learned only by men and women who, together with the softer virtues,
possess also the stronger; who can do, and dare, and die at need,
but who while life lasts will never flinch from their allotted task.
You farmers, and wage-workers, and business men of this great State,
of this mighty and wonderful Nation, are gathered together to-day,
proud of your State and still prouder of your Nation, because your
forefathers and predecessors have lived up to just this creed. You
have received from their hands a great inheritance, and you will leave
an even greater inheritance to your children, and your children’s
children, provided only that you practice alike in your private and
your public lives the strong virtues that have given us as a people
greatness in the past. It is not enough to be well-meaning and kindly,
but weak; neither is it enough to be strong, unless morality and
decency go hand in hand with strength. We must possess the qualities
which make us do our duty in our homes and among our neighbors, and in
addition we must possess the qualities which are indispensable to the
make-up of every great and masterful nation—the qualities of courage
and hardihood, of individual initiative and yet of power to combine
for a common end, and above all, the resolute determination to permit
no man and no set of men to sunder us one from the other by lines
of caste or creed or section. We must act upon the motto of all for
each and each for all. There must be ever present in our minds the
fundamental truth that in a republic such as ours the only safety is
to stand neither for nor against any man because he is rich or because
he is poor, because he is engaged in one occupation or another,
because he works with his brains or because he works with his hands.
We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see
that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more
and should receive no less. Finally we must keep ever in mind that a
republic such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly liberty
which comes through the equal domination of the law over all men
alike, and through its administration in such resolute and fearless
fashion as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it.
AT RICHMOND HILL, N. Y., SEPTEMBER 8, 1903
_Dr. Kimball, and you, Men, Women, and Children of Richmond Hill_:
I wish I could talk better to all of you; but I will ask you to have a
little patience for one moment while I thank you for having come out
to greet me, I am glad to see all of you, and allow me to say that I
am most glad to see those who carry small folks in their arms.
You know I am very fond of Mr. Riis; and the reason why is because
when I preach about decent citizenship I can turn to him and think
he has practiced just what I have been preaching. The worth of any
sermon lies in the way in which that sermon can be and is applied
in practice. Of course I am glad to have the chance of being with a
man who shows by his life that he knows how practically to apply the
spirit of decency unaccompanied by mournfulness or false pretences
of any kind, or by weakness. I want to see men decent; I want to
see them act squarely; I want to see them work. That does not mean
that I want to see them have sour faces. I want to see all enjoy
themselves, men, women, and children. I believe in play; I believe in
happiness, and in the joy of living; and I do not believe in the life
that is nothing but play. I believe that you have a thousandfold more
enjoyment if work comes first; but get time to play also. I believe
in cheerfulness as well as in decency and honesty. Finally, I believe
in always combining strength with the sweetness. I want to say how
deeply touched I am at your coming out to greet me, and I want you to
understand that you give me strength of heart when you come in this
way. I greet you all; I am glad to see the grown up people of Richmond
Hill, and I am even more glad to see the children.
AT ANTIETAM, MD., SEPTEMBER 17, 1903
_Governor Murphy, Veterans of New Jersey, Men of the Grand Army_:
I thank you of New Jersey for the monument to the troops of New
Jersey who fought at Antietam, and on behalf of the Nation I accept
the gift. We meet to-day upon one of the great battle-fields of the
Civil War. No other battle of the Civil War lasting but one day shows
as great a percentage of loss as that which occurred here upon the
day on which Antietam was fought. Moreover, in its ultimate effects
this battle was of momentous and even decisive importance, for when
it had ended and Lee had retreated south of the Potomac, Lincoln
forthwith published that immortal paper, the preliminary declaration
of emancipation; the paper which decided that the Civil War, besides
being a war for the preservation of the Union, should be a war for the
emancipation of the slave, so that from that time onward the cause of
Union and of Freedom, of national greatness and individual liberty,
were one and the same.
Men of New Jersey, I congratulate your State because she has the right
to claim her full share in the honor and glory of that memorable day;
and I congratulate you, Governor Murphy, because on that day you had
the high good fortune to serve as a lad with credit and honor in
one of the five regiments which your State sent to the battle. Four
of those regiments, by the way, served in the division commanded
by that gallant soldier, Henry W. Slocum, whom we of New York can
claim as our own. The other regiment, that in which Governor Murphy
served, although practically an entirely new regiment, did work as
good as that of any veteran organization upon the field, and suffered
a proportional loss. This regiment was at one time ordered to the
support of a division commanded by another New York soldier, the
gallant General Greene, whose son himself served as a major-general
in the war with Spain and is now, as Police Commissioner of New York,
rendering as signal service in civil life as he had already rendered
in military life.
If the issue of Antietam had been other than it was, it is probable
that at least two great European powers would have recognized the
independence of the Confederacy; so that you who fought here forty-one
years ago have the profound satisfaction of feeling that you played
well your part in one of those crises big with the fate of all
mankind. You men of the Grand Army by your victory not only rendered
all Americans your debtors for evermore, but you rendered all humanity
your debtors. If the Union had been dissolved, if the great edifice
built with blood and sweat and tears by mighty Washington and his
compeers had gone down in wreck and ruin, the result would have been
an incalculable calamity, not only for our people—and most of all
for those who, in such event would have seemingly triumphed—but for
all mankind. The great American Republic would have become a memory
of derision; and the failure of the experiment of self-government
by a great people on a great scale would have delighted the heart
of every foe of republican institutions. Our country, now so great
and so wonderful, would have been split into little jangling rival
nationalities, each with a history both bloody and contemptible.
It was because you, the men who wear the button of the Grand Army,
triumphed in those dark years, that every American now holds his
head high, proud in the knowledge that he belongs to a Nation whose
glorious past and great present will be succeeded by an even mightier
future; whereas had you failed we would all of us, North and South,
East and West, be now treated by other nations at the best with
contemptuous tolerance; at the worst with overbearing insolence.
Moreover, every friend of liberty, every believer in self-government,
every idealist who wished to see his ideals take practical shape,
wherever he might be in the world, knew that the success of all in
which he most believed was bound up with the success of the Union
armies in this great struggle. I confidently predict that when the
final judgment of history is recorded it will be said that in no other
war of which we have written record was it more vitally essential
for the welfare of mankind that victory should rest where it finally
rested. There have been other wars for individual freedom. There have
been other wars for national greatness. But there has never been
another war in which the issues at stake were so large, looked at from
either standpoint. We take just pride in the great deeds of the men
of 1776, but we must keep in mind that the Revolutionary War would
have been shorn of wellnigh all its results had the side of union and
liberty been defeated in the Civil War. In such case we should merely
have added another to the lamentably long list of cases in which
peoples have shown that after winning their liberty they are wholly
unable to make good use of it.
It now rests with us in civil life to make good by our deeds the
deeds which you who wore the blue did in the great years from ’61
to ’65. The patriotism, the courage, the unflinching resolution and
steadfast endurance of the soldiers whose triumph was crowned at
Appomattox must be supplemented on our part by civic courage, civic
honesty, cool sanity, and steadfast adherence to the immutable laws
of righteousness. You left us a reunited country; reunited in fact
as well as in name. You left us the right of brotherhood with your
gallant foes who wore the gray; the right to feel pride in their
courage and their high fealty to an ideal, even though they warred
against the stars in their courses. You left us also the most splendid
example of what brotherhood really means; for in your careers you
showed in practical fashion that the only safety in our American life
lies in spurning the accidental distinctions which sunder one man from
another, and in paying homage to each man only because of what he
essentially is; in stripping off the husks of occupation, of position,
of accident, until the soul stands forth revealed, and we know the man
only because of his worth as a man.
There was no patent device for securing victory by force of arms
forty years ago; and there is no patent device for securing victory
for the forces of righteousness in civil life now. In each case the
all-important factor was and is the character of the individual man.
Good laws in the State, like a good organization in an army, are
the expressions of national character. Leaders will be developed in
military and in civil life alike; and weapons and tactics change from
generation to generation, as methods of achieving good government
change in civic affairs; but the fundamental qualities which make for
good citizenship do not change any more than the fundamental qualities
which make good soldiers. In the long run in the Civil War the thing
that counted for more than aught else was the fact that the average
American had the fighting edge; had within him the spirit which
spurred him on through toil and danger, fatigue and hardship, to the
goal of the splendid ultimate triumph. So in achieving good government
the fundamental factor must be the character of the average citizen;
that average citizen’s power of hatred for what is mean and base and
unlovely; his fearless scorn of cowardice and his determination to war
unyieldingly against the dark and sordid forces of evil.
The Continental troops who followed Washington were clad in blue
and buff, and were armed with clumsy, flintlock muskets. You, who
followed Grant, wore the famous old blue uniform, and your weapons
had changed as had your uniform; and now the men of the American Army
who uphold the honor of the flag in the far tropic lands are yet
differently armed and differently clad and differently trained; but
the spirit that has driven you all to victory has remained forever
unchanged. So it is in civil life. As you did not win in a month or
a year, but only after long years of hard and dangerous work, so the
fight for governmental honesty and efficiency can be won only by
the display of similar patience and similar resolution and power of
endurance. We need the same type of character now that was needed
by the men who with Washington first inaugurated the system of free
popular government, the system of combined liberty and order here
on this Continent; that was needed by the men who under Lincoln
perpetuated the government which had thus been inaugurated in the
days of Washington. The qualities essential to good citizenship and
to good public service now are in all their essentials exactly the
same as in the days when the first Congresses met to provide for the
establishment of the Union; as in the days seventy years later, when
the Congresses met which had to provide for its salvation.
There are many qualities which we need alike in private citizen
and in public man, but three above all—three for the lack of which
no brilliancy and no genius can atone—and those three are courage,
honesty, and common-sense.
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE SHERMAN STATUE, WASHINGTON, D. C., OCTOBER 15,
1903
_General Dodge, Veterans of the Four Great Armies, and you, my
Fellow-Citizens_:
To-day we meet together to do honor to the memory of one of the great
men whom, in the hour of her agony, our Nation brought forth for her
preservation. The Civil War was not only in the importance of the
issues at stake and of the outcome the greatest of modern times, but
it was also, taking into account its duration, the severity of the
fighting, and the size of the armies engaged, the greatest since
the close of the Napoleonic struggles. Among the generals who rose
to high position as leaders of the various armies in the field are
many who will be remembered in our history as long as this history
itself is remembered. Sheridan, the incarnation of fiery energy and
prowess; Thomas, far-sighted, cool-headed, whose steadfast courage
burned ever highest in the supreme moment of the crisis; McClellan,
with his extraordinary gift for organization; Meade, victor in one of
the decisive battles of all time; Hancock, type of the true fighting
man among the regulars; Logan, type of the true fighting man among
the volunteers—the names of these and of many others will endure so
long as our people hold sacred the memory of the fight for union and
for liberty. High among these chiefs rise the figures of Grant and of
Grant’s great lieutenant, Sherman, whose statue here in the national
capital is to-day to be unveiled. It is not necessary here to go
over the long roll of Sherman’s mighty feats. They are written large
throughout the history of the Civil War. Our memories would be poor
indeed if we did not recall them now, as we look along Pennsylvania
Avenue and think of the great triumphal march which surged down its
length when at the close of the war the victorious armies of the East
and of the West met here in the capital of the Nation they had saved.
There is a peculiar fitness in commemorating the great deeds of the
soldiers who preserved this Nation, by suitable monuments at the
National Capital. I trust we shall soon have a proper statue of
Abraham Lincoln, to whom more than to any other one man this Nation
owes its salvation. Meanwhile, on behalf of the people of the Nation,
I wish to congratulate all of you who have been instrumental in
securing the erection of this statue to General Sherman.
The living can best show their respect for the memory of the great
dead by the way in which they take to heart and act upon the lessons
taught by the lives which made these dead men great. Our homage to-day
to the memory of Sherman comes from the depths of our being. We would
be unworthy citizens did we not feel profound gratitude toward him,
and those like him and under him, who, when the country called in her
dire need, sprang forward with such gallant eagerness to answer that
call. Their blood and their toil, their endurance and patriotism,
have made us and all who come after us forever their debtors. They
left us not merely a reunited country, but a country incalculably
greater because of its rich heritage in the deeds which thus left it
reunited. As a Nation we are the greater, not only for the valor and
devotion to duty displayed by the men in blue, who won in the great
struggle for the Union, but also for the valor and the loyalty toward
what they regarded as right of the men in gray; for this war, thrice
fortunate above all other recent wars in its outcome, left to all of
us the right of brotherhood alike with valiant victor and valiant
vanquished.
Moreover, our homage must not only find expression on our lips; it
must also show itself forth in our deeds. It is a great and glorious
thing for a nation to be stirred to present triumph by the splendid
memories of triumphs in the past. But it is a shameful thing for a
nation, if these memories stir it only to empty boastings, to a pride
that does not shrink from present abasement, to that self-satisfaction
which accepts the high resolve and unbending effort of the father as
an excuse for effortless ease or wrongly directed effort in the son.
We of the present, if we are true to the past, must show by our lives
that we have learned aright the lessons taught by the men who did the
mighty deeds of the past. We must have in us the spirit which made the
men of the Civil War what they were; the spirit which produced leaders
such as Sherman; the spirit which gave to the average soldier the
grim tenacity and resourcefulness that made the armies of Grant and
Sherman as formidable fighting machines as this world has ever seen.
We need their ruggedness of body, their keen and vigorous minds, and
above all their dominant quality of forceful character. Their lives
teach us in our own lives to strive after, not the thing which is
merely pleasant, but the thing which it is our duty to do. The life of
duty, not the life of mere ease or mere pleasure—that is the kind of
life which makes the great man as it makes the great nation.
We can not afford to lose the virtues which made the men of ’61 to
’65 great in war. No man is warranted in feeling pride in the deeds
of the Army and Navy of the past if he does not back up the Army and
the Navy of the present. If we are far-sighted in our patriotism,
there will be no let-up in the work of building, and of keeping at
the highest point of efficiency, a navy suited to the part the United
States must hereafter play in the world, and of making and keeping our
small Regular Army, which in the event of a great war can never be
anything but the nucleus around which our volunteer armies must form
themselves, the best army of its size to be found among the nations.
So much for our duties in keeping unstained the honor roll our fathers
made in war. It is of even more instant need that we should show their
spirit of patriotism in the affairs of peace. The duties of peace are
with us always; those of war are but occasional; and with a nation as
with a man, the worthiness of life depends upon the way in which the
every-day duties are done. The home duties are the vital duties. The
nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its border;
and if the average man is not hard-working, just, and fearless in his
dealings with those about him, then our average of public life will in
the end be low; for the stream can rise no higher than its source. But
in addition we need to remember that a peculiar responsibility rests
upon the man in public life. We meet in the capital of the Nation, in
the city which owes its existence to the fact that it is the seat of
the National Government. It is well for us in this place, and at this
time, to remember that exactly as there are certain homely qualities
the lack of which will prevent the most brilliant man alive from being
a useful soldier to his country, so there are certain homely qualities
for the lack of which in the public servant no shrewdness or ability
can atone. The greatest leaders, whether in war or in peace, must of
course show a peculiar quality of genius; but the most redoubtable
armies that have ever existed have been redoubtable because the
average soldier, the average officer, possessed to a high degree such
comparatively simple qualities as loyalty, courage, and hardihood.
And so the most successful governments are those in which the average
public servant possesses that variant of loyalty which we call
patriotism, together with common-sense and honesty. We can as little
afford to tolerate a dishonest man in the public service as a coward
in the army. The murderer takes a single life; the corruptionist in
public life, whether he be bribe giver or bribe taker, strikes at the
heart of the commonwealth. In every public service, as in every army,
there will be wrongdoers, there will occur misdeeds. This can not be
avoided; but vigilant watch must be kept, and as soon as discovered
the wrongdoing must be stopped and the wrongdoers punished. Remember
that in popular government we must rely on the people themselves,
alike for the punishment and the reformation. Those upon whom our
institutions cast the initial duty of bringing malefactors to the bar
of justice must be diligent in its discharge; yet in the last resort
the success of their efforts to purge the public service of corruption
must depend upon the attitude of the courts and of the juries drawn
from the people. Leadership is of avail only so far as there is wise
and resolute public sentiment behind it.
In the long run, then, it depends upon us ourselves, upon us the
people as a whole, whether this Government is or is not to stand in
the future as it has stood in the past; and my faith that it will
show no falling off is based upon my faith in the character of our
average citizenship. The one supreme duty is to try to keep this
average high. To this end it is well to keep alive the memory of
those men who are fit to serve as examples of what is loftiest and
best in American citizenship. Such a man was General Sherman. To very
few in any generation is it given to render such services as he
rendered; but each of us in his degree can try to show something of
those qualities of character upon which, in their sum, the high worth
of Sherman rested—his courage, his kindliness, his clean and simple
living, his sturdy good sense, his manliness and tenderness in the
intimate relations of life, and finally, his inflexible rectitude of
soul and his loyalty to all that in this free Republic is hallowed and
symbolized by the national flag.
AT THE PAN-AMERICAN MISSIONARY SERVICE, CATHEDRAL OF ST. PETER AND
ST. PAUL, MOUNT ST. ALBAN, WASHINGTON, D. C., OCTOBER 25, 1903
_Bishop Satterlee; and to you representatives of the Church both at
home and abroad; and to all of you, my friends and fellow-citizens_:
I extend greeting, and in your name I especially welcome those who
are in a sense the guests of the nation to-day. In what I am about to
say to you, I wish to dwell upon certain thoughts suggested by three
different quotations: In the first place, “Thou shalt serve the Lord
with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind;” the
next, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves;” and
finally, in the Collect which you, Bishop Doane, just read, that “we
being ready both in body and soul may cheerfully accomplish those
things which thou commandest.”
To an audience such as this I do not have to say anything as to
serving the cause of decency with heart and with soul. I want to
dwell, however, upon the fact that we have the right to claim from you
not merely that you shall have heart in your work, not merely that you
shall put your souls into it, but that you shall give the best that
your minds have to it also. In the eternal, the unending warfare for
righteousness and against evil, the friends of what is good need to
remember that in addition to being decent they must be efficient; that
good intentions, high purposes, can not be in themselves effective,
that they are in no sense a substitute for power to make those
purposes, those intentions felt in action. Of course we must first
have the purpose and the intention. If our powers are not guided
aright it is better that we should not have them at all; but we must
have the power itself before we can guide it aright.
In the second text we are told not merely to be harmless as doves, but
also to be wise as serpents. One of our American humorists who veils
under jocular phrases much deep wisdom—one of those men has remarked
that it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent. Now,
we are not to be excused if we do not show both qualities. It is not
very much praise to give a man to say that he is harmless. We have
a right to ask that in addition to the fact that he does no harm to
any one he shall possess the wisdom and the strength to do good to
his neighbor; that together with innocence, together with purity of
motive, shall be joined the wisdom and strength to make that purity
effective, that motive translated into substantial result.