ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, DELIVERED AT THE DEDICATION OF THE COLLEGE AND INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL
My fellow citizens, I count myself fortunate in being given the privilege of dedicating this university, and we are all as Americans to be congratulated that there are among us men who so worthily apply the fortunes that they have made in devoting a portion of their fortunes to the cause of education in this country. (Turning to Mr. Millikin) Mr. Millikin, I feel that as an American it is proper for me to express to you and to those like you the obligation that good Americans feel for what you and they have done in this university and in other educational institutions throughout the land.
I am especially pleased that I am to take part in the dedication of an institution of learning where so much of the teaching is to be with the direct view to an industrial betterment of the country. Ours is an age of specialization and the man who h to do the highest industrial work will find himself immeasurably better prepared for it if he can have had the proper kind of industrial training.
I congratulate all of the men and women whom I address because this building is consecrated to such a purpose; and that it is being erected here; for not only does such an institution benefit the stu dents, benefit those supposed to be the only beneficiaries, but it also indirectly helps all of us; because it becomes at once the center for the diffusion of learning, the diffusion of education.
And now a word to the students, to those who v/ill benefit by what has been done; to whom much has been given, from them much shall rightly be expected.
The man who has received an education which he owes in part either to the state or to a private gift, has accepted a favor which, as a self-respecting American citizen, he is bound to return. He can return it in but one way. There is no return he can make to his alma mater, there is no return he can make in the way of physical repayment upon what has been spent on his education, either to the state or to the university, or to the donor who benefits the university.
The return must be made in the way of good citizenship in the country. The return for an education must take the form of the highest possible achievement on the part of the man who has received the education. The college man is entitled to no privilege because he has received a college education but he is to be held peculiarly accountable and be held to have acquired to a peculiar degree new responsibilities. The man, the boy, whose parents by their thrift and saving, or whom the state by its erection of public schools, high schools, and universities, or to whom outside benefactors through the schools of learning have given the chance to acquire special training to fit him in the struggle for life, is bound to show that he has in him the quality to make good use of what has been given to him.
Exactly as we rightly hold that the man who has had a good training and advantages at home is one on whom we have a right to call for the proper performance of duty, both in his home and with reference to the state, so we have that same right to demand an extra quality of service from the boy or girl, the young man or the young woman who has had the benefit of training, general or technical, in an institution such as this.
In our American life no man is entitled to receive what he does not in some way make return for, and the student, the college graduate, must make the return for the training that he has received in the shape of good citizenship in the community at large. And let me in closing say to you, men and women of Illinois, that in traveling through your state, much as I am impressed by its boundless beauty and fertility, much though I am impressed by wh.rt nature and Providence have done for you, and by the way in which you have taken advantage of the gifts and advantages put at your disposal, I am even more impressed by the way in which you have recognized that you have more than material needs for which to care.
It is of course the merest truism to say that natural advantages count only so far as they are made of use by the average citizen and the success or failure of our American government in the future depends upon what kind of men and women the boys and girls of today turn out to be and I congratulate you upon the evidences I have seen that you appreciate that fact, that you are training them in your homes, in the schools, in the colleges, such as this.
The American boy and girl of today should turn into the kind of man, the kind of woman tomorrow who will be enabled to carry on with unfaltering courage and strength the work that the Americans of the past have done. We have great problems before us as a nation. We have solved great problems in the past and we can do our duty in the future only on condition that we breed the same kind cf man and woman that we have had in the past.
Illinois sprang to the front and made the wonderful record it did in the Civil war because Illinois had the right stufif for citizenship within its borders. And I believe that the people of Illinois, I believe that the people of all this country will rise to the level of the needs of the future because I believe we will continue to train properly the right type of citizenship to do the duties of the future.
I thank you.
– President Theodore Roosevelt, June 4, 1903