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.

Remember always that the securing of a substantial education, whether by the individual or by a people, is attained only by a process, not by an act.  You can no more make a man really educated by giving him a certain curriculum of studies than you can make a people fit for self-government by giving it a paper constitution.  The training of an individual so as to fit him to do good work in the world is a matter 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