Chapter I: Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

The original edition did not include a Table of Contents. For the
convenience of the reader one has been created:

Presidential Addresses and State Papers 5

Remarks at the Dinner of the Periodical Publishers’ Association of
America. the New Willard, Washington, D. C., April 7, 1904 5

Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School, Groton, Mass.,
May 24, 1904 8

Address at Gettysburg, Pa., Memorial Day, May 30, 1904 21

Remarks at the Washington Memorial Chapel, Valley Forge, Pa.,
June 19, 1904 29

Address at Oyster Bay, N. Y., July 27, 1904, in Response to the
Committee Appointed to Notify Him of His Nomination For the
Presidency 36

Letter Accepting the Republican Nomination For President of the
United States 47

Remarks at the White House, Sept. 24, 1904, on the Occasion of the
Reception of the Interparliamentary Union 95

Correspondence, November 4, 1904 - Re: Judge Parker 97

Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of Frederick the Great, at
Washington, Nov. 19, 1904 101

Remarks at St. Patrick’s Church, Washington, D. C., Nov. 20, 1904 108

Remarks Introducing Rev. Charles Wagner, at the Lafayette Opera
House, Washington, D. C., Nov. 22, 1904 112

Message of the President of the United States, Communicated to the
Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Third Session of
the Fifty-eighth Congress 119

Address to the Forest Congress, Washington, D. C., Jan. 5, 1905 190

Speech at the Dinner of the American Institute of Architects, at
the Arlington Hotel, Washington, D. C., Jan. 11, 1905 201

Address at Luther Place Memorial Church, Washington, D. C.,
Jan. 29, 1905 205

Address to the Graduating Class of the Naval Academy at Annapolis,
Maryland, Jan. 30, 1905 209

Address at the Union League Club, Philadelphia, Pa., Jan. 30, 1905 217

Address at the Lincoln Dinner of the Republican Club of the City of
New York, Waldorf-astoria Hotel, Feb. 13, 1905 224

Address at the Hungarian Club Dinner, New York City, Feb. 14, 1905 236

Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting
a Protocol of an Agreement Between the United States and the
Dominican Republic, Providing For the Collection and Disbursement
by the United States of the Customs Revenues of the Dominican
Republic, Signed on February 4, 1905 241

Address at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.,
Feb. 22, 1905 261

Inaugural Address, March 4, 1905 269

Correspondence, March 6, 1905 - To the Senate 273

Address at the Meeting of the American Tract Society, at Grace
Reformed Church, Washington, D. C., March 12, 1905 276

Address Before the National Congress of Mothers, Washington, D. C.,
March 13, 1905 282

Address at the Dinner of the Society of Friendly Sons of St.
Patrick, Delmonico’s, New York City, March 17, 1905 292

Address at the Dinner of the Sons of the American Revolution, Hotel
Astor, New York City, March 17, 1905 300

Address to the Graduates of the United States Naval Medical School,
Washington, D. C., March 25, 1905 309

At Outdoor Meeting at Dallas, Tex., April 5, 1905 314

At the Banquet at Dallas, Tex., April 5, 1905 319

To the Legislature of Texas, Austin, Tex., April 6, 1905 324

Outside of Capitol Building, Austin, Tex., April 6, 1905 330

In Front of the Alamo, San Antonio, Tex., April 7, 1905 334

To the Congregation Assembled at the Blue Schoolhouse on Upper
Divide Creek, Colo., Sunday, April 30, 1905 345

At the Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade,
Denver, Colo., May 9, 1905 350

Homeward Bound Edition

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES
AND STATE PAPERS

_April 7, 1904, to May 9, 1905_

BY

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE
AUTHOR THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

VOLUME III

NEW YORK

THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY

MCMX

The Publishers desire to make clear to the readers that Ex-president
Roosevelt retains no pecuniary interest in the sale of the volumes
containing these speeches. He feels that the material contained in
these addresses has been dedicated to the public, and that it
is, therefore, not to be handled as copyrighted material from
which Mr. Roosevelt should receive any pecuniary return.

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES
AND STATE PAPERS

APRIL 7, 1904

TO

MAY 9, 1905

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

REMARKS AT THE DINNER OF THE PERIODICAL PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA. THE NEW WILLARD, WASHINGTON, D. C., APRIL 7, 1904

_Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen_:

It is always a pleasure to a man in public life to meet the real governing classes. I wish to bid you welcome to Washington this evening, and to say but one word of greeting to you, and that word shall take the form of a warning. I did not speak in jest when I alluded to you as representatives of the governing classes. I think that we of the United States can not keep too fresh in our minds the fact that the men ultimately responsible for the Government are not the representatives of the people, but the people themselves, and that therefore heavy is the responsibility that lies upon the people and above all upon those who do the most toward shaping the thought of the people. In the days of my youth I was a literary man myself. In reading a book recently, a series of essays, I was immensely struck by one thought developed in it. The writer, one of our greatest scholars, was speaking of the fact that freedom could not exist unless there went with it a thorough appreciation of responsibility, and he used a phrase somewhat like this—that among all peoples there must be restraint; if there is no restraint the result is inevitably anarchy. That means the negation of all government, and the negation of all government of course means the negation of popular government; and that therefore there must be restraint, and that therefore a free people had merely substituted self-restraint for external restraint; and the permanence of our freedom as a people, the permanence of our liberties, depends upon the way in which we show and exercise that self-restraint.

There must be much more than good laws to make a good people. The man whose morality is expressed simply in the non-infringement of the law is a pretty poor creature. Unless our average citizenship is based upon a good deal more than the mere observance of the laws on the statute books—that, of course, is the preliminary—that, of course, is the beginning—but unless it is based on more than that then our average citizenship can never produce the kind of government which it must and will produce. So far from liberty, from freedom, from responsible self-government, being things that come easily and to any peoples, they are peculiarly things that can come only to the highly developed peoples. Only peoples capable, not merely of mastering others, but of mastering themselves, can achieve real liberty, can achieve real self-government; and for that self-mastery, for the cultivation of the spirit of self-restraint which is but another side of the spirit of self-reliance, we must rely to no small degree upon those who furnish us much of the thought of the great bulk of our people who think most. Therefore, gentlemen, in greeting you here to-night I wish not merely to welcome you, but to say that I trust every man of you feels the weight of the responsibility that rests upon him. The man who writes, the man who month in and month out, week in and week out, day in and day out, furnishes the material which is to do its part in shaping the thoughts of our people is fundamentally the man who, more than any other, determines what kind of character, and therefore ultimately what kind of government, this people shall possess. I believe in the future of this people; I believe in the growth and greatness of this country, because I believe that fundamentally you and those like you approach your task in the proper spirit. It seems to me that because of the very fact that we are so confident in the greatness of our country and in our country’s future, we should beware of any undue levity, of any spirit of mere boastfulness, of that most irritating of all qualities, not the most noxious, but the most irritating of all qualities—the tendency to depreciate others and thereby exalt ourselves.

Courtesy among individuals is a good thing, but international courtesy is quite as good a thing. If there is any one quality to be deprecated in a public man and in a public writer alike, it is the using of language which without any corresponding gain to ourselves tends to produce irritation among nations with whom we ought to be on friendly terms. Nations are now brought much nearer together than they formerly were. Steam, electricity, the immense spread of the newspaper press in all countries, the way in which so much of what is written in any country is translated into the language of another country, all of these facts have tended to bring peoples closer together now. That ought to and I think in the future will tell predominantly for good; but it does not help us in the least to be brought closer together with other peoples if they merely find our unamiable traits more strongly marked than they thought. We can rest assured that no man ever thinks better of us because we point out his salient defects; and no nation is ever won to a kindlier feeling toward us if we adopt toward it a tone which we would resent if adopted toward us.

We have a very large field for warring against evil here at home. When we have made things all as they should be in Nation, State, and municipality here at home, then we can talk about reforming the rest of mankind; but meanwhile let us begin at home.

ADDRESS AT THE PRIZE DAY EXERCISES AT GROTON SCHOOL, GROTON, MASS., MAY 24, 1904

_Mr. Rector, and Boys, and Fellow-Parents_:

All I shall have to say to you to-day will be simply in the line of illustrating what the Rector has said, for it seems to me that he has preached just about the right gospel of life as we ought to learn it; and let me at the beginning thank the Rector for what I shall hope was a personal allusion to me, because it is the only time in my life that I have been even indirectly compared to Apollo. When the comparison was made I saw the Bishop look self-conscious, so I wish to put in my claim first.

I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and lacks any one of those three traits.

I was struck, Mr. Peabody, by what you said as to the attitude these boys should have in college. The boys from a school like this—from Groton, from St. Mark’s, from St. Paul’s, from any of these schools—if they are worth their salt, if they have real loyalty and not merely lip-loyalty to their schools, ought to go to Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, with the firm intention of so carrying themselves that Groton, St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and the other schools shall not be sneered at because of anything they do. You are not entitled, either in college or in after life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been at Groton—not an ounce; but we are entitled to hold you to an exceptional accountability because you have been at Groton. Because much has been given to you, therefore we have a right to expect much from you; and we have a right to expect that you shall begin to give that much just as soon as you leave school and go to college, so that you shall count when you are there.

I read the other day in a very bright college book a sentence that grated on me because of a sneer it contained at the “shoals of freshmen from church schools,” which implied that they did not so conduct themselves as to add weight for what was best in college life. I do not think such sneers are justified; but you are peculiarly liable to such sneers, and therefore you should be peculiarly careful to walk so as not to be suspected of deserving them. We have a right to expect that you will, from the outset, and without showing yourselves varieties of that most obnoxious of creatures, the prig, handle yourselves decently, so as to be a force for what is decent and right in college.

Another thing: I was glad to hear the Rector, in describing one pitfall that you are to avoid, use just exactly the right word when he asked you to be careful not to turn out snobs. Now, there are in our civic and social life very much worse creatures than snobs, but none more contemptible. (By the way—this is not speaking to the boys, but to the parents—I have had the good luck to have my boys go to the public schools before they came here.) If you have any stuff in you at all, and try to amount to anything in after life, you will not remain snobs even if you start as such. It will be taken out of you very soon and very roughly if you go into any real work. Go into politics—go to your district convention, and try to carry it on the snob basis and see how far you will get. The thing that will strike you in just about a week is that there are a whole lot of able people sliding around this planet. The fact that the individual opposed to you does not wear a cravat, and does wear a saw-edge collar, does not imply that you are going to carry the convention against him! You will soon find that it is not his clothes but his political sense and energy that control. You will find that if you expect to do anything there will be mighty little temptation to try to treat the men with whom you are working on any basis save the fundamental democratic basis of what they amount to, and what you can show you amount to as compared to them. So that if you go into life to do anything, it is perfectly useless for me to tell you to get rid of snobbery, because you will have to. It is just as true in every other field as in politics. Every man who works in philanthropy—and he can do nothing in philanthropy unless he combines a very earnest desire to accomplish what is decent with the determination to accomplish it in practical fashion (I shall speak of that later)—if he goes into philanthropy and tries to do something in a college settlement, tries to do his part in working to disentangle the tangled knot of our social and civic life, he will find just as soon as he gets interested in his work he won’t care and won’t know who the people are who are with him except as he judges them by their fruits. The interest that you take in him is, can a given man accomplish something? If he can not, then let him give place to the man who can.

You see, all I am doing is to amplify here and there the Rector’s speech. Take what was said about scholarship. I came here intending to speak to you along that same line, although in a slightly different way, approaching it from a slightly different aspect. I believe with all my heart in athletics, in sport, and have always done as much thereof as my limited capacity and my numerous duties would permit; but I believe in bodily vigor chiefly because I believe in the spirit that lies back of it. If a boy can not go into athletics because he is not physically able to, that does not count in the least against him. He may be just as much of a man in after life as if he could, because it is not physical address but the moral quality behind it which really counts. But if he has the physical ability and keeps out because he is afraid, because he is lazy, because he is a mollycoddle, then I haven’t any use for him. If he has not the right spirit, the spirit which makes him scorn self-indulgence, timidity and mere ease, that is if he has not the spirit which normally stands at the base of physical hardihood, physical prowess, then that boy does not amount to much, and he is not ordinarily going to amount to much in after life. Of course, there are people with special abilities so great as to outweigh even defects like timidity and laziness, but the man who makes the Republic what it is, if he has not courage, the capacity to show prowess, the desire for hardihood; if he has not the scorn of mere ease, the scorn of pain, the scorn of discomfort (all of them qualities that go to make a man’s worth on an eleven or a nine or an eight); if he has not something of that sort in him then the lack is so great that it must be amply atoned for, more than amply atoned for, in other ways, or his usefulness to the community will be small. So I believe heartily in physical prowess, in the sports that go to make physical prowess. I believe in them not only because of the amusement and pleasure they bring, but because I think they are useful. Yet I think you had a great deal better never go into them than to go into them with the idea that they are the chief end even of school or college; still more of life. There was an article in one of the “Atlantic” monthlies last year which all parents (even those of the most limited intellectual home development, Mr. Peabody!) should read, by Lawrence Lowell, on the careers in after life of those who have distinguished themselves as scholars and as athletes in college; and the showing for the athletes was not as good, either, as I had hoped or as I had expected that it would have been. I believe that to have been in athletics is an advantage to a man only if he realizes that even when he is in college it is not his chief end, and if he realizes that once out of college it can not be his end at all. It is a mighty good thing to be a halfback on a varsity eleven; but it is a mighty poor thing, when a man reaches the age of forty, only to be able to say that he was once halfback on an eleven. Do not lose the sense of proportion. Remember that in life, and above all in the very active, practical, workaday life on this continent, the man who wins out must be the man who works. He can not play all the time. He can not have play as his principal occupation and win out. Let him play; let him have as good a time as he can have. I have a pity that is akin to contempt for the man who does not have as good a time as he can out of life. But let him work. Let him count in the world. When he comes to the end of his life let him feel he has pulled his weight and a little more. A sound body is good; a sound mind is better; but a strong and clean character is better than either. In college it is not necessary to get into Phi Beta Kappa, though that is desirable; but it is necessary to work hard at your studies. It is necessary to have the habit of application, the habit of subordinating mere pleasure to serious duty, if you are going to do really good work once you are out of school and out of college. And while I would be very sorry to see those who are in control here in Groton lose that personal touch with their students which has made them again and again keep a poor scholar and thereby make in the end a good citizen; while I should be very sorry to see that policy reversed, still I am glad—I do not know that the boys will share my joy on this point—I am glad that the standard of scholarship is to be raised.

Now, what I have to say to you yourselves, boys, as to what you will amount to when you are men, is in substance but a repetition of what I have already said. If you leave Groton, and the college to which you afterward go, if you go to any—if you leave simply with the feeling that you have had ten delightful years; that you have _just_ barely got through your examinations; that you have graduated; that you are not positively disgraced; that you have met decent people, and that life has been easy and it won’t be your fault if it does not continue as easy—if that is the feeling with which you have left school and college, then you are poor creatures, and there is small good that will ever come out of you. Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that—and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality—comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment—or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for. Incidentally, of all the miserable people that I know I should put high in the top rank those who reach middle age having steadfastly striven only to amuse themselves as they went through life. If there ever was a pursuit which stultified itself by its very conditions, it is the pursuit of pleasure as the all-sufficing end of life. Happiness can not come to any man capable of enjoying true happiness unless it comes as the sequel to duty well and honestly done. To do that duty you need to have more than one trait. You will meet plenty of well-meaning people who speak to you as if one trait were enough. That is not so. You might just as well in any rough sport in any game, think that a man could win by mere strength if he was clumsy; or by mere agility and precision of movement without strength; or by strength and agility if he had no heart. You need a great many qualities to make a successful man on a nine or an eleven; and just so you need a great many different qualities to make a good citizen. In the first place, of course it is almost tautological to say that to make a good citizen the prime need is to be decent, clean in thought, clean in mind, clean in action; to have an ideal and not to keep that ideal purely for the study—to have an ideal which you will in good faith strive to live up to when you are out in life. If you have an ideal only good while you sit at home, an ideal that nobody can live up to in outside life, then I advise you strongly to take that ideal, examine it closely, and then cast it away. It is not a good one. The ideal that it is impossible for a man to strive after in practical life is not the type of ideal that you wish to hold up and follow. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground. Be truthful; a lie implies fear, vanity or malevolence; and be frank; furtiveness and insincerity are faults incompatible with true manliness. Be honest, and remember that honesty counts for nothing unless back of it lie courage and efficiency. If in this country we ever have to face a state of things in which on one side stand the men of high ideals who are honest, good, well-meaning, pleasant people, utterly unable to put those ideals into shape in the rough field of practical life, while on the other side are grouped the strong, powerful, efficient men with no ideals: then the end of the Republic will be near. The salvation of the Republic depends—the salvation of our whole social system depends—upon the production year by year of a sufficient number of citizens who possess high ideals combined with the practical power to realize them in actual life.

You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business, politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before they pass final judgment. And now, gentlemen and ladies, I must be pardoned for one personal allusion. We have here to-day one man whom I have found exactly to answer to that need, who stands as a strong pillar for decency because he has high ideals combined with practical common-sense; and that is Bishop Lawrence.

Well, I guess I have said about all I have to say. Success does not lie entirely in the hands of any one of us. From the day the tower of Siloam fell, misfortune has fallen sometimes upon the just as well as the unjust. We sometimes see the good man, the honest man, the strong man, broken down by forces over which he had no control. If the hand of the Lord is heavy upon us the strength and wisdom of man shall avail nothing. But as a rule in the long run each of us comes pretty near to getting what he deserves. Each of us can, as a rule—there are, of course, exceptions—finally achieve the success best worth having, the success of having played his part honestly and manfully; of having lived so as to feel at the end he has done his duty; of having been a good husband, a good father; of having tried to make the world a little better off rather than worse off because he has lived; of having been a doer of the word and not a hearer only—still less a mere critic of the doers. Every man has it in him, unless fate is indeed hard upon him, to win out that measure of success if he will honestly try.

There are two kinds of success to be won. In the first place, there is success in doing the thing that can only be done by the exceptional man. Therefore most of us can not achieve this kind of success. It comes only to the man who has very exceptional qualities. The other kind, a very, very high kind, is the ordinary kind of success, the success that comes to the man who does the things which most men could do, but which they do not do; which comes to the man who develops or possesses to a higher degree the qualities that all of us have to a greater or less extent. In the history of the world some of the men who stand high—who stand in all but the very highest places—are those who have not possessed any wonderful genius in statecraft, war, art, literature—in whatever calling; but who have developed within themselves, by long, patient effort, resolutely maintained in spite of repeated failure, the ordinary, everyday, humdrum qualities of courage, of resolution, of proper appreciation of the relative importance of things; of honesty, of truth, of good sense, of unyielding perseverance. We can each one of us develop to a very high degree these qualities; and if we do so develop them, each one of us is sure of a measure of success; and I greet you here on this twentieth anniversary of the founding of Groton School because I feel that Groton School is one of those institutions which pre-eminently stand for the development of precisely those qualities among the boys whom it sends forth to be American men, American citizens, to do honor to themselves and their school by honoring the commonwealth to which we all belong.

ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG, PA., MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 30, 1904

_Governor, and You, my Fellow-Citizens_:

It is indeed a pleasure to greet you to-day. In greeting all I, of course, greet above all others the men to whom we owe it that we are here to-day, or that we have a country of which to be proud—the men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. And, having greeted first those at one end of the line, I want to speak of the others and say I was exceedingly pleased to see the children. Also let me say a word of greeting in your behalf, my comrades of the Civil War, to the regulars who were here to-day as an escort—to the men who now wear the uniform of “Uncle Sam,” and wear it honorably to defend the flag as you defended it in your youth and early manhood. The memories of this field are inextricably entwined in our hearts with the great deeds of the leaders of the past, as one by one the men who here signalized themselves have passed away.

Governor Pennypacker alluded to the fact that to-day Pennsylvania mourns its senior Senator. The regiment which Senator Quay was instrumental in raising took part in the battle of Gettysburg—the battle in which Governor Pennypacker shared. Senator Quay was not with it here; he had gone with another regiment, and it is appropriate at this time to recall the fact that when the term of service of that regiment expired, just before the battle of Fredericksburg, Senator Quay declined to accept the discharge and continued as a volunteer with the army that fought at Fredericksburg and won the medal of honor on that bloody day.

The place where we now are has won a double distinction. Here was fought one of the great battles of all time, and here was spoken one of the few speeches which shall last through the ages. As long as this Republic endures or its history is known, so long shall the memory of the Battle of Gettysburg likewise endure and be known; and as long as the English tongue is understood, so long shall Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech thrill the hearts of mankind.

The Civil War was a great war for righteousness; a war waged for the noblest ideals, but waged also in thoroughgoing, practical fashion. That is why you won then—because you had the ideals, because you had the lift of soul in you, and because also you had the right stuff in you to make those ideals count in actual life. You had to have the ideals, but if you had not been able to march and shoot you could not have put them into practice. It was one of the few wars which mean, in their successful outcome, a lift toward better things for the nations of mankind. Some wars have meant the triumph of order over anarchy and licentiousness masquerading as liberty; some wars have meant the triumph of liberty over tyranny masquerading as order; but this victorious war of ours meant the triumph of both liberty and order, the triumph of orderly liberty, the bestowal of civil rights upon the freed slaves, and at the same time the stern insistence on the supremacy of the national law throughout the length and breadth of the land. Moreover, this was one of those rare contests in which it was to the immeasurable interest of the vanquished that they should lose, while at the same time the victors acquired the precious privilege of transmitting to those who came after them, as a heritage of honor forever, not only the memory of their own valiant deeds, but the memory of the deeds of those who, no less valiantly and with equal sincerity of purpose, fought against the stars in their courses. The war left to us all, as fellow-countrymen, as brothers, the right to rejoice that the Union has been restored in indestructible shape in a country where slavery no longer mocks the boast of freedom, and also the right to rejoice with exultant pride in the courage, the self-sacrifice, and the devotion, alike of the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray.

He is but a poor American who, looking at this field, does not feel within himself a deeper reverence for the Nation’s past and a higher purpose to make the Nation’s future rise level to her past. Here fought the chosen sons of the North and the South, the East and the West. The armies which on this field contended for the mastery were veteran armies, hardened by long campaigning and desperate fighting into such instruments of war as no other nation then possessed. The severity of the fighting is attested by the proportionate loss—a loss unrivaled in any battle of similar size since the close of the Napoleonic struggles; a loss which in certain regiments was from three-fourths to four-fifths of the men engaged. Every spot on this field has its own associations of soldierly duty nobly done, of supreme self-sacrifice freely rendered. The names of the chiefs who served in the two armies form a long honor roll; and the enlisted men were worthy, and even more than worthy, of those who led them. Every acre of this ground has its own associations. We see where the fight thundered through and around the village of Gettysburg; where the artillery formed on the ridges; where the cavalry fought; where the hills were attacked and defended; and where, finally, the great charge surged up the slope only to break on the summit in the bloody spray of gallant failure.

But the soldiers who won at Gettysburg, the soldiers who fought to a finish the Civil War and thereby made their countrymen forever their debtors, have left us far more even than the memories of the war itself. They fought for four years in order that on this Continent those who came after them, their children and their children’s children, might enjoy a lasting peace. They took arms not to destroy, but to save liberty; not to overthrow, but to establish the supremacy of the law. The crisis which they faced was to determine whether or not this people was fit for self-government and, therefore, fit for liberty. Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those who show themselves worthy of it. In this world no privilege can be permanently appropriated by men who have not the power and the will successfully to assume the responsibility of using it aright. In his recent admirable little volume on freedom and responsibility in democratic government, President Hadley of Yale has pointed out that the freedom which is worth anything is the freedom which means self-government and not anarchy. Freedom thus conceived is a constructive force, which enables an intelligent and good man to do better things than he could do without it; which is in its essence the substitution of self-restraint for external restraint—the substitution of a form of restraint which promotes progress for the form which retards it. This is the right view to take of freedom; but it can only be taken if there is a full recognition of the close connection between liberty and responsibility in every domain of human thought and action. It was essentially the view taken by Abraham Lincoln, and by all those who, when the Civil War broke out, realized that in a self-governing democracy those who desire to be considered fit to enjoy liberty must show that they know how to use it with moderation and justice in peace, and how to fight for it when it is jeoparded by malice domestic or foreign levy.

The lessons they taught us are lessons as applicable in our everyday lives now as in the rare times of great stress. The men who made this field forever memorable did so because they combined the power of fealty to a lofty ideal with the power of showing that fealty in hard, practical, common-sense fashion. They stood for the life of effort, not the life of ease. They had that love of country, that love of justice, that love of their fellow-men, without which power and resourceful efficiency but make a man a danger to his fellows. Yet, in addition thereto, they likewise possessed the power and the efficiency; for otherwise their high purpose would have been barren of result. They knew each how to act for himself, and yet each how to act with his fellows. They learned, as all the generation of the Civil War learned, that rare indeed is the chance to do anything worth doing by one sudden and violent effort. The men who believed that the Civil War would be ended in ninety days, the men who cried loudest “On to Richmond,” if they had the right stuff in them speedily learned their error; and the war was actually won by those who settled themselves steadfastly down to fight for three years, or for as much longer as the war might last, and who gradually grew to understand that the triumph would come, not by a single brilliant victory, but by a hundred painful and tedious campaigns. In the East and the West the columns advanced and recoiled, swayed from side to side, and again advanced; along the coasts the black ships stood endlessly off and on before the hostile forts; generals and admirals emerged into the light, each to face his crowded hour of success or failure; the men in front fought; the men behind supplied and pushed forward those in front; and the final victory was due to the deeds of all who played their parts well and manfully, in the scores of battles, in the countless skirmishes, in march, in camp, or in reserve, as commissioned officers, or in the ranks—wherever and whenever duty called them. That is why the title that most appeals to you now is the title of comrade, by which the private in the ranks and the lieutenant-general address one another, because each did his duty and asks no more than recognition of that fact. Just so it must be for us in civil life. We can make and keep this country worthy of the men who gave their lives to save it, only on condition that the average man among us on the whole does his duty bravely, loyally, and with common-sense, in whatever position life allots to him. Exactly as in time of war courage is the cardinal virtue of the soldier, so in time of peace honesty, using the word in its deepest and broadest significance, is the essential basic virtue, without which all else avails nothing. National greatness is of slow growth. It can not be forced and yet be stable and enduring; for it is based fundamentally upon national character, and national character is stamped deep in a people by the lives of many generations. The men who went into the army had to submit to discipline, had to submit to restraint through the government of the leaders they had chosen, as the price of winning. So we, the people, can preserve our liberty and our greatness in time of peace only by ourselves exercising the virtues of honesty, of self-restraint, and of fair dealing between man and man. In all the ages of the past men have seen countries lose their liberty, because their people could not restrain and order themselves, and therefore forfeited the right to what they were unable to use with wisdom.

It was because you men of the Civil War both knew how to use liberty temperately and how to defend it at need that we and our children and our children’s children shall hold you in honor forever. Here, on Memorial Day, on this great battlefield, we commemorate not only the chiefs who actually won this battle; not only Meade, and his lieutenants, Hancock and Reynolds and Howard and Sickles, and the many others whose names flame in our annals; but also the chiefs who had made the Army of the Potomac what it was, and those who afterward led it in the campaigns which were crowned at Appomattox; and furthermore those who made and used its sister armies: McClellan, with his extraordinary genius for organization; Rosecrans; Buell; Thomas, the unyielding, the steadfast; and that great trio, Sherman, Sheridan, and last and greatest of all, Grant himself, the silent soldier whose hammer-like blows finally beat down even the prowess of the men who fought against him. Above all we meet here to pay homage to the officers and enlisted men who served and fought and died, without having, as their chiefs had, the chance to write their names on the tablets of fame; to the men who marched and fought in the ranks, who were buried in long trenches on the field of battle, who died in cots marked only by numbers in the hospitals; who, if they lived, when the war was over, went back each to his task on the farm or in the town, to do his duty in peace as he had done it in war; to take up the threads of his working life where he had dropped them when the trumpets of the Nation pealed to arms. To-day, all over this land our people meet to pay reverent homage to the dead who died that the Nation might live; and we pay homage also to their comrades who are still with us.

All are at one now, the sons of those who wore the blue and the sons of those who wore the gray, and all can unite in paying respect to the memory of those who fell, each of them giving his life for his duty as he saw it; and all should be at one in learning from the deaths of these men how to live usefully while the times call for the performance of the countless necessary duties of everyday life, and how to hold ourselves ready to die nobly should the Nation ever again demand of her sons the splendid ultimate proof of loyalty to her and to the flag.

REMARKS AT THE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL CHAPEL, VALLEY FORGE, PA., JUNE 19, 1904

It is a great pleasure to come here this afternoon and say a word on behalf of the project to erect a memorial chapel on this great historic site. Three weeks ago I was at the field where the bloodiest and most decisive battle of the Civil War was fought, and it is a noteworthy thing that this State of Pennsylvania should have within its borders the places which mark the two turning points in our history—Gettysburg, which saw the high-tide of the Rebellion—Valley Forge, which saw the getting beyond the danger point of the Revolution.

There have been two great crises in our national history—two crises where failure meant the absolute breaking asunder of the Nation—one the Revolutionary War, one the Civil War. If the men who took to arms in ’76 for national independence had failed, then not merely would there never have been a national growth on this Continent, but the whole spirit of nationality for the younger lands of the world would have perished still-born. If the men of ’61 had failed in the great struggle for national unity it would have meant that the work done by Washington and his associates might almost or quite as well have been left undone. There would have been no point in commemorating what was done at Valley Forge if Gettysburg had not given us the national right to commemorate it. If we were now split up into a dozen wrangling little communities, if we lacked the power to keep away here on our own Continent, within our own lines, or to show ourselves a unit as against foreign aggression, then, indeed, the Declaration of Independence would read like empty sound, and the Constitution would not be worth the paper upon which it was written, save as a study for antiquarians.

There have been other crises than those that culminated during the War for Independence and the great Civil War, there have been great deeds and great men at other periods of our national history, but there never has been another deed vital to the welfare of the Nation save the two—the deed of those who founded and the deed of those who saved the Republic. There never has been another man whose life has been vital to the Republic save Washington and Lincoln. I am not here to say anything about Lincoln, but I do not see how any American can think of either of them without thinking of the other too, because they represent the same work. Think how fortunate we are as a Nation. Think what it means to us as a people that our young men should have as their ideals two men, not conquerors, not men who have won glory by wrongdoing; not men whose lives were spent in their own advancement, but men who lived, one of whom died, that the Nation might grow steadily greater and better—the man who founded the Republic and took no glory from it himself save what was freely given him by his fellow-citizens, and that only in the shape of a chance of rendering them service, and the man who afterward saved the Republic, who saved the state, without striking down liberty. Often in history a state has been saved and liberty struck down at the same time. Lincoln saved the Union and lifted the cause of liberty higher than before. Washington created the Republic, rose by statecraft to the highest position, and used that position only for the welfare of his fellows and for so long as his fellows wished him to keep it.

It is a good thing that of these great landmarks of our history—Gettysburg and Valley Forge—one should commemorate a single tremendous effort and the other what we need, on the whole, much more commonly, and what I think is, on the whole, rather more difficult to do—long-sustained effort. Only men with a touch of the heroic in them could have lasted out that three days’ struggle at Gettysburg. Only men fit to rank with the great men of all time could have beaten back the mighty onslaught of that gallant and wonderful army of Northern Virginia, whose final supreme effort faded at the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge on that July day forty-one years ago.

But after all, hard though it is to rise to the supreme height of self-sacrifice and of effort at a time of crisis that is short, to rise to it for a single great effort—it is harder yet to rise to the level of a crisis when that crisis takes the form of needing constant, patient, steady work, month after month, year after year, when, too, it does not end after a terrible struggle in a glorious day—when it means months of gloom and effort steadfastly endured, and triumph wrested only at the very end.

Here at Valley Forge Washington and his Continentals warred not against the foreign soldiery, but against themselves, against all the appeals of our nature that are most difficult to resist—against discouragement, discontent, the mean envies and jealousies, and heart-burnings sure to arise at any time in large bodies of men, but especially sure to arise when defeat and disaster have come to large bodies of men. Here the soldiers who carried our national flag had to suffer from cold, from privation, from hardship, knowing that their foes were well housed, knowing that things went easier for the others than it did for them. And they conquered, because they had in them the spirit that made them steadfast, not merely on an occasional great day, but day after day in the life of daily endeavor to do duty well.

When two lessons are both indispensable, it seems hardly worth while to dwell more on one than on the other. Yet I think that as a people we need more to learn the lesson of Valley Forge even than that of Gettysburg. I have not the slightest anxiety but that this people, if the need should come in the future, will be able to show the heroism, the supreme effort that was shown at Gettysburg, though it may well be that it would mean a similar two years of effort, checkered by disaster, to lead up to it. But the vital thing for this Nation to do is steadily to cultivate the quality which Washington and those under him so pre-eminently showed during the winter at Valley Forge—the quality of steady adherence to duty in the teeth of difficulty, in the teeth of discouragement, and even disaster, the quality that makes a man do what is straight and decent, not one day when a great crisis comes, but every day, day in and day out, until success comes at the end.

Of course, all of us are agreed that a prime national need is the need of commemorating the memories of the men who did greatly, thought highly, who fought, suffered, endured, for the Nation. It is a great thing to commemorate their lives; but, after all, the worthy way to do so is to try to show by our lives that we have profited by them. If we show that the lives of the great men of the past have been to us incitements to do well in the present, then we have paid to them the only homage which is really worthy of them. If we treat their great deeds as matters merely for idle boasting, not as spurring us on to effort, but as excusing us from effort, then we show that we are not worthy of our sires, of the people who went before us in the history of our land. What we as a people need more than aught else is the steady performance of the everyday duties of life, not with hope of reward, but because they are duties.