- landlines

this country. Let’s make something out of it. Let’s show
that the athletic departments of the American colleges can
justify themselves as training schools of fine citizenship.

It is trite, of course, to say that the Battle of Waterloo
was won on the playing fields of great private schools, of
Eton, in England; but it isn’t trite to say that the athletic
officers of the American colleges today have it in their hands
to decide whether or not the young men of America will go
forth prepared, either for warfare when the guns are boom-
ing, or in the other warfare that we must face, economic
and social and political.

I remember, some years ago when I lived in Washington,
I was asked by the Boy Scouts to give a George Washington
Birthday address at the Tomb of the First Great American,
during their annual pilgrimage to Mount Vernon. I drove
down with General LeJeun, whom some of you knew. We
got there before the Boy Scouts did, because of the fact
that they came down by excursion steamer. As we stood
there by the Tomb, a little group from the American Citizen-
ship School of Washington came up—about thirty of them
from eighteen or nineteen to twenty-three years of age. A
boy stepped forward with a poor little wreath and laying it
against the grated door of the tomb in broken English, with
tears rolling down his cheeks he said, “George Washington,
you are dead. You cannot speak to us. But you can speak
to God. Speak to God, George Washington, and ask Him to
make us good citizens of the country which has done so
much for us.”

I thought then, and I have thought many times since, that
if we could teach the college boys of America to utter that
prayer from their hearts, not from their lips, America would
be safer than she is today.

You have that power. I have that power. There is no sep-
aration between the athletic departments and the other de-
partments in our colleges today, in their opportunity and
their responsibility for that service which may save civili-
zation.