Without them no
people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from
the outside. I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great
university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual
development; I pay all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and
specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the
assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are
the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to
work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The
need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to
warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born
that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if
they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of
the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially
non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do
this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom
remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must
earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should
be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does
not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at
whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of
contempt, an object of derision.
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