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 together under the name of character; but it can be of enormous use in…

It is a source of just pride to every American that our people have so consistently acted in accordance with Washington’s principle 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.

The higher education, such as is provided by the University of Pennsylvania and kindred bodies, not only confers great benefits to those able to take advantage of it, but entails upon them corresponding duties.

To merely political issues have succeeded those of grave social and economic importance, the solution of which demands the best efforts of the best men.

That college graduate is but a poor creature who does not feel when he has left college that he has received something for which he owes a return.

It is but occasionally that a college graduate can do much outright for his alma mater; he can best repay her by living a life that will reflect credit upon her, by so carrying himself as a citizen that men shall see that the years spent…

The educated man is entitled to no special privilege, save the inestimable privilege of trying to show that his education enables him to take the lead in striving to guide his fellows aright in the difficult task which is set to us of the…

To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent.

We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization.

We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away.

Much has been given to us, and much will rightfully be expected from us.

We have become a great Nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth; and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.

We must show not only in our words but in our deeds that we are earnestly desirous of securing their goodwill by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights.

But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong.

While ever careful to refrain from wronging others, we must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves.

We wish peace; but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness.

We wish it because we think it is right and not because we are afraid.

Our relations with the other Powers of the world are important; but still more important are our relations among ourselves.

Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the last half century are felt in every fibre of our social and political being.

Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic republic.

The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation…

Upon the success of our experiment much depends; not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind.

If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations; and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.

Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced…