are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of
all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family
life, the fundamental and essential qualities--the homely, every-day,
all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not
in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the
average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy
children, then the state will topple, will go down, no matter what may
be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But
these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be that
power of organization, that power of working in common for a common
end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion during
the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even
more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the
hard intolerance and arid intellectual barrenness of what was worst in
the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater
need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So,
while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern
philosophy in its various branches, it would be worse than folly on
our part to ignore our need of intellectual leadership. Your own great
Frederick once said that if he wished to punish a province he would
leave it to be governed by philosophers; the sneer had in it an element
of justice; and yet no one better than the great Frederick knew the
value of philosophers, the value of men of science, men of letters,
men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed to accept Tolstoi as a
guide in social and moral matters; but it would also be a bad thing
not to have Tolstoi, not to profit by the lofty side of his teachings.
There are plenty of scientific men whose hard arrogance, whose cynical
materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put them on a level with the
bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they denounce. Yet our debt to
scientific men is incalculable, and our civilization of to-day would
have reft from it all that which most highly distinguishes it if the
work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries
were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism,
seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the
folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the
believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with
his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must
remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by
the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure
of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of
well-being than was ever attained by any preceding civilization. Unjust
war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready
to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe
thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting
edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should
arise!
It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which morality,
ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike
be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil
passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of
sentimental attachment to the rights of man; in which a high material
development in the things of the body shall be achieved without
subordination of the things of the soul; in which there shall be a
genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of those virile
qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall avail any
race; in which the fullest development of scientific research, the
great distinguishing feature of our present civilization, shall
yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever take the place of
character--for, from the standpoint of the nation as of the individual,
it is character that is the one vital possession.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which
is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the
nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love
of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of
the world’s progress is essential to the world’s well-being. You, my
hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under
modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to
our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and
do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each
people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but
each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it
first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be
a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage
be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you
and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness
and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different
fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the
less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the
people of my own land.
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC[4]
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from
the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient
institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty
kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through
the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that
tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he
sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship
meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the
dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
[4] Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.
This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when
no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services
to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the
remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago,
were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers,
and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of
the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has
now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent,
to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare;
and the generations engaged in it can not keep, still less add to,
the stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are
still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To
conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile
forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our
race. The primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which
are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully
acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward
civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive
culture. At first only the rudest schools can be established, for no
others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust
forward the frontier in the teeth of savage man and savage nature; and
many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of
higher learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast
stretches of fertile farmland; the stockaded clusters of log cabins
change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude
frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their
lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an
oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for
which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and
supplanters, and then their children and children’s children, change
and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate
vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities
and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant,
self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and
blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier
days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more
intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these
themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and
predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many
lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the
spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to
wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new
life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the
life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of
value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift
that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought
can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New
World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon
the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in
the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak
to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it
is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation,
not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt
that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and
productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of
the Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can
show that Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship,
the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to
me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great
democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours--an
effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for
the people--represents the most gigantic of all possible social
experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good
and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means
the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for
us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme.
Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or of a very
few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such
governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nation
may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to
the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the
average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible
quantity in working out the final results of that type of national
greatness.
But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and
with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be
conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman,
does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life,
and next in those great occasional crises which call for the heroic
virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics
are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than
the main source; and the main source of national power and national
greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore
it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average
citizen is kept high; and the average can not be kept high unless the
standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in
any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes
represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those
classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of
devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special
advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental
training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance
for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of
your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you
much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which
it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated
intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should especially
guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable;
and if yielded to, their--your--chances of useful service are at an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that
queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the
cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to
whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face
it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride
in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of
the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There
is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he
who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering
disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement
or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to
achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to
criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an
intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s
realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think,
of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear
their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the
affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from
others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there
is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both
criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done
them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the
arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is
no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive
to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end
the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails,
at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop
into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a
workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is
but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who
shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for
those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the
brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they
would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what
they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure
in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.
There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the
great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the
lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if
they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth
all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard
fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory
we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for
the vile guns would have been a soldier.”
France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the
most important is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high
artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership
in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier
has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries
at every court in Europe the “freemasons of fashion” have treated the
French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of
letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvellous
instrument of precision, French prose, has turned toward France for aid
and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted
is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a
modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland’s doom
and the vengeance of Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish host
were stricken at Roncesvalles.
Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a
high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that
these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound
body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above
body stands character--the sum of those qualities which we mean when
we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of
honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we
keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I
believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But
the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be
really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of
intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack
of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common
sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of
acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution--these are
the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can
control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.
I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which
represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay
all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training
of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of
you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace,
every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to
work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The
need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant
insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they
can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make
it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most
valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative
in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in
large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of
indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He
should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he
occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not
an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale
he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision.
In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave
man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve
his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning
philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are
right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness.
War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity.
But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war. The
choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this whether the
alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The question
must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be,
Is the right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more
to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must
be, “Yes,” whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be
made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be
made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep
out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting
nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important
than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of
blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit
the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is
the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of
sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited
upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that
the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children,
so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so,
if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it
is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful
fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of
ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk,
which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If
we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have
emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down
on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it
will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to
boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy
of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no
sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate
for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great
fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the
race.
Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty
he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man’s foremost
duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by
earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being;
it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher
superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this
has been done that he can help in movements for the general well-being.
He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus
strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that
bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel
for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a
burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity
in the abstract, but who can not keep his wife in comfort or educate
his children.
Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely
acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of
material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with
equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing
but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable,
is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher
life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire,
the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and
especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses
his wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of real use--and
such is often the case--why, then he does become an asset of worth.
But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the
mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need
in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great
guiding intelligences. Their places can not be supplied by any number
of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample
recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to
the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the
reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration
will come only from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that,
after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has
been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly
less importance compared to other things that can be done in life. It
is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard
of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the
deification of material well-being in and for itself. The man who, for
any cause for which he is himself accountable, has failed to support
himself and those for whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he
has fallen lamentably short in his prime duty. But the man who, having
far surpassed the limit of providing for the wants, both of body and
mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a
great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns
no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be
made to feel that, so far from being a desirable, he is an unworthy,
citizen of the community; that he is to be neither admired nor envied;
that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of
citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those
whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few
words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully
safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human
rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run
identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict
between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property
belongs to man and not man to property.