Université Paris-Sorbonne
23 April 1910
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind
of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body
in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes
pass the shadows of mighty kings and war-like nobles, of
great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust
of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of
the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and
he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship
meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet
from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
This was the most famous university of mediaeval Europe
at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to
discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge
already stretched far back into the remote past at a time
when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the
sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and
fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness
of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has
now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a
continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature,
means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it
cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered
wisdom which where once theirs, and which are still in the
hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer
the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces
with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of our
race. The primaeval conditions must be met by the
primaeval qualities which are incompatible with the
retention of much that has been painfully acquired by
humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward
civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive
culture. At first only the rudest school can be established,
for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven,
sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of
savage men and savage nature; and many years elapse before
any of these schools can develop into seats of higher
learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand
into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded
clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of
game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and
tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives
long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers
of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the
civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children
of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and
their children and children’s children, change and develop
with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate
vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good
qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism,
self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its
rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings.
To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard
materialism of an industrialism even more intense and
absorbing than that of the older nations; although these
themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a
complex and predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success
in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the
possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce
their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first
rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward
to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly,
that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an
individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there
is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to
loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be
developed afresh from what is roundabout in the New World;
but it can developed in full only by freely drawing upon
the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored
in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this is where
I speak to-day. It is a mistake for any nation to merely
copy another; but it is even a greater mistake, it is a
proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn
from one another and willing and able to adapt that
learning to the new national conditions and make it
fruitful and productive therein. It is for us of the New World
to sit at the feet of Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the
right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his turn can
become a teacher as well as a scholar.
To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual
citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you,
my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we
a great citizens of great democratic republics. A
democratic republic such as ours – an effort to realize its
full sense government by, of, and for the people –
represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments,
the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and
evil. The success or republics like yours and like ours
means the glory, and our failure of despair, of mankind;
and for you and for us the question of the quality of the
individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of
government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the
quality of the leaders is all-important. If, under such governments,
the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for
generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially
to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the
quality of average citizen; because the average citizen is
an almost negligible quantity in working out the final
results of that type of national greatness.
But with you and us the case is different. With you
here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or
failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the
average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first
in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in
those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues.
The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics
are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the
main source; and the main source of national power and
national greatness is found in the average citizenship of
the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see
that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and
the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the
leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in
any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course,
drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day;
but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of
sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals.
You and those like you have received special advantages;
you have all of you had the opportunity for mental
training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance
for enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority
of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given,
and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain
failings against which it is especially incumbent that
both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of
inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves,
because to these failings they are especially liable; and if
yielded to, their – your – chances of useful service are at
an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure,
beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself
and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown
emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as
one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a
sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride
in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to
criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even
attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of
respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to
hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is
great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble
effort which, even if it fails, comes to second
achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness
to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform,
an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact
with life’s realities – all these are marks, not as the
possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of
weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part
painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the
affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide
from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is
easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man
who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man
who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the
doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face
in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,
because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but
who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great
enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a
worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph
of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at
least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall
never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know
victory nor defeat.
Shame on the man of cultivated
taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that
unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.
Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a
small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered
life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less
room is there for those who deride of slight what is done
by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for
those others who always profess that they would like to take action,
if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they
actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid
figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or
fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose
tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of
the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of
the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these
men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail,
given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put
forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur,
spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and
valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over
the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns
would have been a valiant soldier.”
France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely
one of the most important lesson is the lesson her whole
history teaches, that a high artistic and literary
development is compatible with notable leadership im arms
and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French
soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during
these same centuries at every court in Europe the “freemasons of
fashion: have treated the French tongue as their common
speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every
man of science able to appreciate that marvelous instrument
of precision, French prose, had turned toward France for
aid and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and
letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the
earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid
French epic which tells of Roland’s doom and the vengeance
of Charlemange when the lords of the Frankish hosts where
stricken at Roncesvalles.
Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive
to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship.
Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain
other things. There is need of a sound body, and even more
of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands
character – the sum of those qualities which we mean when
we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith
and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always
provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means
and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the
people a good education. But the education must contain
much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We
must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of
intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for
the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint,
self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual
responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with
others, courage and resolution – these are the qualities
which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can
control itself, or save itself from being controlled from
the outside. I speak to brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great
university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual
development; I pay all homage to intellect and to
elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and
yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present
when I add that more important still are the commonplace,
every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will
and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of
healthy children. The need that the average man shall work
is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a
few people in every country so born that they can lead
lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make
it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some
of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially
non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people
who do this work should in large part be drawn from those
to whom remuneration is an object of indifference. But the
average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be
trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he
occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he
is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the
social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an
object of derision.
In the next place, the good man should be both a strong
and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he
should be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the
need arises. There are well-meaning philosophers who
declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right
only if they lay all their emphasis upon the
unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime
against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust,
not because it is a war. The choice must ever be in favor
of righteousness, and this is whether the alternative be
peace or whether the alternative be war. The question must
not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question
must be, Is it right to prevail? Are the great laws of
righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong
and virile people must be “Yes,” whatever the cost. Every
honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just
as every honorable effort should always be made by the
individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep
out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no
self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work,
even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to
remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it
shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown
of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of
blessings now. The greatest of all curses in is the curse
of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should
be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential
in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and
mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and
not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the
society there is failure to increase, it is a great
misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and
wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one
of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking
from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes
more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if
we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves
form the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our
heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then
it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our
achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement
of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid
heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and
literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the
great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental
virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the
race.
Character must show itself in the man’s performance
both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the
state. The man’s foremast duty is owed to himself and his
family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by
providing what is essential to material well-being; it is
only after this has been done that he can hope to build a
higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it
is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements
for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first,
and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to
the general public. It is not good to excite that bitter
laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we
feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is
such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes
to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who
cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.
Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point,
while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact
that there must be a basis of material well-being for the
individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis
insist that this material well-being represents nothing but
the foundation, and that the foundation, though
indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure
of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the
mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset
of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to
my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a
way that makes him a real benefit, of real use – and such is
often the case – why, then he does become an asset of real worth.
But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not
the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit.
There is need in business, as in most other forms of human
activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places
cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences.
It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition,
ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to
the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should
be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then
admiration will only come from those who are mean of soul.
The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible
material success or reward has been achieved, the question
of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance
compared to the other things that can be done in life.
It
is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard
of success; and their can be no falser standard than that set
by the deification of material well-being in and for
itself. But the man who, having far surpassed the limits of
providing for the wants; both of the body and mind, of
himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a
great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he
returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole,
should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable,
he is an unworthy, citizen of the community: that he is to be
neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow
countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and
leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose
level of purpose is even lower than his own.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be
put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights
must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great
majority of cases, human rights and property rights are
fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it
clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them,
human rights must have the upper hand, for property
belongs to man and not man to property.
In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly
to understand that there are certain qualities which we in a
democracy are prone to admire in and of themselves, which
ought by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse
solely from the standpoint of the use made of them.
Foremost among these I should include two very distinct
gifts – the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making,
the money touch I have spoken of above. It is a quality
which in a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful
when developed to a very great degree, but only if
accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and without
such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the
least attractive types produced by a modern industrial
democracy. So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a
leader of opinion in democracy should be able to state his views
clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do
of value to the community is enable the man thus to explain
himself; if it enables the orator to put false values on
things, it merely makes him power for mischief. Some
excellent public servants have not that gift at all, and
must merely rely on their deeds to speak for them; and unless
oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common sense
and able to be translated into efficient performance, then
the better the oratory the greater the damage to the public
it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked political
weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be
carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words
in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which
they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the
ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not
make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is
simply a noxious element in the body politic, and it speaks
ill for the public if he has influence over them. To
admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral
quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with
even greater force to the orator’s latter-day and more
influential brother, the journalist. The power of the
journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect
nor admiration because of that power unless it is used
aright. He cna do, and often does, great good. He can do,
and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all
writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities
of their profession, should bear testimony against those
who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals,
which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely
worse if made into instruments for debauching the community
through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism,
inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the
debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced
for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that demand
must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were
advanced by purveyors of food who sell poisonous
adulterations.
In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize
that the ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that
neither avails without the other. He must have those
qualities which make for efficiency; and that he also must
have those qualities which direct the efficiency into
channels for the public good. He is useless if he is
inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen
of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue
which is dependant upon a sluggish circulation is not
impressive. There is little place in active life for the
timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from
robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from robuster
virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all
be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the
ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make
him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen
unless he is an efficient citizen.
But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated
by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he
is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage,
intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a
man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own
advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of
others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships
these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless
of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It
makes no difference as to the precise way in which this
sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference
whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in
a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator,
journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the
more successful he is the more he should be despised and
condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man
merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people
at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone
wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their
inability to understand that in the last analysis free
institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that
by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.
The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary
workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and
housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good
husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the
bottom of character. But of course many other must be added
thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good
citizenship is not good citizenship if only exhibited in the
home. There remains the duties of the individual in relation to the
State, and these duties are none too easy under the
conditions which exist where the effort is made to carry on
the free government in a complex industrial civilization.
Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, and,
above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to
remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire.
The closest philosopher, the refined and cultured individual
who from his library tells how men ought to be governed
under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental
work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the
mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power
promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely
useless but noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must
be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good
comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown
fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable
to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often
the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of
the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and
shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give
effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better
things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty
idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the
man of action, turns against him when he appears and
hampers him when he does work! Moreover, the preacher of
ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which
he will cut, how great the damage that he will do, if he does
not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize
the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember
also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined
by the success with which it can in practice be realized.
We should abhor the so-called “practical” men whose
practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness
which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in
disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a
creature is the worst enemy of the body of politic. But
only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent
and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes the
impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires
of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an
extreme socialism. Individual initiative, so far from being
discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should
remember that, as society develops and grows more complex,
we continually find that things which once it was desirable
to leave to individual initiative can, under changed conditions, be
performed with better results by common effort. It is quite
impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a
hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets
of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the pride
of the closest philosopher will see, if he will only take
the trouble to think about some of our closet phenomena.
For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets,
each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and
water-supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a
given area produces new problems which, because they differ
in size, are found to differ not only in degree, but in
kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and
water-supply have to be considered from the common standpoint.
It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this
point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical
experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and
individualism is entirely pointless, because of the failure
to agree on terminology. It is not good to be a slave of
names. I am a strong individualist by personal habit,
inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense
to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens
acting together, can do a number of things better than if
they were left to individual action. The individualism
which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force
is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we
of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that
individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits
the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We
ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about
justice and the equality of opportunity, to turn the
tool-user more and more into the tool-owner, to shift
burdens so that they can be more equitably borne. The deadening
effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme
socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell
sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and
outrage, fouler immortality, than any existing system. But
this does not mean that we may not with great advantage
adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set
of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid
to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part. (I strike this out for two reasons: One, I disagree with it and do not want to leave the impression that I do and, second, the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, one of my most disliked presidents, failed to live to see the horrific deeds of those men "who happen to call themselves Socialists" and the utter and complete moral, ethical, financial and realistic bankruptcy of the economic and political theory of Socialism; thus, he could only imagine the "grosser wrongs, outrages, fouler immortalities.")
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more
than in telling a lie. We should not say that men are equal
where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption
that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we
should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at
least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is
due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain
people, blood of their blood, and bone of their bone, who
all his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, at the
end died for them, who always strove to represent them, who would
never tell an untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of
equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound
common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local
significance):
“I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal-equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all – constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.”
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would
make us desist from the effort to do away with the
inequality which means injustice; the inequality of
right, opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor
to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far is
humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the
ideal that each man shall have an equal opportunity to
show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he renders
service. There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity
to render service; but just so long as there is
inequality of service there should and must be
inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general,
the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession
or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose
fault it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must
go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is
to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and
weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever
form it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable,
ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted,
capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and
cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us
beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles,
it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one
of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man
lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and
it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that
the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and
those who do it.
Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and
not be misled into following any proposal for achieving the
millennium, for recreating the golden age, until we
have subjected it to hardheaded examination. On the
other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal merely
because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme
is proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it,
disregard formulas. It does not matter in the least who
proposes it, or why. If it seems good, try it. If it
proves good, accept it; otherwise reject it. There are
plenty of good men calling themselves Socialists with
whom, up to a certain point, it is quite possible to
work. If the next step is one which both we and they
wish to take, why of course take it, without any regard
to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may differ. But,
on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it has
been worth while to take one step, this does not in the
least mean that it may not be highly disadvantageous
to take the next. It is just as foolish to refuse all
progress because people demanding it desire at some
points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go
to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures
advocated by the extremists were wise.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter
of pride he will see to it that others receive liberty
which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test
of true love of liberty in any country in the way in
which minorities are treated in that country. Not only
should there be complete liberty in matters of religion
and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead
his life as he desires, provided only that in so he
does not wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is
persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the
most to be the persecutor and which the persecuted.
Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without
regard to the individual who, at a given time,
substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation,
of substitutes hatred of men because they happen to
come in a certain social category, for judgement awarded them
according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure
of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance
which would look down upon or crush any man because he
is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a
man because he is wealthy. The overbearing brutality of
the man of wealth or power, and the envious and
hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really
at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely
two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to
wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate
brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and
violent demagogue who excites those who have not
property to plunder those who have. The gravest wrong
upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station,
who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line
that separates class from class, occupation from
occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth,
instead of remembering that the only safe standard is
that which judges each man on his worth as a man,
whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without
regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the
only true democratic test, the only test that can with
propriety be applied in a republic. There have been
many republics in the past, both in what we call
antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They
fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact
that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates
wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was
successful; it made no difference whether the republic
fell under the rule of and oligarchy or the rule of a
mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had
been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end
of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need
to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage
between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad
citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel
with, the lines of cleavage between class and class,
between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the
face if we judge a man by his position instead of
judging him by his conduct in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity
of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of
conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of
religious, political, and social belief must exist if
conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if
there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter
internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs,
not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether
religious or antireligious, democratic or
antidemocratic, it itself but a manifestation of the
gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the
downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of
a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to
them to support him on the ground that he is hostile
to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure
for those who elect him, in one shape or another,
profit at the expense of other citizens of the
republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to
class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious
prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be
presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own
interest. The very last thing an intelligent and
self-respecting member of a democratic community should
do is to reward any public man because that public man
says that he will get the private citizen something to which
this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some
emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought
not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one anecdote
from my own experience. A number of years ago I was
engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the
western Unite States. There were no fences. The cattle
wandered free, the ownership of each one was determined
by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the cows
they followed. If on a round-up and animal was passed by, the
following year it would appear as an unbranded
yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom
of the country these mavericks were branded with the
brand of the man on whose range they were found. One
day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy,
and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built
a fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it in the fire; and
then the cowboy started to put on the brand. I said to
him, “It So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose
range we happened to be. He answered: “That’s all
right, boss; I know my business.” In another moment I
said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!” To which
he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s
brand.” I answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight
back to the ranch and get whatever is owing to you; I
don’t need you any longer.” He jumped up and said:
“Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.”
And I answered:
“Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me, then you will steal from me.”
Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies
also in public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by
saying that he will do something wrong in your
interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it
becomes worth his while he will do something wrong
against your interest.
So much for the citizenship to the individual in his relations
to his family, to his neighbor, to the State. There remain
duties of citizenship which the State, the aggregation
of all the individuals, owes in connection with other
States, with other nations. Let me say at once that I
am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe
that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and
as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world.
Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that
his international feeling swamps his national feeling,
that he does not care for his country because he cares
so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself
the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does
not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he
is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and
exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the
world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all
moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present,
if a man can view his own country and all others
countries from the same level with tepid indifference,
it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to
distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate
view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies,
however intense his activities, he need have no fear
that they will be cramped by love of his native land.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish
to good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as
I think that the man who loves his family is more apt
to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I
think that the most useful member of the family of
nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far
from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper
regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot,
who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman of
his own honor, will be careful to see that the nations
neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a
gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer
others to wrong him. I do not for one moment admit that
a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in
his dealing with other nations, any more than he should act deceitfully
in his dealings as a private citizen with other private
citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation
should treat other nations in a different spirit from
that in which an honorable man would treat other men.
In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases
there is, of course, a great practical difference to be
taken into account. We speak of international law; but
international law is something wholly different from
private of municipal law, and the capital difference is
that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction
for the other; that there is an outside force which
compels individuals to obey the one, while there is no such
outside force to compel obedience as regards to the other.
International law will, I believe, as the generations
pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or
other there develops the power to make it respected.
But as yet it is only in the first formative period. As
yet, as a rule, each nation is of necessity to judge
for itself in matters of vital importance between it and its neighbors,
and actions must be of necessity, where this is the
case, be different from what they are where, as among
private citizens, there is an outside force whose
action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any
crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise statesman,
gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and
build up every movement which will substitute or tend to
substitute some other agency for force in the
settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of
every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so
that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet
the great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves
and to the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep in
mind that in the last resort they must possess both the
will and the power to resent wrong-doings from others.
The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach
righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether
among private citizens or among nations. We believe
that our ideals should be so high, but not so high as
to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely
and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice
conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for
justice though the whole world came in arms against
him.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the
only two republics among the great powers of the world. The
ancient friendship between France and the United States
has been, on the whole, a sincere and disinterested
friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to us.
But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil
of the history of humanity certain nations stand out
as possessing a peculiar power or charm, some special gift
of beauty or wisdom of strength, which puts them among the
immortals, which makes them rank forever with the
leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For
her to sink would be a loss to all the world. There
are certain lessons of brilliance and of generous
gallantry that she can teach better than any of her sister nations.
When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it was to tell
how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward
through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries
ago, Froisart, writing of the time of dire disaster,
said that the realm of France was never so stricken
that there were not left men who would valiantly fight
for it. You have had a great past. I believe you will have a great
future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of
a nation which bears a leading part in the teaching
and uplifting of mankind.
- Theodore Roosevelt
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