society of the undergraduates of Cambridge University. To the
Vice-President, a member of Emmanuel College, the college of John
Harvard who founded Harvard University, was appropriately assigned
the duty of proposing the resolution admitting Mr. Roosevelt to
honorary membership in the Union Society. In supporting the
resolution the Vice-President referred to the peculiar relation
which unites the English Cambridge and the American Cambridge in a
common bond and touched upon Mr. Roosevelt's African exploits by
jocosely expressing anxiety for the safety of "the crest of my own
college, the Emmanuel Lion, which I see before me well within
range." There had just appeared in _Punch_, at the time of Mr.
Roosevelt's arrival in England, a full-page cartoon showing the
lions of the Nelson Monument in Trafalgar Square guarded by
policemen and protected by a placard announcing that "these lions
are not to be shot." The Secretary, in seconding the resolution,
humorously alluded to the doctor's gown, hood, and cap, in which
Mr. Roosevelt received his degree, as a possible example of what
America sometimes regards as the gilded trappings of a feudal and
reactionary Europe.--L.F.A.
Now I thank you very much for having made me an honorary member.
Harvard men feel peculiarly at home when they come to Cambridge. We
feel we are in the domain of our spiritual forefathers, and I doubt if
you yourselves can appreciate what it is to walk about the courts, to
see your buildings, and your pictures and statues of the innumerable
men whose names we know so well, and who have been brought closer to
us by what we see here. That would apply not alone to men of the past.
The Bishop of Ely to you is the Bishop of to-day; but I felt like
asking him when I met him this morning, "Where is Hereward the Wake?"
It gives an American university man a peculiar feeling to come here
and see so much that tells of the ancient history of the University.
The tie between Harvard and Cambridge has always been kept up. I
remember when you sent over Mr. Lehmann to teach us how to row. He
found us rather refractory pupils, I am afraid. In the course of the
struggle, the captain of the Harvard crew was eliminated. He
afterwards came down to Cuba and was one of the very best captains in
my regiment. At that time, however, he was still too close to his
college days--he was separated from them only by about two weeks when
he joined me--to appreciate what I endeavored to instil into him, that
while winning a boat-race was all very well, to take part in a
victorious fight, in a real battle, was a good deal better. Sport is a
fine thing as a pastime, and indeed it is more than a mere pastime;
but it is a very poor business if it is permitted to become the one
serious occupation of life.
One of the things I wish we could learn from you is how to make the
game of football a rather less homicidal pastime. (Laughter.) I do not
wish to speak as a mere sentimentalist; but I do not think that
killing should be a normal accompaniment of the game, and while we
develop our football from Rugby, I wish we could go back and undevelop
it, and get it nearer your game. I am not qualified to speak as an
expert on the subject, but I wish we could make it more open and
eliminate some features that certainly tend to add to the danger of
the game as it is played in America now. On the Pacific slope we have
been going back to your type of Rugby football. I would not have
football abolished for anything, but I want to have it changed, just
because I want to draw the teeth of the men who always clamor for the
abolition of any manly game. I wish to deprive those whom I put in the
mollycoddle class, of any argument against good sport. I thoroughly
believe in sport, but I think it is a great mistake if it is made
anything like a profession, or carried on in a way that gives just
cause for fault-finding and complaint among people whose objection is
not really to the defects, but to the sport itself.
Now I am going to disregard your poet and preach to you for just one
moment, but I will make it as little obnoxious as possible.
(Laughter.) The Secretary spoke of me as if I were an athlete. I am
not, and never have been one, although I have always been very fond of
outdoor amusement and exercise. There was, however, in my class at
Harvard, one real athlete who is now in public life. I made him
Secretary of State, or what you call Minister of Foreign Affairs, and
he is now Ambassador in Paris. If I catch your terminology straight,
he would correspond to your triple blue. He was captain of the
football eleven, played on the base-ball team, and rowed in the crew,
and in addition to that he was champion heavy-weight boxer and
wrestler, and won the 220-yard dash. His son was captain of the
Harvard University crew that came over here and was beaten by Oxford
two years ago. [Voices: "Cambridge."] Well, I never took a great
interest in defeats. (Loud laughter and applause.) Now, as I said
before, I never was an athlete, although I have always led an outdoor
life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory
is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the
utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually
possesses.
There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes
to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to
do. That is genius. I am not discussing what form that genius takes;
whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one
else can write, _The Ode on a Grecian Urn_, for example, or _Helen,
thy beauty is to me_; or of a man who can do 100 yards in nine and
three-fifths seconds. Such a man does what no one else can do. Only a
very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing
genius. The average man who is successful,--the average statesman, the
average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call
great success--is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the
ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has
developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.
Take such a thing as hunting or any form of vigorous bodily exercise.
Most men can ride hard if they choose. Almost any man can kill a lion
if he will exercise a little resolution in training the qualities that
will enable him to do it. [Taking a tumbler from the table, Mr.
Roosevelt held it up.] Now it is a pretty easy thing to aim straight
at an object about that size. Almost any one, if he practises with the
rifle at all, can learn to hit that tumbler; and he can hit the lion
all right if he learns to shoot as straight at its brain or heart as
at the tumbler. He does not have to possess any extraordinary
capacity, not a bit,--all he has to do is to develop certain rather
ordinary qualities, but develop them to such a degree that he will
not get flustered, so that he will press the trigger steadily instead
of jerking it--and then he will shoot at the lion as well as he will
at that tumbler. It is a perfectly simple quality to develop. You
don't need any remarkable skill; all you need is to possess ordinary
qualities, but to develop them to a more than ordinary degree.
It is just the same with the soldier. What is needed is that the man
as soldier should develop certain qualities that have been known for
thousands of years, but develop them to such a point that in an
emergency he does, as a matter of course, what a great multitude of
men can do but what a very large proportion of them don't do. And in
making the appeal to the soldier, if you want to get out of him the
stuff that is in him, you will have to use phrases which the
intellectual gentlemen who do not fight will say are platitudes.
(Laughter and applause.)
It is just so in public life. It is not genius, it is not
extraordinary subtlety, or acuteness of intellect, that is important.
The things that are important are the rather commonplace, the rather
humdrum, virtues that in their sum are designated as character. If you
have in public life men of good ability, not geniuses, but men of
good abilities, with character,--and, gentlemen, you must include as
one of the most important elements of character commonsense--if you
possess such men, the Government will go on very well.
I have spoken only of the great successes; but what I have said
applies just as much to the success that is within the reach of almost
every one of us. I think that any man who has had what is regarded in
the world as a great success must realize that the element of chance
has played a great part in it. Of course a man has to take advantage
of his opportunities; but the opportunities have to come. If there is
not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great
occasion you don't get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in
times of peace no one would have known his name now. The great crisis
must come, or no man has the chance to develop great qualities.
There are exceptional cases, of course, where there is a man who can
do just one thing, such as a man who can play a dozen games of chess
or juggle with four rows of figures at once--and as a rule he can do
nothing else. A man of this type can do nothing unless in the one
crisis for which his powers fit him. But normally the man who makes
the great success when the emergency arises is the man who would have
made a fair success in any event. I believe that the man who is really
happy in a great position--in what we call a career--is the man who
would also be happy and regard his life as successful if he had never
been thrown into that position. If a man lives a decent life and does
his work fairly and squarely so that those dependent on him and
attached to him are better for his having lived, then he is a success,
and he deserves to feel that he has done his duty and he deserves to
be treated by those who have had greater success as nevertheless
having shown the fundamental qualities that entitle him to respect. We
have in the United States an organization composed of the men who
forty-five years ago fought to a finish the great Civil War. One thing
that has always appealed to me in that organization is that all of the
men admitted are on a perfect equality provided the records show that
their duty was well done. Whether a man served as a lieutenant-general
or an eighteen-year-old recruit, so long as he was able to serve for
six months and did his duty in his appointed place, then he is called
Comrade and stands on an exact equality with the other men. The same
principle should shape our associations in ordinary civil life.
I am not speaking cant to you. I remember once sitting at a table with
six or eight other public officials, and each was explaining* how he
regarded being in public life, how only the sternest sense of duty
prevented him from resigning his office, and how the strain of working
for a thankless constituency was telling upon him, and nothing but the
fact that he felt he ought to sacrifice his comfort to the welfare of
his country kept him in the arduous life of statesmanship. It went
round the table until it came to my turn. This was during my first
term of office as President of the United States. I said: "Now,
gentlemen, I do not wish there to be any misunderstanding. I like my
job, and I want to keep it for four years longer." (Loud laughter and
applause.) I don't think any President ever enjoyed himself more than
I did. Moreover, I don't think any ex-President ever enjoyed himself
more. I have enjoyed my life and my work because I thoroughly believe
that success--the real success--does not depend upon the position you
hold, but upon how you carry yourself in that position. There is no
man here to-day who has not the chance so to shape his life after he
leaves this university that he shall have the right to feel, when his
life ends, that he has made a real success of it; and his making a
real success of it does not in the least depend upon the prominence of
the position he holds. Gentlemen, I thank you, and I am glad I have
violated the poet's hope and have preached to you.
*Transcriber's Note: Original "explaning"
* * * * *
BRITISH RULE IN AFRICA
Address Delivered at the Guildhall, London, May 31, 1910[11]
[11] The occasion of this address was the ceremony in the
Guildhall in which Mr. Roosevelt was presented by the Corporation
of the City of London (the oldest corporation in the world), with
the Freedom of the City. Sir Joseph Dimsdale, on behalf of the
Lord Mayor and the Corporation, made the address of
presentation.--L.F.A.
It is a peculiar pleasure to me to be here. And yet I cannot but
appreciate, as we all do, the sadness of the fact that I come here
just after the death of the Sovereign whom you so mourn, and whose
death caused such an outburst of sympathy for you throughout the
civilized world. One of the things I shall never forget is the
attitude of that great mass of people, assembled on the day of the
funeral, who in silence, in perfect order, and with uncovered heads,
saw the body of the dead King pass to its last resting-place. I had
the high honor of being deputed to come to the funeral as the
representative of America, and by my presence to express the deep and
universal feeling of sympathy which moves the entire American people
for the British people in their hour of sadness and trial.
I need hardly say how profoundly I feel the high honor that you confer
upon me; an honor great in itself, and great because of the ancient
historic associations connected with it, with the ceremonies incident
to conferring it, and with the place in which it is conferred. I am
very deeply appreciative of all that this ceremony means, all that
this gift implies, and all the kind words which Sir Joseph Dimsdale
has used in conferring it. I thank you heartily for myself. I thank
you still more because I know that what you have done is to be taken
primarily as a sign of the respect and friendly good-will which more
and more, as time goes by, tends to knit together the English-speaking
peoples.
I shall not try to make you any extended address of mere thanks, still
less of mere eulogy. I prefer to speak, and I know you would prefer to
have me speak, on matters of real concern to you, as to which I happen
at this moment to possess some first-hand knowledge; for recently I
traversed certain portions of the British Empire under conditions
which made me intimately cognizant of their circumstances and needs. I
have just spent nearly a year in Africa. While there I saw four
British protectorates. I grew heartily to respect the men whom I there
met, settlers and military and civil officials; and it seems to me
that the best service I can render them and you is very briefly to
tell you how I was impressed by some of the things that I saw. Your
men in Africa are doing a great work for your Empire, and they are
also doing a great work for civilization. This fact and my sympathy
for and belief in them are my reasons for speaking. The people at
home, whether in Europe or in America, who live softly, often fail
fully to realize what is being done for them by the men who are
actually engaged in the pioneer work of civilization abroad. Of
course, in any mass of men there are sure to be some who are weak or
unworthy, and even those who are good are sure to make occasional
mistakes--that is as true of pioneers as of other men. Nevertheless,
the great fact in world history during the last century has been the
spread of civilization over the world's waste spaces. The work is
still going on; and the soldiers, the settlers, and the civic
officials who are actually doing it are, as a whole, entitled to the
heartiest respect and the fullest support from their brothers who
remain at home.
At the outset, there is one point upon which I wish to insist with all
possible emphasis. The civilized nations who are conquering for
civilization savage lands should work together in a spirit of hearty
mutual good-will. I listened with special interest to what Sir Joseph
Dimsdale said about the blessing of peace and good-will among nations.
I agree with that in the abstract. Let us show by our actions and our
words in specific cases that we agree with it also in the concrete.
Ill-will between civilized nations is bad enough anywhere, but it is
peculiarly harmful and contemptible when those actuated by it are
engaged in the same task, a task of such far-reaching importance to
the future of humanity, the task of subduing the savagery of wild man
and wild nature, and of bringing abreast of our civilization those
lands where there is an older civilization which has somehow gone
crooked. Mankind as a whole has benefited by the noteworthy success
that has attended the French occupation of Algiers and Tunis, just as
mankind as a whole has benefited by what England has done in India;
and each nation should be glad of the other nation's achievements. In
the same way, it is of interest to all civilized men that a similar
success shall attend alike the Englishman and the German as they work
in East Africa; exactly as it has been a benefit to every one that
America took possession of the Philippines. Those of you who know Lord
Cromer's excellent book in which he compares modern and ancient
imperialism need no words from me to prove that the dominion of modern
civilized nations over the dark places of the earth has been fraught
with widespread good for mankind; and my plea is that the civilized
nations engaged in doing this work shall treat one another with
respect and friendship, and shall hold it as discreditable to permit
envy and jealousy, backbiting and antagonism among themselves. I
visited four different British protectorates or possessions in
Africa--namely, East Africa, Uganda, the Sudan, and Egypt. About the
first three, I have nothing to say to you save what is pleasant, as
well as true. About the last, I wish to say a few words because they
are true, without regard to whether or not they are pleasant.
In the highlands of East Africa you have a land which can be made a
true white man's country. While there I met many settlers on intimate
terms, and I felt for them a peculiar sympathy, because they so
strikingly reminded me of the men of our own western frontier of
America, of the pioneer farmers and ranch-men who built up the States
of the great plains and the Rocky Mountains. It is of high importance
to encourage these settlers in every way, remembering--I say that here
in the City--remembering that the prime need is not for capitalists to
exploit the land, but for settlers who shall make their permanent
homes therein. Capital is a good servant, but a mighty poor master. No
alien race should be permitted to come into competition with the
settlers. Fortunately you have now in the Governor of East Africa, Sir
Percy Girouard, a man admirably fitted to deal wisely and firmly with
the many problems before him. He is on the ground and knows the needs
of the country, and is zealously devoted to its interests. All that is
necessary is to follow his lead, and to give him cordial support and
backing. The principle upon which I think it is wise to act in dealing
with far-away possessions is this--choose your man, change him if you
become discontented with him, but while you keep him back him up.
In Uganda the problem is totally different. Uganda cannot be made a
white man's country, and the prime need is to administer the land in
the interest of the native races, and to help forward their
development. Uganda has been the scene of an extraordinary development
of Christianity. Nowhere else of recent times has missionary effort
met with such success; the inhabitants stand far above most of the
races in the Dark Continent in their capacity for progress towards
civilization. They have made great strides, and the English officials
have shown equal judgment and disinterestedness in the work they have
done; and they have been especially wise in trying to develop the
natives along their own lines, instead of seeking to turn them into
imitation or make-believe Englishmen. In Uganda all that is necessary
is to go forward on the paths you have already marked out.
The Sudan is peculiarly interesting because it affords the best
possible example of the wisdom--and when I say that I speak with
historical accuracy--of disregarding the well-meaning but unwise
sentimentalists who object to the spread of civilization at the
expense of savagery. I remember a quarter of a century ago when you
were engaged in the occupation of the Sudan that many of your people
at home and some of ours in America said that what was demanded in the
Sudan was the application of the principles of independence and
self-government to the Sudanese, coupled with insistence upon complete
religious toleration and the abolition of the slave trade.
Unfortunately, the chief reason why the Mahdists wanted independence
and self-government was that they could put down all religions but
their own and carry on the slave trade. I do not believe that in the
whole world there is to be found any nook of territory which has shown
such astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being
and prosperity as the Sudan has shown during the last twelve years
while it has been under British rule. Up to that time it was
independent, and it governed itself; and independence and
self-government in the hands of the Sudanese proved to be much what
independence and self-government would have been in a wolf pack. Great
crimes were committed there, crimes so dark that their very
hideousness protects them from exposure. During a decade and a half,
while Mahdism controlled the country, there flourished a tyranny which
for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton
destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even
imagine. The keystones of the Mahdist party were religious intolerance
and slavery, with murder and the most abominable cruelty as the method
of obtaining each.