When the citizens of a commonwealth tax themselves in order to give university instruction to their children, does it necessarily follow that the university life will develop the highest citizenship? Does it develop a feeling of pride in the State and of loyalty to it? Is the position of the State as an instrument of modern civilization strengthened or weakened thereby?
Does university training tend to produce an accelerated or a deferred maturity of the judicial sense—the power to distinguish between what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, what is genuine and what is false; and to distinguish promptly between the man that is frankly striving for principle, and the one who is falsely striving for position?
If any considerable number of college graduates should be of the opinion that the State, in addition to providing some twenty-five years of free instruction, should also provide free board, is it not obvious that difficulties akin to those that surround the issue of fiat money would quickly arise on the issue of fiat food?
If graduates on becoming citizens believe that they are entitled to anything and everything that can be extracted from the State, and if their lives are to be spent under this obsession, ought not the community to prepare itself for a long series of constitutional amendments?
Is a university graduate sufficiently prepared to meet the strife of adult life if he leaves his institution wise with facts, emotional to the spell of the professional agitator, and innocent of the craft of the publicity agent?
Our institutions may teach what is right, but what is being done to develop the moral fibre and personal independence that will put the right into operation? What forces are at work to encourage open and vigorous opposition to social doctrines that are generally considered damaging to the State?
Does free and excessive opportunity engender a feeling of gratitude on the part of the recipient, or are such feelings inconsistent with modern conventions?
When the lust for individual gain and personal possession on the part of the few, is legitimatized at the expense of many, are the results more reprehensible when the process has been conducted by the aristocratic adult, than when conducted by the proletariat youth?
When students have listened to and communed with the most eminent instructors in social and political science that the State can furnish, why should they believe that labor, when organized, has inherent rights that labor individualized does not possess?
Are the cardinal principles of our form of constitutional government being upheld when it becomes necessary for the individual to declare allegiance to some party or organization before he can enjoy the ordinary privileges of citizenship?