t heart, unless there are also strength and courage
behind it. Morality, decency, clean living, courage, manliness,
self-respect--these qualities are more important in the make-up of a
people than any mental subtlety. Shape this University's course so
that it shall help in the production of a constantly upward trend for
all your people.
You should be always on your guard against one defect in Western
education. There has been altogether too great a tendency in the
higher schools of learning in the West to train men merely for
literary, professional, and official positions; altogether too great a
tendency to act as if a literary education were the only real
education. I am exceedingly glad that you have already started
industrial and agricultural schools in Egypt. A literary education is
simply one of many different kinds of education, and it is not wise
that more than a small percentage of the people of any country should
have an exclusively literary education. The average man must either
supplement it by another education, or else as soon as he has left an
institution of learning, even though he has benefited by it, he must
at once begin to train himself to do work along totally different
lines. His Highness the Khedive, in the midst of his activities
touching many phases of Egyptian life, has shown conspicuous wisdom,
great foresight, and keen understanding of the needs of the country in
the way in which he has devoted himself to its agricultural
betterment, in the interest which he has taken in the improvement of
cattle, crops, etc. You need in this country, as is the case in every
other country, a certain number of men whose education shall fit them
for the life of scholarship, or to become teachers or public
officials. But it is a very unhealthy thing for any country for more
than a small proportion of the strongest and best minds of the country
to turn into such channels. It is essential also to develop
industrialism, to train people so that they can be cultivators of the
soil in the largest sense on as successful a scale as the most
successful lawyer or public man, to train them so that they shall be
engineers, merchants--in short, men able to take the lead in all the
various functions indispensable in a great modern civilized state. An
honest, courageous, and far-sighted politician is a good thing in any
country. But his usefulness will depend chiefly upon his being able to
express the wishes of a population w
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