_Mr. Chairman, and you, my Fellow-Americans_:
I am glad indeed to have the honor of coming to-day to your beautiful
city in your beautiful State to greet, on behalf of the whole country,
a Tennesseean who has rendered high and honorable service to the whole
country—a Tennesseean of whom it can be said, as it has been said of
the Greek hero:
“Much has he seen and known, cities of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Himself not least, but honored of them all;
Has drunk delight of battle with his peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”
We are one people absolutely. The memories of the Civil War are now
heritages of honor alike for those whose fathers wore the blue and
for those whose fathers wore the gray. There is one curious and not
inappropriate coincidence to-day—my mother’s brother served under Mrs.
Wright’s father in the Confederate Navy. I am proud of his valor; and
I can say this freely, for if I had been old enough I would myself
have surely worn the blue uniform.
I come here to-day to greet General Wright because it has been given
to him to render a peculiar service to the whole country. A man can
render service of the very highest character at home, but owing to
the very nature of our system of government, he must, in his election
at least, represent particularly a given party. I say in his election
at least, for after election, if he is worth anything, he must be a
representative of the whole country. But there are certain branches
of the public service in which if we are wise and far-seeing we will
never allow partisan politics to enter. There must be no partisan
politics in the army or the navy of the United States. All that
concerns us to know about any general or admiral, about a mighty
captain by sea or by land, is whether he is a thoroughly fit commander
of men and loyal to the country as a whole. In the same way if we are
wise, if we care for our reputation abroad, if we are sensitive of our
honor at home, we will allow no question of partisan politics ever to
enter into the administration of the great islands which came under
our flag as a result of the war with Spain.
Hence I say that General Wright, like Governor Taft and his
associates, has rendered a peculiar service to every man jealous of
the honor of the American name in what he has done in administering
the Philippine Islands. For fourteen months it has been part of
my business to see how the work there was done. I am not speaking
exaggeratedly, I am speaking literally, telling the naked truth, when
I say that never during that time has a question of party politics
entered into even the smallest action of those in control of the
Philippine Islands.
My fellow-Americans, we can not afford to have the honor of the Nation
in any way smirched in connection with our dependencies. We can not
afford to have it smirched anywhere; but if we wrong ourselves here at
home we are to blame and we pay the penalty, while if we allow wrong
in connection with the islands not only the islands suffer, but an
indelible stigma of shame comes to the American name. I am earnestly
desirous that the administration of the Philippine Islands shall be
put and kept upon such a plane of patriotic efficiency that no change
will be made in it owing to any change of party here at home. Party
feeling should of course stop at the water-line. The inestimable
service rendered by Governor Wright in the Philippine Islands has been
because he has so conducted the government of those islands as to make
it not only of signal benefit to them, but of signal honor to every
citizen of our country; that he has so handled the administration of
affairs as to make us feel a justifiable confidence that hereafter
the storms of party politics in the United States shall never touch
the government of the Philippine Islands, and that whatever changes
of administration there are here in the Union, there shall not be a
ripple of change in the course of conduct in the Philippines marked
out by Governor Wright and his associates. The man of whom that can be
truthfully said is a man entitled to honor from his fellow-countrymen;
and of Governor Wright it can be truthfully said.
AT THE FOUNDERS’ DAY BANQUET OF THE UNION LEAGUE, PHILADELPHIA, PA.,
NOVEMBER 22, 1902
_Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Union League_:
Forty years ago this club was founded, in the dark days of the Civil
War, to uphold the hands of Abraham Lincoln and give aid to those
who battled for the Union and for human liberty. Two years ago
President McKinley came here as your guest to thank you, and through
you all those far-sighted and loyal men who had supported him in his
successful effort to keep untarnished the national good faith at home
and the national honor abroad, and to bring back to this country
the material well-being which we now so abundantly enjoy. It was no
accident which made the men of this club who stood as in a peculiar
sense the champions and upholders of the principles of Lincoln in the
early sixties stand no less stoutly for those typified in the person
of McKinley during the closing years of the century. The qualities
apt to make men respond to the call of duty in one crisis are also
apt to make them respond to a similar call in a crisis of a different
character. The traits which enabled our people to pass unscathed
through the fiery ordeal of the Civil War were the traits upon which
we had to rely in the less serious, but yet serious, dangers by which
we were menaced in 1896, 1898, and 1900.
From the very beginning our people have markedly combined practical
capacity for affairs with power of devotion to an ideal. The lack of
either quality would have rendered the possession of the other of
small value. Mere ability to achieve success in things concerning
the body would not have atoned for the failure to live the life of
high endeavor; and, on the other hand, without a foundation of those
qualities which bring material prosperity there would be nothing on
which the higher life could be built. The men of the Revolution would
have failed if they had not possessed alike devotion to liberty and
ability (once liberty had been achieved) to show common-sense and
self-restraint in its use. The men of the great Civil War would have
failed had they not possessed the business capacity which developed
and organized their resources in addition to the stern resolution
to expend these resources as freely as they expended their blood in
furtherance of the great cause for which their hearts leaped. It
is this combination of qualities that has made our people succeed.
Other peoples have been as devoted to liberty, and yet, because of
lack of hard-headed common-sense and of ability to show restraint and
subordinate individual passions for the general good, have failed
so signally in the struggle of life as to become a byword among
the nations. Yet other peoples, again, have possessed all possible
thrift and business capacity, but have been trampled under foot, or
have played a sordid and ignoble part in the world, because their
business capacity was unaccompanied by any of the lift toward nobler
things which marks a great and generous nation. The stern but just
rule of judgment for humanity is that each nation shall be known by
its fruits; and if there are no fruits, if the nation has failed, it
matters but little whether it has failed through meanness of soul or
through lack of robustness of character. We must judge a nation by the
net result of its life and activity. And so we must judge the policies
of those who at any time control the destinies of a nation.
Therefore I ask you to-night to look at the results of the policies
championed by President McKinley on both the occasions when he
appealed to the people for their suffrages, and to see how well that
appeal has been justified by the event. Most certainly I do not
claim all the good that has befallen us during the past six years
as due solely to any human policy. No legislation, however wise, no
Administration, however efficient, can secure prosperity to a people
or greatness to a nation. All that can be done by the law-maker and
the administrator is to give the best chance possible for the people
of the country themselves to show the stuff that is in them. President
McKinley was elected in 1896 on the specific pledge that he would
keep the financial honor of the Nation untarnished and would put our
economic system on a stable basis, so that our people might be given
a chance to secure the return of prosperity. Both pledges have been
so well kept that, as is but too often the case, men are beginning
to forget how much the keeping of them has meant. When people have
become very prosperous they tend to become sluggishly indifferent to
the continuation of the policies that brought about their prosperity.
At such times as these it is of course a mere law of nature that some
men prosper more than others, and too often those who prosper less, in
their jealousy of their more fortunate brethren, forget that all have
prospered somewhat. I ask you soberly to remember that the complaint
made at the present day of our industrial or economic conditions never
takes the form of stating that any of our people are less well off
than they were seven or eight years back, before President McKinley
came in and his policies had a chance to be applied; but that the
complaint is that some people have received more than their share
of the good things of the world. There was no such complaint eight
years ago, in the summer of 1894. Complaint was not then that any one
had prospered too much; it was that no one had prospered enough. Let
each one of us think of the affairs of his own household and his own
business, let each of us compare his standing now with his standing
eight years back, and then let him answer for himself whether it is
not true that the policies for which William McKinley stood in 1896
have justified themselves thrice over by the results they have brought
about.
In 1900 the issues were in part the same, but new ones had been added.
Prosperity had returned; the gold standard was assured; our tariff
was remodeled on the lines that have marked it at all periods when
our well-being was greatest. But as must often happen, the President
elected on certain issues was obliged to face others entirely
unforeseen. Rarely indeed have our greatest men made issues—they
have shown their greatness by meeting them as they arose. President
McKinley faced the problems of the Spanish War and those that followed
it exactly as he had faced the problems of our economic and financial
needs. As a sequel to the war with Spain we found ourselves in
possession of the Philippines under circumstances which rendered it
necessary to subdue a formidable insurrection which made it impossible
for us with honor or with regard to the welfare of the island to
withdraw therefrom. The occasion was seized by the opponents of the
President for trying to raise a new issue, on which they hoped they
might be more successful than on the old. The clamor raised against
him was joined in not only by many honest men who were led astray
by a mistaken view or imperfect knowledge of the facts, but by all
who feared effort, who shrank from the rough work of endeavor. The
campaign of 1900 had to be fought largely upon the new issue thus
raised. President McKinley met it squarely. Two years and eight months
ago, before his second nomination, he spoke as follows:
“We believe that the century of free government which the American
people have enjoyed has not rendered them irresolute and faithless,
but has fitted them for the great task of lifting up and assisting
to better conditions and larger liberty those distant peoples who
through the issue of battle have become our wards. Let us fear not.
There is no occasion for faint hearts, no excuse for regrets. Nations
do not grow in strength, the cause of liberty and law is not advanced
by the doing of easy things. The harder the task the greater will
be the result, the benefit, and the honor. To doubt our power to
accomplish it is to lose faith in the soundness and strength of our
popular institutions.... We have the new care and can not shift it.
And, breaking up the camp of ease and isolation, let us bravely and
hopefully and soberly continue the march of faithful service, and
falter not until the work is done.... The burden is our opportunity.
The opportunity is greater than the burden.”
There spoke the man who preached the gospel of hope as well as the
gospel of duty, and on the issue thus fairly drawn between those who
said we would do our new work well and triumphantly and those who
said we would fail lamentably in the effort, the contest was joined.
We won. And now I ask you, two years after the victory, to look across
the seas and judge for yourselves whether or not the promise has
been kept. The prophets of disaster have seen their predictions so
completely falsified by the event that it is actually difficult to
arouse even a passing interest in their failure. To answer them now,
to review their attack on our army, is of merely academic interest.
They played their brief part of obstruction and clamor; they said
their say; and the current of our life went over them and they sank
under it as did their predecessors who, thirty-six years before, had
declared that another and greater war was a failure, that another and
greater struggle for true liberty was only a contest for subjugation
in which the United States could never succeed. The insurrection among
the Filipinos has been absolutely quelled. The war has been brought
to an end sooner than even the most sanguine of us dared to hope. The
world has not in recent years seen any military task done with more
soldierly energy and ability; and done, moreover, in a spirit of great
humanity. The strain on the army was terrible, for the conditions of
climate and soil made their work harassing to an extraordinary degree,
and the foes in the field were treacherous and cruel, not merely
toward our men, but toward the great multitude of peaceful islanders
who welcomed our rule. Under the strain of wellnigh intolerable
provocation there were shameful instances, as must happen in all
wars, where the soldiers forgot themselves, and retaliated evil for
evil. There were one hundred thousand of our men in the Philippines,
a hundred thousand hired for a small sum a month apiece, put there
under conditions that strained their nerves to the breaking point, and
some of the hundred thousand did what they ought not to have done.
But out of a hundred thousand men at home, have all been faultless?
Every effort has been made to detect such cases, to punish the
offenders, and to prevent any recurrence of the deed. It is a cruel
injustice to the gallant men who fought so well in the Philippines
not to recognize that these instances were exceptional, and that the
American troops who served in the far-off tropic islands deserve
praise the same in kind that has always been given to those who have
well and valiantly fought for the honor of our common flag and common
country. The work of civil administration has kept pace with the work
of military administration, and when on July 4 last amnesty and peace
were declared throughout the islands the civil government assumed the
complete control. Peace and order now prevail and a greater measure
of prosperity and of happiness than the Filipinos have ever hitherto
known in all their dark and checkered history; and each one of them
has a greater measure of liberty, a greater chance of happiness, and
greater safety for his life and property than he or his forefathers
have ever before known.
Thus we have met each task that has confronted us during the past
six years. Thus we have kept every promise made in 1896 and 1900. We
have a right to be proud of the memories of the last six years. But
we must remember that each victory only opens the chance for a new
struggle; that the remembrance of triumphs achieved in the past is of
use chiefly if it spurs us to fresh effort in the present. No nation
has ever prospered as we are prospering now, and we must see to it
that by our own folly we do not mar this prosperity. Yet we must see
to it also that wherever wrong flourishes it be repressed. It is not
the habit of our people to shirk issues, but squarely to face them.
It is not the habit of our people to treat a good record in the past
as anything but a reason for expecting an even better record in the
present; and no Administration, gentlemen, should ask to be judged
save on those lines. The tremendous growth of our industrialism has
brought to the front many problems with which we must deal; and I
trust that we shall deal with them along the lines indicated in speech
and in action by that profound jurist and upright and fearless public
servant who represents Pennsylvania in the Cabinet—Attorney-General
Knox. The question of the so-called trusts is but one of the questions
we must meet in connection with our industrial system. There are many
of them and they are serious; but they can and will be met. Time may
be needed for making the solution perfect; but it is idle to tell
this people that we have not the power to solve such a problem as
that of exercising adequate supervision over the great industrial
combinations of to-day. We have the power and we shall find out the
way. We shall not act hastily or recklessly; but we have firmly made
up our minds that a solution, and a right solution, shall be found,
and found it will be.
No nation as great as ours can expect to escape the penalty of
greatness, for greatness does not come without trouble and labor.
There are problems ahead of us at home and problems abroad, because
such problems are incident to the working out of a great national
career. We do not shrink from them. Scant is our patience with those
who preach the gospel of craven weakness. No nation under the sun ever
yet played a part worth playing if it feared its fate overmuch—if it
did not have the courage to be great. We of America, we, the sons of
a nation yet in the pride of its lusty youth, spurn the teachings of
distrust, spurn the creed of failure and despair. We know that the
future is ours if we have in us the manhood to grasp it, and we enter
the new century girding our loins for the contest before us, rejoicing
in the struggle, and resolute so to bear ourselves that the Nation’s
future shall even surpass her glorious past.
AT THE BANQUET TO JUSTICE HARLAN, THE NEW WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON,
D. C., DECEMBER 9, 1902
_Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen_:
It is a peculiar privilege to be here to-night as one of those
gathered to do homage to a career which has honored America. It is
difficult to say certain of the truths which must need be said without
being guilty of truisms in saying them. It is not an idle boast of
this country when we speak of the court upon which Mr. Justice Harlan
sits as the most illustrious and important court in all the civilized
world. It is not merely our own people who say that—it is the verdict
of other nations as well.
Mr. Justice Harlan has served for a quarter of a century on that
court. During that time he has exercised an influence over the
judicial statesmanship of the country of a kind such as is possible
only under our own form of government. For the judges of the Supreme
Court of the land must be not only great jurists, but they must
be great constructive statesmen. And the truth of what I say is
illustrated by every study of American statesmanship, for in not one
serious study of American political life will it be possible to omit
the immense part played by the Supreme Court in the creation, not
merely the modification, of the great policies through and by means of
which the country has moved on to its present position.
Thrice fortunate is the court when it has as one of its members a man
who has played a great part in other spheres of our composite national
life. Mr. Justice Harlan came from Kentucky, a State in which the
patriotism of the people was put to so peculiarly a severe test in
the Civil War. In the States of the further North it was easy for the
man to make up his mind on which side he would unsheathe his sword.
In the States of the further South it was equally easy. In Kentucky
the task was a difficult one. I remember, Mr. Justice, being told by a
Kentuckian, who was a stanch friend of yours and one of the greatest
lawyers and most patriotic citizens whom this country had—John Mason
Brown—that he came back from a trip from the West as a young man of
twenty-one, just at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, just
after Sumter had been fired upon, and his mother brought down to him
the sword that his father had carried in the Mexican War, and said to
him:
“My son, this is the sword your father carried. I hope you will draw
it on the side that defends the flag for which your father fought,
but, for one side or the other, draw it you must.”
In any audience in any State of the Union, take it as far north as
you wish, I can appeal with confidence to the people I address when I
say that next to the homage we pay to the men who proved the truth of
their endeavor as they battled in the blue uniform is the homage we
pay to the men who, with equal sincerity, with equal devotion to the
right as it was given them to see the right, wore the gray. And none
pay that tribute of regard so frankly as those who themselves wore the
blue in battle.
And having said that, I am sure that none of my friends who fought in
the Confederate service will misunderstand me or will grudge what I am
about to say when I say that the greatest debt owed by this country
to any set of men is owed by it to those men of the so-called border
States—the men who in statesmanship followed Clay and the Crittendens
and the Blairs; the men who as soldiers fought on the same side with
Thomas and Farragut, the men who were for the Union, without regard
to whether their immediate associates were for it or not. In New
York, in Massachusetts, in Illinois, in Iowa, the men who stood for
the Union went with the stream. In parts of Kentucky, of Virginia,
of Missouri, they stemmed the torrent. And, gentlemen, I am half a
Southerner myself. Two of my uncles fought in the Confederate Navy.
One of them served under the father-in-law of Vice-Governor Luke
Wright, of the Philippine Islands. And so I think I have the right
to say that, knowing the Southern people as I do, I would heartily
advocate fighting twice as hard as you fought from 1861 to 1865 for
the privilege of staying in the same Union with them.
The man to be a great statesman on the bench of the Supreme Court
must have many qualities, and fortunate are we that this evening we
can point to Justice Harlan as embodying them. A good citizen must
be a good citizen in peace and in war. He must have the decent and
orderly virtues, and he must have the essential manliness for the lack
of which no good intention can atone. It will be a bad thing for the
nation if ever we grow as a nation to submit to the suppression of
efficiency and morality, if we ever grow to accept the belief that we
are to have two camps, in one of which will be grouped the men who
mean well, but who don’t do things, and in the other the men who do
things, but who do not mean well.
The art of successful self-government is not an easy art for people
or for individuals. It comes to our people here as the inheritance
of ages of effort. It can be thrown away; it can be unlearned very
easily, and it surely will be unlearned if we forget the vital need
not merely of preaching, but of practicing both sets of virtues—if we
forget the vital need of having the average citizen not only a good
man, but a man.
It is a fine thing to have on the Supreme Court a man who dared
venture all for the great prize of death in battle when the country
called for him, and a man who, after the war was closed, did not
content himself with living an ignoble life on the plea that he had
done so well it was not necessary to do more, but who continued to
do his duty as a citizen all the better because he had done it as a
soldier; the man who remembered that duty done, to be of practical
use, must serve not as an excuse for not doing further duty, but as an
incentive, as a spur, to make him feel ashamed that his present or
his future should fall short of his past.
So, Judge Harlan, I greet you personally, sir. I wish to express my
own personal debt to you for your influence, for your example, but I
wish far more, speaking as the representative of all our people, to
express the infinite sense of obligation we have to you for having
shown by your life what the type of fearless American citizenship
should be.
RECEPTION OF A DELEGATION FROM THE NATIONAL BOARD OF TRADE,
WASHINGTON, D. C., JANUARY 15, 1903
Mr. Randall, speaking for the delegation, said: Mr. President, we have
come here merely to present ourselves and to make our annual call on
the President of the United States. We thank you for meeting us.
The President responded: I shall not try to make you any speech.
I wish simply to say what a very real pleasure it is to see you,
and also to say this—that I am glad to see the meetings of the big
business interests take place sometimes in Washington. Nothing can be
better both for the business interests and for legislation than to
have as close a touch as possible between the elective representatives
here and the men whose welfare is so interwoven with what is done in
the halls of Congress. It is a very great help to all of us to have
you come here. I thank you for coming.
AT THE BANQUET OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, NEW WILLARD
HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 19, 1903
_Mr. Chairman, Gentlemen_:
It is no accident that we should meet here to celebrate a record
of fifty years—that period which covers the half century which has
seen the gigantic industrial change of the world, which has seen the
fruition of the forces that have brought about a revolution, socially
and industrially, within the fifty years such as was hardly seen
within any preceding five centuries. Life has been very intense, has
been carried on at a very high pressure, during that half century;
more intense, carried on at a higher pressure, than ever before. That
means of course that all the forces have been raised to a higher
degree of power—the forces of evil, and, thank heaven, also the
forces of good. If it had not been for the work of such organizations
as this, for such organized effort as that represented by you here
to-night, the immense material progress of the world during the past
half century would have been a progress that would have told for ill
for the nations, not for good. We can say with truth that we are
better off than we were. We can say that the creed of those who have
faith is the right creed as justified in present history, because
side by side with this great material development, and with an even
stronger rate of growth than the forces of evil, have grown the forces
of good. If it had not been for the work done by those who founded
this movement, and of course by all those who have taken part in
similar movements, in all movements for good, in every movement for
social betterment, for civic betterment, in every movement to make men
decent and manly and strong—if it had not been for the work done by
them, if they had sat supine and thought things would make themselves
better, things would have become steadily worse. We see all around us
people who say, “Oh, well, things will come out all right.” So they
will; but not because there are men who are content to _say_ that they
will come out all right; but because there is a sufficient number of
earnest men with the root of righteousness in them who are bound to
_do_ what will make them come out right.
The remarkable concentration of our lives during the last half century
has rendered it possible for anything that is evil to manifest itself
more strongly than ever before, and therefore made it necessary for us
to see that the good has a corresponding development. A hundred years
ago there was no such need for the Young Men’s Christian Associations,
for the invaluable Young Women’s Christian Associations. Life was
simpler. The temptation would come surely to every man, but it would
not come so frequently and in so intense a form. As the forces of
evil manifested themselves in stronger and stronger form they had to
be met, if they were to be successfully grappled with, by organized
effort, by the effort of the many, which must always be stronger than
the effort of one; and the successful effort to combat the forces
of evil had to take just such shape as has been given to the growth
of the Young Men’s Christian Associations. It had to take the shape
of combining decency and efficiency. There are many things that are
so true that it seems almost trite to speak of them, and yet it is
continually necessary to speak of them. There have been philanthropic
movements led and supported by most excellent people, which,
nevertheless, have produced results altogether incommensurable with
the efforts spent, because they failed to combine as this movement has
combined a recognition of the needs of human nature with a resolute
effort to make that human nature better.
I have been acquainted especially with three types of your work:
the work in the army and navy, the work among railroad men, and the
work among college students. These three classes are not going to
be effectively reached as classes by any effort which fails to take
account of the fact that they demand manliness as well as virtue;
and you can make them straight only on condition that in making them
straight you also keep in mind that it is necessary for them to be
strong. Remember Wesley’s remark when some one criticised him because
his hymn tunes were so good. He answered that he was not going to
leave all the good tunes to the devil. We want to be exceedingly
careful that the impression shall not get about that good men intend
to leave strength to those who serve the devil. I was very much
interested in what was said by Mr. Mott as to the meeting at Yale a
few nights ago, where the captain of the football team and the captain
of the crew of next season both were present. I think that is typical
of the whole movement. I am certain that those who have had experience
in the army and navy have seen that in the long run the man who is
a decent man is apt to be the man who is the best soldier. The work
among the railroad men always particularly appealed to me because the
railroad men are those who follow that modern industry which more than
any other modern industry makes demand upon its followers for the
heroic virtues, for the willingness to take risks, the willingness to
accept responsibilities, the readiness to adopt a standard of duty
which will require at need the sacrifice of life; those who follow it
must possess both the power to obey and the power to act on individual
initiative—the power to take responsibility. You can make men like
that accept morality if you can make them understand that it is not
only compatible with but is demanded by essential manliness. The work
of the Y. M. C. A. has grown so among college students, for instance,
because (I think I am right in saying) it has tried, not to dwarf any
of the impulses of the young, vigorous men but to guide them aright.
It has sought not to make a man’s development one-sided, not to
prevent his being a man, but to see that he is in the fullest sense
a man, and a good man. We greet to-night with peculiar pleasure the
men who served in the great war. Those men won in the day of trial
because they and their fellows had in them, in the first place, the
power of devotion to an ideal, and, in the next place, the strength
to realize that power in effective fashion. If the men of ’61 had
not been driven forward by a spirit which made them anxious to lay
down their lives if need should be rather than to see the flag of
the Union torn in twain, if they had not had in them the lift toward
loftier things which comes to those who value life as of small account
compared to devotion to country and to the flag, if they had not in
the truest and greatest and deepest sense of the word been patriotic,
then no amount of fighting capacity would have saved them. I don’t
care how good natural soldiers or sailors they had been, if their
ambitions had been personal, if they had been fundamentally disloyal,
if each had been striving to build up himself and had viewed his
fellows as rivals to be trampled down for his own advantage, then
failure would have come upon them. If Grant and Sherman and Thomas
and Farragut had not all felt that they were fighting for one end,
that they were holding up the arms of mighty Lincoln as he toiled
and wrought and suffered for the people, then their prowess would
have availed naught, and this Nation would have gone down into bloody
anarchy, would have crumbled into dust as so many republics had
crumbled of old. They needed fervent devotion to country, devotion to
the right, and power to fight.
In addition to the lofty ideal—in no way as a substitute for it,
but in addition to this power of devotion to an ideal—the man must
have the fibre of heart, the fibre of body, to make his devotion take
effective shape for the Nation’s welfare. And nowadays we shall win
out, in the fight for a loftier life—we shall make this twentieth
century better and not worse than any century that has gone before
it—in proportion as we approach the problems that face us as this
society has approached those problems, with a firm resolution to
neglect neither side of the development of our people, to strive to
make the young men decent, God-fearing, law-abiding, honor-loving,
justice-doing; and also fearless and strong, able to hold their own in
the hurly-burly of the world’s work, able to strive mightily that the
forces of right may be in the end triumphant.
AT THE BANQUET AT CANTON, OHIO, JANUARY 27, 1903, IN HONOR OF THE
BIRTHDAY OF THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY
_Mr. Toastmaster, Ladies, and Gentlemen_:
Throughout our history, and indeed throughout history generally,
it has been given to only a very few thrice-favored men to take so
marked a lead in the crises faced by their several generations that
thereafter each stands as the embodiment of the triumphant effort of
his generation. President McKinley was one of these men.
If during the lifetime of a generation no crisis occurs sufficient
to call out in marked manner the energies of the strongest leader,
then of course the world does not and can not know of the existence
of such a leader; and in consequence there are long periods in the
history of every nation during which no man appears who leaves an
indelible mark in history. If, on the other hand, the crisis is one
so many-sided as to call for the development and exercise of many
distinct attributes, it may be that more than one man will appear in
order that the requirements shall be fully met. In the Revolution and
in the period of constructive statesmanship immediately following it,
for our good fortune it befell us that the highest military and the
highest civic attributes were embodied in Washington, and so in him we
have one of the undying men of history—a great soldier, if possible
an even greater statesman, and above all a public servant whose lofty
and disinterested patriotism rendered his power and ability—alike on
fought fields and in council chambers—of the most far-reaching service
to the Republic. In the Civil War the two functions were divided, and
Lincoln and Grant will stand for evermore with their names inscribed
on the honor roll of those who have deserved well of mankind by saving
to humanity a precious heritage. In similar fashion Thomas Jefferson
and Andrew Jackson stand each as the foremost representative of the
great movement of his generation, and their names symbolize to us
their times and the hopes and aspirations of their times.
It was given to President McKinley to take the foremost place in our
political life at a time when our country was brought face to face
with problems more momentous than any whose solution we have ever
attempted, save only in the Revolution and in the Civil War; and it
was under his leadership that the Nation solved these mighty problems
aright. Therefore he shall stand in the eyes of history not merely as
the first man of his generation, but as among the greatest figures
in our national life, coming second only to the men of the two great
crises in which the Union was founded and preserved.
No man could carry through successfully such a task as President
McKinley undertook, unless trained by long years of effort for its
performance. Knowledge of his fellow-citizens, ability to understand
them, keen sympathy with even their innermost feelings, and yet power
to lead them, together with far-sighted sagacity and resolute belief
both in the people and in their future—all these were needed in the
man who headed the march of our people during the eventful years from
1896 to 1901. These were the qualities possessed by McKinley and
developed by him throughout his whole history previous to assuming
the Presidency. As a lad he had the inestimable privilege of serving,
first in the ranks, and then as a commissioned officer, in the great
war for national union, righteousness, and grandeur; he was one of
those whom a kindly Providence permitted to take part in a struggle
which ennobled every man who fought therein. He who when little more
than a boy had seen the grim steadfastness which after four years
of giant struggle restored the Union and freed the slaves was not
thereafter to be daunted by danger or frightened out of his belief in
the great destiny of our people.
Some years after the war closed McKinley came to Congress, and rose,
during a succession of terms, to leadership in his party in the lower
House. He also became Governor of his native State, Ohio. During
this varied service he received practical training of the kind most
valuable to him when he became Chief Executive of the Nation. To the
high faith of his early years was added the capacity to realize his
ideals, to work with his fellow-men at the same time that he led them.
President McKinley’s rise to greatness had in it nothing of the
sudden, nothing of the unexpected or seemingly accidental. Throughout
his long term of service in Congress there was a steady increase
alike in his power of leadership and in the recognition of that power
both by his associates in public life and by the public itself.
Session after session his influence in the House grew greater; his
party antagonists grew to look upon him with constantly increasing
respect, his party friends with constantly increasing faith and
admiration. Eight years before he was nominated for President he was
already considered a Presidential possibility. Four years before he
was nominated only his own high sense of honor prevented his being
made a formidable competitor of the chief upon whom the choice of
the convention then actually fell. In 1896, he was chosen because the
great mass of his party knew him and believed in him and regarded him
as symbolizing their ideals, as representing their aspirations. In
estimating the forces which brought about this nomination and election
I do not undervalue that devoted personal friendship which he had the
faculty to inspire in so marked a degree among the ablest and most
influential leaders; this leadership was of immense consequence in
bringing about the result; but, after all, the prime factor was the
trust in and devotion to him felt by the great mass of men who had
come to accept him as their recognized spokesman. In his nomination
the national convention of a great party carried into effect in good
faith the deliberate judgment of that party as to whom its candidate
should be.
But even as a candidate President McKinley was far more than the
candidate of a party, and as President he was in the broadest and
fullest sense the President of all the people of all sections of the
country.
His first nomination came to him because of the qualities he had shown
in healthy and open political leadership, the leadership which by
word and deed impresses itself as a virile force for good upon the
people at large and which has nothing in common with mere intrigue
or manipulation. But, in 1896, the issue was fairly joined, chiefly
upon a question which as a party question was entirely new, so that
the old lines of political cleavage were, in large part, abandoned.
All other issues sank in importance when compared with the vital
need of keeping our financial system on the high and honorable plane
imperatively demanded by our position as a great civilized power.
As the champion of such a principle President McKinley received the
support not only of his own party, but of hundreds of thousands of
those to whom he had been politically opposed. He triumphed, and
he made good with scrupulous fidelity the promises upon which the
campaign was won. We were at the time in a period of great industrial
depression, and it was promised for and on behalf of McKinley that
if he were elected our financial system should not only be preserved
unharmed but improved and our economic system shaped in accordance
with those theories which have always marked our periods of greatest
prosperity. The promises were kept and following their keeping came
the prosperity which we now enjoy. All that was foretold concerning
the well-being which would follow the election of McKinley has been
justified by the event. But as so often happens in our history, the
President was forced to face questions other than those at issue at
the time of his election. Within a year the situation in Cuba had
become literally intolerable. President McKinley had fought too well
in his youth, he knew too well at first hand what war really was,
lightly to enter into a struggle. He sought by every honorable means
to preserve peace, to avert war. He made every effort consistent
with the national honor to bring about an amicable settlement of the
Cuban difficulty. Then, when it became evident that these efforts were
useless, that peace could not be honorably entertained, he devoted his
strength to making the war as short and as decisive as possible. It is
needless to tell the result in detail. Suffice it to say that rarely
indeed in history has a contest so far-reaching in the importance of
its outcome been achieved with such ease. There followed a harder
task. As a result of the war we came into possession of Cuba, Porto
Rico, and the Philippines. In each island the conditions were such
that we had to face problems entirely new to our national experience,
and, moreover, in each island or group of islands the problems
differed radically from those presented in the others. In Porto Rico
the task was simple. The island could not be independent. It became in
all essentials a part of the Union. It has been given all the benefits
of our economic and financial system. Its inhabitants have been given
the highest individual liberty, while yet their government has been
kept under the supervision of officials so well chosen that the island
can be appealed to as affording a model for all such experiments in
the future; and this result was mainly owing to the admirable choice
of instruments by President McKinley when he selected the governing
officials.
In Cuba, where we were pledged to give the island independence, the
pledge was kept not merely in letter but in spirit. It would have
been a betrayal of our duty to have given Cuba independence out of
hand. President McKinley, with his usual singular sagacity in the
choice of agents, selected in General Leonard Wood the man of all
others best fit to bring the island through its uncertain period
of preparation for independence, and the result of his wisdom was
shown when last May the island became in name and in fact a free
Republic, for it started with a better equipment and under more
favorable conditions than had ever previously been the case with any
Spanish-American commonwealth.
Finally, in the Philippines, the problem was one of great complexity.
There was an insurrectionary party claiming to represent the
people of the islands and putting forth their claim with a certain
speciousness which deceived no small number of excellent men here
at home, and which afforded to yet others a chance to arouse a
factious party spirit against the President. Of course, looking
back, it is now easy to see that it would have been both absurd and
wicked to abandon the Philippine Archipelago and let the scores of
different tribes—Christian, Mohammedan, and pagan, in every stage of
semi-civilization and Asiatic barbarism—turn the islands into a welter
of bloody savagery, with the absolute certainty that some strong
power would have to step in and take possession. But though now it
is easy enough to see that our duty was to stay in the islands, to
put down the insurrection by force of arms, and then to establish
freedom-giving civil government, it needed genuine statesmanship to
see this and to act accordingly at the time of the first revolt. A
weaker and less far-sighted man than President McKinley would have
shrunk from a task very difficult in itself, and certain to furnish
occasion for attack and misrepresentation no less than for honest
misunderstanding. But President McKinley never flinched. He refused to
consider the thought of abandoning our duty in our new possessions.
While sedulously endeavoring to act with the utmost humanity toward
the insurrectionists, he never faltered in the determination to put
them down by force of arms, alike for the sake of our own interest
and honor, and for the sake of the interest of the islanders, and
particularly of the great numbers of friendly natives, including those
most highly civilized, for whom abandonment by us would have meant
ruin and death. Again his policy was most amply vindicated. Peace has
come to the islands, together with a greater measure of individual
liberty and self-government than they have ever before known. All the
tasks set us as a result of the war with Spain have so far been well
and honorably accomplished, and as a result this Nation stands higher
than ever before among the nations of mankind.
President McKinley’s second campaign was fought mainly on the issue
of approving what he had done in his first administration, and
specifically what he had done as regards these problems springing out
of the war with Spain. The result was that the popular verdict in his
favor was more overwhelming than it had been before.
No other President in our history has seen high and honorable effort
crowned with more conspicuous personal success. No other President
entered upon his second term feeling such right to a profound and
peaceful satisfaction. Then by a stroke of horror, so strange in its
fantastic iniquity as to stand unique in the black annals of crime,
he was struck down. The brave, strong, gentle heart was stilled
forever, and word was brought to the woman who wept that she was to
walk thenceforth alone in the shadow. The hideous infamy of the deed
shocked the Nation to its depths, for the man thus struck at was in a
peculiar sense the champion of the plain people, in a peculiar sense
the representative and the exponent of those ideals which, if we
live up to them, will make, as they have largely made, our country a
blessed refuge for all who strive to do right and to live their lives
simply and well as light is given them. The Nation was stunned, and
the people mourned with a sense of bitter bereavement because they
had lost a man whose heart beat for them as the heart of Lincoln once
had beaten. We did right to mourn; for the loss was ours, not his. He
died in the golden fulness of his triumph. He died victorious in that
highest of all kinds of strife—the strife for an ampler, juster, and
more generous national life. For him the laurel; but woe for those
whom he left behind; woe to the Nation that lost him; and woe to
mankind that there should exist creatures so foul that one among them
should strike at so noble a life.
We are gathered together to-night to recall his memory, to pay our
tribute of respect to the great chief and leader who fell in the
harness, who was stricken down while his eyes were bright with “the
light that tells of triumph tasted.” We can honor him best by the
way we show in actual deed that we have taken to heart the lessons
of his life. We must strive to achieve, each in the measure that
he can, something of the qualities which made President McKinley a
leader of men, a mighty power for good—his strength, his courage,
his courtesy and dignity, his sense of justice, his ever-present
kindliness and regard for the rights of others. He won greatness
by meeting and solving the issues as they arose—not by shirking
them—meeting them with wisdom, with the exercise of the most skilful
and cautious judgment, but with fearless resolution when the time of
crisis came. He met each crisis on its own merits; he never sought
excuse for shirking a task in the fact that it was different from the
one he had expected to face. The long public career, which opened
when as a boy he carried a musket in the ranks and closed when as
a man in the prime of his intellectual strength he stood among the
world’s chief statesmen, came to what it was because he treated
each triumph as opening the road to fresh effort, not as an excuse
for ceasing from effort. He undertook mighty tasks. Some of them
he finished completely; others we must finish; and there remain yet
others which he did not have to face, but which, if we are worthy to
be the inheritors of his principles, we will in our turn face with the
same resolution, the same sanity, the same unfaltering belief in the
greatness of this country, and unfaltering championship of the rights
of each and all of our people, which marked his high and splendid
career.
AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., FEBRUARY 26, 1903, UPON THE
OCCASION OF THE BI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE BIRTH OF JOHN WESLEY
_Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen_:
I am glad to have the chance of addressing this representative body
of the great Church which Wesley founded, on the occasion of the
commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. America,
moreover, has a peculiar proprietary claim on Wesley’s memory, for
it is on our continent that the Methodist Church has received its
greatest development. In the days of our Colonial life Methodism was
not on the whole a great factor in the religious and social life of
the people. The Congregationalists were supreme throughout most of New
England; the Episcopalians on the seaboard from New York southward;
while the Presbyterian congregations were most numerous along what was
then the entire Western frontier; and the Quaker, Catholic, and Dutch
Reformed Churches each had developments in special places. The great
growth of the Methodist Church, like the great growth of the Baptist
Church, began at about the time of the Revolutionary War. To-day my
theme is purely Methodism.
Since the days of the Revolution not only has the Methodist Church
increased greatly in the old communities of the thirteen original
States, but it has played a peculiar and prominent part in the pioneer
growth of our country, and has in consequence assumed a position of
immense importance throughout the vast region west of the Alleghanies
which has been added to our Nation since the days when the Continental
Congress first met.
For a century after the Declaration of Independence the greatest
work of our people, with the exception only of the work of
self-preservation under Lincoln, was the work of the pioneers as they
took possession of this continent. During that century we pushed
westward from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, southward to the Gulf
and the Rio Grande, and also took possession of Alaska. The work
of advancing our boundary, of pushing the frontier across forest
and desert and mountain chain, was the great typical work of our
Nation; and the men who did it—the frontiersmen, the pioneers, the
backwoodsmen, plainsmen, mountain men—formed a class by themselves.
It was an iron task, which none but men of iron soul and iron body
could do. The men who carried it to a successful conclusion had
characters strong alike for good and for evil. Their rugged natures
made them powers who served light or darkness with fierce intensity;
and together with heroic traits they had those evil and dreadful
tendencies which are but too apt to be found in characters of heroic
possibilities. Such men make the most efficient servants of the Lord
if their abounding vitality and energy are directed aright; and if
misdirected their influence is equally potent against the cause of
Christianity and true civilization. In the hard and cruel life of
the border, with its grim struggle against the forbidding forces of
wild nature and wilder men, there was much to pull the frontiersman
down. If left to himself, without moral teaching and moral guidance,
without any of the influences that tend toward the uplifting of man
and the subduing of the brute within him, sad would have been his, and
therefore our, fate. From this fate we have been largely rescued by
the fact that together with the rest of the pioneers went the pioneer
preachers; and all honor be given to the Methodists for the great
proportion of these pioneer preachers whom they furnished.
These preachers were of the stamp of old Peter Cartwright—men who
suffered and overcame every hardship in common with their flock,
and who in addition tamed the wild and fierce spirits of their
fellow-pioneers. It was not a task that could have been accomplished
by men desirous to live in the soft places of the earth and to walk
easily on life’s journey. They had to possess the spirit of the
martyrs; but not of martyrs who could merely suffer, not of martyrs
who could oppose only passive endurance to wrong. The pioneer
preachers warred against the forces of spiritual evil with the same
fiery zeal and energy that they and their fellows showed in the
conquest of the rugged continent. They had in them the heroic spirit,
the spirit that scorns ease if it must be purchased by failure to
do duty, the spirit that courts risk and a life of hard endeavor
if the goal to be reached is really worth attaining. Great is our
debt to these men and scant the patience we need show toward their
critics. At times they seemed hard and narrow to those whose training
and surroundings had saved them from similar temptations; and they
have been criticised, as all men, whether missionaries, soldiers,
explorers, or frontier settlers, are criticised when they go forth
to do the rough work that must inevitably be done by those who act
as the first harbingers, the first heralds, of civilization in the
world’s dark places. It is easy for those who stay at home in comfort,
who never have to see humanity in the raw, or to strive against the
dreadful naked forces which appear clothed, hidden, and subdued in
civilized life—it is easy for such to criticise the men who, in rough
fashion, and amid grim surroundings, make ready the way for the higher
life that is to come afterward; but let us all remember that the
untempted and the effortless should be cautious in passing too heavy
judgment upon their brethren who may show hardness, who may be guilty
of shortcomings, but who nevertheless do the great deeds by which
mankind advances. These pioneers of Methodism had the strong, militant
virtues which go to the accomplishment of such great deeds. Now and
then they betrayed the shortcomings natural to men of their type; but
their shortcomings seem small indeed when we place beside them the
magnitude of the work they achieved.
And now, friends, in celebrating the wonderful growth of Methodism,
in rejoicing at the good it has done to the country and to mankind,
I need hardly ask a body like this to remember that the greatness of
the fathers becomes to the children a shameful thing if they use it
only as an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to effort for
noble aims. I speak to you not only as Methodists—I speak to you as
American citizens. The pioneer days are over. We now all of us form
parts of a great civilized nation, with a complex industrial and
social life and infinite possibilities both for good and for evil.
The instruments with which, and the surroundings in which, we work,
have changed immeasurably from what they were in the days when the
rough backwoods preachers ministered to the moral and spiritual needs
of their rough backwoods congregations. But if we are to succeed, the
spirit in which we do our work must be the same as the spirit in which
they did theirs. These men drove forward, and fought their way upward,
to success, because their sense of duty was in their hearts, in the
very marrow of their bones. It was not with them something to be
considered as a mere adjunct to their theology, standing separate and
apart from their daily life. They had it with them week days as well
as Sundays. They did not divorce the spiritual from the secular. They
did not have one kind of conscience for one side of their lives and
another for another.
If we are to succeed as a nation we must have the same spirit in us.
We must be absolutely practical, of course, and must face facts as
they are. The pioneer preachers of Methodism could not have held their
own for a fortnight if they had not shown an intense practicability of
spirit, if they had not possessed the broadest and deepest sympathy
for, and understanding of, their fellowmen. But in addition to the
hard, practical common-sense needed by each of us in life, we must
have a lift toward lofty things or we shall be lost, individually
and collectively, as a nation. Life is not easy, and least of all is
it easy for either the man or the nation that aspires to do great
deeds. In the century opening, the play of the infinitely far-reaching
forces and tendencies which go to make up our social system bids fair
to be even fiercer in its activity than in the century which has
just closed. If during this century the men of high and fine moral
sense show themselves weaklings; if they possess only that cloistered
virtue which shrinks shuddering from contact with the raw facts of
actual life; if they dare not go down into the hurly-burly where the
men of might contend for the mastery; if they stand aside from the
pressure and conflict; then as surely as the sun rises and sets all
of our great material progress, all the multiplication of the physical
agencies which tend for our comfort and enjoyment, will go for naught
and our civilization will become a brutal sham and mockery. If we are
to do as I believe we shall and will do, if we are to advance in broad
humanity, in kindliness, in the spirit of brotherhood, exactly as we
advance in our conquest over the hidden forces of nature, it must be
by developing strength in virtue and virtue in strength, by breeding
and training men who shall be both good and strong, both gentle and
valiant—men who scorn wrongdoing, and who at the same time have both
the courage and the strength to strive mightily for the right. Wesley
accomplished so much for mankind because he refused to leave the
stronger, manlier qualities to be availed of only in the interest
of evil. The Church he founded has through its career been a Church
for the poor as well as for the rich and has known no distinction of
persons. It has been a Church whose members, if true to the teachings
of its founder, have sought for no greater privilege than to spend
and be spent in the interest of the higher life, who have prided
themselves, not on shirking rough duty, but on undertaking it and
carrying it to a successful conclusion.
I come here to-night to greet you and to pay my tribute to your past
because you have deserved well of mankind, because you have striven
with strength and courage to bring nearer the day when peace and
justice shall obtain among the peoples of the earth.
AT A MEETING OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS, HELD AT THE
RESIDENCE OF MR. GIFFORD PINCHOT, WASHINGTON, D. C., MARCH 26, 1903
_Mr. Pinchot, Mr. Secretary, and Gentlemen_:
I have felt that this evening the meeting was of such a character
as not merely to warrant but in a sense require that I should break
through my custom of not coming out to make speeches of this sort. For
I believe there are few bodies of men who have it in their power to do
a greater service to the country than those engaged in the scientific
study and practical application of improved methods of forestry for
the preservation of our woods in the United States. I am glad to see
here this evening not only the officials, including the head, of the
Department of Agriculture, but those, like Governor Richards, most
concerned in carrying out the policy of the Department of the Interior.
First and foremost, you can never afford to forget for one moment what
is the object of the forest policy. Primarily that object is not to
preserve forests because they are beautiful—though that is good in
itself;—not to preserve them because they are refuges for the wild
creatures of the wilderness—though that too is good in itself—but
the primary object of the forest policy as of the land policy of
the United States, is the making of prosperous homes, is part of
the traditional policy of home-making of our country. Every other
consideration comes as secondary. The whole effort of the government
in dealing with the forests must be directed to this end, keeping in
view the fact that it is not only necessary to start the homes as
prosperous, but to keep them so. That is the way the forests have
need to be kept. You can start a prosperous home by destroying the
forest, but you do not keep it. You will be able to make that policy
permanently the policy of the country only in so far as you are able
to make the people at large, and then all the people concretely,
interested in the results in the different localities, appreciative
of what it means; give them a full recognition of its value, and make
them earnest and zealous adherents of it. Keep that in mind too. In a
government such as ours it is out of the question to impose a policy
like this upon the people from without. A permanent policy can come
only from the intelligent conviction of the people themselves that it
is wise, and useful; nay, indispensable. We shall decide in the long
run whether we will or will not preserve the forests of the Rocky
Mountains accordingly as we are or are not able to make the people
of the States around the mountains, in their neighborhood, hearty
believers in the policy of forest preservation. This is the only way
in which this policy can be made a permanent success. In other words,
you must convince the people of the truth—and it is the truth—that
the success of home-makers depends in the long run upon the wisdom
with which the Nation takes care of its forests. That seems a strong
statement. It is none too strong. There are small sections of this
country where what is done with the woodlands makes no difference;
but over the great extent of the country the ultimate well-being of
the home-maker will depend in very large part upon the intelligent
use made of the forests. In other words, you, yourselves, must keep
this practical object before your mind. You must remember that the
forest which contributes nothing to the wealth, progress, or safety
of the country is of no interest to the government, and it should be
of little to the forester. Your attention should be directed not to
the preservation of the forests as an end in itself, but as the means
for preserving and increasing the prosperity of the Nation. Forestry
is the preservation of forests by wise use. We shall succeed, not by
preventing the use, but by making the forests of use to the settler,
the rancher, the miner, the man who lives in the neighborhood, and
indirectly the man who may live hundreds of miles off, down the course
of some great river which has its rise among the forests.
The forest problem is in many ways the most vital internal problem
of the United States. The more closely this statement is examined
the more evident its truth becomes. In the arid regions of the West
agricultural prosperity depends first of all upon the available
water supply. Forest protection alone can maintain the streamflow
necessary for irrigation in the West and prevent floods destructive
to agriculture and manufactures in the East. The relation between
forests and the whole mineral industry is an extremely intimate one,
for mines can not be developed without timber, and usually not without
timber close at hand. In many regions of the West ore is more abundant
than wood, and where the ore is of low grade, transportation of the
necessary mine timbers from a distance is out of the question. The use
of the mine is strictly limited to the man who has timber available
close at hand. The very existence of lumbering, the fourth great
industry of the United States, depends upon the success of your work
and our work as a Nation in putting practical forestry into effective
operation.
As it is with mining and lumbering, so it is in only less degree with
transportation, manufacture, and commerce in general. The relation
of all these industries to the forests is of the most intimate and
dependent kind. It is a matter for congratulation that so many of
these great interests are waking up to this fact. The railroads,
especially, managed as they are by men who are obliged by the very
nature of their profession to possess insight into the future, have
awakened to a clearer realization of the vast importance of economical
use both of timber and of forests. Even the grazing industry, as it
is carried out in the great West, which might at first sight appear
to have little relation to forestry, is nevertheless closely related
to it, because great areas of winter range would be entirely useless
without the summer range in the mountains, where the forest reserves
lie.
The forest resources of our country are already seriously depleted.
They can be renewed and maintained only by the co-operation of the
forester and the lumberman. The most striking and encouraging fact in
the forest situation is that lumbermen are realizing that practical
lumbering and practical forestry are allies and not enemies, and that
the future of each depends upon the other. The resolutions passed
at the last great meeting of the representative lumber interests
held here in Washington are strong proof of this fact and the most
encouraging feature of the present situation. As long as we could not
make the men concerned in the great lumbering industry realize that
the foresters were endeavoring to work in their interests and not
against them, the headway that could be made was but small. And we
will be able to work effectively to bring about immediate results of
permanent importance largely in proportion as we are able to convince
the men at the head of that great business of the practical wisdom of
what the foresters of the United States are seeking to accomplish. In
the last analysis, the attitude of the lumbermen toward your work will
be the chief factor of the success or failure of that work. In other
words, gentlemen, I can not too often say to you, as indeed it can not
be too often said to any body of men of high ideals and of scientific
training who are endeavoring to accomplish work of real worth for the
country, you must keep your ideals, and yet seek to realize them in
practical ways.
The United States is exhausting its forest supplies far more
rapidly than they are being produced. The situation is a grave one,
and there is but one remedy. That remedy is the introduction of
practical forestry on a large scale, and of course that is impossible
without trained men; men trained in the closet and trained by actual
field work, under practical conditions. You will have created a new
profession; a profession of the highest importance; a profession of
the highest usefulness toward the State; and you are in honor bound
to yourselves and to the people to make your profession stand as
high as the profession of law, as the profession of medicine, as
any other profession most intimately connected with our highest and
finest development as a nation. You are engaged in pioneer work in a
calling whose opportunities for public service are very great. Treat
the calling seriously; remember how much it means for the country as a
whole; remember that if you do your work in crude fashion, if you only
half learn your profession, you discredit it as well as yourselves.
Give yourselves every chance by thorough and generous preparation and
by acquiring not only a thorough knowledge, but a wide outlook over
all the questions on which you have to touch. The profession which you
have adopted is one which touches the Republic on almost every side,
political, social, industrial, commercial; and to rise to its level
you will need a wide acquaintance with the general life of the Nation,
and a viewpoint both broad and high. Any profession which makes you
deal with your fellowmen at large makes it necessary that, if you
are to succeed, you should understand what these fellowmen are, and
not merely what they are thought to be by people who live in the
closet and the parlor. You must know who the men are with whom you are
acting; how they feel; how far you can go; when you have to stop; when
it is necessary to push on; you must know all of these things if you
are going to do work of the highest value.
I believe that the foresters of the United States will create and
apply a more effective system of forestry than we have yet seen. If
you don’t, gentlemen, I will feel that you have fallen behind your
brethren of other callings; and I don’t believe you will fall behind
them. Nowhere else is the development of a country more closely bound
up with the creation and execution of a judicious forest policy. This
is of course especially true of the West; but it is true of the East
also. Fortunately in the West we have been able relatively to the
growth of the country to begin at an earlier day; so that we have been
able to provide great forest reserves in the Rocky Mountains, instead
of waiting and attempting to get Congress to pay a very large sum
for their creation, as we are now endeavoring to do in the Southern
Appalachians. In the administration of the national forest reserves,
the introduction of conservative lumbering on the timber tract of the
lumberman and the woodlot of the farmer, in the practical solution of
forest problems which affect every industry and every activity of the
nation, the members of this society have an unexampled field before
them. You have heavy responsibilities—every man that does any work
that is worth doing has a heavy responsibility—for upon the quality
of your work the development of forestry in the United States and
the protection of the industries which depend upon it will largely
rest. You have made a good beginning, and I congratulate you upon
it. Not only is a sound national forest policy coming rapidly into
being, but the lumbermen of the country are proving their interest
in forestry by practicing it. Twenty years ago a meeting such as
this to-night would have been impossible, and the desires we hear
expressed would have been treated as having no possible relation to
practical life. I think, Mr. Secretary, that since you first came into
Congress here there has been a complete revolution in the attitude
of public men toward this question. We have reached a point where
American foresters, trained in American forest schools, are attacking
American forest problems with success. That is the way to meet the
larger work you have before you. It is a work of peculiar difficulty,
because precedents are lacking. It will demand training, steadiness,
devotion, and above all _esprit de corps_, fealty to the body of which
you are members, zeal to keep the practice as well as the ideals of
that body high. The more harmoniously you work with each other, the
better your work will be. And above all a condition precedent upon
your usefulness to the body politic as a whole is the way in which
you are able both to instil your own ideals into the mass of your
fellowmen with whom you come in contact, and at the same time to show
your ability to work in practical fashion with them; to convince them
that as a business matter it will pay for them to co-operate with
you; to convince the public of that, and then also so to convince the
people of the localities, of the neighborhoods in which you work, and
especially the lumbermen and all others who make their life trades
dealing with the forests.