of years; just as the training of a nation to fit it successfully to
fulfil the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or
two, but of generations. There are foolish empiricists who believe
that the granting of a paper constitution, prefaced by some
high-sounding declaration, of itself confers the power of
self-government upon a people. This is never so. Nobody can "give" a
people "self-government," any more than it is possible to "give" an
individual "self-help." You know that the Arab proverb runs, "God
helps those who help themselves." In the long run, the only permanent
way by which an individual can be helped is to help him to help
himself, and this is one of the things your University should
inculcate. But it must be his own slow growth in character that is
the final and determining factor in the problem. So it is with a
people. In the two Americas we have seen certain commonwealths rise
and prosper greatly. We have also seen other commonwealths start under
identically the same conditions, with the same freedom and the same
rights, the same guarantees, and yet have seen them fail miserably and
lamentably, and sink into corruption and anarchy and tyranny, simply
because the people for whom the constitution was made did not develop
the qualities which alone would enable them to take advantage of it.
With any people the essential quality to show is, not haste in
grasping after a power which it is only too easy to misuse, but a
slow, steady, resolute development of those substantial qualities,
such as the love of justice, the love of fair play, the spirit of
self-reliance, of moderation, which alone enable a people to govern
themselves. In this long and even tedious but absolutely essential
process, I believe your University will take an important part. When I
was recently in the Sudan I heard a vernacular proverb, based on a
text in the Koran, which is so apt that, although not an Arabic
scholar, I shall attempt to repeat it in Arabic: "_Allah ma el