portion of it in a given crisis will depend mainly upon the excellence
of the whole body, and so the triumph of any part is legitimately
felt to reflect honor upon the whole and to have been participated
in by every one. Dewey’s captains could not have followed him with
the precision they displayed, could not have shown the excellent gun
practice they did show—in short, the victory would not have been
possible had it not been for the unwearied training and practice given
the navy during the dozen years previous by the admirals, the captains,
and the crews who incessantly and in all weathers kept their vessels
exercised, singly and in squadron, until the men on the bridge, the
men in the gun-turrets, and the men in the engine-rooms knew how to do
their work perfectly, alone or together. Every officer and man, from
the highest to the lowest, who did his full duty in raising the navy to
the standard of efficiency it had reached on May 1, 1898, is entitled
to feel some personal share in the glory won by Dewey and Dewey’s men.
It would have been absolutely impossible not merely to improvise either
the material or the personnel with which Dewey fought, but to have
produced them in any limited number of years. A thoroughly good navy
takes a long time to build up, and the best officer embodies always the
traditions of a first-class service. Ships take years to build, crews
take years before they become thoroughly expert, while the officers not
only have to pass their early youth in a course of special training,
but can not possibly rise to supreme excellence in their profession
unless they make it their life-work.
We should therefore keep in mind that the hero can not win save for the
forethought, energy, courage, and capacity of countless other men. Yet
we must keep in mind also that all this forethought, energy, courage,
and capacity will be wasted unless at the supreme moment some man of
the heroic type arises capable of using to the best advantage the
powers lying ready to hand. Whether it is Nelson, the greatest of all
admirals, at Aboukir, Copenhagen, or Trafalgar; or Farragut, second
only to Nelson, at New Orleans or Mobile; or Dewey at Manila—the great
occasion must meet with the great man, or the result will be at worst a
failure, at best an indecisive success. The nation must make ready the
tools and train the men to use them, but at the crisis a great triumph
can be achieved only should some heroic man appear. Therefore it is
right and seemly to pay homage of deep respect and admiration to the
man when he does appear.
Admiral Dewey performed one of the great feats of all time. At the very
outset of the Spanish War he struck one of the two decisive blows which
brought the war to a conclusion, and as his was the first fight, his
success exercised an incalculable effect upon the whole conflict. He
set the note of the war. He had carefully prepared for action during
the months he was on the Asiatic coast. He had his plans thoroughly
matured, and he struck the instant that war was declared. There was no
delay, no hesitation. As soon as news came that he was to move, his
war-steamers turned their bows toward Manila Bay. There was nothing to
show whether or not Spanish mines and forts would be efficient; but
Dewey, cautious as he was at the right time, had not a particle of fear
of taking risks when the need arose. In the tropic night he steamed
past the forts, and then on over the mines to where the Spanish vessels
lay. What material inferiority there was on the Spanish side was nearly
made up by the forts and mines. The overwhelming difference was moral,
not material. It was the difference in the two commanders, in the
officers and crews of the two fleets, and in the naval service, afloat
and ashore, of the two nations. On the one side there had been thorough
preparation; on the other, none that was adequate. It would be idle to
recapitulate the results. Steaming in with cool steadiness, Dewey’s
fleet cut the Spaniards to pieces, while the Americans were practically
unhurt. Then Dewey drew off to breakfast, satisfied himself that he had
enough ammunition, and returned to stamp out what embers of resistance
were still feebly smouldering.
The victory ensured the fall of the Philippines, for Manila surrendered
as soon as our land forces arrived and were in position to press their
attack home. The work, however, was by no means done, and Dewey’s
diplomacy and firmness were given full scope for the year he remained
in Manila waters, not only in dealing with Spaniards and insurgents,
but in making it evident that we would tolerate no interference from
any hostile European power. It is not yet the time to show how much he
did in this last respect. Suffice it to say that by his firmness he
effectually frustrated any attempt to interfere with our rights, while
by his tact he avoided giving needless offence, and he acted in hearty
accord with our cordial well-wishers, the English naval and diplomatic
representatives in the islands.
Admiral Dewey comes back to his native land having won the right to a
greeting such as has been given to no other man since the Civil War.
GRANT
SPEECH DELIVERED AT GALENA, ILLINOIS, APRIL 27, 1900
In the long run every great nation instinctively recognizes the men
who peculiarly and pre-eminently represent its own type of greatness.
Here in our country we have had many public men of high rank—soldiers,
orators, constructive statesmen, and popular leaders. We have even had
great philosophers who were also leaders of popular thought. Each one
of these men has had his own group of devoted followers, and some of
them have at times swayed the nation with a power such as the foremost
of all hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip away, as the dust
of conflict settles, and as through the clearing air we look back with
keener wisdom into the nation’s past, mightiest among the mighty dead
loom the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. There
are great men also in the second rank; for in any gallery of merely
national heroes Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson, would
surely have their place. But these three greatest men have taken their
place among the great men of all nations, the great men of all time.
They stood supreme in the two great crises of our history, on the two
great occasions when we stood in the van of all humanity and struck
the most effective blows that have ever been struck for the cause of
human freedom under the law, for that spirit of orderly liberty which
must stand at the base of every wise movement to secure to each man his
rights, and to guard each from being wronged by his fellows.
Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and it was his good fortune
to win the highest renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the second
and even greater struggle the deeds of Lincoln the statesman were made
good by those of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the
work that dropped from Lincoln’s tired hands when the assassin’s bullet
went home, and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were closed forever.
It was no mere accident that made our three mightiest men, two of them
soldiers, and one the great war President. It is only through work and
strife that either nation or individual moves on to greatness. The
great man is always the man of mighty effort, and usually the man whom
grinding need has trained to mighty effort. Rest and peace are good
things, are great blessings, but only if they come honorably; and it
is those who fearlessly turn away from them, when they have not been
earned, who in the long run deserve best of their country. In the
sweat of our brows do we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at
times, yet it is far more bitter to eat the bread that is unearned,
unwon, undeserved. America must nerve herself for labor and peril. The
men who have made our national greatness are those who faced danger and
overcame it, who met difficulties and surmounted them, not those whose
lines were cast in such pleasant places that toil and dread were ever
far from them.
Neither was it an accident that our three leaders were men who, while
they did not shrink from war, were nevertheless heartily men of peace.
The man who will not fight to avert or undo wrong is but a poor
creature; but, after all, he is less dangerous than the man who fights
on the side of wrong. Again and again in a nation’s history the time
may, and indeed sometimes must, come when the nation’s highest duty is
war. But peace must be the normal condition, or the nation will come
to a bloody doom. Twice in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and twice
in lesser crises, in 1812 and 1898, the nation was called to arms in
the name of all that makes the words “honor,” “freedom,” and “justice”
other than empty sounds. On each occasion the net result of the war
was greatly for the benefit of mankind. But on each occasion this net
result was of benefit only because after the war came peace, came
justice and order and liberty. If the Revolution had been followed
by bloody anarchy, if the Declaration of Independence had not been
supplemented by the adoption of the Constitution, if the freedom won
by the sword of Washington had not been supplemented by the stable and
orderly government which Washington was instrumental in founding, then
we should have but added to the chaos of the world, and our victories
would have told against and not for the betterment of mankind. So it
was with the Civil War. If the four iron years had not been followed by
peace, they would not have been justified. If the great silent soldier,
the Hammer of the North, had struck the shackles off the slave only,
as so many conquerors in civil strife before him had done, to rivet
them around the wrists of freemen, then the war would have been fought
in vain, and worse than in vain. If the Union, which so many men shed
their blood to restore, were not now a union in fact, then the precious
blood would have been wasted. But it was not wasted; for the work of
peace has made good the work of war, and North and South, East and
West, we are now one people in fact as well as in name; one in purpose,
in fellow-feeling, and in high resolve, as we stand to greet the new
century, and, high of heart, to face the mighty tasks which the coming
years will surely bring.
Grant and his fellow-soldiers who fought through the war, and his
fellow-statesmen who completed the work partly done by the soldiers,
not only left us the heritage of a reunited country and of a land
from which slavery had been banished, but left us what was quite as
important, the great memory of their great deeds, to serve forever
as an example and an inspiration, to spur us on so that we may not
fall below the level reached by our fathers. The rough, strong poet
of democracy has sung of Grant as “the man of mighty days, and equal
to the days.” The days are less mighty now, and that is all the more
reason why we should show ourselves equal to them. We meet here to pay
glad homage to the memory of our illustrious dead; but let us keep ever
clear before our minds the fact that mere lip-loyalty is no loyalty at
all, and that the only homage that counts is the homage of deeds, not
of words. It is but an idle waste of time to celebrate the memory of
the dead unless we, the living, in our lives strive to show ourselves
not unworthy of them. If the careers of Washington and Grant are not
vital and full of meaning to us, if they are merely part of the storied
past, and stir us to no eager emulation in the ceaseless, endless war
for right against wrong, then the root of right thinking is not in us;
and where we do not think right we can not act right.
It is not my purpose in this address to sketch, in even the briefest
manner, the life and deeds of Grant. It is not even my purpose to
touch on the points where his influence has told so tremendously in
the making of our history. It is part of the man’s greatness that now
we can use his career purely for illustration. We can take for granted
the fact that each American who knows the history of the country must
know the history of this man, at least in its broad outline; and that
we no more need to explain Vicksburg and Appomattox than we need to
explain Yorktown. I shall ask attention, not to Grant’s life, but to
the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day should learn them.
Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of stubborn fixity of
purpose. In the Union armies there were generals as brilliant as
Grant, but none with his iron determination. This quality he showed
as President no less than as general. He was no more to be influenced
by a hostile majority in Congress into abandoning his attitude in
favor of a sound and stable currency than he was to be influenced by
check or repulse into releasing his grip on beleaguered Richmond. It
is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially
to refer when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective
way, by praising him as a man. It is the one quality which we can
least afford to lose. It is the only quality the lack of which is
as unpardonable in the nation as in the man. It is the antithesis
of levity, fickleness, volatility, of undue exaltation, of undue
depression, of hysteria and neuroticism in all their myriad forms. The
lesson of unyielding, unflinching, unfaltering perseverance in the
course upon which the nation has entered is one very necessary for a
generation whose preachers sometimes dwell overmuch on the policies
of the moment. There are not a few public men, not a few men who try
to mold opinion within Congress and without, on the stump and in the
daily press, who seem to aim at instability, who pander to and thereby
increase the thirst for overstatement of each situation as it arises,
whose effort is, accordingly, to make the people move in zigzags
instead of in a straight line. We all saw this in the Spanish War,
when the very men who at one time branded as traitors everybody who
said there was anything wrong in the army at another time branded as
traitors everybody who said there was anything right. Of course such an
attitude is as unhealthy on one side as on the other, and it is equally
destructive of any effort to do away with abuse.
Hysterics of this kind may have all the results of extreme timidity.
A nation that has not the power of endurance, the power of dogged
insistence on a determined policy, come weal or woe, has lost one chief
element of greatness. The people who wish to abandon the Philippines
because we have had heavy skirmishing out there, or who think that
our rule is a failure whenever they discover some sporadic upgrowth of
evil, would do well to remember the two long years of disaster this
nation suffered before the July morning when the news was flashed to
the waiting millions that Vicksburg had fallen in the West and that in
the East the splendid soldiery of Lee had recoiled at last from the
low hills of Gettysburg. Even after this nearly two years more were
to pass before the end came at Appomattox. Throughout this time the
cry of prophets of disaster never ceased. The peace-at-any-price men
never wearied of declaiming against the war, of describing the evils
of conquest and subjugation as worse than any possible benefits that
could result therefrom. The hysterical minority, passed alternately
from unreasoning confidence to unreasoning despair; and at times they
even infected for the moment many of their sober, steady countrymen.
Eighteen months after the war began the State and Congressional
elections went heavily against the war party, and two years later the
opposition party actually waged the Presidential campaign on the issue
that the war was a failure. Meanwhile there was plenty of blundering
at the front, plenty of mistakes at Washington. The country was saved
by the fact that our people, as a whole, were steadfast and unshaken.
Both at Washington and at the front the leaders were men of undaunted
resolution, who would not abandon the policy to which the nation was
definitely committed, who regarded disaster as merely a spur to fresh
effort, who saw in each blunder merely something to be retrieved, and
not a reason for abandoning the long-determined course. Above all,
the great mass of the people possessed a tough and stubborn fibre of
character.
There was then, as always, ample room for criticism, and there was
every reason why the mistakes should be corrected. But in the long
run our gratitude was due primarily, not to the critics, not to the
fault-finders, but to the men who actually did the work; not to the
men of negative policy, but to those who struggled toward the given
goal. Merciful oblivion has swallowed up the names of those who railed
at the men who were saving the Union, while it has given us the memory
of these same men as a heritage of honor forever; and brightest among
their names flame those of Lincoln and Grant, the steadfast, the
unswerving, the enduring, the finally triumphant.
Grant’s supreme virtue as a soldier was his doggedness, the quality
which found expression in his famous phrases of “unconditional
surrender” and “fighting it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
He was a master of strategy and tactics, but he was also a master
of hard hitting, of that “continuous hammering” which finally broke
through even Lee’s guard. While an armed foe was in the field, it
never occurred to Grant that any question could be so important as his
overthrow. He felt nothing but impatient contempt for the weak souls
who wished to hold parley with the enemy while that enemy was still
capable of resistance.
There is a fine lesson in this to the people who have been asking us
to invite the certain destruction of our power in the Philippines, and
therefore the certain destruction of the islands themselves, by putting
any concession on our part ahead of the duty of reducing the islands
to quiet at all costs and of stamping out the last embers of armed
resistance. At the time of the Civil War the only way to secure peace
was to fight for it, and it would have been a crime against humanity to
have stopped fighting before peace was conquered. So in the far less
important, but still very important, crisis which confronts us to-day,
it would be a crime against humanity if, whether from weakness or from
mistaken sentimentalism, we failed to perceive that in the Philippines
the all-important duty is to restore order; because peace, and the
gradually increasing measure of self-government for the islands which
will follow peace, can only come when armed resistance has completely
vanished.
Grant was no brawler, no lover of fighting for fighting’s sake. He
was a plain, quiet man, not seeking for glory; but a man who, when
aroused, was always in deadly earnest, and who never shrank from duty.
He was slow to strike, but he never struck softly. He was not in the
least of the type which gets up mass-meetings, makes inflammatory
speeches or passes inflammatory resolutions, and then permits
over-forcible talk to be followed by over-feeble action. His promise
squared with his performance. His deeds made good his words. He did
not denounce an evil in strained and hyperbolic language; but when he
did denounce it, he strove to make his denunciation effective by his
action. He did not plunge lightly into war, but once in, he saw the
war through, and when it was over, it was over entirely. Unsparing
in battle, he was very merciful in victory. There was no let-up in
his grim attack, his grim pursuit, until the last body of armed foes
surrendered. But that feat once accomplished, his first thought was
for the valiant defeated; to let them take back their horses to their
little homes because they would need them to work on their farms.
Grant, the champion whose sword was sharpest in the great fight for
liberty, was no less sternly insistent upon the need of order and of
obedience to law. No stouter foe of anarchy in every form ever lived
within our borders. The man who more than any other, save Lincoln, had
changed us into a nation whose citizens were all freemen, realized
entirely that these freemen would remain free only while they kept
mastery over their own evil passions. He saw that lawlessness in all
its forms was the handmaiden of tyranny. No nation ever yet retained
its freedom for any length of time after losing its respect for the
law, after losing the law-abiding spirit, the spirit that really makes
orderly liberty.
Grant, in short, stood for the great elementary virtues, for justice,
for freedom, for order, for unyielding resolution, for manliness
in its broadest and highest sense. His greatness was not so much
greatness of intellect as greatness of character, including in the
word “character” all the strong, virile virtues. It is character that
counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good thing to have a keen, fine
intellectual development in a nation, to produce orators, artists,
successful business men; but it is an infinitely greater thing to
have those solid qualities which we group together under the name of
character—sobriety, steadfastness, the sense of obligation toward
one’s neighbor and one’s God, hard common-sense, and, combined with it,
the lift of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is right. These are the
qualities which go to make up true national greatness, and these were
the qualities which Grant possessed in an eminent degree.
We have come here, then, to realize what the mighty dead did for the
nation, what the dead did for us who are now living. Let us in return
try to shape our deeds so that the America of the future shall justify
by her career the lives of the great men of her past. Every man who
does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as a private citizen
is paying to Grant’s memory the kind of homage that is best worth
paying. We have difficulties and dangers enough in the present, and it
is the way we face them which it to determine whether or not we are
fit descendants of the men of the mighty past. We must not flinch from
our duties abroad merely because we have even more important duties
at home. That these home duties are the most important of all every
thinking man will freely acknowledge. We must do our duty to ourselves
and our brethren in the complex social life of the time. We must
possess the spirit of broad humanity, deep charity, and loving-kindness
for our fellowmen, and must remember, at the same time, that this
spirit is really the absolute antithesis of mere sentimentalism, of
soup-kitchen, pauperizing philanthropy, and of legislation which is
inspired either by foolish mock benevolence or by class greed or class
hate. We need to be possessed of the spirit of justice and of the
spirit which recognizes in work and not ease the proper end of effort.
Of course the all-important thing to keep in mind is that if we
have not both strength and virtue we shall fail. Indeed, in the old
acceptation of the word, virtue included strength and courage, for the
clear-sighted men at the dawn of our era knew that the passive virtues
could not by themselves avail, that wisdom without courage would sink
into mere cunning, and courage without morality into ruthless, lawless,
self-destructive ferocity. The iron Roman made himself lord of the
world because to the courage of the barbarian he opposed a courage as
fierce and an infinitely keener mind; while his civilized rivals, the
keen-witted Greek and Carthaginian, though of even finer intellect,
had let corruption eat into their brilliant civilizations until their
strength had been corroded as if by acid. In short, the Roman had
character as well as masterful genius, and when pitted against peoples
either of less genius or of less character, these peoples went down.