_Mr. Chairman, and you, my Fellow-Citizens_:
It is a great pleasure to come before you this evening. Since Saturday
I have been traveling through your great and beautiful State. I know
your people; I have been with them; I have worked with them; and it
is indeed a joy to come here now and see from one end of your State
to the other the signs of your abounding prosperity. I feel that the
future of Nebraska is secure. There will be temporary ups and downs,
and of course if any of you are guilty of folly, from your own folly
nothing can save you but yourselves. But if you act as I believe and
trust that you will act, this State has a future before it second to
that of no other State in this great Nation.
I address you to-night on the anniversary of the birth of the great
silent soldier—Ulysses Grant, and I am glad to have the chance of
saying a few words to an audience such as this in this great typical
city of the West on the occasion of the birthday of the great Western
general, the great American general. It is a good thing to pay homage
with our lips to the illustrious dead. It is a good thing to keep in
mind what we owe to the memories of Washington and his fellows, who
founded this mighty Republic; to Abraham Lincoln and Grant and their
fellows, who saved it. It is a far better thing to pay the homage that
counts—the homage of our lives and our deeds. Illustrious memories of
the Nation’s past are but curses if they serve the men of the Nation
at present as excuses for shirking the problems of the day. They are
blessings if they serve to spur on the men of now to see that they act
as well in their time as the men of yesterday did in theirs.
Each generation has its peculiar problems; each generation has certain
tasks allotted to it to do. Shame to it if it treats the glorious
deeds of a generation that went before as an excuse for its own
failure to do the peculiar task it finds ready to hand. Upon the way
in which we solve our problems will depend whether our children and
our children’s children shall look back or shall not look back to us
with the veneration which we feel for the men of the mighty years
of the Civil War. Our task is a lighter one than theirs, but it is
an important one, and do it we must, if we wish to rise level to
the standard set us by our forefathers. You in Nebraska have passed
through periods of terrible privation, of misery and hardship. They
were evil times. And yet, there is no experience, no evil, that out
of it good can not come, if only we look at it right. Things are
better now. Things can be kept better, but only on condition that
we face facts with coolness and sanity, with clear-eyed vision that
tells us what is true and what is false. When things go wrong there
is a tendency in humanity to wish to blame some of its fellows. It
is a natural tendency, and by no means always a wholesome tendency.
There is always a tendency to feel that somehow by legislation, by
the enactment of some law, by the trying of some patent scheme
things can be made permanently better. Now, something can be done
by law. A good deal can be done by law. Even more can be done by
the honest administration of the law; an administration which knows
neither fear nor favor, which treats each man exactly as that man’s
record entitles him to be treated; the kind of enforcement of the
law which I think I may promise that you will have while Mr. Knox
remains Attorney-General. But more than the law, far more than the
administration of the law, depends upon the individual quality of the
average citizen. The chief factor in winning success for your State,
for the people in the State, must be what the chief factor in winning
the success of a people has been from the beginning of time—the
character of the individual man, of the individual woman.
I have spoken of the homage we should pay to the memory of Grant.
It is the homage we should pay to the memory of Lincoln, the homage
we should pay to all of our fellow-countrymen who have at any time
rendered great service to the Republic, and it can be rendered in
most efficient form not by merely praising them for having dealt
with problems which now we do not have to face, but by facing our
problems in the same spirit in which they faced theirs. Nothing was
more noteworthy in all of Lincoln’s character than the way in which
he combined fealty to the loftiest ideal with a thoroughly practical
capacity to achieve that ideal by practical methods. He did not war
with phantoms; he did not struggle among the clouds; he faced facts;
he endeavored to get the best results he could out of the warring
forces with which he had to deal. When he could not get the best he
was forced to content himself, and did content himself, with the
best possible. What he did in his day we must do in ours. It is not
possible to lay down any rule of conduct so specific that it will
enable us to meet each particular issue as it arises. All that can be
done is to lay down certain general rules, and then to try, each man
for himself, to apply those general rules to the specific cases that
come up.
Our complex industrial civilization has not only been productive of
much benefit, but has also brought us face to face with many puzzling
problems; problems that are puzzling, partly because there are men
that are wicked, partly because there are good men who are foolish
or short-sighted. There are many such to-day—the problems of labor
and capital, the problems which we group together rather vaguely when
we speak of the problems of the trusts, the problems affecting the
farmers on the one hand, the railroads on the other. It would not be
possible in any one place to deal with the particular shapes which
these problems take at that time and in that place. And yet, there are
certain general rules which can be laid down for dealing with them,
and those rules are the immutable rules of justice, of sanity, of
courage, of common-sense. Six months ago it fell to my lot to appoint
a commission to investigate into and conclude about matters connected
with the great and menacing strike in the anthracite coal fields of
Pennsylvania. On that commission I appointed representatives of the
church, of the bench, of the army, a representative of the capitalists
of the region, and a representative of organized labor. They published
a report which was not only of the utmost moment because of dealing
with the great and vital problem with which they were appointed to
deal, but also because in its conclusions it initiated certain general
rules in so clear and masterful a fashion that I wish most earnestly
it could receive the broadest circulation as a tract wherever there
exists or threatens to exist trouble in any way akin to that with
which those commissioners dealt.
If I might give a word of advice to Omaha, I should like to see your
daily press publish in full the concluding portion of that report
of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, signed by all the members
thereof, by those in a special sense the champion of the wage-worker,
and by those in a special sense identified with capital, organized
or unorganized; because, men and women of Omaha, those people did
not speak first as capitalist or as laborer, did not speak first as
judge, as army man, as church man, but all of them signed that report
as American citizens anxious to see right and justice prevail. No one
quality will get us out of any difficulty. We need more than one; we
need a good many. We need, as I said, the power first of each man’s
honestly trying to look at the problem from his fellow’s standpoint.
Capitalist and wage-worker alike should honestly endeavor each to look
at any matter from the other’s standpoint, with a freedom on the one
hand from the contemptible arrogance which looks down upon the man
of less means, and on the other, from the no less contemptible envy,
jealousy and rancor, which hates another because he is better off.
Each quality is the supplement of the other, and in point of baseness
there is not the weight of a finger to choose between them. Look at
the report signed by those men; look at it in the spirit in which they
wrote it, and if you can only make yourselves, make this community,
approach the problems of to-day in the spirit that those men, your
fellows, showed in approaching the problem of yesterday, your problems
will be solved.
Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of
creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to
do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long
run with absolute certainty that class’s own worst enemy. In the long
run, and as a whole, we are going to go up or go down together. Of
course there will be individual exceptions, small, local exceptions,
exceptions in kind, exceptions in place; but as a whole, if the
commonwealth prospers some measure of prosperity comes to all of
us. If it is not prosperous, then the adversity, though it may fall
unequally upon us, will weigh more or less upon all. It lies with us
ourselves to determine our own fate. I can not too often say that the
wisest law, the best administration of the law, can do naught more
than give us a fair field in which to work out that fate aright. If as
individuals, or as a community, we mar our future by our own folly,
let us remember that it is upon ourselves that the responsibility must
rest.