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[Illustration: _THE PRESIDENT IN THE SADDLE_

_Mr. Roosevelt’s afternoon ride from the White House to Chevy Chase,
across country and over Virginia fences_]




THE WORKS OF

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

IN FOURTEEN VOLUMES,

_Illustrated_


THE STRENUOUS LIFE


[Illustration]


EXECUTIVE EDITION

PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE
PRESIDENT THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
WITH THE CENTURY CO., MESSRS. CHARLES
SCRIBNER’S SONS, AND G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS


NEW YORK

P. F. COLLIER & SON, PUBLISHERS

12

       *       *       *       *       *

COPYRIGHT 1900
BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY

COPYRIGHT 1900
BY THE CHURCHMAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT 1899
BY THE S. S. MCCLURE COMPANY

COPYRIGHT 1899, 1900, 1901
BY THE CENTURY COMPANY

       *       *       *       *       *

    How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
    To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
    As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
    Were all too little, and of one to me
    Little remains: but every hour is saved
    From that eternal silence, something more,
    A bringer of new things; and vile it were
    For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
    And this gray spirit yearning in desire
    To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
    Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
                                   ... My mariners,
    Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
    That ever with a frolic welcome took
    The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
    Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
    Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;
    Death closes all: but something ere the end,
    Some work of noble note, may yet be done,—

       *       *       *       *       *

    Push off, and sitting well in order smite
    The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
    To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
    Of all the western stars, until I die.

                    —TENNYSON’S “ULYSSES.”

    Ja! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben,
    Dass ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss;
    Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
    Der täglich sie erobern muss.
    Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr,
    Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr.
    Solch’ ein Gewimmel möcht’ ich sehn,
    Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.

                    —GOETHE’S “FAUST.”

    EXECUTIVE MANSION, ALBANY, N. Y.
        _September, 1900._




CONTENTS


THE STRENUOUS LIFE                                                     3

EXPANSION AND PEACE                                                   23

LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE AMONG REFORMERS                                37

FELLOW-FEELING AS A POLITICAL FACTOR                                  58

CIVIC HELPFULNESS                                                     80

CHARACTER AND SUCCESS                                                 98

THE EIGHTH AND NINTH COMMANDMENTS IN POLITICS                        107

THE BEST AND THE GOOD                                                113

PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE                                              119

THE AMERICAN BOY                                                     128

MILITARY PREPAREDNESS AND UNPREPAREDNESS                             138

ADMIRAL DEWEY                                                        156

GRANT                                                                171

THE TWO AMERICAS                                                     189

MANHOOD AND STATEHOOD                                                201

BROTHERHOOD AND THE HEROIC VIRTUES                                   215

NATIONAL DUTIES                                                      228

THE LABOR QUESTION                                                   245

CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP                                                262




THE STRENUOUS LIFE

SPEECH BEFORE THE HAMILTON CLUB, CHICAGO, APRIL 10, 1899


In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of
the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who
pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the
American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease,
but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of
labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes,
not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not
shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of
these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely
from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things,
is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that
what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his
sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among
you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first
consideration in their eyes—to be the ultimate goal after which they
strive? You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of
Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making
America great, because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine.
You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are
rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they
may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used
leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the
necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to
carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in
art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most
need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects
most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace.
We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never
wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those
virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In
this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the
present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past.
A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he
or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom
thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work,
though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether
in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure,
he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of
freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation,
but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment,
he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth’s surface, and he
surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to
do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very
satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits
those who follow it for serious work in the world.

In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men
and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when
the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk
difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how
to wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a
man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to
keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the
helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy
children. In one of Daudet’s powerful and melancholy books he speaks
of “the fear of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the
present day.” When such words can be truthfully written of a nation,
that nation is rotten to the heart’s core. When men fear work or fear
righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of
doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they
are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves
strong and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base
untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice
happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to
dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows
not victory nor defeat. If, in 1861, the men who loved the Union had
believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the
worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have
saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds
of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and
treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of
many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared
the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our
armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering
simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we
would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to
stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in
the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln,
and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children
of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let us, the
children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant
conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels
of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of
sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife
endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and
the mighty American Republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among
nations.

We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our
fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to
perform them! We can not, if we would, play the part of China, and
be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders,
taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling
commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of
toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for
the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question,
what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has
trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in
the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly
and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we
must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We can not
avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is
whether we shall meet them well or ill. In 1898 we could not help being
brought face to face with the problem of war with Spain. All we could
decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or
enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and, once
in, whether failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now.

We can not avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba,
Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall
meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether
we shall make of our dealings with these new problems a dark and
shameful page in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all merely
amounts to dealing with them badly. We have a given problem to solve.
If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that
we may not solve it aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution
simply renders it certain that we can not possibly solve it aright.
The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the
over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues,
the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of
feeling the mighty lift that thrills “stern men with empires in their
brains”—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake
its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate
to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work,
by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from
which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish
flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only
national life which is really worth leading. They believe in that
cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps
them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of
gain and greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all and end-all
of national life, instead of realizing that, though an indispensable
element, it is, after all, but one of the many elements that go to
make up true national greatness. No country can long endure if its
foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes
from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing
effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation
ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All
honor must be paid to the architects of our material prosperity, to
the great captains of industry who have built our factories and our
railroads, to the strong men who toil for wealth with brain or hand;
for great is the debt of the nation to these and their kind. But our
debt is yet greater to the men whose highest type is to be found in
a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like Grant. They showed by their
lives that they recognized the law of work, the law of strife; they
toiled to win a competence for themselves and those dependent upon
them; but they recognized that there were yet other and even loftier
duties—duties to the nation and duties to the race.

We can not sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely
an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens
beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the nations
grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into
closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle
for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without
our own borders. We must build the Isthmian Canal, and we must grasp
the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding
the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West.

So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint of international
honor the argument is even stronger. The guns that thundered off Manila
and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of
duty. If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage
anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than
idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their
fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course
of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched
islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in
and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to
carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited
nations are eager to undertake.

The work must be done; we can not escape our responsibility; and
if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance to do the
work—glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of the great
tasks set modern civilization. But let us not deceive ourselves as to
the importance of the task. Let us not be misled by vainglory into
underestimating the strain it will put on our powers. Above all, let
us, as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities with
proper seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We must demand the
highest order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to
grapple with these new problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability
those public servants who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the
nation or inability to rise to the high level of the new demands upon
our strength and our resources.

Of course we must remember not to judge any public servant by any one
act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are
merely the occasions and not the causes of disaster. Let me illustrate
what I mean by the army and the navy. If twenty years ago we had gone
to war, we should have found the navy as absolutely unprepared as the
army. At that time our ships could not have encountered with success
the fleets of Spain any more than nowadays we can put untrained
soldiers, no matter how brave, who are armed with archaic black-powder
weapons, against well-drilled regulars armed with the highest type of
modern repeating rifle. But in the early eighties the attention of the
nation became directed to our naval needs. Congress most wisely made a
series of appropriations to build up a new navy, and under a succession
of able and patriotic Secretaries, of both political parties, the
navy was gradually built up, until its material became equal to its
splendid personnel, with the result that in the summer of 1898 it
leaped to its proper place as one of the most brilliant and formidable
fighting navies in the entire world. We rightly pay all honor to the
men controlling the navy at the time it won these great deeds, honor
to Secretary Long and Admiral Dewey, to the captains who handled the
ships in action, to the daring lieutenants who braved death in the
smaller craft, and to the heads of bureaus at Washington who saw that
the ships were so commanded, so armed, so equipped, so well engined,
as to ensure the best results. But let us also keep ever in mind that
all of this would not have availed if it had not been for the wisdom
of the men who during the preceding fifteen years had built up the
navy. Keep in mind the Secretaries of the Navy during those years;
keep in mind the Senators and Congressmen who by their votes gave the
money necessary to build and to armor the ships, to construct the great
guns, and to train the crews; remember also those who actually did
build the ships, the armor, and the guns; and remember the admirals and
captains who handled battleship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat on the high
seas, alone and in squadrons, developing the seamanship, the gunnery,
and the power of acting together, which their successors utilized so
gloriously at Manila and off Santiago. And, gentlemen, remember the
converse, too. Remember that justice has two sides. Be just to those
who built up the navy, and, for the sake of the future of the country,
keep in mind those who opposed its building up. Read the “Congressional
Record.” Find out the Senators and Congressmen who opposed the grants
for building the new ships; who opposed the purchase of armor, without
which the ships were worthless; who opposed any adequate maintenance
for the Navy Department, and strove to cut down the number of men
necessary to man our fleets. The men who did these things were one
and all working to bring disaster on the country. They have no share
in the glory of Manila, in the honor of Santiago. They have no cause
to feel proud of the valor of our sea-captains, of the renown of our
flag. Their motives may or may not have been good, but their acts were
heavily fraught with evil. They did ill for the national honor, and we
won in spite of their sinister opposition.

Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day. Our army has never
been built up as it should be built up. I shall not discuss with an
audience like this the puerile suggestion that a nation of seventy
millions of freemen is in danger of losing its liberties from the
existence of an army of one hundred thousand men, three-fourths of
whom will be employed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast
fortresses, and on Indian reservations. No man of good sense and stout
heart can take such a proposition seriously. If we are such weaklings
as the proposition implies, then we are unworthy of freedom in any
event. To no body of men in the United States is the country so much
indebted as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular
army and navy. There is no body from which the country has less to
fear, and none of which it should be prouder, none which it should be
more anxious to upbuild.

Our army needs complete reorganization,—not merely enlarging,—and the
reorganization can only come as the result of legislation. A proper
general staff should be established, and the positions of ordnance,
commissary, and quartermaster officers should be filled by detail from
the line. Above all, the army must be given the chance to exercise
in large bodies. Never again should we see, as we saw in the Spanish
War, major-generals in command of divisions who had never before
commanded three companies together in the field. Yet, incredible to
relate, Congress has shown a queer inability to learn some of the
lessons of the war. There were large bodies of men in both branches
who opposed the declaration of war, who opposed the ratification of
peace, who opposed the upbuilding of the army, and who even opposed
the purchase of armor at a reasonable price for the battleships and
cruisers, thereby putting an absolute stop to the building of any new
fighting-ships for the navy. If, during the years to come, any disaster
should befall our arms, afloat or ashore, and thereby any shame come
to the United States, remember that the blame will lie upon the men
whose names appear upon the roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side of
these great questions. On them will lie the burden of any loss of our
soldiers and sailors, of any dishonor to the flag; and upon you and the
people of this country will lie the blame if you do not repudiate, in
no unmistakable way, what these men have done. The blame will not rest
upon the untrained commander of untried troops, upon the civil officers
of a department the organization of which has been left utterly
inadequate, or upon the admiral with an insufficient number of ships;
but upon the public men who have so lamentably failed in forethought as
to refuse to remedy these evils long in advance, and upon the nation
that stands behind those public men.

So, at the present hour, no small share of the responsibility for the
blood shed in the Philippines, the blood of our brothers, and the blood
of their wild and ignorant foes, lies at the thresholds of those who so
long delayed the adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those who by
their worse than foolish words deliberately invited a savage people to
plunge into a war fraught with sure disaster for them—a war, too, in
which our own brave men who follow the flag most pay with their blood
for the silly, mock humanitarianism of the prattlers who sit at home in
peace.

The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation
must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth—if
she is not to stand merely as the China of the Western Hemisphere. Our
proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain
is merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course
we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must
see that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense
in our home administration of city, State, and nation. We must strive
for honesty in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation
and of the individual; for the widest freedom of individual initiative
where possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative
where it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we set our
own household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part
in the great affairs of the world. A man’s first duty is to his own
home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the State;
for if he fails in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing
to be a freeman. In the same way, while a nation’s first duty is within
its own borders, it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in
the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits
its right to struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the
destiny of mankind.

In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are confronted by most
difficult problems. It is cowardly to shrink from solving them in
the proper way; for solved they must be, if not by us, then by some
stronger and more manful race. If we are too weak, too selfish, or too
foolish to solve them, some bolder and abler people must undertake the
solution. Personally, I am far too firm a believer in the greatness of
my country and the power of my countrymen to admit for one moment that
we shall ever be driven to the ignoble alternative.

The problems are different for the different islands. Porto Rico is
not large enough to stand alone. We must govern it wisely and well,
primarily in the interest of its own people. Cuba is, in my judgment,
entitled ultimately to settle for itself whether it shall be an
independent State or an integral portion of the mightiest of Republics.
But until order and stable liberty are secured, we must remain in the
island to ensure them, and infinite tact, judgment, moderation, and
courage must be shown by our military and civil representatives in
keeping the island pacified, in relentlessly stamping out brigandage,
in protecting all alike, and yet in showing proper recognition to
the men who have fought for Cuban liberty. The Philippines offer a
yet graver problem. Their population includes half-caste and native
Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are
utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit.
Others may in time become fit, but at present can only take part in
self-government under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent.
We have driven Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let it be
replaced by savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and not for
good. I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task
of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear
to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense
and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a
pretence of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who
cant about “liberty” and the “consent of the governed,” in order to
excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.
Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to
leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to
decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines
condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these
United States.

England’s rule in India and Egypt has been of great benefit to England,
for it has trained up generations of men accustomed to look at the
larger and loftier side of public life. It has been of even greater
benefit to India and Egypt. And finally, and most of all, it has
advanced the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in the
Philippines, we will add to that national renown which is the highest
and finest part of national life, we will greatly benefit the people of
the Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play our part well in
the great work of uplifting mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in
mind that we must show in a very high degree the qualities of courage,
of honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance must be stamped out. The
first and all-important work to be done is to establish the supremacy
of our flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can accomplish
anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in
dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the
foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be
remembered that their utterances are not saved from being treasonable
merely by the fact that they are despicable.

When once we have put down armed resistance, when once our rule is
acknowledged, then an even more difficult task will begin, for then
we must see to it that the islands are administered with absolute
honesty and with good judgment. If we let the public service of the
islands be turned into the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have
begun to tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction. We
must send out there only good and able men, chosen for their fitness,
and not because of their partisan service, and these men must not
only administer impartial justice to the natives and serve their own
government with honesty and fidelity, but must show the utmost tact and
firmness, remembering that, with such people as those with whom we are
to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness
comes lack of consideration for their principles and prejudices.

I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for
the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth
century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand
idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace,
if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of
their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder
and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the
domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of
strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold
righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and
brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all,
let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the
nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is
only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall
ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.




EXPANSION AND PEACE

PUBLISHED IN THE “INDEPENDENT,” DECEMBER 21, 1899


It was the gentlest of our poets who wrote:

    “Be bolde! Be bolde! and everywhere, Be bolde”;
    Be not too bold! Yet better the excess
    Than the defect; better the more than less.

Longfellow’s love of peace was profound; but he was a man, and a wise
man, and he knew that cowardice does not promote peace, and that even
the great evil of war may be a less evil than cringing to iniquity.

Captain Mahan, than whom there is not in the country a man whom we can
more appropriately designate by the fine and high phrase, “a Christian
gentleman,” and who is incapable of advocating wrong-doing of any kind,
national or individual, gives utterance to the feeling of the great
majority of manly and thoughtful men when he denounces the great danger
of indiscriminate advocacy of peace at any price, because “it may
lead men to tamper with iniquity, to compromise with unrighteousness,
soothing their conscience with the belief that war is so entirely
wrong that beside it no other tolerated evil is wrong. Witness Armenia
and witness Crete. War has been avoided; but what of the national
consciences that beheld such iniquity and withheld the hand?”

Peace is a great good; and doubly harmful, therefore, is the attitude
of those who advocate it in terms that would make it synonymous with
selfish and cowardly shrinking from warring against the existence of
evil. The wisest and most far-seeing champions of peace will ever
remember that, in the first place, to be good it must be righteous, for
unrighteous and cowardly peace may be worse than any war; and, in the
second place, that it can often be obtained only at the cost of war.
Let me take two illustrations:

The great blot upon European international morality in the closing
decade of this century has been not a war, but the infamous peace kept
by the joint action of the great powers, while Turkey inflicted the
last horrors of butchery, torture, and outrage upon the men, women,
and children of despairing Armenia. War was avoided; peace was kept;
but what a peace! Infinitely greater human misery was inflicted during
this peace than in the late wars of Germany with France, of Russia with
Turkey; and this misery fell, not on armed men, but upon defenceless
women and children, upon the gray-beard and the stripling no less than
upon the head of the family; and it came, not in the mere form of
death or imprisonment, but of tortures upon men, and, above all, upon
women, too horrible to relate—tortures of which it is too terrible
even to think. Moreover, no good resulted from the bloodshed and
misery. Often this is the case in a war, but often it is not the case.
The result of the last Turko-Russian war was an immense and permanent
increase of happiness for Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.
These provinces became independent or passed under the dominion of
Austria, and the advantage that accrued to them because of this
expansion of the domain of civilization at the expense of barbarism
has been simply incalculable. This expansion produced peace, and put a
stop to the ceaseless, grinding, bloody tyranny that had desolated the
Balkans for so many centuries. There are many excellent people who have
praised Tolstoi’s fantastic religious doctrines, his fantastic advocacy
of peace. The same quality that makes the debauchee and the devotee
alternate in certain decadent families, the hysterical development
which leads to violent emotional reaction in a morbid nature from vice
to virtue, also leads to the creation of Tolstoi’s “Kreutzer Sonata”
on the one hand, and of his unhealthy peace-mysticism on the other. A
sane and healthy mind would be as incapable of the moral degradation of
the novel as of the decadent morality of the philosophy. If Tolstoi’s
countrymen had acted according to his moral theories they would now
be extinct, and savages would have taken their place. Unjust war is
a terrible sin. It does not nowadays in the aggregate cause anything
like the misery that is caused in the aggregate by unjust dealing
toward one’s neighbors in the commercial and social world; and to
condemn all war is just as logical as to condemn all business and
all social relations, as to condemn love and marriage because of the
frightful misery caused by brutal and unregulated passion. If Russia
had acted upon Tolstoi’s philosophy, all its people would long ago
have disappeared from the face of the earth, and the country would now
be occupied by wandering tribes of Tartar barbarians. The Armenian
massacres are simply illustrations on a small scale of what would
take place on the very largest scale if Tolstoi’s principles became
universal among civilized people. It is not necessary to point out
that the teaching which would produce such a condition of things is
fundamentally immoral.

Again, peace may come only through war. There are men in our country
who seemingly forget that at the outbreak of the Civil War the great
cry raised by the opponents of the war was the cry for peace. One of
the most amusing and most biting satires written by the friends of
union and liberty during the Civil War was called the “New Gospel of
Peace,” in derision of this attitude. The men in our own country who,
in the name of peace, have been encouraging Aguinaldo and his people
to shoot down our soldiers in the Philippines might profit not a
little if they would look back to the days of the bloody draft riots,
which were deliberately incited in the name of peace and free speech,
when the mob killed men and women in the streets and burned orphan
children in the asylums as a protest against the war. Four years of
bloody struggle with an armed foe, who was helped at every turn by the
self-styled advocates of peace, were needed in order to restore the
Union; but the result has been that the peace of this continent has
been effectually assured. Had the short-sighted advocates of peace for
the moment had their way, and secession become an actual fact, nothing
could have prevented a repetition in North America of the devastating
anarchic warfare that obtained for three quarters of a century in
South America after the yoke of Spain was thrown off. We escaped
generations of anarchy and bloodshed, because our fathers who upheld
Lincoln and followed Grant were men in every sense of the term, with
too much common sense to be misled by those who preached that war was
always wrong, and with a fund of stern virtue deep in their souls which
enabled them to do deeds from which men of over-soft natures would have
shrunk appalled.

Wars between civilized communities are very dreadful, and as nations
grow more and more civilized we have every reason, not merely to
hope, but to believe that they will grow rarer and rarer. Even with
civilized peoples, as was shown by our own experience in 1861, it
may be necessary at last to draw the sword rather than to submit to
wrong-doing. But a very marked feature in the world-history of the
present century has been the growing infrequency of wars between
great civilized nations. The Peace Conference at The Hague is but one
of the signs of this growth. I am among those who believe that much
was accomplished at that conference, and I am proud of the leading
position taken in the conference by our delegates. Incidentally I may
mention that the testimony is unanimous that they were able to take
this leading position chiefly because we had just emerged victorious
from our most righteous war with Spain. Scant attention is paid to the
weakling or the coward who babbles of peace; but due heed is given to
the strong man with the sword girt on thigh who preaches peace, not
from ignoble motives, not from fear or distrust of his own powers, but
from a deep sense of moral obligation.

The growth of peacefulness between nations, however, has been confined
strictly to those that are civilized. It can only come when both
parties to a possible quarrel feel the same spirit. With a barbarous
nation peace is the exceptional condition. On the border between
civilization and barbarism war is generally normal because it must be
under the conditions of barbarism. Whether the barbarian be the Red
Indian on the frontier of the United States, the Afghan on the border
of British India, or the Turkoman who confronts the Siberian Cossack,
the result is the same. In the long run civilized man finds he can keep
the peace only by subduing his barbarian neighbor; for the barbarian
will yield only to force, save in instances so exceptional that they
may be disregarded. Back of the force must come fair dealing, if the
peace is to be permanent. But without force fair dealing usually
amounts to nothing. In our history we have had more trouble from the
Indian tribes whom we pampered and petted than from those we wronged;
and this has been true in Siberia, Hindustan, and Africa.

Every expansion of civilization makes for peace. In other words,
every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law,
order, and righteousness. This has been the case in every instance of
expansion during the present century, whether the expanding power were
France or England, Russia or America. In every instance the expansion
has been of benefit, not so much to the power nominally benefited,
as to the whole world. In every instance the result proved that the
expanding power was doing a duty to civilization far greater and more
important than could have been done by any stationary power. Take the
case of France and Algiers. During the early decades of the present
century piracy of the most dreadful description was rife on the
Mediterranean, and thousands of civilized men were yearly dragged into
slavery by the Moorish pirates. A degrading peace was purchased by the
civilized powers by the payment of tribute. Our own country was one
among the tributary nations which thus paid blood-money to the Moslem
bandits of the sea. We fought occasional battles with them; and so, on
a larger scale, did the English. But peace did not follow, because the
country was not occupied. Our last payment was made in 1830, and the
reason it was the last was because in that year the French conquest of
Algiers began. Foolish sentimentalists, like those who wrote little
poems in favor of the Mahdists against the English, and who now write
little essays in favor of Aguinaldo against the Americans, celebrated
the Algerian freebooters as heroes who were striving for liberty
against the invading French. But the French continued to do their
work; France expanded over Algiers, and the result was that piracy on
the Mediterranean came to an end, and Algiers has thriven as never
before in its history. On an even larger scale the same thing is true
of England and the Soudan. The expansion of England throughout the
Nile valley has been an incalculable gain for civilization. Any one
who reads the writings of the Austrian priests and laymen who were
prisoners in the Soudan under the Mahdi will realize that when England
crushed him and conquered the Soudan she conferred a priceless boon
upon humanity and made the civilized world her debtor. Again, the same
thing is true of the Russian advance in Asia. As in the Soudan the
English conquest is followed by peace, and the endless massacres of the
Mahdi are stopped forever, so the Russian conquest of the khanates of
central Asia meant the cessation of the barbarous warfare under which
Asian civilization had steadily withered away since the days of Genghis
Khan, and the substitution in its place of the reign of peace and
order. All civilization has been the gainer by the Russian advance, as
it was the gainer by the advance of France in North Africa; as it has
been the gainer by the advance of England in both Asia and Africa, both
Canada and Australia. Above all, there has been the greatest possible
gain in peace. The rule of law and of order has succeeded to the rule
of barbarous and bloody violence. Until the great civilized nations
stepped in there was no chance for anything but such bloody violence.

So it has been in the history of our own country. Of course our whole
national history has been one of expansion. Under Washington and Adams
we expanded westward to the Mississippi; under Jefferson we expanded
across the continent to the mouth of the Columbia; under Monroe we
expanded into Florida; and then into Texas and California; and finally,
largely through the instrumentality of Seward, into Alaska; while under
every administration the process of expansion in the great plains
and the Rockies has continued with growing rapidity. While we had a
frontier the chief feature of frontier life was the endless war between
the settlers and the red men. Sometimes the immediate occasion for the
war was to be found in the conduct of the whites and sometimes in that
of the reds, but the ultimate cause was simply that we were in contact
with a country held by savages or half-savages.

Where we abut on Canada there is no danger of war, nor is there any
danger where we abut on the well-settled regions of Mexico. But
elsewhere war had to continue until we expanded over the country. Then
it was succeeded at once by a peace which has remained unbroken to
the present day. In North America, as elsewhere throughout the entire
world, the expansion of a civilized nation has invariably meant the
growth of the area in which peace is normal throughout the world.

The same will be true of the Philippines. If the men who have counseled
national degradation, national dishonor, by urging us to leave the
Philippines and put the Aguinaldan oligarchy in control of those
islands, could have their way, we should merely turn them over to
rapine and bloodshed until some stronger, manlier power stepped in
to do the task we had shown ourselves fearful of performing. But, as
it is, this country will keep the islands and will establish therein
a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the
world’s surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness.
Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace.

With civilized powers there is but little danger of our getting into
war. In the Pacific, for instance, the great progressive, colonizing
nations are England and Germany. With England we have recently begun to
feel ties of kindness as well as of kinship, and with her our relations
are better than ever before; and so they ought to be with Germany.
Recently affairs in Samoa have been straightened out, although there we
suffered from the worst of all types of government, one in which three
powers had a joint responsibility (the type, by the way, which some
of the anti-imperialists actually advocated our introducing in the
Philippines, under the pretence of rendering them neutral). This was
accomplished very largely because the three nations set good-humoredly
to work to come to an agreement which would do justice to all. In the
preliminary negotiations the agents of America and Germany were Mr.
Tripp and Baron Sternburg. No difficulty can ever arise between Germany
and the United States which will not be settled with satisfaction to
both, if the negotiations are conducted by such representatives of
the two powers as these two men. What is necessary is to approach the
subject, not with a desire to get ahead of one another, but to do even
and exact justice, and to put into operation a scheme which will work,
while scrupulously conserving the honor and interest of all concerned.

Nations that expand and nations that do not expand may both ultimately
go down, but the one leaves heirs and a glorious memory, and the other
leaves neither. The Roman expanded, and he has left a memory which has
profoundly influenced the history of mankind, and he has further left
as the heirs of his body, and, above all, of his tongue and culture,
the so-called Latin peoples of Europe and America. Similarly to-day
it is the great expanding peoples who bequeath to the future ages the
great memories and material results of their achievements, and the
nations which shall have sprung from their loins, England standing as
the archetype and best exemplar of all such mighty nations. But the
peoples that do not expand leave, and can leave, nothing behind them.

It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace
to the world. The Arab wrecked the civilization of the Mediterranean
coasts, the Turk wrecked the civilization of southeastern Europe, and
the Tartar desolated from China to Russia and to Persia, setting back
the progress of the world for centuries, solely because the civilized
nations opposed to them had lost the great fighting qualities, and,
in becoming overpeaceful, had lost the power of keeping peace with
a strong hand. Their passing away marked the beginning of a period
of chaotic barbarian warfare. Those whose memories are not so short
as to have forgotten the defeat of the Greeks by the Turks, of the
Italians by the Abyssinians, and the feeble campaigns waged by Spain
against feeble Morocco, must realize that at the present moment the
Mediterranean coasts would be overrun either by the Turks or by
the Soudan Mahdists if these warlike barbarians had only to fear
those southern European powers which have lost the fighting edge.
Such a barbarian conquest would mean endless war; and the fact that
nowadays the reverse takes place, and that the barbarians recede
or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their
retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty
civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by
their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where
the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.




LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE AMONG REFORMERS

PUBLISHED IN THE “CENTURY,” JUNE, 1900


One of Miss Mary E. Wilkins’s delightful heroines remarks, in speaking
of certain would-be leaders of social reform in her village: “I don’t
know that I think they are so much above us as too far to one side.
Sometimes it is longitude and sometimes it is latitude that separates
people.” This is true, and the philosophy it teaches applies quite as
much to those who would reform the politics of a large city, or, for
that matter, of the whole country, as to those who would reform the
society of a hamlet.

There is always danger of being misunderstood when one writes about
such a subject as this, because there are on each side unhealthy
extremists who like to take half of any statement and twist it into an
argument in favor of themselves or against their opponents. No single
sentence or two is sufficient to explain a man’s full meaning, any more
than in a sentence or two it would be possible to treat the question of
the necessity for, and the limitations of, proper party loyalty, with
the thoroughness and justice shown, for instance, by Mr. Lecky in his
recent queerly named volume, “The Map of Life.”

All men in whose character there is not an element of hardened baseness
must admit the need in our public life of those qualities which we
somewhat vaguely group together when we speak of “reform,” and all men
of sound mind must also admit the need of efficiency. There are, of
course, men of such low moral type, or of such ingrained cynicism, that
they do not believe in the possibility of making anything better, or
do not care to see things better. There are also men who are slightly
disordered mentally, or who are cursed with a moral twist which
makes them champion reforms less from a desire to do good to others
than as a kind of tribute to their own righteousness, for the sake
of emphasizing their own superiority. From neither of these classes
can we get any real help in the unending struggle for righteousness.
There remains the great body of the people, including the entire body
of those through whom the salvation of the people must ultimately be
worked out. All these men combine or seek to combine in varying degrees
the quality of striving after the ideal, that is, the quality which
makes men reformers, and the quality of so striving through practical
methods—the quality which makes men efficient. Both qualities are
absolutely essential. The absence of either makes the presence of the
other worthless or worse.

If there is one tendency of the day which more than any other
is unhealthy and undesirable, it is the tendency to deify mere
“smartness,” unaccompanied by a sense of moral accountability. We
shall never make our Republic what it should be until as a people we
thoroughly understand and put in practice the doctrine that success is
abhorrent if attained by the sacrifice of the fundamental principles
of morality. The successful man, whether in business or in politics,
who has risen by conscienceless swindling of his neighbors, by deceit
and chicanery, by unscrupulous boldness and unscrupulous cunning,
stands toward society as a dangerous wild beast. The mean and cringing
admiration which such a career commands among those who think crookedly
or not at all makes this kind of success perhaps the most dangerous of
all the influences that threaten our national life. Our standard of
public and private conduct will never be raised to the proper level
until we make the scoundrel who succeeds feel the weight of a hostile
public opinion even more strongly than the scoundrel who fails.

On the other hand, mere beating the air, mere visionary adherence to a
nebulous and possibly highly undesirable ideal, is utterly worthless.
The cloistered virtue which timidly shrinks from all contact with the
rough world of actual life, and the uneasy, self-conscious vanity which
misnames itself virtue, and which declines to co-operate with whatever
does not adopt its own fantastic standard, are rather worse than
valueless, because they tend to rob the forces of good of elements on
which they ought to be able to count in the ceaseless contest with the
forces of evil. It is true that the impracticable idealist differs from
the hard-working, sincere man who in practical fashion, and by deeds as
well as by words, strives in some sort actually to realize his ideal;
but the difference lies in the fact that the first is impracticable,
not in his having a high ideal, for the ideal of the other may be even
higher. At times a man must cut loose from his associates, and stand
alone for a great cause; but the necessity for such action is almost
as rare as the necessity for a revolution; and to take such ground
continually, in season and out of season, is the sign of an unhealthy
nature. It is not possible to lay down an inflexible rule as to when
compromise is right and when wrong; when it is a sign of the highest
statesmanship to temporize, and when it is merely a proof of weakness.
Now and then one can stand uncompromisingly for a naked principle and
force people up to it. This is always the attractive course; but in
certain great crises it may be a very wrong course. Compromise, in the
proper sense, merely means agreement; in the proper sense opportunism
should merely mean doing the best possible with actual conditions as
they exist. A compromise which results in a half-step toward evil is
all wrong, just as the opportunist who saves himself for the moment by
adopting a policy which is fraught with future disaster is all wrong;
but no less wrong is the attitude of those who will not come to an
agreement through which, or will not follow the course by which, it is
alone possible to accomplish practical results for good.

These two attitudes, the attitude of deifying mere efficiency, mere
success, without regard to the moral qualities lying behind it and the
attitude of disregarding efficiency, disregarding practical results,
are the Scylla and Charybdis between which every earnest reformer,
every politician who desires to make the name of his profession a term
of honor instead of shame, must steer. He must avoid both under penalty
of wreckage, and it avails him nothing to have avoided one, if he
founders on the other. People are apt to speak as if in political life,
public life, it ought to be a mere case of striving upward—striving
toward a high peak. The simile is inexact. Every man who is striving
to do good public work is traveling along a ridge crest, with the gulf
of failure on each side—the gulf of inefficiency on the one side,
the gulf of unrighteousness on the other. All kinds of forces are
continually playing on him, to shove him first into one gulf and then
into the other; and even a wise and good man, unless he braces himself
with uncommon firmness and foresight, as he is pushed this way and
that, will find that his course becomes a pronounced zigzag instead
of a straight line; and if it becomes too pronounced he is lost, no
matter to which side the zigzag may take him. Nor is he lost only as
regards his own career. What is far more serious, his power of doing
useful service to the public is at an end. He may still, if a mere
politician, have political place, or, if a make-believe reformer,
retain that notoriety upon which his vanity feeds. But, in either case,
his usefulness to the community has ceased.

The man who sacrifices everything to efficiency needs but a short
shrift in a discussion like this. The abler he is, the more dangerous
he is to the community. The master and typical representative of a
great municipal political organization recently stated under oath that
“he was in politics for his pocket every time.” This put in its baldest
and most cynically offensive shape the doctrine upon which certain
public men act. It is not necessary to argue its iniquity with those
who have advanced any great distance beyond the brigand theory of
political life. Some years ago another public man enunciated much the
same doctrine in the phrase, “The Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no
part in political life.” Such statements, openly made, imply a belief
that the public conscience is dull; and where the men who make them
continue to be political leaders, the public has itself to thank for
all shortcomings in public life.

The man who is constitutionally incapable of working for practical
results ought not to need a much longer shrift. In every community
there are little knots of fantastic extremists who loudly proclaim that
they are striving for righteousness, and who, in reality, do their
feeble best for unrighteousness. Just as the upright politician should
hold in peculiar scorn the man who makes the name of politician a
reproach and a shame, so the genuine reformer should realize that the
cause he champions is especially jeopardized by the mock reformer who
does what he can to make reform a laughing-stock among decent men.

A caustic observer once remarked that when Dr. Johnson spoke of
patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, “he was ignorant of the
infinite possibilities contained in the word ‘reform.’” The sneer was
discreditable to the man who uttered it, for it is no more possible
to justify corruption by railing at those who by their conduct throw
scandal upon the cause of reform than it is to justify treason by
showing that men of shady character frequently try to cover their
misconduct by fervent protestations of love of country. Nevertheless,
the fact remains that exactly as true patriots should be especially
jealous of any appeal to what is base under the guise of patriotism, so
men who strive for honesty, and for the cleansing of what is corrupt
in the dark places of our politics, should emphatically disassociate
themselves from the men whose antics throw discredit upon the reforms
they profess to advocate.

These little knots of extremists are found everywhere, one type
flourishing chiefly in one locality and another type in another. In
the particular objects they severally profess to champion they are as
far asunder as the poles, for one of their characteristics is that
each little group has its own patent recipe for salvation and pays no
attention whatever to the other little groups; but in mental and moral
habit they are fundamentally alike. They may be socialists of twenty
different types, from the followers of Tolstoi down and up, or they may
ostensibly champion some cause in itself excellent, such as temperance
or municipal reform, or they may merely with comprehensive vagueness
announce themselves as the general enemies of what is bad, of corrupt,
machine politics, and the like. Their policies and principles are
usually mutually exclusive; but that does not alter the conviction,
which each feels or affects to feel, that his particular group is the
real vanguard of the army of reform. Of course, as the particular
groups are all marching in different directions, it is not possible for
more than one of them to be the vanguard. The others, at best, must
be off to one side, and may possibly be marching the wrong way in the
rear; and, as a matter of fact, it is only occasionally that any one of
them is in the front. There are in each group many entirely sincere and
honest men, and because of the presence of these men we are too apt to
pay some of their associates the unmerited compliment of speaking of
them also as honest but impracticable. As a matter of fact, the typical
extremist of this kind differs from the practical reformer, from the
public man who strives in practical fashion for decency, not at all
in superior morality, but in inferior sense. He is not more virtuous;
he is less virtuous. He is merely more foolish. When Wendell Phillips
denounced Abraham Lincoln as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” he did not
show himself more virtuous than Lincoln, but more foolish. Neither did
he advance the cause of human freedom. When the contest for the Union
and against slavery took on definite shape then he and his kind were
swept aside by the statesmen and soldiers, like Lincoln and Seward,
Grant and Farragut, who alone were able to ride the storm. Great as
is the superiority in efficiency of the men who do things over those
who do not, it may be no greater than their superiority in morality.
In addition to the simple and sincere men who have a twist in their
mental make-up, these knots of enthusiasts contain, especially among
their leaders, men of morbid vanity, who thirst for notoriety, men who
lack power to accomplish anything if they go in with their fellows to
fight for results, and who prefer to sit outside and attract momentary
attention by denouncing those who are really forces for good.

In every community in our land there are many hundreds of earnest and
sincere men, clergymen and laymen, reformers who strive for reform in
the field of politics, in the field of philanthropy, in the field of
social life; and we could count on the fingers of one hand the number
of times these men have been really aided in their efforts by the men
of the type referred to in the preceding paragraph. The socialist who
raves against the existing order is not the man who ever lifts his
hand practically to make our social life a little better, to make the
conditions that bear upon the unfortunate a little easier; the man who
demands the immediate impossible in temperance is not the man who ever
aids in an effort to minimize the evils caused by the saloon; and those
who work practically for political reform are hampered, so far as
they are affected at all, by the strutting vanity of the professional
impracticables.

It is not that these little knots of men accomplish much of a
positive nature that is objectionable, for their direct influence is
inconsiderable; but they do have an undoubted indirect effect for bad,
and this of a double kind. They affect for evil a certain number of
decent men in one way and a certain number of equally decent men in an
entirely different way. Some decent men, following their lead, withdraw
themselves from the active work of life, whether social, philanthropic,
or political, and by the amount they thus withdraw from the side of
the forces of good they strengthen the forces of evil, as, of course,
it makes no difference whether we lessen the numerator or increase the
denominator. Other decent men are so alienated by such conduct that
in their turn they abandon all effort to fight for reform, believing
reformers to be either hypocrites or fools. Both of these phenomena
are perfectly familiar to every active politician who has striven for
decency, and to every man who has studied history in an intelligent
way. Few things hurt a good cause more than the excesses of its nominal
friends.

Fortunately, most extremists lack the power to commit dangerous
excesses. Their action is normally as abortive as that of the queer
abolitionist who, in 1864, nominated a candidate against Abraham
Lincoln when he was running for re-election to the Presidency. The men
entering this movement represented all extremes, moral and mental.
Nominally they opposed Lincoln because they did not feel that he had
gone far enough in what they deemed the right direction,—had not
been sufficiently extreme,—and they objected to what they styled his
opportunism, his tendency to compromise, his temporizing conduct,
and his being a practical politician. In reality, of course, their
opposition to Lincoln was conditioned, not upon what Lincoln had
done, but upon their own natures. They were incapable of supporting
a great constructive statesman in a great crisis; and this, not
because they were too virtuous, but because they lacked the necessary
common-sense and power of subordination of self to enable them to
work disinterestedly with others for the common good. Their movement,
however, proved utterly abortive, and they had no effect even for evil.
The sound, wholesome common-sense of the American people fortunately
renders such movements, as a rule, innocuous; and this is, in reality,
the prime reason why republican government prospers in America, as it
does not prosper, for instance, in France. With us these little knots
of impracticables have an insignificant effect upon the national life,
and no representation to speak of in our governmental assemblies. In
France, where the nation has not the habit of self-government, and
where the national spirit is more volatile and less sane, each little
group grows until it becomes a power for evil, and, taken together, all
the little groups give to French political life its curious, and by no
means elevating, kaleidoscopic character.

Macaulay’s eminently sane and wholesome spirit and his knowledge
of practical affairs give him a peculiar value among historians
of political thought. In speaking of Scotland at the end of the
seventeenth century he writes as follows:

“It is a remarkable circumstance that the same country should have
produced in the same age the most wonderful specimens of both extremes
of human nature. Even in things indifferent the Scotch Puritan would
hear of no compromise; and he was but too ready to consider all who
recommended prudence and charity as traitors to the cause of truth. On
the other hand, the Scotchmen of that generation who made a figure in
Parliament were the most dishonest and unblushing time-servers that the
world has ever seen. Perhaps it is natural that the most callous and
impudent vice should be found in the near neighborhood of unreasonable
and impracticable virtue. Where enthusiasts are ready to destroy or
be destroyed for trifles magnified into importance by a squeamish
conscience, it is not strange that the very name of conscience should
become a byword of contempt to cool and shrewd men of business.”

What he says of Scotland in the time of King James and King William is
true, word for word, of civic life in New York two centuries later.
We see in New York sodden masses of voters manipulated by clever,
unscrupulous, and utterly selfish masters of machine politics. Against
them we see, it is true, masses of voters who both know how to, and
do, strive for righteousness; but we see also very many others in whom
the capacity for self-government seems to have atrophied. They have
lost the power to do practical work by ceasing to exercise it, by
confining themselves to criticism and theorizing, to intemperate abuse
and intemperate championship of what they but imperfectly understand.
The analogues of the men whom Macaulay condemns exist in numbers in
New York, and work evil in our public life for the very reason that
Macaulay gives. They do not do practical work, and the extreme folly
of their position makes them not infrequently the allies of scoundrels
who cynically practice corruption. Too often, indeed, they actually
alienate from the cause of decency keen and honest men, who grow to
regard all movements for reform with contemptuous dislike because
of the folly and vanity of the men who in the name of righteousness
preach unwisdom and practice uncharitableness. These men thus do
inestimable damage; for the reform spirit, the spirit of striving after
high ideals, is the breath of life in our political institutions; and
whatever weakens it by just so much lessens the chance of ultimate
success under democratic government.

Discarding the two extremes, the men who deliberately work for evil,
and the men who are unwilling or incapable of working for good, there
remains the great mass of men who do desire to be efficient, who do
desire to make this world a better place to live in, and to do what
they can toward achieving cleaner minds and more wholesome bodies. To
these, after all, we can only say: Strive manfully for righteousness,
and strive so as to make your efforts for good count. You are not to be
excused if you fail to try to make things better; and the very phrase
“trying to make things better” implies trying in practical fashion. One
man’s capacity is for one kind of work and another man’s capacity for
another kind of work. One affects certain methods and another affects
entirely different methods. All this is of little concern. What is of
really vital importance is that something should be accomplished, and
that this something should be worthy of accomplishment. The field is
of vast size, and the laborers are always too few. There is not the
slightest excuse for one sincere worker looking down upon another
because he chooses a different part of the field and different
implements. It is inexcusable to refuse to work, to work slackly or
perversely, or to mar the work of others.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. He is
bound to do all the good possible. Yet he must consider the question
of expediency, in order that he may do all the good possible, for
otherwise he will do none. As soon as a politician gets to the point
of thinking that in order to be “practical” he has got to be base,
he has become a noxious member of the body politic. That species of
practicability eats into the moral sense of the people like a cancer,
and he who practices it can no more be excused than an editor who
debauches public decency in order to sell his paper.

We need the worker in the fields of social and civic reform; the man
who is keenly interested in some university settlement, some civic club
or citizens’ association which is striving to elevate the standard of
life. We need clean, healthy newspapers, with clean, healthy criticism
which shall be fearless and truthful. We need upright politicians,
who will take the time and trouble, and who possess the capacity, to
manage caucuses, conventions, and public assemblies. We need men who
try to be their poorer brothers’ keepers to the extent of befriending
them and working with them so far as they are willing; men who work
in charitable associations, or, what is even better, strive to get
into touch with the wage-workers, to understand them, and to champion
their cause when it is just. We need the sound and healthy idealist;
the theoretic writer, preacher, or teacher; the Emerson or Phillips
Brooks, who helps to create the atmosphere of enthusiasm and practical
endeavor. In public life we need not only men who are able to work
in and through their parties, but also upright, fearless, rational
independents, who will deal impartial justice to all men and all
parties. We need men who are far-sighted and resolute; men who combine
sincerity with sanity. We need scholarly men, too—men who study all
the difficult questions of our political life from the standpoint both
of practice and of theory; men who thus study trusts, or municipal
government, or finance, or taxation, or civil-service reform, as the
authors of the “Federalist” studied the problems of federal government.

In closing, let me again dwell upon the point I am seeking to
emphasize, so that there shall be no chance of honest misunderstanding
of what I say. It is vital that every man who is in politics, as a man
ought to be, with a disinterested purpose to serve the public, should
strive steadily for reform; that he should have the highest ideals. He
must lead, only he must lead in the right direction, and normally he
must be in sight of his followers. Cynicism in public life is a curse,
and when a man has lost the power of enthusiasm for righteousness it
will be better for him and the country if he abandons public life.

Above all, the political reformer must not permit himself to be driven
from his duty of supporting what is right by any irritation at the men
who, while nominally supporting the same objects, and even ridiculing
him as a backslider or an “opportunist,” yet by their levity or
fanaticism do damage to the cause which he really serves, and which
they profess to serve. Let him disregard them; for though they are,
according to their ability, the foes of decent politics, yet, after
all, they are but weaklings, and the real and dangerous enemies of
the cause he holds dear are those sinister beings who batten on the
evil of our political system, and both profit by its existence, and
by their own existence tend to perpetuate and increase it. We must
not be diverted from our warfare with these powerful and efficient
corruptionists by irritation at the vain prattlers who think they are
at the head of the reform forces, whereas they are really wandering in
bypaths in the rear.

The professional impracticable, the man who sneers at the sane and
honest strivers after good, who sneers at the men who are following,
however humbly, in the footsteps of those who worked for and secured
practical results in the days of Washington, and again in the days
of Lincoln, who denounces them as time-servers and compromisers, is,
of course, an ally of corruption. But, after all, he can generally
be disregarded, whereas the real and dangerous foe is the corrupt
politician, whom we can not afford to disregard. When one of these
professional impracticables denounces the attitude of decent men as “a
hodge-podge of the ideal and the practicable,” he is amusingly unaware
that he is writing his own condemnation, showing his own inability to
do good work or to appreciate good work. The Constitutional Convention
over which Washington presided, and which made us a nation, represented
precisely and exactly this “hodge-podge,” and was frantically denounced
in its day by the men of the impracticable type. Lincoln’s career
throughout the Civil War was such a “hodge-podge,” and was in its
turn denounced in exactly the same way. Lincoln disregarded the jibes
of these men, who did their puny best to hurt the great cause for
which he battled; and they never, by their pin-pricks, succeeded in
diverting him from the real foe. The fanatical antislavery people
wished to hurry him into unwise, extreme, and premature action, and
denounced him as compromising with the forces of evil, as being a
practical politician—which he was, if practicality is held to include
wisdom and high purpose. He did not permit himself to be affected by
their position. He did not yield to what they advised when it was
impracticable, nor did he permit himself to become prejudiced against
so much of what they championed as was right and practicable. His
ideal was just as high as theirs. He did not lower it. He did not lose
his temper at their conduct, or cease to strive for the abolition of
slavery and the restoration of the Union; and whereas their conduct
foreboded disaster to both causes, his efforts secured the success
of both. So, in our turn, we of to-day are bound to try to tread in
the footsteps of those great Americans who in the past have held high
ideal and have striven mightily through practical methods to realize
that ideal. There must be many compromises; but we can not compromise
with dishonesty, with sin. We must not be misled at any time by the
cheap assertion that people get only what they want; that the editor
of a degraded newspaper is to be excused because the public want the
degradation; that the city officials who inaugurate a “wide-open”
policy are to be excused because a portion of the public likes vice;
that the men who jeer at philanthropy are to be excused because among
philanthropists there are hypocrites, and among unfortunates there are
vicious and unworthy people. To pander to depravity inevitably means
to increase the depravity. It is a dreadful thing that public sentiment
should condone misconduct in a public man; but this is no excuse for
the public man, if by his conduct he still further degrades public
sentiment. There can be no meddling with the laws of righteousness, of
decency, of morality. We are in honor bound to put into practice what
we preach; to remember that we are not to be excused if we do not; and
that in the last resort no material prosperity, no business acumen, no
intellectual development of any kind, can atone in the life of a nation
for the lack of the fundamental qualities of courage, honesty, and
common sense.




FELLOW-FEELING AS A POLITICAL FACTOR

PUBLISHED IN THE “CENTURY,” JANUARY, 1900


Fellow-feeling, sympathy in the broadest sense, is the most important
factor in producing a healthy political and social life. Neither our
national nor our local civil life can be what it should be unless it is
marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect,
the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men
take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together
for a common object. A very large share of the rancor of political
and social strife arises either from sheer misunderstanding by one
section, or by one class, of another, or else from the fact that the
two sections, or two classes, are so cut off from each other that
neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed,
point of view, while they are both entirely ignorant of their community
of feeling as regards the essentials of manhood and humanity.

This is one reason why the public school is so admirable an
institution. To it more than to any other among the many causes
which, in our American life, tell for religious toleration is due the
impossibility of persecution of a particular creed. When in their
earliest and most impressionable years Protestants, Catholics, and Jews
go to the same schools, learn the same lessons, play the same games,
and are forced, in the rough-and-ready democracy of boy life, to take
each at his true worth, it is impossible later to make the disciples
of one creed persecute those of another. From the evils of religious
persecution America is safe.

From the evils of sectional hostility we are, at any rate, far safer
than we were. The war with Spain was the most absolutely righteous
foreign war in which any nation has engaged during the nineteenth
century, and not the least of its many good features was the unity
it brought about between the sons of the men who wore the blue and
of those who wore the gray. This necessarily meant the dying out of
the old antipathy. Of course embers smoulder here and there; but the
country at large is growing more and more to take pride in the valor,
the self-devotion, the loyalty to an ideal, displayed alike by the
soldiers of both sides in the Civil War. We are all united now. We are
all glad that the Union was restored, and are one in our loyalty to it;
and hand in hand with this general recognition of the all-importance of
preserving the Union has gone the recognition of the fact that at the
outbreak of the Civil War men could not cut loose from the ingrained
habits and traditions of generations, and that the man from the North
and the man from the South each was loyal to his highest ideal of duty
when he drew sword or shouldered rifle to fight to the death for what
he believed to be right.

Nor is it only the North and the South that have struck hands. The
East and the West are fundamentally closer together than ever before.
Using the word “West” in the old sense, as meaning the country west
of the Alleghanies, it is of course perfectly obvious that it is the
West which will shape the destinies of this nation. The great group of
wealthy and powerful States about the Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the
Missouri, and their tributaries, will have far more weight than any
other section in deciding the fate of the Republic in the centuries
that are opening. This is not in the least to be regretted by the East,
for the simple and excellent reason that the interests of the West
and the East are one. The West will shape our destinies because she
will have more people and a greater territory, and because the whole
development of the Western country is such as to make it peculiarly the
exponent of all that is most vigorously and characteristically American
in our national life.

So it is with the Pacific <DW72>, and the giant young States that are
there growing by leaps and bounds. The greater the share they have in
directing the national life, the better it will be for all of us.

I do not for a moment mean that mistakes will not be committed in
every section of the country; they certainly will be, and in whatever
section they are committed it will be our duty to protest against
them, and to try to overthrow those who are responsible for them: but
I do mean to say that in the long run each section is going to find
that its welfare, instead of being antagonistic to, is indissolubly
bound up in, the welfare of other sections; and the growth of means of
communication, the growth of education in its highest and finest sense,
means the growth in the sense of solidarity throughout the country, in
the feeling of patriotic pride of each American in the deeds of all
other Americans—of pride in the past history and present and future
greatness of the whole country.

Nobody is interested in the fact that Dewey comes from Vermont, Hobson
from Alabama, or Funston from Kansas. If all three came from the same
county it would make no difference to us. They are Americans, and every
American has an equal right to challenge his share of glory in their
deeds. As we read of the famous feats of our army in the Philippines,
it matters nothing to us whether the regiments come from Oregon, Idaho,
California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, or Tennessee. What does matter
is that these splendid soldiers are all Americans; that they are our
heroes; that our blood runs in their veins; that the flag under which
we live is the flag for which they have fought, for which some of them
have died.

Danger from religious antipathy is dead, and from sectional antipathy
dying; but there are at times very ugly manifestations of antipathy
between class and class. It seems a pity to have to use the word
“class,” because there are really no classes in our American life in
the sense in which the word “class” is used in Europe. Our social and
political systems do not admit of them in theory, and in practice they
exist only in a very fluid state. In most European countries classes
are separated by rigid boundaries, which can be crossed but rarely,
and with the utmost difficulty and peril. Here the boundaries can
not properly be said to exist, and are certainly so fluctuating and
evasive, so indistinctly marked, that they can not be appreciated when
seen near by. Any American family which lasts a few generations will
be apt to have representatives in all the different classes. The great
business men, even the great professional men, and especially the
great statesmen and sailors and soldiers, are very apt to spring from
among the farmers or wage-workers, and their kinsfolk remain near the
old home or at the old trade. If ever there existed in the world a
community where the identity of interest, of habit, of principle, and
of ideals should be felt as a living force, ours is the one. Speaking
generally, it really is felt to a degree quite unknown in other
countries of our size. There are, doubtless, portions of Norway and
Switzerland where the social and political ideals, and their nearness
to realization, are not materially different from those of the most
essentially American portions of our own land; but this is not true
of any European country of considerable size. It is only in American
communities that we see the farmer, the hired man, the lawyer, and the
merchant, and possibly even the officer of the army or the navy, all
kinsmen, and all accepting their relations as perfectly natural and
simple. This is eminently healthy. This is just as it should be in our
Republic. It represents the ideal toward which it would be a good thing
to approximate everywhere. In the great industrial centres, with their
highly complex, highly specialized conditions, it is of course merely
an ideal. There are parts even of our oldest States, as, for example,
New York, where this ideal is actually realized; there are other parts,
particularly the great cities, where the life is so wholly different
that the attempt to live up precisely to the country conditions would
be artificial and impossible. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
the only true solution of our political and social problems lies in
cultivating everywhere the spirit of brotherhood, of fellow-feeling and
understanding between man and man, and the willingness to treat a man
as a man, which are the essential factors in American democracy as we
still see it in the country districts.

The chief factor in producing such sympathy is simply association on a
plane of equality, and for a common object. Any healthy-minded American
is bound to think well of his fellow-Americans if he only gets to know
them. The trouble is that he does not know them. If the banker and
the farmer never meet, or meet only in the most perfunctory business
way, if the banking is not done by men whom the farmer knows as his
friends and associates, a spirit of mistrust is almost sure to spring
up. If the merchant or the manufacturer, the lawyer or the clerk, never
meets the mechanic or the handicraftsman, save on rare occasions,
when the meeting may be of a hostile kind, each side feels that the
other is alien and naturally antagonistic. But if any one individual
of any group were to be thrown into natural association with another
group, the difficulties would be found to disappear so far as he was
concerned. Very possibly he would become the ardent champion of the
other group.

Perhaps I may be pardoned for quoting my own experience as an instance
in point. Outside of college boys and politicians my first intimate
associates were ranchmen, cow-punchers, and game-hunters, and I
speedily became convinced that there were no other men in the country
who were their equals. Then I was thrown much with farmers, and I
made up my mind that it was the farmer upon whom the foundations of
the commonwealth really rested—that the farmer was the archetypical
good American. Then I saw a good deal of railroad men, and after quite
an intimate acquaintance with them I grew to feel that, especially
in their higher ranks, they typified the very qualities of courage,
self-reliance, self-command, hardihood, capacity for work, power of
initiative, and power of obedience, which we like most to associate
with the American name. Then I happened to have dealings with certain
carpenters’ unions, and grew to have a great respect for the carpenter,
for the mechanic type. By this time it dawned upon me that they were
all pretty good fellows, and that my championship of each set in
succession above all other sets had sprung largely from the fact that
I was very familiar with the set I championed, and less familiar with
the remainder. In other words, I had grown into sympathy with, into
understanding of, group after group, with the effect that I invariably
found that they and I had common purposes and a common standpoint. We
differed among ourselves, or agreed among ourselves, not because we had
different occupations or the same occupation, but because of our ways
of looking at life.

It is this capacity for sympathy, for fellow-feeling and mutual
understanding, which must lie at the basis of all really successful
movements for good government and the betterment of social and
civic conditions. There is no patent device for bringing about good
government. Still less is there any patent device for remedying social
evils and doing away with social inequalities. Wise legislation can
help in each case, and crude, vicious, or demagogic legislation can
do an infinity of harm. But the betterment must come through the slow
workings of the same forces which always have tended for righteousness,
and always will.

The prime lesson to be taught is the lesson of treating each man on
his worth as a man, and of remembering that while sometimes it is
necessary, from both a legislative and social standpoint, to consider
men as a class, yet in the long run our safety lies in recognizing the
individual’s worth or lack of worth as the chief basis of action, and
in shaping our whole conduct, and especially our political conduct,
accordingly. It is impossible for a democracy to endure if the
political lines are drawn to coincide with class lines. The resulting
government, whether of the upper or of the lower class, is not a
government of the whole people, but a government of part of the people
at the expense of the rest. Where the lines of political division are
vertical, the men of each occupation and of every social standing
separating according to their vocations and principles, the result
is healthy and normal. Just so far, however, as the lines are drawn
horizontally, the result is unhealthy, and in the long run disastrous,
for such a division means that men are pitted against one another in
accordance with the blind and selfish interests of the moment. Each is
thus placed over against his neighbor in an attitude of greedy class
hostility, which becomes the mainspring of his conduct, instead of each
basing his political action upon his own convictions as to what is
advisable and what inadvisable, and upon his own disinterested sense
of devotion to the interests of the whole community as he sees them.
Republics have fallen in the past primarily because the parties that
controlled them divided along the lines of class, so that inevitably
the triumph of one or the other implied the supremacy of a part over
the whole. The result might be an oligarchy, or it might be mob rule;
it mattered little which, as regards the ultimate effect, for in both
cases tyranny and anarchy were sure to alternate. The failure of the
Greek and Italian republics was fundamentally due to this cause.
Switzerland has flourished because the divisions upon which her
political issues have been fought have not been primarily those of
mere caste or social class, and America will flourish and will become
greater than any empire because, in the long run, in this country, any
party which strives to found itself upon sectional or class jealousy
and hostility must go down before the good sense of the people.

The only way to provide against the evils of a horizontal cleavage in
politics is to encourage the growth of fellow-feeling, of a feeling
based on the relations of man to man, and not of class to class. In
the country districts this is not very difficult. In the neighborhood
where I live, on the Fourth of July the four Protestant ministers and
the Catholic priest speak from the same platform, the children of all
of us go to the same district school, and the landowner and the hired
man take the same views, not merely of politics, but of duck-shooting
and of international yacht races. Naturally in such a community there
is small chance for class division. There is a slight feeling against
the mere summer residents, precisely because there is not much sympathy
with them, and because they do not share in our local interests; but
otherwise there are enough objects in common to put all much on the
same plane of interest in various important particulars, and each man
has too much self-respect to feel particularly jealous of any other
man. Moreover, as the community is small and consists for the most part
of persons who have dwelt long in the land, while those of foreign
ancestry, instead of keeping by themselves, have intermarried with the
natives, there is still a realizing sense of kinship among the men
who follow the different occupations. The characteristic family names
are often borne by men of widely different fortunes, ranging from the
local bayman through the captain of the oyster-sloop, the sail-maker,
or the wheelright, to the owner of what the countryside may know as the
manor-house—which probably contains one of the innumerable rooms in
which Washington is said to have slept. We have sharp rivalries, and
our politics are by no means always what they should be, but at least
we do not divide on class lines, for the very good reason that there
has been no crystallization into classes.

This condition prevails in essentials throughout the country
districts of New York, which are politically very much the healthiest
districts. Any man who has served in the Legislature realizes that the
country members form, on the whole, a very sound and healthy body of
legislators. Any man who has gone about much to the county fairs in
New York—almost the only place where the farm folks gather in large
numbers—can not but have been struck by the high character of the
average countryman. He is a fine fellow, rugged, hard-working, shrewd,
and keenly alive to the fundamental virtues. He and his brethren of the
smaller towns and villages, in ordinary circumstances, take very little
account, indeed, of any caste difference; they greet each man strictly
on his merits as a man, and therefore form a community in which there
is singularly little caste spirit, and in which men associate on
a thoroughly healthy and American ground of common ideals, common
convictions, and common sympathies.

Unfortunately, this can not be said of the larger cities, where the
conditions of life are so complicated that there has been an extreme
differentiation and specialization in every species of occupation,
whether of business or pleasure. The people of a certain degree of
wealth and of a certain occupation may never come into any real contact
with the people of another occupation, of another social standing.
The tendency is for the relations always to be between class and
class instead of between individual and individual. This produces the
thoroughly unhealthy belief that it is for the interest of one class as
against another to have its class representatives dominant in public
life. The ills of any such system are obvious. As a matter of fact,
the enormous mass of our legislation and administration ought to be
concerned with matters that are strictly for the commonweal; and where
special legislation or administration is needed, as it often must be,
for a certain class, the need can be met primarily by mere honesty and
common sense. But if men are elected solely from any caste, or on any
caste theory, the voter gradually substitutes the theory of allegiance
to the caste for the theory of allegiance to the commonwealth as
a whole, and instead of demanding as fundamental the qualities of
probity and broad intelligence—which are the indispensable qualities
in securing the welfare of the whole—as the first consideration, he
demands, as a substitute, zeal in the service, or apparent service of
the class, which is quite compatible with gross corruption outside.
In short, we get back to the conditions which foredoomed democracy to
failure in the ancient Greek and mediæval republics, where party lines
were horizontal and class warred against class, each in consequence
necessarily substituting devotion to the interest of a class for
devotion to the interest of the state and to the elementary ideas of
morality.

The only way to avoid the growth of these evils is, so far as may
be, to help in the creation of conditions which will permit mutual
understanding and fellow-feeling between the members of different
classes. To do this it is absolutely necessary that there should be
natural association between the members for a common end or with a
common purpose. As long as men are separated by their caste lines,
each body having its own amusements, interests, and occupations, they
are certain to regard one another with that instinctive distrust which
they feel for foreigners. There are exceptions to the rule, but it is
a rule. The average man, when he has no means of being brought into
contact with another, or of gaining any insight into that other’s ideas
and aspirations, either ignores these ideas and aspirations completely,
or else feels toward them a more or less tepid dislike. The result
is a complete and perhaps fatal misunderstanding, due primarily to
the fact that the capacity for fellow-feeling is given no opportunity
to flourish. On the other hand, if the men can be mixed together in
some way that will loosen the class or caste bonds and put each on
his merits as an individual man, there is certain to be a regrouping
independent of caste lines. A tie may remain between the members of
a caste, based merely upon the similarity of their habits of life;
but this will be much less strong than the ties based on identity of
passion, of principle, or of ways of looking at life. Any man who has
ever, for his good fortune, been obliged to work with men in masses,
in some place or under some condition or in some association where
the dislocation of caste was complete, must recognize the truth of
this as apparent. Every mining-camp, every successful volunteer
regiment, proves it. In such cases there is always some object which
must be attained, and the men interested in its attainment have to
develop their own leaders and their own ties of association, while
the would-be leader can succeed only by selecting for assistants the
men whose peculiar capacities fit them to do the best work in the
various emergencies that arise. Under such circumstances the men who
work together for the achievement of a common result in which they are
intensely interested are very soon certain to disregard, and, indeed,
to forget, the creed or race origin or antecedent social standing or
class occupation of the man who is either their friend or their foe.
They get down to the naked bed-rock of character and capacity.

This is to a large extent true of the party organizations in a great
city, and, indeed, of all serious political organizations. If they are
to be successful they must necessarily be democratic, in the sense that
each man is treated strictly on his merits as a man. No one can succeed
who attempts to go in on any other basis; above all, no one can succeed
if he goes in feeling that, instead of merely doing his duty, he is
conferring a favor upon the community, and is therefore warranted in
adopting an attitude of condescension toward his fellows. It is often
quite as irritating to be patronized as to be plundered; as reformers
have more than once discovered when the mass of the voters stolidly
voted against them, and in favor of a gang of familiar scoundrels,
chiefly because they had no sense of fellow-feeling with their would-be
benefactors.

The tendency to patronize is certain to be eradicated as soon as any
man goes into politics in a practical and not in a dilettante fashion.
He speedily finds that the quality of successful management, the power
to handle men and secure results, may exist in seemingly unlikely
persons. If he intends to carry a caucus or primary, or elect a given
candidate, or secure a certain piece of legislation or administration,
he will have to find out and work with innumerable allies, and make
use of innumerable subordinates. Given that he and they have a common
object, the one test that he must apply to them is as to their ability
to help in achieving that object. The result is that in a very short
time the men whose purposes are the same forget about all differences,
save in capacity to carry out the purpose. The banker who is interested
in seeing a certain nomination made or a certain election carried
forgets everything but his community of interest with the retail
butcher who is a leader along his section of the avenue, or the starter
who can control a considerable number of the motormen; and in return
the butcher and the starter accept the banker quite naturally as an
ally whom they may follow or lead, as circumstances dictate. In other
words, all three grow to feel in common on certain important subjects,
and this fellow-feeling has results as far-reaching as they are healthy.

Good thus follows from mere ordinary political affiliation. A man
who has taken an active part in the political life of a great city
possesses an incalculable advantage over his fellow-citizens who have
not so taken part, because normally he has more understanding than they
can possibly have of the attitude of mind, the passions, prejudices,
hopes, and animosities of his fellow-citizens, with whom he would not
ordinarily be brought into business or social contact. Of course there
are plenty of exceptions to this rule. A man who is drawn into politics
from absolutely selfish reasons, and especially a rich man who merely
desires to buy political promotion, may know absolutely nothing that is
of value as to any but the basest side of the human nature with which
his sphere of contact has been enlarged; and, on the other hand, a
wise employer of labor, or a philanthropist in whom zeal and judgment
balance each other, may know far more than most politicians. But the
fact remains that the effect of political life, and of the associations
that it brings, is of very great benefit in producing a better
understanding and a keener fellow-feeling among men who otherwise
would know one another not at all, or else as members of alien bodies
or classes.

This being the case, how much more is it true if the same habit of
association for a common purpose can be applied where the purpose
is really of the highest! Much is accomplished in this way by the
university settlements and similar associations. Wherever these
associations are entered into in a healthy and sane spirit, the good
they do is incalculable, from the simple fact that they bring together
in pursuit of a worthy common object men of excellent character, who
would never otherwise meet. It is of just as much importance to the
one as to the other that the man from Hester Street or the Bowery or
Avenue B, and the man from the Riverside Drive or Fifth Avenue, should
have some meeting-ground where they can grow to understand one another
as an incident of working for a common end. Of course if, on the one
hand, the work is entered into in a patronizing spirit, no good will
result; and, on the other hand, if the zealous enthusiast loses his
sanity, only harm will follow. There is much dreadful misery in a great
city, and a high-spirited, generous young man, when first brought into
contact with it, has his sympathies so excited that he is very apt
to become a socialist, or turn to the advocacy of any wild scheme,
courting a plunge from bad to worse, exactly as do too many of the
leaders of the discontent around him. His sanity and cool-headedness
will be thoroughly tried, and if he loses them his power for good will
vanish.

But this is merely to state one form of a general truth. If a man
permits largeness of heart to degenerate into softness of head, he
inevitably becomes a nuisance in any relation of life. If sympathy
becomes distorted and morbid, it hampers instead of helping the effort
toward social betterment. Yet without sympathy, without fellow-feeling,
no permanent good can be accomplished. In any healthy community there
must be a solidarity of sentiment and a knowledge of solidarity of
interest among the different members. Where this solidarity ceases
to exist, where there is no fellow-feeling, the community is ripe
for disaster. Of course the fellow-feeling may be of value much in
proportion as it is unconscious. A sentiment that is easy and natural
is far better than one which has to be artificially stimulated. But
the artificial stimulus is better than none, and with fellow-feeling,
as with all other emotions, what is started artificially may become
quite natural in its continuance. With most men courage is largely
an acquired habit, and on the first occasions when it is called for
it necessitates the exercise of will-power and self-control; but by
exercise it gradually becomes almost automatic.

So it is with fellow-feeling. A man who conscientiously endeavors to
throw in his lot with those about him, to make his interests theirs,
to put himself in a position where he and they have a common object,
will at first feel a little self-conscious, will realize too plainly
his own aims. But with exercise this will pass off. He will speedily
find that the fellow-feeling which at first he had to stimulate was
really existent, though latent, and is capable of a very healthy
growth. It can, of course, become normal only when the man himself
becomes genuinely interested in the object which he and his fellows
are striving to attain. It is therefore obviously desirable that this
object should possess a real and vital interest for every one. Such is
the case with a proper political association.

Much has been done, not merely by the ordinary political associations,
but by the city clubs, civic federations, and the like, and very much
more can be done. Of course there is danger of any such association
being perverted either by knavery or folly. When a partisan political
organization becomes merely an association for purposes of plunder and
patronage, it may be a menace instead of a help to a community; and
when a non-partisan political organization falls under the control of
the fantastic extremists always attracted to such movements, in its
turn it becomes either useless or noxious. But if these organizations,
partisan or non-partisan, are conducted along the lines of sanity and
honesty, they produce a good more far-reaching than their promoters
suppose, and achieve results of greater importance than those
immediately aimed at.

It is an excellent thing to win a triumph for good government at a
given election; but it is a far better thing gradually to build up that
spirit of fellow-feeling among American citizens, which, in the long
run, is absolutely necessary if we are to see the principles of virile
honesty and robust common-sense triumph in our civic life.




CIVIC HELPFULNESS

PUBLISHED IN THE “CENTURY,” OCTOBER, 1900


In Mr. Lecky’s profoundly suggestive book, “The Map of Life,” referred
to by me in a former article, he emphasizes the change that has been
gradually coming over the religious attitude of the world because of
the growing importance laid upon conduct as compared with dogma. In
this country we are long past the stage of regarding it as any part of
the State’s duty to enforce a particular religious dogma; and more and
more the professors of the different creeds themselves are beginning
tacitly to acknowledge that the prime worth of a creed is to be gauged
by the standard of conduct it exacts among its followers toward their
fellows. The creed which each man in his heart believes to be essential
to his own salvation is for him alone to determine; but we have a right
to pass judgment upon his actions toward those about him.

Tried by this standard, the religious teachers of the community
stand most honorably high. It is probable that no other class of our
citizens do anything like the amount of disinterested labor for
their fellow-men. To those who are associated with them at close
quarters this statement will seem so obviously a truism as to rank
among the platitudes. But there is a far from inconsiderable body of
public opinion which, to judge by the speeches, writings, and jests
in which it delights, has no conception of this state of things. If
such people would but take the trouble to follow out the actual life
of a hard-worked clergyman or priest, I think they would become a
little ashamed of the tone of flippancy they are so prone to adopt when
speaking about them.

In the country districts the minister of the gospel is normally the
associate and leader of his congregation and in close personal touch
with them. He shares in and partially directs their intellectual
and moral life, and is responsive to their spiritual needs. If they
are prosperous, he is prosperous. If the community be poor and
hard-working, he shares the poverty and works as hard as any one.
As fine a figure as I can call to mind is that of one such country
clergyman in a poor farming community not far from the capital of the
State of New York—a vigorous old man, who works on his farm six days
in the week, and on the seventh preaches what he himself has been
practicing. The farm work does not occupy all of the week-days, for
there is not a spiritual need of his parishioners that he neglects. He
visits them, looks after them if they are sick, baptizes the children,
comforts those in sorrow, and is ready with shrewd advice for those
who need aid; in short, shows himself from week’s end to week’s end
a thoroughly sincere, earnest, hard-working old Christian. This is
perhaps the healthiest type. It is in keeping with the surroundings,
for in the country districts the quality of self-help is very highly
developed, and there is little use for the great organized charities.
Neighbors know one another. The poorest and the richest are more or
less in touch, and charitable feelings find a natural and simple
expression in the homely methods of performing charitable duties. This
does not mean that there is not room for an immense amount of work in
country communities and in villages and small towns. Every now and
then, in traveling over the State, one comes upon a public library, a
Young Men’s Christian Association building, or some similar structure
which has been put up by a man born in the place, who has made his
money elsewhere, and feels he would like to have some memorial in his
old home. Such a gift is of far-reaching benefit. Almost better is what
is done in the way of circulating libraries and the like by the united
action of those men and women who appreciate clearly the intellectual
needs of the people who live far from the great centres of our rather
feverish modern civilization; for in country life it is necessary to
guard, not against mental fever, but against lack of mental stimulus
and interests.

In cities the conditions are very different, both as regards the needs
and as regards the way it is possible to meet these needs. There is
much less feeling of essential community of interest, and poverty of
the body is lamentably visible among great masses. There are districts
populated to the point of congestion, where hardly any one is above
the level of poverty, though this poverty does not by any means always
imply misery. Where it does mean misery it must be met by organization,
and, above all, by the disinterested, endless labor of those who,
by choice, and to do good, live in the midst of it, temporarily or
permanently. Very many men and women spend part of their lives or do
part of their life-work under such circumstances, and conspicuous among
them are clergymen and priests.

Only those who have seen something of such work at close quarters
realize how much of it goes on quietly and without the slightest
outside show, and how much it represents to many lives that else would
be passed in gray squalor. It is not necessary to give the names of
the living, or I could enumerate among my personal acquaintance fifty
clergymen and priests, men of every church, of every degree of wealth,
each of whom cheerfully and quietly, year in and year out, does his
share, and more than his share, of the unending work which he feels
is imposed upon him alike by Christianity and by that form of applied
Christianity which we call good citizenship. Far more than that number
of women, in and out of religious bodies, who do to the full as much
work, could be mentioned. Of course, for every one thus mentioned there
would be a hundred, or many hundreds, unmentioned. Perhaps there is no
harm in alluding to one man who is dead. Very early in my career as a
police commissioner of the City of New York I was brought in contact
with Father Casserly of the Paulist Fathers. After he had made up his
mind that I was really trying to get things decent in the department,
and to see that law and order prevailed, and that crime and vice were
warred against in practical fashion, he became very intimate with
me, helping me in every way, and unconsciously giving me an insight
into his own work and his own character. Continually, in one way and
another, I came across what Father Casserly was doing, always in the
way of showing the intense human sympathy and interest he was taking
in the lives about him. If one of the boys of a family was wild, it
was Father Casserly who planned methods of steadying him. If, on the
other hand, a steady boy met with some misfortune,—lost his place, or
something of the kind,—it was Father Casserly who went and stated
the facts to the employer. The Paulist Fathers had always been among
the most efficient foes of the abuses of the liquor traffic. They
never hesitated to interfere with saloons, dance-houses, and the like.
One secret of their influence with our Police Board was that, as they
continually went about among their people and knew them all, and as
they were entirely disinterested, they could be trusted to tell who
did right and who did wrong among the instruments of the law. One of
the perplexing matters in dealing with policemen is that, as they are
always in hostile contact with criminals and would-be criminals, who
are sure to lie about them, it is next to impossible to tell when
accusations against them are false and when they are true; for the
good man who does his duty is certain to have scoundrelly foes, and
the bad man who blackmails these same scoundrels usually has nothing
but the same evidence against him. But Father Casserly and the rest of
his order knew the policemen personally, and we found we could trust
them implicitly to tell exactly who was good and who was not. Whether
the man were Protestant, Catholic, or Jew, if he was a faithful public
servant they would so report him; and if he was unfaithful he would
be reported as such wholly without regard to his creed. We had this
experience with an honorably large number of priests and clergymen.
Once in the same batch of promotions from sergeant to captain there
was a Protestant to whom our attention had been drawn by the earnest
praise of Fathers Casserly and Doyle, and a Catholic who had first been
brought to our notice by the advocacy of Bishop Potter.

There were other ways in which clergymen helped our Police Board. We
wanted at one time to get plenty of strong, honest young men for the
police force, and did not want to draw them from among the ordinary
types of ward heeler. Two fertile recruiting-grounds proved to be, one
a Catholic church and the other a Methodist church. The rector of the
former, Dr. Wall, had a temperance lyceum for the young men of his
parish; the pastor of the latter had a congregation made out of a bit
of old native America suddenly overlapped by the growth of the city,
and his wheelwrights, ship-carpenters, baymen, and coasting-sailors
gave us the same good type of officer that we got from among the
mechanics, motormen, and blacksmiths who came from Dr. Wall’s lyceum.
Among our other close friends was another Methodist preacher, who had
once been a reporter, but who had felt stirred by an irresistible
impulse to leave his profession and devote his life to the East Side,
where he ministered to the wants of those who would not go to the
fashionable churches, and for whom no other church was especially
prepared. In connection with his work, one of the things that was
especially pleasing was the way in which he had gone in not only with
the rest of the Protestant clergy and the non-sectarian philanthropic
workers of the district, but with the Catholic clergy, joining hands in
the fight against the seething evils of the slum. One of his Catholic
allies, by the way, a certain Brother A——, was doing an immense
amount for the Italian children of his parish. He had a large parochial
school, originally attended by the children of Irish parents. Gradually
the Irish had moved uptown, and had been supplanted by the Italians. It
was his life-work to lift these little Italians over the first painful
steps on the road toward American citizenship.

Again, let me call to mind an institution, not in New York, but in
Albany, where the sisters of a religious organization devote their
entire lives to helping girls who either have slipped, and would go
down to be trampled under foot in the blackest mire if they were not
helped, or who, by force of their surroundings, would surely slip if
the hand were not held out to them in time. It is the kind of work
the doing of which is of infinite importance both from the standpoint
of the state and from the standpoint of the individual; yet it is a
work which, to be successful, must emphatically be a labor of love.
Most men and women, even among those who appreciate the need of the
work and who are not wholly insensible to the demands made upon them
by the spirit of brotherly love for mankind, lack either the time,
the opportunity, or the moral and mental qualities to succeed in such
work; and to very many the sheer distaste of it would prevent their
doing it well. There is nothing attractive in it save for those who are
entirely earnest and disinterested. There is no reputation, there is
not even any notoriety, to be gained from it. Surely people who realize
that such work ought to be done, and who realize also how exceedingly
distasteful it would be for them to do it, ought to feel a sense of the
most profound gratitude to those who with whole-hearted sincerity have
undertaken it, and should support them in every way. This particular
institution is under the management of a creed not my own, but few
things gave me greater pleasure than to sign a bill increasing its
power and usefulness. Compared with the vital necessity of reclaiming
these poor hunted creatures to paths of womanliness and wholesome
living, it is of infinitesimal importance along the lines of which
creed these paths lead.

Undoubtedly the best type of philanthropic work is that which helps
men and women who are willing and able to help themselves; for
fundamentally this aid is simply what each of us should be all the
time both giving and receiving. Every man and woman in the land ought
to prize above almost every other quality the capacity for self-help;
and yet every man and woman in the land will at some time or other
be sorely in need of the help of others, and at some time or other
will find that he or she can in turn give help even to the strongest.
The quality of self-help is so splendid a quality that nothing can
compensate for its loss; yet, like every virtue, it can be twisted into
a fault, and it becomes a fault if carried to the point of cold-hearted
arrogance, of inability to understand that now and then the strongest
may be in need of aid, and that for this reason alone, if for no other,
the strong should always be glad of the chance in turn to aid the weak.

The Young Men’s Christian Associations and the Young Women’s
Christian Associations, which have now spread over all the country,
are invaluable because they can reach every one. I am certainly a
beneficiary myself, having not infrequently used them as clubs or
reading-rooms when I was in some city in which I had but little or no
personal acquaintance. In part they develop the good qualities of those
who join them; in part they do what is even more valuable, that is,
simply give opportunity for the men or women to develop the qualities
themselves. In most cases they provide reading-rooms and gymnasiums,
and therefore furnish a means for a man or woman to pass his or her
leisure hours in profit or amusement as seems best. The average
individual will not spend the hours in which he is not working in doing
something that is unpleasant, and absolutely the only way permanently
to draw average men or women from occupations and amusements that
are unhealthy for soul or body is to furnish an alternative which
they will accept. To forbid all amusements, or to treat innocent and
vicious amusements as on the same plane, simply ensures recruits for
the vicious amusements. The Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian
Associations would have demonstrated their value a hundredfold over
if they had done nothing more than furnish reading-rooms, gymnasiums,
and places where, especially after nightfall, those without homes,
or without attractive homes, could go without receiving injury. They
furnish meeting-grounds for many young men who otherwise would be
driven, perhaps to the saloon, or if not, then to some cigar-store or
other lounging-place, where at the best the conversation would not
be elevating, and at the worst companionships might be formed which
would lead to future disaster. In addition to this the associations
give every opportunity for self-improvement to those who care to
take advantage of the opportunity, and an astonishing number do take
advantage of it.

Mention was made above of some of the sources from which at times
we drew policemen while engaged in managing the New York Police
Department. Several came from Young Men’s Christian Associations. One
of them whom we got from the Bowery Branch of the Young Men’s Christian
Association I remember particularly. I had gone around there one night,
and the secretary mentioned to me that they had a young man who had
just rescued a woman from a burning building, showing great strength,
coolness, and courage. The story interested me, and I asked him to
send for the young fellow. When he turned up he proved to be a Jew,
Otto R——, who, when very young, had come over with his people from
Russia at the time of one of the waves of persecution in that country.
He was evidently physically of the right type, and as he had been
studying in the association classes for some time he was also mentally
fit, while his feat at the fire showed he had good moral qualities. We
were going to hold the examinations in a few days, and I told him to
try them. Sure enough, he passed and was appointed. He made one of the
best policemen we put on. As a result of his appointment, which meant
tripling the salary he had been earning, and making an immense bound in
social standing, he was able to keep his mother and old grandmother in
comfort, and see to the starting of his small brothers and sisters in
life; for he was already a good son and brother, so that it was not
surprising that he made a good policeman.

I have not dwelt on the work of the State charitable institutions, or
of those who are paid to do charitable work as officers and otherwise.
But it is bare justice to point out that the great majority of those
thus paid have gone into the work, not for the sake of the money, but
for the sake of the work itself, though, being dependent upon their own
exertions for a livelihood, they are obliged to receive some recompense
for their services.

There is one class of public servants, however, not employed directly
as philanthropic agents, whose work, nevertheless, is as truly
philanthropic in character as that of any man or woman existing. I
allude to the public-school teachers whose schools lie in the poorer
quarters of the city. In dealing with any body of men and women general
statements must be made cautiously, and it must always be understood
that there are numerous exceptions. Speaking generally, however, the
women teachers—I mention these because they are more numerous than
the men—who carry on their work in the poorer districts of the great
cities form as high-principled and useful a body of citizens as is
to be found in the entire community, and render an amount of service
which can hardly be paralleled by that of any other equal number of men
or women. Most women who lead lives actively devoted to intelligent
work for others grow to have a certain look of serene and high purpose
which stamps them at once. This look is generally seen, for instance,
among the higher types of women doctors, trained nurses, and of those
who devote their lives to work among the poor; and it is precisely
this look which one so often sees on the faces of those public-school
teachers who have grown to regard the welfare of their pupils as
the vital interest of their own lives. It is not merely the regular
day-work the school-teachers do, but the amount of attention they pay
outside their regular classes; the influence they have in shaping
the lives of the boys, and perhaps even more of the girls, brought
in contact with them; the care they take of the younger, and the way
they unconsciously hold up ideals to the elder boys and girls, to whom
they often represent the most tangible embodiment of what is best in
American life. They are a great force for producing good citizenship.
Above all things, they represent the most potent power in Americanizing
as well as in humanizing the children of the newcomers of every grade
who arrive here from Europe. Where the immigrant parents are able to
make their way in the world, their children have no more difficulty
than the children of the native-born in becoming part of American life,
in sharing all its privileges and in doing all its duties. But the
children of the very poor of foreign birth would be handicapped almost
as much as their parents, were it not for the public schools and the
start thus given them. Loyalty to the flag is taught by precept and
practice in all these public schools, and loyalty to the principles of
good citizenship is also taught in no merely perfunctory manner.

Here I hardly touch upon the “little red schoolhouse” out in the
country districts simply because in the country districts all of
our children go to the same schools, and thereby get an inestimable
knowledge of the solidarity of our American life. I have touched on
this in a former article, and I can here only say that it would be
impossible to overestimate the good done by the association this
engenders, and the excellent educational work of the teachers. We
always feel that we have given our children no small advantage by the
mere fact of allowing them to go to these little district schools,
where they all have the same treatment and are all tried by the same
standard. But with us in the country the district school is only
philanthropic in that excellent sense in which all joint effort for the
common good is philanthropic.

A very wholesome effect has been produced in great cities by the
university settlements, college settlements, and similar efforts to
do practical good by bringing closer together the more and the less
fortunate in life. It is no easy task to make movements of this
kind succeed. If managed in a spirit of patronizing condescension,
or with ignorance of the desires, needs, and passions of those round
about, little good indeed will come from them. The fact that, instead
of little, much good does in reality result, is due to the entirely
practical methods and the spirit of comradeship shown by those foremost
in these organizations. One particularly good feature has been their
tendency to get into politics. Of course this has its drawbacks,
but they are outweighed by the advantages. Clean politics is simply
one form of applied good citizenship. No man can be a really good
citizen unless he takes a lively interest in politics from a high
standpoint. Moreover, the minute that a move is made in politics, the
people who are helped and those who would help them grow to have a
common interest which is genuine and absorbing instead of being in any
degree artificial, and this will bring them together as nothing else
would. Part of the good that results from such community of feeling
is precisely like the good that results from the community of feeling
about a club, football team, or baseball nine. This in itself has a
good side; but there is an even better side, due to the fact that
disinterested motives are appealed to, and that men are made to feel
that they are working for others, for the community as a whole as well
as for themselves.

There remain the host of philanthropic workers who can not be classed
in any of the above-mentioned classes. They do most good when they are
in touch with some organization, although, in addition, the strongest
will keep some of their leisure time for work on individual lines to
meet the cases where no organized relief will accomplish anything.
Philanthropy has undoubtedly been a good deal discredited both by
the exceedingly noxious individuals who go into it with ostentation
to make a reputation, and by the only less noxious persons who are
foolish and indiscriminate givers. Anything that encourages pauperism,
anything that relaxes the manly fibre and lowers self-respect,
is an unmixed evil. The soup-kitchen style of philanthropy is as
thoroughly demoralizing as most forms of vice or oppression, and it
is of course particularly revolting when some corporation or private
individual undertakes it, not even in a spirit of foolish charity,
but for purposes of self-advertisement. In a time of sudden and
widespread disaster, caused by a flood, a blizzard, an earthquake, or
an epidemic, there may be ample reason for the extension of charity
on the largest scale to every one who needs it. But these conditions
are wholly exceptional, and the methods of relief employed to meet
them must also be treated as wholly exceptional. In charity the one
thing always to be remembered is that, while any man may slip and
should at once be helped to rise to his feet, yet no man can be
carried with advantage either to him or to the community. The greatest
possible good can be done by the extension of a helping hand at the
right moment, but the attempt to carry any one permanently can end in
nothing but harm. The really hard-working philanthropists, who spend
their lives in doing good to their neighbors, do not, as a rule,
belong to the “mushy” class, and thoroughly realize the unwisdom of
foolish and indiscriminate giving, or of wild and crude plans of social
reformations. The young enthusiast who is for the first time brought
into contact with the terrible suffering and stunting degradation which
are so evident in many parts of our great cities is apt to become so
appalled as to lose his head. If there is a twist in his moral or
mental make-up, he will never regain his poise; but if he is sound
and healthy he will soon realize that things being bad affords no
justification for making them infinitely worse, and that the only safe
rule is for each man to strive to do his duty in a spirit of sanity and
wholesome common-sense. No one of us can make the world move on very
far, but it moves at all only when each one of a very large number does
his duty.




CHARACTER AND SUCCESS

PUBLISHED IN THE “OUTLOOK,” MARCH 31, 1900


A year or two ago I was speaking to a famous Yale professor, one of
the most noted scholars in the country, and one who is even more than
a scholar, because he is in every sense of the word a man. We had been
discussing the Yale-Harvard foot-ball teams, and he remarked of a
certain player: “I told them not to take him, for he was slack in his
studies, and my experience is that, as a rule, the man who is slack in
his studies will be slack in his foot-ball work; it is character that
counts in both.”

Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far
above both is character. It is true, of course, that a genius may,
on certain lines, do more than a brave and manly fellow who is not
a genius; and so, in sports, vast physical strength may overcome
weakness, even though the puny body may have in it the heart of a
lion. But, in the long run, in the great battle of life, no brilliancy
of intellect, no perfection of bodily development, will count when
weighed in the balance against that assemblage of virtues, active and
passive, of moral qualities, which we group together under the name of
character; and if between any two contestants, even in college sport or
in college work, the difference in character on the right side is as
great as the difference of intellect or strength the other way, it is
the character side that will win.

Of course this does not mean that either intellect or bodily vigor can
safely be neglected. On the contrary, it means that both should be
developed, and that not the least of the benefits of developing both
comes from the indirect effect which this development itself has upon
the character. In very rude and ignorant communities all schooling is
more or less looked down upon; but there are now very few places indeed
in the United States where elementary schooling is not considered a
necessity. There are any number of men, however, priding themselves
upon being “hard-headed” and “practical,” who sneer at book-learning
and at every form of higher education, under the impression that the
additional mental culture is at best useless, and is ordinarily harmful
in practical life. Not long ago two of the wealthiest men in the United
States publicly committed themselves to the proposition that to go to
college was a positive disadvantage for a young man who strove for
success. Now, of course, the very most successful men we have ever had,
men like Lincoln, had no chance to go to college, but did have such
indomitable tenacity and such keen appreciation of the value of wisdom
that they set to work and learned for themselves far more than they
could have been taught in any academy. On the other hand, boys of weak
fibre, who go to high school or college instead of going to work after
getting through the primary schools, may be seriously damaged instead
of benefited. But, as a rule, if the boy has in him the right stuff, it
is a great advantage to him should his circumstances be so fortunate
as to enable him to get the years of additional mental training. The
trouble with the two rich men whose views are above quoted was that,
owing largely perhaps to their own defects in early training, they did
not know what success really was. Their speeches merely betrayed their
own limitations, and did not furnish any argument against education.
Success must always include, as its first element, earning a competence
for the support of the man himself, and for the bringing up of those
dependent upon him. In the vast majority of cases it ought to include
financially rather more than this. But the acquisition of wealth is
not in the least the only test of success. After a certain amount of
wealth has been accumulated, the accumulation of more is of very little
consequence indeed from the standpoint of success, as success should
be understood both by the community and the individual. Wealthy men who
use their wealth aright are a great power for good in the community,
and help to upbuild that material national prosperity which must
underlie national greatness; but if this were the only kind of success,
the nation would be indeed poorly off. Successful statesmen, soldiers,
sailors, explorers, historians, poets, and scientific men are also
essential to national greatness, and, in fact, very much more essential
than any mere successful business man can possibly be. The average man,
into whom the average boy develops, is, of course, not going to be a
marvel in any line, but, if he only chooses to try, he can be very
good in any line, and the chances of his doing good work are immensely
increased if he has trained his mind. Of course, if, as a result of
his high-school, academy, or college experience, he gets to thinking
that the only kind of learning is that to be found in books, he will do
very little; but if he keeps his mental balance,—that is, if he shows
character,—he will understand both what learning can do and what it
can not, and he will be all the better the more he can get.

A good deal the same thing is true of bodily development. Exactly
as one kind of man sneers at college work because he does not think
it bears any immediate fruit in money-getting, so another type of
man sneers at college sports because he does not see their immediate
effect for good in practical life. Of course, if they are carried to
an excessive degree, they are altogether bad. It is a good thing for a
boy to have captained his school or college eleven, but it is a very
bad thing if, twenty years afterward, all that can be said of him is
that he has continued to take an interest in foot-ball, base-ball, or
boxing, and has with him the memory that he was once captain. A very
acute observer has pointed out that, not impossibly, excessive devotion
to sports and games has proved a serious detriment in the British
army, by leading the officers and even the men to neglect the hard,
practical work of their profession for the sake of racing, foot-ball,
base-ball, polo, and tennis—until they received a very rude awakening
at the hands of the Boers. Of course this means merely that any healthy
pursuit can be abused. The student in a college who “crams” in order
to stand at the head of his class, and neglects his health and stunts
his development by working for high marks, may do himself much damage;
but all that he proves is that the abuse of study is wrong. The fact
remains that the study itself is essential. So it is with vigorous
pastimes. If rowing or foot-ball or base-ball is treated as the end of
life by any considerable section of a community, then that community
shows itself to be in an unhealthy condition. If treated as it should
be,—that is, as good, healthy play,—it is of great benefit, not only
to the body, but in its effect upon character. To study hard implies
character in the student, and to work hard at a sport which entails
severe physical exertion and steady training also implies character.

All kinds of qualities go to make up character, for, emphatically, the
term should include the positive no less than the negative virtues. If
we say of a boy or a man, “He is of good character,” we mean that he
does not do a great many things that are wrong, and we also mean that
he does do a great many things which imply much effort of will and
readiness to face what is disagreeable. He must not steal, he must not
be intemperate, he must not be vicious in any way; he must not be mean
or brutal; he must not bully the weak. In fact, he must refrain from
whatever is evil. But besides refraining from evil, he must do good.
He must be brave and energetic; he must be resolute and persevering.
The Bible always inculcates the need of the positive no less than
the negative virtues, although certain people who profess to teach
Christianity are apt to dwell wholly on the negative. We are bidden
not merely to be harmless as doves, but also as wise as serpents. It
is very much easier to carry out the former part of the order than the
latter; while, on the other hand, it is of much more importance for
the good of mankind that our goodness should be accompanied by wisdom
than that we should merely be harmless. If with the serpent wisdom we
unite the serpent guile, terrible will be the damage we do; and if,
with the best of intentions, we can only manage to deserve the epithet
of “harmless,” it is hardly worth while to have lived in the world at
all.

Perhaps there is no more important component of character than
steadfast resolution. The boy who is going to make a great man, or is
going to count in any way in after life, must make up his mind not
merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a
thousand repulses or defeats. He may be able to wrest success along
the lines on which he originally started. He may have to try something
entirely new. On the one hand, he must not be volatile and irresolute,
and, on the other hand, he must not fear to try a new line because he
has failed in another. Grant did well as a boy and well as a young
man; then came a period of trouble and failure, and then the Civil War
and his opportunity; and he grasped it, and rose until his name is
among the greatest in our history. Young Lincoln, struggling against
incalculable odds, worked his way up, trying one thing and another
until he, too, struck out boldly into the turbulent torrent of our
national life, at a time when only the boldest and wisest could so
carry themselves as to win success and honor; and from the struggle he
won both death and honor, and stands for evermore among the greatest of
mankind.

Character is shown in peace no less than in war. As the greatest
fertility of invention, the greatest perfection of armament, will not
make soldiers out of cowards, so no mental training and no bodily
vigor will make a nation great if it lacks the fundamental principles
of honesty and moral cleanliness. After the death of Alexander the
Great nearly all of the then civilized world was divided among the
Greek monarchies ruled by his companions and their successors. This
Greek world was very brilliant and very wealthy. It contained haughty
military empires, and huge trading cities, under republican government,
which attained the highest pitch of commercial and industrial
prosperity. Art flourished to an extraordinary degree; science advanced
as never before. There were academies for men of letters; there were
many orators, many philosophers. Merchants and business men throve
apace, and for a long period the Greek soldiers kept the superiority
and renown they had won under the mighty conqueror of the East. But
the heart of the people was incurably false, incurably treacherous and
debased. Almost every statesman had his price, almost every soldier was
a mercenary who, for a sufficient inducement, would betray any cause.
Moral corruption ate into the whole social and domestic fabric, until,
a little more than a century after the death of Alexander, the empire
which he had left had become a mere glittering shell, which went down
like a house of cards on impact with the Romans; for the Romans, with
all their faults, were then a thoroughly manly race—a race of strong,
virile character.

Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable
requisite is character—character that does and dares as well as
endures, character that is active in the performance of virtue no less
than firm in the refusal to do aught that is vicious or degraded.




THE EIGHTH AND NINTH COMMANDMENTS IN POLITICS

PUBLISHED IN THE “OUTLOOK,” MAY 12, 1900


The two commandments which are specially applicable in public life are
the eighth and the ninth. Not only every politician, high or low, but
every citizen interested in politics, and especially every man who, in
a newspaper or on the stump, advocates or condemns any public policy or
any public man, should remember always that the two cardinal points in
his doctrine ought to be, “Thou shalt not steal,” and “Thou shalt not
bear false witness against thy neighbor.” He should also, of course,
remember that the multitude of men who break the moral law expressed
in these two commandments are not to be justified because they keep
out of the clutches of the human law. Robbery and theft, perjury and
subornation of perjury, are crimes punishable by the courts; but many
a man who technically never commits any one of these crimes is yet
morally quite as guilty as is his less adroit but not more wicked,
and possibly infinitely less dangerous, brother who gets into the
penitentiary.

As regards the eighth commandment, while the remark of one of the
founders of our government, that the whole art of politics consists
in being honest, is an overstatement, it remains true that absolute
honesty is what Cromwell would have called a “fundamental” of healthy
political life. We can afford to differ on the currency, the tariff,
and foreign policy; but we can not afford to differ on the question of
honesty if we expect our Republic permanently to endure. No community
is healthy where it is ever necessary to distinguish one politician
among his fellows because “he is honest.” Honesty is not so much a
credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public.
Unless a man is honest we have no right to keep him in public life, it
matters not how brilliant his capacity, it hardly matters how great
his power of doing good service on certain lines may be. Probably
very few men will disagree with this statement in the abstract, yet
in the concrete there is much wavering about it. The number of public
servants who actually take bribes is not very numerous outside of
certain well-known centres of festering corruption. But the temptation
to be dishonest often comes in insidious ways. There are not a few
public men who, though they would repel with indignation an offer
of a bribe, will give certain corporations special legislative and
executive privileges because they have contributed heavily to campaign
funds; will permit loose and extravagant work because a contractor has
political influence; or, at any rate, will permit a public servant to
take public money without rendering an adequate return, by conniving
at inefficient service on the part of men who are protected by
prominent party leaders. Various degrees of moral guilt are involved
in the multitudinous actions of this kind; but, after all, directly or
indirectly, every such case comes dangerously near the border-line of
the commandment which, in forbidding theft, certainly by implication
forbids the connivance at theft, or the failure to punish it. One of
the favorite schemes of reformers is to devise some method by which
big corporations can be prevented from making heavy subscriptions to
campaign funds, and thereby acquiring improper influence. But the best
way to prevent them from making contributions for improper purposes
is simply to elect as public servants, not professional denouncers
of corporations,—for such men are in practice usually their most
servile tools,—but men who say, and mean, that they will neither be
for nor against corporations; that, on the one hand, they will not
be frightened from doing them justice by popular clamor, or, on the
other hand, led by any interest whatsoever into doing them more than
justice. At the Anti-Trust Conference last summer Mr. Bryan commented,
with a sneer, on the fact that “of course” New York would not pass
a law prohibiting contributions by corporations. He was right in
thinking that New York, while it retains rational civic habits, will
not pass ridiculous legislation which can not be made effective, and
which is merely intended to deceive during the campaign the voters
least capable of thought. But there will not be the slightest need for
such legislation if only the public spirit is sufficiently healthy,
sufficiently removed alike from corruption and from demagogy, to see
that each corporation receives its exact rights and nothing more;
and this is exactly what is now being done in New York by men whom
dishonest corporations dread a hundred times more than they dread the
demagogic agitators who are a terror merely to honest corporations.

It is, of course, not enough that a public official should be honest.
No amount of honesty will avail if he is not also brave and wise. The
weakling and the coward can not be saved by honesty alone; but without
honesty the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should
be hunted down by every lover of righteousness. No man who is corrupt,
no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty
by the community. When this truth is accepted as axiomatic in our
politics, then, and not till then, shall we see such a moral uplifting
of the people as will render, for instance, Tammany rule in New York,
as Tammany rule now is, no more possible than it would be possible to
revive the robber baronage of the Middle Ages.

Great is the danger to our country from the failure among our public
men to live up to the eighth commandment, from the callousness in the
public which permits such shortcomings. Yet it is not exaggeration to
say that the danger is quite as great from those who year in and year
out violate the ninth commandment by bearing false witness against the
honest man, and who thereby degrade him and elevate the dishonest man
until they are both on the same level. The public is quite as much
harmed in the one case as in the other, by the one set of wrong-doers
as by the other. “Liar” is just as ugly a word as “thief,” because
it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the
other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under
oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under
the statute law. Under the higher law, under the great law of morality
and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a
court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability
the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more wide-spread and
more pernicious. The difference between perjury and mendacity is not
in the least one of morals or ethics. It is simply one of legal forms.

The same man may break both commandments, or one group of men may be
tempted to break one and another group of men the other. In our civic
life the worst offenders against the law of honesty owe no small
part of their immunity to those who sin against the law by bearing
false witness against their honest neighbors. The sin is, of course,
peculiarly revolting when coupled with hypocrisy, when it is committed
in the name of morality. Few politicians do as much harm as the
newspaper editor, the clergyman, or the lay reformer who, day in and
day out, by virulent and untruthful invective aimed at the upholders of
honesty, weakens them for the benefit of the frankly vicious. We need
fearless criticism of dishonest men, and of honest men on any point
where they go wrong; but even more do we need criticism which shall be
truthful both in what it says and in what it leaves unsaid—truthful
in words and truthful in the impression it designs to leave upon the
readers’ or hearers’ minds.

We need absolute honesty in public life; and we shall not get it until
we remember that truth-telling must go hand in hand with it, and that
it is quite as important not to tell an untruth about a decent man as
it is to tell the truth about one who is not decent.




THE BEST AND THE GOOD

PUBLISHED IN THE “CHURCHMAN,” MARCH 17, 1900


Among the people to whom we are all under a very real debt of
obligation for the help they give to those seeking for good government
at Albany is Bishop Doane. All of us who at the State capital have
been painfully striving to wrest, often from adverse conditions, the
best results obtainable, are strengthened and heartened in every way
by the active interest the bishop takes in every good cause, the keen
intelligence with which he sees “the instant need of things,” and the
sane and wholesome spirit, as remote from fanaticism as from cynicism,
in which he approaches all public questions.

Quite unconsciously the bishop the other day gave an admirable
summing up of his own attitude in quoting an extract from the “Life”
of Archbishop Benson. In a letter which the archbishop wrote to his
chancellor in regard to a bill regulating patronage in the Church of
England occurs the following passage:

“The bill does not, of course, represent my ideal, but it is a careful
collection of points which could be claimed, which it would be
indecent to refuse, and which would make a considerable difference
about our powers of dealing rightly with cases. Gain that platform, and
it would be a footing for more ideal measures. I do not want the best
to be any more the deadly enemy of the good. We climb through degrees
of comparison.”

This is really a description as excellent as it is epigrammatic of
the attitude which must be maintained by every public man, by every
leader and guide of public thought, who hopes to accomplish work of
real worth to the community. It is a melancholy fact that many of the
worst laws put upon the statute-books have been put there with the
best of intentions by thoroughly well-meaning people. Mere desire
to do right can no more by itself make a good statesman than it can
make a good general. Of course it is entirely unnecessary to say that
nothing atones for the lack of this desire to do right. Exactly as the
brilliant military ability of an Arnold merely makes his treason the
more abhorrent, so our statesmanship can not be put upon the proper
plane of purity and ability until the condemnation visited upon a
traitor like Arnold is visited with no less severity upon the statesman
who betrays the people by corruption. The one is as great an offence as
the other. Military power is at an end when the honor of the soldier
can no longer be trusted; and, in the right sense of the word, civic
greatness is at an end when civic righteousness is no longer its
foundation.

But, of course, every one knows that a soldier must be more than merely
honorable before he is fit to do credit to the country; and just the
same thing is true of a statesman. He must have high ideals, and the
leader of public opinion in the pulpit, in the press, on the platform,
or on the stump must preach high ideals. But the possession or
preaching of these high ideals may not only be useless, but a source of
positive harm, if unaccompanied by practical good sense, if they do not
lead to the effort to get the best possible when the perfect best is
not attainable—and in this life the perfect best rarely is attainable.
Every leader of a great reform has to contend, on the one hand, with
the open, avowed enemies of the reform, and, on the other hand, with
its extreme advocates, who wish the impossible, and who join hands with
their extreme opponents to defeat the rational friends of the reform.
Of course the typical instance of this kind of conduct was afforded by
Wendell Phillips when in 1864 he added his weight, slight though it
was, to the copperhead opposition to the re-election of Abraham Lincoln.

The alliance, between Blifil and Black George is world-old. Blifil
always acts in the name of morality. Often, of course, he is not
moral at all. It is a great mistake to think that the extremist is a
better man than the moderate. Usually the difference is not that he
is morally stronger, but that he is intellectually weaker. He is not
more virtuous. He is simply more foolish. This is notably true in our
American life of many of those who are most pessimistic in denouncing
the condition of our politics. Certainly there is infinite room for
improvement, infinite need of fearless and trenchant criticism; but
the improvement can only come through intelligent and straightforward
effort. It is set back by those extremists who by their action always
invite reaction, and, above all, by those worst enemies of our public
honesty who by their incessant attacks upon good men give the utmost
possible assistance to the bad.

Offenders of this type need but a short shrift. Though extremists
after a fashion; they are morally worse instead of better than the
moderates. There remains, however, a considerable group of men who
are really striving for the best, and who mistakenly, though in good
faith, permit the best to be the enemy of the good. Under very rare
conditions their attitude may be right, and because it is thus right
once in a hundred times they are apt to be blind to the harm they do
the other ninety-nine times. These men need, above all, to realize
that healthy growth can not normally come through revolution. A
revolution is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual
the country in which they take place is going down-hill. Hysteria in
any form is incompatible with sane and healthy endeavor. We must never
compromise in a way that means retrogression. But in moving forward
we must realize that normally the condition of sure progress is that
it shall not be so fast as to ensure a revolt and a stoppage of the
upward course. In this country especially, where what we have now to
contend with is not so much any one concrete evil as a general lowering
of the standards, we must remember that to keep these standards
high does not at all imply that they should be put upon impossible
positions—positions which must ultimately be abandoned. There can
be no compromise on the great fundamental principles of morality. A
public man who directly or indirectly breaks the eighth commandment is
just as guilty as an editor or a speaker who breaks the ninth, and it
matters little whether the fault be due to venality in the one case or
to morbid vanity and mean envy in the other. If a man is dishonest he
should be driven from public life. If a course of policy is vicious
and produces harm it should be reversed at any cost. But when we come
to the countless measures and efforts for doing good, let us keep ever
clearly in mind that while we must always strive for the utmost good
that can be obtained, and must be content with no less, yet that we
do only harm if, by intemperate championship of the impossible good,
we cut ourselves off from the opportunity to work a real abatement of
existing and menacing evil.




PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE

PUBLISHED IN THE “OUTLOOK,” JULY 28, 1900


It is customary to express wonder and horror at the cynical baseness
of the doctrines of Machiavelli. Both the wonder and the horror are
justified,—though it would perhaps be wiser to keep them for the
society which the Italian described rather than for the describer
himself,—but it is somewhat astonishing that there should be so little
insistence upon the fact that Machiavelli rests his whole system upon
his contemptuous belief in the folly and low civic morality of the
multitude, and their demand for fine promises and their indifference to
performance. Thus he says: “It is necessary to be a great deceiver and
hypocrite; for men are so simple and yield so readily to the wants of
the moment that he who will trick shall always find another who will
suffer himself to be tricked.... Therefore a ruler must take great care
that no word shall slip from his mouth that shall not be full of piety,
trust, humanity, religion, and simple faith, and he must appear to eye
and ear all compact of these, ... because the vulgar are always caught
by appearance and by the event, and in this world there are none but
the vulgar.”

It therefore appears that Machiavelli’s system is predicated partly on
the entire indifference to performance of promise by the prince and
partly upon a greedy demand for impossible promises among the people.
The infamy of the conduct championed by Machiavelli as proper for
public men is usually what rivets the attention, but the folly which
alone makes such infamy possible is quite as well worthy of study.
Hypocrisy is a peculiarly revolting vice alike in public and private
life; and in public life—at least in high position—it can only be
practiced on a large scale for any length of time in those places where
the people in mass really warrant Machiavelli’s description, and are
content with a complete divorce between promise and performance.

It would be difficult to say which is the surest way of bringing about
such a complete divorce: on the one hand, the tolerance in a public man
of the nonperformance of promises which can be kept; or, on the other
hand, the insistence by the public upon promises which they either know
or ought to know can not be kept. When in public speech or in a party
platform a policy is outlined which it is known can not or will not be
pursued, the fact is a reflection not only upon the speaker and the
platform-maker, but upon the public feeling to which they appeal. When
a section of the people demand from a candidate promises which he can
not believe that he will be able to fulfil and, on his refusal, support
some man who cheerfully guarantees an immediate millennium, why, under
such circumstances the people are striving to bring about in America
some of the conditions of public life which produced the profligacy and
tyranny of mediæval Italy. Such conduct means that the capacity for
self-government has atrophied; and the hard-headed common-sense with
which the American people, as a whole, refuse to sanction such conduct
is the best possible proof and guarantee of their capacity to perform
the high and difficult task of administering the greatest Republic upon
which the sun has ever shone.

There are always politicians willing, on the one hand, to promise
everything to the people, and, on the other, to perform everything
for the machine or the boss, with chuckling delight in the success of
their efforts to hoodwink the former and serve the latter. Now, not
only should such politicians be regarded as infamous, but the people
who are hoodwinked by them should share the blame. The man who is taken
in by, or demands, impossible promises is not much less culpable than
the politician who deliberately makes such promises and then breaks
faith. Thus when any public man says that he “will never compromise
under any conditions,” he is certain to receive the applause of a few
emotional people who do not think correctly, and the one fact about him
that can be instantly asserted as true beyond peradventure is that, if
he is a serious personage at all, he is deliberately lying, while it
is only less certain that he will be guilty of base and dishonorable
compromise when the opportunity arises. “Compromise” is so often used
in a bad sense that it is difficult to remember that properly it merely
describes the process of reaching an agreement. Naturally there are
certain subjects on which no man can compromise. For instance, there
must be no compromise under any circumstances with official corruption,
and of course no man should hesitate to say as much. Again, an honest
politician is entirely justified in promising on the stump that he will
make no compromise on any question of right and wrong. This promise he
can and ought to make good. But when questions of policy arise—and
most questions, from the tariff to municipal ownership of public
utilities and the franchise tax, are primarily questions of policy—he
will have to come to some kind of working agreement with his fellows,
and if he says that he will not, he either deliberately utters what he
knows to be false, or else he ensures for himself the humiliation of
being forced to break his word. No decent politician need compromise in
any way save as Washington and Lincoln did. He need not go nearly as
far as Hamilton, Jefferson, and Jackson went; but some distance he must
go if he expects to accomplish anything.

Again, take the case of those who promise an impossible good to the
community as a whole if a given course of legislation is adopted. The
man who makes such a promise may be a well-meaning but unbalanced
enthusiast, or he may be merely a designing demagogue. In either case
the people who listen to and believe him are not to be excused, though
they may be pitied. Softness of heart is an admirable quality, but when
it extends its area until it also becomes softness of head, its results
are anything but admirable. It is a good thing to combine a warm heart
with a cool head. People really fit for self-government will not be
misled by over-effusiveness in promise, and, on the other hand, they
will demand that every proper promise shall be made good.

Wise legislation and upright administration can undoubtedly work
very great good to a community, and, above all, can give to each
individual the chance to do the best work for himself. But ultimately
the individual’s own faculties must form the chief factor in working
out his own salvation. In the last analysis it is the thrift, energy,
self-mastery, and business intelligence of each man which have most
to do with deciding whether he rises or falls. It is easy enough
to devise a scheme of government which shall absolutely nullify all
these qualities and ensure failure to everybody, whether he deserves
success or not. But the best scheme of government can do little more
than provide against injustice, and then let the individual rise or
fall on his own merits. Of course something can be done by the State
acting in its collective capacity, and in certain instances such action
may be necessary to remedy real wrong. Gross misconduct of individuals
or corporations may make it necessary for the State or some of its
subdivisions to assume the charge of what are called public utilities.
But when all that can be done in this way has been done, when every
individual has been saved so far as the State can save him from the
tyranny of any other man or body of men, the individual’s own qualities
of body and mind, his own strength of heart and hand, will remain the
determining conditions in his career. The people who trust to or exact
promises that, if a certain political leader is followed or a certain
public policy adopted, this great truth will cease to operate, are not
merely leaning on a broken reed, but are working for their own undoing.

So much for the men who by their demands for the impossible encourage
the promise of the impossible, whether in the domain of economic
legislation or of legislation which has for its object the promotion
of morality. The other side is that no man should be held excusable
if he does not perform what he promises, unless for the best and most
sufficient reason. This should be especially true of every politician.
It shows a thoroughly unhealthy state of mind when the public pardons
with a laugh failure to keep a distinct pledge, on the ground that a
politician can not be expected to confine himself to the truth when on
the stump or the platform. A man should no more be excused for lying
on the stump than for lying off the stump. Of course matters may so
change that it may be impossible for him, or highly inadvisable for
the country, that he should try to do what he in good faith said he
was going to do. But the necessity for the change should be made very
evident, and it should be well understood that such a case is the
exception and not the rule. As a rule, and speaking with due regard
to the exceptions, it should be taken as axiomatic that when a man in
public life pledges himself to a certain course of action he shall as a
matter of course do what he said he would do, and shall not be held to
have acted honorably if he does otherwise.

All great fundamental truths are apt to sound rather trite, and yet
in spite of their triteness they need to be reiterated over and over
again. The visionary or the self-seeking knave who promises the golden
impossible, and the credulous dupe who is taken in by such a promise,
and who in clutching at the impossible loses the chance of securing the
real though lesser good, are as old as the political organizations of
mankind. Throughout the history of the world the nations who have done
best in self-government are those who have demanded from their public
men only the promise of what can actually be done for righteousness and
honesty, and who have sternly insisted that such promise must be kept
in letter and in spirit.

So it is with the general question of obtaining good government. We
can not trust the mere doctrinaire; we can not trust the mere closet
reformer, nor yet his acrid brother who himself does nothing, but who
rails at those who endure the heat and burden of the day. Yet we can
trust still less those base beings who treat politics only as a game
out of which to wrong a soiled livelihood, and in whose vocabulary the
word “practical” has come to be a synonym for whatever is mean and
corrupt. A man is worthless unless he has in him a lofty devotion to an
ideal, and he is worthless also unless he strives to realize this ideal
by practical methods. He must promise, both to himself and to others,
only what he can perform; but what really can be performed he must
promise, and such promise he must at all hazards make good.

The problems that confront us in this age are, after all, in
their essence the same as those that have always confronted free
peoples striving to secure and to keep free government. No political
philosopher of the present day can put the case more clearly than it
was put by the wonderful old Greeks. Says Aristotle: “Two principles
have to be kept in view: what is possible, what is becoming; at these
every man ought to aim.” Plato expresses precisely the same idea:
“Those who are not schooled and practiced in truth [who are not honest
and upright men] can never manage aright the government, nor yet can
those who spend their lives as closet philosophers; because the former
have no high purpose to guide their actions, while the latter keep
aloof from public life, having the idea that even while yet living they
have been translated to the Islands of the Blest.... [Men must] both
contemplate the good and try actually to achieve it. Thus the state
will be settled as a reality, and not as a dream, like most of those
inhabited by persons fighting about shadows.”[1]

[1] Translated freely and condensed.




THE AMERICAN BOY

PUBLISHED IN “ST. NICHOLAS,” MAY, 1900


Of course what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he
shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong
that he won’t be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He
must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He
must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived,
and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all
comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind
of American man of whom America can be really proud.

There are always in life countless tendencies for good and for
evil, and each succeeding generation sees some of these tendencies
strengthened and some weakened; nor is it by any means always,
alas! that the tendencies for evil are weakened and those for good
strengthened. But during the last few decades there certainly have
been some notable changes for good in boy life. The great growth in
the love of athletic sports, for instance, while fraught with danger
if it becomes one-sided and unhealthy, has beyond all question had an
excellent effect in increased manliness. Forty or fifty years ago the
writer on American morals was sure to deplore the effeminacy and luxury
of young Americans who were born of rich parents. The boy who was well
off then, especially in the big Eastern cities, lived too luxuriously,
took to billiards as his chief innocent recreation, and felt small
shame in his inability to take part in rough pastimes and field-sports.
Nowadays, whatever other faults the son of rich parents may tend to
develop, he is at least forced by the opinion of all his associates of
his own age to bear himself well in manly exercises and to develop his
body—and therefore, to a certain extent, his character—in the rough
sports which call for pluck, endurance, and physical address.

Of course boys who live under such fortunate conditions that they have
to do either a good deal of outdoor work or a good deal of what might
be called natural outdoor play do not need this athletic development.
In the Civil War the soldiers who came from the prairie and the
backwoods and the rugged farms where stumps still dotted the clearings,
and who had learned to ride in their infancy, to shoot as soon as they
could handle a rifle, and to camp out whenever they got the chance,
were better fitted for military work than any set of mere school or
college athletes could possibly be. Moreover, to mis-estimate athletics
is equally bad whether their importance is magnified or minimized. The
Greeks were famous athletes, and as long as their athletic training
had a normal place in their lives, it was a good thing. But it was a
very bad thing when they kept up their athletic games while letting
the stern qualities of soldiership and statesmanship sink into disuse.
Some of the younger readers of this book will certainly sometime read
the famous letters of the younger Pliny, a Roman who wrote, with what
seems to us a curiously modern touch, in the first century of the
present era. His correspondence with the Emperor Trajan is particularly
interesting; and not the least noteworthy thing in it is the tone of
contempt with which he speaks of the Greek athletic sports, treating
them as the diversions of an unwarlike people which it was safe to
encourage in order to keep the Greeks from turning into anything
formidable. So at one time the Persian kings had to forbid polo,
because soldiers neglected their proper duties for the fascinations
of the game. We can not expect the best work from soldiers who have
carried to an unhealthy extreme the sports and pastimes which would be
healthy if indulged in with moderation, and have neglected to learn
as they should the business of their profession. A soldier needs to
know how to shoot and take cover and shift for himself—not to box or
play foot-ball. There is, of course, always the risk of thus mistaking
means for ends. Fox-hunting is a first-class sport; but one of the
most absurd things in real life is to note the bated breath with which
certain excellent fox-hunters, otherwise of quite healthy minds, speak
of this admirable but not over-important pastime. They tend to make
it almost as much of a fetich as, in the last century, the French and
German nobles made the chase of the stag, when they carried hunting
and game-preserving to a point which was ruinous to the national
life. Fox-hunting is very good as a pastime, but it is about as poor
a business as can be followed by any man of intelligence. Certain
writers about it are fond of quoting the anecdote of a fox-hunter who,
in the days of the English civil war, was discovered pursuing his
favorite sport just before a great battle between the Cavaliers and
the Puritans, and right between their lines as they came together.
These writers apparently consider it a merit in this man that when his
country was in a death-grapple, instead of taking arms and hurrying to
the defence of the cause he believed right, he should placidly have
gone about his usual sports. Of course, in reality the chief serious
use of fox-hunting is to encourage manliness and vigor, and to keep
men hardy, so that at need they can show themselves fit to take part
in work or strife for their native land. When a man so far confuses
ends and means as to think that fox-hunting, or polo, or foot-ball,
or whatever else the sport may be, is to be itself taken as the end,
instead of as the mere means of preparation to do work that counts when
the time arises, when the occasion calls—why, that man had better
abandon sport altogether.

No boy can afford to neglect his work, and with a boy work, as a rule,
means study. Of course there are occasionally brilliant successes in
life where the man has been worthless as a student when a boy. To
take these exceptions as examples would be as unsafe as it would be
to advocate blindness because some blind men have won undying honor
by triumphing over their physical infirmity and accomplishing great
results in the world. I am no advocate of senseless and excessive
cramming in studies, but a boy should work, and should work hard,
at his lessons—in the first place, for the sake of what he will
learn, and in the next place, for the sake of the effect upon his own
character of resolutely settling down to learn it. Shiftlessness,
slackness, indifference in studying, are almost certain to mean
inability to get on in other walks of life. Of course, as a boy grows
older it is a good thing if he can shape his studies in the direction
toward which he has a natural bent; but whether he can do this or
not, he must put his whole heart into them. I do not believe in
mischief-doing in school hours, or in the kind of animal spirits that
results in making bad scholars; and I believe that those boys who take
part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for
horse-play in school. While they study they should study just as hard
as they play foot-ball in a match game. It is wise to obey the homely
old adage, “Work while you work; play while you play.”

A boy needs both physical and moral courage. Neither can take the
place of the other. When boys become men they will find out that there
are some soldiers very brave in the field who have proved timid and
worthless as politicians, and some politicians who show an entire
readiness to take chances and assume responsibilities in civil affairs,
but who lack the fighting edge when opposed to physical danger. In
each case, with the soldiers and politicians alike, there is but half
a virtue. The possession of the courage of the soldier does not excuse
the lack of courage in the statesman and even less does the possession
of the courage of the statesman excuse shrinking on the field of
battle. Now, this is all just as true of boys. A coward who will take a
blow without returning it is a contemptible creature; but, after all,
he is hardly as contemptible as the boy who dares not stand up for what
he deems right against the sneers of his companions who are themselves
wrong. Ridicule is one of the favorite weapons of wickedness, and it is
sometimes incomprehensible how good and brave boys will be influenced
for evil by the jeers of associates who have no one quality that calls
for respect, but who affect to laugh at the very traits which ought to
be peculiarly the cause for pride.

There is no need to be a prig. There is no need for a boy to preach
about his own good conduct and virtue. If he does he will make himself
offensive and ridiculous. But there is urgent need that he should
practice decency; that he should be clean and straight, honest and
truthful, gentle and tender, as well as brave. If he can once get to a
proper understanding of things, he will have a far more hearty contempt
for the boy who has begun a course of feeble dissipation, or who is
untruthful, or mean, or dishonest, or cruel, than this boy and his
fellows can possibly, in return, feel for him. The very fact that the
boy should be manly and able to hold his own, that he should be ashamed
to submit to bullying without instant retaliation, should, in return,
make him abhor any form of bullying, cruelty, or brutality.

There are two delightful books, Thomas Hughes’s “Tom Brown at Rugby,”
and Aldrich’s “Story of a Bad Boy,” which I hope every boy still
reads; and I think American boys will always feel more in sympathy
with Aldrich’s story, because there is in it none of the fagging, and
the bullying which goes with fagging, the account of which, and the
acceptance of which, always puzzle an American admirer of Tom Brown.

There is the same contrast between two stories of Kipling’s. One,
called “Captains Courageous,” describes in the liveliest way just what
a boy should be and do. The hero is painted in the beginning as the
spoiled, over-indulged child of wealthy parents, of a type which we do
sometimes unfortunately see, and than which there exist few things more
objectionable on the face of the broad earth. This boy is afterward
thrown on his own resources, amid wholesome surroundings, and is forced
to work hard among boys and men who are real boys and real men doing
real work. The effect is invaluable.

On the other hand, if one wishes to find types of boys to be avoided
with utter dislike, one will find them in another story by Kipling,
called “Stalky & Co.,” a story which ought never to have been written,
for there is hardly a single form of meanness which it does not seem to
extol, or of school mismanagement which it does not seem to applaud.
Bullies do not make brave men; and boys or men of foul life can not
become good citizens, good Americans, until they change; and even
after the change scars will be left on their souls.

The boy can best become a good man by being a good boy—not a
goody-goody boy, but just a plain good boy. I do not mean that he
must love only the negative virtues; I mean he must love the positive
virtues also. “Good,” in the largest sense, should include whatever is
fine, straightforward, clean, brave, and manly. The best boys I know
—the best men I know—are good at their studies or their business,
fearless and stalwart, hated and feared by all that is wicked and
depraved, incapable of submitting to wrong-doing, and equally incapable
of being aught but tender to the weak and helpless. A healthy-minded
boy should feel hearty contempt for the coward, and even more hearty
indignation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, or tortures
animals. One prime reason for abhorring cowards is because every good
boy should have it in him to thrash the objectionable boy as the need
arises.

Of course the effect that a thoroughly manly, thoroughly straight and
upright boy can have upon the companions of his own age, and upon those
who are younger, is incalculable. If he is not thoroughly manly, then
they will not respect him, and his good qualities will count for but
little; while, of course, if he is mean, cruel, or wicked, then his
physical strength and force of mind merely make him so much the more
objectionable a member of society. He can not do good work if he is not
strong and does not try with his whole heart and soul to count in any
contest; and his strength will be a curse to himself and to every one
else if he does not have thorough command over himself and over his
own evil passions, and if he does not use his strength on the side of
decency, justice, and fair dealing.

In short, in life, as in a foot-ball game, the principle to follow is:

Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!




MILITARY PREPAREDNESS AND UNPREPAREDNESS

PUBLISHED IN THE “CENTURY,” NOVEMBER, 1899


At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, M. Pierre Loti, member of
the French Academy and cultivated exponent of the hopes and beliefs of
the average citizen of Continental Europe in regard to the contest, was
at Madrid. Dewey’s victory caused him grief; but he consoled himself,
after watching a parade of the Spanish troops, by remarking: “They are
indeed still the solid and splendid Spanish troops, heroic in every
epoch—it needs only to look at them to divine the woe that awaits the
American shopkeepers when brought face to face with such soldiers.”
The excellent M. Loti had already explained Manila by vague references
to American bombs loaded with petroleum, and to a devilish mechanical
ingenuity wholly unaccompanied by either humanity or courage, and he
still allowed himself to dwell on the hope that there were reserved for
America _des surprises sanglantes_.

M. Loti’s views on military matters need not detain us, for his
attitude toward the war was merely the attitude of Continental Europe
generally, in striking contrast to that of England. But it is a curious
fact that his view reflects not unfairly two different opinions, which
two different classes of our people would have expressed before the
event—opinions singularly falsified by the fact. Our pessimists feared
that we had lost courage and fighting capacity; some of our optimists
asserted that we needed neither, in view of our marvelous wealth and
extraordinary inventiveness and mechanical skill. The national trait of
“smartness,” used in the Yankee sense of the word, has very good and
very bad sides. Among the latter is its tendency to create the belief
that we need not prepare for war, because somehow we shall be able
to win by some novel patent device, some new trick or new invention
developed on the spur of the moment by the ingenuity of our people. In
this way it is hoped to provide a substitute for preparedness—that
is, for years of patient and faithful attention to detail in advance.
It is even sometimes said that these mechanical devices will be of so
terrible a character as to nullify the courage which has always in the
past been the prime factor in winning battles.

Now, as all sound military judges knew in advance must inevitably be
the case, the experience of the Spanish War completely falsified every
prediction of this kind. We did not win through any special ingenuity.
Not a device of any kind was improvised during or immediately before
the war which was of any practical service. The “bombs enveloped
in petroleum” had no existence save in the brains of the Spaniards
and their more credulous sympathizers. Our navy won because of its
preparedness and because of the splendid seamanship and gunnery which
had been handed down as traditional in the service, and had been
perfected by the most careful work. The army, at the only point where
it was seriously opposed, did its work by sheer dogged courage and
hard fighting, in spite of an unpreparedness which almost brought
disaster upon it, and would without doubt actually have done so had not
the defects and shortcomings of the Spanish administration been even
greater than our own.

We won the war in a very short time, and without having to expend
more than the merest fraction of our strength. The navy was shown to
be in good shape; and Secretary Root, to whom the wisdom of President
McKinley has intrusted the War Department, has already shown himself as
good a man as ever held the portfolio—a man whose administration is
certain to be of inestimable service to the army and to the country. In
consequence, too many of our people show signs of thinking that, after
all, everything was all right, and is all right now; that we need not
bother ourselves to learn any lessons that are not agreeable to us, and
that if in the future we get into a war with a more formidable power
than Spain, we shall pull through somehow. Such a view is unjust to the
nation, and particularly unjust to the splendid men of the army and of
the navy, who would be sacrificed to it, should we ever engage in a
serious war without having learned the lessons that the year 1898 ought
to have taught.

If we wish to get an explanation of the efficiency of our navy in 1898,
and of the astonishing ease with which its victories were won, we
must go a long way back of that year, and study not only its history,
but the history of the Spanish navy for many decades. Of course any
such study must begin with a prompt admission of the splendid natural
quality of our officers and men. On the bridge, in the gun-turrets, in
the engine-room, and behind the quick-firers, every one alike, from the
highest to the lowest, was eager for the war, and was in heart, mind,
and body, of the very type which makes the best kind of fighting man.
Many of the officers of our ships have mentioned to me that during the
war punishments almost ceased, because the men who got into scrapes in
times of peace were so aroused and excited by the chance of battle that
their behavior was perfect. We read now and then of foreign services
where men hate their officers, have no community of interest with them,
and no desire to fight for the flag. Most emphatically such is not the
case in our service. The discipline is just but not severe, unless
severity is imperatively called for. As a whole, the officers have the
welfare of the men very much at heart, and take care of their bodies
with the same forethought that they show in training them for battle.
The physique of the men is excellent, and to it are joined eagerness to
learn, and readiness to take risks and to stand danger unmoved.

Nevertheless, all this, though indispensable as a base, would mean
nothing whatever for the efficiency of the navy without years of
careful preparation and training. A warship is such a complicated
machine, and such highly specialized training is self-evidently
needed to command it, that our naval commanders, unlike our military
commanders, are freed from having to combat the exasperating belief
that the average civilian could at short notice do their work. Of
course, in reality a special order of ability and special training are
needed to enable a man to command troops successfully; but the need is
not so obvious as on shipboard. No civilian could be five minutes on a
battleship without realizing his unfitness to command it; but there are
any number of civilians who firmly believe they can command regiments,
when they have not a single trait, natural or acquired, that really
fits them for the task. A blunder in the one case meets with instant,
open, and terrible punishment; in the other, it is at the moment only
a source of laughter or exasperation to the few, ominous though it may
be for the future. A colonel who issued the wrong order would cause
confusion. A ship-captain by such an order might wreck his ship. It
follows that the navy is comparatively free in time of war from the
presence in the higher ranks of men utterly unfit to perform their
duties. The nation realizes that it can not improvise naval officers
even out of first-rate skippers of merchantmen and passenger-steamers.
Such men could be used to a certain extent as under-officers to meet a
sudden and great emergency; but at best they would met it imperfectly,
and this the public at large understands.

There is, however, some failure to understand that much the same
condition prevails among ordinary seamen. The public speakers and
newspaper writers who may be loudest in clamoring for war are often
precisely the men who clamor against preparations for war. Whether
from sheer ignorance or from demagogy, they frequently assert that, as
this is the day of mechanics, even on the sea, and as we have a large
mechanical population, we could at once fit out any number of vessels
with men who would from the first do their duty thoroughly and well.

As a matter of fact, though the sea-mechanic has replaced the
sailorman, yet it is almost as necessary as ever that a man should have
the sea habit in order to be of use aboard ship; and it is infinitely
more necessary than in former times that a man-of-war’s-man should have
especial training with his guns before he can use them aright. In the
old days cannon were very simple; sighting was done roughly; and the
ordinary merchant seaman speedily grew fit to do his share of work on
a frigate. Nowadays men must be carefully trained for a considerable
space of time before they can be of any assistance whatever in handling
and getting good results from the formidable engines of destruction on
battleship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat. Crews can not be improvised.
To get the very best work out of them, they should all be composed of
trained and seasoned men; and in any event they should not be sent
against a formidable adversary unless each crew has for a nucleus a
large body of such men filling all the important positions. From time
immemorial it has proved impossible to improvise so much as a makeshift
navy for use against a formidable naval opponent. Any such effort must
meet with disaster.

Most fortunately, the United States had grown to realize this some
time before the Spanish War broke out. After the gigantic Civil War
the reaction from the strain of the contest was such that our navy
was permitted to go to pieces. Fifteen years after the close of the
contest in which Farragut took rank as one of the great admirals of
all time, the splendid navy of which he was the chief ornament had
become an object of derision, to every third-rate power in Europe and
South America. The elderly monitors and wooden steamers, with their
old-fashioned smooth-bore guns, would have been as incompetent to face
the modern ships of the period as the _Congress_ and the _Cumberland_
were to face the _Merrimac_. Our men were as brave as ever, but in war
their courage would have been of no more avail than the splendid valor
of the men who sank with their guns firing and flags flying when the
great Confederate ironclad came out to Hampton Roads.

At last the nation awoke from its lethargy. In 1883, under the
Administration of President Arthur, when Secretary Chandler was in
the Navy Department, the work was begun. The first step taken was the
refusal to repair the more antiquated wooden ships, and the building
of new steel ships to replace them. One of the ships thus laid down
was the _Boston_, which was in Dewey’s fleet. It is therefore merely
the literal truth to say that the preparations which made Dewey’s
victory possible began just fifteen years before the famous day when
he steamed into Manila Bay. Every Senator and Congressman who voted an
appropriation which enabled Secretary Chandler to begin the upbuilding
of the new navy, the President who advised the course, the Secretary
who had the direct management of it, the shipbuilder in whose yard the
ship was constructed, the skilled experts who planned her hull, engine,
and guns, and the skilled workmen who worked out these plans, all alike
are entitled to their share in the credit of the great Manila victory.

The majority of the men can never be known by name, but the fact that
they did well their part in the deed is of vastly more importance than
the obtaining of any reward for it, whether by way of recognition
or otherwise; and this fact will always remain. Nevertheless, it is
important for our own future that, so far as possible, we should
recognize the men who did well. This is peculiarly important in the
case of Congress, whose action has been the indispensable prerequisite
for every effort to build up the navy, as Congress provided the means
for each step.

As there was always a division in Congress, while in the popular mind
the whole body is apt to be held accountable for any deed, good or
ill, done by the majority, it is much to be wished, in the interest
of justice, that some special historian of the navy would take out
from the records the votes, and here and there the speeches, for
and against the successive measures by which the navy was built up.
Every man who by vote and voice from time to time took part in adding
to our fleet, in buying the armor, in preparing the gun-factories,
in increasing the personnel and enabling it to practice, deserves
well of the whole nation, and a record of his action should be kept,
that his children may feel proud of him. No less clearly should we
understand that throughout these fifteen years the men who, whether
from honest but misguided motives, from short-sightedness, from lack
of patriotism, or from demagogy, opposed the building up of the navy,
have deserved ill of the nation, exactly as did those men who recently
prevented the purchase of armor for the battleships, or, under the
lead of Senator Gorman, prevented the establishment of our army on the
footing necessary for our national needs. If disaster comes through
lack of preparedness, the fault necessarily lies far less with the
men under whom the disaster actually occurs than with those to whose
wrong-headedness or short-sighted indifference in time past the lack of
preparedness is due.

The mistakes, the blunders, and the shortcomings in the army management
during the summer of 1898 should be credited mainly, not to any one in
office in 1898, but to the public servants of the people, and therefore
to the people themselves, who permitted the army to rust since the
Civil War with a wholly faulty administration, and with no chance
whatever to perfect itself by practice, as the navy was perfected. In
like manner, any trouble that may come upon the army, and therefore
upon the nation, in the next few years, will be due to the failure to
provide for a thoroughly reorganized regular army of adequate size in
1898; and for this failure the members in the Senate and the House who
took the lead against increasing the regular army, and reorganizing
it, will be primarily responsible. On them will rest the blame of any
check to the national arms, and the honor that will undoubtedly be won
for the flag by our army will have been won in spite of their sinister
opposition.

In May, 1898, when our battleships were lying off Havana and the
Spanish torpedo-boat destroyers were crossing the ocean, our best
commanders felt justifiable anxiety because we had no destroyers to
guard our fleet against the Spanish destroyers. Thanks to the blunders
and lack of initiative of the Spaniards, they made no good use whatever
of their formidable boats, sending them against our ships in daylight,
when it was hopeless to expect anything from them.

But in war it is unsafe to trust to the blunders of the adversary to
offset our own blunders. Many a naval officer, when with improvised
craft of small real worth he was trying to guard our battleships
against the terrible possibilities of an attack by torpedo-boat
destroyers in the darkness, must have thought with bitterness how
a year before, when Senator Lodge and those who thought like him
were striving to secure an adequate support of large, high-class
torpedo-boats, the majority of the Senate followed the lead of
Senator Gorman in opposition. So in the future, if what we all most
earnestly hope will not happen does happen, and we are engaged in war
with some formidable sea power, any failure of our arms resulting
from an inadequate number of battleships, or imperfectly prepared
battleships, will have to be credited to those members of Congress who
opposed increasing the number of ships, or opposed giving them proper
armament, for no matter what reason. On the other hand, the national
consciousness of capacity to vindicate national honor must be due
mainly to the action of those Congressmen who have in fact built up our
fleet.

Secretary Chandler was succeeded by a line of men, each of whom,
however he might differ from the others politically and personally,
sincerely desired and strove hard for the upbuilding of the navy. Under
Messrs. Whitney, Tracy, Herbert, and Long the work has gone steadily
forward, thanks, of course, to the fact that successive Congresses,
Democratic and Republican alike, have permitted it to go forward.

But the appropriation of money and the building of ships were not
enough. We must keep steadily in mind that not only was it necessary to
build the navy, but it was equally necessary to train our officers and
men aboard it by actual practice. If in 1883 we had been able suddenly
to purchase our present battleships, cruisers, and torpedo-boats,
they could not have been handled with any degree of efficiency by our
officers and crews as they then were. Still less would it be possible
to handle them by improvised crews. In an emergency bodies of men like
our naval militia can do special bits of work excellently, and, thanks
to their high average of character and intellect, they are remarkably
good makeshifts, but it would be folly to expect from them all that is
expected from a veteran crew of trained man-of-war’s-men. And if we are
ever pitted ship for ship on equal terms against the first-class navy
of a first-class power, we shall need our best captains and our best
crews if we are to win.

As fast as the new navy was built we had to break in the men to
handle it. The young officers who first took hold and developed the
possibilities of our torpedo-boats, for instance, really deserve as
much credit as their successors have rightly received for handling
them with dash and skill during the war. The admirals who first
exercised the new ships in squadrons were giving the training without
which Dewey and Sampson would have found their tasks incomparably
more difficult. As for the ordinary officers and seamen, of course
it was their incessant practice in handling the ships and the guns
at sea, in all kinds of weather, both alone and in company, year in
and year out, that made them able to keep up the never-relaxing night
blockade at Santiago, to steam into Manila Bay in the darkness, to
prevent breakdowns and make repairs of the machinery, and finally to
hit what they aimed at when the battle was on. In the naval bureaus
the great bulk of what in the army would be called staff places are
held by line officers. The men who made ready the guns were the same
men who afterward used them. In the Engineering Bureau were the men
who had handled or were to handle the engines in action. The Bureau of
Navigation, the Bureau of Equipment, the Bureau of Information, were
held by men who had commanded ships in actual service, or who were
thus to command them against the Spaniards. The head of the Bureau of
Navigation is the chief of staff, and he has always been an officer of
distinction, detailed, like all of the other bureau chiefs, for special
service. From the highest to the lowest officer, every naval man had
seen and taken part, during time of peace, in the work which he would
have to do in time of war. The commodores and captains who took active
part in the war had commanded fleets in sea service, or at the least
had been in command of single ships in these fleets. There was not one
thing they were to do in war which they had not done in peace, save
actually receive the enemy’s fire.

Contrast this with the army. The material in the army is exactly as
good as that in the navy, and in the lower ranks the excellence is as
great. In no service, ashore or afloat, in the world could better men
of their grade be found than the lieutenants, and indeed the captains,
of the infantry and dismounted cavalry at Santiago. But in the army
the staff bureaus are permanent positions, instead of being held, as
of course they should be, by officers detailed from the line, with the
needs of the line and experiences of actual service fresh in their
minds.

The artillery had for thirty-five years had no field-practice that was
in the slightest degree adequate to its needs, or that compared in any
way with the practice received by the different companies and troops
of the infantry and cavalry. The bureaus in Washington were absolutely
enmeshed in red tape, and were held for the most part by elderly men,
of fine records in the past, who were no longer fit to break through
routine and to show the extraordinary energy, business capacity,
initiative, and willingness to accept responsibility which were needed.
Finally, the higher officers had been absolutely denied that chance to
practice their profession to which the higher officers of the navy had
long been accustomed. Every time a warship goes to sea and cruises
around the world, its captain has just such an experience as the
colonel of a regiment would have if sent off for a six or eight months’
march, and if during those six or eight months he incessantly practiced
his regiment in every item of duty which it would have to perform in
battle. Every warship in the American navy, and not a single regiment
in the American army, had had this experience.

Every naval captain had exercised command for long periods, under
conditions which made up nine tenths of what he would have to encounter
in war. Hardly a colonel had such an experience to his credit. The
regiments were not even assembled, but were scattered by companies
here and there. After a man ceased being a junior captain he usually
had hardly any chance for field-service; it was the lieutenants and
junior captains who did most of the field work in the West of recent
years. Of course there were exceptions; even at Santiago there were
generals and colonels who showed themselves not only good fighters,
but masters of their profession; and in the Philippines the war has
developed admirable leaders, so that now we have ready the right man;
but the general rule remains true. The best man alive, if allowed to
rust at a three-company post, or in a garrison near some big city, for
ten or fifteen years, will find himself in straits if suddenly called
to command a division, or mayhap even an army-corps, on a foreign
expedition, especially when not one of his important subordinates has
ever so much as seen five thousand troops gathered, fed, sheltered,
manœuvred, and shipped. The marvel is, not that there was blundering,
but that there was so little, in the late war with Spain.

Captain (now Colonel) John Bigelow, Jr., in his account of his personal
experiences in command of a troop of cavalry during the Santiago
campaign, has pictured the welter of confusion during that campaign,
and the utter lack of organization, and of that skilled leadership
which can come only through practice. His book should be studied by
every man who wishes to see our army made what it should be. In the
Santiago campaign the army was more than once uncomfortably near grave
disaster, from which it was saved by the remarkable fighting qualities
of its individual fractions, and, above all, by the incompetency of its
foes. To go against a well-organized, well-handled, well-led foreign
foe under such conditions would inevitably have meant failure and
humiliation. Of course party demagogues and the thoughtless generally
are sure to credit these disasters to the people under whom they occur,
to the Secretary, or to the commander of the army.

As a matter of fact, the blame must rest in all such cases far less
with them than with those responsible for the existence of the system.
Even if we had the best Secretary of War the country could supply
and the best general the army could furnish, it would be impossible
for them offhand to get good results if the nation, through its
representatives, had failed to make adequate provision for a proper
army, and to provide for the reorganization of the army and for its
practice in time of peace. The whole staff system, and much else,
should be remodeled. Above all, the army should be practiced in mass
in the actual work of marching and camping. Only thus will it be
possible to train the commanders, the quartermasters, the commissaries,
the doctors, so that they may by actual experience learn to do their
duties, as naval officers by actual experience have learned to do
theirs. Only thus can we do full justice to as splendid and gallant a
body of men as any nation ever had the good luck to include among its
armed defenders.




ADMIRAL DEWEY

PUBLISHED IN “McCLURE’S MAGAZINE,” OCTOBER, 1899


Admiral Dewey has done more than add a glorious page to our history;
more even than do a deed the memory of which will always be an
inspiration to his countrymen, and especially his countrymen of his own
profession. He has also taught us a lesson which should have profound
practical effects, if only we are willing to learn it aright.

In the first place, he partly grasped and partly made his opportunity.
Of course, in a certain sense, no man can absolutely make an
opportunity. There were a number of admirals who, during the dozen
years preceding the Spanish War, were retired without the opportunity
of ever coming where it was possible to distinguish themselves; and it
may be that some of these lacked nothing but the chance. Nevertheless,
when the chance does come, only the great man can see it instantly
and use it aright. In the second place, it must always be remembered
that the power of using the chance aright comes only to the man who
has faithfully and for long years made ready himself and his weapons
for the possible need. Finally, and most important of all, it should
ever be kept in mind that the man who does a great work must almost
invariably owe the possibility of doing it to the faithful work of
other men, either at the time or long before. Without his brilliancy
their labor might be wasted, but without their labor his brilliancy
would be of no avail.

It has been said that it was a mere accident that Dewey happened to be
in command of the Asiatic Squadron when the war with Spain broke out.
This is not the fact. He was sent to command it in the fall of 1897,
because, to use the very language employed at the time, it was deemed
wise to have there a man “who could go into Manila if necessary.” He
owed the appointment to the high professional reputation he enjoyed,
and to the character he had established for willingness to accept
responsibility, for sound judgment, and for entire fearlessness.

Probably the best way (although no way is infallible) to tell the worth
of a naval commander as yet untried in war is to get at the estimate
in which he is held by the best fighting men who would have to serve
under him. In the summer of 1897 there were in Washington captains and
commanders who later won honor for themselves and their country in the
war with Spain, and who were already known for the dash and skill with
which they handled their ships, the excellence of their gun practice,
the good discipline of their crews, and their eager desire to win
honorable renown. All these men were a unit in their faith in the then
Commodore Dewey, in their desire to serve under him, should the chance
arise, and in their unquestioning belief that he was the man to meet an
emergency in a way that would do credit to the flag.

An excellent test is afforded by the readiness which the man has shown
to take responsibility in any emergency in the past. One factor in
Admiral Dewey’s appointment—of which he is very possibly ignorant—was
the way in which he had taken responsibility in purchasing coal for the
squadron that was to have been used against Chile, if war with Chile
had broken out, at the time General Harrison was President. A service
will do well or ill at the outbreak of war very much in proportion to
the way it has been prepared to meet the outbreak during the preceding
months. Now, it is often impossible to say whether the symptoms that
seem to forbode war will or will not be followed by war. At one time,
under President Harrison, we seemed as near war with Chile as ever we
seemed to war with Spain under President McKinley. Therefore, when war
threatens, preparations must be made in any event; for the evil of
what proves to be the needless expenditure of money in one instance
is not to be weighed for a moment against the failure to prepare in
the other. But only a limited number of men have the moral courage to
make these preparations, because there is always risk to the individual
making them. Laws and regulations must be stretched when an emergency
arises, and yet there is always some danger to the person who stretches
them; and, moreover, in time of sudden need, some indispensable article
can very possibly only be obtained at an altogether exorbitant price.
If war comes, and the article, whether it be a cargo of coal, or a
collier, or an auxiliary naval vessel, proves its usefulness, no
complaint is ever made. But if the war does not come, then some small
demagogue, some cheap economist, or some undersized superior who is
afraid of taking the responsibility himself, may blame the man who
bought the article and say that he exceeded his authority; that he
showed more zeal than discretion in not waiting for a few days, etc.
These are the risks which must be taken, and the men who take them
should be singled out for reward and for duty. Admiral Dewey’s whole
action in connection with the question of coal-supply for our fleet
during the Chilean scare marked him as one of these men.

No one who has not some knowledge of the army and navy will appreciate
how much this means. It is necessary to have a complete system of
checks upon the actions, and especially upon the expenditures, of
the army and navy; but the present system is at times altogether too
complete, especially in war. The efficiency of the quartermasters
and commissary officers of the army in the war with Spain was very
seriously marred by their perfectly justifiable fear that the slightest
departure from the requirements of the red-tape regulations of peace
would result in the docking of their own pay by men more concerned in
enforcing the letter of the law than in seeing the army clothed and
fed. In the navy, before the passage of the Personnel Bill, a positive
premium was put on a man’s doing nothing but keep out of trouble; for
if only he could avoid a court-martial, his promotions would take
care of themselves, so that from the selfish standpoint no possible
good could come to him from taking risks, while they might cause him
very great harm. The best officers in the service recognized the
menace that this state of affairs meant to the service, and strove to
counterbalance it in every way. No small part of the good done by the
admirable War College, under Captains Mahan, Taylor, and Goodrich, lay
in their insistence upon the need of the naval officer’s instantly
accepting responsibility in any crisis, and doing what was best for the
flag, even though it was probable the action might be disavowed by his
immediate superiors, and though it might result in his own personal
inconvenience and detriment. This was taught not merely as an abstract
theory, but with direct reference to concrete cases; for instance,
with reference to taking possession of Hawaii, if a revolution should
by chance break out there during the presence of an American warship,
or if the warship of a foreign power attempted to interfere with the
affairs of the island.

For the work which Dewey had to do willingness to accept responsibility
was a prime requisite. A man afraid to vary in times of emergency from
the regulations laid down in time of peace would never even have got
the coal with which to steam to Manila from Hong Kong the instant the
crisis came. We were peculiarly fortunate in our Secretary of the Navy,
Mr. Long; but the best Secretary that ever held the navy portfolio
could not successfully direct operations on the other side of the
world. All that he could do was to choose a good man, give him the
largest possible liberty of action, and back him up in every way; and
this Secretary Long did. But if the man chosen had been timid about
taking risks, nothing that could be done for him would have availed.
Such a man would not have disobeyed orders. The danger would have been
of precisely the contrary character. He would scrupulously have done
just whatever he was told to do, and then would have sat down and
waited for further instructions, so as to protect himself if something
happened to go wrong. An infinity of excuses can always be found for
non-action.

Admiral Dewey was sent to command the fleet on the Asiatic station
primarily because he had such a record in the past that the best
officers in the navy believed him to be peculiarly a man of the
fighting temperament and fit to meet emergencies, and because he had
shown his willingness to assume heavy responsibilities. How amply he
justified his choice it is not necessary to say. On our roll of naval
heroes his name will stand second to that of Farragut alone, and no
man since the Civil War, whether soldier or civilian, has added so
much to the honorable renown of the nation or has deserved so well of
it. For our own sakes, and in particular for the sake of any naval
officer who in the future may be called upon to do such a piece of
work as Dewey did, let us keep in mind the further fact that he could
not have accomplished his feat if he had not had first-class vessels
and excellently trained men; if his warships had not been so good, and
his captains and crews such thorough masters of their art. A man of
less daring courage than Dewey would never have done what he did; but
the courage itself was not enough. The Spaniards, too, had courage.
What they lacked was energy, training, forethought. They fought their
vessels until they burned or sank; but their gunnery was so poor that
they did not kill a man in the American fleet. Even Dewey’s splendid
capacity would not have enabled him to win the battle of Manila Bay
had it not been for the traditional energy and seamanship of our
naval service, so well illustrated in his captains, and the excellent
gun-practice of the crews, the result of years of steady training.
Furthermore, even this excellence in the personnel would not have
availed if under a succession of Secretaries of the Navy, and through
the wisdom of a succession of Congresses, the material of the navy had
not been built up as it actually was.

If war with Spain had broken out fifteen years before it did,—that
is, in the year 1883, before our new navy was built,—it would have
been physically impossible to get the results we actually did get. At
that time our navy consisted of a collection of rusty monitors and
antiquated wooden ships left over from the Civil War, which could
not possibly have been matched against even the navy of Spain. Every
proposal to increase the navy was then violently opposed with exactly
the same arguments used nowadays by the men who oppose building up our
army. The Congressmen who rallied to the support of Senator Gorman in
his refusal to furnish an adequate army to take care of the Philippines
and meet the new national needs, or who defeated the proposition to
buy armor-plate for the new ships, assumed precisely the ground that
was taken by the men who, prior to 1883, had succeeded in preventing
the rebuilding of the navy. Both alike did all they could to prevent
the upholding of the national honor in times of emergency. There were
the usual arguments: that we were a great peaceful people, and would
never have to go to war; that if we had a navy or army we should
be tempted to use it and therefore embark in a career of military
conquest; that there was no need of regulars anyhow, because we could
always raise volunteers to do anything; that war was a barbarous method
of settling disputes, and too expensive to undertake even to avoid
national disgrace, and so on.

But fortunately the men of sturdy common sense and sound patriotism
proved victors, and the new navy was begun. Its upbuilding was not a
party matter. The first ships were laid down under Secretary Chandler;
Secretary Whitney continued the work; Secretary Tracy carried it still
further; so did Secretary Herbert, and then Secretary Long. Congress
after Congress voted the necessary money. We have never had as many
ships as a nation of such size and such vast interests really needs;
but still by degrees we have acquired a small fleet of battleships,
cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo-boats, all excellent of their class.
The squadron with which Dewey entered Manila Bay included ships laid
down or launched under Secretaries Chandler, Whitney, Tracy, and
Herbert; and all four of these Secretaries, their naval architects,
the chiefs of bureaus, the young engineers and constructors, the
outside contractors, the shipyard men like Roach, Cramp, and Scott,
and, finally and emphatically, the Congressmen who during these fifteen
years voted the supplies, are entitled to take a just pride in their
share of the glory of the achievement. Every man in Congress whose
vote made possible the building of the _Olympia_, the _Baltimore_,
the _Raleigh_, or the putting aboard them and their sister ships the
modern eight-inch or rapid-fire five-inch guns, or the giving them the
best engines and the means where with to practice their crews at the
targets—every such man has the right to tell his children that he did
his part in securing Dewey’s victory, and that, save for the action of
him and his fellows, it could not have been won. This is no less true
of the man who planned the ships and of the other men, whether in the
government service or in private employment, who built them, from the
head of the great business concern which put up an armor-plate factory
down to the iron-worker who conscientiously and skilfully did his part
on gun-shield or gun.

So much for the men who furnished the material and the means for
assembling and practicing the personnel. The same praise must be given
the men who actually drilled the personnel, part of which Dewey used.
If our ships had merely been built and then laid up, if officers and
crews had not been exercised season after season in all weathers on
the high seas in handling their ships both separately and in squadron,
and in practicing with the guns, all the excellent material would
have availed us little. Exactly as it is of no use to give an army
the best arms and equipment if it is not also given the chance to
practice with its arms and equipment, so the finest ships and the best
natural sailors and fighters are useless to a navy if the most ample
opportunity for training is not allowed. Only incessant practice will
make a good gunner; though, inasmuch as there are natural marksmen as
well as men who never can become good marksmen, there should always be
the widest intelligence displayed in the choice of gunners. Not only is
it impossible for a man to learn how to handle a ship or do his duty
aboard her save by long cruises at sea, but it is also impossible for a
good single-ship captain to be an efficient unit in a fleet unless he
is accustomed to manœuvre as part of a fleet.

It is particularly true of the naval service that the excellence of any
portion of it in a given crisis will depend mainly upon the excellence
of the whole body, and so the triumph of any part is legitimately
felt to reflect honor upon the whole and to have been participated
in by every one. Dewey’s captains could not have followed him with
the precision they displayed, could not have shown the excellent gun
practice they did show—in short, the victory would not have been
possible had it not been for the unwearied training and practice given
the navy during the dozen years previous by the admirals, the captains,
and the crews who incessantly and in all weathers kept their vessels
exercised, singly and in squadron, until the men on the bridge, the
men in the gun-turrets, and the men in the engine-rooms knew how to do
their work perfectly, alone or together. Every officer and man, from
the highest to the lowest, who did his full duty in raising the navy to
the standard of efficiency it had reached on May 1, 1898, is entitled
to feel some personal share in the glory won by Dewey and Dewey’s men.
It would have been absolutely impossible not merely to improvise either
the material or the personnel with which Dewey fought, but to have
produced them in any limited number of years. A thoroughly good navy
takes a long time to build up, and the best officer embodies always the
traditions of a first-class service. Ships take years to build, crews
take years before they become thoroughly expert, while the officers not
only have to pass their early youth in a course of special training,
but can not possibly rise to supreme excellence in their profession
unless they make it their life-work.

We should therefore keep in mind that the hero can not win save for the
forethought, energy, courage, and capacity of countless other men. Yet
we must keep in mind also that all this forethought, energy, courage,
and capacity will be wasted unless at the supreme moment some man of
the heroic type arises capable of using to the best advantage the
powers lying ready to hand. Whether it is Nelson, the greatest of all
admirals, at Aboukir, Copenhagen, or Trafalgar; or Farragut, second
only to Nelson, at New Orleans or Mobile; or Dewey at Manila—the great
occasion must meet with the great man, or the result will be at worst a
failure, at best an indecisive success. The nation must make ready the
tools and train the men to use them, but at the crisis a great triumph
can be achieved only should some heroic man appear. Therefore it is
right and seemly to pay homage of deep respect and admiration to the
man when he does appear.

Admiral Dewey performed one of the great feats of all time. At the very
outset of the Spanish War he struck one of the two decisive blows which
brought the war to a conclusion, and as his was the first fight, his
success exercised an incalculable effect upon the whole conflict. He
set the note of the war. He had carefully prepared for action during
the months he was on the Asiatic coast. He had his plans thoroughly
matured, and he struck the instant that war was declared. There was no
delay, no hesitation. As soon as news came that he was to move, his
war-steamers turned their bows toward Manila Bay. There was nothing to
show whether or not Spanish mines and forts would be efficient; but
Dewey, cautious as he was at the right time, had not a particle of fear
of taking risks when the need arose. In the tropic night he steamed
past the forts, and then on over the mines to where the Spanish vessels
lay. What material inferiority there was on the Spanish side was nearly
made up by the forts and mines. The overwhelming difference was moral,
not material. It was the difference in the two commanders, in the
officers and crews of the two fleets, and in the naval service, afloat
and ashore, of the two nations. On the one side there had been thorough
preparation; on the other, none that was adequate. It would be idle to
recapitulate the results. Steaming in with cool steadiness, Dewey’s
fleet cut the Spaniards to pieces, while the Americans were practically
unhurt. Then Dewey drew off to breakfast, satisfied himself that he had
enough ammunition, and returned to stamp out what embers of resistance
were still feebly smouldering.

The victory ensured the fall of the Philippines, for Manila surrendered
as soon as our land forces arrived and were in position to press their
attack home. The work, however, was by no means done, and Dewey’s
diplomacy and firmness were given full scope for the year he remained
in Manila waters, not only in dealing with Spaniards and insurgents,
but in making it evident that we would tolerate no interference from
any hostile European power. It is not yet the time to show how much he
did in this last respect. Suffice it to say that by his firmness he
effectually frustrated any attempt to interfere with our rights, while
by his tact he avoided giving needless offence, and he acted in hearty
accord with our cordial well-wishers, the English naval and diplomatic
representatives in the islands.

Admiral Dewey comes back to his native land having won the right to a
greeting such as has been given to no other man since the Civil War.




GRANT

SPEECH DELIVERED AT GALENA, ILLINOIS, APRIL 27, 1900


In the long run every great nation instinctively recognizes the men
who peculiarly and pre-eminently represent its own type of greatness.
Here in our country we have had many public men of high rank—soldiers,
orators, constructive statesmen, and popular leaders. We have even had
great philosophers who were also leaders of popular thought. Each one
of these men has had his own group of devoted followers, and some of
them have at times swayed the nation with a power such as the foremost
of all hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip away, as the dust
of conflict settles, and as through the clearing air we look back with
keener wisdom into the nation’s past, mightiest among the mighty dead
loom the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. There
are great men also in the second rank; for in any gallery of merely
national heroes Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson, would
surely have their place. But these three greatest men have taken their
place among the great men of all nations, the great men of all time.
They stood supreme in the two great crises of our history, on the two
great occasions when we stood in the van of all humanity and struck
the most effective blows that have ever been struck for the cause of
human freedom under the law, for that spirit of orderly liberty which
must stand at the base of every wise movement to secure to each man his
rights, and to guard each from being wronged by his fellows.

Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and it was his good fortune
to win the highest renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the second
and even greater struggle the deeds of Lincoln the statesman were made
good by those of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the
work that dropped from Lincoln’s tired hands when the assassin’s bullet
went home, and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were closed forever.

It was no mere accident that made our three mightiest men, two of them
soldiers, and one the great war President. It is only through work and
strife that either nation or individual moves on to greatness. The
great man is always the man of mighty effort, and usually the man whom
grinding need has trained to mighty effort. Rest and peace are good
things, are great blessings, but only if they come honorably; and it
is those who fearlessly turn away from them, when they have not been
earned, who in the long run deserve best of their country. In the
sweat of our brows do we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at
times, yet it is far more bitter to eat the bread that is unearned,
unwon, undeserved. America must nerve herself for labor and peril. The
men who have made our national greatness are those who faced danger and
overcame it, who met difficulties and surmounted them, not those whose
lines were cast in such pleasant places that toil and dread were ever
far from them.

Neither was it an accident that our three leaders were men who, while
they did not shrink from war, were nevertheless heartily men of peace.
The man who will not fight to avert or undo wrong is but a poor
creature; but, after all, he is less dangerous than the man who fights
on the side of wrong. Again and again in a nation’s history the time
may, and indeed sometimes must, come when the nation’s highest duty is
war. But peace must be the normal condition, or the nation will come
to a bloody doom. Twice in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and twice
in lesser crises, in 1812 and 1898, the nation was called to arms in
the name of all that makes the words “honor,” “freedom,” and “justice”
other than empty sounds. On each occasion the net result of the war
was greatly for the benefit of mankind. But on each occasion this net
result was of benefit only because after the war came peace, came
justice and order and liberty. If the Revolution had been followed
by bloody anarchy, if the Declaration of Independence had not been
supplemented by the adoption of the Constitution, if the freedom won
by the sword of Washington had not been supplemented by the stable and
orderly government which Washington was instrumental in founding, then
we should have but added to the chaos of the world, and our victories
would have told against and not for the betterment of mankind. So it
was with the Civil War. If the four iron years had not been followed by
peace, they would not have been justified. If the great silent soldier,
the Hammer of the North, had struck the shackles off the slave only,
as so many conquerors in civil strife before him had done, to rivet
them around the wrists of freemen, then the war would have been fought
in vain, and worse than in vain. If the Union, which so many men shed
their blood to restore, were not now a union in fact, then the precious
blood would have been wasted. But it was not wasted; for the work of
peace has made good the work of war, and North and South, East and
West, we are now one people in fact as well as in name; one in purpose,
in fellow-feeling, and in high resolve, as we stand to greet the new
century, and, high of heart, to face the mighty tasks which the coming
years will surely bring.

Grant and his fellow-soldiers who fought through the war, and his
fellow-statesmen who completed the work partly done by the soldiers,
not only left us the heritage of a reunited country and of a land
from which slavery had been banished, but left us what was quite as
important, the great memory of their great deeds, to serve forever
as an example and an inspiration, to spur us on so that we may not
fall below the level reached by our fathers. The rough, strong poet
of democracy has sung of Grant as “the man of mighty days, and equal
to the days.” The days are less mighty now, and that is all the more
reason why we should show ourselves equal to them. We meet here to pay
glad homage to the memory of our illustrious dead; but let us keep ever
clear before our minds the fact that mere lip-loyalty is no loyalty at
all, and that the only homage that counts is the homage of deeds, not
of words. It is but an idle waste of time to celebrate the memory of
the dead unless we, the living, in our lives strive to show ourselves
not unworthy of them. If the careers of Washington and Grant are not
vital and full of meaning to us, if they are merely part of the storied
past, and stir us to no eager emulation in the ceaseless, endless war
for right against wrong, then the root of right thinking is not in us;
and where we do not think right we can not act right.

It is not my purpose in this address to sketch, in even the briefest
manner, the life and deeds of Grant. It is not even my purpose to
touch on the points where his influence has told so tremendously in
the making of our history. It is part of the man’s greatness that now
we can use his career purely for illustration. We can take for granted
the fact that each American who knows the history of the country must
know the history of this man, at least in its broad outline; and that
we no more need to explain Vicksburg and Appomattox than we need to
explain Yorktown. I shall ask attention, not to Grant’s life, but to
the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day should learn them.

Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of stubborn fixity of
purpose. In the Union armies there were generals as brilliant as
Grant, but none with his iron determination. This quality he showed
as President no less than as general. He was no more to be influenced
by a hostile majority in Congress into abandoning his attitude in
favor of a sound and stable currency than he was to be influenced by
check or repulse into releasing his grip on beleaguered Richmond. It
is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially
to refer when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective
way, by praising him as a man. It is the one quality which we can
least afford to lose. It is the only quality the lack of which is
as unpardonable in the nation as in the man. It is the antithesis
of levity, fickleness, volatility, of undue exaltation, of undue
depression, of hysteria and neuroticism in all their myriad forms. The
lesson of unyielding, unflinching, unfaltering perseverance in the
course upon which the nation has entered is one very necessary for a
generation whose preachers sometimes dwell overmuch on the policies
of the moment. There are not a few public men, not a few men who try
to mold opinion within Congress and without, on the stump and in the
daily press, who seem to aim at instability, who pander to and thereby
increase the thirst for overstatement of each situation as it arises,
whose effort is, accordingly, to make the people move in zigzags
instead of in a straight line. We all saw this in the Spanish War,
when the very men who at one time branded as traitors everybody who
said there was anything wrong in the army at another time branded as
traitors everybody who said there was anything right. Of course such an
attitude is as unhealthy on one side as on the other, and it is equally
destructive of any effort to do away with abuse.

Hysterics of this kind may have all the results of extreme timidity.
A nation that has not the power of endurance, the power of dogged
insistence on a determined policy, come weal or woe, has lost one chief
element of greatness. The people who wish to abandon the Philippines
because we have had heavy skirmishing out there, or who think that
our rule is a failure whenever they discover some sporadic upgrowth of
evil, would do well to remember the two long years of disaster this
nation suffered before the July morning when the news was flashed to
the waiting millions that Vicksburg had fallen in the West and that in
the East the splendid soldiery of Lee had recoiled at last from the
low hills of Gettysburg. Even after this nearly two years more were
to pass before the end came at Appomattox. Throughout this time the
cry of prophets of disaster never ceased. The peace-at-any-price men
never wearied of declaiming against the war, of describing the evils
of conquest and subjugation as worse than any possible benefits that
could result therefrom. The hysterical minority, passed alternately
from unreasoning confidence to unreasoning despair; and at times they
even infected for the moment many of their sober, steady countrymen.
Eighteen months after the war began the State and Congressional
elections went heavily against the war party, and two years later the
opposition party actually waged the Presidential campaign on the issue
that the war was a failure. Meanwhile there was plenty of blundering
at the front, plenty of mistakes at Washington. The country was saved
by the fact that our people, as a whole, were steadfast and unshaken.
Both at Washington and at the front the leaders were men of undaunted
resolution, who would not abandon the policy to which the nation was
definitely committed, who regarded disaster as merely a spur to fresh
effort, who saw in each blunder merely something to be retrieved, and
not a reason for abandoning the long-determined course. Above all,
the great mass of the people possessed a tough and stubborn fibre of
character.

There was then, as always, ample room for criticism, and there was
every reason why the mistakes should be corrected. But in the long
run our gratitude was due primarily, not to the critics, not to the
fault-finders, but to the men who actually did the work; not to the
men of negative policy, but to those who struggled toward the given
goal. Merciful oblivion has swallowed up the names of those who railed
at the men who were saving the Union, while it has given us the memory
of these same men as a heritage of honor forever; and brightest among
their names flame those of Lincoln and Grant, the steadfast, the
unswerving, the enduring, the finally triumphant.

Grant’s supreme virtue as a soldier was his doggedness, the quality
which found expression in his famous phrases of “unconditional
surrender” and “fighting it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
He was a master of strategy and tactics, but he was also a master
of hard hitting, of that “continuous hammering” which finally broke
through even Lee’s guard. While an armed foe was in the field, it
never occurred to Grant that any question could be so important as his
overthrow. He felt nothing but impatient contempt for the weak souls
who wished to hold parley with the enemy while that enemy was still
capable of resistance.

There is a fine lesson in this to the people who have been asking us
to invite the certain destruction of our power in the Philippines, and
therefore the certain destruction of the islands themselves, by putting
any concession on our part ahead of the duty of reducing the islands
to quiet at all costs and of stamping out the last embers of armed
resistance. At the time of the Civil War the only way to secure peace
was to fight for it, and it would have been a crime against humanity to
have stopped fighting before peace was conquered. So in the far less
important, but still very important, crisis which confronts us to-day,
it would be a crime against humanity if, whether from weakness or from
mistaken sentimentalism, we failed to perceive that in the Philippines
the all-important duty is to restore order; because peace, and the
gradually increasing measure of self-government for the islands which
will follow peace, can only come when armed resistance has completely
vanished.

Grant was no brawler, no lover of fighting for fighting’s sake. He
was a plain, quiet man, not seeking for glory; but a man who, when
aroused, was always in deadly earnest, and who never shrank from duty.
He was slow to strike, but he never struck softly. He was not in the
least of the type which gets up mass-meetings, makes inflammatory
speeches or passes inflammatory resolutions, and then permits
over-forcible talk to be followed by over-feeble action. His promise
squared with his performance. His deeds made good his words. He did
not denounce an evil in strained and hyperbolic language; but when he
did denounce it, he strove to make his denunciation effective by his
action. He did not plunge lightly into war, but once in, he saw the
war through, and when it was over, it was over entirely. Unsparing
in battle, he was very merciful in victory. There was no let-up in
his grim attack, his grim pursuit, until the last body of armed foes
surrendered. But that feat once accomplished, his first thought was
for the valiant defeated; to let them take back their horses to their
little homes because they would need them to work on their farms.
Grant, the champion whose sword was sharpest in the great fight for
liberty, was no less sternly insistent upon the need of order and of
obedience to law. No stouter foe of anarchy in every form ever lived
within our borders. The man who more than any other, save Lincoln, had
changed us into a nation whose citizens were all freemen, realized
entirely that these freemen would remain free only while they kept
mastery over their own evil passions. He saw that lawlessness in all
its forms was the handmaiden of tyranny. No nation ever yet retained
its freedom for any length of time after losing its respect for the
law, after losing the law-abiding spirit, the spirit that really makes
orderly liberty.

Grant, in short, stood for the great elementary virtues, for justice,
for freedom, for order, for unyielding resolution, for manliness
in its broadest and highest sense. His greatness was not so much
greatness of intellect as greatness of character, including in the
word “character” all the strong, virile virtues. It is character that
counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good thing to have a keen, fine
intellectual development in a nation, to produce orators, artists,
successful business men; but it is an infinitely greater thing to
have those solid qualities which we group together under the name of
character—sobriety, steadfastness, the sense of obligation toward
one’s neighbor and one’s God, hard common-sense, and, combined with it,
the lift of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is right. These are the
qualities which go to make up true national greatness, and these were
the qualities which Grant possessed in an eminent degree.

We have come here, then, to realize what the mighty dead did for the
nation, what the dead did for us who are now living. Let us in return
try to shape our deeds so that the America of the future shall justify
by her career the lives of the great men of her past. Every man who
does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as a private citizen
is paying to Grant’s memory the kind of homage that is best worth
paying. We have difficulties and dangers enough in the present, and it
is the way we face them which it to determine whether or not we are
fit descendants of the men of the mighty past. We must not flinch from
our duties abroad merely because we have even more important duties
at home. That these home duties are the most important of all every
thinking man will freely acknowledge. We must do our duty to ourselves
and our brethren in the complex social life of the time. We must
possess the spirit of broad humanity, deep charity, and loving-kindness
for our fellowmen, and must remember, at the same time, that this
spirit is really the absolute antithesis of mere sentimentalism, of
soup-kitchen, pauperizing philanthropy, and of legislation which is
inspired either by foolish mock benevolence or by class greed or class
hate. We need to be possessed of the spirit of justice and of the
spirit which recognizes in work and not ease the proper end of effort.

Of course the all-important thing to keep in mind is that if we
have not both strength and virtue we shall fail. Indeed, in the old
acceptation of the word, virtue included strength and courage, for the
clear-sighted men at the dawn of our era knew that the passive virtues
could not by themselves avail, that wisdom without courage would sink
into mere cunning, and courage without morality into ruthless, lawless,
self-destructive ferocity. The iron Roman made himself lord of the
world because to the courage of the barbarian he opposed a courage as
fierce and an infinitely keener mind; while his civilized rivals, the
keen-witted Greek and Carthaginian, though of even finer intellect,
had let corruption eat into their brilliant civilizations until their
strength had been corroded as if by acid. In short, the Roman had
character as well as masterful genius, and when pitted against peoples
either of less genius or of less character, these peoples went down.

As the ages roll by, the eternal problem forever fronting each man
and each race forever shifts its outward shape, and yet at the bottom
it is always the same. There are dangers of peace and dangers of war;
dangers of excess in militarism and of excess by the avoidance of duty
that implies militarism; dangers of slow dry-rot, and dangers which
become acute only in great crises. When these crises come, the nation
will triumph or sink accordingly as it produces or fails to produce
statesmen like Lincoln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as
it does or does not back them in their efforts. We do not need men of
unsteady brilliancy or erratic power—unbalanced men. The men we need
are the men of strong, earnest, solid character—the men who possess
the homely virtues, and who to these virtues add rugged courage,
rugged honesty, and high resolve. Grant, with his self-poise, his
self-command, his self-mastery; Grant, who loved peace and did not
fear war, who would not draw the sword if he could honorably keep it
sheathed, but who, when once he had drawn it, would not return it to
the sheath until the weary years had brought the blood-won victory;
Grant, who had no thought after the fight was won save of leading the
life led by other Americans, and who aspired to the Presidency only as
Zachary Taylor or Andrew Jackson had aspired to it—Grant was of a type
upon which the men of to-day can well afford to model themselves. As I
have already said, our first duty, our most important work, is setting
our own house in order. We must be true to ourselves, or else, in the
long run, we shall be false to all others. The Republic can not stand
if honesty and decency do not prevail alike in public and private life;
if we do not set ourselves seriously at work to solve the tremendous
social problems forced upon us by the far-sweeping industrial changes
of the last two generations.

But in considering the life of Grant it is peculiarly appropriate to
remember that, besides the regeneration in political and social life
within our own borders, we must also face what has come upon us from
without. No friendliness with other nations, no good will for them or
by them, can take the place of national self-reliance. No alliance, no
inoffensive conduct on our part, would supply, in time of need, the
failure in ability to hold our own with the strong hand. We must work
out our own destiny by our own strength. A vigorous young nation like
ours does not always stand still. Now and then there comes a time when
it is sure either to shrink or to expand. Grant saw to it that we did
not shrink, and therefore we had to expand when the inevitable moment
came.

Great duties face us in the islands where the Stars and Stripes now
float in place of the arrogant flag of Spain. As we perform those
duties well or ill, so will we, in large part, determine our right to
a place among the great nations of the earth. We have got to meet them
in the very spirit of Grant. If we are frightened at the task, above
all, if we are cowed or disheartened by any check, or by the clamor of
the sensation-monger, we shall show ourselves weaklings unfit to invoke
the memories of the stalwart men who fought to a finish the great
Civil War. If we do not rule wisely, and if our rule is not in the
interest of the peoples who have come under our guardianship, then we
had best never to have begun the effort at all. As a nation we shall
have to choose our representatives in these islands as carefully as
Grant chose the generals who were to serve at the vital points under
him. Fortunately, so far the choice has been most wise. No nation has
ever sent a better man than we sent to Cuba when President McKinley
appointed as governor-general of that island Leonard Wood; and now, in
sending Judge Taft at the head of the Commission to the Philippines,
the President has again chosen the very best man to be found in all the
United States for the purpose in view.

Part of Grant’s great strength lay in the fact that he faced facts as
they were, and not as he wished they might be. He was not originally
an abolitionist, and he probably could not originally have defined his
views as to State sovereignty; but when the Civil War was on, he saw
that the only thing to do was to fight it to a finish and establish by
force of arms the Constitutional right to put down rebellion. It is
just the same thing nowadays with expansion. It has come, and it has
come to stay, whether we wish it or not. Certain duties have fallen to
us as a legacy of the war with Spain, and we can not avoid performing
them. All we can decide is whether we will perform them well or ill. We
can not leave the Philippines. We have got to stay there, establish
order, and then give the inhabitants as much self-government as they
show they can use to advantage. We can not run away if we would. We
have got to see the work through, because we are not a nation of
weaklings. We are strong men, and we intend to do our duty.

To do our duty—that is the sum and substance of the whole matter.
We are not trying to win glory. We are not trying to do anything
especially brilliant or unusual. We are setting ourselves vigorously at
each task as the task arises, and we are trying to face each difficulty
as Grant faced innumerable and infinitely greater difficulties. The
sure way to succeed is to set about our work in the spirit that
marked the great soldier whose life we this day celebrate: the spirit
of devotion to duty, of determination to deal fairly, justly, and
fearlessly with all men, and of iron resolution never to abandon
any task once begun until it has been brought to a successful and
triumphant conclusion.




THE TWO AMERICAS

SPEECH AT THE FORMAL OPENING OF THE PAN-AMERICAN EXPOSITION, BUFFALO,
MAY 20, 1901


To-day we formally open this great exposition by the shores of the
mighty inland seas of the North, where all the peoples of the Western
Hemisphere have joined to show what they have done in art, science, and
industrial invention, what they have been able to accomplish with their
manifold resources and their infinitely varied individual and national
qualities. Such an exposition, held at the opening of this new century,
inevitably suggests two trains of thought. It should make us think
seriously and solemnly of our several duties to one another as citizens
of the different nations of this Western Hemisphere, and also of our
duties each to the nation to which he personally belongs.

The century upon which we have just entered must inevitably be one of
tremendous triumph or of tremendous failure for the whole human race,
because, to an infinitely greater extent than ever before, humanity is
knit together in all its parts, for weal or woe. All about us there are
innumerable tendencies that tell for good, and innumerable tendencies
that tell for evil. It is, of course, a mere truism to say that our
own acts must determine which set of tendencies shall overcome the
other. In order to act wisely we must first see clearly. There is no
place among us for the mere pessimist; no man who looks at life with
a vision that sees all things black or gray can do aught healthful in
molding the destiny of a mighty and vigorous people. But there is just
as little use for the foolish optimist who refuses to face the many and
real evils that exist, and who fails to see that the only way to ensure
the triumph of righteousness in the future is to war against all that
is base, weak, and unlovely in the present.

There are certain things so obvious as to seem commonplace, which,
nevertheless, must be kept constantly before us if we are to preserve
our just sense of proportion. This twentieth century is big with
the fate of the nations of mankind, because the fate of each is now
interwoven with the fate of all to a degree never even approached in
any previous stage of history. No better proof could be given than by
this very exposition. A century ago no such exposition could have even
been thought of. The larger part of the territory represented here
to-day by so many free nations was not even mapped, and very much of it
was unknown to the hardiest explorer. The influence of America upon Old
World affairs was imponderable. World politics still meant European
politics.

All that is now changed, not merely by what has happened here in
America, but by what has happened elsewhere. It is not necessary for
us here to consider the giant changes which have come elsewhere in
the globe; to treat of the rise in the South Seas of the great free
commonwealths of Australia and New Zealand; of the way in which Japan
has been rejuvenated and has advanced by leaps and bounds to a position
among the leading civilized powers; of the problems, affecting the
major portion of mankind, which call imperiously for solution in parts
of the Old World which, a century ago, were barely known to Europe,
even by rumor. Our present concern is not with the Old World, but with
our own Western Hemisphere, America. We meet to-day, representing the
people of this continent, from the Dominion of Canada in the north, to
Chile and the Argentine in the south; representing peoples who have
traveled far and fast in the last century, because in them has been
practically shown that it is the spirit of adventure which is the maker
of commonwealths; peoples who are learning and striving to put in
practice the vital truth that freedom is the necessary first step, but
only the first step, in successful free government.

During the last century we have on the whole made long strides in
the right direction, but we have very much yet to learn. We all look
forward to the day when there shall be a nearer approximation than
there has ever yet been to the brotherhood of man and the peace of the
world. More and more we are learning that to love one’s country above
all others is in no way incompatible with respecting and wishing well
to all others, and that, as between man and man, so between nation
and nation, there should live the great law of right. These are the
goals toward which we strive; and let us at least earnestly endeavor
to realize them here on this continent. From Hudson Bay to the Straits
of Magellan, we, the men of the two Americas, have been conquering the
wilderness, carving it into state and province, and seeking to build
up in state and province governments which shall combine industrial
prosperity and moral well-being. Let us ever most vividly remember the
falsity of the belief that any one of us is to be permanently benefited
by the hurt of another. Let us strive to have our public men treat as
axiomatic the truth that it is for the interest of every commonwealth
in the Western Hemisphere to see every other commonwealth grow in
riches and in happiness, in material wealth and in the sober, strong,
self-respecting manliness, without which material wealth avails so
little.

To-day on behalf of the United States I welcome you here—you, our
brothers of the North and you, our brothers of the South; we wish you
well; we wish you all prosperity; and we say to you that we earnestly
hope for your well-being, not only for your own sakes, but also for our
own, for it is a benefit to each of us to have the others do well. The
relations between us now are those of cordial friendship, and it is
to the interest of all alike that this friendship should ever remain
unbroken. Nor is there the least chance of its being broken, provided
only that all of us alike act with full recognition of the vital need
that each should realize that his own interests can best be served by
serving the interests of others.

You, men of Canada, are doing substantially the same work that we of
this Republic are doing, and face substantially the same problems that
we also face. Yours is the world of the merchant, the manufacturer and
mechanic, the farmer, the ranchman, and the miner; you are subduing the
prairie and the forest, tilling farm-land, building cities, striving
to raise ever higher the standard of right, to bring ever nearer the
day when true justice shall obtain between man and man; and we wish
Godspeed to you and yours, and may the kindliest ties of good will
always exist between us.

To you of the republics south of us, I wish to say a special word.
I believe with all my heart in the Monroe Doctrine. This doctrine
is not to be invoked for the aggrandizement of any one of us here
on this continent at the expense of any one else on this continent.
It should be regarded simply as a great international Pan-American
policy, vital to the interests of all of us. The United States has, and
ought to have, and must ever have, only the desire to see her sister
commonwealths in the Western Hemisphere continue to flourish, and the
determination that no Old World power shall acquire new territory here
on this Western Continent. We of the two Americas must be left to work
out our own salvation along our own lines; and if we are wise we will
make it understood as a cardinal feature of our joint foreign policy
that, on the one hand, we will not submit to territorial aggrandizement
on this continent by any Old World power, and that, on the other hand,
among ourselves each nation must scrupulously regard the rights and
interests of the others, so that, instead of any one of us committing
the criminal folly of trying to rise at the expense of our neighbors,
we shall all strive upward in honest and manly brotherhood, shoulder to
shoulder.

A word now especially to my own fellow-countrymen. I think that we
have all of us reason to be satisfied with the showing made in this
Exposition, as in the great expositions of the past, of the results of
the enterprise, the shrewd daring, the business energy and capacity,
and the artistic and, above all, the wonderful mechanical skill and
inventiveness of our people. In all of this we have legitimate cause
to feel a noble pride, and a still nobler pride in the showing made of
what we have done in such matters as our system of widespread popular
education and in the field of philanthropy, especially in that best
kind of philanthropy which teaches each man to help lift both himself
and his neighbor by joining with that neighbor hand in hand in a common
effort for the common good.

But we should err greatly, we should err in the most fatal of ways,
by wilful blindness to whatever is not pleasant, if, while justly
proud of our achievements, we failed to realize that we had plenty of
shortcomings to remedy, that there are terrible problems before us,
which we must work out right, under the gravest national penalties
if we fail. It can not be too often repeated that there is no patent
device for securing good government; that after all is said and done,
after we have given full credit to every scheme for increasing our
material prosperity, to every effort of the lawmaker to provide a
system under which each man shall be best secured in his own rights,
it yet remains true that the great factor in working out the success
of this giant Republic of the Western Continent must be the possession
of those qualities of essential virtue and essential manliness which
have built up every great and mighty people of the past, and the lack
of which always has brought, and always will bring, the proudest of
nations crashing down to ruin. Here in this Exposition, on the Stadium
and on the pylons of the bridge, you have written certain sentences to
which we all must subscribe, and to which we must live up if we are
in any way or measure to do our duty: “Who shuns the dust and sweat
of the contest, on his brow falls not the cool shade of the olive,”
and “A free State exists only in the virtue of the citizen.” We all
accept these statements in theory; but if we do not live up to them in
practice, then there is no health in us. Take the two together always.
In our eager, restless life of effort but little can be done by that
cloistered virtue of which Milton spoke with such fine contempt. We
need the rough, strong qualities that make a man fit to play his part
well among men. Yet we need to remember even more that no ability, no
strength and force, no power of intellect or power of wealth, shall
avail us, if we have not the root of right living in us, if we do not
pay more than a mere lip-loyalty to the old, old commonplace virtues,
which stand at the foundation of all social and political well-being.

It is easy to say what we ought to do, but it is hard to do it; and yet
no scheme can be devised which will save us from the need of doing just
this hard work. Not merely must each of us strive to do his duty; in
addition it is imperatively necessary also to establish a strong and
intelligent public opinion which will require each to do his duty. If
any man here falls short he should not only feel ashamed of himself,
but in some way he ought also to be made conscious of the condemnation
of his fellows, and this no matter what form his shortcoming takes.
Doing our duty is, of course, incumbent on every one of us alike; yet
the heaviest blame for dereliction should fall on the man who sins
against the light, the man to whom much has been given, and from whom,
therefore, we have a right to expect much in return. We should hold to
a peculiarly rigid accountability those men who in public life, or as
editors of great papers, or as owners of vast fortunes, or as leaders
and molders of opinion in the pulpit, or on the platform, or at the
bar, are guilty of wrongdoing, no matter what form that wrongdoing may
take.

In addition, however, to the problems which, under protean shapes,
are yet fundamentally the same for all nations and for all times,
there are others which especially need our attention, because they are
the especial productions of our present industrial civilization. The
tremendous industrial development of the nineteenth century has not
only conferred great benefits upon us of the twentieth, but it has
also exposed us to grave dangers. This highly complex movement has had
many sides, some good and some bad, and has produced an absolutely
novel set of phenomena. To secure from them the best results will tax
to the utmost the resources of the statesman, the economist, and the
social reformer. There has been an immense relative growth of urban
population, and, in consequence, an immense growth of the body of
wages-workers, together with an accumulation of enormous fortunes which
more and more tend to express their power through great corporations
that are themselves guided by some master mind of the business world.
As a result, we are confronted by a formidable series of perplexing
problems, with which it is absolutely necessary to deal, and yet with
which it is not merely useless, but in the highest degree unwise and
dangerous to deal, save with wisdom, insight, and self-restraint.

There are certain truths which are so commonplace as to be axiomatic,
and yet so important that we can not keep them too vividly before our
minds. The true welfare of the nation is indissolubly bound up with
the welfare of the farmer and the wage-worker—of the man who tills
the soil, and of the mechanic, the handicraftsman, the laborer. If we
can ensure the prosperity of these two classes we need not trouble
ourselves about the prosperity of the rest, for that will follow as a
matter of course.

On the other hand, it is equally true that the prosperity of any of
us can best be attained by measures that will promote the prosperity
of all. The poorest motto upon which an American can act is the motto
of “Some men down,” and the safest to follow is that of “All men up.”
A good deal can and ought to be done by law. For instance, the State
and, if necessary, the nation should by law assume ample power of
supervising and regulating the acts of any corporation (which can be
but its creature), and generally of those immense business enterprises
which exist only because of the safety and protection to property
guaranteed by our system of government. Yet it is equally true that,
while this power should exist, it should be used sparingly and with
self-restraint. Modern industrial competition is very keen between
nation and nation, and now that our country is striding forward with
the pace of a giant to take the leading position in the international
industrial world, we should beware how we fetter our limbs, how
we cramp our Titan strength. While striving to prevent industrial
injustice at home, we must not bring upon ourselves industrial weakness
abroad. This is a task for which we need the finest abilities of the
statesman, the student, the patriot, and the far-seeing lover of
mankind. It is a task in which we shall fail with absolute certainty
if we approach it after having surrendered ourselves to the guidance
of the demagogue, or to the doctrinaire, of the well-meaning man
who thinks feebly, or of the cunning self-seeker who endeavors to
rise by committing that worst of crimes against our people—the
crime of inflaming brother against brother, one American against his
fellow-Americans.

My fellow-countrymen, bad laws are evil things, good laws are
necessary; and a clean, fearless, common-sense administration of the
laws is even more necessary; but what we need most of all is to look
to our own selves to see that our consciences as individuals, that our
collective national conscience, may respond instantly to every appeal
for high action, for lofty and generous endeavor. There must and shall
be no falling off in the national traits of hardihood and manliness;
and we must keep ever bright the love of justice, the spirit of strong
brotherly friendship for one’s fellows, which we hope and believe will
hereafter stand as typical of the men who make up this, the mightiest
Republic upon which the sun has ever shone.




MANHOOD AND STATEHOOD

ADDRESS AT THE QUARTER-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF STATEHOOD IN COLORADO,
AT COLORADO SPRINGS, AUGUST 2, 1901


This anniversary, which marks the completion by Colorado of her first
quarter-century of Statehood, is of interest not only to her sisters,
the States of the Rocky Mountain region, but to our whole country.
With the exception of the admission to Statehood of California, no
other event emphasized in such dramatic fashion the full meaning of the
growth of our country as did the incoming of Colorado.

It is a law of our intellectual development that the greatest and most
important truths, when once we have become thoroughly familiar with
them, often because of that very familiarity grow dim in our minds. The
westward spread of our people across this continent has been so rapid,
and so great has been their success in taming the rugged wilderness,
turning the gray desert into green fertility, and filling the waste and
lonely places with the eager, thronging, crowded life of our industrial
civilization, that we have begun to accept it all as part of the order
of Nature. Moreover, it now seems to us equally a matter of course that
when a sufficient number of the citizens of our common country have
thus entered into and taken possession of some great tract of empty
wilderness, they should be permitted to enter the Union as a State on
an absolute equality with the older States, having the same right both
to manage their own local affairs as they deem best, and to exercise
their full share of control over all the affairs of whatever kind or
sort in which the nation is interested as a whole. The youngest and the
oldest States stand on an exact level in one indissoluble and perpetual
Union.

To us nowadays these processes seem so natural that it is only by a
mental wrench that we conceive of any other as possible. Yet they
are really wholly modern and of purely American development. When, a
century before Colorado became a State, the original thirteen States
began the great experiment of a free and independent Republic on this
continent, the processes which we now accept in such matter-of-course
fashion were looked upon as abnormal and revolutionary. It is our own
success here in America that has brought about the complete alteration
in feeling. The chief factor in producing the Revolution, and later
in producing the War of 1812, was the inability of the mother country
to understand that the freemen who went forth to conquer a continent
should be encouraged in that work, and could not and ought not to be
expected to toil only for the profit or glory of others. When the
first Continental Congress assembled, the British Government, like
every other government of Europe at that time, simply did not know
how to look upon the general question of the progress of the colonies
save from the standpoint of the people who had stayed at home. The
spread of the hardy, venturesome backwoodsmen was to most of the
statesmen of London a matter of anxiety rather than of pride, and
the famous Quebec Act of 1774 was in part designed with the purpose
of keeping the English-speaking settlements permanently east of the
Alleghanies, and preserving the mighty and beautiful valley of the Ohio
as a hunting-ground for savages, a preserve for the great fur-trading
companies; and as late as 1812 this project was partially revived.

More extraordinary still, even after independence was achieved, and a
firm Union accomplished under that wonderful document, the Constitution
adopted in 1789, we still see traces of the same feeling lingering
here and there in our own country. There were plenty of men in the
seaboard States who looked with what seems to us ludicrous apprehension
at the steady westward growth of our people. Grave Senators and
Representatives expressed dire foreboding as to the ruin which would
result from admitting the communities growing up along the Ohio to
a full equality with the older States; and when Louisiana was given
Statehood, they insisted that that very fact dissolved the Union. When
our people had began to settle in the Mississippi Valley, Jefferson
himself accepted with equanimity the view that probably it would not be
possible to keep regions so infinitely remote as the Mississippi and
the Atlantic Coast in the same Union. Later even such a stanch Union
man and firm believer in Western growth as fearless old Tom Benton of
Missouri thought that it would be folly to try to extend the national
limits westward of the Rocky Mountains. In 1830 our then best-known man
of letters and historian, Washington Irving, prophesied that for ages
to come the country upon which we now stand would be inhabited simply
by roving tribes of nomads.

The mental attitude of all these good people need not surprise anybody.
There was nothing in the past by which to judge either the task before
this country, or the way in which that task was to be done. As Lowell
finely said, on this continent we have made new States as Old World men
pitch tents. Even the most far-seeing statesmen, those most gifted with
the imagination needed by really great statesmen, could not at first
grasp what the process really meant. Slowly and with incredible labor
the backwoodsmen of the old colonies hewed their way through the dense
forests from the tide-water region to the crests of the Alleghanies.
But by the time the Alleghanies were reached, about at the moment when
our national life began, the movement had gained wonderful momentum.
Thenceforward it advanced by leaps and bounds, and the frontier pushed
westward across the continent with ever-increasing rapidity until the
day came when it vanished entirely. Our greatest statesmen have always
been those who _believed in the nation_—who had faith in the power of
our people to spread until they should become the mightiest among the
peoples of the world.

Under any governmental system which was known to Europe, the problem
offered by the westward thrust, across a continent, of so masterful
and liberty-loving a race as ours would have been insoluble. The great
civilized and colonizing races of antiquity, the Greeks and the Romans,
had been utterly unable to devise a scheme under which when their
race spread it might be possible to preserve both national unity and
local and individual freedom. When a Hellenic or Latin city sent off
a colony, one of two things happened. Either the colony was kept in
political subjection to the city or state of which it was an offshoot,
or else it became a wholly independent and alien, and often a hostile,
nation. Both systems were fraught with disaster. With the Greeks race
unity was sacrificed to local independence, and as a result the Greek
world became the easy prey of foreign conquerors. The Romans kept
national unity, but only by means of a crushing centralized despotism.

When the modern world entered upon the marvelous era of expansion which
began with the discoveries of Columbus, the nations were able to devise
no new plan. All the great colonizing powers, England, France, Spain,
Portugal, Holland, and Russia, managed their colonies primarily in the
interest of the home country. Some did better than others,—England
probably best and Spain worst,—but in no case were the colonists
treated as citizens of equal rights in a common country. Our ancestors,
who were at once the strongest and the most liberty-loving among all
the peoples who had been thrust out into new continents, were the first
to revolt against this system; and the lesson taught by their success
has been thoroughly learned.

In applying the new principles to our conditions we have found the
Federal Constitution a nearly perfect instrument. The system of a
closely knit and indestructible union of free commonwealths has enabled
us to do what neither Greek nor Roman in their greatest days could
do. We have preserved the complete unity of an expanding race without
impairing in the slightest degree the liberty of the individual.
When in a given locality the settlers became sufficiently numerous,
they were admitted to Statehood, and thenceforward shared all the
rights and all the duties of the citizens of the older States. As with
Columbus and the egg, the expedient seems obvious enough nowadays, but
then it was so novel that a couple of generations had to pass before
we ourselves thoroughly grasped all its features. At last we grew to
accept as axiomatic the two facts of national union and local and
personal freedom. As whatever is axiomatic seems commonplace, we now
tend to accept what has been accomplished as a mere matter-of-course
incident, of no great moment. The very completeness with which
the vitally important task has been done almost blinds us to the
extraordinary nature of the achievement.

You, the men of Colorado, and, above all, the older among those whom I
am now addressing, have been engaged in doing the great typical work
of our people. Save only the preservation of the Union itself, no
other task has been so important as the conquest and settlement of the
West. This conquest and settlement has been the stupendous feat of our
race for the century that has just closed. It stands supreme among all
such feats. The same kind of thing has been in Australia and Canada,
but upon a less important scale, while the Russian advance in Siberia
has been incomparably slower. In all the history of mankind there is
nothing that quite parallels the way in which our people have filled
a vacant continent with self-governing commonwealths, knit into one
nation. And of all this marvelous history perhaps the most wonderful
portion is that which deals with the way in which the Pacific Coast and
the Rocky Mountains were settled.

The men who founded these communities showed practically by their
life-work that it is indeed the spirit of adventure which is the
maker of commonwealths. Their traits of daring and hardihood and iron
endurance are not merely indispensable traits for pioneers; they are
also traits which must go to the make-up of every mighty and successful
people. You and your fathers who built up the West did more even than
you thought; for you shaped thereby the destiny of the whole Republic,
and as a necessary corollary profoundly influenced the course of events
throughout the world. More and more as the years go by this Republic
will find its guidance in the thought and action of the West, because
the conditions of development in the West have steadily tended to
accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics of its people.

There was scant room for the coward and the weakling in the ranks of
the adventurous frontiersmen—the pioneer settlers who first broke up
the wild prairie soil, who first hewed their way into the primeval
forest, who guided their white-topped wagons across the endless leagues
of Indian-haunted desolation, and explored every remote mountain-chain
in the restless quest for metal wealth. Behind them came the men
who completed the work they had roughly begun: who drove the great
railroad systems over plain and desert and mountain pass; who stocked
the teeming ranches, and under irrigation saw the bright green of the
alfalfa and the yellow of the golden stubble supplant the gray of the
sage-brush desert; who have built great populous cities—cities in
which every art and science of civilization are carried to the highest
point—on tracts which, when the nineteenth century had passed its
meridian, were still known only to the grim trappers and hunters and
the red lords of the wilderness with whom they waged eternal war.

Such is the record of which we are so proud. It is a record of men who
greatly dared and greatly did; a record of wanderings wider and more
dangerous than those of the Vikings; a record of endless feats of arms,
of victory after victory in the ceaseless strife waged against wild man
and wild nature. The winning of the West was the great epic feat in the
history of our race.

We have, then, a right to meet to-day in a spirit of just pride in
the past. But when we pay homage to the hardy, grim, resolute men
who, with incredible toil and risk, laid deep the foundations of the
civilization that we inherit, let us steadily remember that the only
homage that counts is the homage of deeds—not merely of words. It is
well to gather here to show that we remember what has been done in the
past by the Western pioneers of our people, and that we glory in the
greatness for which they prepared the way. But lip-loyalty by itself
avails very little, whether it is expressed concerning a nation or an
ideal. It would be a sad and evil thing for this country if ever the
day came when we considered the great deeds of our forefathers as an
excuse for our resting slothfully satisfied with what has been already
done. On the contrary, they should be an inspiration and appeal,
summoning us to show that we too have courage and strength; that we
too are ready to dare greatly if the need arises; and, above all, that
we are firmly bent upon that steady performance of every-day duty
which, in the long run, is of such incredible worth in the formation of
national character.

The old iron days have gone, the days when the weakling died as the
penalty of inability to hold his own in the rough warfare against his
surroundings. We live in softer times. Let us see to it that, while we
take advantage of every gentler and more humanizing tendency of the
age, we yet preserve the iron quality which made our forefathers and
predecessors fit to do the deeds they did. It will of necessity find
a different expression now, but the quality itself remains just as
necessary as ever. Surely you men of the West, you men who with stout
heart, cool head, and ready hand have wrought out your own success and
built up these great new commonwealths, surely you need no reminder
of the fact that if either man or nation wishes to play a great part
in the world there must be no dallying with the life of lazy ease.
In the abounding energy and intensity of existence in our mighty
democratic Republic there is small space indeed for the idler, for
the luxury-loving man who prizes ease more than hard, triumph-crowned
effort.

We hold work not as a curse but as a blessing, and we regard the idler
with scornful pity. It would be in the highest degree undesirable that
we should all work in the same way or at the same things, and for the
sake of the real greatness of the nation we should in the fullest and
most cordial way recognize the fact that some of the most needed work
must, from its very nature, be unremunerative in a material sense.
Each man must choose so far as the conditions allow him the path to
which he is bidden by his own peculiar powers and inclinations. But if
he is a man he must in some way or shape do a man’s work. If, after
making all the effort that his strength of body and of mind permits,
he yet honorably fails, why, he is still entitled to a certain share
of respect because he has made the effort. But if he does not make the
effort, or if he makes it half-heartedly and recoils from the labor,
the risk, or the irksome monotony of his task, why, he has forfeited
all right to our respect, and has shown himself a mere cumberer of the
earth. It is not given to us all to succeed, but it is given to us all
to strive manfully to deserve success.

We need, then, the iron qualities that must go with true manhood. We
need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable
will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always
be done, and to persevere through the long days of slow progress or of
seeming failure which always come before any final triumph, no matter
how brilliant. But we need more than these qualities. This country can
not afford to have its sons less than men; but neither can it afford to
have them other than good men. If courage and strength and intellect
are unaccompanied by the moral purpose, the moral sense, they become
merely forms of expression for unscrupulous force and unscrupulous
cunning. If the strong man has not in him the lift toward lofty things
his strength makes him only a curse to himself and to his neighbor. All
this is true in private life, and it is no less true in public life. If
Washington and Lincoln had not had in them the whipcord fibre of moral
and mental strength, the soul that steels itself to endure disaster
unshaken and with grim resolve to wrest victory from defeat, then the
one could not have founded, nor the other preserved, our mighty Federal
Union. The least touch of flabbiness, of unhealthy softness, in either
would have meant ruin for this nation, and therefore the downfall of
the proudest hope of mankind. But no less is it true that had either
been influenced by self-seeking ambition, by callous disregard of
others, by contempt for the moral law, he would have dashed us down
into the black gulf of failure. Woe to all of us if ever as a people we
grow to condone evil because it is successful. We can no more afford
to lose social and civic decency and honesty than we can afford to
lose the qualities of courage and strength. It is the merest truism to
say that the nation rests upon the individual, upon the family—upon
individual manliness and womanliness, using the words in their widest
and fullest meaning.

To be a good husband or good wife, a good neighbor and friend, to be
hard-working and upright in business and social relations, to bring
up many healthy children—to be and to do all this is to lay the
foundations of good citizenship as they must be laid. But we can not
stop even with this. Each of us has not only his duty to himself,
his family, and his neighbors, but his duty to the State and to the
nation. We are in honor bound each to strive according to his or her
strength to bring ever nearer the day when justice and wisdom shall
obtain in public life as in private life. We can not retain the
full measure of our self-respect if we can not retain pride in our
citizenship. For the sake not only of ourselves but of our children
and our children’s children we must see that this nation stands for
strength and honesty both at home and abroad. In our internal policy we
can not afford to rest satisfied until all that the government can do
has been done to secure fair dealing and equal justice as between man
and man. In the great part which hereafter, whether we will or not, we
must play in the world at large, let us see to it that we neither do
wrong nor shrink from doing right because the right is difficult; that
on the one hand we inflict no injury, and that on the other we have a
due regard for the honor and the interest of our mighty nation; and
that we keep unsullied the renown of the flag which beyond all others
of the present time or of the ages of the past stands for confident
faith in the future welfare and greatness of mankind.




BROTHERHOOD AND THE HEROIC VIRTUES

ADDRESS AT VETERANS’ REUNION, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, SEPTEMBER 5, 1901


I speak to you to-night less as men of Vermont than as members of
the Grand Army which saved the Union. But at the outset I must pay a
special tribute to your State. Vermont was not a rich State, compared
with many States, and she had sent out so many tens of thousands of
her sons to the West that it is not improbable that as many men of
Vermont birth served in the regiments of other States as in those of
her own State. Yet, notwithstanding this drain, your gallant State
was surpassed by no other State of the North, either in the number
of men according to her population which she sent into the army, or
in the relative extent of her financial support of the war. Too much
can not be said of the high quality of the Vermont soldiers; and one
contributing factor in securing this high quality was the good sense
which continually sent recruits into the already existing regiments
instead of forming new ones.

It is difficult to express the full measure of obligation under
which this country is to the men who from ’61 to ’65 took up the most
terrible and vitally necessary task which has ever fallen to the lot
of any generation of men in the Western Hemisphere. Other men have
rendered great service to the country, but the service you rendered
was not merely great—it was incalculable. Other men by their lives
or their deaths have kept unstained our honor, have wrought marvels
for our interest, have led us forward to triumph, or warded off
disaster from us; other men have marshaled our ranks upward across the
stony <DW72>s of greatness. But you did more, for you saved us from
annihilation. We can feel proud of what others did only because of
what you did. It was given to you, when the mighty days came, to do
the mighty deeds for which the days called, and if your deeds had been
left undone, all that had been already accomplished would have turned
into apples of Sodom under our teeth. The glory of Washington and the
majesty of Marshall would have crumbled into meaningless dust if you
and your comrades had not buttressed their work with your strength of
steel, your courage of fire. The Declaration of Independence would now
sound like a windy platitude, the Constitution of the United States
would ring as false as if drawn by the Abbé Sieyès in the days of the
French Terror, if your stern valor had not proved the truth of the one
and made good the promise of the other. In our history there have been
other victorious struggles for right, on the field of battle and in
civic strife. To have failed in these other struggles would have meant
bitter shame and grievous loss. But you fought in the one struggle
where failure meant death and destruction to our people; meant that our
whole past history would be crossed out of the records of successful
endeavor with the red and black lines of failure; meant that not one
man in all this wide country would now be holding his head upright as a
free citizen of a mighty and glorious Republic.

All this you did, and therefore you are entitled to the homage of all
men who have not forgotten in their blindness either the awful nature
of the crisis, or the worth of priceless service rendered in the hour
of direst need.

You met a great need, that vanished because of your success. You have
left us many memories, to be prized for evermore. You have taught us
many lessons, and none more important than the lesson of brotherhood.
The realization of the underlying brotherhood of our people, the
feeling that there should be among them an essential unity of purpose
and sympathy, must be kept close at heart if we are to do our work well
here in our American life. You have taught us both by what you did on
the tented fields, and by what you have done since in civic life, how
this spirit of brotherhood can be made a living, a vital force.

In the first place, you have left us the right of brotherhood with
the gallant men who wore the gray in the ranks against which you were
pitted. At the opening of this new century, all of us, the children
of a reunited country, have a right to glory in the countless deeds
of valor done alike by the men of the North and the men of the South.
We can retain an ever-growing sense of the all-importance, not merely
to our people but to mankind, of the Union victory, while giving the
freest and heartiest recognition to the sincerity and self-devotion of
those Americans, our fellow-countrymen, who then fought against the
stars in their courses. Now there is none left, North or South, who
does not take joy and pride in the Union; and when three years ago we
once more had to face a foreign enemy, the heart of every true American
thrilled with pride to see veterans who had fought in the Confederate
uniform once more appear under Uncle Sam’s colors, side by side with
their former foes, and leading to victory under the famous old flag the
sons both of those who had worn the blue and of those who had worn the
gray.

But there are other ways in which you have taught the lesson of
brotherhood. In our highly complex, highly specialized industrial
life of to-day there are many tendencies for good and there are also
many tendencies for evil. Chief among the latter is the way in which,
in great industrial centres, the segregation of interests invites a
segregation of sympathies. In our old American life, and in the country
districts where to-day the old conditions still largely obtain, there
was and is no such sharp and rigid demarcation between different
groups of citizens. In most country districts at the present day not
only have the people many feelings in common, but, what is quite as
important, they are perfectly aware that they have these feelings in
common. In the cities the divergence of real interests is nothing like
as great as is commonly supposed; but it does exist, and, above all,
there is a tendency to forget or ignore the community of interest.
There is comparatively little neighborliness, and life is so busy and
the population so crowded that it is impossible for the average man
to get into touch with any of his fellow-citizens save those in his
immediate little group. In consequence there tends to grow up a feeling
of estrangement between different groups, of forgetfulness of the great
primal needs and primal passions that are common to all of us.

It is therefore of the utmost benefit to have men thrown together under
circumstances which force them to realize their community of interest,
especially where the community of interest arises from community of
devotion to a lofty ideal. The great Civil War rendered precisely this
service. It drew into the field a very large proportion of the adult
male population, and it lasted so long that its lessons were thoroughly
driven home. In our other wars the same lessons, or nearly the same
lessons, have been taught, but upon so much smaller a scale that the
effect is in no shape or way comparable. In the Civil War, merchant
and clerk, manufacturer and mechanic, farmer and hired man, capitalist
and wage-worker, city man and country man, Easterner and Westerner,
went into the army together, faced toil and risk and hardship side by
side, died with the same fortitude, and felt the same disinterested
thrill of triumph when the victory came. In our modern life there are
only a few occupations where risk has to be feared, and there are many
occupations where no exhausting labor has to be faced; and so there are
plenty of us who can be benefited by a little actual experience with
the rough side of things. It was a good thing, a very good thing, to
have a great mass of our people learn what it was to face death and
endure toil together, and all on an exact level. You whom I am now
addressing remember well, do you not, the weary, foot-sore marches
under the burning sun, when the blankets seemed too heavy to carry, and
then the shivering sleep in the trenches, when the mud froze after dark
and the blankets seemed altogether too light instead of too heavy?
You remember the scanty fare, and you remember, above all, how you got
to estimate each of your fellows by what there was in him and not by
anything adventitious in his surroundings. It was of vital importance
to you that the men of your left and your right should do their duty;
that they should come forward when the order was to advance; that they
should keep the lines with ceaseless vigilance and fortitude if on the
defensive. You neither knew nor cared what had been their occupations,
or whether they were in worldly ways well off or the reverse. What you
desired to know about them was to be sure that they would “stay put”
when the crisis came. Was not this so? You know it was.

Moreover, all these qualities of fine heroism and stubborn endurance
were displayed in a spirit of devotion to a lofty ideal, and not for
material gain. The average man who fought in our armies during the
Civil War could have gained much more money if he had stayed in civil
life. When the end came his sole reward was to feel that the Union
had been saved, and the flag which had been rent in sunder once more
made whole. Nothing was more noteworthy than the marvelous way in
which, once the war was ended, the great armies which had fought it
to a triumphant conclusion disbanded, and were instantly lost in the
current of our civil life. The soldier turned at once to the task
of earning his own livelihood. But he carried within him memories of
inestimable benefit to himself, and he bequeathed to us who come after
him the priceless heritage of his example. From the major-general to
the private in the ranks each came back to civil life with the proud
consciousness of duty well done, and all with a feeling of community
of interest which they could have gained in no other way. Each knew
what work was, what danger was. Each came back with his own power for
labor and endurance strengthened, and yet with his sympathy for others
quickened. From that day to this the men who fought in the great war
have inevitably had in them a spirit to which appeal for any lofty
cause could be made with the confident knowledge that there would
be immediate and eager response. In the breasts of the men who saw
Appomattox there was no room for the growth of the jealous, greedy,
sullen envy which makes anarchy, which has bred the red Commune. They
had gone down to the root of things, and knew how to judge and value,
each man his neighbor, whether that neighbor was rich or poor, neither
envying him because of his wealth nor despising him because of his
poverty.

The lesson taught by the great war could only be imperfectly taught by
any lesser war. Nevertheless, not a little good has been done even by
such struggles as that which ended in ensuring independence to Cuba,
and in giving to the Philippines a freedom to which they could never
have attained had we permitted them to fall into anarchy or under
tyranny. It was a pleasant thing to see the way in which men came
forward from every walk of life, from every section of the country,
as soon as the call to arms occurred. The need was small and easily
met, and not one in a hundred of the ardent young fellows who pressed
forward to enter the army had a chance to see any service whatever. But
it was good to see that the spirit of ’61 had not been lost. Perhaps
the best feature of the whole movement was the eagerness with which
men went into the ranks, anxious only to serve their country and to do
their share of the work without regard to anything in the way of reward
or position; for, gentlemen, it is upon the efficiency of the enlisted
man, upon the way he does his duty, that the efficiency of the whole
army really depends, and the prime work of the officer is, after all,
only to develop, foster, and direct the good qualities of the men under
him.

Well, this rush into the ranks not only had a very good side, but
also at times an amusing side. I remember one characteristic incident
which occurred on board one of our naval vessels. Several of these
vessels were officered and manned chiefly from the naval militia of
the different States, the commander and executive officer and a few
veterans here and there among the crew being the only ones that came
from the regular service. The naval militia contained every type of
man, from bankers with a taste for yachting to longshoremen, and they
all went in and did their best. But of course it was a little hard
for some of them to adjust themselves to their surroundings. One of
the vessels in question, toward the end of the war, returned from the
Spanish Main and anchored in one of our big ports. Early one morning
a hard-looking and seemingly rather dejected member of the crew was
engaged in “squeegeeing” the quarter-deck, when the captain came up
and, noticing a large and handsome yacht near by (I shall not use the
real name of the yacht), remarked to himself: “I wonder what boat that
is?” The man with the squeegee touched his cap and said in answer:
“The _Dawn_, sir.” “How do you know that?” quoth the captain, looking
at him. “Because I own her, sir,” responded the man with the squeegee,
again touching his cap; and the conversation ended.

Now, it was a first-rate thing for that man himself to have served his
trick, not merely as the man behind the gun, but as the man with the
squeegee; and is was a mighty good thing for the country that he should
do it. In our volunteer regiments we had scores of enlisted men of
independent means serving under officers many of whom were dependent
for their daily bread upon the work of their hands or brain from month
to month. It was a good thing for both classes to be brought together
on such terms. It showed that we of this generation had not wholly
forgotten the lesson taught by you who fought to a finish the great
Civil War. And there is no danger to the future of this country just
so long as that lesson is remembered in all its bearings, civil and
military.

Your history, rightly studied, will teach us the time-worn truth
that in war, as in peace, we need chiefly the every-day, commonplace
virtues, and above all, an unflagging sense of duty. Yet in dwelling
upon the lessons for our ordinary conduct which we can learn from your
experience, we must never forget that it also shows us what should be
our model in times that are not ordinary, in the times that try men’s
souls. We need to have within us the splendid heroic virtues which
alone avail in the mighty crises, the terrible catastrophes whereby
a nation is either purified as if by fire, or else consumed forever
in the flames. When you of the Civil War sprang forward at Abraham
Lincoln’s call to put all that life holds dear, and life itself, in the
scale with the nation’s honor, you were able to do what you did because
you had in you not only the qualities that make good citizens, but in
addition the high and intense traits, the deep passion and enthusiasm,
which go to make up those heroes who are fit to deal with iron days.
We can never as a nation afford to forget that, back of our reason, our
understanding, and our common-sense, there must lie, in full strength,
the tremendous fundamental passions, which are not often needed, but
which every truly great race must have as a well-spring of motive in
time of need.

I shall end by quoting to you in substance certain words from a
minister of the gospel, a most witty man, who was also a philosopher
and a man of profound wisdom, Sydney Smith:

“The history of the world shows us that men are not to be counted by
their numbers, but by the fire and vigor of their passions; by their
deep sense of injury; by their memory of past glory; by their eagerness
for fresh fame; by their clear and steady resolution of either ceasing
to live, or of achieving a particular object, which, when it is once
formed, strikes off a load of manacles and chains, and gives free
space to all heavenly and heroic feelings. All great and extraordinary
actions come from the heart. There are seasons in human affairs when
qualities, fit enough to conduct the common business of life, are
feeble and useless, when men must trust to emotion for that safety
which reason at such times can never give. These are the feelings
which led the ten thousand over the Carduchian mountains; these are
the feelings by which a handful of Greeks broke in pieces the power
of Persia; and in the fens of the Dutch and in the mountains of the
Swiss these feelings defended happiness and revenged the oppressions of
man! God calls all the passions out in their keenness and vigor for the
present safety of mankind, anger and revenge and the heroic mind, and a
readiness to suffer—all the secret strength, all the invisible array
of the feelings—all that nature has reserved for the great scenes of
the world. When the usual hopes and the common aids of man are all
gone, nothing remains under God but those passions which have often
proved the best ministers of His purpose and the surest protectors of
the world.”




NATIONAL DUTIES

ADDRESS AT MINNESOTA STATE FAIR, SEPT. 2, 1901


In his admirable series of studies of twentieth-century problems, Dr.
Lyman Abbott has pointed out that we are a nation of pioneers; that the
first colonists to our shores were pioneers, and that pioneers selected
out from among the descendants of these early pioneers, mingled with
others selected afresh from the Old World, pushed westward into the
wilderness and laid the foundations for new commonwealths. They were
men of hope and expectation, of enterprise and energy; for the men of
dull content or more dull despair had no part in the great movement
into and across the New World. Our country has been populated by
pioneers, and therefore it has in it more energy, more enterprise, more
expansive power than any other in the wide world.

You whom I am now addressing stand for the most part but one generation
removed from these pioneers. You are typical Americans, for you have
done the great, the characteristic, the typical work of our American
life. In making homes and carving out careers for yourselves and your
children, you have built up this State. Throughout our history the
success of the home-maker has been but another name for the upbuilding
of the nation. The men who with axe in the forests and pick in the
mountains and plow on the prairies pushed to completion the dominion of
our people over the American wilderness have given the definite shape
to our nation. They have shown the qualities of daring, endurance,
and far-sightedness, of eager desire for victory and stubborn refusal
to accept defeat, which go to make up the essential manliness of the
American character. Above all, they have recognized in practical form
the fundamental law of success in American life—the law of worthy
work, the law of high, resolute endeavor. We have but little room among
our people for the timid, the irresolute, and the idle; and it is no
less true that there is scant room in the world at large for the nation
with mighty thews that dares not to be great.

Surely in speaking to the sons of the men who actually did the rough
and hard and infinitely glorious work of making the great Northwest
what it now is, I need hardly insist upon the righteousness of this
doctrine. In your own vigorous lives you show by every act how scant is
your patience with those who do not see in the life of effort the life
supremely worth living. Sometimes we hear those who do not work spoken
of with envy. Surely the wilfully idle need arouse in the breast of a
healthy man no emotion stronger than that of contempt—at the outside
no emotion stronger than angry contempt. The feeling of envy would have
in it an admission of inferiority on our part, to which the men who
know not the sterner joys of life are not entitled. Poverty is a bitter
thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity
and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom
themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all
vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in
itself. The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman, has no
place in a sane, healthy, and vigorous community. Moreover, the gross
and hideous selfishness for which each stands defeats even its own
miserable aims. Exactly as infinitely the happiest woman is she who has
borne and brought up many healthy children, so infinitely the happiest
man is he who has toiled hard and successfully in his life-work. The
work may be done in a thousand different ways—with the brain or the
hands, in the study, the field, or the workshop—if it is honest work,
honestly done and well worth doing, that is all we have a right to ask.
Every father and mother here, if they are wise, will bring up their
children not to shirk difficulties, but to meet them and overcome them;
not to strive after a life of ignoble ease, but to strive to do their
duty, first to themselves and their families, and then to the whole
State; and this duty must inevitably take the shape of work in some
form or other. You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your
ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs. They
sought for true success, and therefore they did not seek ease. They
knew that success comes only to those who lead the life of endeavor.

It seems to me that the simple acceptance of this fundamental fact
of American life, this acknowledgment that the law of work is the
fundamental law of our being, will help us to start aright in facing
not a few of the problems that confront us from without and from
within. As regards internal affairs, it should teach us the prime need
of remembering that, after all has been said and done, the chief factor
in any man’s success or failure must be his own character—that is, the
sum of his common-sense, his courage, his virile energy and capacity.
Nothing can take the place of this individual factor.

I do not for a moment mean that much can not be done to supplement
it. Besides each one of us working individually, all of us have got
to work together. We can not possibly do our best work as a nation
unless all of us know how to act in combination as well as how to act
each individually for himself. The acting in combination can take many
forms, but of course its most effective form must be when it comes
in the shape of law—that is, of action by the community as a whole
through the law-making body.

But it is not possible ever to ensure prosperity merely by law.
Something for good can be done by law, and a bad law can do an
infinity of mischief; but, after all, the best law can only prevent
wrong and injustice, and give to the thrifty, the far-seeing, and the
hard-working a chance to exercise to best advantage their special
and peculiar abilities. No hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to
where our legislation shall stop in interfering between man and man,
between interest and interest. All that can be said is that it is
highly undesirable, on the one hand, to weaken individual initiative,
and, on the other hand, that in a constantly increasing number of cases
we shall find it necessary in the future to shackle cunning as in
the past we have shackled force. It is not only highly desirable but
necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield
the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor
of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under
which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no
conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment.

Nor can legislation stop only with what are termed labor questions.
The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of
capital, which have marked the development of our industrial system,
create new conditions and necessitate a change from the old attitude
of the State and the nation toward property. It is probably true that
the large majority of the fortunes that now exist in this country have
been amassed not by injuring our people, but as an incident to the
conferring of great benefits upon the community; and this, no matter
what may have been the conscious purpose of those amassing them. There
is but the scantiest justification for most of the outcry against the
men of wealth _as such_; and it ought to be unnecessary to state that
any appeal which directly or indirectly leads to suspicion and hatred
among ourselves, which tends to limit opportunity, and therefore to
shut the door of success against poor men of talent, and, finally,
which entails the possibility of lawlessness and violence, is an attack
upon the fundamental properties of American citizenship. Our interests
are at bottom common; in the long run we go up or go down together.
Yet more and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the
Nation, must possess the right of supervision and control as regards
the great corporations which are its creatures, particularly as regards
the great business combinations which derive a portion of their
importance from the existence of some monopolistic tendency. The right
should be exercised with caution and self-restraint; but it should
exist, so that it may be invoked if the need arises.

So much for our duties, each to himself and each to his neighbor,
within the limits of our own country. But our country, as it strides
forward with ever-increasing rapidity to a foremost place among the
world powers, must necessarily find, more and more, that it has world
duties also. There are excellent people who believe that we can shirk
these duties and yet retain our self-respect; but these good people are
in error. Other good people seek to deter us from treading the path of
hard but lofty duty by bidding us remember that all nations that have
achieved greatness, that have expanded and played their part as world
powers, have in the end passed away. So they have; and so have all
others. The weak and the stationary have vanished as surely as, and
more rapidly than, those whose citizens felt within them the lift that
impels generous souls to great and noble effort. This is only another
way of stating the universal law of death, which is itself part of the
universal law of life. The man who works, the man who does great deeds,
in the end dies as surely as the veriest idler who cumbers the earth’s
surface; but he leaves behind him the great fact that he has done his
work well. So it is with nations. While the nation that has dared to be
great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of
the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the nation that has
played the part of the weakling must also die; and whereas the nation
that has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has
done a great work really continues, though in changed form, to live
for evermore. The Roman has passed away exactly as all the nations of
antiquity which did not expand when he expanded have passed away; but
their very memory has vanished, while he himself is still a living
force throughout the wide world in our entire civilization of to-day,
and will so continue through countless generations, through untold ages.

It is because we believe with all our heart and soul in the greatness
of this country, because we feel the thrill of hardy life in our
veins, and are confident that to us is given the privilege of playing
a leading part in the century that has just opened, that we hail with
eager delight the opportunity to do whatever task Providence may
allot us. We admit with all sincerity that our first duty is within
our own household; that we must not merely talk, but act, in favor of
cleanliness and decency and righteousness, in all political, social,
and civic matters. No prosperity and no glory can save a nation that
is rotten at heart. We must ever keep the core of our national being
sound, and see to it that not only our citizens in private life, but,
above all, our statesmen in public life, practice the old, commonplace
virtues which from time immemorial have lain at the root of all true
national well-being. Yet while this is our first duty, it is not our
whole duty. Exactly as each man, while doing first his duty to his wife
and the children within his home, must yet, if he hopes to amount to
much, strive mightily in the world outside his home, so our nation,
while first of all seeing to its own domestic well-being, must not
shrink from playing its part among the great nations without. Our
duty may take many forms in the future as it has taken many forms in
the past. Nor is it possible to lay down a hard-and-fast rule for all
cases. We must ever face the fact of our shifting national needs, of
the always-changing opportunities that present themselves. But we may
be certain of one thing: whether we wish it or not, we can not avoid
hereafter having duties to do in the face of other nations. All that we
can do is to settle whether we shall perform these duties well or ill.

Right here let me make as vigorous a plea as I know how in favor of
saying nothing that we do not mean, and of acting without hesitation up
to whatever we say. A good many of you are probably acquainted with the
old proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.” If
a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not
save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back
of the softness there does not lie strength, power. In private life
there are few beings more obnoxious than the man who is always loudly
boasting; and if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words his
position becomes absolutely contemptible. So it is with the nation. It
is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification,
and, above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples.
Whenever on any point we come in contact with a foreign power, I hope
that we shall always strive to speak courteously and respectfully
of that foreign power. Let us make it evident that we intend to do
justice. Then let us make it equally evident that we will not tolerate
injustice being done to us in return. Let us further make it evident
that we use no words which we are not prepared to back up with deeds,
and that while our speech is always moderate, we are ready and willing
to make it good. Such an attitude will be the surest possible guarantee
of that self-respecting peace, the attainment of which is and must ever
be the prime aim of a self-governing people.

This is the attitude we should take as regards the Monroe Doctrine.
There is not the least need of blustering about it. Still less should
it be used as a pretext for our own aggrandizement at the expense of
any other American state. But, most emphatically, we must make it
evident that we intend on this point ever to maintain the old American
position. Indeed, it is hard to understand how any man can take any
other position, now that we are all looking forward to the building
of the Isthmian Canal. The Monroe Doctrine is not international law;
but there is no necessity that it should be. All that is needful is
that it should continue to be a cardinal feature of American policy
on this continent; and the Spanish-American states should, in their
own interests, champion it as strongly as we do. We do not by this
doctrine intend to sanction any policy of aggression by one American
commonwealth at the expense of any other, nor any policy of commercial
discrimination against any foreign power whatsoever. Commercially, as
far as this doctrine is concerned, all we wish is a fair field and no
favor; but if we are wise we shall strenuously insist that under no
pretext whatsoever shall there be any territorial aggrandizement on
American soil by any European power, and this, no matter what form the
territorial aggrandizement may take.

We most earnestly hope and believe that the chance of our having any
hostile military complication with any foreign power is very small. But
that there will come a strain, a jar, here and there, from commercial
and agricultural—that is, from industrial—competition, is almost
inevitable. Here again we must remember that our first duty is to our
own people, and yet that we can best get justice by doing justice. We
must continue the policy that has been so brilliantly successful in
the past, and so shape our economic system as to give every advantage
to the skill, energy, and intelligence of our farmers, merchants,
manufacturers, and wage-workers; and yet we must also remember, in
dealing with other nations, that benefits must be given where benefits
are sought. It is not possible to dogmatize as to the exact way of
attaining this end, for the exact conditions can not be foretold. In
the long run, one of our prime needs is stability and continuity of
economic policy; and yet, through treaty or by direct legislation, it
may, at least in certain cases, become advantageous to supplement our
present policy by a system of reciprocal benefit and obligation.

Throughout a large part of our national career our history has been
one of expansion, the expansion being of different kinds at different
times. This expansion is not a matter of regret, but of pride. It
is vain to tell a people as masterful as ours that the spirit of
enterprise is not safe. The true American has never feared to run risks
when the prize to be won was of sufficient value. No nation capable
of self-government, and of developing by its own efforts a sane and
orderly civilization, no matter how small it may be, has anything to
fear from us. Our dealings with Cuba illustrate this, and should be
forever a subject of just national pride. We speak in no spirit of
arrogance when we state as a simple historic fact that never in recent
times has any great nation acted with such disinterestedness as we
have shown in Cuba. We freed the island from the Spanish yoke. We then
earnestly did our best to help the Cubans in the establishment of free
education, of law and order, of material prosperity, of the cleanliness
necessary to sanitary well-being in their great cities. We did all
this at great expense of treasure, at some expense of life; and now
we are establishing them in a free and independent commonwealth, and
have asked in return nothing whatever save that at no time shall their
independence be prostituted to the advantage of some foreign rival of
ours, or so as to menace our well-being. To have failed to ask this
would have amounted to national stultification on our part.

In the Philippines we have brought peace, and we are at this moment
giving them such freedom and self-government as they could never under
any conceivable conditions have obtained had we turned them loose to
sink into a welter of blood and confusion, or to become the prey of
some strong tyranny without or within. The bare recital of the facts
is sufficient to show that we did our duty; and what prouder title
to honor can a nation have than to have done its duty? We have done
our duty ourselves, and we have done the higher duty of promoting
the civilization of mankind. The first essential of civilization is
law. Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and
despotism. Law and order enforced with justice and by strength lie
at the foundations of civilization. Law must be based upon justice,
else it can not stand, and it must be enforced with resolute firmness,
because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no
justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous
strength. Without the habit of orderly obedience to the law, without
the stern enforcement of the laws at the expense of those who defiantly
resist them, there can be no possible progress, moral or material,
in civilization. There can be no weakening of the law-abiding spirit
here at home, if we are permanently to succeed; and just as little can
we afford to show weakness abroad. Lawlessness and anarchy were put
down in the Philippines as a prerequisite to introducing the reign of
justice.

Barbarism has, and can have, no place in a civilized world. It is our
duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed
from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism
itself. The missionary, the merchant, and the soldier may each have
to play a part in this destruction, and in the consequent uplifting
of the people. Exactly as it is the duty of a civilized power
scrupulously to respect the rights of all weaker civilized powers and
gladly to help those who are struggling toward civilization, so it is
its duty to put down savagery and barbarism. As in such a work human
instruments must be used, and as human instruments are imperfect, this
means that at times there will be injustice; that at times merchant or
soldier, or even missionary, may do wrong. Let us instantly condemn
and rectify such wrong when it occurs, and if possible punish the
wrongdoer. But shame, thrice shame to us, if we are so foolish as to
make such occasional wrongdoing an excuse for failing to perform a
great and righteous task. Not only in our own land, but throughout the
world, throughout all history, the advance of civilization has been of
incalculable benefit to mankind, and those through whom it has advanced
deserve the highest honor. All honor to the missionary, all honor to
the soldier, all honor to the merchant who now in our own day have done
so much to bring light into the world’s dark places.

Let me insist again, for fear of possible misconstruction, upon the
fact that our duty is twofold, and that we must raise others while
we are benefiting ourselves. In bringing order to the Philippines,
our soldiers added a new page to the honor-roll of American history,
and they incalculably benefited the islanders themselves. Under the
wise administration of Governor Taft the islands now enjoy a peace
and liberty of which they have hitherto never even dreamed. But this
peace and liberty under the law must be supplemented by material, by
industrial development. Every encouragement should be given to their
commercial development, to the introduction of American industries and
products; not merely because this will be a good thing for our people,
but infinitely more because it will be of incalculable benefit to the
people in the Philippines.

We shall make mistakes; and if we let these mistakes frighten us
from our work we shall show ourselves weaklings. Half a century
ago Minnesota and the two Dakotas were Indian hunting-grounds. We
committed plenty of blunders, and now and then worse than blunders, in
our dealings with the Indians. But who does not admit at the present
day that we were right in wresting from barbarism and adding to
civilization the territory out of which we have made these beautiful
States? And now we are civilizing the Indian and putting him on a level
to which he could never have attained under the old conditions.

In the Philippines let us remember that the spirit and not the
mere form of government is the essential matter. The Tagalogs have
a hundredfold the freedom under us that they would have if we had
abandoned the islands. We are not trying to subjugate a people; we
are trying to develop them and make them a law-abiding, industrious,
and educated people, and we hope ultimately a self-governing people.
In short, in the work we have done we are but carrying out the true
principles of our democracy. We work in a spirit of self-respect for
ourselves and of good-will toward others, in a spirit of love for and
of infinite faith in mankind. We do not blindly refuse to face the
evils that exist, or the shortcomings inherent in humanity; but across
blundering and shirking, across selfishness and meanness of motive,
across short-sightedness and cowardice, we gaze steadfastly toward the
far horizon of golden triumph. If you will study our past history as
a nation you will see we have made many blunders and have been guilty
of many shortcomings, and yet that we have always in the end come
out victorious because we have refused to be daunted by blunders and
defeats, have recognized them, but have persevered in spite of them.
So it must be in the future. We gird up our loins as a nation, with
the stern purpose to play our part manfully in winning the ultimate
triumph; and therefore we turn scornfully aside from the paths of mere
ease and idleness, and with unfaltering steps tread the rough road of
endeavor, smiting down and battling for the right, as Greatheart smote
and battled in Bunyan’s immortal story.




THE LABOR QUESTION

AT THE CHICAGO LABOR DAY PICNIC, SEPT. 3, 1900


By far the greatest problem, the most far-reaching in its stupendous
importance, is that problem, or rather that group of problems, which
we have grown to speak of as the labor question. It must be always a
peculiar privilege for any thoughtful public man to address a body of
men predominantly composed of wage-workers, for the foundation of our
whole social structure rests upon the material and moral well-being,
the intelligence, the foresight, the sanity, the sense of duty, and
the wholesome patriotism of the wage-worker. This is doubly the case
now; for, in addition to each man’s individual action, you have learned
the great lesson of acting in combination. It would be impossible to
overestimate the far-reaching influences of, and, on the whole, the
amount of good done through your associations.

In addressing you, the one thing that I wish to avoid is any mere
glittering generality, any mere high-sounding phraseology, and, above
all, any appeal whatsoever made in a demagogic spirit, or in a spirit
of mere emotionalism. When we come to dealing with our social and
industrial needs, remedies, rights and wrongs, a ton of oratory is not
worth an ounce of hard-headed, kindly common-sense.


The fundamental law of healthy political life in this great Republic
is that each man shall in deed, and not merely in word, be treated
strictly on his worth as a man; that each shall do full justice to his
fellow, and in return shall exact full justice from him. Each group
of men has its special interests; and yet the higher, the broader and
deeper interests are those which apply to all men alike; for the spirit
of brotherhood in American citizenship, when rightly understood and
rightly applied, is more important than aught else. Let us scrupulously
guard the special interests of the wage-worker, the farmer, the
manufacturer, and the merchant, giving to each man his due and also
seeing that he does not wrong his fellows; but let us keep ever clearly
before our minds the great fact that, where the deepest chords are
touched, the interests of all are alike and must be guarded alike.

We must beware of any attempt to make hatred in any form the basis
of action. Most emphatically each of us needs to stand up for his
own rights; all men and all groups of men are bound to retain their
self-respect, and, demanding this same respect from others, to see
that they are not injured and that they have secured to them the
fullest liberty of thought and action. But to feed fat a grudge against
others, while it may or may not harm them, is sure in the long run to
do infinitely greater harm to the man himself.

The more a healthy American sees of his fellow-Americans the greater
grows his conviction that our chief troubles come from mutual
misunderstanding, from failure to appreciate one another’s point of
view. In other words, the great need is fellow-feeling, sympathy,
brotherhood; and all this naturally comes by association. It is,
therefore, of vital importance that there should be such association.
The most serious disadvantage in city life is the tendency of each
man to keep isolated in his own little set, and to look upon the
vast majority of his fellow-citizens indifferently, so that he soon
comes to forget that they have the same red blood, the same loves and
hates, the same likes and dislikes, the same desire for good, and the
same perpetual tendency, ever needing to be checked and corrected, to
lapse from good into evil. If only our people can be thrown together,
where they act on a common ground with the same motives, and have the
same objects, we need not have much fear of their failing to acquire
a genuine respect for one another; and with such respect there must
finally come fair play for all.

The first time I ever labored alongside of and got thrown into intimate
companionship with men who were mighty men of their hands was in the
cattle country of the Northwest. I soon grew to have an immense liking
and respect for my associates, and as I knew them, and did not know
similar workers in other parts of the country, it seemed to me that the
ranch-owner was a great deal better than any Eastern business man, and
that the cowpuncher stood on a corresponding altitude compared with any
of his brethren in the East.

Well, after a little while I was thrown into close relations with the
farmers, and it did not take long before I had moved them up alongside
of my beloved cowmen; and I made up my mind that _they_ really formed
the backbone of the land. Then, because of certain circumstances, I was
thrown into intimate contact with railroad men, and I gradually came to
the conclusion that these railroad men were about the finest citizens
there were anywhere around. Then, in the course of some official work,
I was thrown into close contact with a number of the carpenters,
blacksmiths, and men in the building trades, that is, skilled mechanics
of a high order, and it was not long before I had them on the same
pedestal with the others. By that time it began to dawn on me that the
difference was not in the men but in my own point of view, and that
if any man is thrown into close contact with any large body of our
fellow-citizens it is apt to be the man’s own fault if he does not grow
to feel for them a very hearty regard and, moreover, grow to understand
that, on the great questions that lie at the root of human well-being,
he and they feel alike.

Our prime need as a nation is that every American should understand and
work with his fellow-citizens, getting into touch with them, so that
by actual contact he may learn that fundamentally he and they have the
same interests, needs, and aspirations.

Of course different sections of the community have different needs. The
gravest questions that are before us, the questions that are for all
time, affect us all alike. But there are separate needs that affect
separate groups of men, just as there are separate needs that affect
each individual man. It is just as unwise to forget the one fact as it
is to forget the other. The specialization of our modern industrial
life, its high development and complex character, means a corresponding
specialization in needs and interests. While we should, so long as we
can safely do so, give to each individual the largest possible liberty,
a liberty which necessarily includes initiative and responsibility, yet
we must not hesitate to interfere whenever it is clearly seen that harm
comes from excessive individualism. We can not afford to be empirical
one way or the other. In the country districts the surroundings are
such that a man can usually work out his own fate by himself to the
best advantage. In our cities, or where men congregate in masses, it is
often necessary to work in combination, that is, through associations;
and here it is that we can see the great good conferred by labor
organizations, by trade-unions. Of course, if managed unwisely, the
very power of such a union or organization makes it capable of doing
much harm; but, on the whole, it would be hard to overestimate the
good these organizations have done in the past, and still harder to
estimate the good they can do in the future if handled with resolution,
forethought, honesty, and sanity.

It is not possible to lay down a hard-and-fast rule, logically perfect,
as to when the State shall interfere, and when the individual must be
left unhampered and unhelped.

We have exactly the same right to regulate the conditions of life
and work in factories and tenement-houses that we have to regulate
fire-escapes and the like in other houses. In certain communities the
existence of a thoroughly efficient department of factory inspection is
just as essential as the establishment of a fire department. How far
we shall go in regulating the hours of labor, or the liabilities of
employers, is a matter of expediency, and each case must be determined
on its own merits, exactly as it is a matter of expediency to
determine what so-called “public utilities” the community shall itself
own and what ones it shall leave to private or corporate ownership,
securing to itself merely the right to regulate. Sometimes one course
is expedient, sometimes the other.

In my own State during the last half-dozen years we have made a number
of notable strides in labor legislation, and, with very few exceptions,
the laws have worked well. This is, of course, partly because we have
not tried to do too much and have proceeded cautiously, feeling our
way, and, while always advancing, yet taking each step in advance only
when we were satisfied that the step already taken was in the right
direction. To invite reaction by unregulated zeal is never wise, and is
sometimes fatal.

In New York our action has been along two lines. In the first place,
we determined that as an employer of labor the State should set a good
example to other employers. We do not intend to permit the people’s
money to be squandered or to tolerate any work that is not the best.
But we think that, while rigidly insisting upon good work, we should
see that there is fair play in return. Accordingly, we have adopted
an eight-hour law for the State employees and for all contractors
who do State work, and we have also adopted a law requiring that the
fair market rate of wages shall be given. I am glad to say that both
measures have so far, on the whole, worked well. Of course there have
been individual difficulties, mostly where the work is intermittent,
as, for instance, among lock-tenders on the canals, where it is
very difficult to define what eight hours’ work means. But, on the
whole, the result has been good. The practical experiment of working
men for eight hours has been advantageous to the State. Poor work
is always dear, whether poorly paid or not, and good work is always
well worth having; and as a mere question of expediency, aside even
from the question of humanity, we find that we can obtain the best
work by paying fair wages and permitting the work to go on only for a
reasonable time.

The other side of our labor legislation has been that affecting the
wage-workers who do not work for the State. Here we have acted in
three different ways: through the Bureau of Labor Statistics, through
the Board of Mediation and Arbitration, and through the Department of
Factory Inspection.

During the last two years the Board of Mediation and Arbitration have
been especially successful. Not only have they succeeded in settling
many strikes after they were started, but they have succeeded in
preventing a much larger number of strikes before they got fairly under
way. Where possible it is always better to mediate before the strike
begins than to try to arbitrate when the fight is on and both sides
have grown stubborn and bitter.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has done more than merely gather the
statistics, for by keeping in close touch with all the leading labor
interests it has kept them informed on countless matters that were
really of vital concern to them. Incidentally, one pleasing feature
of the work of this bureau has been the steady upward tendency shown
during the last four, years both in amount of wages received and in the
quantity and steadiness of employment. No other man has benefited so
much as the wage-worker by the growth in prosperity during these years.

The Factory Inspection Department deals chiefly, of course, with
conditions in great cities. One very important phase of its work during
the last two years has been the enforcement of the anti-sweatshop
law, which is primarily designed to do away with the tenement-house
factory. The conditions of life in some of the congested tenement-house
districts, notably in New York City, had become such as to demand
action by the State. As with other reforms, in order to make it stable
and permanent, it had to be gradual. It proceeded by evolution, not
revolution. But progress has been steady, and wherever needed it
has been radical. Much remains to be done, but the condition of the
dwellers in the congested districts has been markedly improved, to the
great benefit not only of themselves, but of the whole community.

A word on the general question. In the first place, in addressing an
audience like this I do not have to say that the law of life is work,
and that work in itself, so far from being a hardship, is a great
blessing, provided, always, it is carried on under conditions which
preserve a man’s self-respect and which allow him to develop his own
character and rear his children so that he and they, as well as the
whole community of which he and they are part, may steadily move
onward and upward. The idler, rich or poor, is at best a useless and
is generally a noxious member of the community. To whom much has been
given, from him much is rightfully expected, and a heavy burden of
responsibility rests upon the man of means to justify by his actions
the social conditions which have rendered it possible for him or his
forefathers to accumulate and to keep the property he enjoys. He is
not to be excused if he does not render full measure of service to the
State and to the community at large. There are many ways in which this
service can be rendered,—in art, in literature, in philanthropy, as
a statesman, as a solider,—but in some way he is in honor bound to
render it, so that benefit may accrue to his brethren who have been
less favored by fortune than he has been. In short, he must work, and
work not only for himself, but for others. If he does not work, he
fails not only in his duty to the rest of the community, but he fails
signally in his duty to himself. There is no need of envying the idle.
Ordinarily, we can afford to treat them with impatient contempt; for
when they fail to do their duty they fail to get from life the highest
and keenest pleasure that life can give.

To do our duty—that is the summing up of the whole matter. We must do
our duty by ourselves and we must do our duty by our neighbors. Every
good citizen, whatever his condition, owes his first service to those
who are nearest to him, who are dependent upon him, to his wife, and
his children; next he owes his duty to his fellow-citizens, and this
duty he must perform both to his individual neighbor and to the State,
which is simply a form of expression for all his neighbors combined.
He must keep his self-respect and exact the respect of others. It is
eminently wise and proper to strive for such leisure in our lives as
will give a chance for self-improvement; but woe to the man who seeks,
or trains up his children to seek, idleness instead of the chance to
do good work. No worse wrong can be done by a man to his children than
to teach them to go through life endeavoring to shirk difficulties
instead of meeting them and overcoming them. You men here in the West
have built up this country not by seeking to avoid work, but by doing
it well; not by flinching from every difficulty, but by triumphing
over each as it arose and making out of it a stepping-stone to further
triumph.

We must all learn the two lessons—the lesson of self-help and the
lesson of giving help to and receiving help from our brother. There is
not a man of us who does not sometimes slip, who does not sometimes
need a helping hand; and woe to him who, when the chance comes, fails
to stretch out that helping hand. Yet, though each man can and ought
thus to be helped at times, he is lost beyond redemption if he becomes
so dependent upon outside help that he feels that his own exertions
are secondary. Any man at times will stumble, and it is then our
duty to lift him up and set him on his feet again; but no man can be
permanently carried, for if he expects to be carried he shows that he
is not worth carrying.

Before us loom industrial problems vast in their importance and their
complexity. The last half-century has been one of extraordinary social
and industrial development. The changes have been far-reaching; some
of them for good, and some of them for evil. It is not given to the
wisest of us to see into the future with absolute clearness. No man can
be certain that he has found the entire solution of this infinitely
great and intricate problem, and yet each man of us, if he would do
his duty, must strive manfully so far as in him lies to help bring
about that solution. It is not as yet possible to say what shall be the
exact limit of influence allowed the State, or what limit shall be set
to that right of individual initiative so dear to the hearts of the
American people. All we can say is that the need has been shown on the
one hand for action by the people, in their collective capacity through
the State, in many matters; that in other matters much can be done by
associations of different groups of individuals, as in trade-unions
and similar organizations; and that in other matters it remains now as
true as ever that final success will be for the man who trusts in the
struggle only to his cool, head, his brave heart, and his strong right
arm. There are spheres in which the State can properly act, and spheres
in which a free field must be given to individual initiative.

Though the conditions of life have grown so puzzling in their
complexity, though the changes have been so vast, yet we may remain
absolutely sure of one thing, that now, as ever in the past, and as
it ever will be in the future, there can be no substitute for the
elemental virtues, for the elemental qualities to which we allude
when we speak of a man as not only a good man but as emphatically
a man. We can build up the standard of individual citizenship and
individual well-being, we can raise the national standard and make it
what it can and shall be made, only by each of us steadfastly keeping
in mind that there can be no substitute for the world-old, humdrum,
commonplace qualities of truth, justice and courage, thrift, industry,
common-sense, and genuine sympathy with and fellow-feeling for others.
The nation is the aggregate of the individuals composing it, and each
individual American ever raises the nation higher when he so conducts
himself as to wrong no man, to suffer no wrong from others, and to show
both his sturdy capacity for self-help and his readiness to extend a
helping hand to the neighbor sinking under a burden too heavy for him
to bear.

The one fact which all of us need to keep steadfastly before our eyes
is the need that performance should square with promise if good work
is to be done, whether in the industrial or in the political world.
Nothing does more to promote mental dishonesty and moral insincerity
than the habit either of promising the impossible, or of demanding the
performance of the impossible, or finally, of failing to keep a promise
that has been made; and it makes not the slightest difference whether
it is a promise made on the stump or off the stump. Remember that there
are two sides to the wrong thus committed. There is, first, the wrong
of failing to keep a promise made, and, in the next place, there is the
wrong of demanding the impossible, and therefore forcing or permitting
weak or unscrupulous men to make a promise which they either know, or
should know, can not be kept. No small part of our troubles in dealing
with many of the gravest social questions, such as the so-called labor
question, the trust question, and others like them, arises from these
two attitudes. We can do a great deal when we undertake, soberly, to do
the possible. When we undertake the impossible, we too often fail to do
anything at all. The success of the law for the taxation of franchises
recently enacted in New York State, a measure which has resulted in
putting upon the assessment books nearly $200,000,000 worth of property
which had theretofore escaped taxation, is an illustration of how much
can be accomplished when effort is made along sane and sober lines,
with care not to promise the impossible but to make performance square
with promise, and with insistence on the fact that honesty is never
one-sided, and that in dealing with corporations it is necessary
both to do to them and to exact from them full and complete justice.
The success of this effort, made in a resolute but also a temperate
and reasonable spirit, shows what can be done when such a problem
is approached in a sound and healthy manner. It offers a striking
contrast to the complete breakdown of the species of crude and violent
anti-trust legislation which has been so often attempted, and which has
always failed, because of its very crudeness and violence, to make any
impression upon the real and dangerous evils which have excited such
just popular resentment.

I thank you for listening to me. I have come here to-day not to preach
to you, but partly to tell you how these matters look and seem to me,
and partly to set forth certain facts which seem to me to show the
essential community that there is among all of us who strive in good
faith to do our duty as American citizens. No man can do his duty who
does not work, and the work may take many different shapes, mental
and physical; but of this you can rest assured, that this work can be
done well for the nation only when each of us approaches his separate
task, not only with the determination to do it, but with the knowledge
that his fellow, when he in his turn does his task, has fundamentally
the same rights and the same duties, and that while each must work for
himself, yet each must also work for the common welfare of all.

On the whole, we shall all go up or go down together. Some may go up
or go down further than others, but, disregarding special exceptions,
the rule is that we must all share in common something of whatever
adversity or whatever prosperity is in store for the nation as a whole.
In the long run each section of the community will rise or fall as the
community rises or falls. If hard times come to the nation, whether
as the result of natural causes or because they are invited by our
own folly, all of us will suffer. Certain of us will suffer more, and
others less, but all will suffer somewhat. If, on the other hand, under
Providence, our own energy and good sense bring prosperity to us,
all will share in that prosperity. We will not all share alike, but
something each one of us will get. Let us strive to make the conditions
of life such that as nearly as possible each man shall receive the
share to which he is honestly entitled and no more; and let us remember
at the same time that our efforts must be to build up, rather than to
strike down, and that we can best help ourselves, not at the expense of
others, but by heartily working with them for the common good of each
and all.




CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP

ADDRESS BEFORE THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, CARNEGIE HALL,
NEW YORK, DECEMBER 30, 1900


It is a peculiar pleasure to me to come before you to-night to greet
you and to bear testimony to the great good that has been done by these
Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations throughout the
United States. More and more we are getting to recognize the law of
combination. This is true of many phases in our industrial life, and it
is equally true of the world of philanthropic effort. Nowhere is it,
or will it ever be, possible to supplant individual effort, individual
initiative; but in addition to this there must be work in combination.
More and more this is recognized as true not only in charitable work
proper, but in that best form of philanthropic endeavor where we all do
good to ourselves by all joining together to do good to one another.
This is exactly what is done in your associations.

It seems to me that there are several reasons why you are entitled to
especial recognition from all who are interested in the betterment of
our American social system. First and foremost, your organization
recognizes the vital need of brotherhood, the most vital of all our
needs here in this great Republic. The existence of a Young Men’s or
Young Women’s Christian Association is certain proof that some people
at least recognize in practical shape the identity of aspiration and
interest, both in things material and in things higher, which with us
must be widespread through the masses of our people if our national
life is to attain full development. This spirit of brotherhood
recognizes of necessity both the need of self-help and also the need
of helping others in the only way which ever ultimately does great
good, that is, of helping them to help themselves. Every man of us
needs such help at some time or other, and each of us should be glad
to stretch out his hand to a brother who stumbles. But while every man
needs at times to be lifted up when he stumbles, no man can afford to
let himself be carried, and it is worth no man’s while to try thus to
carry some one else. The man who lies down, who will not try to walk,
has become a mere cumberer of the earth’s surface.

These Associations of yours try to make men self-helpful and to help
them when they are self-helpful. They do not try merely to carry them,
to benefit them for the moment at the cost of their future undoing.
This means that all in any way connected with them not merely retain
but increase their self-respect. Any man who takes part in the work
of such an organization is benefited to some extent and benefits the
community to some extent—of course, always with the proviso that the
organization is well managed and is run on a business basis, as well as
with a philanthropic purpose.

The feeling of brotherhood is necessarily as remote from a patronizing
spirit, on the one hand, as from a spirit of envy and malice, on the
other. The best work for our uplifting must be done by ourselves,
and yet with brotherly kindness for our neighbor. In such work, and
therefore in the kind of work done by the Young Men’s Christian
Associations, we all stand on the self-respecting basis of mutual
benefit and common effort. All of us who take part in any such work,
in whatever measure, both receive and confer benefits. This is true of
the founder and giver, and it is no less true of every man who takes
advantage of what the founder and giver have done. These bodies make us
all realize how much we have in common, and how much we can do when we
work in common. I doubt if it is possible to overestimate the good done
by the mere fact of association with a common interest and for a common
end, and when the common interest is high and the common end peculiarly
worthy, the good done is of course many times increased.

Besides developing this sense of brotherhood, the feeling which breeds
respect both for one’s self and for others, your Associations have a
peculiar value in showing what can be done by acting in combination
without aid from the State. While on the one hand it has become
evident that under the conditions of modern life we can not allow an
unlimited individualism which may work harm to the community, it is no
less evident that the sphere of the State’s action should be extended
very cautiously, and so far as possible only where it will not crush
out healthy individual initiative. Voluntary action by individuals
in the form of associations of any kind for mutual betterment or
mutual advantage often offers a way to avoid alike the dangers of
State control and the dangers of excessive individualism. This is
particularly true of efforts for that most important of all forms of
betterment, moral betterment—the moral betterment which usually brings
material betterment in its train.

It is only in this way, by all of us working together in a spirit of
brotherhood, by each doing his part for the betterment of himself and
of others, that it is possible for us to solve the tremendous problems
with which as a nation we are now confronted. Our industrial life
has become so complex, its rate of movement so very rapid, and the
specialization and differentiation so intense that we find ourselves
face to face with conditions that were practically unknown in this
nation half a century ago. The power of the forces of evil has been
greatly increased, and it is necessary for our self-preservation that
we should similarly strengthen the forces for good. We are all of us
bound to work toward this end. No one of us can do everything, but each
of us can do something, and if we work together the aggregate of these
somethings will be very considerable.

There are, of course, a thousand different ways in which the work can
be done, and each man must choose as his tastes and his powers bid
him, if he is to do the best of which he is capable. But all the kinds
of work must be carried along on certain definite lines if good is to
come. All the work must be attempted as on the whole this Young Men’s
Christian Association work has been done, that is, in a spirit of good
will toward all and not of hatred toward some; in a spirit in which to
broad charity for mankind there is added a keen and healthy sanity of
mind. We must retain our self-respect, each and all of us, and we must
beware alike of mushy sentimentality and of envy and hatred.

It ought not to be necessary for me to warn you against mere
sentimentality, against the philanthropy and charity which are not
merely insufficient but harmful. It is eminently desirable that we
should none of us be hard-hearted, but it is no less desirable that
we should not be soft-headed. I really do not know which quality is
most productive of evil to mankind in the long run, hardness of heart
or softness of head. Naked charity is not what we permanently want.
There are of course certain classes, such as young children, widows
with large families, or crippled or very aged people, or even strong
men temporarily crushed by stunning misfortune, on whose behalf we
may have to make a frank and direct appeal to charity, and who can be
the recipients of it without any loss of self-respect. But taking us
as a whole, taking the mass of Americans, we do not want charity, we
do not want sentimentality; we merely want to learn how to act both
individually and together in such fashion as to enable us to hold our
own in the world, to do good to others according to the measure of our
opportunities, and to receive good from others in ways which will not
entail on our part any loss of self-respect.

It ought to be unnecessary to say that any man who tries to solve the
great problems that confront us by an appeal to anger and passion, to
ignorance and folly, to malice and envy, is not, and never can be,
aught but an enemy of the very people he professes to befriend. In the
words of Lowell, it is far safer to adopt “All men up” than “Some men
down” for a motto. Speaking broadly, we can not in the long run benefit
one man by the downfall of another. Our energies, as a rule, can be
employed to much better advantage in uplifting some than in pulling
down others. Of course there must sometimes be pulling down, too. We
have no business to blink evils, and where it is necessary that the
knife should be used, let it be used unsparingly, but let it be used
intelligently. When there is need of a drastic remedy, apply it, but do
not apply it in the spirit of hate. Normally a pound of construction is
worth a ton of destruction.

There is degradation to us if we feel envy and malice and hatred toward
our neighbor for any cause; and if we envy him merely his riches, we
show we have ourselves low ideals. Money is a good thing. It is a
foolish affectation to deny it. But it is not the only good thing,
and after a certain amount has been amassed it ceases to be the chief
even of material good things. It is far better, for instance, to do
well a bit of work which is well worth doing, than to have a large
fortune. I do not care whether this work is that of an engineer on a
great railroad, or captain of a fishing-boat, or foreman in a factory
or machine-shop, or section boss, or division chief, or assistant
astronomer in an observatory, or a second lieutenant somewhere in China
or the Philippines—each has an important piece of work to do, and if
he is really interested in it, and has the right stuff in him, he will
be altogether too proud of what he is doing, and too intent on doing
it well, to waste his time in envying others.

From the days when the chosen people received the Decalogue to our own,
envy and malice have been recognized as evils, and woe to those who
appeal to them. To break the Tenth Commandment is no more moral now
than it has been for the past thirty centuries. The vice of envy is not
only a dangerous but also a mean vice, for it is always a confession
of inferiority. It may provoke conduct which will be fruitful of
wrongdoing to others, and it must cause misery to the man who feels
it. It will not be any the less fruitful of wrong and misery if, as
is so often the case with evil motives, it adopts some high-sounding
alias. The truth is that each one of us has in him certain passions and
instincts which if they gained the upper hand in his soul would mean
that the wild beast had come uppermost in him. Envy, malice, and hatred
are such passions, and they are just as bad if directed against a class
or group of men as if directed against an individual. What we need in
our leaders and teachers is help in suppressing such feelings, help in
arousing and directing the feelings that are their extreme opposites.
Woe to us as a nation if we ever follow the lead of men who seek not
to smother but to inflame the wild-beast qualities of the human heart!
In social and industrial no less than in political reform we can do
healthy work, work fit for a free Republic, fit for self-governing
democracy, only by treading in the footsteps of Washington and Franklin
and Adams and Patrick Henry, and not in the steps of Marat and
Robespierre.

So far, what I have had to say has dealt mainly with our relations
to one another in what may be called the service of the State. But
the basis of good citizenship is the home. A man must be a good son,
husband, and father, a woman a good daughter, wife, and mother, first
and foremost. There must be no shirking of duties in big things or
in little things. The man who will not work hard for his wife and
his little ones, the woman who shrinks from bearing and rearing many
healthy children, these have no place among the men and women who are
striving upward and onward. Of course the family is the foundation of
all things in the State. Sins against pure and healthy family life
are those which of all others are sure in the end to be visited most
heavily upon the nation in which they take place. We must beware,
moreover, not merely of the great sins, but of the lesser ones which
when taken together cause such an appalling aggregate of misery
and wrong. The drunkard, the lewd liver, the coward, the liar, the
dishonest man, the man who is brutal to or neglectful of parents,
wife, or children—of all of these the shrift should be short when we
speak of decent citizenship. Every ounce of effort for good in your
Associations is part of the ceaseless war against the traits which
produce such men. But in addition to condemning the grosser forms of
evil we must not forget to condemn also the evils of bad temper, lack
of gentleness, nagging and whining fretfulness, lack of consideration
for others—the evils of selfishness in all its myriad forms. Each man
or woman must remember his or her duty to all around, and especially to
those closest and nearest, and such remembrance is the best possible
preparation for doing duty for the State as a whole.

We ask that these Associations, and the men and women who take part
in them, practice the Christian doctrines which are preached from
every true pulpit. The Decalogue and the Golden Rule must stand as the
foundation of every successful effort to better either our social or
our political life. “Fear the Lord and walk in his ways” and “Love thy
neighbor as thyself”—when we practice these two precepts, the reign
of social and civic righteousness will be close at hand. Christianity
teaches not only that each of us must so live as to save his own soul,
but that each must also strive to do his whole duty by his neighbor. We
can not live up to these teachings as we should; for in the presence
of infinite might and infinite wisdom, the strength of the strongest
man is but weakness, and the keenest of mortal eyes see but dimly.
But each of us can at least strive, as light and strength are given
him, toward the ideal. Effort along any one line will not suffice. We
must not only be good, but strong. We must not only be high-minded,
but brave-hearted. We must think loftily, and we must also work hard.
It is not written in the Holy Book that we must merely be harmless
as doves. It is also written that we must be wise as serpents. Craft
unaccompanied by conscience makes the crafty man a social wild beast
who preys on the community and must be hunted out of it. Gentleness and
sweetness unbacked by strength and high resolve are almost impotent for
good.

The true Christian is the true citizen, lofty of purpose, resolute in
endeavor, ready for a hero’s deeds, but never looking down on his task
because it is cast in the day of small things; scornful of baseness,
awake to his own duties as well as to his rights, following the higher
law with reverence, and in this world doing all that in him lies, so
that when death comes he may feel that mankind is in some degree better
because he has lived.

END OF VOLUME TWELVE





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt,
Volume 12 (of 14), by Theodore Roosevelt

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