“After honesty as the foundation of the citizenship that counts, in
business or in politics, must come courage. You must have courage not
only in battle, but also in civic life. We need physical and we need
moral courage. Neither is enough by itself. You need moral courage.
Many a man has been brave physically who has flinched morally. You must
feel in you a fiery wrath against evil. When you see a wrong, instead
of feeling shocked and hurt, and a desire to go home, and a wish that
right prevailed, you should go out and fight until that wrong is
overcome. You must feel ashamed if you do not stand up for the right
as you see it; ashamed if you lead a soft and easy life and fail to do
your duty. You must have courage. If you do not, the honesty is of no
avail.
“But honesty and courage, while indispensable, are not enough for good
citizenship. I do not care how brave and honest a man is; if he is a
fool, he is not worth knocking on the head. In addition to courage
and honesty, you must have the saving quality of common sense. One
hundred and ten years ago, France started to form a republic, and one
of her noted men—an exceedingly brilliant man, a scholar of exceptional
thought, the Abbe Sieyés,—undertook to draw up a constitution. He drew
up several constitutions, beautiful documents; but they would not work.
The French national convention resolved in favor of liberty; and, in
the name of liberty, they beheaded every man who did not think as they
did. They resolved in favor of fraternity, and beheaded those who
objected to such a brotherhood. They resolved in favor of equality,
and cut off the heads of those who rose above the general level. They
indulged in such hideous butcheries, in the name of liberty, equality,
and fraternity, as to make tyranny seem mild in comparison;—and all
because they lacked common sense, as well as morality.
“Two or three years before that, we, in America, had a body of men
gathered in a constitutional convention to make a constitution. They
assembled under the lead of Washington, with Alexander Hamilton,
Madison, and many other eminent men. They did not draw up a
constitution in a week, as the brilliant Sieyés did, but just one
constitution, and that one worked. That was the great point!
“It worked, primarily, because it was drawn up by practical
politicians,—by practical politicians who believed in decency, as well
as in common sense. If they had been a set of excellent theorists, they
would have drawn up a constitution which would have commended itself
to other excellent theorists, but which would not have worked. If they
had been base, corrupt men, mere opportunists, men who lacked elevating
ideals, dishonest, cowardly, they would have drawn up a document that
would not have worked at all. On the great scale, the only practical
politics is honest politics. The makers of our constitution were
practical politicians, who were also sincere reformers, and as brave
and upright as they were sensible.”