Theodore Roosevelt
April 10, 1899, at The Hamilton Club, Chicago, Illinois.
In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the
State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently
and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American
character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the
doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor
and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to
the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink
from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these
wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely
from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is
as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that which
every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons
shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would
teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration
in their eyes — to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You
men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done
your share, and more than your share, in making America great, because
you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work yourselves,
and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your
salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is
not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that
those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their
livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of
non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in
historical research — work of the type we most need in this country,
the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the
nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who
embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who
is prompt tohelp a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary
to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is
worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save
by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there
has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the
necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him
have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used
aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind,
whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in
the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good
fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual
labor as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even
though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a
cumberer of the earth’s surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold
his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere
life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above
all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for
serious work in the world.
In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and
women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the
children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk
difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to
wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a man’s
work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep
those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet
of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.
In one of Daudet’s powerful and melancholy books he speaks of “the fear
of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present
day.” When such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that nation
is rotten to the heart’s core. When men fear work or fear righteous
war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and
well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit
subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong
and brave and high-minded.
As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base
untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice
happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to
dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows
not victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had
believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the
worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have
saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of
millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure
we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women,
the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country
those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched
only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by
shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have
shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the
great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our
fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore sword or
rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved
themselves equal to the mighty days, let us, the children of the men
who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the
God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected;
that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair, were
unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the
slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American republic
placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations. We of this
generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced,
but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them! We
cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by
inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what
goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the
higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying
ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly
we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has already
found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself to a career
of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before
other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.
If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to
play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues.
All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them
well or ill. In 1898 we could not help being brought face to face with
the problem of war with Spain. All we could decide was whether we should
shrink like cowards from the contest, or enter into it as beseemed a
brave and high-spirited people; and, once in, whether failure or success
should crown our banners. So it is now. We cannot avoid the
responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the
Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a way
that will redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make of
our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful page in our
history. To refuse to deal with them at all merely amounts to dealing
with them badly. We have a given problem to solve. If we undertake the
solution, there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it
aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it
certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright. The timid man, the lazy
man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has
lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the
man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift
that thrills “stern men with empires in their brains” — all these, of
course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink
from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink
from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out
of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our
soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who
fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really
worth leading. They believe in that cloistered life which saps the
hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual; or else
they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes
in commercialism the be-all and end-all of national life, instead of
realizing that, though an indispensable element, it is, after all, but
one of the many elements that go to make up true national greatness. No
country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the
material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and
enterprise, from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial
activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied
upon material prosperity alone. All honor must be paid to the architects
of our material prosperity, to the great captains of industry who have
built our factories and our rail- roads, to the strong men who toil for
wealth with brain or hand; for great is the debt of the nation to these
and their kind. But our debt is yet greater to the men whose highest
type is to be found in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like Grant.
They showed by their lives that they recognized the law of work, the law
of strife; they toiled to win a competence for themselves and those
dependent upon them; but they recognized that there were yet other and
even loftier duties — duties to the nation and duties to the race.
We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves
merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what
happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the
nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought
into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the
struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power
without our own borders. We must build the isthmian canal, and we must
grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in
deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West.
So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint of international
honor the argument is even stronger. The guns that thundered off Manila
and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of
duty. If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage
anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than
idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their
fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course
of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched
islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in
and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to
carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited
nations are eager to undertake.
The work must be done; we cannot escape our responsibility; and if we
are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance to do the work —
glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of the great tasks set
modern civilization. But let us not deceive ourselves as to the
importance of the task. Let us not be misled by vainglory into
underestimating the strain it will put on our powers. Above all, let us,
as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities with proper
seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We must demand the highest
order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to grapple with
these new problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability those public
servants who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the nation or
inability to rise to the high level of the new demands upon our
strength and our resources.
Of course we must remember not to judge any public servant by any one
act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are
merely the occasions and not the causes of disaster. Let me illustrate
what I mean by the army and the navy. If twenty years ago we had gone to
war, we should have found the navy as absolutely unprepared as the
army. At that time our ships could not have encountered with success the
fleets of Spain any more than nowadays we can put untrained soldiers,
no matter how brave, who are armed with archaic black-powder weapons,
against well-drilled regulars armed with the highest type of modern
repeating rifle. But in the early eighties the attention of the nation
became directed to our naval needs. Congress most wisely made a series
of appropriations to build up a new navy, and under a succession of able
and patriotic secretaries, of both political parties, the navy was
gradually built up, until its material became equal to its splendid
personnel, with the result that in the summer of 1898 it leaped to its
proper place as one of the most brilliant and formidable fighting navies
in the entire world. We rightly pay all honor to the men controlling
the navy at the time it won these great deeds, honor to Secretary Long
and Admiral Dewey, to the captains who handled the ships in action, to
the daring lieutenants who braved death in the smaller craft, and to the
heads of bureaus at Washington who saw that the ships were so
commanded, so armed, so equipped, so well engined, as to insure the best
results. But let us also keep ever in mind that all of this would not
have availed if it had not been for the wisdom of the men who during the
preceding fifteen years had built up the navy. Keep in mind the
secretaries of the navy during those years; keep in mind the senators
and congressmen who by their votes gave the money necessary to build and
to armor the ships, to construct the great guns, and to train the
crews; remember also those who actually did build the ships, the armor,
and the guns; and remember the admirals and captains who handled
battle-ship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat on the high seas, alone and in
squadrons, developing the seamanship, the gunnery, and the power of
acting together, which their successors utilized so gloriously at Manila
and off Santiago. And, gentlemen, remember the converse, too. Remember
that justice has two sides. Be just to those who built up the navy, and,
for the sake of the future of the country, keep in mind those who
opposed its building up. Read the “Congressional Record.” Find out the
senators and congressmen who opposed the grants for building the new
ships; who opposed the purchase of armor, without which the ships were
worthless; who opposed any adequate maintenance for the Navy Department,
and strove to cut down the number of men necessary to man our fleets.
The men who did these things were one and all working to bring disaster
on the country. They have no share in the glory of Manila, in the honor
of Santiago. They have no cause to feel proud of the valor of our sea-
captains, of the renown of our flag. Their motives may or may not have
been good, but their acts were heavily fraught with evil. They did ill
for the national honor, and we won in spite of their sinister
opposition.
Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day. Our army has never
been built up as it should be built up. I shall not discuss with an
audience like this the puerile suggestion that a nation of seventy
millions of freemen is in danger of losing its liberties from the
existence of an army of one hundred thousand men, three fourths of whom
will be employed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast
fortresses, and on Island reservations. No man of good sense and stout
heart can take such a proposition seriously. If we are such weaklings as
the proposition implies, then we are unworthy of freedom in any event.
To no body of men in the United States is the country so much indebted
as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular army and
navy. There is no body from which the country has less to fear, and none
of which it should be prouder, none which it should be more anxious to
upbuild.
Our army needs complete reorganization, — not merely enlarging, — and
the reorganization can only come as the result of legislation. A proper
general staff should be established, and the positions of ordinance,
commissary, and quartermaster officers should be filled by detail from
the line. Above all, the army must be given the chance to exercise in
large bodies. Never again should we see, as we saw in the Spanish war,
major-generals in command of divisions who had never before commanded
three companies together in the field. Yet, incredible to relate,
Congress has shown a queer inability to learn some of the lessons of the
war. There were large bodies of men in both branches who opposed the
declaration of war, who opposed the ratification of peace, who opposed
the upbuilding of the army, and who even opposed the purchase of armor
at a reasonable price for the battle-ships and cruisers, thereby putting
an absolute stop to the building of any new fighting-ships for the
navy. If, during the years to come, any disaster should befall our arms,
afloat or ashore, and thereby any shame come to the United States,
remember that the blame will lie upon the men whose names appear upon
the roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side of these great questions.
On them will lie the burden of any loss of our soldiers and sailors, of
any dishonor to the flag; and upon you and the people of this country
will lie the blame if you do not repudiate, in no unmistakable way, what
these men have done. The blame will not rest upon the untrained
commander of untried troops, upon the civil officers of a department the
organization of which has been left utterly inadequate, or upon the
admiral with an insufficient number of ships; but upon the public men
who have so lamentably failed in forethought as to refuse to remedy
these evils long in advance, and upon the nation that stands behind
those public men.
So, at the present hour, no small share of the responsibility for the
blood shed in the Philippines, the blood of our brothers, and the blood
of their wild and ignorant foes, lies at the thresholds of those who so
long delayed the adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those who by
their worse than foolish words deliberately invited a savage people to
plunge into a war fraught with sure disaster for them — a war, too, in
which our own brave men who follow the flag must pay with their blood
for the silly, mock humanitarianism of the prattlers who sit at home in
peace.
The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation
must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth — if
she is not to stand merely as the China of the western hemisphere. Our
proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is
merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course we are
bound to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must see that
there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense in our home
administration of city, State, and nation. We must strive for honesty
in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation and of the
individual; for the widest freedom of individual initiative where
possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative where it
is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we set our own
household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part in
the great affairs of the world. A man’s first duty is to his own home,
but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the State; for if
he fails in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing to be a
freeman. In the same way, while a nation’s first duty is within its own
borders, it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world
as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to
struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of
mankind.
In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are confronted by
most difficult problems. It is cowardly to shrink from solving them in
the proper way; for solved they must be, if not by us, then by some
stronger and more manful race. If we are too weak, too selfish, or too
foolish to solve them, some bolder and abler people must undertake the
solution. Personally, I am far too firm a believer in the greatness of
my country and the power of my countrymen to admit for one moment that
we shall ever be driven to the ignoble alternative.
The problems are different for the different islands. Porto Rico is
not large enough to stand alone. We must govern it wisely and well,
primarily in the interest of its own people. Cuba is, in my judgment,
entitled ultimately to settle for itself whether it shall be an
independent state or an integral portion of the mightiest of republics.
But until order and stable liberty are secured, we must remain in the
island to insure them, and infinite tact, judgment, moderation, and
courage must be shown by our military and civil representatives in
keeping the island pacified, in relentlessly stamping out brigandage, in
protecting all alike, and yet in showing proper recognition to the men
who have fought for Cuban liberty. The Philippines offer a yet graver
problem. Their population includes half-caste and native Christians,
warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit
for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit. Others may in
time become fit but at present can only take part in self- government
under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent. We have driven
Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let it be replaced by savage
anarchy, our work has been for harm and not for good. I have scant
patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the
Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it, or
that they shrink from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have
even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism
to hide and cover their timidity, and who can about “liberty” and the
“consent of the governed,” in order to excuse themselves for their
unwillingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out,
would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work
out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian
reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever
having settled in these United States.
England’s rule in India and Egypt has been of great benefit to
England, for it has trained up generations of men accustomed to look at
the larger and loftier side of public life. It has been of even greater
benefit to India and Egypt. And finally, and most of all, it has
advanced the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in the
Philippines, we will add to that national renown which is the highest
and finest part of national life, will greatly benefit the people of the
Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play our part well in the
great work of uplifting mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in mind
that we must show in a very high degree the qualities of courage, of
honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance must be stamped out. The first
and all-important work to be done is to establish the supremacy of our
flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can accomplish
anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in
dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the
foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be
remembered that their utterances are not saved from being treasonable
merely by the fact that they are despicable.
When once we have put down armed resistance, when once our rule is
acknowledged, then an even more difficult task will begin, for then we
must see to it that the islands are administered with absolute honesty
and with good judgment. If we let the public service of the islands be
turned into the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have begun to
tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction. We must send out
there only good and able men, chosen for their fitness, and not because
of their partizan service, and these men must not only administer
impartial justice to the natives and serve their own government with
honesty and fidelity, but must show the utmost tact and firmness,
remembering that, with such people as those with whom we are to deal,
weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness comes lack
of consideration for their principles and prejudices.
I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for
the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth
century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand
idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if
we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their
lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and
stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the
domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of
strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold
righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave,
to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us
shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation,
provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only
through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall
ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.
