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.
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, plowmen, woodchoppers, 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 cannot 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 farm land; 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 cannot 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 towards 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 role is easy;
there is none easier, save only the role 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 towards 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 cannot keep his wife in
comfort or educate his children.
Neverthless, 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 multi-millionaire, 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
cannot 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.
In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand
that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to
admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged
admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of
them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct
gifts--the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making,
the money touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a
moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a
very great degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other
qualities; and without such control the possessor tends to develop
into one of the least attractive types produced by a modern industrial
democracy. So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a
leader of opinion in a democracy should be able to state his views
clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to
the community is to enable the man thus to explain himself; if it
enables the orator to persuade his hearers to put false values on
things, it merely makes him a power for mischief. Some excellent
public servants have not the gift at all, and must rely upon their
deeds to speak for them; and unless the oratory does represent genuine
conviction, based on good common-sense and able to be translated into
efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the
damage to the public it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked
political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be
carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for
themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to
stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker, however
great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and
right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic,
and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To
admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind
the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force
to the orator's latter-day and more influential brother, the
journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled
neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is
used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and
he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for
the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their
profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit
it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a
private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for
debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander,
sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for
the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced
for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand
must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by
the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.