REMARKS AT THE DINNER OF THE PERIODICAL PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION OF
AMERICA. THE NEW WILLARD, WASHINGTON, D. C., APRIL 7, 1904
_Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen_:
It is always a pleasure to a man in public life to meet the real
governing classes. I wish to bid you welcome to Washington this
evening, and to say but one word of greeting to you, and that word
shall take the form of a warning. I did not speak in jest when I
alluded to you as representatives of the governing classes. I think
that we of the United States can not keep too fresh in our minds the
fact that the men ultimately responsible for the Government are not
the representatives of the people, but the people themselves, and that
therefore heavy is the responsibility that lies upon the people and
above all upon those who do the most toward shaping the thought of
the people. In the days of my youth I was a literary man myself. In
reading a book recently, a series of essays, I was immensely struck by
one thought developed in it. The writer, one of our greatest scholars,
was speaking of the fact that freedom could not exist unless there
went with it a thorough appreciation of responsibility, and he used
a phrase somewhat like this—that among all peoples there must be
restraint; if there is no restraint the result is inevitably anarchy.
That means the negation of all government, and the negation of all
government of course means the negation of popular government; and that
therefore there must be restraint, and that therefore a free people
had merely substituted self-restraint for external restraint; and the
permanence of our freedom as a people, the permanence of our liberties,
depends upon the way in which we show and exercise that self-restraint.
There must be much more than good laws to make a good people. The man
whose morality is expressed simply in the non-infringement of the law
is a pretty poor creature. Unless our average citizenship is based upon
a good deal more than the mere observance of the laws on the statute
books—that, of course, is the preliminary—that, of course, is the
beginning—but unless it is based on more than that then our average
citizenship can never produce the kind of government which it must
and will produce. So far from liberty, from freedom, from responsible
self-government, being things that come easily and to any peoples,
they are peculiarly things that can come only to the highly developed
peoples. Only peoples capable, not merely of mastering others, but
of mastering themselves, can achieve real liberty, can achieve real
self-government; and for that self-mastery, for the cultivation of the
spirit of self-restraint which is but another side of the spirit of
self-reliance, we must rely to no small degree upon those who furnish
us much of the thought of the great bulk of our people who think most.
Therefore, gentlemen, in greeting you here to-night I wish not merely
to welcome you, but to say that I trust every man of you feels the
weight of the responsibility that rests upon him. The man who writes,
the man who month in and month out, week in and week out, day in and
day out, furnishes the material which is to do its part in shaping the
thoughts of our people is fundamentally the man who, more than any
other, determines what kind of character, and therefore ultimately what
kind of government, this people shall possess. I believe in the future
of this people; I believe in the growth and greatness of this country,
because I believe that fundamentally you and those like you approach
your task in the proper spirit. It seems to me that because of the
very fact that we are so confident in the greatness of our country and
in our country’s future, we should beware of any undue levity, of any
spirit of mere boastfulness, of that most irritating of all qualities,
not the most noxious, but the most irritating of all qualities—the
tendency to depreciate others and thereby exalt ourselves.
Courtesy among individuals is a good thing, but international courtesy
is quite as good a thing. If there is any one quality to be deprecated
in a public man and in a public writer alike, it is the using of
language which without any corresponding gain to ourselves tends to
produce irritation among nations with whom we ought to be on friendly
terms. Nations are now brought much nearer together than they formerly
were. Steam, electricity, the immense spread of the newspaper press
in all countries, the way in which so much of what is written in any
country is translated into the language of another country, all of
these facts have tended to bring peoples closer together now. That
ought to and I think in the future will tell predominantly for good;
but it does not help us in the least to be brought closer together with
other peoples if they merely find our unamiable traits more strongly
marked than they thought. We can rest assured that no man ever thinks
better of us because we point out his salient defects; and no nation is
ever won to a kindlier feeling toward us if we adopt toward it a tone
which we would resent if adopted toward us.
We have a very large field for warring against evil here at home.
When we have made things all as they should be in Nation, State, and
municipality here at home, then we can talk about reforming the rest of
mankind; but meanwhile let us begin at home.
ADDRESS AT THE PRIZE DAY EXERCISES AT GROTON SCHOOL, GROTON, MASS., MAY
24, 1904
_Mr. Rector, and Boys, and Fellow-Parents_:
All I shall have to say to you to-day will be simply in the line of
illustrating what the Rector has said, for it seems to me that he has
preached just about the right gospel of life as we ought to learn it;
and let me at the beginning thank the Rector for what I shall hope was
a personal allusion to me, because it is the only time in my life that
I have been even indirectly compared to Apollo. When the comparison was
made I saw the Bishop look self-conscious, so I wish to put in my claim
first.
I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and
in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things
hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent
man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the
same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a
pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and
lacks any one of those three traits.
I was struck, Mr. Peabody, by what you said as to the attitude these
boys should have in college. The boys from a school like this—from
Groton, from St. Mark’s, from St. Paul’s, from any of these schools—if
they are worth their salt, if they have real loyalty and not merely
lip-loyalty to their schools, ought to go to Columbia, Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, with the firm intention of so carrying themselves that Groton,
St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and the other schools shall not be sneered at
because of anything they do. You are not entitled, either in college
or in after life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been at
Groton—not an ounce; but we are entitled to hold you to an exceptional
accountability because you have been at Groton. Because much has been
given to you, therefore we have a right to expect much from you; and
we have a right to expect that you shall begin to give that much just
as soon as you leave school and go to college, so that you shall count
when you are there.
I read the other day in a very bright college book a sentence that
grated on me because of a sneer it contained at the “shoals of freshmen
from church schools,” which implied that they did not so conduct
themselves as to add weight for what was best in college life. I do not
think such sneers are justified; but you are peculiarly liable to such
sneers, and therefore you should be peculiarly careful to walk so as
not to be suspected of deserving them. We have a right to expect that
you will, from the outset, and without showing yourselves varieties of
that most obnoxious of creatures, the prig, handle yourselves decently,
so as to be a force for what is decent and right in college.
Another thing: I was glad to hear the Rector, in describing one pitfall
that you are to avoid, use just exactly the right word when he asked
you to be careful not to turn out snobs. Now, there are in our civic
and social life very much worse creatures than snobs, but none more
contemptible. (By the way—this is not speaking to the boys, but to
the parents—I have had the good luck to have my boys go to the public
schools before they came here.) If you have any stuff in you at all,
and try to amount to anything in after life, you will not remain snobs
even if you start as such. It will be taken out of you very soon and
very roughly if you go into any real work. Go into politics—go to your
district convention, and try to carry it on the snob basis and see
how far you will get. The thing that will strike you in just about a
week is that there are a whole lot of able people sliding around this
planet. The fact that the individual opposed to you does not wear a
cravat, and does wear a saw-edge collar, does not imply that you are
going to carry the convention against him! You will soon find that it
is not his clothes but his political sense and energy that control.
You will find that if you expect to do anything there will be mighty
little temptation to try to treat the men with whom you are working on
any basis save the fundamental democratic basis of what they amount
to, and what you can show you amount to as compared to them. So that
if you go into life to do anything, it is perfectly useless for me to
tell you to get rid of snobbery, because you will have to. It is just
as true in every other field as in politics. Every man who works in
philanthropy—and he can do nothing in philanthropy unless he combines a
very earnest desire to accomplish what is decent with the determination
to accomplish it in practical fashion (I shall speak of that later)—if
he goes into philanthropy and tries to do something in a college
settlement, tries to do his part in working to disentangle the tangled
knot of our social and civic life, he will find just as soon as he gets
interested in his work he won’t care and won’t know who the people are
who are with him except as he judges them by their fruits. The interest
that you take in him is, can a given man accomplish something? If he
can not, then let him give place to the man who can.
You see, all I am doing is to amplify here and there the Rector’s
speech. Take what was said about scholarship. I came here intending to
speak to you along that same line, although in a slightly different
way, approaching it from a slightly different aspect. I believe with
all my heart in athletics, in sport, and have always done as much
thereof as my limited capacity and my numerous duties would permit; but
I believe in bodily vigor chiefly because I believe in the spirit that
lies back of it. If a boy can not go into athletics because he is not
physically able to, that does not count in the least against him. He
may be just as much of a man in after life as if he could, because it
is not physical address but the moral quality behind it which really
counts. But if he has the physical ability and keeps out because he is
afraid, because he is lazy, because he is a mollycoddle, then I haven’t
any use for him. If he has not the right spirit, the spirit which makes
him scorn self-indulgence, timidity and mere ease, that is if he has
not the spirit which normally stands at the base of physical hardihood,
physical prowess, then that boy does not amount to much, and he is
not ordinarily going to amount to much in after life. Of course, there
are people with special abilities so great as to outweigh even defects
like timidity and laziness, but the man who makes the Republic what it
is, if he has not courage, the capacity to show prowess, the desire for
hardihood; if he has not the scorn of mere ease, the scorn of pain,
the scorn of discomfort (all of them qualities that go to make a man’s
worth on an eleven or a nine or an eight); if he has not something of
that sort in him then the lack is so great that it must be amply atoned
for, more than amply atoned for, in other ways, or his usefulness to
the community will be small. So I believe heartily in physical prowess,
in the sports that go to make physical prowess. I believe in them not
only because of the amusement and pleasure they bring, but because I
think they are useful. Yet I think you had a great deal better never
go into them than to go into them with the idea that they are the
chief end even of school or college; still more of life. There was an
article in one of the “Atlantic” monthlies last year which all parents
(even those of the most limited intellectual home development, Mr.
Peabody!) should read, by Lawrence Lowell, on the careers in after life
of those who have distinguished themselves as scholars and as athletes
in college; and the showing for the athletes was not as good, either,
as I had hoped or as I had expected that it would have been. I believe
that to have been in athletics is an advantage to a man only if he
realizes that even when he is in college it is not his chief end,
and if he realizes that once out of college it can not be his end at
all. It is a mighty good thing to be a halfback on a varsity eleven;
but it is a mighty poor thing, when a man reaches the age of forty,
only to be able to say that he was once halfback on an eleven. Do not
lose the sense of proportion. Remember that in life, and above all in
the very active, practical, workaday life on this continent, the man
who wins out must be the man who works. He can not play all the time.
He can not have play as his principal occupation and win out. Let him
play; let him have as good a time as he can have. I have a pity that
is akin to contempt for the man who does not have as good a time as he
can out of life. But let him work. Let him count in the world. When
he comes to the end of his life let him feel he has pulled his weight
and a little more. A sound body is good; a sound mind is better; but a
strong and clean character is better than either. In college it is not
necessary to get into Phi Beta Kappa, though that is desirable; but
it is necessary to work hard at your studies. It is necessary to have
the habit of application, the habit of subordinating mere pleasure to
serious duty, if you are going to do really good work once you are out
of school and out of college. And while I would be very sorry to see
those who are in control here in Groton lose that personal touch with
their students which has made them again and again keep a poor scholar
and thereby make in the end a good citizen; while I should be very
sorry to see that policy reversed, still I am glad—I do not know that
the boys will share my joy on this point—I am glad that the standard of
scholarship is to be raised.
Now, what I have to say to you yourselves, boys, as to what you will
amount to when you are men, is in substance but a repetition of what I
have already said. If you leave Groton, and the college to which you
afterward go, if you go to any—if you leave simply with the feeling
that you have had ten delightful years; that you have _just_ barely
got through your examinations; that you have graduated; that you are
not positively disgraced; that you have met decent people, and that
life has been easy and it won’t be your fault if it does not continue
as easy—if that is the feeling with which you have left school and
college, then you are poor creatures, and there is small good that
will ever come out of you. Of course, the worst of all lives is the
vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition
to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that—and when I am
speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to
amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in
criminality—comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a
man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with
the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical
enjoyment—or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life
that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the
life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving
for. Incidentally, of all the miserable people that I know I should
put high in the top rank those who reach middle age having steadfastly
striven only to amuse themselves as they went through life. If there
ever was a pursuit which stultified itself by its very conditions, it
is the pursuit of pleasure as the all-sufficing end of life. Happiness
can not come to any man capable of enjoying true happiness unless it
comes as the sequel to duty well and honestly done. To do that duty you
need to have more than one trait. You will meet plenty of well-meaning
people who speak to you as if one trait were enough. That is not so.
You might just as well in any rough sport in any game, think that a man
could win by mere strength if he was clumsy; or by mere agility and
precision of movement without strength; or by strength and agility if
he had no heart. You need a great many qualities to make a successful
man on a nine or an eleven; and just so you need a great many different
qualities to make a good citizen. In the first place, of course it is
almost tautological to say that to make a good citizen the prime need
is to be decent, clean in thought, clean in mind, clean in action; to
have an ideal and not to keep that ideal purely for the study—to have
an ideal which you will in good faith strive to live up to when you
are out in life. If you have an ideal only good while you sit at home,
an ideal that nobody can live up to in outside life, then I advise you
strongly to take that ideal, examine it closely, and then cast it
away. It is not a good one. The ideal that it is impossible for a man
to strive after in practical life is not the type of ideal that you
wish to hold up and follow. Be practical as well as generous in your
ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on
the ground. Be truthful; a lie implies fear, vanity or malevolence;
and be frank; furtiveness and insincerity are faults incompatible with
true manliness. Be honest, and remember that honesty counts for nothing
unless back of it lie courage and efficiency. If in this country we
ever have to face a state of things in which on one side stand the men
of high ideals who are honest, good, well-meaning, pleasant people,
utterly unable to put those ideals into shape in the rough field
of practical life, while on the other side are grouped the strong,
powerful, efficient men with no ideals: then the end of the Republic
will be near. The salvation of the Republic depends—the salvation of
our whole social system depends—upon the production year by year of a
sufficient number of citizens who possess high ideals combined with the
practical power to realize them in actual life.
You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward
toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were
traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side
and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have
avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing
if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing
if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business,
politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in
everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work
well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a
thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the
men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but
an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon
men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to
see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the
good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any
such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and
strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without
having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a
public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal
for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness
would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that
any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every
detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before
they pass final judgment. And now, gentlemen and ladies, I must be
pardoned for one personal allusion. We have here to-day one man whom
I have found exactly to answer to that need, who stands as a strong
pillar for decency because he has high ideals combined with practical
common-sense; and that is Bishop Lawrence.
Well, I guess I have said about all I have to say. Success does not
lie entirely in the hands of any one of us. From the day the tower of
Siloam fell, misfortune has fallen sometimes upon the just as well as
the unjust. We sometimes see the good man, the honest man, the strong
man, broken down by forces over which he had no control. If the hand of
the Lord is heavy upon us the strength and wisdom of man shall avail
nothing. But as a rule in the long run each of us comes pretty near
to getting what he deserves. Each of us can, as a rule—there are, of
course, exceptions—finally achieve the success best worth having, the
success of having played his part honestly and manfully; of having
lived so as to feel at the end he has done his duty; of having been a
good husband, a good father; of having tried to make the world a little
better off rather than worse off because he has lived; of having been a
doer of the word and not a hearer only—still less a mere critic of the
doers. Every man has it in him, unless fate is indeed hard upon him, to
win out that measure of success if he will honestly try.
There are two kinds of success to be won. In the first place, there is
success in doing the thing that can only be done by the exceptional
man. Therefore most of us can not achieve this kind of success. It
comes only to the man who has very exceptional qualities. The other
kind, a very, very high kind, is the ordinary kind of success, the
success that comes to the man who does the things which most men could
do, but which they do not do; which comes to the man who develops or
possesses to a higher degree the qualities that all of us have to
a greater or less extent. In the history of the world some of the
men who stand high—who stand in all but the very highest places—are
those who have not possessed any wonderful genius in statecraft, war,
art, literature—in whatever calling; but who have developed within
themselves, by long, patient effort, resolutely maintained in spite of
repeated failure, the ordinary, everyday, humdrum qualities of courage,
of resolution, of proper appreciation of the relative importance
of things; of honesty, of truth, of good sense, of unyielding
perseverance. We can each one of us develop to a very high degree these
qualities; and if we do so develop them, each one of us is sure of a
measure of success; and I greet you here on this twentieth anniversary
of the founding of Groton School because I feel that Groton School is
one of those institutions which pre-eminently stand for the development
of precisely those qualities among the boys whom it sends forth to be
American men, American citizens, to do honor to themselves and their
school by honoring the commonwealth to which we all belong.