firm Union accomplished under that wonderful document, the Constitution
adopted in 1789, we still see traces of the same feeling lingering
here and there in our own country. There were plenty of men in the
seaboard States who looked with what seems to us ludicrous apprehension
at the steady westward growth of our people. Grave Senators and
Representatives expressed dire foreboding as to the ruin which would
result from admitting the communities growing up along the Ohio to
a full equality with the older States; and when Louisiana was given
Statehood, they insisted that that very fact dissolved the Union. When
our people had began to settle in the Mississippi Valley, Jefferson
himself accepted with equanimity the view that probably it would not be
possible to keep regions so infinitely remote as the Mississippi and
the Atlantic Coast in the same Union. Later even such a stanch Union
man and firm believer in Western growth as fearless old Tom Benton of
Missouri thought that it would be folly to try to extend the national
limits westward of the Rocky Mountains. In 1830 our then best-known man
of letters and historian, Washington Irving, prophesied that for ages
to come the country upon which we now stand would be inhabited simply
by roving tribes of nomads.
The mental attitude of all these good people need not surprise anybody.
There was nothing in the past by which to judge either the task before
this country, or the way in which that task was to be done. As Lowell
finely said, on this continent we have made new States as Old World men
pitch tents. Even the most far-seeing statesmen, those most gifted with
the imagination needed by really great statesmen, could not at first
grasp what the process really meant. Slowly and with incredible labor
the backwoodsmen of the old colonies hewed their way through the dense
forests from the tide-water region to the crests of the Alleghanies.
But by the time the Alleghanies were reached, about at the moment when
our national life began, the movement had gained wonderful momentum.
Thenceforward it advanced by leaps and bounds, and the frontier pushed
westward across the continent with ever-increasing rapidity until the
day came when it vanished entirely. Our greatest statesmen have always
been those who _believed in the nation_—who had faith in the power of
our people to spread until they should become the mightiest among the
peoples of the world.
Under any governmental system which was known to Europe, the problem
offered by the westward thrust, across a continent, of so masterful
and liberty-loving a race as ours would have been insoluble. The great
civilized and colonizing races of antiquity, the Greeks and the Romans,
had been utterly unable to devise a scheme under which when their
race spread it might be possible to preserve both national unity and
local and individual freedom. When a Hellenic or Latin city sent off
a colony, one of two things happened. Either the colony was kept in
political subjection to the city or state of which it was an offshoot,
or else it became a wholly independent and alien, and often a hostile,
nation. Both systems were fraught with disaster. With the Greeks race
unity was sacrificed to local independence, and as a result the Greek
world became the easy prey of foreign conquerors. The Romans kept
national unity, but only by means of a crushing centralized despotism.
When the modern world entered upon the marvelous era of expansion which
began with the discoveries of Columbus, the nations were able to devise
no new plan. All the great colonizing powers, England, France, Spain,
Portugal, Holland, and Russia, managed their colonies primarily in the
interest of the home country. Some did better than others,—England
probably best and Spain worst,—but in no case were the colonists
treated as citizens of equal rights in a common country. Our ancestors,
who were at once the strongest and the most liberty-loving among all
the peoples who had been thrust out into new continents, were the first
to revolt against this system; and the lesson taught by their success
has been thoroughly learned.
In applying the new principles to our conditions we have found the
Federal Constitution a nearly perfect instrument. The system of a
closely knit and indestructible union of free commonwealths has enabled
us to do what neither Greek nor Roman in their greatest days could
do. We have preserved the complete unity of an expanding race without
impairing in the slightest degree the liberty of the individual.
When in a given locality the settlers became sufficiently numerous,
they were admitted to Statehood, and thenceforward shared all the
rights and all the duties of the citizens of the older States. As with
Columbus and the egg, the expedient seems obvious enough nowadays, but
then it was so novel that a couple of generations had to pass before
we ourselves thoroughly grasped all its features. At last we grew to
accept as axiomatic the two facts of national union and local and
personal freedom. As whatever is axiomatic seems commonplace, we now
tend to accept what has been accomplished as a mere matter-of-course
incident, of no great moment. The very completeness with which
the vitally important task has been done almost blinds us to the
extraordinary nature of the achievement.
You, the men of Colorado, and, above all, the older among those whom I
am now addressing, have been engaged in doing the great typical work
of our people. Save only the preservation of the Union itself, no
other task has been so important as the conquest and settlement of the
West. This conquest and settlement has been the stupendous feat of our
race for the century that has just closed. It stands supreme among all
such feats. The same kind of thing has been in Australia and Canada,
but upon a less important scale, while the Russian advance in Siberia
has been incomparably slower. In all the history of mankind there is
nothing that quite parallels the way in which our people have filled
a vacant continent with self-governing commonwealths, knit into one
nation. And of all this marvelous history perhaps the most wonderful
portion is that which deals with the way in which the Pacific Coast and
the Rocky Mountains were settled.
The men who founded these communities showed practically by their
life-work that it is indeed the spirit of adventure which is the
maker of commonwealths. Their traits of daring and hardihood and iron
endurance are not merely indispensable traits for pioneers; they are
also traits which must go to the make-up of every mighty and successful
people. You and your fathers who built up the West did more even than
you thought; for you shaped thereby the destiny of the whole Republic,
and as a necessary corollary profoundly influenced the course of events
throughout the world. More and more as the years go by this Republic
will find its guidance in the thought and action of the West, because
the conditions of development in the West have steadily tended to
accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics of its people.
There was scant room for the coward and the weakling in the ranks of
the adventurous frontiersmen—the pioneer settlers who first broke up
the wild prairie soil, who first hewed their way into the primeval
forest, who guided their white-topped wagons across the endless leagues
of Indian-haunted desolation, and explored every remote mountain-chain
in the restless quest for metal wealth. Behind them came the men
who completed the work they had roughly begun: who drove the great
railroad systems over plain and desert and mountain pass; who stocked
the teeming ranches, and under irrigation saw the bright green of the
alfalfa and the yellow of the golden stubble supplant the gray of the
sage-brush desert; who have built great populous cities—cities in
which every art and science of civilization are carried to the highest
point—on tracts which, when the nineteenth century had passed its
meridian, were still known only to the grim trappers and hunters and
the red lords of the wilderness with whom they waged eternal war.
Such is the record of which we are so proud. It is a record of men who
greatly dared and greatly did; a record of wanderings wider and more
dangerous than those of the Vikings; a record of endless feats of arms,
of victory after victory in the ceaseless strife waged against wild man
and wild nature. The winning of the West was the great epic feat in the
history of our race.
We have, then, a right to meet to-day in a spirit of just pride in
the past. But when we pay homage to the hardy, grim, resolute men
who, with incredible toil and risk, laid deep the foundations of the
civilization that we inherit, let us steadily remember that the only
homage that counts is the homage of deeds—not merely of words. It is
well to gather here to show that we remember what has been done in the
past by the Western pioneers of our people, and that we glory in the
greatness for which they prepared the way. But lip-loyalty by itself
avails very little, whether it is expressed concerning a nation or an
ideal. It would be a sad and evil thing for this country if ever the
day came when we considered the great deeds of our forefathers as an
excuse for our resting slothfully satisfied with what has been already
done. On the contrary, they should be an inspiration and appeal,
summoning us to show that we too have courage and strength; that we
too are ready to dare greatly if the need arises; and, above all, that
we are firmly bent upon that steady performance of every-day duty
which, in the long run, is of such incredible worth in the formation of
national character.
The old iron days have gone, the days when the weakling died as the
penalty of inability to hold his own in the rough warfare against his
surroundings. We live in softer times. Let us see to it that, while we
take advantage of every gentler and more humanizing tendency of the
age, we yet preserve the iron quality which made our forefathers and
predecessors fit to do the deeds they did. It will of necessity find
a different expression now, but the quality itself remains just as
necessary as ever. Surely you men of the West, you men who with stout
heart, cool head, and ready hand have wrought out your own success and
built up these great new commonwealths, surely you need no reminder
of the fact that if either man or nation wishes to play a great part
in the world there must be no dallying with the life of lazy ease.
In the abounding energy and intensity of existence in our mighty
democratic Republic there is small space indeed for the idler, for
the luxury-loving man who prizes ease more than hard, triumph-crowned
effort.
We hold work not as a curse but as a blessing, and we regard the idler
with scornful pity. It would be in the highest degree undesirable that
we should all work in the same way or at the same things, and for the
sake of the real greatness of the nation we should in the fullest and
most cordial way recognize the fact that some of the most needed work
must, from its very nature, be unremunerative in a material sense.
Each man must choose so far as the conditions allow him the path to
which he is bidden by his own peculiar powers and inclinations. But if
he is a man he must in some way or shape do a man’s work. If, after
making all the effort that his strength of body and of mind permits,
he yet honorably fails, why, he is still entitled to a certain share
of respect because he has made the effort. But if he does not make the
effort, or if he makes it half-heartedly and recoils from the labor,
the risk, or the irksome monotony of his task, why, he has forfeited
all right to our respect, and has shown himself a mere cumberer of the
earth. It is not given to us all to succeed, but it is given to us all
to strive manfully to deserve success.
We need, then, the iron qualities that must go with true manhood. We
need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable
will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always
be done, and to persevere through the long days of slow progress or of
seeming failure which always come before any final triumph, no matter
how brilliant. But we need more than these qualities. This country can
not afford to have its sons less than men; but neither can it afford to
have them other than good men. If courage and strength and intellect
are unaccompanied by the moral purpose, the moral sense, they become
merely forms of expression for unscrupulous force and unscrupulous
cunning. If the strong man has not in him the lift toward lofty things
his strength makes him only a curse to himself and to his neighbor. All
this is true in private life, and it is no less true in public life. If
Washington and Lincoln had not had in them the whipcord fibre of moral
and mental strength, the soul that steels itself to endure disaster
unshaken and with grim resolve to wrest victory from defeat, then the
one could not have founded, nor the other preserved, our mighty Federal
Union. The least touch of flabbiness, of unhealthy softness, in either
would have meant ruin for this nation, and therefore the downfall of
the proudest hope of mankind. But no less is it true that had either
been influenced by self-seeking ambition, by callous disregard of
others, by contempt for the moral law, he would have dashed us down
into the black gulf of failure. Woe to all of us if ever as a people we
grow to condone evil because it is successful. We can no more afford
to lose social and civic decency and honesty than we can afford to
lose the qualities of courage and strength. It is the merest truism to
say that the nation rests upon the individual, upon the family—upon
individual manliness and womanliness, using the words in their widest
and fullest meaning.
To be a good husband or good wife, a good neighbor and friend, to be
hard-working and upright in business and social relations, to bring
up many healthy children—to be and to do all this is to lay the
foundations of good citizenship as they must be laid. But we can not
stop even with this. Each of us has not only his duty to himself,
his family, and his neighbors, but his duty to the State and to the
nation. We are in honor bound each to strive according to his or her
strength to bring ever nearer the day when justice and wisdom shall
obtain in public life as in private life. We can not retain the
full measure of our self-respect if we can not retain pride in our
citizenship. For the sake not only of ourselves but of our children
and our children’s children we must see that this nation stands for
strength and honesty both at home and abroad. In our internal policy we
can not afford to rest satisfied until all that the government can do
has been done to secure fair dealing and equal justice as between man
and man. In the great part which hereafter, whether we will or not, we
must play in the world at large, let us see to it that we neither do
wrong nor shrink from doing right because the right is difficult; that
on the one hand we inflict no injury, and that on the other we have a
due regard for the honor and the interest of our mighty nation; and
that we keep unsullied the renown of the flag which beyond all others
of the present time or of the ages of the past stands for confident
faith in the future welfare and greatness of mankind.
BROTHERHOOD AND THE HEROIC VIRTUES
ADDRESS AT VETERANS’ REUNION, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, SEPTEMBER 5, 1901
I speak to you to-night less as men of Vermont than as members of
the Grand Army which saved the Union. But at the outset I must pay a
special tribute to your State. Vermont was not a rich State, compared
with many States, and she had sent out so many tens of thousands of
her sons to the West that it is not improbable that as many men of
Vermont birth served in the regiments of other States as in those of
her own State. Yet, notwithstanding this drain, your gallant State
was surpassed by no other State of the North, either in the number
of men according to her population which she sent into the army, or
in the relative extent of her financial support of the war. Too much
can not be said of the high quality of the Vermont soldiers; and one
contributing factor in securing this high quality was the good sense
which continually sent recruits into the already existing regiments
instead of forming new ones.
It is difficult to express the full measure of obligation under
which this country is to the men who from ’61 to ’65 took up the most
terrible and vitally necessary task which has ever fallen to the lot
of any generation of men in the Western Hemisphere. Other men have
rendered great service to the country, but the service you rendered
was not merely great—it was incalculable. Other men by their lives
or their deaths have kept unstained our honor, have wrought marvels
for our interest, have led us forward to triumph, or warded off
disaster from us; other men have marshaled our ranks upward across the
stony slopes of greatness. But you did more, for you saved us from
annihilation. We can feel proud of what others did only because of
what you did. It was given to you, when the mighty days came, to do
the mighty deeds for which the days called, and if your deeds had been
left undone, all that had been already accomplished would have turned
into apples of Sodom under our teeth. The glory of Washington and the
majesty of Marshall would have crumbled into meaningless dust if you
and your comrades had not buttressed their work with your strength of
steel, your courage of fire. The Declaration of Independence would now
sound like a windy platitude, the Constitution of the United States
would ring as false as if drawn by the Abbé Sieyès in the days of the
French Terror, if your stern valor had not proved the truth of the one
and made good the promise of the other. In our history there have been
other victorious struggles for right, on the field of battle and in
civic strife. To have failed in these other struggles would have meant
bitter shame and grievous loss. But you fought in the one struggle
where failure meant death and destruction to our people; meant that our
whole past history would be crossed out of the records of successful
endeavor with the red and black lines of failure; meant that not one
man in all this wide country would now be holding his head upright as a
free citizen of a mighty and glorious Republic.
All this you did, and therefore you are entitled to the homage of all
men who have not forgotten in their blindness either the awful nature
of the crisis, or the worth of priceless service rendered in the hour
of direst need.
You met a great need, that vanished because of your success. You have
left us many memories, to be prized for evermore. You have taught us
many lessons, and none more important than the lesson of brotherhood.
The realization of the underlying brotherhood of our people, the
feeling that there should be among them an essential unity of purpose
and sympathy, must be kept close at heart if we are to do our work well
here in our American life. You have taught us both by what you did on
the tented fields, and by what you have done since in civic life, how
this spirit of brotherhood can be made a living, a vital force.
In the first place, you have left us the right of brotherhood with
the gallant men who wore the gray in the ranks against which you were
pitted. At the opening of this new century, all of us, the children
of a reunited country, have a right to glory in the countless deeds
of valor done alike by the men of the North and the men of the South.
We can retain an ever-growing sense of the all-importance, not merely
to our people but to mankind, of the Union victory, while giving the
freest and heartiest recognition to the sincerity and self-devotion of
those Americans, our fellow-countrymen, who then fought against the
stars in their courses. Now there is none left, North or South, who
does not take joy and pride in the Union; and when three years ago we
once more had to face a foreign enemy, the heart of every true American
thrilled with pride to see veterans who had fought in the Confederate
uniform once more appear under Uncle Sam’s colors, side by side with
their former foes, and leading to victory under the famous old flag the
sons both of those who had worn the blue and of those who had worn the
gray.
But there are other ways in which you have taught the lesson of
brotherhood. In our highly complex, highly specialized industrial
life of to-day there are many tendencies for good and there are also
many tendencies for evil. Chief among the latter is the way in which,
in great industrial centres, the segregation of interests invites a
segregation of sympathies. In our old American life, and in the country
districts where to-day the old conditions still largely obtain, there
was and is no such sharp and rigid demarcation between different
groups of citizens. In most country districts at the present day not
only have the people many feelings in common, but, what is quite as
important, they are perfectly aware that they have these feelings in
common. In the cities the divergence of real interests is nothing like
as great as is commonly supposed; but it does exist, and, above all,
there is a tendency to forget or ignore the community of interest.
There is comparatively little neighborliness, and life is so busy and
the population so crowded that it is impossible for the average man
to get into touch with any of his fellow-citizens save those in his
immediate little group. In consequence there tends to grow up a feeling
of estrangement between different groups, of forgetfulness of the great
primal needs and primal passions that are common to all of us.
It is therefore of the utmost benefit to have men thrown together under
circumstances which force them to realize their community of interest,
especially where the community of interest arises from community of
devotion to a lofty ideal. The great Civil War rendered precisely this
service. It drew into the field a very large proportion of the adult
male population, and it lasted so long that its lessons were thoroughly
driven home. In our other wars the same lessons, or nearly the same
lessons, have been taught, but upon so much smaller a scale that the
effect is in no shape or way comparable. In the Civil War, merchant
and clerk, manufacturer and mechanic, farmer and hired man, capitalist
and wage-worker, city man and country man, Easterner and Westerner,
went into the army together, faced toil and risk and hardship side by
side, died with the same fortitude, and felt the same disinterested
thrill of triumph when the victory came. In our modern life there are
only a few occupations where risk has to be feared, and there are many
occupations where no exhausting labor has to be faced; and so there are
plenty of us who can be benefited by a little actual experience with
the rough side of things. It was a good thing, a very good thing, to
have a great mass of our people learn what it was to face death and
endure toil together, and all on an exact level. You whom I am now
addressing remember well, do you not, the weary, foot-sore marches
under the burning sun, when the blankets seemed too heavy to carry, and
then the shivering sleep in the trenches, when the mud froze after dark
and the blankets seemed altogether too light instead of too heavy?
You remember the scanty fare, and you remember, above all, how you got
to estimate each of your fellows by what there was in him and not by
anything adventitious in his surroundings. It was of vital importance
to you that the men of your left and your right should do their duty;
that they should come forward when the order was to advance; that they
should keep the lines with ceaseless vigilance and fortitude if on the
defensive. You neither knew nor cared what had been their occupations,
or whether they were in worldly ways well off or the reverse. What you
desired to know about them was to be sure that they would “stay put”
when the crisis came. Was not this so? You know it was.