_Colonel McCook, Gentlemen, and Ladies_:
It needed no urging to get me to accept your invitation. I hailed
the chance of speaking a few words to you on this occasion, because
it seems to me that the railroad branch of the Young Men’s Christian
Association exemplifies in practice just exactly what I like to
preach; that is, the combination of efficiency with decent living and
high ideals.
In our present advanced civilization we have to pay certain penalties
for what we have obtained. Among the penalties is the fact that in
very many occupations there is so little demand upon nerve, hardihood,
and endurance, that there is a tendency to unhealthy softening of
fibre and relaxation of fibre; and such being the case I think it is a
fortunate thing for our people as a whole that there should be certain
occupations, prominent among them railroading, in which the man has to
show the very qualities of courage, of hardihood, or willingness to
face danger, the cultivation of the power of an instantaneous decision
under difficulties, and the other qualities which go to make up the
virile side of a man’s character—the qualities, Colonel McCook, which
you and those like you showed when as boys, as young men, they fought
to a finish the great Civil War.
So much for the manliness, so much for the strength, so much for the
courage developed by your profession, all of which you show, and have
to show, or you could not succeed in doing the work you are doing as
your life work. These qualities are all-important, but they are not
all-sufficient. It is necessary absolutely to have them. No nation
can rise to greatness without them; but by them alone no nation will
ever become great. Reading through the pages of history you come
upon nation after nation in which there has been a high average of
individual strength, bravery, and hardihood, and yet in which there
has been nothing approaching to national greatness, because those
qualities were not supplemented by others just as necessary. With the
courage, with the hardihood, with the strength, must come the power
of self-restraint, the power of self-mastery, the capacity to work
for and with others as well as for one’s self, the power of giving to
others the love which each of us must bear for his neighbor, if we are
to make our civilization really great. And these are the qualities
which are fostered and developed, which are given full play, by
institutions such as the Young Men’s Christian Association.
The other day in a little Lutheran church at Sioux Falls I listened
to a most interesting and most stimulating sermon, which struck me
particularly because of the translation of a word which, I am ashamed
to say, I had myself always before mistranslated. It was on the old
text of faith, hope, and charity. The sermon was delivered in German,
and the word that the preacher used for charity was not charity, but
love; preaching that the greatest of all the forces with which we
deal for betterment is love. Looking it up I found, of course, what
I ought to have known but did not, that the Greek word which we have
translated into the word charity, should be more properly translated
love. That is, we use the word charity at present in a sense which
does not make it correspond entirely to the word used in the original
Greek. This Lutheran preacher developed in a very striking but very
happy fashion the absolute need of love in the broadest sense of the
word, in order to make mankind even approximately perfect.
We need then the two qualities—the quality of which I first spoke to
you which has many shapes, the quality which rests upon courage, upon
bodily and mental strength, upon will, upon daring, upon resolution,
the quality which makes a man work; and then we need the quality of
which the preacher spoke when he spoke of love as being the great
factor, the ultimate factor, in bringing about the kind of human
fellowship which will even approximately enable us to come up toward
the standard after which I think all of us with many shortcomings
strive. Work, the quality which makes a man ashamed not to be able to
pull his own weight, not to be able to do for himself as well as for
others without being beholden to any one for what he is doing. No man
is happy if he does not work. Of all miserable creatures the idler, in
whatever rank of society, is in the long run the most miserable. If a
man does not work, if he has not in him not merely the capacity for
work but the desire for work, then nothing can be done with him. He is
out of place in our community. We have in our scheme of government no
room for the man who does not wish to pay his way through life by what
he does for himself and for the community. If he has leisure which
makes it unnecessary for him to devote his time to earning his daily
bread, then all the more he is bound to work just as hard in some way
that will make the community the better off for his existence. If he
fails in that, he fails to justify his existence. Work, the capacity
for work, is absolutely necessary; and no man’s life is full, no man
can be said to live in the true sense of the word, if he does not
work. This is necessary, and yet it is not enough. If a man is utterly
selfish, if utterly disregardful of the rights of others, if he has no
ideals, if he works simply for the sake of ministering to his own base
passions, if he works simply to gratify himself, small is his good in
the community. I think even then he is probably better off than if he
is an idler, but he is of no real use unless together with the quality
which enables him to work he has the quality which enables him to
love his fellows, to work with them and for them for the common good
of all.
It seems to me that these Young Men’s Christian Associations play a
part of the greatest consequence, not merely because of the great
good they do in themselves, but because of the lesson of brotherhood
that they teach all of us. All of us here are knit together by bonds
which we can not sever. For weal or for woe our fates are inextricably
intermingled. All of us in our present civilization are dependent upon
one another to a degree never before known in the history of mankind,
and in the long run we are going to go up or go down together. For a
moment some man may rise by trampling on his fellows; for a moment,
and much more commonly, some men may think they will rise or gratify
their envy and hatred by pulling down others. But any such movement
upward is probably illusory, and is certainly short-lived. Any
permanent movement upward must come in such a shape that all of us
feel the lift a little, and if there is a tendency down ward all of us
will feel that tendency, too. We must, if we are to raise ourselves,
realize that each of us in the long run can with certainty be raised
only if the conditions are such that all of us are somewhat raised. In
order to bring about these conditions the first essential is that each
shall have a genuine spirit of regard and friendship for the others,
and that each of us shall try to look at the problems of life somewhat
from his neighbor’s standpoint—that we shall have the capacity to
understand one another’s position, one another’s needs, and also
the desire each to help his brother as well as to help himself. To
do that wisely, wisely to strive with that as the aim, is not very
easy. Many qualities are needed in order that we can contribute our
mite toward the upward movement of the world—among them the quality
of self-abnegation, and yet combined with it the quality which will
refuse to submit to injustice. I want to preach the two qualities
going hand in hand. I do not want a man to fail to try to strive
for his own betterment, I do not want him to be quick to yield to
injustice; I want him to stand for his rights; but I want him to be
very certain that he knows what his rights are, and that he does not
make them the wrongs of some one else.
I have a great deal of faith in the average American citizen. I think
he is a pretty good fellow, and I think he can generally get on with
the other average American citizen if he will only know him. If he
does not know him, but makes him a monster in his mind, then he will
not get on with him. But if he will take the trouble to know him and
realize that he is a being just like himself, with the same instincts,
not all of them good, the same desire to overcome those that are not
good, the same purposes, the same tendencies, the same shortcomings,
the same desires for good, the same need of striving against evil; if
he will realize all this, then if you can get the two together with
an honest desire each to try not only to help himself but to help the
other, most of our problems will be solved. And I can imagine no
way more likely to hurry forward such a favorable solution than to
encourage the building up of just such institutions as this.
Therefore, I congratulate you with all my heart upon this meeting
to-day. Therefore I esteem myself most fortunate in having the chance
of addressing you. It is a very good thing to attend to the material
side of life. We must in the first instance attend to our material
prosperity. Unless we have that as a foundation we can not build up
any higher kind of life. But we shall lead a miserable and sordid
life if we spend our whole time in doing nothing but attending to our
material needs. If the building up of the railroads, of the farms,
of the factories, of the industrial centres, means nothing whatever
but an increase in the instruments of production and an increase in
the fevered haste with which those instruments are used, progress
amounts to but a little thing. If, however, the developing of our
material prosperity is to serve as a foundation upon which we raise
a higher, a purer, a fuller, a better life, then indeed things are
well with the Republic. If as our wealth increases the wisdom of
our use of the wealth increases in even greater proportion, then
the wealth has justified its existence many times over. If with the
industry, the skill, the hardihood, of those whom I am addressing and
their fellows, nothing comes beyond a selfish desire each to grasp
for himself whatever he can of material enjoyment, then the outlook
for the future is indeed grave, then the advantages of living in
the twentieth century surrounded by all our modern improvements, our
modern symbols of progress, is indeed small. But if we mean to make of
each fresh development in the way of material betterment a step toward
a fresh development in moral and spiritual betterment, then we are to
be congratulated.
To me the future seems full of hope because, although there are many
conflicting tendencies, and although some of these tendencies of our
present life are for evil, yet, on the whole the tendencies for good
are in the ascendency. And I greet this audience, this great body of
delegates, with peculiar pleasure because they are men who embody, and
embody by the very fact of their presence here, the two essential sets
of qualities of which I have been speaking. They embody the capacity
for self-help with the desire mutually to help one the other. You
have several qualities I like. You have sound bodies. Your profession
is not one that can be carried on, at least in some of its branches,
without the sound body. You have sound minds, and that is better than
sound bodies; and finally, the fact that you are here, the fact that
you have done what you have done, shows that you have that which
counts for more than body, for more than mind—character.
I congratulate you upon what you are doing for yourselves, and I
congratulate you even more upon what you are doing for all men who
hope to see the day brought nearer when the people of all nations,
shall realize—not merely talk of, but realize—what the essence of
brotherhood is. I congratulate you, as I say, not only because you
are bettering yourselves, but because to you, for your good fortune,
it is given to better others, to teach, in the way in which teaching
is most effective, not merely by precept but by action. The railroad
men of this country are a body entitled to the well wishes of their
fellow-men in any event, but peculiarly is this true of the railroad
men of the country who join in such work as that of the Young Men’s
Christian Associations, because they are showing by their actions—and
oh, how much louder actions speak than words!—that it is not only
possible, but very, very possible and easy to combine the manliness
which makes a man able to do his own share of the world’s work, with
that fine and lofty love of one’s fellow-men which makes you able to
come together with your fellows and work hand in hand with them for
the common good of mankind in general.