_Mr. Commander; Comrades; and you, the men and women of the United
States who owe your being here to what was done by the men of the
great Civil War_:
I greet you, and thank you for the honor done me in asking me to
be present this day. It is a good custom for our country to have
certain solemn holidays in commemoration of our greatest men and
of the greatest crises in our history. There should be but few such
holidays. To increase their number is to cheapen them. Washington
and Lincoln—the man who did most to found the Union, and the man
who did most to preserve it—stand head and shoulders above all our
other public men, and have by common consent won the right to this
preëminence. Among the holidays which commemorate the turning points
in American history, Thanksgiving has a significance peculiarly its
own. On July 4 we celebrate the birth of the nation; on this day,
the 30th of May, we call to mind the deaths of those who died that
the nation might live, who wagered all that life holds dear for the
great prize of death in battle, who poured out their blood like water
in order that the mighty national structure raised by the far-seeing
genius of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Hamilton, and the other
great leaders of the Revolution, great framers of the Constitution,
should not crumble into meaningless ruins.
You whom I address to-day and your comrades who wore the blue beside
you in the perilous years during which strong, sad, patient Lincoln
bore the crushing load of national leadership, performed the one
feat the failure to perform which would have meant destruction to
everything which makes the name America a symbol of hope among the
nations of mankind. You did the greatest and most necessary task which
has ever fallen to the lot of any men on this Western Hemisphere.
Nearly three centuries have passed since the waters of our coasts were
first furrowed by the keels of those whose children’s children were to
inherit this fair land. Over a century and a half of colonial growth
followed the settlement; and now for over a century and a quarter we
have been a nation.
During our four generations of national life we have had to do many
tasks, and some of them of far-reaching importance; but the only
really vital task was the one you did, the task of saving the Union.
There were other crises in which to have gone wrong would have meant
disaster; but this was the one crisis in which to have gone wrong
would have meant not merely disaster but annihilation. For failure at
any other point atonement could have been made; but had you failed
in the iron days the loss would have been irreparable, the defeat
irretrievable. Upon your success depended all the future of the people
on this continent, and much of the future of mankind as a whole.
You left us a reunited country. You left us the right of brotherhood
with the men in gray, who with such courage, and such devotion for
what they deemed the right, fought against you. But you left us much
more even than your achievement, for you left us the memory of how
it was achieved. You, who made good by your valor and patriotism the
statesmanship of Lincoln and the soldiership of Grant, have set as
the standards for our efforts in the future both the way you did your
work in war and the way in which, when the war was over, you turned
again to the work of peace. In war and in peace alike your example
will stand as the wisest of lessons to us and our children and our
children’s children.
Just at this moment the Army of the United States, led by men who
served among you in the great war, is carrying to completion a small
but peculiarly trying and difficult war in which is involved not only
the honor of the flag but the triumph of civilization over forces
which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism. The task
has not been as difficult or as important as yours, but, oh, my
comrades, the men in the uniform of the United States, who have for
the last three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the
American cause in the Philippine Islands, are your younger brothers,
your sons. They have shown themselves not unworthy of you, and they
are entitled to the support of all men who are proud of what you did.
These younger comrades of yours have fought under terrible
difficulties and have received terrible provocation from a very cruel
and very treacherous enemy. Under the strain of these provocations
I deeply deplore to say that some among them have so far forgotten
themselves as to counsel and commit, in retaliation, acts of
cruelty. The fact that for every guilty act committed by one of our
troops a hundred acts of far greater atrocity have been committed
by the hostile natives upon our troops, or upon the peaceable and
law-abiding natives who are friendly to us, can not be held to excuse
any wrongdoers on our side. Determined and unswerving effort must be
made, and has been and is being made, to find out every instance of
barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and
to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been
taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the
future.
Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes
commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From time
to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame
of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman
cruelty and barbarity—cruelty infinitely worse than any that has ever
been committed by our troops in the Philippines; worse to the victims,
and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it. The men who fail to
condemn these lynchings, and yet clamor about what has been done in
the Philippines, are indeed guilty of neglecting the beam in their own
eye while taunting their brother about the mote in his. Understand me.
These lynchings afford us no excuse for failure to stop cruelty in the
Philippines. But keep in mind that these cruelties in the Philippines
have been wholly exceptional, and have been shamelessly exaggerated.
We deeply and bitterly regret that they should have been committed,
no matter how rarely, no matter under what provocation, by American
troops. But they afford far less ground for a general condemnation
of our army than these lynchings afford for the condemnation of the
communities in which they occur. In each case it is well to condemn
the deed, and it is well also to refrain from including both guilty
and innocent in the same sweeping condemnation.
In every community there are people who commit acts of wellnigh
inconceivable horror and baseness. If we fix our eyes only upon
these individuals and upon their acts, and if we forget the far more
numerous citizens of upright and honest life and blind ourselves to
their countless deeds of wisdom and justice and philanthropy, it is
easy enough to condemn the community. There is not a city in this
land which we could not thus condemn if we fixed our eyes solely upon
its police record and refused to look at what it had accomplished for
decency and justice and charity. Yet this is exactly the attitude
which has been taken by too many men with reference to our army in the
Philippines; and it is an attitude iniquitous in its absurdity and its
injustice.
The rules of warfare which have been promulgated by the War Department
and accepted as the basis of conduct by our troops in the field are
the rules laid down by Abraham Lincoln when you, my hearers, were
fighting for the Union. These rules provide, of course, for the
just severity necessary in war. The most destructive of all forms
of cruelty would be to show weakness where sternness is demanded by
iron need. But all cruelty is forbidden, and all harshness beyond
what is called for by need. Our enemies in the Philippines have not
merely violated every rule of war, but have made of these violations
their only method of carrying on the war. Think over that! It is not a
rhetorical statement—it is a bald statement of contemporary history.
They have been able to prolong the war at all only by recourse to
acts each one of which put them beyond the pale of civilized warfare.
We would have been justified by Abraham Lincoln’s rules of war in
infinitely greater severity than has been shown.
The fact really is that our warfare in the Philippines has been
carried on with singular humanity. For every act of cruelty by our
men there have been innumerable acts of forbearance, magnanimity, and
generous kindness. These are the qualities which have characterized
the war as a whole. The cruelties on our part have been wholly
exceptional.
The guilty are to be punished; but in punishing them, let those who
sit at ease at home, who walk delicately and live in the soft places
of the earth, remember also to do them common justice. Let not the
effortless and the untempted rail overmuch at strong men who with
blood and sweat face years of toil and days of agony, and at need
lay down their lives in remote tropic jungles to bring the light
of civilization into the world’s dark places. The warfare that has
extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism
and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in
the progress of humanity. Yet from its very nature it has always and
everywhere been liable to dark abuses.
It behooves us to keep a vigilant watch to prevent these abuses and to
punish those who commit them; but if because of them we flinch from
finishing the task on which we have entered, we show ourselves cravens
and weaklings, unworthy of the sires from whose loins we sprang. Oh,
my comrades, how the men of the present tend to forget not merely
what was done but what was spoken in the past! There were abuses and
to spare in the Civil War; and slander enough, too, by each side
against the other. Your false friends then called Grant a “butcher”
and spoke of you who are listening to me as mercenaries, as “Lincoln’s
hirelings.” Your open foes—as in the resolution passed by the
Confederate Congress in October, 1862—accused you, at great length,
and with much particularity, of “contemptuous disregard of the usages
of civilized war;” of subjecting women and children to “banishment,
imprisonment, and death;” of “murder,” of “rapine,” of “outrages on
women,” of “lawless cruelty,” of “perpetrating atrocities which would
be disgraceful in savages;” and Abraham Lincoln was singled out for
especial attack because of his “spirit of barbarous ferocity.” Verily,
these men who thus foully slandered you have their heirs to-day in
those who traduce our armies in the Philippines, who fix their eyes on
individual deeds of wrong so keenly that at last they become blind to
the great work of peace and freedom that has already been accomplished.
Peace and freedom—are there two better objects for which a soldier can
fight? Well, these are precisely the objects for which our soldiers
are fighting in the Philippines. When there is talk of the cruelties
committed in the Philippines, remember always that by far the greater
proportion of these cruelties have been committed by the insurgents
against their own people—as well as against our soldiers—and that not
only the surest but the only effectual way of stopping them is by the
progress of the American arms. The victories of the American Army have
been the really effective means of putting a stop to cruelty in the
Philippines. Wherever these victories have been complete—and such is
now the case throughout the greater part of the islands—all cruelties
have ceased, and the native is secure in his life, his liberty, and
his pursuit of happiness. Where the insurrection still smoulders there
is always a chance for cruelty to show itself.
Our soldiers conquer; and what is the object for which they
conquer? To establish a military government? No. The laws we are
now endeavoring to enact for the government of the Philippines are
to increase the power and domain of the civil at the expense of the
military authorities, and to render even more difficult than in the
past the chance of oppression. The military power is used to secure
peace, in order that it may itself be supplanted by the civil power.
The progress of the American arms means the abolition of cruelty,
the bringing of peace, and the rule of law and order under the civil
government. Other nations have conquered to create irresponsible
military rule. We conquer to bring just and responsible civil
government to the conquered.
But our armies do more than bring peace, do more than bring order.
They bring freedom. Remember always that the independence of a tribe
or a community may, and often does, have nothing whatever to do with
the freedom of the individual in that tribe or community. There are
now in Asia and Africa scores of despotic monarchies, each of which is
independent, and in no one of which is there the slightest vestige of
freedom for the individual man. Scant indeed is the gain to mankind
from the “independence” of a blood-stained tyrant who rules over
abject and brutalized slaves. But great is the gain to humanity which
follows the steady though slow introduction of the orderly liberty,
the law-abiding freedom of the individual, which is the only sure
foundation upon which national independence can be built. Wherever in
the Philippines the insurrection has been definitely and finally put
down, there the individual Filipino already enjoys such freedom, such
personal liberty under our rule, as he could never even have dreamed
of under the rule of an “independent” Aguinaldian oligarchy.
The slowly-learned and difficult art of self-government, an art
which our people have taught themselves by the labor of a thousand
years, can not be grasped in a day by a people only just emerging
from conditions of life which our ancestors left behind them in the
dim years before history dawned. We believe that we can rapidly teach
the people of the Philippine Islands not only how to enjoy but how
to make good use of their freedom; and with their growing knowledge
their growth in self-government shall keep steady pace. When they
have thus shown their capacity for real freedom by their power of
self-government, then, and not till then, will it be possible to
decide whether they are to exist independently of us or be knit to us
by ties of common friendship and interest. When that day will come
it is not in human wisdom now to foretell. All that we can say with
certainty is that it would be put back an immeasurable distance if we
should yield to the counsels of unmanly weakness and turn loose the
islands, to see our victorious foes butcher with revolting cruelty
our betrayed friends, and shed the blood of the most humane, the most
enlightened, the most peaceful, the wisest and the best of their own
number—for these are the classes who have already learned to welcome
our rule.
Nor, while fully acknowledging our duties to others, need we wholly
forget our duty to ourselves. The Pacific seaboard is as much to us as
the Atlantic; as we grow in power and prosperity so our interests will
grow in that furthest west which is the immemorial east. The shadow
of our destiny has already reached to the shores of Asia. The might
of our people already looms large against the world-horizon; and it
will loom ever larger as the years go by. No statesman has a right to
neglect the interests of our people in the Pacific; interests which
are important to all our people, but of most importance to those of
our people who have built populous and thriving States to the west of
the great watershed of this continent.
This should no more be a party question than the war for the Union
should have been a party question. At this moment the man in highest
office in the Philippine Islands is the Vice-Governor, General Luke
Wright, of Tennessee, who gallantly wore the gray in the Civil War
and who is now working hand in hand with the head of our army in
the Philippines, Adna Chaffee, who in the Civil War gallantly wore
the blue. Those two, and the men under them, from the North and
from the South, in civil life and in military life, as teachers, as
administrators, as soldiers, are laboring mightily for us who live at
home. Here and there black sheep are to be found among them; but taken
as a whole they represent as high a standard of public service as this
country has ever seen. They are doing a great work for civilization,
a great work for the honor and the interest of this nation, and above
all for the welfare of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. All
honor to them; and shame, thrice shame, to us if we fail to uphold
their hands!
AT THE OPENING SESSION OF THE MILITARY SURGEONS’ ASSOCIATION,
WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 5, 1902
_Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen_:
I am glad to have the opportunity to bid welcome to the members of
this Association and their friends to-day. The men of your Association
combine two professions each of which is rightfully held in high honor
by all capable of appreciating the real work of men—the profession of
the soldier and the profession of the doctor. Conditions in modern
civilization tend more and more to make the average life of the
community one of great ease, compared to what has been the case in
the past. Together with what advantages have come from this softening
of life and rendering it more easy there are certain attendant
disadvantages. It is a very necessary thing that there should be some
professions, some trades, where the same demands are made now as ever
in the past upon the heroic qualities. Those demands are made alike
upon the soldier and upon the doctor; and more upon those who are
both soldiers and doctors, upon the men who have continually to face
all the responsibility, all the risk, faced by their brothers in the
civilian branch of the profession, and who also, in time of war, must
face much the same risks, often exactly the same risks, that are faced
by their brothers in arms whose trade is to kill and not to cure! It
has been my good fortune, gentlemen, to see some of your body at work
in the field, to see them carrying the wounded and the dying from the
firing-line, themselves as much exposed to danger as those they were
rescuing, and to see them working day and night in the field hospital
afterward when even the intensity of the strain could hardly keep them
awake, so fagged out were they by having each to do the work of ten.
I welcome you here, and I am glad to have the chance of seeing
you, and I wish to say a word of congratulation to you upon this
Association. In all our modern life we have found it absolutely
indispensable to supplement the work of the individual by the work of
the individuals gathered into an association. Without this work of
the association you can not give the highest expression to individual
endeavor, and it would be a great misfortune if the military members
of the surgical and medical profession did not take every advantage
of their opportunities in the same way that is taken by the members
of the medical and the surgical professions who are not in the army
or the navy or the marine hospital service—who are in civilian life
outside. I am glad to see you gathered in this association. Just
one word of warning: Pay all possible heed to the scientific side
of your work; perfect yourselves as scientific men able to work
with the best and most delicate apparatus; and never for one moment
forget—especially the higher officers among you—that in time of need
you will have to do your work with the scantiest possible apparatus!
and that then your usefulness will be conditioned not upon the
adequacy of the complaint that you did not have apparatus enough,
but upon what you have done with the insufficient apparatus you had.
Remember that and remember also—and this especially applies to the
higher officers—that you must supplement in your calling the work of
the surgeon with the work of the administrator. You must be doctors
and military men and able administrators.
AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UNITED
STATES MILITARY ACADEMY, WEST POINT, JUNE 11, 1902
_Colonel Mills, graduates of West Point, and you, the Men and Women
who are drawn to them by ties of kinship, or by the simple fact that
you are Americans, and therefore of necessity drawn to them_:
I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you to-day. There
is little need for me to say how well your performance has squared
with the prophetic promise made on your behalf by the greatest of
Americans, Washington. This institution has completed its first
hundred years of life. During that century no other educational
institution in the land has contributed as many names as West Point to
the honor roll of the nation’s greatest citizens.
Colonel Mills, I claim to be a historian, and I speak simply in the
spirit of one, simply as a reciter of facts, when I say what I have
said. And more than that; not merely has West Point contributed a
greater number of the men who stand highest on the nation’s honor
roll, but I think beyond question that, taken as a whole, the average
graduate of West Point, during this hundred years, has given a greater
sum of service to the country through his life than has the average
graduate of any other institution in this broad land. Now, gentlemen,
that is not surprising. It is what we had a right to expect from this
Military University, founded by the nation. It is what we had a right
to expect, but I am glad that the expectation has been made good.
And of all the institutions in this country, none is more absolutely
American, none, in the proper sense of the word, more absolutely
democratic than this.
Here we care nothing for the boy’s birthplace, nor his creed, nor his
social standing; here we care nothing save for his worth as he is able
to show it. Here you represent with almost mathematical exactness all
the country geographically. You are drawn from every walk of life by
a method of choice made to ensure, and which in the great majority
of cases does ensure, that heed shall be paid to nothing save the
boy’s aptitude for the profession into which he seeks entrance. Here
you come together as representatives of America in a higher and more
peculiar sense than can possibly be true of any other institution in
the land, save your sister college that makes similar preparation for
the service of the country on the seas.
This morning I have shaken hands with many of you; and I have met the
men who stand as representatives of every great struggle, every great
forward movement this nation has made for the last fifty-five or sixty
years. There are some still left who took part in the Mexican War,
a struggle which added to this country a territory vaster than has
changed hands in Europe as the result of all the wars of the last two
centuries. I meet, when I see any of the older men among you, men who
took part in the great Civil War, when this nation was tried as in a
furnace; the men who were called upon to do the one deed which had to
be done under penalty of making the memory of Washington himself of
little account, because if you had failed, then failure would also
have been written across the record of his work. Finally, I see the
younger men as well as the older ones, the men whom I myself have
seen taking part in a little war—a war that was the merest skirmish
compared with the struggle in which you fought from ’61 to ’65, and
yet a war that has had most far-reaching effects, not merely upon
the destiny of this nation, but, therefore, upon the destiny of the
world—the war with Spain.
It was my good fortune to see in the campaign in Cuba how the
graduates of West Point handled themselves; to see and to endeavor
to profit by their example. It is a peculiar pleasure to come here
to-day, because I was at that time intimately associated with many of
these, your graduates, who are here. On the day before the San Juan
fight, when we were marched up into position, the officers with whom
I was, lost connection with the baggage and food, and I, for supper
that night, had what Colonel Mills gave me. And the next morning
Colonel Mills was with another West Pointer, gallant Shipp, of North
Carolina. The next morning we breakfasted together. I remember well
congratulating myself that my regiment, a raw volunteer regiment,
could have, to set it an example, men like Mills and Shipp, whose very
presence made the men cool, made them feel collected and at ease.
Mills and Shipp went with our regiment into action. Shortly after it
began Shipp was killed and Colonel Mills received a wound from which
no one of us at the time dreamed that he would recover. I had at that
time in my regiment, as acting second lieutenant, a cadet from West
Point. He was having his holiday; he took his holiday coming down
with us, and just before the assault he was shot, the bullet going, I
think, into the stomach, and coming out the other side. He fell, and
as we came up I leaned over him, and he said, “All right, Colonel, I
am going to get well.” I did not think he was, but I said, “All right,
I am sure you will,” and he did; he is all right now. There was never
a moment during that time, by day or by night, that I was not an
eyewitness to some performance of duty, some bit of duty well done, by
a West Pointer, and I never saw a West Pointer failing in his duty.
I want to be perfectly frank, gentlemen; I _heard_ of two or three
instances; you can not get in any body of men absolute uniformity of
good conduct; but I am happy to say that I never was an eyewitness to
such misconduct. It was my good fortune to see what is the rule, what
is the rule with only the rarest exception; the rule of duty done in
a way that makes a man proud to be an American, the fellow-citizen of
such Americans.
Your duty here at West Point has been to fit men to do well in war.
But it is a noteworthy fact that you also have fitted them to do
singularly well in peace. The highest positions in the land have been
held, not exceptionally, but again and again by West Pointers. West
Pointers have risen to the first rank in all the occupations of civil
life. Colonel Mills, I make the answer that a man who answers the
question must make when I say that, while we had a right to expect
that West Point would do well, we could not have expected that she
would do so well as she has done.
I want to say one word to those who are graduating here, and to the
undergraduates as well. I was greatly impressed the other day by an
article of one of your instructors, himself a West Pointer, in which
he dwelt upon the changed conditions of warfare, and the absolute need
that the man who was to be a good officer should meet those changed
conditions. I think it is going to be a great deal harder to be a
first-class officer in the future than it has been in the past. In
addition to the courage and steadfastness that have always been the
prime requirements in a soldier, you have got to show far greater
fertility of resource and far greater power of individual initiative
than has ever been necessary before if you are to come up to the
highest level of officer-like performance of duty.
As has been well said, the developments of warfare during the last
few years have shown that in the future the unit will not be the
regiment nor the company nor troop; the unit will be the individual
man. The army is to a very great extent going to do well or ill
according to the average of that individual man. If he does not know
how to shoot, how to shift for himself, how both to obey orders and to
accept responsibility when the emergency comes where he will not have
any orders to obey, if he is not able to do all of that, and if in
addition he has not got the fighting edge, you had better have him out
of the army; he will be a damage in it.
In a battle hereafter each man is going to be to a considerable extent
alone. The formation will be so open that the youngest officer will
have to take much of the responsibility that in former wars fell
on his seniors; and many of the enlisted men will have to do most
of their work without supervision from any officer whatsoever. The
man will have to act largely alone, and if he shows a tendency to
huddle up to somebody else his usefulness will be pretty near at an
end. He must draw on his own courage and resourcefulness to meet the
emergencies as they come up. It will be more difficult in the future
than ever before to know your profession, and more essential also; and
you officers, and you who are about to become officers, if you are
going to do well, have got to learn how to perform the duty which,
while become more essential, has become harder to perform.
You want to face the fact and realize more than ever before that the
honor or the shame of the country may depend upon the high average
of character and capacity of the officers and enlisted men, and that
a high average of character and capacity in the enlisted men can to
a large degree be obtained only through you, the officers; that you
must devote your time in peace to bringing up the standard of fighting
efficiency of the men under you, not merely in doing your duty so that
you can not be called to account for failure to perform it, but doing
it in a way that will make any man under you abler to perform his.
I noticed throughout the time that we were in Cuba that the orders
given and executed were of the simplest kind, and that there was
very little manœuvring, practically none of the manœuvring of the
parade-ground. Now, I want you to weigh what I say, for if you take
only half of it, you will invert it. I found out very soon in my
regiment that the best man was the man who had been in the Regular
Army in actual service, out in the West, campaigning on the plains; if
he had been a good man in the Regular Army in actual service on the
plains he was the best man that I could get hold of. On the other
hand, if he had merely served in time of peace a couple of years in
an Eastern garrison, where he did practically nothing outside of
parade grounds and barracks, or if he had been in an ordinary National
Guard regiment, then one of two things was true; if he understood
that he had only learned five per cent of war, he was five per cent
better than any one who had learned none of it, and that was a big
advance; but if he thought he had also learned the other ninety-five
per cent he was worse than any one else. I recollect perfectly one
man who had been a corporal in the Regular Army; this young fellow
joined us sure that he knew everything, confident that war consisted
in nice parade-ground manœuvres. It was almost impossible to turn his
attention from trying the very difficult task of making my cowpunchers
keep in a straight line, to the easier task of training them so that
they could do the most efficient fighting when the occasion arose. He
confused the essentials and the non-essentials. The non-essentials
are so pretty and so easy that it is a great temptation to think that
your duty lies in perfecting yourself and the men under you in them.
You have got to do that, too; but if you only do that you will not be
worth your salt when the day of trial comes.
Gentlemen, I do not intend to try here to preach to you upon the
performance of your duties. It has been your special business to
learn to do that. I do ask you to remember the difference there is
in the military profession now from what it has been in past time;
to remember that the final test of soldiership is not excellence in
parade-ground formation, but efficiency in actual service in the
field, and that the usefulness, the real and great usefulness in the
parade-ground and barracks work comes from its being used not as an
end, but as one of the means to an end. I ask you to remember that.
I do not have to ask you to remember what you can not forget—the
lessons of loyalty, of courage, of steadfast adherence to the highest
standards of honor and uprightness which all men draw in when they
breathe the atmosphere of this great institution.