Every time a law is broken, every individual in the community has the moral tone of his life lowered.

And when any body of men in any community stands bravely for what is right, these men not merely serve a useful purpose in doing the particular task to which they set themselves, but give a lift to the cause of good citizenship throughout…

Now let you remember on the other hand that no help can permanently avail you save as you yourselves develop capacity for self-help.

You young colored men and women educated at Tuskegee must by precept and example lead your fellows toward sober, industrious, law-abiding lives.

You are in honor bound to join hands in favor of law and order and to war against all crime, and especially against all crime by men of your own race; for the heaviest wrong done by the criminal is the wrong to his own race.

You must teach the people of your race that they must scrupulously observe any contract into which they in good faith enter, no matter whether it is hard to keep or not.

The vital deeds of life are those things which it lies within the reach of each of us to do, and the failure to perform which means the destruction of the State.

Proud though I am of your extraordinary industrial prosperity, I am prouder yet of the men who have achieved it.

Remember that we shall leave this country in the hands of the children of to-day, and that the American of to-morrow will be what we train the boy or girl to be.

If the children are not well educated, if they are not brought up as they should be, the State will go down.

Honor to us if we treat your great deeds as spurring us onward; and shame to us if we treat your great deeds as excuses for our own idleness or folly.

When I speak of education I do not mean only education in intelligence.

That counts tremendously; but education in character counts more.

I ask that the same lesson that you of the Civil War applied practically in your own persons during and since that war be applied by the rest of us in civil life.

I ask that we scorn alike the base arrogance of the rich man who would look down on his poorer brother and the equally base envy of the poor man who would hate his richer brother; and that you apply to every citizen of this Republic just…

Does he do his duty fairly by himself, his family, his neighbor, and the State and the Nation?

I am fortunate in being President of a nation where you do not have to praise one State by running down any other State.

Arkansas, the New England States, the Western, the Eastern, the Northern, the Southern—they are all good States and I am for them all.

Thank heaven, we are free now from all danger of sectional antagonism!

We must now see that there never comes any spirit of class antagonism in this country, any spirit of hostility between capitalist and wage-worker, between employer and employed; and we can avoid the upgrowth of any such feeling by…

Do not hold it for him or against him that he is either rich or poor.

If he is a crooked man and rich, hold it against him, not because he is rich, but because he is crooked.

If he is not a rich man and crooked, hold it against him, still because he is crooked.

If he is a square man, no matter how much or how little money he has, stand by him because he is a square man.

Distrust more than any other man in this Republic the man who would try to teach Americans to substitute loyalty to any class for loyalty to the whole American people.