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Your Royal
Highness, Your Excellency,
The Rt. Hon. Minister of Education:
Tomorrow
Independence Day, you will be the children of the citizens of the Independent
State of Trinidad and Tobago and in a few years after that you will be
called upon by the law of the land to share in the privileges and responsibilities,
the rights and duties of citizens. Tomorrow I shall have an equally great
honour and responsibility that of being the first Prime Minister of an
Independent nation.
I am very happy indeed, therefore, to take part today in this memorable
Rally and to send through you, the boys and girls here today at the Queen's
Park Oval, to all the young people of Trinidad and Tobago. Our new nation
must maintain and develop its political system and its democratic machinery.
It must provide the cabinet ministers, the members of parliament, the
civil servants, the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the ambassadors,
the nurses, the teachers, the skilled workers and the writers and artistes,
which every independent nation has and provides for itself. It must organise
and plan our economy to increase the national wealth and improve our living
standards.
We who are doing all this today as well as we can will have to giveaway
in the years to come to you young people who will come forward to take
our place. The nation is on the march, there is no fuming back. The road
from now on leads forward and only forward. Your responsibility, therefore,
is a very heavy one. If you shirk it you betray the nation. If you fail
in that responsibility, you jeopardize our nation. I have given to the
nation as its watch words DISCIPLINE, PRODUCTION, TOLERANCE, they
apply as much as to you the young people as to your parents. The discipline
is both individual and national. The individual cannot be allowed to seek
his personal interests and gratify his personal ambitions at the expense
of a nation. We must produce in order to enjoy. Wealth does not drop from
the sky for any individual or any nation. Reduce production, skylark on
the job, take twice as long to do a job and make it cost twice as much,
do any of these things and in effect you reduce the total amount available
to be shared among the total number of people. You don't pull your weight
and you fatten at the expense of others.
Your Rally here today is a good demonstration of our mixed society, some
of you halve ancestors who came from one country, some from another, others
from a third. Some of you profess one religion, some another, others a
third or fourth. You in your schools have, like the nation in general
only two alternatives. You learn to live together in peace or you fight
it out and destroy one another. The second alternative makes no sense
and is sheer barbarism. The first alternative is civilised and is simple
common sense. You the children, yours is the great responsibility to educate
your parents, teach them to live together in harmony. The difference is
not race, or colour of skin, but merit only -difference of wealth and
family status being rejected in favour of equality of opportunities. I
call upon all of you young people to practice what you sing today and
tomorrow; to translate the ideal of our national anthem into a code of
everyday behaviour, and to make our nation one in which every creed and
race find an equal place.
I give you the young people one additional principle on which to place
your lives for the salvation of our nation. This principle is honesty.
In your future career, you will at some time or other have responsibility
for money that is not yours, whether your employer is the government of
this country or a private firm. Every country makes special provision
for the control of public expenditure and for the protection of the property
of its citizens. In the final analysis, however, the control is exercised
not by the government or by the police but by the citizens themselves.
Make honesty the guiding principle of your life from this day forward.
Let your ambition be the development of a nation, which, whatever its
limitations, is distinguished in the eyes of the world by the honesty
and the maturity of its citizens.
And so I say to you young people, forward to independence. Do not allow
anyone to disrespect our national flag; do not allow anyone to destroy
one single national bird; do not allow anyone to desecrate our national
anthem; they are your flag, your bird, your anthem, it is your nation
even more than it is the nation of your parents. You are the future, we
are at best the present, at worst the past. To your tender and loving
hands the future of the nation is entrusted; in your innocent hearts the
pride of the nation is enshrined; on your scholastic development the salvation
of the nation is dependent.
At the birth of our nation four of its leading personalities, four people
with the heaviest responsibility for its guidance in the Cabinet, Parliament
and the Judiciary are scholarship winners, educated abroad at the expense
of your parents -the taxpayers- the Prime Minister and Leader of the House
of Representatives and the Leader of the Opposition. And I hope soon to
announce that yet a fifth scholarship winner has been selected to represent
our nation in one of the highest positions in the Diplomatic Service.
When you return to your classes after Independence, remember therefore,
each and everyone of you, that you carry the future of Trinidad and Tobago
in your school bags. Good luck to you all, to your parents and your teachers
and to Trinidad and Tobago.
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