ready both in body and in soul, that we may cheerfully accomplish
those things that we are commanded to do. Ready both in body and in
soul; that means that we must fit ourselves physically and mentally,
fit ourselves to work with the weapons necessary for dealing with this
life no less than with the higher, spiritual weapons; fit ourselves
thus to do the work commanded; and moreover, to do it cheerfully.
Small is our use for the man who individually helps any of us and
shows that he does it grudgingly. We had rather not be helped than
be helped in such fashion. A favor extended in a manner which shows
that the man is sorry that he has to grant it is robbed, sometimes of
all, and sometimes of more than all, its benefit. So, in serving the
Lord, if we serve him, if we serve the cause of decency, the cause of
righteousness, in a way that impresses others with the fact that we
are sad in doing it, our service is robbed of an immense proportion
of its efficacy. We have a right to ask a cheerful heart, a right
to ask a buoyant and cheerful spirit among those to whom is granted
the inestimable privilege of doing the Lord’s work in this world.
The chance to do work, the duty to do work is not a penalty; it is a
privilege. Let me quote a sentence that I have quoted once before:
“In this life the man who wins to any goal worth winning almost always
comes to that goal with a burden bound on his shoulders.” The man who
does best in this world, the woman who does best, almost inevitably
does it because he or she carries some burden. Life is so constituted
that the man or the woman who has not some responsibility is thereby
deprived of the deepest happiness that can come to mankind, because
each and every one of us, if he or she is fit to live in the world
must be conscious that responsibility always rests on him or on
her—the responsibility of duty toward those dependent upon us; the
responsibility of duty toward our families, toward our friends, toward
our fellow-citizens; the responsibility of duty to wife and child, to
the state, to the church. Not only can no man shirk some or all of
those responsibilities, but no man worth his salt will wish to shirk
them. On the contrary, he will welcome thrice over the fortune that
puts them upon him.
In closing, I want to call your attention to something that is
especially my business for the time being, and that is measurably your
business all the time, or else you are unfit to be citizens of this
Republic. In the seventh hymn which we sung, in the last line, you
all joined in singing “God save the State!” Do you intend merely to
sing that, or to try to do it? If you intend merely to sing it, your
part in doing it will be but small. The State will be saved, if the
Lord puts it into the heart of the average man so to shape his life
that the State shall be worth saving, and only on those terms. We need
civic righteousness. The best constitution that the wit of man has
ever devised, the best institutions that the ablest statesmen in the
world have ever reduced to practice by law or by custom, all these
shall be of no avail if they are not vivified by the spirit which
makes a State great by making its citizens honest, just, and brave. I
do not ask you as practical believers in applied Christianity to take
part one way or the other in matters that are merely partisan. There
are plenty of questions about which honest men can and do differ very
greatly and very intensely, but as to which the triumph of either side
may be compatible with the welfare of the State—a lesser degree of
welfare or a greater degree of welfare—but compatible with the welfare
of the State. But there are certain great principles, such as those
which Cromwell would have called “fundamentals,” concerning which
no man has a right to have more than one opinion. Such a question
is honesty. If you have not honesty in the average private citizen,
in the average public servant, then all else goes for nothing. The
abler a man is, the more dexterous, the shrewder, the bolder, why
the more dangerous he is if he has not the root of right living and
right thinking in him—and that in private life, and even more in
public life. Exactly as in time of war, although you need in each
fighting man far more than courage, yet all else counts for nothing
if there is not that courage upon which to base it, so in our civil
life, although we need that the average man in private life, that
the average public servant, shall have far more than honesty, yet
all other qualities go for nothing or for worse than nothing unless
honesty underlies them—honesty in public life and honesty in private
life; not only the honesty that keeps its skirts technically clear,
but the honesty that is such according to the spirit as well as
the letter of the law; the honesty that is aggressive, the honesty
that not merely deplores corruption—it is easy enough to deplore
corruption—but that wars against it and tramples it under foot. I
ask for that type of honesty, I ask for militant honesty, for the
honesty of the kind that makes those who have it discontented with
themselves as long as they have failed to do everything that in them
lies to stamp out dishonesty wherever it can be found, in high place
or in low. And let us not flatter ourselves, we who live in countries
where the people rule that it is ultimately possible for the people
to cast upon any but themselves the responsibilities for the shape
the government and the social and political life of the community
assumes. I ask then that our people feel quickened within them burning
indignation against wrong in every shape, and condemnation of that
wrong, whether found in private or in public life. We have a right to
demand courage of every man who wears the uniform; it is not so much
a credit to him to have it as it is shame unutterable to him if he
lacks it. So when we demand honesty, we demand it not as entitling
the possessor to praise, but as warranting the heartiest condemnation
possible if he lacks it. Surely in every movement for the betterment
of our life, our life social in the truest and deepest sense, our
life political, we have a special right to ask not merely support but
leadership from those of the Church. We ask that you here to whom
much has been given will remember that from you rightly much will be
expected in return. For all of us here the lines have been cast in
pleasant places. Each of us has been given one talent, or five, or ten
talents, and each of us is in honor bound to use that talent or those
talents aright, and to show at the end that he is entitled to the
praise of having done well as a faithful servant.
I greet you this afternoon, and am glad to see you here, and I trust
and believe that after this service every one of us will go home
feeling that he or she has been warranted in coming here by the way
in which he or she, after going home, takes up with fresh heart, with
fresh courage, and with fresh and higher purpose the burden of life as
that burden has been given to him or to her to carry.
AT THE CENTENNIAL EXERCISES IN THE N. Y. AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,
WASHINGTON, D. C., NOV. 16, 1903
_Mr. Justice_:
Let me first express the appreciation that all of us feel to Professor
McMaster for his exceedingly interesting address; and the address
showed why he can justly claim to be the historian of the people of
the United States, for what he has told us was what the people did,
not merely what the outward forms and observances were, but what the
life of the people was a century ago. And, Mr. Justice, I think that
the recital has left in the minds of all of us the feeling that while
we revere our ancestors, we are not wholly discontented that we live
in the present day.
To each generation comes its allotted task; and no generation is to
be excused for failure to perform that task. No generation can claim
as an excuse for such failure the fact that it is not guilty of the
sins of the preceding generation. It was a surprise to me, I suppose
it was a surprise to many of us, to realize that a hundred years
ago, in the days of the fathers, the lot of the poor debtor was so
hard. It seems incredible to us now that there should have been such
callousness to the undeserved human suffering then. I hope sincerely
that a century hence it will seem equally incredible to the American
of that generation that there should be corruption and venality
in public life. We can divide, and must divide, on party lines as
regards certain questions; as regards the deepest, as regards the
vital questions, we can not afford to divide, and I have the right
to challenge the best effort of every American worthy of the name
to putting down by every means in his power corruption in private
life, and above all corruption in public life. And, remember, you,
the people of this government by the people, that while the public
servant, the legislator, the executive officer, the judge, are not
to be excused if they fall short of their duty, yet that their doing
their duty can not avail unless you do yours. In the last resort we
have to depend upon the jury drawn from the people to convict the
scoundrel who has tainted our public life; and unless that jury does
its duty, unless it is backed by the public sentiment of the people,
all the work of legislator, of executive officer, of judicial officer,
are for naught.
Mr. Justice, a man would be a poor citizen of this country if he
could sit in Abraham Lincoln’s pew and not feel the solemn sense of
the associations borne in upon him; and I wish to thank the people of
this church for that reverence for the historic past, for the sense
of historic continuity, which has made them keep this pew unchanged.
I hope it will remain unchanged in this church as long as our country
endures. We have not too many monuments of the past; let us keep every
little bit of association with that which is highest and best of the
past as a reminder to us, equally of what we owe to those who have
gone before and of how we should show our appreciation. This evening I
sit in this pew of Abraham Lincoln’s, together with Abraham Lincoln’s
private secretary, who, for my good fortune, now serves as Secretary
of State in my Cabinet.
If ever there lived a President who during his term of service
needed all of the consolation and of the strength that he could
draw from the unseen powers above him, it was Abraham Lincoln, who
worked and suffered for the people, and when he had lived for them
to good end gave his life at the end. If ever there was a man who
practically applied what was taught in our churches, it was Abraham
Lincoln. The other day I was rereading—on the suggestion of Mr. Hay—a
little speech not often quoted of his, yet which seems to me one of
the most remarkable that he ever made; delivered right after his
re-election, I think, to a body of serenaders who had come, if my
memory is correct, from Maryland, and called for an address from him
from the White House. It is extraordinary to read that speech, and to
realize that the man who made it had just come successfully through
a great political contest in which he felt that so much was at stake
for the Nation that he had no time to think whether or not anything
was at stake for himself. The speech is devoid of the least shade of
bitterness. There is not a word of unseemly triumph over those who
have been defeated. There is not a word of glorification of himself,
or in any improper sense of his party. There is an earnest appeal,
now that the election is over, now that the civic strife has been
completed, for all decent men who love the country to join together
in service to the country; and in the speech he uses a thoroughly
Lincoln-like phrase when he says “I have not willingly planted a
thorn in the breast of any man,” thus trying to make clear that he
has nothing to say against any opponent, no bitterness toward any
opponent; that all he wishes is that those who opposed him should join
with those who favored him in working toward a common end. In reading
his works and addresses, one is struck by the fact that as he went
higher and higher all personal bitterness seemed to die out of him. In
the Lincoln-Douglas debates one can still catch now and then a note of
personal antagonism; the man was in the arena, and as the blows were
given and taken you can see that now and then he had a feeling against
his antagonist. When he became President and faced the crisis that he
had to face, from that time on I do not think that you can find an
expression, a speech, a word of Lincoln’s, written or spoken, in which
bitterness is shown to any man. His devotion to the cause was so great
that he neither could nor would have feeling against any individual.
In closing, Mr. Justice, in thanking you of this church, the church so
closely kindred to my own Dutch Reformed Church, in thanking you for
asking me here, let me say how peculiarly glad I am that in the chair
sits one man, a Justice of the Supreme Court, and that I could be
escorted here by another man, who has just severed his connection with
one of the highest places in the United States Army, both of whom—you,
Justice Harlan, you, General Breckinridge—had enjoyed the wonderful
privilege of proving by their deeds the faith that was in them in the
days that tried men’s souls; both of whom did their part in holding
up the hands of mighty Lincoln, and both of whom were born in the
State of Lincoln’s birth.
REMARKS TO THE DELEGATES OF THE GERMAN SOCIETIES RECEIVED AT THE
WHITE HOUSE, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1903
_Mr. Voelckner, and Gentlemen_:
It gives me peculiar pleasure to greet you to-day; and it is a matter
of real regret to me that I can not attend formally your celebration.
You are quite right, Mr. Chairman, when you speak of the stand that
the German element in our citizenship has always taken in all crises
of our national life. In the first place, from the beginning of our
colonial history to this day, the German strain has been constantly
increasing in importance among the many strains that go to make up our
composite national character. I do not have to repeat to you the story
of the early German immigration to this country—the German immigration
that began in a mass toward the end of the seventeenth century, but
before that time had been represented among the very first settlers.
Allow me to give you one bit of ancestral experience of mine. The
first head of the New York City Government who was of German birth was
Leisler, about the year 1680. He was the representative of the popular
faction in the New York colony of that day, and among the Leislerian
aldermen was a forbear of mine named Roosevelt. You are entirely
familiar, of course, with the German immigration that went to the
formation of Pennsylvania from the beginning. That element was equally
strong in the Mohawk Valley in New York; it was equally strong in
Middle and Western Maryland. For instance, in the Revolutionary War,
one of the distinguished figures contributed by New York to the cause
of independence was that of the German Herkimer, whose fight in the
Mohawk Valley represented one of the turning points in the struggle
for independence; and one of the New York counties is now named after
him. The other day I went out to the battlefield of Antietam, here in
Maryland. There the Memorial Church is the German Lutheran Church,
which was founded in 1768, the settlement in the neighborhood of
Antietam being originally exclusively a German settlement. There is a
list of its pastors, and curiously enough a series of memorial windows
of men with German names—men who belonged to the Maryland regiment
recruited largely from that region for the Civil War, which Maryland
regiment was mainly composed of men of German extraction. In the
Civil War it would be difficult to paint in too strong colors what I
may wellnigh call the all-importance of the attitude of the American
citizens of German birth and extraction toward the cause of Union and
Liberty, especially in what were then known as the border States. It
would have been out of the question to have kept Missouri loyal had it
not been for the German element therein. It was the German portion
of the city of St. Louis which formed the core of the Union cause in
Missouri. And but little less important was the part played by the
Germans in Maryland, and also in Louisville and other portions of
Kentucky.
Each body of immigrants, each element that has thus been added to
our national strain, has contributed something of value to the
national character; and to no element do we owe more than we owe to
that element represented by those whom I have the honor this day of
addressing.
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON,
_October 18, 1902_
MY DEAR MRS. VAN VORST:
I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated your
article, “The Woman who Toils.” But to me there is a most melancholy
side to it, when you touch upon what is fundamentally infinitely
more important than any other question in this country—that is, the
question of race suicide, complete or partial.
An easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to be “independent,”
that is, to live one’s life purely according to one’s own desires,
are in no sense substitutes for the fundamental virtues, for the
practice of the strong racial qualities without which there can be
no strong races—the qualities of courage and resolution in both men
and women, of scorn of what is mean, base, and selfish, of eager
desire to work or fight or suffer as the case may be, provided the
end to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside
of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and worry.
I do not know whether I most pity or despise the foolish and selfish
man or woman who does not understand that the only things really
worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally
means cost and effort. If a man or woman, through no fault of his or
hers, goes throughout life denied those highest of all joys which
spring only from home life, from the having and bringing up of many
healthy children, I feel for them deep and respectful sympathy; the
sympathy one extends to the gallant fellow killed at the beginning of
a campaign, or the man who toils hard and is brought to ruin by the
fault of others. But the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage
and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow
and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal
against the race and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by
all healthy people.
Of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no one quality
will save a nation. But there are certain great qualities for the
lack of which no amount of intellectual brilliancy or of material
prosperity or of easiness of life can atone, and which show decadence
and corruption in the nation, just as much if they are produced by
selfishness and coldness and ease-loving laziness among comparatively
poor people as if they are produced by vicious or frivolous luxury in
the rich. If the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many
different ways, with all their might and strength, and ready and able
to fight at need, and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the
women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be
a good wife and mother, why, that nation has cause to be alarmed about
its future.
There is no physical trouble among us Americans. The trouble with the
situation you set forth is one of character, and therefore we can
conquer it if we only will.
Very sincerely yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
MRS. BESSIE VAN VORST,
Philadelphia, Pa.
_Personal._
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON,
_November 26, 1902_
MY DEAR SIR:
I am in receipt of your letter of November 10 and of one from Mr. ——
under date of November 11, in reference to the appointment of Dr. Crum
as collector of the Port of Charleston.
In your letter you make certain specific charges against Dr. Crum,
tending to show his unfitness in several respects for the office
sought. These charges are entitled to the utmost consideration from
me and I shall go over them carefully before taking any action. After
making these charges you add, as a further reason for opposition to
him, that he is a colored man, and after reciting the misdeeds that
followed carpet-bag rule and negro domination in South Carolina,
you say that “we have sworn never again to submit to the rule of
the African, and such an appointment as that of Dr. Crum to any
such office forces us to protest unanimously against this insult to
the white blood”; and you add that you understood me to say that I
would never force a negro on such a community as yours. Mr. —— puts
the objection of color first, saying: “First, he is a colored man,
and that of itself ought to bar him from the office.” In view of
these last statements, I think I ought to make clear to you why I am
concerned and pained by your making them and what my attitude is as
regards all such appointments. How any one could have gained the idea
that I had said I would not appoint reputable and upright colored
men to office, when objection was made to them solely on account of
their color, I confess I am wholly unable to understand. At the time
of my visit to Charleston last spring, I had made, and since that
time I have made, a number of such appointments from several States
in which there is a considerable colored population. For example, I
made one such appointment in Mississippi, and another in Alabama,
shortly before my visit to Charleston. I had at that time appointed
two colored men as judicial magistrates in the District of Columbia.
I have recently announced another such appointment for New Orleans,
and have just made one from Pennsylvania. The great majority of my
appointments in every State have been of white men. North and South
alike it has been my sedulous endeavor to appoint only men of high
character and good capacity, whether white or black. But it has been
my consistent policy in every State where their numbers warranted
it to recognize colored men of good repute and standing in making
appointments to office. These appointments of colored men have in
no State made more than a small proportion of the total number of
appointments. I am unable to see how I can legitimately be asked to
make an exception for South Carolina. In South Carolina, to the four
most important positions in the State I have appointed three men and
continued in office a fourth, all of them white men—three of them
originally Gold Democrats—two of them, as I am informed, the sons
of Confederate soldiers. I have been informed by the citizens of
Charleston whom I have met that these four men represent a high grade
of public service.
I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to office. So far as I
legitimately can I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes
and feelings of the people of each locality; but I can not consent to
take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to
be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of
race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions,
be fundamentally wrong. If, as you hold, the great bulk of the
colored people are not yet fit in point of character and influence
to hold such positions, it seems to me that it is worth while putting
a premium upon the effort among them to achieve the character and
standing which will fit them.
The question of “negro domination” does not enter into the matter
at all. It might as well be asserted that when I was Governor of
New York I sought to bring about negro domination in that State
because I appointed two colored men of good character and standing to
responsible positions—one of them to a position paying a salary twice
as large as that paid in the office now under consideration—one of
them as a director of the Buffalo exposition. The question raised by
you and Mr. —— in the statements to which I refer, is simply whether
it is to be declared that under no circumstances shall any man of
color, no matter how upright and honest, no matter how good a citizen,
no matter how fair in his dealings with his fellows, be permitted
to hold any office under our government. I certainly can not assume
such an attitude, and you must permit me to say that in my view it
is an attitude no man should assume, whether he looks at it from the
standpoint of the true interest of the white men of the South or of
the colored men of the South—not to speak of any other section of the
Union. It seems to me that it is a good thing from every standpoint
to let the colored man know that if he shows in marked degree the
qualities of good citizenship—the qualities which in a white man we
feel are entitled to reward—then he will not be cut off from all hope
of similar reward.
Without any regard to what my decision may be on the merits of this
particular applicant for this particular place, I feel that I ought to
let you know clearly my attitude on the far broader question raised
by you and Mr. ——; an attitude from which I have not varied during my
term of office.
Faithfully yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
HON. ——
Charleston, S. C.
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON,
_February 24, 1903_
MY DEAR MR. HOWELL:
I have a high opinion of the gentleman you mention and if the
opportunity occurs I shall be glad to do anything I can for him.