AN EXHORTATION TO STUDENTS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 32, 23 May 1947, Page 6

AN EXHORTATION TO STUDENTS

THEIR OBLIGATIONS TO COMMUNITY SHOULD ASSOCIATE WITH PUBLIC LIFE “I hope that you won’t take it amiss if my message is directed towards the part, and indeed the obligation, which lies upon you to associate yourselves with public life and the service of your fellows,” said the Mayor (Mr Appleton) to students of Victoria University College at the 1947 capping ceremony in the Wellington Town Hall.

Most of today’s students, he said, had enjoyed special opportunities compared with the young people of his own generation. It was some comfort to know that the debt which univei’sities in young countries owed the Old World had been in part repaid by the sacrifice of so many young men who died that freedom might be restored to ancient seats of learning. It would be another tragedy if that sacrifice had been partly in vain. The remedy for the oft-repeated remark that the most able men were not attracted to public life and service surely lay with the people, more particularly among those whose training had been on a higher plane than was taken advantage of by most of the community. “You university men and women have a great responsibility in this regard—a duty to your country, to those who died to preserve its institutions, to yourselves and your families to be,” said Mr Appleton. “It is to you to match the duty and the hour. Never were opportunities more numerous.

“You are the governors of the future if you will accept your responsibility, the guardians of what was worthy in the past and worthwhile preserving and improving. It is my earnest wish, and I am certain that of the rest of the citizens of Wellington and of the country generally, that from among this gathering there will come public leaders. He who sleeps upon his watch is as guilty as he who goes over to the enemy.”