|
THEODORE ROOSEVELT AT THE SORBONNE - 1910
The Man in the Arena
 |
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
thralldom 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 fisher
folk 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 primeval conditions must be met by the
primeval 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.
Today 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 criticize 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 role is easy; there
is none easier, save only the role 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 is 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 Charlemagne 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 willful 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 thralldom 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 can 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.
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 judgment 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.
More History
|
|
