Another thing, gentlemen, and now I want to speak to you for a moment from the religious standpoint, to speak to you in connection with the work of this mission. I wish I could make every member of a Christian church feel that just in so far as he spends his time in quarrelling with other Christians of other churches he is helping to discredit Christianity in the eyes of the world. Avoid as you would the plague those who seek to embroil you in conflict, one Christian sect with another. Not only does what I am about to say apply to the behavior of Christians towards one another, but of all Christians towards their non-Christian brethren, towards their fellow-citizens of another creed. You can do most for the colleges from which you come, you can do most for the creed which you profess, by doing your work in the position to which you have been called in a way that brings the respect of your fellow-men to you, and therefore to those for whom you stand. Let it be a matter of pride with the Christian in the army that in the time of danger no man is nearer that danger than he is. Let it be a matter of pride to the officer whose duty it is to fight that no man, when the country calls on him to fight, fights better than he does. That is how you can do more for Christianity, for the name of Christians, you who are in the army. Let the man in a civil governmental position so bear himself that it shall be acceptable as axiomatic that when you have a Christian, a graduate of a missionary school, in a public office, the efficiency and honesty of that office are guaranteed. That is the kind of Christianity that counts in a public official, that counts in the military official—the Christianity that makes him do his duty in war, or makes him do his duty in peace. And you—who I hope will be the great majority—who are not in Government service, can conduct yourselves so that your neighbors shall have every respect for your courage, your honesty, your good faith, shall have implicit trust that you will deal religiously with your brother as man to man, whether it be in business or whether it be in connection with your relations to the community as a whole. The kind of graduate of a Christian school really worth calling a Christian is the man who shows his creed practically by the way he behaves towards his wife and towards his children, towards his neighbor, towards those with whom he deals in the business world, and towards the city and Government. In no way can he do as much for the institution that trains him, in no way can he do as much to bring respect and regard to the creed that he professes. And, remember, you need more than one quality. I have spoken of courage; it is, of course, the first virtue of the soldier, but every one of you who is worth his salt must have it in him too. Do not forget that the good man who is afraid is only a handicap to his fellows who are striving for what is best. I want to see each Christian cultivate the manly virtues; each to be able to hold his own in the country, but in a broil not thrusting himself forward. Avoid quarrelling wherever you can. Make it evident that the other man wants to avoid quarrelling with you too.
One closing word. Do not make the mistake, those of you who are young men, of thinking that when you get out of school or college your education stops. On the contrary, it is only about half begun. Now, I am fifty years old, and if I had stopped learning, if I felt now that I had stopped learning, had stopped trying to better myself, I feel that my usefulness to the community would be pretty nearly at an end. And I want each of you, as he leaves college, not to feel, "Now I have had my education, I can afford to vegetate." I want you to feel, "I have been given a great opportunity of laying deep the foundations for a ripe education, and while going on with my work I am going to keep training myself, educating myself, so that year by year, decade by decade, instead of standing still I shall go forward, and grow constantly fitter, and do good work and better work."
I visited, many years ago, the college at Beirut. I have known at first hand what excellent work was being done there. Unfortunately, owing to my very limited time, it is not going to be possible for me to stop at the college at Assiut, which has done such admirable work in Egypt and here in the Sudan, whose graduates I meet in all kinds of occupations wherever I stop. I am proud, as an American, Dr. Giffen, of what has been done by men like you, like Mr. Young, like the other Americans who have been here, and, I want to say still further, by the women who have come with them. I always thought that the American was a pretty good fellow. I think his wife is still better, and, great though my respect for the man from America has been, my respect for the woman has been greater.
I stopped a few days ago at the little mission at the Sobat. One of the things that struck me there was what was being accomplished by the medical side of that mission. From one hundred and twenty-five miles around there were patients who had come in to be attended to by the doctors in the mission. There were about thirty patients who were under the charge of the surgeon, the doctor, at that mission. I do not know a better type of missionary than the doctor who comes out here and does his work well and gives his whole heart to it. He is doing practical work of the most valuable type for civilization, and for bringing the people of the country up to a realization of the standards that you are trying to set. If you make it evident to a man that you are sincerely concerned in bettering his body, he will be much more ready to believe that you are trying to better his soul.
Now, gentlemen, it has been a great pleasure to see you. When I get back to the United States, this meeting is one of the things I shall have to tell to my people at home, so that I may give them an idea of what is being done in this country. I wish you well with all my heart, and I thank you for having received me to-day.
Law and Order in Egypt
An Address before the National University in Cairo, March 28, 1910
It is to me a peculiar pleasure to speak to-day under such distinguished auspices as yours, Prince Fouad,3 before this National University, and it is of good augury for the great cause of higher education in Egypt that it should have enlisted the special interest of so distinguished and eminent a man. The Arabic-speaking world produced the great University of Cordova, which flourished a thousand years ago, and was a source of light and learning when the rest of Europe was either in twilight or darkness; in the centuries following the creation of that Spanish Moslem university, Arabic men of science, travellers, and geographers—such as the noteworthy African traveller Ibn Batutu, a copy of whose book, by the way, I saw yesterday in the library of the Alhazar4—were teachers whose works are still to be eagerly studied; and I trust that here we shall see the revival, and more than the revival, of the conditions that made possible such contributions to the growth of civilization.
This scheme of a National University is fraught with literally untold possibilities for good to your country. You have many rocks ahead of which you must steer clear; and because I am your earnest friend and well-wisher, I desire to point out one or two of these which it is necessary especially to avoid. In the first place, there is one point upon which I always lay stress in my own country, in your country, in all countries—the need of entire honesty as the only foundation on which it is safe to build. It is a prime essential that all who are in any way responsible for the beginnings of the University shall make it evident to every one that the management of the University, financial and otherwise, will be conducted with absolute honesty. Very much money will have to be raised and expended for this University in order to make it what it can and ought to be made; for, if properly managed, I firmly believe that it will become one of the greatest influences, and perhaps the very greatest influence, for good in all that part of the world where Mohammedanism is the leading religion; that is, in all those regions of the Orient, including North Africa and Southwestern Asia, which stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the farther confines of India and to the hither provinces of China. This University should have a profound influence in all things educational, social, economic, industrial, throughout this whole region, because of the very fact of Egypt's immense strategic importance, so to speak, in the world of the Orient; an importance due partly to her geographical position, partly to other causes. Moreover, it is most fortunate that Egypt's present position is such that this University will enjoy a freedom hitherto unparalleled in the investigation and testing out of all problems vital to the future of the peoples of the Orient.
Nor will the importance of this University be confined to the Orient. Egypt must necessarily from now on always occupy a similar strategic position as regards the peoples of the Occident, for she sits on one of the highways of the commerce that will flow in ever-increasing volume from Europe to the East. Those responsible for the management of this University should set before themselves a very high ideal. Not merely should it stand for the uplifting of all Mohammedan peoples and of all Christians and peoples of other religions who live in Mohammedan lands, but it should also carry its teaching and practice to such perfection as in the end to make it a factor in instructing the Occident. When a scholar is sufficiently apt, sufficiently sincere and intelligent, he always has before him the opportunity of eventually himself giving aid to the teachers from whom he has received aid.
Now, to make a good beginning towards the definite achievement of these high ends, it is essential that you should command respect and should be absolutely trusted. Make it felt that you will not tolerate the least little particle of financial crookedness in the raising or expenditure of any money, so that those who wish to give money to this deserving cause may feel entire confidence that their piasters will be well and honestly applied.
In the next place, show the same good faith, wisdom, and sincerity in your educational plans that you do in the financial management of the institution. Avoid sham and hollow pretence just as you avoid religious, racial, or political bigotry. You have much to learn from the universities of Europe and of my own land, but there is also in them not a little which it is well to avoid. Copy what is good in them, but test in a critical spirit whatever you take, so as to be sure that you take only what is wisest and best for yourselves. More important even than avoiding any mere educational shortcoming is the avoidance of moral shortcoming. Students are already being sent to Europe to prepare themselves to return as professors. Such preparation is now essential, for it is of prime importance that the University should be familiar with what is being done in the best universities of Europe and America. But let the men who are sent be careful to bring back what is fine and good, what is essential to the highest kind of modern progress, and let them avoid what are the mere non-essentials of the present-day civilization, and, above all, the vices of modern civilized nations. Let these men keep open minds. It would be a capital blunder to refuse to copy, and thereafter to adapt to your own needs, what has raised the Occident in the scale of power and justice and clean living. But it would be a no less capital blunder to copy what is cheap or trivial or vicious, or even what is merely wrongheaded. Let the men who go to Europe feel that they have much to learn and much also to avoid and reject; let them bring back the good and leave behind the discarded evil.
Remember that character is far more important than intellect, and that a really great university should strive to develop the qualities that go to make up character even more than the qualities that go to make up a highly trained mind. No man can reach the front rank if he is not intelligent and if he is not trained with intelligence; but mere intelligence by itself is worse than useless unless it is guided by an upright 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 wherein the politician forms but a fragment of the leadership, where the business man and the landowner, the engineer and the man of technical knowledge, the men of a hundred different pursuits, represent the average type of leadership. No people has ever permanently amounted to anything if its only public leaders were clerks, politicians, and lawyers. The base, the foundation, of healthy life in any country, in any society, is necessarily composed of the men who do the actual productive work of the country, whether in tilling the soil, in the handicrafts, or in business; and it matters little whether they work with hands or head, although more and more we are growing to realize that it is a good thing to have the same man work with both head and hands. These men, in many different careers, do the work which is most important to the community's life; although, of course, it must be supplemented by the work of the other men whose education and activities are literary and scholastic, of the men who work in politics or law, or in literary and clerical positions.
Never forget that in any country the most important activities are the activities of the man who works with head or hands in the ordinary life of the community, whether he be handicraftsman, farmer, or business man—no matter what his occupation, so long as it is useful and no matter what his position, from the guiding intelligence at the top down all the way through, just as long as his work is good. I preach this to you here by the banks of the Nile, and it is the identical doctrine I preach no less earnestly by the banks of the Hudson, the Mississippi, and the Columbia.