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Title: African and European Addresses
Author: Theodore Roosevelt
Release Date: November 3, 2004 [eBook #13930]
Language: English
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AFRICAN AND EUROPEAN ADDRESSES
by
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
With an Introduction presenting a Description of the Conditions under
which the Addresses were given during Mr. Roosevelt's Journey in 1910
from Khartum through Europe to New York
by LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT
1910
FOREWORD
My original intention had been to return to the United States direct
from Africa, by the same route I took when going out. I altered this
intention because of receiving from the Chancellor of Oxford
University, Lord Curzon, an invitation to deliver the Romanes Lecture
at Oxford. The Romanes Foundation had always greatly interested me,
and I had been much struck by the general character of the annual
addresses, so that I was glad to accept. Immediately afterwards, I
received and accepted invitations to speak at the Sorbonne in Paris,
and at the University of Berlin. In Berlin and at Oxford, my addresses
were of a scholastic character, designed especially for the learned
bodies which I was addressing, and for men who shared their interests
in scientific and historical matters. In Paris, after consultation
with the French Ambassador, M. Jusserand, through whom the invitation
was tendered, I decided to speak more generally, as the citizen of
one republic addressing the citizens of another republic.
When, for these reasons, I had decided to stop in Europe on my way
home, it of course became necessary that I should speak to the Nobel
Prize Committee in Christiania, in acknowledgment of the Committee's
award of the peace prize, after the Peace of Portsmouth had closed the
war between Japan and Russia.
While in Africa, I became greatly interested in the work of the
Government officials and soldiers who were there upholding the cause
of civilization. These men appealed to me; in the first place, because
they reminded me so much of our own officials and soldiers who have
reflected such credit on the American name in the Philippines, in
Panama, in Cuba, in Porto Rico; and, in the next place, because I was
really touched by the way in which they turned to me, with the
certainty that I understood and believed in their work, and with the
eagerly expressed hope that when I got the chance I would tell the
people at home what they were doing and would urge that they be
supported in doing it.
In my Egyptian address, my endeavor was to hold up the hands of these
men, and at the same time to champion the cause of the missionaries,
of the native Christians, and of the advanced and enlightened
Mohammedans in Egypt. To do this it was necessary emphatically to
discourage the anti-foreign movement, led, as it is, by a band of
reckless, foolish, and sometimes murderous agitators. In other words,
I spoke with the purpose of doing good to Egypt, and with the hope of
deserving well of the Egyptian people of the future, unwilling to
pursue the easy line of moral culpability which is implied in saying
pleasant things of that noisy portion of the Egyptian people of
to-day, who, if they could have their way, would irretrievably and
utterly ruin Egypt's future. In the Guildhall address, I carried out
the same idea.
I made a number of other addresses, some of which--those, for
instance, at Budapest, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and the
University of Christiania,--I would like to present here; but
unfortunately they were made without preparation, and were not taken
down in shorthand, so that with the exception of the address made at
the dinner in Christiania and the address at the Cambridge Union these
can not be included.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL,
July 15, 1910.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Roosevelt as an Orator.
PEACE AND JUSTICE IN THE SUDAN
An Address at the American Mission in Khartum, March 16, 1910.
LAW AND ORDER IN EGYPT
An Address before the National University in Cairo, March 28, 1910.
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
An Address Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.
INTERNATIONAL PEACE
An Address before the Nobel Prize Committee Delivered at Christiania,
Norway, May 5, 1910.
THE COLONIAL POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES
An Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, on the Evening of
May 5, 1910.
THE WORLD MOVEMENT
An Address Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910.
THE CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS
An Address at the Cambridge Union, May 26, 1910.
BRITISH RULE IN AFRICA
Address Delivered at the Guildhall, London, May 31, 1910.
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[1]
Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910.
[1] The text of this lecture, which is the Romanes Lecture for
1910, is included in the present volume under the courteous
permission of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
APPENDIX
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Roosevelt as an Orator
In the tumult, on the one hand of admiration and praise and on the
other of denunciation and criticism, which Mr. Roosevelt's tour in
Africa and Europe excited throughout the civilized world, there was
one--and I am inclined to think only one--note of common agreement.
Friends and foes united in recognizing the surprising versatility of
talents and of ability which the activities of his tour displayed.
Hunters and explorers, archæologists and ethnologists, soldiers and
sailors, scientists and university doctors, statesmen and politicians,
monarchs and diplomats, essayists and historians, athletes and
horsemen, orators and occasional speakers, met him on equal terms. The
purpose of the present volume is to give to American readers, by
collecting a group of his transatlantic addresses and by relating some
incidents and effects of their delivery, some impression of one
particular phase of Mr. Roosevelt's foreign journey,--an impression of
the influence on public thought which he exerted as an orator.
No one would assert that Mr. Roosevelt possesses that persuasive grace
of oratory which made Mr. Gladstone one of the greatest public
speakers of modern times. For oratory as a fine art, he has no use
whatever; he is neither a stylist nor an elocutionist; what he has to
say he says with conviction and in the most direct and effective
phraseology that he can find through which to bring his hearers to his
way of thinking. Three passages from the Guildhall speech afford
typical illustrations of the incisiveness of his English and of its
effect on his audience.
Fortunately you have now in the Governor of East Africa, Sir Percy
Girouard, a man admirably fitted to deal wisely and firmly with
the many problems before him. He is on the ground and knows the
needs of the country and is zealously devoted to its interests.
All that is necessary is to follow his lead and to give him
cordial support and backing. The principle upon which I think it
is wise to act in dealing with far-away possessions is this:
choose your man, change him if you become discontented with him,
but while you keep him, back him up.
* * * * *
I have met people who had some doubt whether the Sudan would pay.
Personally, I think it probably will. But I may add that, in my
judgment, this does not alter the duty of England to stay there.
It is not worth while belonging to a big nation unless the big
nation is willing, when the necessity arises, to undertake a big
task. I feel about you in the Sudan just as I felt about us in
Panama. When we acquired the right to build the Panama Canal, and
entered on the task, there were worthy people who came to me and
said they wondered whether it would pay. I always answered that it
was one of the great world-works that had to be done; that it was
our business as a nation to do it, if we were ready to make good
our claim to be treated as a great World Power; and that as we
were unwilling to abandon the claim, no American worth his salt
ought to hesitate about performing the task. I feel just the same
way about you in the Sudan.
* * * * *
It was with this primary object of establishing order that you
went into Egypt twenty-eight years ago; and the chief and ample
justification for your presence in Egypt was this absolute
necessity of order being established from without, coupled with
your ability and willingness to establish it. Now, either you have
the right to be in Egypt, or you have not; either it is, or it is
not your duty to establish and keep order. If you feel that you
have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish
and keep order there, why then by all means get out of Egypt. If,
as I hope, you feel that your duty to civilized mankind and your
fealty to your own great traditions alike bid you to stay, then
make the fact and the name agree, and show that you are ready to
meet in very deed the responsibility which is yours.
There may be little Ciceronian grace about these passages, but there
is unmistakable verbal power. So many words of one syllable and of
Saxon derivation are used as to warrant the opinion that the speaker
possesses a distinctive style. That it is an effective style was
proved by the response of the audience, which greeted these particular
passages (although they contain by implication frank criticisms of the
British people) with cheers and cries of "Hear, hear!" It should be
remembered, too, that the audience, a distinguished one, while neither
hostile nor antipathetic, came in a distinctly critical frame of mind.
Like the man from Missouri, they were determined "to be shown" the
value of Mr. Roosevelt's personality and views before they accepted
them. That they did accept them, that the British people accepted
them, I shall endeavor to show a little later.
There are people who entertain the notion that it is characteristic of
Mr. Roosevelt to speak on the spur of the moment, trusting to the
occasion to furnish him with both his ideas and his inspiration.
Nothing could be more contrary to the facts. It is true that in his
European journey he developed a facility in extemporaneous
after-dinner speaking or occasional addresses, that was a surprise
even to his intimate friends. At such times, what he said was full of
apt allusions, witty comment (sometimes at his own expense), and
bubbling good humor. The address to the undergraduates at the
Cambridge Union, and his remarks at the supper of the Institute of
British Journalists in Stationers' Hall, are good examples of this
kind of public speaking. But his important speeches are carefully and
painstakingly prepared. It is his habit to dictate the first draft to
a stenographer. He then takes the typewritten original and works over
it, sometimes sleeps over it, and edits it with the greatest care. In
doing this, he usually calls upon his friends, or upon experts in the
subject he is dealing with, for advice and suggestion.
Of the addresses collected in this volume, three--the lectures at the
Sorbonne, at the University of Berlin, and at Oxford--were written
during the winter of 1909, before Mr. Roosevelt left the Presidency; a
fourth, the Nobel Prize speech, was composed during the hunting trip
in Africa, and the original copy, written with indelible pencil on
sheets of varying size and texture, and covered with interlineations
and corrections, bears all the marks of life in the wilderness. The
Cairo and Guildhall addresses were written and rewritten with great
care beforehand. The remaining three, "Peace and Justice in the
Sudan," "The Colonial Policy of the United States," and the speech at
the University of Cambridge were extemporaneous. The Cairo and
Guildhall speeches are on the same subject, and sprang from the same
sources, and although one was delivered at the beginning, and the
other at the close of a three months' journey, they should, in order
to be properly understood, be read as one would read two chapters of
one work.
When Mr. Roosevelt reached Egypt, he found the country in one of those
periods of political unrest and religious fanaticism which have during
the last twenty-five years given all Europe many bad quarters of an
hour. Technically a part of the Ottoman Empire and a province of the
Sultan of Turkey, Egypt is practically an English protectorate. During
the quarter of a century since the tragic death of General Gordon at
Khartum, Egypt has made astonishing progress in prosperity, in the
administration of justice, and in political stability. All Europe
recognizes this progress to be the fruit of English control and
administration. At the time of Mr. Roosevelt's visit, a faction, or
party, of native Egyptians, calling themselves Nationalists, had come
into somewhat unsavory prominence; they openly urged the expulsion of
the English, giving feverish utterance to the cry "Egypt for the
Egyptians!" In Egypt, this cry means more than a political antagonism;
it means the revival of the ancient and bitter feud between
Mohammedanism and Christianity. It is in effect a cry of "Egypt for
the Moslem!" The Nationalist party had by no means succeeded in
affecting the entire Moslem population, but it had succeeded in
attracting to itself all the adventurers, and lovers of darkness and
disorder who cultivate for their own personal gain such movements of
national unrest. The non-Moslem population, European and native, whose
ability and intelligence is indicated by the fact that, while they
form less than ten per cent. of the inhabitants, they own more than
fifty per cent. of the property, were staunch supporters of the
English control which the Nationalists wished to overthrow. The
Nationalists, however, appeared to be the only people who were not
afraid to talk openly and to take definite steps. Just before Mr.
Roosevelt's arrival, Boutros Pasha, the Prime Minister, a native
Egyptian Christian, and one of the ablest administrative officers that
Egypt has ever produced, had been brutally assassinated by a
Nationalist. The murder was discussed everywhere with many shakings of
the head, but in quiet corners, and low tones of voice. Military and
civil officers complained in private that the home government was
paying little heed to the assassination and to the spirit of disorder
which brought it about. English residents, who are commonly courageous
and outspoken in great crises, gave one the impression of speaking in
whispers in the hope that if it were ignored, the agitation might die
away instead of developing into riot and bloodshed.
Now this way of dealing with a law-breaker and political agitator is
totally foreign to Mr. Roosevelt; even his critics admit that he both
talks and fights in the open. In two speeches in Khartum, one at a
dinner given in his honor by British military and civil officers, and
one at a reception arranged by native Egyptian military men and
officials, he pointed out in vigorous language the dangers of
religious fanaticism and the kind of "Nationalism" that condones
assassination. Newspaper organs of the Nationalists attacked him for
these speeches when he arrived in Cairo. This made him all the more
determined to say the same things in Cairo when the proper opportunity
came, especially as officials, both military and civil, of high rank
and responsibility, had persistently urged him to do what he properly
could to arouse the attention of the British Government to the
Egyptian situation. The opportunity came in an invitation to address
the University of Cairo. His speech was carefully thought out and was
written with equal care; some of his friends, both Egyptian, and
English, whom he consulted, were in the uncertain frame of mind of
hoping that he would mention the assassination of Boutros, but
wondering whether he really ought to do so. Mr. Roosevelt spoke with
all his characteristic effectiveness of enunciation and gesture. He
was listened to with earnest attention and vigorous applause by a
representative audience of Egyptians and Europeans, of Moslems and
Christians. The address was delivered on the morning of March 28th; in
the afternoon the comment everywhere was, "Why haven't these things
been said in public before?" Of course the criticisms of the extreme
Nationalists were very bitter. Their newspapers, printed in Arabic,
devoted whole pages to denunciations of the speech. They protested to
the university authorities against the presentation of the honorary
degree which was conferred upon Mr. Roosevelt; they called him "a
traitor to the principles of George Washington," and "an advocate of
despotism"; an orator at a Nationalist mass meeting explained that Mr.
Roosevelt's "opposition to political liberty" was due to his Dutch
origin, "for the Dutch, as every one knows, have treated their
colonies more cruelly than any other civilized nation"; one paper
announced that the United States Senate had recorded its disapproval
of the speech by taking away Mr. Roosevelt's pension of five thousand
dollars, in amusing ignorance of the fact that Mr. Roosevelt never had
any pension of any kind whatsoever. On the other hand, government
officers of authority united with private citizens of distinction
(including missionaries, native Christians, and many progressive
Moslems) in expressing, personally and by letter, approval of the
speech as one that would have a wide influence in Egypt in supporting
the efforts of those who are working for the development of a stable,
just, and enlightened form of government. In connection with the more
widely-known Guildhall address on the same subject it unquestionably
has such an influence.
Between the delivery of the Cairo speech and that of the next fixed
address, the lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23d, there were
a number of extemporaneous and occasional addresses of which no
permanent record has been, or can be made. Some of these were
responses to speeches of welcome made by municipal officials on
railway platforms, or were replies to toasts at luncheons and dinners.
In Rome, Mayor Nathan gave a dinner in his honor in the Campidoglio,
or City Hall, which was attended by a group of about fifty men
prominent in Italian official or private life. On this occasion the
Mayor read an address of welcome in French, to which Mr. Roosevelt
made a reply touching upon the history of Italy and some of the
social problems with which the Italian people have to deal in common
with the other civilized nations of the earth. He began his reply in
French, but soon broke off, and continued in English, asking the Mayor
to translate it, sentence by sentence, into Italian for the assembled
guests, most of whom did not speak English. Both the speech itself and
the personality of the speaker made a marked impression upon his
hearers; and after his retirement from the hall in which the dinner
was held, what he said furnished almost the sole subject of animated
conversation, until the party separated. In Budapest, under the dome
of the beautiful House of Parliament, Count Apponyi, one of the great
political leaders of modern Hungary, on behalf of the Hungarian
delegates to the Inter-Parliamentary Union presented to Mr. Roosevelt
an illuminated address in which was recorded the latter's achievements
in behalf of human rights, human liberty, and international justice.
Mr. Roosevelt in his reply showed an intimate familiarity with the
Hungarian history such as, Count Apponyi afterwards said, he had never
met in any other public man outside of Hungary. Although entirely
extemporaneous, this reply may be taken as a fair exemplification of
the spirit of all his speeches during his foreign journey. Briefly, in
referring to some allusions in Count Apponyi's speech to the great
leaders of liberty in the United States and in Hungary, he asserted
that the principles for which he had endeavored to struggle during his
political career were principles older than those of George Washington
or Abraham Lincoln; older, indeed, than the principles of Kossuth, the
great Hungarian leader; they were the principles enunciated in the
Decalogue and the Golden Rule. One of the significant things about
these sermons by Mr. Roosevelt--I call them sermons because he
frequently himself uses the phrase, "I preach"--is that nobody spoke,
or apparently thought the word cant in connection with them. They were
accepted as the genuine and spontaneous expression of a man who
believes that the highest moral principles are quite compatible with
all the best social joys of life, and with dealing knockout blows when
it is necessary to fight in order to redress wrongs or to maintain
justice.
The people of Paris are perhaps as quick to detect and to laugh at
cant or moral platitudes as anybody of the modern world. And yet the
Sorbonne lecture, delivered by invitation of the officials of the
University of Paris, on April 23d, saturated as it was with moral
ideas and moral exhortation, was a complete success. The occasion
furnished an illustration of the power of moral ideas to interest and
to inspire. The streets surrounding the hall were filled with an
enormous crowd long before the hour announced for the opening of the
doors; and even ticket-holders had great difficulty in gaining
admission. The spacious amphitheatre of the Sorbonne was filled with a
representative audience, numbering probably three thousand people.
Around the hall, were statues of the great masters of French
intellectual life--Pascal, Descartes, Lavoisier, and others. On the
wall was one of the Puvis de Chavannes's most beautiful mural
paintings. The group of university officials and academicians on the
dais, from which Mr. Roosevelt spoke, lent to the occasion an
appropriate university atmosphere. The simple but perfect arrangement
of the French and American flags back of the speaker suggested its
international character.
The speech was an appeal for moral rather than for intellectual or
material greatness. It was received with marked interest and approval;
the passage ending with a reference to "cold and timid souls who know
neither victory nor defeat," was delivered with real eloquence, and
aroused a long-continued storm of applause. With characteristic
courage, Mr. Roosevelt attacked race suicide when speaking to a race
whose population is diminishing, and was loudly applauded.
Occasionally with quizzical humor he interjected an extemporaneous
sentence in French, to the great satisfaction of his audience. A
passage of peculiar interest was the statement of his creed regarding
the relation of property-rights to human rights; it was not in his
original manuscript but was written on the morning of the lecture as
the result of a discussion of the subject of vested interests with one
or two distinguished French publicists. He first pronounced this
passage in English, and then repeated it in French, enforced by
gestures which so clearly indicated his desire to have his hearers
unmistakably understand him in spite of defective pronunciation of a
foreign tongue that the manifest approval of the audience was
expressed in a curious mingling of sympathetic laughter and prolonged
and serious applause.
A fortnight after the Sorbonne address, I received from a friend, an
American military officer living in Paris who knows well its general
habit of mind, a letter from which I venture to quote here, because it
so strikingly portrays the influence that Mr. Roosevelt exerted as an
orator during his European journey:
I find that Paris is still everywhere talking of Mr. Roosevelt. It
was a thing almost without precedent that this _blasé_ city kept
up its interest in him without abatement for eight days; but that
a week after his departure should still find him the main topic of
conversation is a fact which has undoubtedly entered into Paris
history. The _Temps_ [one of the foremost daily newspapers of
Paris] has had fifty-seven thousand copies of his Sorbonne
address printed and distributed free to every schoolteacher in
France and to many other persons. The Socialist or revolutionary
groups and press had made preparations for a monster demonstration
on May first. Walls were placarded with incendiary appeals and
their press was full of calls to arms. Monsieur Briand [the Prime
Minister] flatly refused to allow the demonstration, and gave
orders accordingly to Monsieur Lépine [the Chief of Police]. For
the first time since present influences have governed France,
certainly in fifteen years, the police and the troops were
authorized to _use their arms in self-defence_. The result of this
firmness was that the leaders countermanded the demonstration, and
there can be no doubt that many lives were saved and a new point
gained in the possibility of governing Paris as a free city, yet
one where order must be preserved, votes or no votes. Now this
stiff attitude of M. Briand and the Conseil is freely attributed
in intelligent quarters to Mr. Roosevelt. French people say it is
a repercussion of his visit, of his Sorbonne lecture, and that
going away he left in the minds of these people some of that
intangible spirit of his--in other words, they felt what he would
have felt in a similar emergency, and for the first time in their
lives showed a disregard of voters when they were bent upon
mischief. It is rather an extraordinary verdict, but it has seized
the Parisian imagination, and I, for one, believe it is correct.
Some of the English newspapers, while generally approving of the
Sorbonne address, expressed the feeling that it contained some
platitudes. Of course it did; for the laws of social and moral health,
like the laws of hygiene, are platitudes. It was interesting to have a
French engineer and mathematician of distinguished achievements, who
discussed with me the character and effect of the Sorbonne address,
rather hotly denounce those who affected to regard Mr. Roosevelt's
restatement of obvious, but too often forgotten truth, as
platitudinous. "The finest and most beautiful things in life," said
this scientist, "the most abstruse scientific discoveries, are based
upon platitudes. It is a platitude to say that the whole is greater
than a part, or that the shortest distance between two points is a
straight line, and yet it is upon such platitudes that astronomy, by
aid of which we have penetrated some of the far-off mysteries of the
universe, is based. The greatest cathedrals are built of single blocks
of stone, and a single block of stone is a platitude. Tear the
architectural structure to pieces, and you have nothing left but the
single, common, platitudinous brick; but for that reason do you say
that your architectural structure is platitudinous? The effect of Mr.
Roosevelt's career and personality, which rest upon the secure
foundation of simple and obvious truths, is like that of a fine
architectural structure, and if a man can see only the single bricks
or stones of which it is composed, so much the worse for him."
Of the addresses included in this volume the next in chronological
order was that on "International Peace," officially delivered before
the Nobel Prize Committee, but actually a public oration spoken in the
National Theatre of Christiania, before an audience of two or three
thousand people. The Norwegians did everything to make the occasion a
notable one. The streets were almost impassable from the crowds of
people who assembled about the theatre, but who were unable to gain
admission. An excellent orchestra played an overture, especially
composed for the occasion by a distinguished Norwegian composer, in
which themes from the _Star-Spangled Banner_ and from Norwegian
national airs and folk-songs were ingeniously intertwined. The day was
observed as a holiday in Christiania, and the entire city was
decorated with evergreens and flags. On the evening of the same day,
the Nobel Prize Committee gave a dinner in honor of Mr. Roosevelt
which was attended by two or three hundred guests,--both men and
women. General Bratlie, at one time Norwegian Minister of War, made an
address of welcome, reviewing with appreciation Mr. Roosevelt's
qualities both as a man of war and as a man of peace. The address in
this volume, entitled, "Colonial Policy of the United States" was Mr.
Roosevelt's reply to General Bratlie's personal tribute. It was wholly
extemporaneous, but was taken down stenographically; and it adds to
its interest to note the fact that on the evening of its delivery it
was the first public utterance on any question of American politics
which Mr. Roosevelt had made since he left America a year previous.
The Nobel Prize speech and this address taken together form a pretty
complete exposition of what may perhaps be called, for want of a
better term, Mr. Roosevelt's "peace with action" doctrine.
"The World Movement," the address at the University of Berlin, was the
first of two distinctively academic, or scholastic utterances, the
other, of course, being the Romanes lecture. The Sorbonne speech was
almost purely sociological and ethical. There are, to be sure, social
and moral applications made of the theories laid down at Berlin and at
Oxford; but these two university addresses are distinctly for a
university audience. My own judgment is that the Sorbonne and
Guildhall addresses were more effective in their human interest and
their immediate political influence. But at both Berlin and Oxford,
Mr. Roosevelt showed that he could deal with scholarly subjects in a
scholarly fashion. It may be that he desired on these two occasions to
give some indication that, although universally regarded as a man of
action, he is entitled also to be considered as a man of thought. The
lecture at the University of Berlin was a brilliant and picturesque
academic celebration in which doctors' gowns, military uniforms, and
the somewhat bizarre dress of the representatives of the undergraduate
student corps, mingled in kaleidoscopic effect. One interesting
feature of the ceremony was the singing by a finely trained student
chorus without instrumental accompaniment, of _Hail Columbia_ and _The
Star-Spangled Banner_, harmonized as only the Germans can harmonize
choral music. The Emperor and the Empress, with several members of the
Imperial family, attended the lecture. Those who sat near the Emperor
could see that he followed the address with genuine interest, nodding
his head, or smiling now and then with approval at some incisively
expressed idea, or some phrase of interjected humor, or a
characteristic gesture on the part of the speaker. In one respect the
lecture was a _tour de force_. On account of a sharp attack of
bronchitis, from which he was then recovering, it was not decided by
the physicians in charge until the morning of the lecture that Mr.
Roosevelt could use his voice for one hour in safety. Arrangements had
been made to have some one else read the lecture if at the last moment
it should be necessary; and the fact that Mr. Roosevelt was able to
do it himself effectively under these circumstances indicates that he
has some of the physical as well as the intellectual attributes of the
practised orator.
Mr. Roosevelt's first public speech in England was made at the
University of Cambridge on May 26th when he received the honorary
degree of LL.D. His address on this occasion was not, like the Romanes
lecture at Oxford, a part of the academic ceremony connected with the
conferring of the honorary degree. It was spoken to an audience of
undergraduates when, after the academic exercises in the Senate House,
he was elected to honorary membership in the Union Society, the
well-known Cambridge debating club which has trained some of the best
public speakers of England. At Oxford the doctors and dignitaries
cracked the jokes--in Latin--while the undergraduates were highly
decorous. At Cambridge, on the other hand, the students indulged in
the traditional pranks which often lend a color of gaiety to
University ceremonies at both Oxford and Cambridge. Mr. Roosevelt
entered heartily into the spirit of the undergraduates, and it was
evident that they, quite as heartily, liked his understanding of the
fact that the best university and college life consists in a judicious
mixture of the grave and the gay. The honor which these undergraduates
paid to their guest was seriously intended, was admirably planned,
and its genuineness was all the more apparent because it had a note of
pleasantry. Mr. Roosevelt spoke as a university student to university
students and what he said, although brief, extemporaneous, and even
unpremeditated, deserves to be included with his more important
addresses, because it affords an excellent example of his
characteristic habit of making an occasion of social gaiety also an
occasion of expressing his belief in the fundamental moral principles
of social and political life. The speech was frequently interrupted by
the laughter and applause of the audience, and the theory which Mr.
Roosevelt propounded, that any man in any walk of life may achieve
genuine success simply by developing ordinary qualities to a more than
ordinary degree, was widely quoted and discussed by the press of Great
Britain.
Next in chronological order comes the Guildhall speech. In the
picturesqueness of its setting, in the occasion which gave rise to it,
in the extraordinary effect it had upon public opinion in Great
Britain, the continent of Europe, and America, and in the courage
which it evinced on the part of the speaker, it is in my judgment the
most striking of all Mr. Roosevelt's foreign addresses.
The occasion was a brilliant and notable one. The ancient and splendid
Guildhall--one of the most perfect Gothic interiors in England, which
has historical associations of more than five centuries--was filled
with a representative gathering of English men and women. On the dais,
or stage, at one end of the hall, sat the Lord Mayor and the Lady
Mayoress, and the special guests of the occasion were conducted by
ushers, in robes and carrying maces, down a long aisle flanked with
spectators on either side and up the steps of the dais, where they
were presented. Their names were called out at the beginning of the
aisle, and as the ushers and the guest moved along, the audience
applauded, little or much, according to the popularity of the
newcomer. Thus John Burns and Mr. Balfour were greeted with
enthusiastic hand-clapping and cheers, although they belong, of
course, to opposite parties. The Bishop of London, Lord Cromer, the
maker of modern Egypt, Sargent, the painter, and Sir Edward Grey, the
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, were among those greeted in
this way. In the front row on one side of the dais were seated the
aldermen of the city in their red robes, and various officials in wigs
and gowns lent to the scene a curiously antique aspect to the American
eye. Happily, the City of London has carefully preserved the
historical traditions connected with it and with the Guilds, or groups
of merchants, which in the past had so much to do with the management
of its affairs. Among the invited guests, for example, were the
Master of the Mercers' Company, the Master of the Grocers' Company,
the Master of the Drapers' Company, the Master of the Skinners'
Company, the Master of the Haberdashers' Company, the Master of the
Salters' Company, the Master of the Ironmongers' Company, the Master
of the Vintners' Company, and the Master of the Clothworkers' Company.
These various trades, of course, are no longer carried on by Guilds,
but by private firms or corporations, and yet the Guild organization
is still maintained as a sort of social or semi-social recognition of
the days when the Guildhall was not merely a great assembly-room, but
the place in which the Guilds actually managed the affairs of their
city. It was in such a place and amid such surroundings that Mr.
Roosevelt was formally nominated and elected a Freeman of the ancient
City of London.
Mr. Roosevelt's speech was far from being extemporaneous; it had been
carefully thought out beforehand, and was based upon his experiences
during the previous March, in Egypt; it was really the desire of
influential Englishmen in Africa to have him say something about
Egyptian affairs that led him to make a speech at all. He had had
ample time to think, and he had thought a good deal, yet it was
plainly to be seen that the frankness of his utterance, his
characteristic attitude and gestures, and the pungent quality of his
oratory at first startled his audience, accustomed to more
conventional methods of public speaking. But he soon captured and
carried his hearers with him, as is indicated by the exclamations of
approval on the part of the audience which were incorporated in the
verbatim report of the speech in the London _Times_. It is no
exaggeration to say that his speech became the talk of England--in
clubs, in private homes, and in the newspapers. Of course there was
some criticism, but, on the whole, it was received with commendation.
The extreme wing of the Liberal party, whom we should call
Anti-Imperialists, but who are in Great Britain colloquially spoken of
as "Little Englanders," took exception to it, but even their
disapproval, save in a few instances of bitter personal attack, was
mild. The London _Chronicle_, which is perhaps the most influential of
the morning newspapers representing the Anti-Imperialist view, was of
the opinion that the speech was hardly necessary, because it asserted
that the Government and the British nation have long been of Mr.
Roosevelt's own opinion. The _Westminster Gazette_, the leading
evening Liberal paper, also asserted that "none of the broad
considerations advanced by Mr. Roosevelt have been absent from the
minds of Ministers, and of Sir Edward Grey in particular. We regret
that Mr. Roosevelt should have thought it necessary to speak out
yesterday, not on the narrow ground of etiquette or precedent, but
because we cannot bring ourselves to believe that his words are
calculated to make it any easier to deal with an exceedingly difficult
problem."
The views of these two newspapers fairly express the rather mild
opposition excited by the speech among those who regard British
control in Egypt as a question of partisan politics. On the other
hand, the best and most influential public opinion, while recognizing
the unconventionality of Mr. Roosevelt's course, heartily approved of
both the matter and the manner of the speech. The London _Times_ said:
"Mr. Roosevelt has reminded us in the most friendly way of what we are
at least in danger of forgetting, and no impatience of outside
criticism ought to be allowed to divert us from considering the
substantial truth of his words. His own conduct of great affairs and
the salutary influence of his policy upon American public life ... at
least give him a right, which all international critics do not
possess, to utter a useful, even if not wholly palatable, warning."
The _Daily Telegraph_, after referring to Mr. Roosevelt as "a
practical statesman who combines with all his serious force a famous
sense of humor," expressed the opinion that his "candor is a tonic,
which not only makes plain our immediate duty but helps us to do it.
In Egypt, as in India, there is no doubt as to the alternative he has
stated so vigorously: we must govern or go; and we have no intention
of going." The _Pall Mall Gazette's_ opinion was that Mr. Roosevelt
"delivered a great and memorable speech--a speech that will be read
and pondered over throughout the world."
The London _Spectator_, which is one of the ablest and most thoughtful
journals published in the English language, and which reflects the
most intelligent, broad-minded, and influential public opinion in the
British Empire, devoted a large amount of space to a consideration of
the speech. The _Spectator's_ position in English journalism is such
that I make no apology for a somewhat long quotation from its comment:
Perhaps the chief event of the week has been Mr. Roosevelt's
speech at the Guildhall. Timid, fussy, and pedantic people have
charged Mr. Roosevelt with all sorts of crimes because he had the
courage to speak out, and have even accused him of unfriendliness
to this country because of his criticisms. Happily the British
people as a whole are not so foolish. Instinctively they have
recognized and thoroughly appreciated the good feeling of Mr.
Roosevelt's speech. Only true friends speak as he spoke.... The
barrel-organs, of course, grind out the old tune about Mr.
Roosevelt's tactlessness. In reality he is a very tactful as well
as a very shrewd man. It is surely the height of tactfulness to
recognize that the British people are sane enough and sincere
enough to like being told the truth. His speech is one of the
greatest compliments ever paid to a people by a statesman of
another country.... Mr. Roosevelt has made exactly the kind of
speech we expected him to make--a speech strong, clear, fearless.
He has told us something useful and practical, and has not lost
himself in abstractions and platitudes.... The business of a
trustee is not to do what the subject of the trust likes or thinks
he likes, but to do, however much he may grumble, what is in his
truest and best interests. Unless a trustee is willing to do that,
and does not trouble about abuse, ingratitude, and accusations of
selfishness, he had better give up his trust altogether.... We
thank Mr. Roosevelt once again for giving us so useful a reminder
of our duty in this respect.
These notes of approval were repeated in a great number of letters
which Mr. Roosevelt received from men and women in all walks of life,
men in distinguished official position and "men in the street." There
were some abusive letters, chiefly anonymous, but the general tone of
this correspondence is fairly illustrated by the following:
Allow me, an old colonist in his eighty-fourth year, to thank you
most heartily for your manly address at the Guildhall and for your
life-work in the cause of humanity. If I ever come to the great
Republic, I shall do myself the honor of seeking an audience of
your Excellency. I may do so on my one hundredth birthday! With
best wishes and profound respect.
The envelope of this letter was addressed to "His Excellency
'Govern-or-go' Roosevelt." That the _Daily Telegraph_ and that the
"man in the street" should independently seize upon this salient point
of the address--the "govern-or-go" theory--is significant.
American readers are sufficiently familiar with Mr. Roosevelt's
principles regarding protectorate or colonial government; any
elaborate explanation or exposition of his views is unnecessary. But
it may be well to repeat that he has over and over again said that all
subject peoples, whether in colonies, protectorates, or insular
possessions like the Philippines and Porto Rico, should be governed
for their own benefit and development and should never be exploited
for the mere profit of the controlling powers. It may be well, too, to
add Mr. Roosevelt's own explanation of his criticism of
sentimentality. "Weakness, timidity, and sentimentality," he said in
the Guildhall address, "many cause even more far-reaching harm than
violence and injustice. Of all broken reeds sentimentality is the most
broken reed on which righteousness can lean." Referring to these
phrases, a correspondent a day or two after the speech asked
if the word "sentiment" might not be substituted for the word
"sentimentality." Mr. Roosevelt wrote the following letter in reply:
DEAR SIR: I regard sentiment as the exact antithesis of
sentimentality, and to substitute "sentiment" for "sentimentality"
in my speech would directly invert its meaning. I abhor
sentimentality, and, on the other hand, I think no man is worth
his salt who is not profoundly influenced by sentiment, and who
does not shape his life in accordance with a high ideal.
Faithfully yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
The Romanes lecture at Oxford University was the last of Mr.
Roosevelt's transatlantic speeches. I can think of no greater
intellectual honor that an English-speaking man can receive than to
have conferred upon him by the queen of all universities, the highest
honorary degree in her power to give, and in addition, to be invited
to address the dignitaries and dons and doctors of that university as
a scholar speaking to scholars. There is no American university man
who may not feel entirely satisfied with the way in which the American
university graduate stood the Oxford test on that occasion. He took in
good part the jokes and pleasantries pronounced in Latin by the
Chancellor, Lord Curzon; but after the ceremonies of initiation were
finished, after the beadles had, in response to the order of the
Chancellor, conducted "_Doctorem Honorabilem ad Pulpitum_," and after
the Chancellor had, this time in very direct and beautiful English,
welcomed him to membership in the University, he delivered an address,
the serious scholarship of which held the attention of those who heard
it and arrested the attention of many thousands of others who received
the lecture through the printed page.
The foregoing review of the chief public addresses which Mr. Roosevelt
made during his foreign journey, I think justifies the assertion that,
for variety of subject, variety of occasion, and variety of the fields
of thought and action upon which his speeches had a direct and
manifest influence, he is entitled to be regarded as a public orator
of remarkable distinction and power.
By way of explanation it may perhaps be permissible to add that I met
Mr. Roosevelt in Khartum on March 14, 1910, and travelled with him
through the Sudan, Egypt, the continent of Europe and England, to New
York; I heard all his important speeches, and most of the occasional
addresses; much of the voluminous correspondence which the speeches
gave rise to passed through my hands; and I talked with many men, both
in public and private life, in the various countries through which
the journey was taken about the addresses themselves and their effect
upon world-politics. If there is a failure in these pages to give an
intelligent or an adequate impression of the oratorial features of Mr.
Roosevelt's African and European journey, it is not because there was
any lack of opportunity to observe or learn the facts.
LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT.
* * * * *
PEACE AND JUSTICE IN THE SUDAN
An Address at the American Mission[2] in Khartum, March 16, 1910
[2] The American Mission at Khartum is under the auspices of the
United Presbyterian Church of America. The Rev. Dr. John Giffen
introduced Mr. Roosevelt to the assembly.--L.F.A.
I have long wished to visit the Sudan. I doubt whether in any other
region of the earth there is to be seen a more striking instance of
the progress, the genuine progress, made by the substitution of
civilization for savagery than what we have seen in the Sudan for the
past twelve years. I feel that you here owe a peculiar duty to the
Government under which you live--a peculiar duty in the direction of
doing your full worth to make the present conditions perpetual. It is
incumbent on every decent citizen of the Sudan to uphold the present
order of things; to see that there is no relapse; to see that the
reign of peace and justice continues. But you here have that duty
resting upon you to a peculiar degree, and your best efforts must be
given in all honor, and as a matter, not merely of obligation, but as
a matter of pride on your part, towards the perpetuation of the
condition of things that has made this progress possible, of the
Government as it now stands--as you represent it, Slatin Pasha.[3]
[3] One of the most distinguished officers of the Anglo-Egyptian
Army whose well-known book, _Fire and Sword in the Sudan_, gives a
graphic picture of the conditions England has had to deal with in
the Sudan.--L.F.A.
I am exceedingly pleased to see here officers of the army, and you
have, of course, your oath. You are bound by every tie of loyalty,
military and civil, to work to the end I have named. But, after all,
you are not bound any more than are you, you civilians. And, another
thing, do not think for a moment that when I say that you are bound to
uphold the Government I mean that you are bound to try to get an
office under it. On the contrary, I trust, Dr. Giffen, that the work
done here by you, done by the different educational institutions with
which you are connected or with which you are affiliated, will always
be done, bearing in mind the fact that the most useful citizen to the
Government may be a man who under no consideration would hold any
position connected with the Government. I do not want to see any
missionary college carry on its educational scheme primarily with a
view of turning out Government officials. On the contrary, I want to
see the average graduate prepared to do his work in some capacity in
civil life, without any regard to any aid whatever received from or
any salary drawn from the Government. If a man is a good engineer, a
good mechanic, a good agriculturist, if he is trained so that he
becomes a really good merchant, he is, in his place, the best type of
citizen. It is a misfortune in any country, American, European, or
African, to have the idea grow that the average educated man must find
his career only in the Government service. I hope to see good and
valuable servants of the Government in the military branch and in the
civil branch turned out by this and similar educational institutions;
but, if the conditions are healthy, those Government servants, civil
or military, will never be more than a small fraction of the
graduates, and the prime end and prime object of an educational
institution should be to turn out men who will be able to shift for
themselves, to help themselves, and to help others, fully independent
of all matters connected with the Government. I feel very strongly on
this subject, and I feel it just as strongly in America as I do here.
Another thing, gentlemen, and now I want to speak to you for a moment
from the religious standpoint, to speak to you in connection with the
work of this mission. I wish I could make every member of a Christian
church feel that just in so far as he spends his time in quarrelling
with other Christians of other churches he is helping to discredit
Christianity in the eyes of the world. Avoid as you would the plague
those who seek to embroil you in conflict, one Christian sect with
another. Not only does what I am about to say apply to the behavior of
Christians towards one another, but of all Christians towards their
non-Christian brethren, towards their fellow-citizens of another
creed. You can do most for the colleges from which you come, you can
do most for the creed which you profess, by doing your work in the
position to which you have been called in a way that brings the
respect of your fellow-men to you, and therefore to those for whom you
stand. Let it be a matter of pride with the Christian in the army
that in the time of danger no man is nearer that danger than he is.
Let it be a matter of pride to the officer whose duty it is to fight
that no man, when the country calls on him to fight, fights better
than he does. That is how you can do more for Christianity, for the
name of Christians, you who are in the army. Let the man in a civil
governmental position so bear himself that it shall be acceptable as
axiomatic that when you have a Christian, a graduate of a missionary
school, in a public office, the efficiency and honesty of that office
are guaranteed. That is the kind of Christianity that counts in a
public official, that counts in the military official--the
Christianity that makes him do his duty in war, or makes him do his
duty in peace. And you--who I hope will be the great majority--who are
not in Government service, can conduct yourselves so that your
neighbors shall have every respect for your courage, your honesty,
your good faith, shall have implicit trust that you will deal
religiously with your brother as man to man, whether it be in business
or whether it be in connection with your relations to the community as
a whole. The kind of graduate of a Christian school really worth
calling a Christian is the man who shows his creed practically by the
way he behaves towards his wife and towards his children, towards his
neighbor, towards those with whom he deals in the business world, and
towards the city and Government. In no way can he do as much for the
institution that trains him, in no way can he do as much to bring
respect and regard to the creed that he professes. And, remember, you
need more than one quality. I have spoken of courage; it is, of
course, the first virtue of the soldier, but every one of you who is
worth his salt must have it in him too. Do not forget that the good
man who is afraid is only a handicap to his fellows who are striving
for what is best. I want to see each Christian cultivate the manly
virtues; each to be able to hold his own in the country, but in a
broil not thrusting himself forward. Avoid quarrelling wherever you
can. Make it evident that the other man wants to avoid quarrelling
with you too.
One closing word. Do not make the mistake, those of you who are young
men, of thinking that when you get out of school or college your
education stops. On the contrary, it is only about half begun. Now, I
am fifty years old, and if I had stopped learning, if I felt now that
I had stopped learning, had stopped trying to better myself, I feel
that my usefulness to the community would be pretty nearly at an end.
And I want each of you, as he leaves college, not to feel, "Now I have
had my education, I can afford to vegetate." I want you to feel, "I
have been given a great opportunity of laying deep the foundations for
a ripe education, and while going on with my work I am going to keep
training myself, educating myself, so that year by year, decade by
decade, instead of standing still I shall go forward, and grow
constantly fitter, and do good work and better work."
I visited, many years ago, the college at Beirut. I have known at
first hand what excellent work was being done there. Unfortunately,
owing to my very limited time, it is not going to be possible for me
to stop at the college at Assiut, which has done such admirable work
in Egypt and here in the Sudan, whose graduates I meet in all kinds of
occupations wherever I stop. I am proud, as an American, Dr. Giffen,
of what has been done by men like you, like Mr. Young, like the other
Americans who have been here, and, I want to say still further, by the
women who have come with them. I always thought that the American was
a pretty good fellow. I think his wife is still better, and, great
though my respect for the man from America has been, my respect for
the woman has been greater.
I stopped a few days ago at the little mission at the Sobat. One of
the things that struck me there was what was being accomplished by the
medical side of that mission. From one hundred and twenty-five miles
around there were patients who had come in to be attended to by the
doctors in the mission. There were about thirty patients who were
under the charge of the surgeon, the doctor, at that mission. I do not
know a better type of missionary than the doctor who comes out here
and does his work well and gives his whole heart to it. He is doing
practical work of the most valuable type for civilization, and for
bringing the people of the country up to a realization of the
standards that you are trying to set. If you make it evident to a man
that you are sincerely concerned in bettering his body, he will be
much more ready to believe that you are trying to better his soul.
Now, gentlemen, it has been a great pleasure to see you. When I get
back to the United States, this meeting is one of the things I shall
have to tell to my people at home, so that I may give them an idea of
what is being done in this country. I wish you well with all my heart,
and I thank you for having received me to-day.
* * * * *
LAW AND ORDER IN EGYPT
An Address before the National University in Cairo, March 28, 1910
It is to me a peculiar pleasure to speak to-day under such
distinguished auspices as yours, Prince Fouad,[4] before this National
University, and it is of good augury for the great cause of higher
education in Egypt that it should have enlisted the special interest
of so distinguished and eminent a man. The Arabic-speaking world
produced the great University of Cordova, which flourished a thousand
years ago, and was a source of light and learning when the rest of
Europe was either in twilight or darkness; in the centuries following
the creation of that Spanish Moslem university, Arabic men of science,
travellers, and geographers--such as the noteworthy African traveller
Ibn Batutu, a copy of whose book, by the way, I saw yesterday in the
library of the Alhazar[5]--were teachers whose works are still to be
eagerly studied; and I trust that here we shall see the revival, and
more than the revival, of the conditions that made possible such
contributions to the growth of civilization.
[4] Prince Fouad is the uncle of the Khedive, a Mohammedan
gentleman of education and enlightened views.--L.F.A.
[5] The great Moslem University of Cairo, in which 9000 students
study chiefly the Koran in mediæval fashion.--L.F.A.
This scheme of a National University is fraught with literally untold
possibilities for good to your country. You have many rocks ahead of
which you must steer clear; and because I am your earnest friend and
well-wisher, I desire to point out one or two of these which it is
necessary especially to avoid. In the first place, there is one point
upon which I always lay stress in my own country, in your country, in
all countries--the need of entire honesty as the only foundation on
which it is safe to build. It is a prime essential that all who are in
any way responsible for the beginnings of the University shall make it
evident to every one that the management of the University, financial
and otherwise, will be conducted with absolute honesty. Very much
money will have to be raised and expended for this University in order
to make it what it can and ought to be made; for, if properly managed,
I firmly believe that it will become one of the greatest influences,
and perhaps the very greatest influence, for good in all that part of
the world where Mohammedanism is the leading religion; that is, in all
those regions of the Orient, including North Africa and Southwestern
Asia, which stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the farther confines of
India and to the hither provinces of China. This University should
have a profound influence in all things educational, social, economic,
industrial, throughout this whole region, because of the very fact of
Egypt's immense strategic importance, so to speak, in the world of the
Orient; an importance due partly to her geographical position, partly
to other causes. Moreover, it is most fortunate that Egypt's present
position is such that this University will enjoy a freedom hitherto
unparalleled in the investigation and testing out of all problems
vital to the future of the peoples of the Orient.
Nor will the importance of this University be confined to the Orient.
Egypt must necessarily from now on always occupy a similar strategic
position as regards the peoples of the Occident, for she sits on one
of the highways of the commerce that will flow in ever-increasing
volume from Europe to the East. Those responsible for the management
of this University should set before themselves a very high ideal. Not
merely should it stand for the uplifting of all Mohammedan peoples and
of all Christians and peoples of other religions who live in
Mohammedan lands, but it should also carry its teaching and practice
to such perfection as in the end to make it a factor in instructing
the Occident. When a scholar is sufficiently apt, sufficiently sincere
and intelligent, he always has before him the opportunity of
eventually himself giving aid to the teachers from whom he has
received aid.
Now, to make a good beginning towards the definite achievement of
these high ends, it is essential that you should command respect and
should be absolutely trusted. Make it felt that you will not tolerate
the least little particle of financial crookedness in the raising or
expenditure of any money, so that those who wish to give money to this
deserving cause may feel entire confidence that their piasters will be
well and honestly applied.
In the next place, show the same good faith, wisdom, and sincerity in
your educational plans that you do in the financial management of the
institution. Avoid sham and hollow pretence just as you avoid
religious, racial, or political bigotry. You have much to learn from
the universities of Europe and of my own land, but there is also in
them not a little which it is well to avoid. Copy what is good in
them, but test in a critical spirit whatever you take, so as to be
sure that you take only what is wisest and best for yourselves. More
important even than avoiding any mere educational shortcoming is the
avoidance of moral shortcoming. Students are already being sent to
Europe to prepare themselves to return as professors. Such preparation
is now essential, for it is of prime importance that the University
should be familiar with what is being done in the best universities of
Europe and America. But let the men who are sent be careful to bring
back what is fine and good, what is essential to the highest kind of
modern progress, and let them avoid what are the mere non-essentials
of the present-day civilization, and, above all, the vices of modern
civilized nations. Let these men keep open minds. It would be a
capital blunder to refuse to copy, and thereafter to adapt to your own
needs, what has raised the Occident in the scale of power and justice
and clean living. But it would be a no less capital blunder to copy
what is cheap or trivial or vicious, or even what is merely
wrongheaded. Let the men who go to Europe feel that they have much to
learn and much also to avoid and reject; let them bring back the good
and leave behind the discarded evil.
Remember that character is far more important than intellect, and that
a really great university should strive to develop the qualities that
go to make up character even more than the qualities that go to make
up a highly trained mind. No man can reach the front rank if he is not
intelligent and if he is not trained with intelligence; but mere
intelligence by itself is worse than useless unless it is guided
by an upright heart, unless there are also strength and courage
behind it. Morality, decency, clean living, courage, manliness,
self-respect--these qualities are more important in the make-up of a
people than any mental subtlety. Shape this University's course so
that it shall help in the production of a constantly upward trend for
all your people.
You should be always on your guard against one defect in Western
education. There has been altogether too great a tendency in the
higher schools of learning in the West to train men merely for
literary, professional, and official positions; altogether too great a
tendency to act as if a literary education were the only real
education. I am exceedingly glad that you have already started
industrial and agricultural schools in Egypt. A literary education is
simply one of many different kinds of education, and it is not wise
that more than a small percentage of the people of any country should
have an exclusively literary education. The average man must either
supplement it by another education, or else as soon as he has left an
institution of learning, even though he has benefited by it, he must
at once begin to train himself to do work along totally different
lines. His Highness the Khedive, in the midst of his activities
touching many phases of Egyptian life, has shown conspicuous wisdom,
great foresight, and keen understanding of the needs of the country in
the way in which he has devoted himself to its agricultural
betterment, in the interest which he has taken in the improvement of
cattle, crops, etc. You need in this country, as is the case in every
other country, a certain number of men whose education shall fit them
for the life of scholarship, or to become teachers or public
officials. But it is a very unhealthy thing for any country for more
than a small proportion of the strongest and best minds of the country
to turn into such channels. It is essential also to develop
industrialism, to train people so that they can be cultivators of the
soil in the largest sense on as successful a scale as the most
successful lawyer or public man, to train them so that they shall be
engineers, merchants--in short, men able to take the lead in all the
various functions indispensable in a great modern civilized state. An
honest, courageous, and far-sighted politician is a good thing in any
country. But his usefulness will depend chiefly upon his being able to
express the wishes of a population wherein the politician forms but a
fragment of the leadership, where the business man and the landowner,
the engineer and the man of technical knowledge, the men of a hundred
different pursuits, represent the average type of leadership. No
people has ever permanently amounted to anything if its only public
leaders were clerks, politicians, and lawyers. The base, the
foundation, of healthy life in any country, in any society, is
necessarily composed of the men who do the actual productive work of
the country, whether in tilling the soil, in the handicrafts, or in
business; and it matters little whether they work with hands or head,
although more and more we are growing to realize that it is a good
thing to have the same man work with both head and hands. These men,
in many different careers, do the work which is most important to the
community's life; although, of course, it must be supplemented by the
work of the other men whose education and activities are literary and
scholastic, of the men who work in politics or law, or in literary and
clerical positions.
Never forget that in any country the most important activities are the
activities of the man who works with head or hands in the ordinary
life of the community, whether he be handicraftsman, farmer, or
business man--no matter what his occupation, so long as it is useful
and no matter what his position, from the guiding intelligence at the
top down all the way through, just as long as his work is good. I
preach this to you here by the banks of the Nile, and it is the
identical doctrine I preach no less earnestly by the banks of the
Hudson, the Mississippi, and the Columbia.
Remember always that the securing of a substantial education, whether
by the individual or by a people, is attained only by a process, not
by an act. You can no more make a man really educated by giving him a
certain curriculum of studies than you can make a people fit for
self-government by giving it a paper constitution. The training of an
individual so as to fit him to do good work in the world is a matter
of years; just as the training of a nation to fit it successfully to
fulfil the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or
two, but of generations. There are foolish empiricists who believe
that the granting of a paper constitution, prefaced by some
high-sounding declaration, of itself confers the power of
self-government upon a people. This is never so. Nobody can "give" a
people "self-government," any more than it is possible to "give" an
individual "self-help." You know that the Arab proverb runs, "God
helps those who help themselves." In the long run, the only permanent
way by which an individual can be helped is to help him to help
himself, and this is one of the things your University should
inculcate. But it must be his own slow growth in character that is
the final and determining factor in the problem. So it is with a
people. In the two Americas we have seen certain commonwealths rise
and prosper greatly. We have also seen other commonwealths start under
identically the same conditions, with the same freedom and the same
rights, the same guarantees, and yet have seen them fail miserably and
lamentably, and sink into corruption and anarchy and tyranny, simply
because the people for whom the constitution was made did not develop
the qualities which alone would enable them to take advantage of it.
With any people the essential quality to show is, not haste in
grasping after a power which it is only too easy to misuse, but a
slow, steady, resolute development of those substantial qualities,
such as the love of justice, the love of fair play, the spirit of
self-reliance, of moderation, which alone enable a people to govern
themselves. In this long and even tedious but absolutely essential
process, I believe your University will take an important part. When I
was recently in the Sudan I heard a vernacular proverb, based on a
text in the Koran, which is so apt that, although not an Arabic
scholar, I shall attempt to repeat it in Arabic: "_Allah ma el
saberin, izza sabaru_"--God is with the patient, _if they know how to
wait_.[6]
[6] This bit of Arabic, admirably pronounced by Mr. Roosevelt,
surprised and pleased the audience as much as his acquaintance
with the life and works of Ibn Batutu surprised and pleased the
sheiks at the Moslem University two days before. Both Mr.
Roosevelt's use of the Arabic tongue and his application of the
proverb were greeted with prolonged applause.--L.F.A.
One essential feature of this process must be a spirit which will
condemn every form of lawless evil, every form of envy and hatred,
and, above all, hatred based upon religion or race. All good men, all
the men of every nation whose respect is worth having, have been
inexpressibly shocked by the recent assassination of Boutros Pasha. It
was an even greater calamity for Egypt than it was a wrong to the
individual himself. The type of man which turns out an assassin is a
type possessing all the qualities most alien to good citizenship; the
type which produces poor soldiers in time of war and worse citizens in
time of peace. Such a man stands on a pinnacle of evil infamy; and
those who apologize for or condone his act, those who, by word or
deed, directly or indirectly, encourage such an act in advance, or
defend it afterwards, occupy the same bad eminence. It is of no
consequence whether the assassin be a Moslem or a Christian or a man
of no creed; whether the crime be committed in political strife or
industrial warfare; whether it be an act hired by a rich man or
performed by a poor man; whether it be committed under the pretence of
preserving order or the pretence of obtaining liberty. It is equally
abhorrent in the eyes of all decent men, and, in the long run, equally
damaging to the very cause to which the assassin professes to be
devoted.
Your University is a National University, and as such knows no creed.
This is as it should be. When I speak of equality between Moslem and
Christian, I speak as one who believes that where the Christian is
more powerful he should be scrupulous in doing justice to the Moslem,
exactly as under reverse conditions justice should be done by the
Moslem to the Christian. In my own country we have in the Philippines
Moslems as well as Christians. We do not tolerate for one moment any
oppression by the one or by the other, any discrimination by the
Government between them or failure to mete out the same justice to
each, treating each man on his worth as a man, and behaving towards
him as his conduct demands and deserves.
In short, gentlemen, I earnestly hope that all responsible for the
beginnings of the University, which I trust will become one of the
greatest and most powerful educational influences throughout the whole
world, will feel it incumbent upon themselves to frown on every form
of wrong-doing, whether in the shape of injustice or corruption or
lawlessness, and to stand with firmness, with good sense, and with
courage, for those immutable principles of justice and merciful
dealing as between man and man, without which there can never be the
slightest growth towards a really fine and high civilization.
* * * * *
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
An Address Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the
New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient
institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty
kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and theology;
through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures
that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and
he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship
meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the
dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when
no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to
the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the
remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago,
were among the sparse bands of traders, plowmen, woodchoppers, and
fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the
Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now
become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame
the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the
generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores
of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are still in the
hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the
wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with
which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our race. The
primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which are
incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully
acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward
civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive
culture. At first only the rudest schools can be established, for no
others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust
forward the frontier in the teeth of savage man and savage nature; and
many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats
of higher learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast
stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins
change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude
frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their
lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an
oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for
which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and
supplanters, and then their children and children's children, change
and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate
vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and
all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant,
self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and
blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier
days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more
intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these
themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and
predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many
lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the
spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to
wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new
life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the
life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of
value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift
that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought
can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New
World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the
treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the
ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak
to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it
is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation,
not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt
that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and
productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet
of the Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us,
we can show that, Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a
scholar.
To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship,
the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and
my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great democratic
republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours--an effort to
realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the
people--represents the most gigantic of all possible social
experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for
good and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours
means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you
and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is
supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or
of a very few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If,
under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then
the nation may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add
substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the
quality of the average citizen; because the average citizen is an
almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that
type of national greatness.
But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and
with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be
conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman,
does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of
life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for the
heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our
republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher
than the main source; and the main source of national power and
national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.
Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of
the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high
unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in
any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes
represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those
classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of
devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special
advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental
training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance
for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of
your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you
much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which
it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated
intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should especially
guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially
liable; and if yielded to, their--your--chances of useful service are
at an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that
queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the
cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to
whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face
it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride
in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the
way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no
more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who
either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering
disbelief towards all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement
or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to
achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to
criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an
intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's
realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain
think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to
bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in
the affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide
from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy;
there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike
at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them
better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is
no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive
to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the
end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he
fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall
never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor
defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to
develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work
of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves
there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of
cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less
room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who
actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who
always profess that they would like to take action, if only the
conditions of life were not what they actually are. The man who does
nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether
he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being
whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of
the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who
quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they
succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that
they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and
strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the
many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger,
not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would
have been a soldier."
France has taught many lessons to other nations; surely one of the
most important is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high
artistic and literary development is compatible with notable
leadership in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the
French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during
these same centuries at every court in Europe the "freemasons of
fashion" have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while
every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to
appreciate that marvellous instrument of precision, French prose, has
turned towards France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership
in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact
that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid
French epic which tells of Roland's doom and the vengeance of
Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish host were stricken at
Roncesvalles.
Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a
high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that
these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound
body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above
body stands character--the sum of those qualities which we mean when
we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense of
honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we
keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I
believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But
the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be
really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of
intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack
of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery,
common-sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet
of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution--these
are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no
people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from
the outside. I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great
university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual
development; I pay all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and
specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the
assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are
the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to
work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The
need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to
warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born
that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if
they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of
the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially
non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do
this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom
remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must
earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should
be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does
not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at
whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of
contempt, an object of derision.
In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave
man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve
his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning
philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are
right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness.
War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity.
But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war.
The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this whether
the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The
question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question
must be, Is the right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness
once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile
people must be, "Yes," whatever the cost. Every honorable effort
should always be made to avoid war; just as every honorable effort
should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of
a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual,
no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important
than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of
blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit
the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is
the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of
sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that
visited upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization
is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy
children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is
not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to
increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to
deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is
one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from
pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more
heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free
people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of
wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon
the wilfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to
prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No
refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no
sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and
literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great
fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues, the
greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race. Character must
show itself in the man's performance both of the duty he owes himself
and of the duty he owes the State. The man's foremost duty is owed to
himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money,
by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only
after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher
superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this
has been done that he can help in movements for the general
well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can
his surplus strength be of use to the general public. It is not good
to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt
is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is
such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great
things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in
comfort or educate his children.
Neverthless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely
acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis
of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us
with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents
nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though
indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the
superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize
the mere multi-millionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of
value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own
country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him
of real benefit, of real use,--and such is often the case,--why, then
he does become an asset of worth. But it is the way in which it has
been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles
him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms
of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places
cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good
thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we
must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed
rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the service
having been rendered, then admiration will come only from those who
are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of
tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of
increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to other
things that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to
raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no
falser standard than that set by the deification of material
well-being in and for itself. The man who, for any cause for which he
is himself accountable, has failed to support himself and those for
whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he has fallen lamentably
short in his prime duty. But the man who, having far surpassed the
limit of providing for the wants, both of body and mind, of himself
and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for
the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding
benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that,
so far from being a desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the
community; that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his
right-thinking fellow-countrymen put him low in the scale of
citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those
whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few
words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully
safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human
rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run
identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict
between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property
belongs to man and not man to property.
In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand
that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to
admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged
admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of
them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct
gifts--the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making,
the money touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a
moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a
very great degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other
qualities; and without such control the possessor tends to develop
into one of the least attractive types produced by a modern industrial
democracy. So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a
leader of opinion in a democracy should be able to state his views
clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to
the community is to enable the man thus to explain himself; if it
enables the orator to persuade his hearers to put false values on
things, it merely makes him a power for mischief. Some excellent
public servants have not the gift at all, and must rely upon their
deeds to speak for them; and unless the oratory does represent genuine
conviction, based on good common-sense and able to be translated into
efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the
damage to the public it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked
political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be
carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for
themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to
stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker, however
great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and
right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic,
and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To
admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind
the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force
to the orator's latter-day and more influential brother, the
journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled
neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is
used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and
he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for
the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their
profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit
it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a
private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for
debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander,
sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for
the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced
for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand
must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by
the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.
In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that he ought to
possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the
other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and he
must also have those qualities which direct the efficiency into
channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient.
There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that
can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a
sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in
active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness
from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from the robuster
virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to
hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which
will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard.
The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient
citizen.
But if a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral
sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more
dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful
qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely
for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights
of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships
these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of
whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no
difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is
shown. It makes no difference whether such a man's force and ability
betray themselves in the career of money-maker or politician, soldier
or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil,
then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and
condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by
success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually
so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked
man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last
analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and
that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for
liberty.
The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues
which make the woman a good housewife and house-mother, which make the
man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need,
stand at the bottom of character. But of course many others must be
added thereto if a State is to be not only free but great. Good
citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in the home.
There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the State,
and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist
where the effort is made to carry on free government in a complex,
industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary
citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to
remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire.
The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from
his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions,
is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic,
and still more the mob leader, and the insincere man who to achieve
power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not
merely useless but noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve
them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so
lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and
indeed undesirable to realize. The impracticable visionary is far less
often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the
real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet
does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and
desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty
phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the
ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and
hampers him as he does the work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must
remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut,
how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his
own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for
others. Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be
largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be
realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose
practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds
its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of
high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst
enemy of the body politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his
nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes
the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and
yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more
complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable
to leave to individual initiative can, under the changed conditions,
be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite
impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard and fast
line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one
who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see,
if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest
phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in
little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage
and water supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given
area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are
found to differ not only in degree but in kind from the old; and the
questions of drainage and water supply have to be considered from the
common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to
decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by
practical experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and
individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on
terminology. It is not good to be the slave of names. I am a strong
individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it
is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the
community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things
better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism
which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked
very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in
our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which
triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft
instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in
the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to
turn the tool user more and more into the tool owner, to shift burdens
so that they can be more equitably borne. The deadening effect on any
race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could
not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce
grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, than any existing
system. But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage
adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who
happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be
to make a mark of weakness on our part.
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a
lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal,
nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it
does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable
equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is
due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people,
blood of their blood and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled
and wrought and suffered for them, and at the end died for them, who
always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or
for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of
idealism and sound common-sense. He said (I omit what was of merely
local significance):
I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to
include all men, but that they did not mean to declare all men
equal _in all respects_. They did not mean to say all men were
equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social
capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they
did consider all men created equal--equal in certain inalienable
rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean
to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying
that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it
immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for
free society which should be familiar to all--constantly looked
to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly
attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly
spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the
happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make
us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means
injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege. We
are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far
as is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that
each man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in
him by the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as
possible, be equality of opportunity to render service; but just so
long as there is inequality of service there should and must be
inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter,
the artist, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose
misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill.
But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any
other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of
folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form
it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable,
ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable,
and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try
to level up, but let us beware of the evil of levelling down. If a man
stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us
needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a
waste of time to try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for
every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those
who shirk their work and to those who do it.
Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be
misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for
re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hard-headed
examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal
merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is
proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard
formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If
it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject
it. There are plenty of men calling themselves Socialists with whom,
up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step
is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it,
without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may
differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it
has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least
mean that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is
just as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it
desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go
to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated
by the extremists were wise.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of
pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus
claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in
any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that
country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of
religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his
life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong
his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and
without reference to which side happens at the moment to be the
persecutor and which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the
same way, and without any regard to the individual who, at a given
time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to the nation, or
substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain
social category, for judgment awarded them according to their
conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should
be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any
man because he is poor, and to the envy and hatred which would destroy
a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing brutality of the man of
wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against
wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of
the same quality, merely the two sides of the same shield. The man
who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less
fortunate brethren, is at heart the same as the greedy and violent
demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who
have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man,
whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide
primarily on the line that separates class from class, occupation from
occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of
remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man
on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or poor, without regard to
his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true
democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in
a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what
we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and
the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to
divide along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no
difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether
the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob.
In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for
loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is
no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact
that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship
and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with,
the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and
occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his
position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of
conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide
differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social
belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be
stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine
hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of
belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or
anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a
manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in
the downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a
republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to
support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the
republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or
another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It
makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class
interest, to religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes
such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of
furthering his own interest. The very last thing that an intelligent
and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to
reward any public man because that public man says he will get the
private citizen something to which this private citizen is not
entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this
private citizen ought not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one
anecdote from my own experience. A number of years ago I was engaged
in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western United States.
There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each
being determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand
of the cows they followed. If on the round-up an animal was passed by,
the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was
then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks
were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found.
One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came
upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a little fire,
took out a cinch-ring, heated it at the fire; and the cowboy started
to put on the brand. I said to him, "It is So-and-so's brand," naming
the man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: "That's all
right, boss; I know my business." In another moment I said to him,
"Hold on, you are putting on my brand!" To which he answered, "That's
all right; I always put on the boss's brand." I answered, "Oh, very
well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get what is owing to
you; I don't need you any longer." He jumped up and said: "Why, what's
the matter? I was putting on your brand." And I answered: "Yes, my
friend, and if you will steal _for_ me you will steal _from_ me."
Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in
public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he
will do something wrong _in_ your interest, you can be absolutely
certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something
wrong _against_ your interest.
So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to his
family, to his neighbor, to the State. There remain duties of
citizenship which the State, the aggregation of all the individuals,
owes in connection with other states, with other nations. Let me say
at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe
that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only
possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches
us that the average man who protests that his international feeling
swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country
because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves
himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not
care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is a citizen of
the world, is in very fact usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen
of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. In
the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at
present, if a man can view his own country and all other countries
from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust
him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same
dispassionate view of his wife and his mother. However broad and deep
a man's sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no
fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do
good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that
the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than
the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the
family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from
patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of
other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the
national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful to
see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a
gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong
him. I do not for one moment admit that political morality is
different from private morality, that a promise made on the stump
differs from a promise made in private life. I do not for one moment
admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his
dealings with other nations, any more than that he should act
deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private
citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat
other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable
man would treat other men.
In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there
is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account.
We speak of international law; but international law is something
wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital
difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for
the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to
obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel
obedience as regards the other. International law will, I believe, as
the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or
other there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is
only in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is
of necessity obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital
importance between it and its neighbors, and actions must of
necessity, where this is the case, be different from what they are
where, as among private citizens, there is an outside force whose
action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any crisis of
importance. It is the duty of wise statesmen, gifted with the power of
looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which
will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in
the settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of every
honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong
any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are
to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and
civilization, must keep ever in mind that in the last resort they must
possess both the will and the power to resent wrong-doing from others.
The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness;
but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or
among nations. We believe that our ideals should be high, but not so
high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely
and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we
scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world
came in arms against him.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two
Republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship
between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere
and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to
us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the
history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar
power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom or strength,
which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever
with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her
to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of
brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than
any of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of
Malbrook, it was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight
upward through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago,
Froissart, writing of a time of dire disaster, said that the realm of
France was never so stricken that there were not left men who would
valiantly fight for it. You have had a great past. I believe that you
will have a great future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as
citizens of a nation which bears a leading part in the teaching and
uplifting of mankind.
* * * * *
INTERNATIONAL PEACE
An Address before the Nobel Prize Committee Delivered at Christiania,
Norway, May 5, 1910
It is with peculiar pleasure that I stand here to-day to express the
deep appreciation I feel of the high honor conferred upon me by the
presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize.[7] The gold medal which formed
part of the prize I shall always keep, and I shall hand it on to my
children as a precious heirloom. The sum of money provided as part of
the prize by the wise generosity of the illustrious founder of this
world-famous prize system I did not, under the peculiar circumstances
of the case, feel at liberty to keep. I think it eminently just and
proper that in most cases the recipient of the prize should keep for
his own use the prize in its entirety. But in this case, while I did
not act officially as President of the United States, it was
nevertheless only because I was President that I was enabled to act at
all; and I felt that the money must be considered as having been given
me in trust for the United States. I therefore used it as a nucleus
for a foundation to forward the cause of industrial peace, as being
well within the general purpose of your Committee; for in our complex
industrial civilization of to-day the peace of righteousness and
justice, the only kind of peace worth having, is at least as necessary
in the industrial world as it is among nations. There is at least as
much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world
of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world
of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in
international relationships.
[7] Awarded to Mr. Roosevelt for his acts as mediator between
Russia and Japan which resulted in the Treaty of Portsmouth and
the ending of the Russo-Japanese war.--L.F.A.
We must ever bear in mind that the great end in view is righteousness,
justice as between man and man, nation and nation, the chance to lead
our lives on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of
brotherly good-will one for another. Peace is generally good in
itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the
handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it
serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument
to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the
bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life;
but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth
calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see
those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist
if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this
without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless
and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and
soft effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted
sentimentality.
Moreover, and above all, let us remember that words count only when
they give expression to deeds or are to be translated into them. The
leaders of the Red Terror prattled of peace while they steeped their
hands in the blood of the innocent; and many a tyrant has called it
peace when he has scourged honest protest into silence. Our words must
be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use
practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must
advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do
actually make some progress in the right direction.
Now, having freely admitted the limitations to our work, and the
qualifications to be borne in mind, I feel that I have the right to
have my words taken seriously when I point out where, in my judgment,
great advance can be made in the cause of international peace. I speak
as a practical man, and whatever I now advocate I actually tried to do
when I was for the time being the head of a great nation, and keenly
jealous of its honor and interest. I ask other nations to do only what
I should be glad to see my own nation do.
The advance can be made along several lines. First of all, there can
be treaties of arbitration. There are, of course, states so backward
that a civilized community ought not to enter into an arbitration
treaty with them, at least until we have gone much further than at
present in securing some kind of international police action. But all
really civilized communities should have effective arbitration
treaties among themselves. I believe that these treaties can cover
almost all questions liable to arise between such nations, if they are
drawn with the explicit agreement that each contracting party will
respect the other's territory and its absolute sovereignty within
that territory, and the equally explicit agreement that (aside from
the very rare cases where the nation's honor is vitally concerned) all
other possible subjects of controversy will be submitted to
arbitration. Such a treaty would insure peace unless one party
deliberately violated it. Of course, as yet there is no adequate
safeguard against such deliberate violation, but the establishment of
a sufficient number of these treaties would go a long way towards
creating a world opinion which would finally find expression in the
provision of methods to forbid or punish any such violation.
Secondly, there is the further development of The Hague Tribunal, of
the work of the conferences and courts at The Hague. It has been well
said that the first Hague Conference framed a Magna Charta for the
nations; it set before us an ideal which has already to some extent
been realized, and towards the full realization of which we can all
steadily strive. The second Conference made further progress; the
third should do yet more. Meanwhile the American Government has more
than once tentatively suggested methods for completing the Court of
Arbitral Justice, constituted at the second Hague Conference, and for
rendering it effective. It is earnestly to be hoped that the various
Governments of Europe, working with those of America and of Asia,
shall set themselves seriously to the task of devising some method
which shall accomplish this result. If I may venture the suggestion,
it would be well for the statesmen of the world in planning for the
erection of this world court, to study what has been done in the
United States by the Supreme Court. I cannot help thinking that the
Constitution of the United States, notably in the establishment of the
Supreme Court and in the methods adopted for securing peace and good
relations among and between the different States, offers certain
valuable analogies to what should be striven for in order to secure,
through The Hague courts and conferences, a species of world
federation for international peace and justice. There are, of course,
fundamental differences between what the United States Constitution
does and what we should even attempt at this time to secure at The
Hague; but the methods adopted in the American Constitution to prevent
hostilities between the States, and to secure the supremacy of the
Federal Court in certain classes of cases, are well worth the study
of those who seek at The Hague to obtain the same results on a world
scale.
In the third place, something should be done as soon as possible to
check the growth of armaments, especially naval armaments, by
international agreement. No one Power could or should act by itself;
for it is eminently undesirable, from the standpoint of the peace of
righteousness, that a Power which really does believe in peace should
place itself at the mercy of some rival which may at bottom have no
such belief and no intention of acting on it. But, granted sincerity
of purpose, the great Powers of the world should find no
insurmountable difficulty in reaching an agreement which would put an
end to the present costly and growing extravagance of expenditure on
naval armaments. An agreement merely to limit the size of ships would
have been very useful a few years ago, and would still be of use; but
the agreement should go much further.
Finally, it would be a master stroke if those great Powers honestly
bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace
among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being
broken by others. The supreme difficulty in connection with developing
the peace work of The Hague arises from the lack of any executive
power, of any police power, to enforce the decrees of the court. In
any community of any size the authority of the courts rests upon
actual or potential force; on the existence of a police, or on the
knowledge that the able-bodied men of the country are both ready and
willing to see that the decrees of judicial and legislative bodies are
put into effect. In new and wild communities where there is violence,
an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing
his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him
to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community
retain theirs. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by
his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can
effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down
violence. So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared
to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international
police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between
nations. As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the
world could best be assured by some combination between those great
nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves
of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to
secure peace within certain definite limits and certain definite
conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a
combination would have earned his place in history for all time and
his title to the gratitude of all mankind.
* * * * *
THE COLONIAL POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES
An Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, on the Evening of May 5,
1910
When I first heard that I was to speak again this evening, my heart
failed me. But directly after hearing Mr. Bratlie[8] I feel that it is
a pleasure to say one or two things; and before saying them, let me
express my profound acknowledgment for your words. You have been not
only more than just but more than generous. Because I have been so
kindly treated, I am going to trespass on your kindness still further,
and say a word or two about my own actions while I was President. I do
not speak of them, my friends, save to illustrate the thesis that I
especially uphold, that the man who has the power to act is to be
judged not by his words but by his acts--by his words in so far as
they agree with his acts. All that I say about peace I wish to have
judged and measured by what I actually did as President.
[8] See the Introduction.--L.F.A.
I was particularly pleased by what you said about our course, the
course of the American people, in connection with the Philippines and
Cuba. I believe that we have the Cuban Minister here with us to-night?
[A voice: "Yes."] Well, then, we have a friend who can check off what
I am going to say. At the close of the war of '98 we found our army in
possession of Cuba, and man after man among the European diplomats of
the old school said to me: "Oh, you will never go out of Cuba. You
said you would, of course, but that is quite understood; nations don't
expect promises like that to be kept." As soon as I became President,
I said, "Now you will see that the promise will be kept." We appointed
a day when we would leave Cuba. On that day Cuba began its existence
as an independent republic. Later there came a disaster, there came a
revolution, and we were obliged to land troops again, while I was
President, and then the same gentlemen with whom I had conversed
before said: "Now you are relieved from your promise; your promise has
been kept, and now you will stay in Cuba." I answered: "No, we shall
not. We will keep the promise not only in the letter but in the
spirit. We will stay in Cuba to help it on its feet, and then we will
leave the island in better shape to maintain its permanent independent
existence." And before I left the Presidency Cuba resumed its career
as a separate republic, holding its head erect as a sovereign state
among the other nations of the earth. All that our people want is just
exactly what the Cuban people themselves want--that is, a continuance
of order within the island, and peace and prosperity, so that there
shall be no shadow of an excuse for any outside intervention.
We acted along the same general lines in the case of San Domingo. We
intervened only so far as to prevent the need of taking possession of
the island. None of you will know of this, so I will just tell you
briefly what it was that we did. The Republic of San Domingo, in the
West Indies, had suffered from a good many revolutions. In one
particular period when I had to deal with the island, while I was
President, it was a little difficult to know what to do, because there
were two separate governments in the island, and a revolution going on
against each. A number of dictators, under the title of President, had
seized power at different times, had borrowed money at exorbitant
rates of interest from Europeans and Americans, and had pledged the
custom-houses of the different towns to different countries; and the
chief object of each revolutionary was to get hold of the
custom-houses. Things got to such a pass that it became evident that
certain European Powers would land and take possession of parts of the
island. We then began negotiations with the Government of the island.
We sent down ships to keep within limits various preposterous little
manifestations of the revolutionary habit, and, after some
negotiations, we concluded an agreement. It was agreed that we should
put a man in as head of the custom-houses, that the collection of
customs should be entirely under the management of that man, and that
no one should be allowed to interfere with the custom-houses.
Revolutions could go on outside them without interference from us; but
the custom-houses were not to be touched. We agreed to turn over to
the San Domingo Government forty-five per cent. of the revenue,
keeping fifty-five per cent. as a fund to be applied to a settlement
with the creditors. The creditors also acquiesced in what we had done,
and we started the new arrangement. I found considerable difficulty
in getting the United States Senate to ratify the treaty, but I went
ahead anyhow and executed it until it was ratified. Finally it was
ratified, for the opposition was a purely factious opposition,
representing the smallest kind of politics with a leaven of even baser
motive. Under the treaty we have turned over to the San Domingo
Government forty-five per cent. of the revenues collected, and yet we
have turned over nearly double as much as they ever got when they
collected it _all_ themselves. In addition, we have collected
sufficient to make it certain that the creditors will receive every
cent to which they are entitled. It is self-evident, therefore, that
in this affair we gave a proof of our good faith. We might have taken
possession of San Domingo. Instead of thus taking possession, we put
into the custom-houses one head man and half a dozen assistants, to
see that the revenues were honestly collected, and at the same time
served notice that they should not be forcibly taken away; and the
result has been an extraordinary growth of the tranquillity and
prosperity of the islands, while at the same time the creditors are
equally satisfied, and all danger of outside interference has ceased.
That incident illustrates two things: First, if a nation acts in good
faith, it can often bring about peace without abridging the liberties
of another nation. Second, our experience emphasizes the fact (which
every Peace Association should remember) that the hysterical
sentimentalist for peace is a mighty poor person to follow. I was
actually assailed, right and left, by the more extreme members of the
peace propaganda in the United States for what I did in San Domingo;
most of the other professional peace advocates took no interest in the
matter, or were tepidly hostile; however, I went straight ahead and
did the job. The ultra-peace people attacked me on the ground that I
had "declared war" against San Domingo, the "war" taking the shape of
the one man put in charge of the custom-houses! This will seem to you
incredible, but I am giving you an absolutely accurate account of what
occurred. I disregarded those foolish people, as I shall always
disregard sentimentalists of that type when they are guilty of folly.
At the present we have comparative peace and prosperity in the island,
in consequence of my action, and of my disregard of these self-styled
advocates of peace.
The same reasoning applies in connection with what we did at the
Isthmus of Panama, and what we are doing in the Philippines. Our
colonial problems in the Philippines are not the same as the colonial
problems of other Powers. We have in the Philippines a people mainly
Asiatic in blood, but with a streak of European blood and with the
traditions of European culture, so that their ideals are largely the
ideals of Europe. At the moment when we entered the islands the people
were hopelessly unable to stand alone. If we had abandoned the
islands, we should have left them a prey to anarchy for some months,
and then they would have been seized by some other Power ready to
perform the task that we had not been able to perform. Now I hold that
it is not worth while being a big nation if you cannot do a big task;
I care not whether that task is digging the Panama Canal or handling
the Philippines. In the Philippines I feel that the day will
ultimately come when the Philippine people must settle for themselves
whether they wish to be entirely independent, or in some shape to keep
up a connection with us. The day has not yet come; it may not come for
a generation or two. One of the greatest friends that liberty has ever
had, the great British statesman Burke, said on one occasion that
there must always be government, and that if there is not government
from within, then it must be supplied from without. A child has to be
governed from without, because it has not yet grown to a point when it
can govern itself from within; and a people that shows itself totally
unable to govern itself from within must expect to submit to more or
less of government from without, because it cannot continue to exist
on other terms--indeed, it cannot be permitted permanently to exist as
a source of danger to other nations. Our aim in the Philippines is to
train the people so that they may govern themselves from within. Until
they have reached this point they cannot have self-government. I will
never advocate self-government for a people so long as their
self-government means crime, violence, and extortion, corruption
within, lawlessness among themselves and towards others. If that is
what self-government means to any people then they ought to be
governed by others until they can do better.
What I have related represents a measure of practical achievement in
the way of helping forward the cause of peace and justice, and of
giving to different peoples freedom of action according to the
capacities of each. It is not possible, as the world is now
constituted, to treat every nation as one private individual can treat
all other private individuals, because as yet there is no way of
enforcing obedience to law among nations as there is among private
individuals. If in the streets of this city a man walks about with the
intent to kill somebody, if he manages his house so that it becomes a
source of infection to the neighborhood, the community, with its law
officers, deals with him forthwith. That is just what happened at
Panama, and, as nobody else was able to deal with the matter, I dealt
with it myself, on behalf of the United States Government, and now the
Canal is being dug, and the people of Panama have their independence
and a prosperity hitherto unknown in that country.
In the end, I firmly believe that some method will be devised by which
the people of the world, as a whole, will be able to insure peace, as
it cannot now be insured. How soon that end will come I do not know;
it may be far distant; and until it does come I think that, while we
should give all the support that we can to any possible feasible
scheme for quickly bringing about such a state of affairs, yet we
should meanwhile do the more practicable, though less sensational,
things. Let us advance step by step; let us, for example, endeavor to
increase the number of arbitration treaties and enlarge the methods
for obtaining peaceful settlements. Above all, let us strive to awaken
the public international conscience, so that it shall be expected, and
expected efficiently, of the public men responsible for the management
of any nation's affairs that those affairs shall be conducted with all
proper regard for the interests and well-being of other Powers, great
or small.
* * * * *
THE WORLD MOVEMENT
An Address Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910
I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of
Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is
difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings of
a man who comes from a nation still in the making, to a country with
an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case when that
country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with proud
confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the abounding
vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More than a
thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West became
in fact a German Empire. Throughout mediæval times the Empire and the
Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident.
With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western
life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the
whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it
from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders,
road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething
turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back
heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.
After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman
Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working
for a new uplift of civilization in Western Europe was round the
Karling House, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the
Great, the seat of whose Empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the
Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of
the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars,
wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented
dominion in Middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up
of the Karling Empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of
savagery: Vikings from the frozen North, and new hordes of outlandish
riders from Asia. It was the early Emperors of Germany proper who
quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar
became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that
Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since
then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of
fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement
in arms and in government, in science and the arts. The centre of
power shifted hither and thither within German lands; the great house
of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring
into a commanding position in the very forefront among the nations of
mankind.
To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to
this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young
nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the
great nations of Middle and Western Europe; which has inherited or
acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every
inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German
strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has
been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers
whose children's children have been and are being fused into the
American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the
Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover,
we have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through
our veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For
generations American scholars have flocked to your universities, and,
thanks to the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present
Emperor, the intimate and friendly connection between the two
countries is now in every way closer than it has ever been before.
Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of
to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The
life of this University covers the period during which that movement
has spread until it is felt throughout every continent; while its
velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the
world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is
therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.
When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this
planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight.
Further ages passed, while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal
degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general
law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature,
changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life of
savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups of
savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary
beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call
civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the
most important creature on the planet. The history of the living world
had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something
totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been
before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in
the development of life generally and what has gone on in the
development of human society, and these I shall discuss elsewhere.[9]
But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.
[9] In the Romanes Lecture at Oxford.--L.F.A.
Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for,
properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were
local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed
along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early
stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such
extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and
the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these
inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes,
still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who
know none of them except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may
have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of
the savagery which separated man from brute.
Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high
position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to
violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric
or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given
localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was
later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if
any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have
developed our own; while it is also difficult to say exactly how much
any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as
where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic
peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower
civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other
cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the
beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the
neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a
certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at
the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage
souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that
had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves
of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak
definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years
that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in
prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as
to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to
the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which
Stonehenge is the type.
The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in
that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate
present--and which is but a span's length from the present, even when
compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this
planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia
and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far as we
can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural
development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us
to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern
Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese
civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian
influences.
Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the
striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were
the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness.
The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are
found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds,
leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of
centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action and
reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the
movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual, was
much faster than anything that had occurred during the æons of mere
savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement was
very slow indeed, and, moreover, in each case it was strongly
localized; while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain
conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the
domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread
the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as
a "world movement" at all; for by far the greater part of the
habitable globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at,
so far as peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.
With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into
prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be
said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can
consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances
to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary
man, when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind
specifically these three peoples--although, judged even by the history
of which we have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.
The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of
little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus,
until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under
the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died.
In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the
most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of
mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies
left us by the Greek and the Roman.
The Græco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more
varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that
affected a far larger share of the world's surface. For the first time
there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a "world
movement" in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of the
world's surface and that it represented what was incomparably the most
important of all that was happening in world history at the time. In
breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had greatly
broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by the
civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization
affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean,
there was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced
mankind from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic
Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the
Himalayas. Throughout most of this region there began to work certain
influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did
nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the
forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great
activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great
administrators and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental
questions of social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety
of intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been
known; and for the first time we come across great intellectual
leaders, great philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all
that is highest in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day
as when they were first issued; and there were others of even more
daring and original temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like
Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what
none of their contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their
surroundings that it was physically impossible for them to leave to
the later world much concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization
was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of
Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the
whole system went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a
period short compared with that covered by the reigns of a score of
Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed between a Babylonian
defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later which fully avenged
it.
This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In
its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from
among those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace
our descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far
more thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both
conquests were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest
which in its ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.
With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and it
did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years passed
before it was once more in full swing, so far as European
civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is
concerned. During all those centuries the civilized world, in our
acceptation of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly
climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age
of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be
accepted with qualifications. There is no hard and fast line between
one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or
retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which
the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian,
surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are
some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk
below the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of
poetry, of architecture--especially cathedral architecture--and of
serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries
of violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little
heeded that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in
its scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the
halter.
During this period there were several very important extra-European
movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose,
and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races into
a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able to
rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing European
culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and here and
there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the
civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured
peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered
development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any
European influence.
Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the
unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and
terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction--Hun and
Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of
warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and
destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in
no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.
At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement towards a
world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning of the
modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with the
discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures which
culminated in the discovery of America; and after these two epochal
feats had begun to produce their full effects in material and
intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should
thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that
had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of
intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names
of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man
was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time
experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization.
Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity
and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects
during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or two
dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of the
past, the new movement was shared by many different nations. From
every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than
anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there
has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of
organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural
resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an
immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as
varied as it is striking.
In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their
conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically
vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in
organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of
military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these
two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time
there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a
world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of
Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every sea
and over every continent. In places the conquests have been ethnic;
that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new
commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or
mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate and
sub-tropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in
portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the
conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the
most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators, as in
most of tropical Asia and Africa and in much of tropical America.
Finally, here and there instances occur where there has been no
conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically
changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most
extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan's
growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways
the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her
past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she
has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering
ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading
civilized nations of mankind.
There are of course many grades between these different types of
influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last
four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises
a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world.
There are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but
there is at present no large space of territory in which the general
movement of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt.
This represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto
been seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of
Rome was felt over only a relatively small portion of the world's
surface. Over much the larger part of the world the process of change
and development was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in
the Roman Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence
was felt in action and reaction, and in inter-action, among
themselves, were grouped immediately around the Mediterranean. Now,
however, the whole world is bound together as never before; the bonds
are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds
nevertheless.
Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought or
effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The student
of sociology may live in Berlin or St. Petersburg, Rome or London, or
he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Aires; but in
whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men who
live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor
problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life insurance for
wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and we also
turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is doing.
When a great German scientist is warring against the most dreaded
enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which the
microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of study in
central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is
accomplished in the laboratories of Tokyo, just as he must know the
details of that practical application of science which has changed the
Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health
resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western
methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European and
American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of
European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact
that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem
conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question
in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of
European or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines,
takes the form of demanding that the government be assimilated more
closely to what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and
works of any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical,
social, or political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and
in every continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of
combating or applying Socialism, there is no movement of note which
can take place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting
masses of people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and
Africa. For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together
far closer than ever before.
So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern
civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of
modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The
movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural
forces, in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.
The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase in
every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an
extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of
Nature. In both directions the advance has been very great during the
past four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on
with ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great
age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in
many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain
was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year 150
A.D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central Africa and
the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate than any which
we had as late as 1850 A.D. More was known of physical science, and
more of the truth about the physical world was guessed at, in the days
of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern movement began.
The case was the same as regards military science. At the close of the
Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always been--sword, shield,
bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more than offset by the
loss in knowledge of military organization, in the science of war, and
in military leadership since the days of Hannibal and Cæsar. A hundred
years ago, when this University was founded, the methods of
transportation did not differ in the essentials from what they had
been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and
merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden,
and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and news was
conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements there had
been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some respects
there had been retrogression rather than advance. There were many
parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than the old
Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no
means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam and
electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting
immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely
changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt
to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century
as in the second; and the news communications between the two lands
were not materially improved. A graduate of your University to-day can
go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing
a feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with
a student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention
and use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a
revolution in industry as great as the revolution in transportation;
so that here again the difference between ancient and modern
civilization is one not merely of degree but of kind. In many vital
respects the huge modern city differs more from all preceding cities
than any of these differed one from the other; and the giant factory
town is of and by itself one of the most formidable problems of modern
life.
Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and water
such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air is
directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so the
telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they
annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without
regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each
community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the
body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm
enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained
intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the
effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern
scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of
such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that
exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development
purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and
constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the
approach of the day when our children's children, or their children's
children, shall dwell in an ironless age--and, later on, in an age
without coal--and will have to try to invent or develop new sources
for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many
another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to
preserve it through use. The best use of field and forest will leave
them decade by decade, century by century, more fruitful; and we have
barely begun to use the indestructible power that comes from harnessed
water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine, the conquests in the
entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been literally
marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been over
more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of the
human race.
The advances in the realm of pure intellect have been of equal note,
and they have been both intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields
of learning and wisdom have been discovered by the few, and at the
same time knowledge has spread among the many to a degree never
dreamed of before. Old men among us have seen in their own generation
the rise of the first rational science of the evolution of life. The
astronomer and the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, and
all their brethren in many different fields of wide endeavor, work
with a training and knowledge and method which are in effect
instruments of precision, differentiating their labors from the labors
of their predecessors as the rifle is differentiated from the bow.
The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world
as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces
for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a
thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over
the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid,
the main-spring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the
whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The
machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great,
the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause
to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any
breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out
of the machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our
modern civilization can be in any way compared is that period of
Græco-Roman civilization extending, say, from the Athens of
Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and
tendencies which were then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury,
and refinement, wide material conquests, territorial administration on
a vast scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and
in applied science--all these mark our civilization as they marked the
wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands
twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older
civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are quite
as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old
civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the
two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in
the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that
it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.
One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency
to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge.
When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is
always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness
of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life,
is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of
civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand,
merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now I will not assert that
in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly
overcome; but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome
them than was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously
shown by the military history of the Græco-Roman period as compared
with the history of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and
among nations of European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military
history the change was steadily from a citizen army to an army of
mercenaries. In the days of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes,
and Sparta, in the days when the Roman Republic conquered what world
it knew, the armies were filled with citizen soldiers. But gradually
the citizens refused to serve in the armies, or became unable to
render good service. The Greek states described by Polybius, with but
few exceptions, hired others to do their fighting for them. The Romans
of the days of Augustus had utterly ceased to furnish any cavalry, and
were rapidly ceasing to furnish any infantry, to the legions and
cohorts. When the civilization came to an end, there were no longer
citizens in the ranks of the soldiers. The change from the citizen
army to the army of mercenaries had been completed.
Now, the exact reverse has been the case with us in modern times. A
few centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the principal figure in
most armies, and in great numbers of cases the mercenary soldier was
an alien. In the wars of religion in France, in the Thirty Years' War
in Germany, in the wars that immediately thereafter marked the
beginning of the break-up of the great Polish Kingdom, the regiments
and brigades of foreign soldiers formed a striking and leading feature
in every army. Too often the men of the country in which the fighting
took place played merely the ignoble part of victims, the burghers and
peasants appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary armies by
which they were plundered. Gradually this has all changed, until now
practically every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary has almost
disappeared, while the army exists on a vaster scale than ever before
in history. This is so among the military monarchies of Europe. In our
own Civil War of the United States the same thing occurred, peaceful
people as we are. At that time more than two generations had passed
since the War of Independence. During the whole of that period the
people had been engaged in no life-and-death struggle; and yet, when
the Civil War broke out, and after some costly and bitter lessons at
the beginning, the fighting spirit of the people was shown to better
advantage than ever before. The war was peculiarly a war for a
principle, a war waged by each side for an ideal, and while faults and
shortcomings were plentiful among the combatants, there was
comparatively little sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant
struggle, where across the warp of so many interests is shot the woof
of so many purposes, dark strands and bright, strands sombre and
brilliant, are always intertwined; inevitably there was corruption
here and there in the Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides,
and the great majority of the enormous masses of fighting men, wholly
disregarded, and were wholly uninfluenced by, pecuniary
considerations. There were of course foreigners who came over to serve
as soldiers of fortune for money or for love of adventure; but the
foreign-born citizens served in much the same proportion, and from the
same motives, as the native-born. Taken as a whole, it was, even more
than the Revolutionary War, a true citizens' fight, and the armies of
Grant and Lee were as emphatically citizen armies as Athenian, Theban,
or Spartan armies in the great age of Greece, or as a Roman army in
the days of the Republic.
Another striking contrast in the course of modern civilization as
compared with the later stages of the Græco-Roman or classic
civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and politics.
In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its zenith,
politics became a recognized means of accumulating great wealth. Cæsar
was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he spent an enormous
fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which he made out of
his political-military career. Augustus established Imperial Rome on
firm foundations by the use he made of the huge fortune he had
acquired by plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of
Washington and Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days;
but the immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their
civilizations culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as
one of the incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is
in sharp contrast to what has happened within the last two or three
centuries. During this time there has been a steady growth away from
the theory that money-making is permissible in an honorable public
career. In this respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and
things which statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or
two centuries ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career
even a century ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still
exercise a large, and sometimes an improper, influence in politics,
but it is apt to be an indirect influence; and in the advanced states
the mere suspicion that the wealth of public men is obtained or added
to as an incident of their public careers will bar them from public
life. Speaking generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern
political life, but it is not acquired in political life. The colonial
administrators, German or American, French or English, of this
generation lead careers which, as compared with the careers of other
men of like ability, show too little rather than too much regard for
money-making; and literally a world scandal would be caused by conduct
which a Roman proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and which
would not have been especially uncommon even in the administration of
England a century and a half ago. On the whole, the great statesmen of
the last few generations have been either men of moderate means, or,
if men of wealth, men whose wealth was diminished rather than
increased by their public services.
I have dwelt on these points merely because it is well to emphasize in
the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many respects there is a
complete lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day and the
only other civilization in any way comparable to it, that of the
ancient Græco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many points in which
the analogy is close, and in some of these points the resemblances
are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of all is the
fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of interest,
and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization can be
compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now literally a
world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid and is
ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at
one point is certain to be felt with greater or less effect at almost
every other point. Every path of activity open to the human intellect
is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto dreamed of.
We have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in
consequence, a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and
daring souls have before them a well-nigh limitless opening for
endeavor of any kind.
Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been able to develop
only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field of endeavor
has been limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, of
course, been great movements, but they were of practically only one
form of activity; and although usually this set in motion other kinds
of activities, such was not always the case. The great religious
movements have been the pre-eminent examples of this type. But they
are not the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the
Phoenicians, at almost opposite poles of cultivation, have represented
movements in which one element, military or commercial, so
overshadowed all other elements that the movement died out chiefly
because it was one-sided. The extraordinary outburst of activity among
the Mongols of the thirteenth century was almost purely a military
movement, without even any great administrative side; and it was
therefore well-nigh purely a movement of destruction. The individual
prowess and hardihood of the Mongols, and the perfection of their
military organization, rendered their armies incomparably superior to
those of any European, or any other Asiatic, power of that day. They
conquered from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic;
they seized the Imperial throne of China; they slew the Caliph in
Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of
Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless
against them. The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was
impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath
the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across
Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western
Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they had no root of permanence;
their work was mere evil while it lasted, and it did not last long;
and when they vanished they left hardly a trace behind them. So the
extraordinary Phoenician civilization was almost purely a mercantile,
a business civilization, and though it left an impress on the life
that came after, this impress was faint indeed compared to that left,
for instance, by the Greeks with their many-sided development. Yet the
Greek civilization itself fell, because this many-sided development
became too exclusively one of intellect, at the expense of character,
at the expense of the fundamental qualities which fit men to govern
both themselves and others. When the Greek lost the sterner virtues,
when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew
corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving
rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all their
cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic
development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the
Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older
civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity
to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the
immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the
immense increase in the velocity of the world movement--are all these
to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and
terrible when it comes? We cannot be certain that the answer will be
in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go
down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity
for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we
have the wit and the courage and the honesty.
Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think
that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on
the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has
held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will
not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own
mighty deeds we make them come true. We cannot afford to develop any
one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing
others, equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency
of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phoenician,
nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert
destruction.
We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we are
to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of all,
the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family life,
the fundamental and essential qualities--the homely, every-day,
all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not
in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the
average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy
children, then the State will topple, will go down, no matter what may
be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But
these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be
that power of organization, that power of working in common for a
common end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion
during the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are
even more important than the things of the body. We can well do
without the hard intolerance and and barrenness of what was worst
in the theological systems of the past, but there has never been
greater need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the
present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the
pretensions of modern philosophy in its various branches, it would be
worse than folly on our part to ignore our need of intellectual
leadership. Your own great Frederick once said that if he wished to
punish a province he would leave it to be governed by philosophers;
the sneer had in it an element of justice; and yet no one better than
the great Frederick knew the value of philosophers, the value of men
of science, men of letters, men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed
to accept Tolstoy as a guide in social and moral matters; but it would
also be a bad thing not to have Tolstoy, not to profit by the lofty
side of his teachings. There are plenty of scientific men whose hard
arrogance, whose cynical materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put
them on a level with the bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they
denounce. Yet our debt to scientific men is incalculable, and our
civilization of to-day would have reft from it all that which most
highly distinguishes it if the work of the great masters of science
during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has
philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and
though we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse
than folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when
his heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of
conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along
the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind,
that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more
permanent plane of well-being than was ever attained by any preceding
civilization. Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that
does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who
would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average
man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if
the day of need should arise!
It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which
morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall
all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the
rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often
accompany professions of sentimental attachment to the rights of man;
in which a high material development in the things of the body shall
be achieved without subordination of the things of the soul; in which
there shall be a genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of
those virile qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall
avail any race; in which the fullest development of scientific
research, the great distinguishing feature of our present
civilization, shall yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever
take the place of character--for, from the standpoint of the nation as
of the individual, it is character that is the one vital possession.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is
now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the
nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love
of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the
world's progress is essential to the world's well-being. You, my
hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under
modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to our
newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and do
each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each
people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but
each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it
first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be
a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage
be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you
and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness
and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different
fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the
less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the
people of my own land.
* * * * *
THE CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS
An Address at the Cambridge Union, May 26, 1910
Mr. President and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure for me to be
here to-day and to address you and to wear what the Secretary[10] has
called the gilded trappings which show that I am one of the youngest
living graduates of Cambridge. Something in the nature of a tract was
handed to me before I came up here. It was an issue of the _Gownsman_
[holding up, amid laughter, a copy of an undergraduate publication]
with a poem portraying the poet's natural anxiety lest I should preach
at him. Allow me to interpose an anecdote taken from your own hunting
field. A one-time Master of Foxhounds strongly objected to the
presence of a rather near-sighted and very hard-riding friend who at
times insisted on riding in the middle of the pack; and on one
occasion he earnestly addressed him as follows: "Mr. So and So, would
you mind looking at those two dogs, Ploughboy and Melody. They are
very valuable, and I really wish you would not jump on them." To which
his friend replied, with great courtesy: "My dear sir, I should be
delighted to oblige you, but unfortunately I have left my glasses at
home, and I am afraid they must take their chance." I will promise to
preach as little as I can, but you must take your chance, for it is
impossible to break the bad habit of a lifetime at the bidding of a
comparative stranger. I was deeply touched by the allusion to the lion
and the coat-of-arms. Before I reached London I was given to
understand that it was expected that when I walked through Trafalgar
Square, I should look the other way as I passed the lions.
[10] The Cambridge Union is the home of the well-known debating
society of the undergraduates of Cambridge University. To the
Vice-President, a member of Emmanuel College, the college of John
Harvard who founded Harvard University, was appropriately assigned
the duty of proposing the resolution admitting Mr. Roosevelt to
honorary membership in the Union Society. In supporting the
resolution the Vice-President referred to the peculiar relation
which unites the English Cambridge and the American Cambridge in a
common bond and touched upon Mr. Roosevelt's African exploits by
jocosely expressing anxiety for the safety of "the crest of my own
college, the Emmanuel Lion, which I see before me well within
range." There had just appeared in _Punch_, at the time of Mr.
Roosevelt's arrival in England, a full-page cartoon showing the
lions of the Nelson Monument in Trafalgar Square guarded by
policemen and protected by a placard announcing that "these lions
are not to be shot." The Secretary, in seconding the resolution,
humorously alluded to the doctor's gown, hood, and cap, in which
Mr. Roosevelt received his degree, as a possible example of what
America sometimes regards as the gilded trappings of a feudal and
reactionary Europe.--L.F.A.
Now I thank you very much for having made me an honorary member.
Harvard men feel peculiarly at home when they come to Cambridge. We
feel we are in the domain of our spiritual forefathers, and I doubt if
you yourselves can appreciate what it is to walk about the courts, to
see your buildings, and your pictures and statues of the innumerable
men whose names we know so well, and who have been brought closer to
us by what we see here. That would apply not alone to men of the past.
The Bishop of Ely to you is the Bishop of to-day; but I felt like
asking him when I met him this morning, "Where is Hereward the Wake?"
It gives an American university man a peculiar feeling to come here
and see so much that tells of the ancient history of the University.
The tie between Harvard and Cambridge has always been kept up. I
remember when you sent over Mr. Lehmann to teach us how to row. He
found us rather refractory pupils, I am afraid. In the course of the
struggle, the captain of the Harvard crew was eliminated. He
afterwards came down to Cuba and was one of the very best captains in
my regiment. At that time, however, he was still too close to his
college days--he was separated from them only by about two weeks when
he joined me--to appreciate what I endeavored to instil into him, that
while winning a boat-race was all very well, to take part in a
victorious fight, in a real battle, was a good deal better. Sport is a
fine thing as a pastime, and indeed it is more than a mere pastime;
but it is a very poor business if it is permitted to become the one
serious occupation of life.
One of the things I wish we could learn from you is how to make the
game of football a rather less homicidal pastime. (Laughter.) I do not
wish to speak as a mere sentimentalist; but I do not think that
killing should be a normal accompaniment of the game, and while we
develop our football from Rugby, I wish we could go back and undevelop
it, and get it nearer your game. I am not qualified to speak as an
expert on the subject, but I wish we could make it more open and
eliminate some features that certainly tend to add to the danger of
the game as it is played in America now. On the Pacific slope we have
been going back to your type of Rugby football. I would not have
football abolished for anything, but I want to have it changed, just
because I want to draw the teeth of the men who always clamor for the
abolition of any manly game. I wish to deprive those whom I put in the
mollycoddle class, of any argument against good sport. I thoroughly
believe in sport, but I think it is a great mistake if it is made
anything like a profession, or carried on in a way that gives just
cause for fault-finding and complaint among people whose objection is
not really to the defects, but to the sport itself.
Now I am going to disregard your poet and preach to you for just one
moment, but I will make it as little obnoxious as possible.
(Laughter.) The Secretary spoke of me as if I were an athlete. I am
not, and never have been one, although I have always been very fond of
outdoor amusement and exercise. There was, however, in my class at
Harvard, one real athlete who is now in public life. I made him
Secretary of State, or what you call Minister of Foreign Affairs, and
he is now Ambassador in Paris. If I catch your terminology straight,
he would correspond to your triple blue. He was captain of the
football eleven, played on the base-ball team, and rowed in the crew,
and in addition to that he was champion heavy-weight boxer and
wrestler, and won the 220-yard dash. His son was captain of the
Harvard University crew that came over here and was beaten by Oxford
two years ago. [Voices: "Cambridge."] Well, I never took a great
interest in defeats. (Loud laughter and applause.) Now, as I said
before, I never was an athlete, although I have always led an outdoor
life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory
is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the
utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually
possesses.
There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes
to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to
do. That is genius. I am not discussing what form that genius takes;
whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one
else can write, _The Ode on a Grecian Urn_, for example, or _Helen,
thy beauty is to me_; or of a man who can do 100 yards in nine and
three-fifths seconds. Such a man does what no one else can do. Only a
very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing
genius. The average man who is successful,--the average statesman, the
average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call
great success--is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the
ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has
developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.
Take such a thing as hunting or any form of vigorous bodily exercise.
Most men can ride hard if they choose. Almost any man can kill a lion
if he will exercise a little resolution in training the qualities that
will enable him to do it. [Taking a tumbler from the table, Mr.
Roosevelt held it up.] Now it is a pretty easy thing to aim straight
at an object about that size. Almost any one, if he practises with the
rifle at all, can learn to hit that tumbler; and he can hit the lion
all right if he learns to shoot as straight at its brain or heart as
at the tumbler. He does not have to possess any extraordinary
capacity, not a bit,--all he has to do is to develop certain rather
ordinary qualities, but develop them to such a degree that he will
not get flustered, so that he will press the trigger steadily instead
of jerking it--and then he will shoot at the lion as well as he will
at that tumbler. It is a perfectly simple quality to develop. You
don't need any remarkable skill; all you need is to possess ordinary
qualities, but to develop them to a more than ordinary degree.
It is just the same with the soldier. What is needed is that the man
as soldier should develop certain qualities that have been known for
thousands of years, but develop them to such a point that in an
emergency he does, as a matter of course, what a great multitude of
men can do but what a very large proportion of them don't do. And in
making the appeal to the soldier, if you want to get out of him the
stuff that is in him, you will have to use phrases which the
intellectual gentlemen who do not fight will say are platitudes.
(Laughter and applause.)
It is just so in public life. It is not genius, it is not
extraordinary subtlety, or acuteness of intellect, that is important.
The things that are important are the rather commonplace, the rather
humdrum, virtues that in their sum are designated as character. If you
have in public life men of good ability, not geniuses, but men of
good abilities, with character,--and, gentlemen, you must include as
one of the most important elements of character commonsense--if you
possess such men, the Government will go on very well.
I have spoken only of the great successes; but what I have said
applies just as much to the success that is within the reach of almost
every one of us. I think that any man who has had what is regarded in
the world as a great success must realize that the element of chance
has played a great part in it. Of course a man has to take advantage
of his opportunities; but the opportunities have to come. If there is
not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great
occasion you don't get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in
times of peace no one would have known his name now. The great crisis
must come, or no man has the chance to develop great qualities.
There are exceptional cases, of course, where there is a man who can
do just one thing, such as a man who can play a dozen games of chess
or juggle with four rows of figures at once--and as a rule he can do
nothing else. A man of this type can do nothing unless in the one
crisis for which his powers fit him. But normally the man who makes
the great success when the emergency arises is the man who would have
made a fair success in any event. I believe that the man who is really
happy in a great position--in what we call a career--is the man who
would also be happy and regard his life as successful if he had never
been thrown into that position. If a man lives a decent life and does
his work fairly and squarely so that those dependent on him and
attached to him are better for his having lived, then he is a success,
and he deserves to feel that he has done his duty and he deserves to
be treated by those who have had greater success as nevertheless
having shown the fundamental qualities that entitle him to respect. We
have in the United States an organization composed of the men who
forty-five years ago fought to a finish the great Civil War. One thing
that has always appealed to me in that organization is that all of the
men admitted are on a perfect equality provided the records show that
their duty was well done. Whether a man served as a lieutenant-general
or an eighteen-year-old recruit, so long as he was able to serve for
six months and did his duty in his appointed place, then he is called
Comrade and stands on an exact equality with the other men. The same
principle should shape our associations in ordinary civil life.
I am not speaking cant to you. I remember once sitting at a table with
six or eight other public officials, and each was explaining* how he
regarded being in public life, how only the sternest sense of duty
prevented him from resigning his office, and how the strain of working
for a thankless constituency was telling upon him, and nothing but the
fact that he felt he ought to sacrifice his comfort to the welfare of
his country kept him in the arduous life of statesmanship. It went
round the table until it came to my turn. This was during my first
term of office as President of the United States. I said: "Now,
gentlemen, I do not wish there to be any misunderstanding. I like my
job, and I want to keep it for four years longer." (Loud laughter and
applause.) I don't think any President ever enjoyed himself more than
I did. Moreover, I don't think any ex-President ever enjoyed himself
more. I have enjoyed my life and my work because I thoroughly believe
that success--the real success--does not depend upon the position you
hold, but upon how you carry yourself in that position. There is no
man here to-day who has not the chance so to shape his life after he
leaves this university that he shall have the right to feel, when his
life ends, that he has made a real success of it; and his making a
real success of it does not in the least depend upon the prominence of
the position he holds. Gentlemen, I thank you, and I am glad I have
violated the poet's hope and have preached to you.
*Transcriber's Note: Original "explaning"
* * * * *
BRITISH RULE IN AFRICA
Address Delivered at the Guildhall, London, May 31, 1910[11]
[11] The occasion of this address was the ceremony in the
Guildhall in which Mr. Roosevelt was presented by the Corporation
of the City of London (the oldest corporation in the world), with
the Freedom of the City. Sir Joseph Dimsdale, on behalf of the
Lord Mayor and the Corporation, made the address of
presentation.--L.F.A.
It is a peculiar pleasure to me to be here. And yet I cannot but
appreciate, as we all do, the sadness of the fact that I come here
just after the death of the Sovereign whom you so mourn, and whose
death caused such an outburst of sympathy for you throughout the
civilized world. One of the things I shall never forget is the
attitude of that great mass of people, assembled on the day of the
funeral, who in silence, in perfect order, and with uncovered heads,
saw the body of the dead King pass to its last resting-place. I had
the high honor of being deputed to come to the funeral as the
representative of America, and by my presence to express the deep and
universal feeling of sympathy which moves the entire American people
for the British people in their hour of sadness and trial.
I need hardly say how profoundly I feel the high honor that you confer
upon me; an honor great in itself, and great because of the ancient
historic associations connected with it, with the ceremonies incident
to conferring it, and with the place in which it is conferred. I am
very deeply appreciative of all that this ceremony means, all that
this gift implies, and all the kind words which Sir Joseph Dimsdale
has used in conferring it. I thank you heartily for myself. I thank
you still more because I know that what you have done is to be taken
primarily as a sign of the respect and friendly good-will which more
and more, as time goes by, tends to knit together the English-speaking
peoples.
I shall not try to make you any extended address of mere thanks, still
less of mere eulogy. I prefer to speak, and I know you would prefer to
have me speak, on matters of real concern to you, as to which I happen
at this moment to possess some first-hand knowledge; for recently I
traversed certain portions of the British Empire under conditions
which made me intimately cognizant of their circumstances and needs. I
have just spent nearly a year in Africa. While there I saw four
British protectorates. I grew heartily to respect the men whom I there
met, settlers and military and civil officials; and it seems to me
that the best service I can render them and you is very briefly to
tell you how I was impressed by some of the things that I saw. Your
men in Africa are doing a great work for your Empire, and they are
also doing a great work for civilization. This fact and my sympathy
for and belief in them are my reasons for speaking. The people at
home, whether in Europe or in America, who live softly, often fail
fully to realize what is being done for them by the men who are
actually engaged in the pioneer work of civilization abroad. Of
course, in any mass of men there are sure to be some who are weak or
unworthy, and even those who are good are sure to make occasional
mistakes--that is as true of pioneers as of other men. Nevertheless,
the great fact in world history during the last century has been the
spread of civilization over the world's waste spaces. The work is
still going on; and the soldiers, the settlers, and the civic
officials who are actually doing it are, as a whole, entitled to the
heartiest respect and the fullest support from their brothers who
remain at home.
At the outset, there is one point upon which I wish to insist with all
possible emphasis. The civilized nations who are conquering for
civilization savage lands should work together in a spirit of hearty
mutual good-will. I listened with special interest to what Sir Joseph
Dimsdale said about the blessing of peace and good-will among nations.
I agree with that in the abstract. Let us show by our actions and our
words in specific cases that we agree with it also in the concrete.
Ill-will between civilized nations is bad enough anywhere, but it is
peculiarly harmful and contemptible when those actuated by it are
engaged in the same task, a task of such far-reaching importance to
the future of humanity, the task of subduing the savagery of wild man
and wild nature, and of bringing abreast of our civilization those
lands where there is an older civilization which has somehow gone
crooked. Mankind as a whole has benefited by the noteworthy success
that has attended the French occupation of Algiers and Tunis, just as
mankind as a whole has benefited by what England has done in India;
and each nation should be glad of the other nation's achievements. In
the same way, it is of interest to all civilized men that a similar
success shall attend alike the Englishman and the German as they work
in East Africa; exactly as it has been a benefit to every one that
America took possession of the Philippines. Those of you who know Lord
Cromer's excellent book in which he compares modern and ancient
imperialism need no words from me to prove that the dominion of modern
civilized nations over the dark places of the earth has been fraught
with widespread good for mankind; and my plea is that the civilized
nations engaged in doing this work shall treat one another with
respect and friendship, and shall hold it as discreditable to permit
envy and jealousy, backbiting and antagonism among themselves. I
visited four different British protectorates or possessions in
Africa--namely, East Africa, Uganda, the Sudan, and Egypt. About the
first three, I have nothing to say to you save what is pleasant, as
well as true. About the last, I wish to say a few words because they
are true, without regard to whether or not they are pleasant.
In the highlands of East Africa you have a land which can be made a
true white man's country. While there I met many settlers on intimate
terms, and I felt for them a peculiar sympathy, because they so
strikingly reminded me of the men of our own western frontier of
America, of the pioneer farmers and ranch-men who built up the States
of the great plains and the Rocky Mountains. It is of high importance
to encourage these settlers in every way, remembering--I say that here
in the City--remembering that the prime need is not for capitalists to
exploit the land, but for settlers who shall make their permanent
homes therein. Capital is a good servant, but a mighty poor master. No
alien race should be permitted to come into competition with the
settlers. Fortunately you have now in the Governor of East Africa, Sir
Percy Girouard, a man admirably fitted to deal wisely and firmly with
the many problems before him. He is on the ground and knows the needs
of the country, and is zealously devoted to its interests. All that is
necessary is to follow his lead, and to give him cordial support and
backing. The principle upon which I think it is wise to act in dealing
with far-away possessions is this--choose your man, change him if you
become discontented with him, but while you keep him back him up.
In Uganda the problem is totally different. Uganda cannot be made a
white man's country, and the prime need is to administer the land in
the interest of the native races, and to help forward their
development. Uganda has been the scene of an extraordinary development
of Christianity. Nowhere else of recent times has missionary effort
met with such success; the inhabitants stand far above most of the
races in the Dark Continent in their capacity for progress towards
civilization. They have made great strides, and the English officials
have shown equal judgment and disinterestedness in the work they have
done; and they have been especially wise in trying to develop the
natives along their own lines, instead of seeking to turn them into
imitation or make-believe Englishmen. In Uganda all that is necessary
is to go forward on the paths you have already marked out.
The Sudan is peculiarly interesting because it affords the best
possible example of the wisdom--and when I say that I speak with
historical accuracy--of disregarding the well-meaning but unwise
sentimentalists who object to the spread of civilization at the
expense of savagery. I remember a quarter of a century ago when you
were engaged in the occupation of the Sudan that many of your people
at home and some of ours in America said that what was demanded in the
Sudan was the application of the principles of independence and
self-government to the Sudanese, coupled with insistence upon complete
religious toleration and the abolition of the slave trade.
Unfortunately, the chief reason why the Mahdists wanted independence
and self-government was that they could put down all religions but
their own and carry on the slave trade. I do not believe that in the
whole world there is to be found any nook of territory which has shown
such astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being
and prosperity as the Sudan has shown during the last twelve years
while it has been under British rule. Up to that time it was
independent, and it governed itself; and independence and
self-government in the hands of the Sudanese proved to be much what
independence and self-government would have been in a wolf pack. Great
crimes were committed there, crimes so dark that their very
hideousness protects them from exposure. During a decade and a half,
while Mahdism controlled the country, there flourished a tyranny which
for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton
destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even
imagine. The keystones of the Mahdist party were religious intolerance
and slavery, with murder and the most abominable cruelty as the method
of obtaining each.
During those fifteen years at least two-thirds of the population,
probably seven or eight millions of people, died by violence or by
starvation. Then the English came in; put an end to the independence
and self-government which had wrought this hideous evil; restored
order, kept the peace, and gave to each individual a liberty which,
during the evil days of their own self-government, not one human being
possessed, save only the blood-stained tyrant who at the moment was
ruler. I stopped at village after village in the Sudan, and in many of
them I was struck by the fact that, while there were plenty of
children, they were all under twelve years old; and inquiry always
developed that these children were known as "Government children,"
because in the days of Mahdism it was the literal truth that in a very
large proportion of the communities every child was either killed or
died of starvation and hardship, whereas under the peace brought by
English rule families are flourishing, men and women are no longer
hunted to death, and the children are brought up under more favorable
circumstances, for soul and body, than have ever previously obtained
in the entire history of the Sudan. In administration, in education,
in police work, the Sirdar[12] and his lieutenants, great and small,
have performed to perfection a task equally important and difficult.
The Government officials, civil and military, who are responsible for
this task, and the Egyptian and Sudanese who have worked with and
under them, and as directed by them, have a claim upon all civilized
mankind which should be heartily admitted. It would be a crime not to
go on with the work, a work which the inhabitants themselves are
helpless to perform, unless under firm and wise guidance from outside.
I have met people who had some doubt as to whether the Sudan would
pay. Personally, I think it probably will. But I may add that, in my
judgment, this fact does not alter the duty of England to stay there.
It is not worth while belonging to a big nation unless the big nation
is willing when the necessity arises to undertake a big task. I feel
about you in the Sudan just as I felt about us in Panama. When we
acquired the right to build the Panama Canal, and entered on the task,
there were worthy people who came to me and said they wondered whether
it would pay. I always answered that it was one of the great world
works which had to be done; that it was our business as a nation to do
it, if we were ready to make good our claim to be treated as a great
world Power; and that as we were unwilling to abandon the claim, no
American worth his salt ought to hesitate about performing the task. I
feel just the same way about you in the Sudan.
[12] Sir Reginald Wingate, who at the time of this address was
both Sirdar of the Anglo-Egyptian Army and Governor-General of the
Sudan.--L.F.A.
Now as to Egypt. It would not be worth my while to speak to you at
all, nor would it be worth your while to listen, unless on condition
that I say what I deeply feel ought to be said. I speak as an
outsider, but in one way this is an advantage, for I speak without
national prejudice. I would not talk to you about your own internal
affairs here at home; but you are so very busy at home that I am not
sure whether you realize just how things are, in some places at least,
abroad. At any rate, it can do you no harm to hear the view of one who
has actually been on the ground, and has information at first hand; of
one, moreover, who, it is true, is a sincere well-wisher of the
British Empire, but who is not English by blood, and who is impelled
to speak mainly because of his deep concern in the welfare of mankind
and in the future of civilization. Remember also that I who address
you am not only an American, but a Radical, a real--not a
mock--democrat, and that what I have to say is spoken chiefly because
I am a democrat, a man who feels that his first thought is bound to be
the welfare of the masses of mankind, and his first duty to war
against violence and injustice and wrong-doing, wherever found; and I
advise you only in accordance with the principles on which I have
myself acted as American President in dealing with the Philippines.
In Egypt you are not only the guardians of your own interests; you are
also the guardians of the interests of civilization; and the present
condition of affairs in Egypt is a grave menace to both your Empire
and the entire civilized world. You have given Egypt the best
government it has had for at least two thousand years--probably a
better government than it has ever had before; for never in history
has the poor man in Egypt, the tiller of the soil, the ordinary
laborer, been treated with as much justice and mercy, under a rule as
free from corruption and brutality, as during the last twenty-eight
years. Yet recent events, and especially what has happened in
connection with and following on the assassination of Boutros Pasha
three months ago, have shown that, in certain vital points, you have
erred; and it is for you to make good your error. It has been an error
proceeding from the effort to do too much and not too little in the
interests of the Egyptians themselves; but unfortunately it is
necessary for all of us who have to do with uncivilized peoples, and
especially with fanatical peoples, to remember that in such a
situation as yours in Egypt weakness, timidity, and sentimentality may
cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of all
broken reeds, sentimentality[13] is the most broken reed on which
righteousness can lean.
[13] In the Introduction will be found Mr. Roosevelt's
differentiation of sentimentality from sentiment.--L.F.A.
In Egypt you have been treating all religions with studied fairness
and impartiality; and instead of gratefully acknowledging this, a
noisy section of the native population takes advantage of what your
good treatment has done to bring about an anti-foreign movement, a
movement in which, as events have shown, murder on a large or a small
scale is expected to play a leading part. Boutros Pasha[14] was the
best and most competent Egyptian official, a steadfast upholder of
English rule, and an earnest worker for the welfare of his countrymen;
and he was murdered simply and solely because of these facts, and
because he did his duty wisely, fearlessly, and uprightly. The
attitude of the so-called Egyptian Nationalist Party in connection
with this murder has shown that they were neither desirous nor capable
of guaranteeing even that primary justice the failure to supply which
makes self-government not merely an empty but a noxious farce. Such
are the conditions; and where the effort made by your officials to
help the Egyptians towards self-government is taken advantage of by
them, not to make things better, not to help their country, but to try
to bring murderous chaos upon the land, then it becomes the primary
duty of whoever is responsible for the government in Egypt to
establish order, and to take whatever measures are necessary to that
end.
[14] Compare the address at the University of Cairo.--L.F.A.
It was with this primary object of establishing order that you went
into Egypt twenty-eight years ago; and the chief and ample
justification for your presence in Egypt was this absolute necessity
of order being established from without, coupled with your ability and
willingness to establish it. Now, either you have the right to be in
Egypt or you have not; either it is or it is not your duty to
establish and keep order. If you feel that you have not the right to
be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and to keep order there,
why, then, by all means get out of Egypt. If, as I hope, you feel that
your duty to civilized mankind and your fealty to your own great
traditions alike bid you to stay, then make the fact and the name
agree and show that you are ready to meet in very deed the
responsibility which is yours. It is the thing, not the form, which is
vital; if the present forms of government in Egypt, established by you
in the hope that they would help the Egyptians upward, merely serve to
provoke and permit disorder, then it is for you to alter the forms;
for if you stay in Egypt it is your first duty to keep order, and
above all things also to punish murder and to bring to justice all who
directly or indirectly incite others to commit murder or condone the
crime when it is committed. When a people treats assassination as the
corner-stone of self-government, it forfeits all right to be treated
as worthy of self-government. You are in Egypt for several purposes,
and among them one of the greatest is the benefit of the Egyptian
people. You saved them from ruin by coming in, and at the present
moment, if they are not governed from outside, they will again sink
into a welter of chaos. Some nation must govern Egypt. I hope and
believe that you will decide that it is your duty to be that nation.
* * * * *
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[15]
[15] The text of this Lecture, which is the Romanes Lecture for
1910, is included in the present volume under the courteous
permission of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of
Oxford.--L.F.A.
Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910
An American who in response to such an invitation as I have received
speaks in this University of ancient renown, cannot but feel with
peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught
as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and
all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the
minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who
dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are
no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My
people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I
am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the
Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came
from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people
is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become more
and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the
old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that as time
goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the
English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my
ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come
to Oxford in "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," would have felt
far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in
the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in
the things of the body.
More than ever before in the world's history we of to-day seek to
penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind
but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we
see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we
look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages,
from the immemorial past when in "cramp elf and saurian forms" the
creative forces "swathed their too-much power," down to the yesterday,
a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man
became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet;
and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and
death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of
animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the
highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when
we speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence.
In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the
history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in
scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by
the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits.
I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for
instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and
the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the
science that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements
as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so
accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial
conditions--for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary
life during the last three generations have been greater than in all
the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science
which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life
than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A
hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know
something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather
against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge.
At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in
scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and
the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most
advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled
in the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of
science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect
naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain
tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This is
particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have
scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history
of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what
biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has
arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science.
Both positions are in their essence right; but as regards each
position the more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of
knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As
regards the latter of the two positions, that which would treat
history henceforth merely as one branch of scientific study, we must
of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording facts and
appreciation of their relative worth and inter-relationship are just
as necessary in historical study as in any other kind of study. The
fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course removes it
at once from the category of history, however much it may still
deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group of volumes
which deal with entertaining fiction. But the converse also holds, at
least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon what would seem to
be the elementary fact that a book which is written to be read should
be readable. This rather obvious truth seems to have been forgotten by
some of the more zealous scientific historians, who apparently hold
that the worth of a historical book is directly in proportion to the
impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. Now I am willing
that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on
condition that it also remains a branch of literature; and,
furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the
field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of
literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which
can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to
include literature as well as science, is the need of books for
scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be
readable. So far from doing away with the school of great historians,
the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need
merely that the future writers of history, without losing the
qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the new
facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal. Dryness
is not in itself a measure of value. No "scientific" treatise about
St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that
Joinville's place is in both history and literature; no minute study
of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot--and Marbot is
as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the
branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art
of presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than
the layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics
which can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of
realization, it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the
future must essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great
historians of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an
honorable, but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian
who produces books which are not literature must rest content with the
honor, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him
who gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to
use.
Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of
literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in
the scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He
who would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology,
of the science that treats of living, breathing things; and
especially of that science of evolution which is inseparably connected
with the great name of Darwin. Of course there is no exact parallelism
between the birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world,
and the birth, growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet
there is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be
that there are homologies.
How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are more
than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the
interpretation of human history, we cannot at present say. The
historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man
is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance
is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is
advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and,
moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts
of vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full
significance, are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The
research which enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge
stands first; but second only stands the research which, while
enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also requires us to say that
with our present knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of
the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the
higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.
Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time
necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many
hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed by
since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we find
the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian life
on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as we see
them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of man
substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him, we also
find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind, though
widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day.
Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type,
in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most
imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned
into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed
clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these
lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The
scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of
the relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by
mutation, by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study
their writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work
which our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the
case the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and
such partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying
that we have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the
development of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals,
there are some facts which are clearly established, some great and
sweeping changes for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons.
There are other facts as to which we grope in the dark, and vast
changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give no adequate
explanation.
Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of
terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of species
we must remember that such expressions as "a new species," or as "a
species becoming extinct," are each commonly and indiscriminately
used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course
the "new" species is not new in the sense that its ancestors
appeared later on the globe's surface than those of any old
species tottering to extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now
living must necessarily trace its ancestral descent back through
countless generations, through æons of time, to the early stages of
the appearance of life on the globe. All that we mean by a "new"
species is that from some cause, or set of causes, one of these
ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops into a form unlike any
that has preceded it; so that while in one form of life the ancestral
type is continuously repeated and the old species continues to exist,
in another form of life there is a deviation from the ancestral type
and a new species appears.
Similarly, "extinction of species" is a term which has two entirely
different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and
leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the generations
go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced.
Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the other case
it changes into something different. The huge titanothere, and the
small three-toed horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the
same period of the world's history, back in the middle of the
mammalian age. Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely
disappeared and that nothing like either is to be found in the world
to-day. But whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out,
leaving no descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave
descendants, and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages
went by, finally developed into the highly specialized one-toed
horses, asses, and zebras of to-day.
The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in the
development of human societies is striking. A further analogy is
supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of intense
and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes highly
specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization,
triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great
development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so
extreme that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely
guess, it disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly
come from the less specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant,
and striking types, of the preceding era.
When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide
one period of palæontological history from another, we can sometimes
assign causes, and again we cannot even guess at them. In the case of
single species, or of faunas of very restricted localities, the
explanation is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change in
the amount of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in
vegetation, might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge
herbivores with a bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity of
food, and with teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds
of plants could furnish this food. Again, we now know that the most
deadly foes of the higher forms of life are various lower forms of
life, such as insects, or microscopic creatures conveyed into the
blood by insects. There are districts in South America where many
large animals, wild and domestic, cannot live because of the presence
either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there
is a terrible genus of poison fly, each species acting as the host of
microscopic creatures which are deadly to certain of the higher
vertebrates. One of these species, though harmless to man, is fatal to
all domestic animals, and this although harmless to the
closely-related wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another is fatal to
man himself, being the cause of the "sleeping sickness" which in many
large districts has killed out the entire population. Of course the
development or the extension of the range of any such insects, and any
one of many other causes which we see actually at work around us,
would readily account for the destruction of some given species or
even for the destruction of several species in a limited area of
country.
When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is
different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the
knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctogæal continent, for
instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the glacial
period made a complete, but of course explicable, change in the faunal
life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied
fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna
succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is obvious.
But in many other cases we cannot so much as hazard a guess at why a
given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of these
inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South America
towards the close of the tertiary period. For ages South America had
been an island by itself, cut off from North America at the very time
that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication with
Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South America,
some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while others are
recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and
armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian
fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar
during his career on this earth.
Towards the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land
between this old South American island and North America, near what is
now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge across which the
teeming animal life of the northern continent had access to this queer
southern continent. There followed an inrush of huge, or swift, or
formidable creatures which had attained their development in the
fierce competition of the arctogæal realm. Elephants, camels, horses,
tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer,
crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers
and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not
only was the character of the South American fauna totally changed by
the invasion of these creatures from the north, which soon swarmed
over the continent, but it was also changed through the development
wrought in the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they
were exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types died out.
Others developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and
thereby saved themselves from the new beasts. In consequence, South
America soon became populated with various new species of mastodons,
sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses, deer, cats, wolves, hooved
creatures of strange shapes and some of them of giant size, all of
these being descended from the immigrant types; and side by side with
them there grew up large autochthonous [TR: original autochthonus]
ungulates, giant ground sloths well-nigh as large as elephants, and
armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally of the armadillo
or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only held their own,
but actually in their turn wandered north over the isthmus and invaded
North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, as abundant
in species and individuals, even more noteworthy, because of its huge
size or odd type, and because of the terrific prowess of the more
formidable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in South America, and
flourished for a period which human history would call very long
indeed, but which geologically was short.
Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this
fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate
befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous fauna
and the descendants of the migrants that had come down from the north.
Ground sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all
the associated animals of large size, vanished, and South America,
though still retaining its connection with North America, once again
became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that
of North America and the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for
instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like
wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of
small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes
diminutive representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both of
the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants among
the new and intrusive kinds. The change was widespread and
extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is wholly
inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine any
cause which would account for the extinction of so many species of
huge or moderate size, while smaller representatives, and here and
there medium-sized representatives, of many of them were left.
Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there
are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history of
human societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, of the
development and change, of the temporary dominance, and death or
transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form races or
nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind that we
use each of the words "birth" and "death," "youth" and "age," often
very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally
different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing
as an "old" or a "young" nation, any more than there is an "old" or
"young" family. Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral descent must
be of exactly the same length for every existing individual, and for
every group of individuals, whether forming a family or a nation. All
that can properly be meant by the terms "new" and "young" is that in a
given line of descent there has suddenly come a period of rapid
change. This change may arise either from a new development or
transformation of the old elements, or else from a new grouping of
these elements with other and varied elements; so that the words "new"
nation or "young" nation may have a real difference of significance in
one case from what they have in another.
As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the
specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing,
generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, occurs when a
barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more
complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for
instance, in Western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and,
later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the
modern countries of Western Europe are descended from the states
created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be
called "new" or "young" states in the sense that part or all of the
people composing them were descended from races that hitherto had not
been civilized, and that therefore, for the first time, entered on the
career of civilized communities. In the southern part of Western
Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants
already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the
new kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence
then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders had
come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities
with essentially the same civilization as their southern neighbors;
though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there
was no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which
gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same
races which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a
slowly changing barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the
slavonized Finns of Eastern Europe, when an infiltration of
Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine
culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have
gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the
steppe, formed the mighty Russian Empire of to-day.
Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a long
established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this case
the nation is usually spoken of as a "young," and is correctly spoken
of as a "new," nation; but the term should always be used with a clear
sense of the difference between what is described in such case, and
what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized nation
just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new cities
compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phoenician race was in
every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old city. So,
nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared with
England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and
culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean
for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that
the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished
many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean
that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly
use the phrase "a new people," in speaking of Canadians or
Australians, Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in an entirely
different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of such
communities as those founded by the Northmen and their descendants
during that period of astonishing growth which saw the descendants of
the Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the
British Islands; we use it in an entirely different sense from that in
which we use it when speaking of the new states that grew up around
Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes
and the marshy forests struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to
become builders of cities and to form stable governments. The kingdoms
of Charlemagne and Alfred were "new," compared to the empire on the
Bosphorus; they were also in every way different; their lines of
ancestral descent had nothing in common with that of the polyglot
realm which paid tribute to the Cæsars of Byzantium; their social
problems and after-time history were totally different. This is not
true of those "new" nations which spring direct from old nations.
Brazil, the Argentine, the United States, are all "new" nations,
compared with the nations of Europe; but, with whatever changes in
detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the general European
type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The differences
between these "new" American and these "old" European nations are not
as great as those which separate the "new" nations one from another,
and the "old" nations one from another. There are in each case very
real differences between the new and the old nation; differences both
for good and for evil; but in each case there is the same ancestral
history to reckon with, the same type of civilization, with its
attendant benefits and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer stages are
passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of superficial
differences, are in their essence the same; they are those that
confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront only peoples
struggling from barbarism into civilization.
So, when we speak of the "death" of a tribe, a nation, or a
civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally
different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological
history being complete. Certain tribes of savages--the Tasmanians, for
instance, and various little clans of American Indians--have within
the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals
have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared.
Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are now
disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the veins
of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those white
intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed into
something absolutely different from what they were. In the United
States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees,
Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes, are in process of absorption
into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a
couple of years ago, one of the two Senators, and three of the five
Representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a
few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as
those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by
absorption and transformation into the mass of the American
population.
A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that a
civilization has "died out." The nationality and culture of the
wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have
completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences
dating therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and
hidden form as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the
Roman Empire was of no such character. There was complete change,
far-reaching transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation;
but it would not be correct to speak either of the blood or the
culture of Old Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position to
dogmatize as to the permanence or evanescence of the various strains
of blood that go to make up every civilized nationality; but it is
reasonably certain that the blood of the old Roman still flows through
the veins of the modern Italian; and though there has been much
intermixture, from many different foreign sources--from foreign
conquerors and from foreign slaves--yet it is probable that the
Italian type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the
ancient Latin. As for the culture, the civilization of Rome, this is
even more true. It has suffered a complete transformation, partly by
natural growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements, such
as a Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social
customs; but the process was not one of extinction, but one of growth
and transformation, both from within and by the accretion of outside
elements. In France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small;
but the Roman culture which was forced on those countries has been
tenaciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical
and political changes, as the basis on which their civilizations have
been built. Moreover, the permanent spreading of Roman influence was
not limited to Europe. It has extended to and over half of that New
World which was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of
brilliant life between the birth and the death of Pagan Rome. This New
World was discovered by one Italian, and its mainland first reached
and named by another; and in it, over a territory many times the size
of Trajan's empire, the Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers
founded, beside the St. Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of
the Andes and in the shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico,
from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan, communities, now
flourishing and growing apace, which in speech and culture, and even
as regards one strain in their blood, are the lineal heirs of the
ancient Latin civilization. When we speak of the disappearance, the
passing away, of ancient Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we
are using the same terms to describe totally different phenomena.
The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more clearly
than their predecessors of a couple of generations back how artificial
most great nationalities are, and how loose is the terminology usually
employed to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and
rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which
spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as if
the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something
ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and
faith in their own and their fellow-countrymen's purity of descent
from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a few
generations earlier by the various noble families who traced their
lineage direct to Odin, Æneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course, all
students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the
slightest connection between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue.
In America we find three races, white, red, and black, and three
tongues, English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such a way that the
lines of cleavage of race continually run at right angles to the lines
of cleavage of speech; there being communities practically of pure
blood of each race found speaking each language. Aryan and Teutonic
are terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; but whether they
have any such ethnical meanings as were formerly attributed to them is
so doubtful, that we cannot even be sure whether the ancestors of most
of those we call Teutons originally spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The
term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when used linguistically; but
when used to describe a race it means almost nothing until we find out
which one of several totally different terminologies the writer or
speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is used to designate
the short-headed, medium-sized type common throughout middle Europe,
from east to west, it denotes something entirely different from what
is meant when the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents
of the Romans and the later Greeks; while if used to designate any
modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as the
term Anglo-Saxon itself.
Most of the great societies which have developed a high civilization
and have played a dominant part in the world have been--and
are--artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the sense of
including totally different race types. A great nation rarely belongs
to any one race, though its citizens generally have one essentially
national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great
artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the parts
feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward or go
back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very
powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is
far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed
we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from
one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when
they become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and
creed sink into littleness.
An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided
according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as
stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance
whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities,
of Europe; while on the contrary a linguistic map would show a general
correspondence between speech and nationality. The northern Frenchman
is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to his
German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean
seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than
to the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of
the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that
tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen
feel keenly that they are one, and are different from all outsiders,
their differences dwindling into insignificance, compared with the
extraordinary, artificially produced, resemblances which bring them
together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true
when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the
Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German
of the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and
Yorkshireman in England.
In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and primitive
relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized, civilized, or
semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution in drawing
analogies with what has occurred in the development of the animal
world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of the
phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these complex, artificial
groups of human beings resemble what has happened in myriads of
instances in the history of life on this planet.
Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are knit by a bond of
speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood, show periods of
extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering decay? In some
cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases we cannot as yet
even guess what the proper answer should be. If in any such case the
centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal, the nation will of course
fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure to become a dominant
force is patent to every one. The minute that the spirit which finds
its healthy development in local self-government, and is the antidote
to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into mere
particularism, into inability to combine effectively for achievement
of a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland
and certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the standard
examples of failure of this kind; and the United States would have
ranked with them, and her name would have become a byword of derision,
if the forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the
growth of soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a
national danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the
vision of a seer to foretell what must happen in any community if the
average woman ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy
children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work up
to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely
commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in
graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the
nation has lost what no material prosperity can offset.
But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially
inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great
slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a country-side of
peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like
acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the
citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the
State, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But this does
not explain why the forward movement stopped at different times, so
far as different matters were concerned; at one time as regards
literature, at another time as regards architecture, at another time
as regards city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome's
dissolution at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the
impoverishment and depopulation of the Empire, its fall would be quite
sufficiently explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had
lost the fighting edge--an essential even under a despotism, and
therefore far more essential in free, self-governing communities, such
as those of the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is
rather that out of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during
the last days of the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an
Empire able to hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or
four centuries. But why, for instance, should the higher kinds of
literary productiveness have ceased about the beginning of the second
century, whereas the following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of
energy in the shape of city-building in the provinces, not only in
Western Europe, but in Africa? We cannot even guess why the springs of
one kind of energy dried up, while there was yet no cessation of
another kind.
Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period
covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like
some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the
dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior
in territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or
later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which
she had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it
could not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker
than it needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which
both Great Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed.
Her government was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being
such as often to permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of
the provinces to rob the central authority of all efficiency. This was
bad enough. But the fatal weakness was that so common in rich,
peace-loving societies, where men hate to think of war as possible,
and try to justify their own reluctance to face it either by
high-sounding moral platitudes, or else by a philosophy of
short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were very wealthy. They grew to
believe that they could hire others to do their fighting for them on
land; and on sea, where they did their own fighting, and fought very
well, they refused in time of peace to make ready fleets so efficient,
as either to insure them against the peace being broken, or else to
give them the victory when war came. To be opulent and unarmed is to
secure ease in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster in
the future.
It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position
among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the
same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position
in the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burned
itself out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of
great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the
great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools
followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.
In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it
was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy
teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the
Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no
decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so
many countries; no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no
general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first a
flowering time, in which the country's men of action and men of
thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day;
then this period of command passed, and the State revolved in an eddy,
aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the
people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially
unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered
themselves, and play again a leading part.
In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course
of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really Roman
went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the
gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and frivolity, of
contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating
self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as
most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work
throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism.
It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring
forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people
cowered in helpless misery among the horse-hoofs of the barbarians, as
the wild northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the
cities for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but
in the end it was seen that what came had been in part change and
growth. It was not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a
vast heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern
world; but the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain
in their veins. In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth for
Italy. Then for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many
little city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in
their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts
and letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve
order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, cannot unfairly
be compared with classic Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was
ruled by Spaniard or Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the
nineteenth century, there came for the third time a wonderful new
birth.
Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in
certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance in
certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one time
seemed as firmly established as in Italy--certainly as in Spain or
Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of a
national type can be found than in the case of the Græco-Roman
dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over
nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the
time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins
of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must
once have been. The over-shadowing and far-reaching importance of what
occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New
Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North
Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the Valley of the Po.
The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a
period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage
of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then
they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion,
and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they
vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside
them a new type, the Arab.
Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main
facts. We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the
greatness of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood remains
in Italy, whether to a greater or less extent; and that the Latin
culture has died out in the African realm it once won, while it has
lasted in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to
continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts,
save partially; but the facts themselves we do know. But there are
other cases in which we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we
do not know what the changes really were, still less the hidden
causes and meaning of these changes. Much remains to be found out
before we can speak with any certainty as to whether some changes mean
the actual dying out or the mere transformation of types. It is, for
instance, astonishing how little permanent change in the physical
make-up of the people seems to have been worked in Europe by the
migrations of the races in historic times. A tall, fair-haired,
long-skulled race penetrates to some southern country and establishes
a commonwealth. The generations pass. There is no violent revolution,
no break in continuity of history, nothing in the written records to
indicate an epoch-making change at any given moment; and yet after a
time we find that the old type has reappeared and that the people of
the locality do not substantially differ in physical form from the
people of other localities that did not suffer such an invasion. Does
this mean that gradually the children of the invaders have dwindled
and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient blood, has
there been a change, part reversion and part assimilation, to the
ancient type in its old surroundings? Do tint of skin, eyes and hair,
shape of skull, and stature, change in the new environment, so as to
be like those of the older people who dwelt in this environment? Do
the intrusive races, without change of blood, tend under the pressure
of their new surroundings to change in type so as to resemble the
ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the strains mingled, has the new
strain dwindled and vanished, from causes as yet obscure? Has the
blood of the Lombard practically disappeared from Italy, and of the
Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow in large populations where
the old physical type has once more become dominant? Here in England,
the long-skulled men of the long barrows, the short-skulled men of the
round barrows, have they blended, or has one or the other type
actually died out; or are they merged in some older race which they
seemingly supplanted, or have they adopted the tongue and civilization
of some later race which seemingly destroyed them? We cannot say. We
do not know which of the widely different stocks now speaking Aryan
tongues represents in physical characteristics the ancient Aryan type,
nor where the type originated, nor how or why it imposed its language
on other types, nor how much or how little mixture of blood
accompanied the change of tongue.
The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of those which can
and those which cannot be explained, have been peculiarly in evidence
during the four centuries that have gone by since the discovery of
America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These have been the
four centuries of by far the most intense and constantly accelerating
rapidity of movement and development that the world has yet seen. The
movement has covered all the fields of human activity. It has
witnessed an altogether unexampled spread of civilized mankind over
the world, as well as an altogether unexampled advance in man's
dominion over nature; and this together with a literary and artistic
activity to be matched in but one previous epoch. This period of
extension and development has been that of one race, the so-called
white race, or, to speak more accurately, the group of peoples living
in Europe, who undoubtedly have a certain kinship of blood, who
profess the Christian religion, and trace back their culture to Greece
and Rome.
The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief is
this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race. It
is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years which went
before the opening of this era of European supremacy, the attitude of
Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and Moor,
had on the whole been that of successful aggression against Europe.
More than a century went by after the voyages of Columbus before the
mastery in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During
that time Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand
comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European
advance gathered momentum; until at the present time peoples of
European blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and the
islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia.
Much of this world conquest is merely political, and such a conquest
is always likely in the long run to vanish. But very much of it
represents not a merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the
intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the
conquered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its tongue, law,
culture, and religion, together with a strain of its blood. During
this period substantially all of the world achievements worth
remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent. The
first exception of any consequence is the wonderful rise of Japan
within the last generation--a phenomenon unexampled in history; for
both in blood and in culture the Japanese line of ancestral descent is
as remote as possible from ours, and yet Japan, while hitherto keeping
most of what was strongest in her ancient character and traditions,
has assimilated with curious completeness most of the characteristics
that have given power and leadership to the West.
During this period of intense and feverish activity among the peoples
of European stock, first one and then another has taken the lead. The
movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their flowering time was as
brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of their annals are
illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, poets, and
painters. Then their days of greatness ceased. Many partial
explanations can be given, but something remains behind, some hidden
force for evil, some hidden source of weakness upon which we cannot
lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after
centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese
stock are entering upon another era of development, and there are
other signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.
About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of
the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of
Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the
Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp
leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has
at one time or another sought a place in the movement of expansion;
but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has
been the growth of the English-speaking peoples and their spread over
the world's waste spaces.
Comparison is often made between the Empire of Britain and the Empire
of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all modern
civilization, the Empire of Rome is of course the more important,
simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other
continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by the
Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The Empire of Rome is the
most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time can be
compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying that the
nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection of the
stream's current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one with the
other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the immensely
increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the older
empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand years,
there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and
abounding interest and importance of their careers.
In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its predecessor
had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed large over the
horizon of history, there were left for her to contend with only
decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus,
she strove against the strength of but one of the many fragments into
which Alexander's kingdom had fallen. When she conquered Carthage, she
overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single Greek city
of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy armies
of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of the House
of Barca, which rendered the struggle for ever memorable. It was the
distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen, that
set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was
curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the tall
barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her
greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the
Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened
her but to die.
On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the
great Empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that
have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the
continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the
empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had
at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath,
the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and
Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. The Empire of Britain
is vaster in space, in population, in wealth, in wide variety of
possession, in a history of multiplied and manifold achievement of
every kind, than even the glorious Empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome,
Britain has won dominion in every clime, has carried her flag by
conquest and settlement to the uttermost ends of the earth, at the
very time that haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding youth
or strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness, and to
tear from her what she had won afar. England has peopled continents
with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads of
alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all comers
the right to the world's waste spaces, while at home she has held her
own before nations, each of military power comparable to Rome's at her
zenith.
Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own
borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country, my hearers,
is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from
without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard
ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these
enemies are our own passions and follies. Free peoples can escape
being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves. We
Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep
in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of
a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty,
of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my
hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think
me a very radical democrat--as, for the matter of that, I am--and my
theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as
little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist.
But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think
soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is
the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have
a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool.
No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that
wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman;
but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the
all-important factor in national greatness is national character.
There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever
tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to an end?
Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law of
death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can
tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that
can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for
good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for
vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The
most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of
natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of
the civilized nations of Central and Western Europe, of America and
Australia; a diminution so great that if it continues for the next
century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years,
all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else have
begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have
already gone very far backward.
There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there is
much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be mistaken
than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr
hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a
crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third-and
fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked,
comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to
the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the
civilized portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at
Carlyle's prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the
teeming life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and
of noble effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two
generations since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had
been told and all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth
doing had been done. I believe with all my heart that a great future
remains for us; but whether it does or does not, our duty is not
altered. However the battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name
will with utmost vigor do his allotted task, and bear himself as
valiantly in defeat as in victory. Come what will, we belong to
peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being great. In the
ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations that have
expanded and that have played a mighty part in the world, have in the
end grown old and weakened and vanished; but so have the nations whose
only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who would risk
nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end, the same fate
may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type perishes with
it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the history of all the
future of mankind.
A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in the
physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of
heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence
the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has
done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time to
see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to take up the
task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth. But
if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours to
remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers
were before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation,
from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from
the dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of
this teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward
and the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the
man whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept
alight only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand.
What they worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less
matter than how they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the
realm of the body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was
of substance, then high success was really theirs.
In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between
what has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession of
the ages on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring to the
great artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the
world's surface, during the thousands of years that have elapsed since
cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the
Euphrates, and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of
the Ægean craft. But of course the parallel is true only in the
roughest and most general way. Moreover, even between the
civilizations of to-day and the civilizations of ancient times, there
are differences so profound that we must be cautious in drawing any
conclusions for the present based on what has happened in the past.
While freely admitting all of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it
is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize the incredible advance
that has been made in ethical standards. I do not believe that there
is the slightest necessary connection between any weakening of virile
force and this advance in the moral standard, this growth of the sense
of obligation to one's neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor
wrong. We need have scant patience with that silly cynicism which
insists that kindliness of character only accompanies weakness of
character. On the contrary, just as in private life many of the men of
strongest character are the very men of loftiest and most exalted
morality, so I believe that in national life, as the ages go by, we
shall find that the permanent national types will more and more tend
to become those in which, though intellect stands high, character
stands higher; in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity
to resist wrongful aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a
lofty scorn of doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of
Hampden, of Washington, and Lincoln. These were as good men, as
disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a State; and they were
also as strong men as ever founded or saved a State. Surely such
examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort to combine
justice and strength in the same nation. The really high civilizations
must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love
of ease which they tend to produce.
Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to solve
within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from
juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the
self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must deal
with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the
problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must be
a spirit of broad humanity; of brotherly kindness; of acceptance of
responsibility, one for each and each for all; and at the same time a
spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and
sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to
the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil
affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the
lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted, a reward which
is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned.
The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself;
and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped
at the expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to best
advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of
minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to the
advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a
majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of
contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body
politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an
impossible--and incidentally of a highly undesirable--social
revolution, which in destroying individual rights--including property
rights--and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the
advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance
or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a
dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our
duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social
conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this
betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social
conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with
the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and
business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to
remember that though hardness of heart is a great evil it is no
greater an evil than softness of head.
But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important of
all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern
nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded,
that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien
races, have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong
to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has
ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying on a scale hitherto
unexampled to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the
people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great
Power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve,
and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the
man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and
the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with
utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our
own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the
barbarism which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that
arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They cannot be solved
by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little
patent recipes, and those cut-and-dried theories of the political
nursery which have such limited applicability amid the crash of
elemental forces. Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality of
the men who, whether at home or on the rough frontier of civilization,
adopt might as the only standard of right in dealing with other men,
and treat alien races only as subjects for exploitation.
No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races,
because they differ from one another far more widely than some of them
differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not be
forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for one race
managing or controlling another unless the management and control are
exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. This
is what our peoples have in the main done, and must continue in the
future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the
Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race,
everywhere, at home or abroad, we cannot afford to deviate from the
great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth
as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a
given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted
to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied
to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the other hand, where he
acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was
one of our own stock, he is just as entitled to that respect and
reward if he comes of another stock, even though that other stock
produces a much smaller proportion of men of his type than does our
own. This has nothing to do with social intermingling, with what is
called social equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing
to each man and each woman that elementary justice which will permit
him or her to gain from life the reward which should always accompany
thrift, sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights of others, and
hard and intelligent work to a given end. To more than such just
treatment no man is entitled, and less than such just treatment no man
should receive.
The other type of duty is the international duty, the duty owed by one
nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which should
govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are just as
binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the other. The
application of the moral law must be different in the two cases,
because in one case it has, and in the other it has not, the sanction
of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can depend for his
rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their force from the
police power of the State. The nation can depend upon nothing of the
kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest duty of the
most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves in such a state of
readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the hope of
arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that
lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the
unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples
who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible
foe. But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and the
peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and
iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate
lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong; and
both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous
fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country
should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence
upon one's own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that
marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his
fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience.
For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged
especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those
years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face
of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an
individual in dealing with other individuals.
I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a
right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several
countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of
doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily for
success even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer souls
of small endeavor who know neither failure nor success. Let us hope
that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children and
children's children to endless generations shall arise to take our
places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether
this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least
the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch
in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close,
and we go out into the darkness, and others' hands grasp the torch, at
least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.
* * * * *
APPENDIX
CONVOCATION
JUNE 7, 1910
FOLLOWED BY THE DELIVERY OF
THE ROMANES LECTURE
BY
THE HON'BLE THEODORE ROOSEVELT
HON. D.C.L.
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
LORD CURZON OF KEDLESTON
CHANCELLOR
PRESIDING
* * * * *
Convocation and the Romanes Lecture, June 7, 1910[16]
[16] An artistically printed pamphlet, containing, with text in
Latin and in English, the programme and ritual here given, was
placed by the University authorities in the hands of each member
of the audience.--L.F.A.
THE CHANCELLOR.
Causa huius Convocationis est, Academici, ut, si vobis placuerit, in
virum Honorabilem Theodorum Roosevelt, Civitatum Foederatarum Americae
Borealis olim Praesidentem, Gradus Doctoris in Iure Civili conferatur
honoris causa; ut Praelectio exspectatissima ab eodem, Doctore in
Universitate facto novissimo, coram vobis pronuncietur; necnon ut alia
peragantur, quae ad Venerabilem hanc Domum spectant.
Placetne igitur Venerabili huic Convocationi ut in virum Honorabilem
Theodorum Roosevelt Gradus Doctoris in Iure Civili conferatur honoris
causa?
Placetne vobis, Domini Doctores? Placetne vobis, Magistri?
* * * * *
To the Bedels.
Ite, Bedelli! Petite Virum Honorabilem!
* * * * *
The Chancellor to the Vice-Chancellor, as Mr. Roosevelt takes his
place for presentation.
Hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis,
Cuius in adventum pavidi cessere cometae
Et septemgemini turbant trepida ostia Nili!
* * * * *
PRESENTATION SPEECH by DR. HENRY GOUDY, Regius Professor of Civil Law,
Fellow of All Souls College.
Insignissime Cancellarie!
Vosque Egregii Procuratores!
Saepenumero mihi et antea contigit plurimos e Republica illa illustri
oriundos, affines nostros, vobis praesentare gradum honorarium
Doctoris in Iure Civili accepturos, inter quos vel nomina
praestantissimorum hominum citare in promptu esset. Neque tamen
quemquam vel suis ipsius meritis vel fama digniorem, qui hoc titulo
donaretur, salutavi quam hunc virum quem ad vos duco.
Batavorum antiqua stirpe ortus, sicut et nomen ipsius inclitum
indicat, Americanae patriae germanum civem sese praestitit; in qua
nemo sane laudem maiorem Reipublicae suae suorum iudicio contulisse
creditur.
Tardius quidem ad Britannos fama nominis inclaruit, imprimis tum quum
certamine inter Hispanos atque suos orto alae Equitum praefectus rei
militaris sese peritissimum ostentabat. Huic autem, omnia scire
ardenti, nulla pars humanitatis supervacua aut negligenda videbatur.
Manifesto quippe declaravit, ut cum poeta loquar:
"Non sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo,"
atque exinde annales non tantum patriae suae sed totius terrarum orbis
exemplo virtutis implere.
Quippe bis Hercule! in locum amplissimum Praesulis Reipublicae suae
electus egregio illo in statu ita se gerebat ut laudes et nomen magni
illius antecessoris, Abraham Lincoln, vel aequipararet--quorum alter
servitudinem, alter corruptionem vicit. Unde et spem licet concipere
ut viro bis summum civitatis honorem adepto accedat et denuo idem ille
honor terna vice, numero auspicatissimo, numerandus.
Fortem hospitis nostri animum et tenacem propositi novimus; felicitati
et otio non modo suorum sed etiam gentium exterarum consuluit:
bellator ipse atque idem pacis omnibus terrae gentibus firmandae
auctor indefessus, sicut et exemplum illustre praebuit nuper foedere
icto post bellum inter Iapones et Scytharum populos gestuni. Neque
idem pacem veram esse iudicavit, nisi quae iustitiae et ipsa
inniteretur; quippe civitates laude dignas negavit quibus nee in se
ipsis constaret fides et animi magnitudo.
Venatoriam artem exercuit, historiae naturalis amator; post dimissum
opus civicum requiem in Africae solitudinibus nuper quaesivit ubi in
feras terrae non minore animo, successu haud minore, ferrum exacuit
quam in malos saeculi mores saevire solitus est.
Iam tandem, laboribus functus, patriam suam repetiturus nobiscum
paulum temporis commoratur Ulysses ille alter, viarum pariter expertus
et consiliorum largitor.
Neque praetermittendum est hospitem nostrum, dum varias artes colit,
Musarum opus non neglexisse, stilo non minus quam lingua facundus;
quem nos, Academici, magnis de rebus loquentem hodie audituri sumus.
Hunc igitur praesento
Theodorum Roosevelt,
ut admittatur ad gradum Doctoris in Iure Civili honoris causa.
* * * * *
The Chancellor to Mr. Roosevelt in admitting him to the Degree.
Strenuissime, insignissime, civium toto orbe terrae hodie agentium,
summum ingentis rei publicae magistratum bis incorrupte gestum, ter
forsitan gesture, augustissimis regibus par, hominum domitor, beluarum
ubique vastator, homo omnium humanissime, nihil a te alienum, ne
nigerrimum quidem, putans, ego auctoritate Mea et totius Universitatis
admitto te ad Gradum Doctoris in Iure Civili _honoris causa_.
The Chancellor to the Bedels.
Ite, Bedelli! Ducite Doctorem Honorabilem ad Pulpitum!
* * * * *
The Chancellor will then, in English, welcome Mr. Roosevelt to
Oxford, and invite him to deliver his Lecture.
* * * * *
THE ROMANES LECTURE
* * * * *
At the close of the Lecture the Chancellor will direct the
Vice-Chancellor to dissolve the Convocation as follows:
Iamque tempus enim est, Insignissime mi Vice-Cancellarie, dissolve,
quaeso, Convocationem.
* * * * *
The Vice-Chancellor will dissolve the Convocation as follows:
Celsissime Domine Cancellarie, iussu tuo dissolvimus hanc
Convocationem.
FINIS
* * * * *
Convocation and the Romanes Lecture
TRANSLATION OF THE LATIN
THE CHANCELLOR.
The object of this Convocation is, that, if it be your pleasure,
Gentlemen of the University, the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Civil
Law may be conferred on the Honorable Theodore Roosevelt, ex-President
of the United States of North America, that the long-expected Romanes
Lecture may be delivered by him, when he has been made the youngest
Doctor in the University, and that any other business should be
transacted which may belong to this Venerable House.
Is it the pleasure then of this Venerable House that the Honorary
Degree of Doctor of Civil Law should be conferred upon the Honorable
Theodore Roosevelt? Is it your pleasure, Reverend Doctors? Is it your
pleasure, Masters of the University?
* * * * *
Go, Bedels, and bring in the Honorable gentleman!
* * * * *
The Chancellor to the Vice-Chancellor.
Behold, Vice-Chancellor, the promised wight,
Before whose coming comets turned to flight,
And all the startled mouths of sevenfold Nile took fright!
* * * * *
PRESENTATION SPEECH by DR. HENRY GOUDY.
It has been my privilege to present in former years many distinguished
citizens of the great American Republic for our honorary degree of
Doctor of Laws, but none of them have surpassed in merit or obtained
such world-wide celebrity as he whom I now present to you. Of ancient
Dutch lineage, as his name indicates, but still a genuine American,
he has long been an outstanding figure among his fellow citizens. He
first became known to us in England during the Spanish-American War,
when he commanded a regiment of cavalry and proved himself a most
capable military leader. Omnivorous in his quest of knowledge, nothing
in human affairs seemed to him superfluous or negligible. In the
language of the poet, one might say of him--"Non sibi sed toti genitum
se credere mundo." Twice has he been elevated to the position of
President of the Republic, and in performing the duties of that high
office has acquired a title to be ranked with his great predecessor
Abraham Lincoln--"Quorum alter servitudinem, alter corruptionem
vicit." May we not presage that still a third time--most auspicious of
numbers--he may be called upon to take the reins of government?
With unrivalled energy and tenacity of purpose he has combined lofty
ideals with a sincere devotion to the practical needs not only of his
fellow countrymen, but of humanity at large. A sincere friend of peace
among nations--who does not know of his successful efforts to
terminate the devastating war between Russia and Japan?--he has also
firmly held that Peace is only a good thing when combined with justice
and right. He has ever asserted that a nation can only hope to survive
if it be self-respecting and makes itself respected by others.
A noted sportsman and lover of Natural History, he has recently, after
his arduous labors as Head of the State, been seeking relaxation in
distant Africa, where his onslaughts on the wild beasts of the desert
have been not less fierce nor less successful than over the
many-headed hydra of corruption in his own land.
Now, like another Ulysses, on his homeward way he has come to us for a
brief interval, after visiting many cities and discoursing on many
themes.
Nor must I omit to remind you that our guest, amid his engrossing
duties of State, has not neglected the Muses. Not less facile with the
pen than the tongue, he has written on many topics, and this afternoon
it will be our privilege to listen to him discoursing on a lofty
theme.
* * * * *
By the Chancellor.
Most strenuous of men, most distinguished of citizens to-day playing a
part on the stage of the world, you who have twice administered with
purity the first Magistracy of the Great Republic (and may perhaps
administer it a third time), peer of the most august Kings, queller of
men, destroyer of monsters wherever found, yet the most human of
mankind, deeming nothing indifferent to you, not even the blackest of
the black; I, by my authority and that of the whole University, admit
you to the Degree of Doctor of Civil Law, _honoris causa_.
* * * * *
Go, Bedels, conduct the Honorable Doctor to the Lectern!
* * * * *
Here follows the Chancellor's welcome, and the Romanes Lecture.
* * * * *
After the Lecture, the Chancellor to the Vice-Chancellor.
And now, my dear Vice-Chancellor--for it is time--be good enough to
dissolve the Convocation!
* * * * *
The Vice-Chancellor.
Exalted Lord Chancellor, at your bidding we dissolve the Convocation.
FINIS
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