That is the only way in which you can repay to the college what
the college has done for you. I earnestly hope and believe that you and
those like you in all the colleges of this land will make it evident
to the generation that is rising that you are fit to take leadership,
that the training has not been wasted, that you are ready to render to
the state the kind of service which is invaluable, because it can not
be bought, because there is no price that can be put upon it. We have
the right to expect from college men not merely disinterested service,
but intelligent service. The free peoples who exercise self-government
always have to war not merely against the knavish man who deliberately
does what he knows to be wrong, but against the foolish man, who may
mean very well, but who in actual fact turns out the ally of the other
man who does not mean well; and we must depend upon you men who have
been given special facilities in education to guide our people aright
so that they shall neither fall into the pit of folly nor into the pit
of knavery.