PUBLIC SPIRIT
Violent crises in the lives of men and nations usually produce their own
remedies. They grasp the attention and stir the consciences of men, and
usually they evolve leaders and measures to meet their imperious needs.
But the great evident crises are by no means the only ones of
importance. The quiet turning point, reached and passed often with
slight attention and wholly without struggle, is frequently not less
decisive. Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld
in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical
character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can
say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and irrevocable, step was
actually accomplished.
The United States has been in the midst of such a period of decision
since the Spanish War called into blossom the quiet growth of years, and
we are still face to face with questions of the most vital bearing upon
our future. The changes now in progress are accompanied by no
convulsions, yet the whole character of our civilization is being
rapidly crystallized anew as our country takes its inevitable place in
the world.
So quietly are the great forces at work that some of our most vital
problems have remained almost unrecognized by the public until the last
two years. Yet the fact that these decisions are being made is almost
appalling in its magnitude, and their indescribable consequence not only
to the United States, but to all the nations of the earth, needs to be
vividly realized by every one of us, for it is one of the great
compelling reasons why the public spirit of young men is needed so
urgently and at once. And more specific reasons press upon us from every
side.
Recently the attention of our people, thanks largely to President
Roosevelt, was focussed upon the presence or absence of the common
virtues and the common decencies in public life. The revelation of
corruption in politics, in business, and here and there in the public
service, is a testimony not of unwonted wickedness in high places, but
of unwonted sensitiveness in public opinion, and so far as it goes it is
a most hopeful sign; but it does not yet go far enough.
The opportunity to set a new standard in political morality is here now.
Public sensitiveness on every subject ebbs and flows and must be taken
at the flood if the use of it is to be really effective. Decision made
now as to the character of our public life will be valid for many years,
for it is but seldom that the question comes so clearly before us. The
war for righteousness is endless, but this is one of the great battles,
and its results will endure.
We are now in the throes of decision on the whole question of business
in politics, of politics for business purposes, and we must take our
share in determining whether the object of our political system is to be
unclean money or free men. The present strong movement to prevent the
political control of public men, law-courts, and legislatures by great
commercial enterprises will either flash in the pan or it will succeed;
it will leave either the man or the dollar in control. The decision will
be made by the young men, and it is not far ahead.
The question of efficiency in public office has been brought to the
front as never before in the history of the Nation. As a whole, our
public service is honest, but we should be able to take honesty for
granted. What we lack is the tradition of high efficiency that makes
great enterprises succeed. The national house-keeping, the Government's
vast machinery, should be the cleanest, the most effective, and the best
in methods and in men, for its touch upon the life of the Nation at
every point is constant and vital.
There is no hunger like land hunger, and no object for which men are
more ready to use unfair and desperate means than the acquisition of
land. Under the influence of this compelling desire, assisted by
obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in
the public-land States west of the Mississippi the great question
whether the Western people are to be predominately a people of tenants
under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political vassalage, or
free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating the importance
of the decision.
We have been deciding, and the decision is not yet fully made, whether
the future shall suffer the long train of ills which everywhere has
followed, and must always follow, the abuse of the forest, or whether by
protecting the timberlands we shall assure the prosperity of all of the
users of the wood, the water, and the forage which our forests supply.
Nothing less than the whole agricultural and commercial welfare of the
country is in the balance. No other conservation question compares with
this in the vital intimacy of its touch on every portion of our national
life.
Other great questions only less vital I cannot even refer to, but one of
the central ones remains--our whole future is at stake in the education
of our young men in politics and public spirit. The greatest work that
Theodore Roosevelt did for the United States, the great fact which will
give his influence vitality and power long after we shall all have gone
to our reward, greater than his great services in bringing peace, in
settling strikes, in preaching the crusade of honesty and decency in
business and in daily life, is the fact that he changed the attitude of
the American people toward conserving the natural resources, and toward
public questions and public life. The time was, not long ago, when it
was not respectable to be interested in politics. The time is coming,
and I do not believe it is far ahead, when it will not be respectable
not to be interested in public affairs. Few changes can mean so much.
Among the first duties of every man is to help in bringing the Kingdom
of God on earth. The greatest human power for good, the most efficient
earthly tool for the future uplifting of the nations, is without
question the United States; and the presence or absence of a vital
public spirit in the young men of the United States will determine the
quality of that great tool and the work that it can do. This is the
final object of the best citizenship. Public spirit is the means by
which every man can help toward this great end. Public spirit is
patriotism in action; it is the application of Christianity to the
commonwealth; it is effective loyalty to our country, to the brotherhood
of man, and to the future. It is the use of a man by himself for the
general good.
Public spirit is the one great antidote for all the ills of the Nation,
and greatly the Nation needs it now. In a day when the vast increase in
wealth tends to reduce all things, moral, intellectual and material, to
the measure of the dollar; in a day when we have with us always the man
who is working for his own pocket all the time; when the monopolist of
land, of opportunity, of power or privilege in any form, is ever in the
public eye--it is good to remember that the real leaders are the men who
value the right to give themselves more highly than any gain whatsoever.
It is given to few men to serve their country as greatly as President
Roosevelt has done, yet vastly smaller services are still tremendously
worth while. I question whether there has ever been a time and place
(except in violent crises) when the demand for public spirit was greater
than now and the results of it more assured. Public spirit is never
needed more than in times of prosperity, and it is never more effective.
It is the boat which is floating easily and rapidly with the stream that
is most in danger of striking the rocks.
The reasons why public opinion may be so effective in the United States
are not far to seek. The extreme sensitiveness of our form of government
to political control is one of the commonplaces that has real meaning.
We seldom realize that ours is actually what it pretends to be--a
representative government--and our legislatures are extraordinarily
sensitive to what the people, the politically effective people, really
want. The Senators and Representatives in Congress do actually and
accurately represent the men who send them there, and they respond like
lightning to a clear order from the controlling element at home. It is
in the power of public spirit to say whether men or money shall control.
If public spirit is in the saddle, the fundamental purpose of all the
people, which is good, will govern. If not, the bosses and the great
private interests will have their way. Without the backing of the public
spirit of good men, even the President himself loses by far the greater
portion of his power. For the power to do what we hope to see
accomplished, we must look most of all to the public spirit of the young
men.
But some one will say that great service is beyond his individual power.
I do not believe that great service is beyond the power of any young
man. This is not a matter in which obstacles decide. The man for whom
all the barriers to success have been broken down is not, as a rule, the
man who succeeds. On the contrary, conflict is the condition of
success. The quality of the man himself decides. The more I study men,
which is the daily occupation of every man in affairs, the more firmly I
am assured that the great fundamental difference between men, the reason
why some fail and some succeed, is not a difference in ability or
opportunity, but a difference in vision and in relentless loyalty to
ideals--vision to see the great object, and relentless, unwavering,
uninterrupted loyalty in its service. What young men determine to do at
whatever cost of effort, self-denial, and endurance, provided that their
objects are good and within the possibility of attainment, they will
surely accomplish in so large a proportion of cases that the failures
are negligible. If all that a man has or is, if his death and his daily
life, are wholly and relentlessly at the service of his ideal, without
hesitancy or reservation, then he will achieve his object. Either by
himself or his successors he will achieve it, for he disposes of the
greatest power to which humanity can attain. Under such conditions there
is no man among us who cannot render high service to our beloved
country.