_Mr. Rhodes; and you, My Fellow-Citizens_:
I wish to say that I am stirred most deeply by this magnificent
reception from what Mr. Rhodes has so well called the Magic City of
the South. Alabama has made a wonderful record. At the close of the
war, shattered, war-swept, it seemed that it was impossible for her
people, in the grip of poverty as they were, to rally; and any people
less strong than you of Alabama would have failed; but you had the
stuff in you and you succeeded. About the year 1880 the tide turned,
and the last quarter of a century has seen in Alabama a progress that
would have been absolutely impossible in any other age or in any other
nation than ours. The agriculture of the State went upward by leaps
and bounds; but even more marvelous was your mechanical and industrial
success. You have in this State coal and iron, the two basic elements
in modern industrialism, and you have also a wealth of water power only
partially used; and given that amount of natural resources and the
right type of man to use them, the result will be what we have seen.
But there is something that is ahead of any kind of natural resources,
and that is the citizenship of the man on the soil. Proud though I am
of your extraordinary industrial prosperity, I am prouder yet of the
men who have achieved it.
Think what it means for our nation to have the President of the United
States greeted as he has been to-day, with on his right and his left
hand as the guard of honor the veterans of the Civil War, the men who
wore the blue, the men who wore the gray, united forever.
As I came up the street nothing pleased me as much as the sight of the
school-children drawn up alongside the line of march. Remember that we
shall leave this country in the hands of the children of to-day, and
that the American of to-morrow will be what we train the boy or girl
to be. If the children are not well educated, if they are not brought
up as they should be, the State will go down. We of this generation
have received a splendid heritage from you men of the years of ’60 to
’65. Honor to us if we treat your great deeds as spurring us onward;
and shame to us if we treat your great deeds as excuses for our own
idleness or folly. When I speak of education I do not mean only
education in intelligence. That counts tremendously; but education in
character counts more. It is character that determines the Nation’s
progress in the long run.
In the organizations of veterans after the Civil War each hails
the other as comrade. It makes no difference whether the man was a
lieutenant-general or whether he was the youngest recruit that served
at the very end of the war. All that is asked is, did he do his duty in
the place in which he was. If he did, you are for him. If he did not,
you have no comradeship with him. I ask that the same lesson that you
of the Civil War applied practically in your own persons during and
since that war be applied by the rest of us in civil life. I ask that
we scorn alike the base arrogance of the rich man who would look down
on his poorer brother and the equally base envy of the poor man who
would hate his richer brother; and that you apply to every citizen of
this Republic just this one test—the test that gauges his worth as a
man. Does he do his duty fairly by himself, his family, his neighbor,
and the State and the Nation? If he does, be for him, whether he is
rich or poor, because if you do not you are recreant in the spirit of
Americanism.
REMARKS ON BEING PRESENTED WITH TWO CONFEDERATE BADGES, AT
BIRMINGHAM, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905
_Ladies; General_:
I accept the two badges in the spirit in which they are offered; for
your spirit here is that we are now indeed and forever reunited under
the flag of the indissoluble Union; and that henceforth the only
rivalry between the man whose father fought in the Union army and the
man whose father fought in the Confederate army will be the generous
rivalry of seeing who can do most for our common country.