_Mr. Governor, Mr. Lieutenant-Governor, Mr. Speaker, Members of the
Legislative Body, Men and Women of Minnesota_:
I thank you for greeting me and for giving me the chance to say a word
or two in welcome and in acknowledgment of your greeting.
To any American capable of any depth of reflection whatever, it
should always be a somewhat solemn thing to come into the presence
of two bodies—one a legislative body; the other an educational
body; the legislative body, which is not only the method but the
symbol of our free government; the educational body, which, using
educational in its broadest and truest sense, means the body that
fits us for self-government. Self-government is not an easy thing.
The nations of antiquity, the nations of the middle ages, that tried
the experiment of independent self-government which should guarantee
freedom to the individual, and yet safety from without and within to
the body politic itself, rarely lasted long, never rose to a pitch of
greatness such as ours without having suffered some radical and, as it
proved ultimately, fatal change of structure. Until our Republic was
founded it had proved impossible in the long run to combine freedom
for the individual and greatness for the nation. The republics of
antiquity and of the middle ages went one of two lines; either proved
fatal. Either the individual’s interests were sacrificed, and, while
retaining the forms of freedom, the republic became in effect a
despotism, or else the freedom of the individual was kept at the cost
of utter impotence either to put down disorder at home or to repel
aggression from abroad.
It has been given to us during the century and a quarter of our
national life so to handle ourselves as a people that we have escaped
both dangers. We have been able to escape the leadership of those who
feared Scylla so much that they would plunge us into Charybdis, and
of those who feared Charybdis so much that they would plunge us into
Scylla. We have been able to preserve orderly liberty and strength
to grow in greatness among the nations of the earth, while becoming
steadily more and more democratic in the truest and broadest sense
of the word. I believe with all my heart that we shall continue on
the path thus marked out for us; but we shall so continue only if we
remember that in the last analysis the safety of the Republic depends
upon the high average of individual citizenship.
We can keep all the forms of free government; and every Fourth of
July we can talk possibly a little too boastfully of both the past
and the present; and yet it shall not avail us if we do not have
in our hearts the spirit that makes for decent citizenship, the
spirit that alone counts in the formation of a true republic. And
that spirit is essentially the same in public life as in private
life. The manifestations of it differ, but the spirit is the same.
A public man is as much bound to tell the truth on the stump as off
the stump. On the other hand, his critics will do well to remember
that truth-telling is a virtue for them to practice also. What we
need in public life and in private life is not genius so much as the
many-sided development of the qualities which in their sum make good
citizenship. In a great crisis we shall need a genius; thrice and
thrice over fortunate is the nation which then develops a Lincoln to
lead it in peace; a Grant to lead it in war; a Washington to lead it
in war and peace.
But what we need as a nation, as an individual, at the ordinary times
which are so much larger in the aggregate than the extraordinary
times, and upon our conduct in which really depends our conduct
in extraordinary times, are the commonplace virtues which we all
recognize, and which when we were young we wrote about in copybooks,
and which, if we practice, will count for a thousand times more in the
long run than any brilliance and genius of any kind or sort whatsoever.
I want to say just a word on the other side of the two great
questions, the legislative and educational questions. Education must
be twofold. Of course if we do not have education in the school,
the academy, the college, the university, and have it developed in
the highest and wisest manner, we shall make but a poor fist of
American citizenship. One of the things that is most hopeful in our
Republic is the way in which the State has taken charge of elementary
education; and the way in which, in the East through private gift,
here in the West through the wise liberality of the several States,
the higher education has been taken care of, as in your own University
of Minnesota. But such education can never be all. It can never be
more than half, and sometimes not that. Nothing can take the place
of the education of the home; and that education must be largely the
unconscious influence of character upon character. There is no use
in the father trying to instil wise saws and precepts into the son,
if his own character gives the lie to his advice. And unfortunately
it is just as true in the education of children as in everything
else, that it is almost as harmful to be a virtuous fool as a knave.
So often throughout our social structure from the wealthiest down
to the poorest you see the queer fatuity of the man or the woman
which makes them save their children temporary discomfort, temporary
unpleasantness, at the cost of future destruction; you see a great
many men, and I am sorry to say a great many women, who say, “I have
had to work hard; my boy or my girl shall not do anything.” I have
seen it in every rank. I have heard the millionaire say, “I have had
to work all my life to make money, let my boy spend it.” It would be
better for the boy never to have been born than to be brought up on
that principle. On the other hand, I have seen the overworked drudge,
the laborer’s wife, who said, “Well, I have had to work my heart out
all my days; my daughters shall be ladies”; and her conception of
her daughters being ladies was to have them sit around useless and
incompetent, unable to do anything, brought up to be discontented
cumberers of the earth’s surface. As Abraham Lincoln said: “There is
a deal of human nature in mankind.” Fundamentally, virtues and faults
are just the same in the millionaire and the day laborer. The man or
the woman who seeks to bring up his or her children with the idea that
their happiness is secured by teaching them to avoid difficulties is
doing them a cruel wrong. To bring up the boy and girl so sheltered
that they can not stand any rough knocks, that they shrink from toil,
that when they meet an obstacle they feel they ought to go around or
back instead of going on over it—the man or the woman who does that is
wronging the children to a degree that no other human being can wrong
them. If you are worth your salt and want your children to be worth
their salt, teach them that the life that is not a life of work and
effort is worthless, a curse to the man or woman leading it, a curse
to those around him or her. Teach the boys that if they are ever to
count in the world they will count not by flinching from difficulties,
but by warring with and overcoming them. What utter scorn one feels
for those who seek only the life of ease; the life passed in dexterous
effort to avoid all angular corners, to avoid being put in the places
where a strong man by blood and sweat and toil and risk wins triumph!
What a wretched life is the life of the man passed in endeavoring to
shirk his share of the burden laid upon him in this world! And it
makes no difference whether that man is a man of inherited wealth or
one who has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; it is equally
ignoble in either case. What is true of the individual is true of the
nation. The man who counts is not the man who dodges work, but he who
goes out into life rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, girding
himself for the effort, bound to win and wrest triumph from difficulty
and disaster.
So it is with our Nation. No nation which has bound itself only
to do easy things ever yet amounted to anything, ever yet came to
anything throughout the ages. We have become a great people. At the
threshold of this twentieth century we stand with the future looming
large before us. We face great problems within and great problems
without. We can not if we would refuse to face those problems. All we
can decide is whether we will do them well or ill; for the refusal to
face them would itself mean that we were doing them ill. We are in
the arena into which great nations must come. We must play our part.
It rests with us to decide that we shall not play it ignobly; that we
shall not flinch from the great problems that there are to do, but
that we shall take our place in the forefront of the great nations and
face each problem of the day with confident and resolute hope.
IN THE CHAPEL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.,
APRIL 4, 1903
_Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen_:
I am glad to have the chance of greeting you this evening, but I
regret that the engagements for me have been so numerous that it will
be only a greeting. I wish I could be here to see your beautiful
grounds and buildings by daylight, and to see a little of the life of
the university.
There are plenty of tendencies for good, and, I am sorry to say,
plenty of tendencies for evil in our modern life, and high among the
former must be placed the rapid growth of the great institutions of
learning in this country. There is a twofold side to the work done in
any institution of this kind. In the first place the institution is
to turn out scholars and men proficient in the different technical
branches for which it trains them. It should be the aim of every
university which seeks to develop the liberal side of education
to turn out men and women who will add to the sum of productive
achievement in scholarship; who will not merely be content to work in
the fields that have already been harrowed a thousand times by other
workers, but who will strike out for themselves and try to do new work
that counts; so in each technical school if the institution is worthy
of standing in the front rank, it will turn out those who in that
particular specialty stand at the head. But in addition to this merely
technical work, to the turning out of the scholar, the professional
man, the man or woman trained on some special line, each university
worthy the name must endeavor to turn out men and women in the fullest
sense of the word, good citizens, men and women who will add by what
they do to the sum of noble work in the whole community.
It is a good thing that so much attention should be given to physical
development. I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I
do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered
about a good deal so long as it is not fatal, and if he feels any
sympathy for himself I do not like him. I believe thoroughly in the
sound and vigorous body. I believe still more in the vigorous mind.
And I believe most of all in what count for more than body, for more
than mind, and that is character. That is the sum of the forces
that make the man or the woman worth knowing, worth revering, worth
holding to. Play hard while you play, but do not mistake it for work.
If a young fellow is twenty it is a good thing that he should be a
crack half-back; but when he is forty I am sorry if he has never been
anything else except once at twenty a good half-back. Keep the sense
of proportion. Play hard; it will do you good in your work. But work
hard and remember that this is the main thing.
Finally, in closing, I think it is a safe thing to take a motto that
I heard from the lips of an old football player once: “Don’t flinch,
don’t foul, and hit the line hard.”