Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV THE COLLEGE GRADUATE AND PUBLIC LIFE1 THERE are always, in our national life, certain tendencies that give us ground for alarm, and certain others that give us ground for hope. Among the latter we must put the fact that there has undoubtedly been a growing feeling among educated men that they are in honor bound to do their full share of the work of American public life. We have in this country an equality of rights. It is the plain duty of every man to see that his rights are respected. That weak good n ature which acquiesces in wrong doing, whether from laziness, timidity, or indifference, is a very unwholesome quality. It should be second nature with every man to insist that he be given full justice. But if there is an equality of rights, there is an inequality of duties. It is proper to demand more from the man with exceptional advantages than from the 1 Atlantic Monthly, August, 1894. man without them. A heavy moral obligation rests upon the man of means and upon the man of education to do their full duty by their country. On no class does this obligation rest more heavily than upon the men with a collegiate education, the men who are graduates of our universities. Their education gives them no right to feel the least superiority over any of their fellow citizens ; but it certainly ought to make them feel that they should stand foremost in the honorable effort to serve the. whole public by doing their duty as Americans in the body politic. This obligation very possibly rests even more heavily upon the men of means ; but of this it is not necessary now to speak. The men of mere wealth never can have and never should have the capacity for doing good work that is possessed by the men of exceptional mental training ; but that they may become both a laughing stock an...
|
