Part 2

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.