possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the
other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and he
must also have those qualities which direct the efficiency into
channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient.
There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that
can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a
sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in
active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness
from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from the robuster
virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to
hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which
will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard.
The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient
citizen.
But if a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral
sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more
dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful
qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely
for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights
of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships
these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of
whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no
difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is
shown. It makes no difference whether such a man's force and ability
betray themselves in the career of money-maker or politician, soldier
or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil,
then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and
condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by
success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually
so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked
man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last
analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and
that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for
liberty.
The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues
which make the woman a good housewife and house-mother, which make the
man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need,
stand at the bottom of character. But of course many others must be
added thereto if a State is to be not only free but great. Good
citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in the home.
There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the State,
and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist
where the effort is made to carry on free government in a complex,
industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary
citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to
remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire.
The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from
his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions,
is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic,
and still more the mob leader, and the insincere man who to achieve
power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not
merely useless but noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve
them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so
lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and
indeed undesirable to realize. The impracticable visionary is far less
often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the
real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet
does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and
desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty
phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the
ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and
hampers him as he does the work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must
remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut,
how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his
own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for
others. Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be
largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be
realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose
practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds
its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of
high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst
enemy of the body politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his
nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes
the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and
yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more
complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable
to leave to individual initiative can, under the changed conditions,
be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite
impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard and fast
line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one
who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see,
if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest
phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in
little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage
and water supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given
area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are
found to differ not only in degree but in kind from the old; and the
questions of drainage and water supply have to be considered from the
common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to
decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by
practical experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and
individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on
terminology. It is not good to be the slave of names. I am a strong
individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it
is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the
community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things
better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism
which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked
very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in
our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which
triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft
instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in
the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to
turn the tool user more and more into the tool owner, to shift burdens
so that they can be more equitably borne. The deadening effect on any
race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could
not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce
grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, than any existing
system. But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage
adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who
happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be
to make a mark of weakness on our part.
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a
lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal,
nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it
does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable
equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is
due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people,
blood of their blood and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled
and wrought and suffered for them, and at the end died for them, who
always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or
for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of
idealism and sound common-sense. He said (I omit what was of merely
local significance):
I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to
include all men, but that they did not mean to declare all men
equal _in all respects_. They did not mean to say all men were
equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social
capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they
did consider all men created equal--equal in certain inalienable
rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean
to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying
that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it
immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for
free society which should be familiar to all--constantly looked
to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly
attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly
spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the
happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make
us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means
injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege. We
are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far
as is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that
each man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in
him by the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as
possible, be equality of opportunity to render service; but just so
long as there is inequality of service there should and must be
inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter,
the artist, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose
misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill.
But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any
other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of
folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form
it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable,
ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable,
and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try
to level up, but let us beware of the evil of levelling down. If a man
stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us
needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a
waste of time to try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for
every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those
who shirk their work and to those who do it.
Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be
misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for
re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hard-headed
examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal
merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is
proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard
formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If
it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject
it. There are plenty of men calling themselves Socialists with whom,
up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step
is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it,
without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may
differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it
has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least
mean that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is
just as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it
desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go
to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated
by the extremists were wise.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of
pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus
claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in
any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that
country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of
religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his
life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong
his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and
without reference to which side happens at the moment to be the
persecutor and which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the
same way, and without any regard to the individual who, at a given
time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to the nation, or
substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain
social category, for judgment awarded them according to their
conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should
be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any
man because he is poor, and to the envy and hatred which would destroy
a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing brutality of the man of
wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against
wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of
the same quality, merely the two sides of the same shield. The man
who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less
fortunate brethren, is at heart the same as the greedy and violent
demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who
have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man,
whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide
primarily on the line that separates class from class, occupation from
occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of
remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man
on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or poor, without regard to
his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true
democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in
a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what
we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and
the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to
divide along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no
difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether
the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob.
In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for
loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is
no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact
that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship
and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with,
the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and
occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his
position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of
conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide
differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social
belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be
stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine
hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of
belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or
anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a
manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in
the downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a
republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to
support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the
republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or
another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It
makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class
interest, to religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes
such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of
furthering his own interest. The very last thing that an intelligent
and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to
reward any public man because that public man says he will get the
private citizen something to which this private citizen is not
entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this
private citizen ought not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one
anecdote from my own experience. A number of years ago I was engaged
in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western United States.
There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each
being determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand
of the cows they followed. If on the round-up an animal was passed by,
the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was
then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks
were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found.
One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came
upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a little fire,
took out a cinch-ring, heated it at the fire; and the cowboy started
to put on the brand. I said to him, "It is So-and-so's brand," naming
the man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: "That's all
right, boss; I know my business." In another moment I said to him,
"Hold on, you are putting on my brand!" To which he answered, "That's
all right; I always put on the boss's brand." I answered, "Oh, very
well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get what is owing to
you; I don't need you any longer." He jumped up and said: "Why, what's
the matter? I was putting on your brand." And I answered: "Yes, my
friend, and if you will steal _for_ me you will steal _from_ me."
Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in
public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he
will do something wrong _in_ your interest, you can be absolutely
certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something
wrong _against_ your interest.
So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to his
family, to his neighbor, to the State. There remain duties of
citizenship which the State, the aggregation of all the individuals,
owes in connection with other states, with other nations. Let me say
at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe
that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only
possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches
us that the average man who protests that his international feeling
swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country
because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves
himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not
care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is a citizen of
the world, is in very fact usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen
of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. In
the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at
present, if a man can view his own country and all other countries
from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust
him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same
dispassionate view of his wife and his mother. However broad and deep
a man's sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no
fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do
good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that
the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than
the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the
family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from
patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of
other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the
national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful to
see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a
gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong
him. I do not for one moment admit that political morality is
different from private morality, that a promise made on the stump
differs from a promise made in private life. I do not for one moment
admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his
dealings with other nations, any more than that he should act
deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private
citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat
other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable
man would treat other men.
In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there
is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account.
We speak of international law; but international law is something
wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital
difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for
the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to
obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel
obedience as regards the other. International law will, I believe, as
the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or
other there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is
only in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is
of necessity obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital
importance between it and its neighbors, and actions must of
necessity, where this is the case, be different from what they are
where, as among private citizens, there is an outside force whose
action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any crisis of
importance. It is the duty of wise statesmen, gifted with the power of
looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which
will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in
the settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of every
honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong
any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are
to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and
civilization, must keep ever in mind that in the last resort they must
possess both the will and the power to resent wrong-doing from others.
The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness;
but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or
among nations. We believe that our ideals should be high, but not so
high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely
and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we
scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world
came in arms against him.