SERVICE BY THE EDUCATED NEGRO ADDRESS OF ROSCOE CONKLING BRUCE OF TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE M STREET HIGH SCHOOL METROPOLITAN A. M. E. CHURCH WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 16, 1903 Copyright 1903 C. W. B. Bruce Tuskegee Institute Steam Print. [3] SERVICE BY THE EDUCATED NEGRO. When George William Curtis had received from Harvard her greatest degree, he arose at the Alumni Dinner and said, “In the old Italian story the nobleman turns out of the hot street crowded with eager faces into the coolness and silence of his palace. As he looks at the pictures of the long line of ancestors he hears a voice,—or is it his own heart beating?—which says to him noblesse oblige. The youngest scion of the oldest house is pledged by all the virtues and honor of his ancestry to a life not unworthy his lineage.... When I came here I was not a nobleman, but to-day I have been ennobled. The youngest doctor of the oldest school, I too, say with the Italian, noblesse oblige. I am pledged by all the honorable traditions of the noble family into which I am this day adopted.”... You, my friends, are ennobled by the diploma of a school, rich in traditions of high endeavor and actual service. Shall those traditions fail to enter your hearts, and to quicken your energies, and to chasten your ambitions? This question you are not now competent to answer, and you will not be competent until you have lived your lives. noblesse oblige noblesse oblige Your equipment for the business of life is not contemptible. As workers you have some acquaintance with the natural resources of our country, and the ways in which they have been utilized in the production and distribution of commodities through the perfecting of industrial organization and the applying of science to work. More, importantly, you possess in varying degrees a group of valuable[4] industrial qualities,—that ambition without which work is drudgery and enlargement of life unsought and unattainable; that habit of earnest endeavor which, established by continuous attention to Greek or Latin, mathematics or history, may be utilized in the school room, or on the farm, or in the court room; that habit of self-control which enables men to sacrifice vagrant impulse to
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