[Speech of Theodore Roosevelt at the nineteenth annual dinner of
the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1898.
The President, William B. Davenport, in calling upon Theodore
Roosevelt to speak to the toast, "The Day we Celebrate," said: "For
many years we have been celebrating this day and looking at
ourselves through Yankee eyes. To-night it is to be given us to see
ourselves as others see us. We have with us one of whom it may be
said, to paraphrase the epitaph in the Welsh churchyard:--
'A Dutchman born, at Harvard bred,
In Cuba travelled, but not yet dead.'
In response to this toast, I have the honor of introducing Hon.
Theodore Roosevelt."]
MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--The gentleman on my
right, with the unmistakably Puritan name of McKelway, in the issue of
the "Eagle" to-night alluded to me as a Yankeeized Hollander. I am a
middling good Yankee. I always felt that at these dinners of the New
England Society, to which I come a trifle more readily than to any other
like affairs, I and the president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick,
who is also invariably in attendance, represent, what you would say,
the victims tied to the wheels of the Roman chariot of triumph. You see
I am half Irish myself, and, as I told a New England Senator with whom I
am intimate, when he remarked that the Dutch had been conquered by the
New Englanders, "the Irish have avenged us."
I want to say to you seriously, and, singularly enough, right along the
lines of the admirable speech made by your President, a few words on the
day we celebrate and what it means.
As the years go by, this nation will realize more and more that the year
that has just passed has given to every American the right to hold his
head higher as a citizen of the great Republic, which has taken a long
stride forward toward its proper place among the nations of the world. I
have scant sympathy with this mock humanitarianism, a mock
humanitarianism which is no more alien to the spirit of true religion
than it is to the true spirit of civilization, which would prevent the
great, free, liberty and order-loving races of the earth doing their
duty in the world's waste spaces because there must needs be some rough
surgery at the outset. I do not speak simply of my own country. I hold
that throughout the world every man who strives to be both efficient and
moral--and neither quality is worth anything without the other--that
every man should realize that it is for the interests of mankind to have
the higher supplant the lower life. Small indeed is my sympathy with
those people who bemoan the fact, sometimes in prose, sometimes in even
weaker verse, that the champions of civilization and of righteousness
have overcome the champions of barbarism or of an outworn tyranny,
whether the conflict be fought by the Russian heralds of civilization in
Turkestan, by the English champion of the higher life in the Eastern
world, or by the men who upheld the Stars and Stripes as they freed the
people of the tropic islands of the sea from the mediæval tyranny of
Spain.
I do not ask that you look at this policy from a merely national
standpoint, although if you are good Americans you must look from the
national standpoint first. I ask that you look at it from the standpoint
of civilization, from the standpoint of righteousness, and realize that
it is better for the men who are as yet ages behind us in the struggle
upward that they be helped upward, and that it does not cease to be
better for them, merely because it is better for us also. As I say, cast
aside the selfish view. Consider whether or not it is better that the
brutal barbarism of northern Asia should be supplanted by the
civilization of Russia, which has not yet risen to what we of the
Occident are proud to claim as our standard, but which, as it stands, is
tens of centuries in advance of that of the races it supplants. Again,
from the standpoint of the outsider, look at the improvement worked by
the Englishmen in all the islands of the sea and all the places on the
dark continents where the British flag has been planted; seriously
consider the enormous, the incalculable betterment that comes at this
moment to ninety-five per cent. of the people who have been cowering
under the inconceivably inhuman rule of Mahdism in the Sudan because it
has been supplanted by the reign of law and of justice. I ask you to
read the accounts of the Catholic missionary priests, the Austrian
priests who suffered under Mahdism, to read in their words what they
have suffered under conditions that have gone back to the stone age in
the middle of the nineteenth century. Then you will realize that the
Sirdar and his troops were fighting the battle of righteousness as truly
as ever it was fought by your ancestors and mine two or three or four
centuries ago.
I think you can now understand that I admire what other nations have
done in this regard, and, therefore, that you will believe that I speak
with sincerity when I speak of what we ourselves have done. Thank heaven
that we of this generation, to whom was denied the chance of taking part
in the greatest struggle for righteousness that this century has seen,
the great Civil War, have at least been given the chance to see our
country take part in the world movement that has gone on around about
us. Of course it was partly for our own interest, but it was also
largely a purely disinterested movement. It is a good thing for this
nation that it should be lifted up beyond simply material matters. It is
a good thing for us that we should have interests outside of our own
borders. It is a good thing for us that we must look outward; that we
must consider more than the question of exports and imports; that we
must consider more than whether or not in one decade we have increased
one and a half per cent. more than the average rate of increase in
wealth or not. It is a good thing that we of this nation should keep in
mind, and should have vividly brought before us the fact to which your
ancestors, Mr. President and members of this Society, owe their
greatness; that while it pays a people to pay heed to material matters,
it pays infinitely better to treat material as absolutely second to
moral considerations. I am glad for the sake of America that we have
seen the American Army and the American Navy driving the Spaniard from
the Western world. I am glad that the descendants of the Puritan and the
Hollander should have completed the work begun, when Drake and Hawkins
and Frobisher singed the beard of the King of Spain, and William the
Silent fought to the death to free Holland. I am glad we did it for our
own sake, but I am infinitely more glad because we did it to free the
people of the islands of the sea and tried to do good to them.
I have told you why I am glad, because of what we have done. Let me add
my final word as to why I am anxious about it. We have driven out the
Spaniards. This did not prove for this nation a very serious task. Now
we are approaching the really serious task. Now it behooves us to show
that we are capable of doing infinitely better the work which we blame
the Spaniards for doing so badly; and woe to us unless we do show not
merely a slight but a well-nigh immeasurable improvement! We have
assumed heavy burdens, heavy responsibilities. I have no sympathy with
the men who cry out against our assuming them. If this great nation, if
this nation with its wealth, with its continental vastness of domain,
with its glorious history, with its memory of Washington and Lincoln, of
its statesmen and soldiers and sailors, the builders and the wielders of
commonwealths, if this nation is to stand cowering back because it is
afraid to undertake tasks lest they prove too formidable, we may well
suppose that the decadence of our race has begun. No; the tasks are
difficult, and all the more for that reason let us gird up our loins and
go out to do them. But let us meet them, realizing their difficulty; not
in a spirit of levity, but in a spirit of sincere and earnest desire to
do our duty as it is given us to see our duty. Let us not do it in the
spirit of sentimentality, not saying we must at once give universal
suffrage to the people of the Philippines--they are unfit for it. Do not
let us mistake the shadow for the substance. We have got to show the
practical common sense which was combined with the fervent religion of
the Puritan; the combination which gave him the chance to establish here
that little group of commonwealths which more than any others have
shaped the spirit and destiny of this nation; we must show both
qualities.
Gentlemen, if one of the islands which we have acquired is not fit to
govern itself, then we must govern it until it is fit. If you cannot
govern it according to the principles of the New England town
meeting--because the Philippine Islander is not a New Englander--if you
cannot govern it according to these principles, then find out the
principles upon which you can govern it, and apply those principles.
Fortunately, while we can and ought with wisdom to look abroad for
examples, and to profit by the experience of other nations, we are
already producing, even in this brief period, material of the proper
character within our own border, men of our own people, who are showing
us what to do with these islands. A New Englander, a man who would be
entitled to belong to this Society, a man who is in sympathy with all
that is best and most characteristic of the New England spirit, both
because of his attitude in war and of his attitude toward civic morality
in time of peace, is at present giving us a good object lesson in
administering those tropic provinces. I allude to my former commander,
the present Governor-General of Santiago, Major-General Leonard Wood.
General Wood has before him about as difficult a task as man could well
have. He is now intrusted with the supreme government of a province
which has been torn by the most hideously cruel of all possible civil
wars for the last three years, which has been brought down to a
condition of savage anarchy, and from which our armies, when they
expelled the armies of Spain, expelled the last authoritative
representatives of what order there still was in the province. To him
fell the task of keeping order, of preventing the insurgent visiting
upon the Spaniard his own terrible wrongs, of preventing the taking of
that revenge which to his wild nature seemed eminently justifiable, the
preserving of the rights of property, of keeping unharmed the people who
had been pacific, and yet of gradually giving over the administration
of the island to the people who had fought for its freedom, just as fast
as, and no faster than, they proved that they could be trusted with it.
He has gone about that task, devoted himself to it, body and soul,
spending his strength, his courage, and perseverance, and in the face of
incredible obstacles he has accomplished very, very much.
Now, if we are going to administer the government of the West Indies
Islands which we have acquired, and the Philippines, in a way that will
be a credit to us and to our institutions, we must see that they are
administered by the General Woods. We have got to make up our minds that
we can only send our best men there; that we must then leave them as
largely unhampered as may be. We must exact good results from them, but
give them a large liberty in the methods of reaching these results. If
we treat those islands as the spoil of the politician, we shall tread
again the path which Spain has trod before, and we shall show ourselves
infinitely more blameworthy than Spain, for we shall sin against the
light, seeing the light.
The President says that this is New England doctrine. So it is. It is
Dutch doctrine, too. It is the doctrine of sound Americanism, the
doctrine of common sense and common morality. I am an expansionist. I am
glad we have acquired the islands we have acquired. I am not a bit
afraid of the responsibilities which we have incurred; but neither am I
blind to how heavy those responsibilities are. In closing my speech, I
ask each of you to remember that he cannot shove the blame on others
entirely, if things go wrong. This is a government by the people, and
the people are to blame ultimately if they are misrepresented, just
exactly as much as if their worst passions, their worst desires are
represented; for in the one case it is their supineness that is
represented exactly as in the other case it is their vice. Let each man
here strive to make his weight felt on the side of decency and morality.
Let each man here make his weight felt in supporting a truly American
policy, a policy which decrees that we shall be free and shall hold our
own in the face of other nations, but which decrees also that we shall
be just, and that the peoples whose administration we have taken over
shall have their condition made better and not worse by the fact that
they have come under our sway.