_Mr. President; President Eliot; and you, my Fellow Harvard Men_:
I am speaking for all of you I am sure—I speak for all Americans
to-day, when I say that we watch with the deepest concern the sick-bed
of the English king, and that all Americans in tendering their hearty
sympathy to the people of Great Britain remember keenly the outburst
of genuine grief with which England last fall greeted the calamity
that befell us in the death of President McKinley.
President Eliot spoke of the service due and performed by the college
graduate to the State. It was my great good fortune five years ago
to serve under your President, the then Secretary of the Navy,
ex-Governor Long, and by a strange turn of the wheel of fate he served
in my Cabinet as long as he would consent to serve, and then I had to
replace him by another Harvard man!
I have been fortunate in being associated with Senator Hoar, and I
should indeed think ill of myself if I had not learned something from
association with a man who possesses that fine and noble belief in
mankind, the lack of which forbids healthy effort to do good in a
democracy like ours. I shall not speak of his associate, the junior
senator, another Harvard man—Cabot Lodge—because it would be difficult
for me to discuss in public one who is my closest, stanchest, and most
loyal personal friend. I have another fellow Harvard man to speak
of to-day, and it is necessary to paraphrase an old saying in order
to state the bald truth, that it is indeed a liberal education in
high-minded statesmanship to sit at the same council table with John
Hay.
In addressing you this afternoon, I want to speak of three other
college graduates, because of the service they have done the public.
If a college education means anything, it means fitting a man to do
better service than he could do without it; if it does not mean that
it means nothing, and if a man does not get that out of it, he gets
less than nothing out of it. No man has a right to arrogate to himself
one particle of superiority or consideration because he has had a
college education, but he is bound, if he is in truth a man, to feel
that the fact of his having had a college education imposes upon him
a heavier burden of responsibility, that it makes it doubly incumbent
upon him to do well and nobly in his life, private and public. I wish
to speak of three men, who, during the past three or four years have
met these requirements—of a graduate of Hamilton College, Elihu Root,
of a graduate of Yale, Governor Taft, and of a fellow Harvard man,
Leonard Wood—men who did things; did not merely say how they ought
to be done, but did them themselves; men who have met that greatest
of our national needs, the need for service that can not be bought,
the need for service that can only be rendered by the man willing to
forego material advantages because it has to be given at the man’s own
material cost.
When in England they get a man to do what Lord Cromer did in Egypt,
when a man returns as Lord Kitchener will return from South Africa,
they give him a peerage, and he receives large and tangible reward.
But our Cromers, our men of that stamp, come back to this country, and
if they are fortunate, they go back to private life with the privilege
of taking up as best they can the strings left loose when they severed
their old connections; and if fortune does not favor them they are
accused of maladversion in office—not an accusation that hurts them,
but an accusation that brands with infamy every man who makes it, and
that reflects but ill on the country in which it is made.
Leonard Wood four years ago went down to Cuba, has served there ever
since, has rendered her literally invaluable service; a man who
through those four years thought of nothing else, did nothing else,
save to try to bring up the standard of political and social life in
that island, to clean it physically and morally, to make justice even
and fair in it, to found a school system which should be akin to our
own, to teach the people after four centuries of misrule that there
were such things as governmental righteousness and honesty and fair
play for all men on their merits as men. He did all this. He is a
man of slender means. He did this on his pay as an army officer. As
Governor of the island sixty millions of dollars passed through his
hands, and he came out having been obliged to draw on his slender
capital in order that he might come out even when he left the island.
Credit to him? Yes, in a way. In another, no particular credit,
because he was built so that he could do nothing else. He devoted
himself as disinterestedly to the good of the Cuban people in all
their relations as man could. He has come back here, and has been
attacked, forsooth, by people who are not merely unworthy of having
their names coupled with his but who are incapable of understanding
the motives that have spurred him on to bring honor to this republic.
And Taft, Judge Taft, Governor Taft, who has been the head of the
Philippine Commission, and who has gone back there—Taft, the most
brilliant graduate of his year at Yale, the youngest Yale man upon
whom Yale ever conferred a degree of LL.D., a man who, having won
high position at the bar, and then served as Solicitor-General at
Washington, was appointed to the United States bench. He was then
asked to sacrifice himself, to give up his position in order to go
to the other side of the world to take up an infinitely difficult,
an infinitely dangerous problem, and do his best to solve it. He has
done his best. He came back here the other day. The man has always
had the honorable ambition to get upon the Supreme Court, and he knew
that I had always hoped that he would be put on the Supreme Court,
and when he was back here a few months ago, and there was a question
of a vacancy arising, I said to him: “Governor, I think I ought to
tell you that if a vacancy comes in the Supreme Court” (which I knew
would put him for life in a position which he would especially like
to have), “I do not see how I could possibly give it to you, for I
need you where you are.” He said to me: “Mr. President, it has always
been my ambition to be on the Supreme Court, but if you should offer
me a justiceship now, and at the same time Congress should take away
entirely my salary as Governor, I should go straight back to the
Philippines, nevertheless, for those people need me, and expect me
back, and believe I will not desert them.” He has gone back, gone back
as a strong friend among weaker friends to help that people upward
along the difficult path of self-government. He has gone to do his
part—and a great part—in making the American name a symbol of honor
and good faith in the Philippine Islands; to govern with justice, and
with that firmness, that absence of weakness, which is only another
side of justice. He has gone back to do all of that because it is his
duty as he sees it. We are to be congratulated, we Americans, that we
have a fellow-American like Taft.
And now Elihu Root, who, unlike myself, Mr. President Eliot, but
like most of you present, comes of the old New England stock, whose
great-grandfather stood beside Leonard Wood’s great-grandfather
among the “embattled farmers” at Concord Bridge; Elihu Root, who had
worked his way up from being a poor and unknown country boy in New
York, to the leadership of the bar of the great city—he gave it up,
made the very great pecuniary sacrifice implied in giving it up, and
accepted the position of Secretary of War, a position which, for
the last three years and at present amounts to being not only the
Secretary of War, but the Secretary for the islands, the Secretary
for the colonies at the same time. He has done the most exhausting
and the most responsible work of any man in the administration, more
exhausting and more responsible work than the work of the President,
because circumstances have been such that with a man of Root’s
wonderful ability, wonderful industry and wonderful conscientiousness,
the President could not help but devolve upon him work that made
his task one under which almost any other man would have staggered.
He has done all this absolutely, disinterestedly. Nothing can come
to Root in the way of reward save the reward that is implied in the
knowledge that he has done something of incalculable importance which
hardly another man in the Union—no other man that I know of—could
have done as well as he has done it. He has before him continually
questions of the utmost intricacy to decide, questions upon which
life and death hang, questions the decision of which will affect our
whole future world policy, questions which affect the welfare of the
millions of people with whom we have been brought into such intimate
contact by the events of the Spanish War, whose welfare must be a
prime consideration from now on with every American public man worthy
to serve his country. Root has done this work with the certainty of
attack, with the certainty of misunderstanding, with the certainty of
being hampered by ignorance (and worse than ignorance). And yet he has
created, not for himself but for the nation also, a wonderful triumph
from all these adverse forces.
Those three men have rendered inestimable service to the American
people. I can do nothing for them. I can show my appreciation of them
in no way save the wholly insufficient one of standing up for them,
and for their work; and that I will do as long as I have tongue to
speak!