Part 24

Here in San Antonio what is the building you are proudest of?—the Alamo. It is not exactly up to date. Other buildings are more useful. But you are proud of it because it commemorates forever the spirit of those who made its fame immortal. So in the State itself, important though it is to provide for the industrial welfare of the commonwealth, the thing that is most important is to take care of the really vital crop—the crop of citizens. The thing which the State most needs to care for is the welfare, not merely material, but moral and intellectual as well, of the children who are going to make up the State fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years hence; and that is why I am so glad to see the care which you of Texas are taking in the training of the generation that is now coming up.

A thing that is distressing to me to see is when sometimes the man and woman who have done well in life show a curious inability to train their own children in the way that has resulted successfully for themselves. I think that all of us know people who, because they have worked hard and triumphed, feel that somehow or other they will spare their children the acquisition of the very qualities which have made the parents triumph. Too often you see the man, and I am sorry to say the woman, who says, “I have had to work hard; my sons and my daughters shall have an easy time.” Such a man or woman is preparing ruin for the children about whom this is said. Of course, you want to give your children all the love possible; but it is not right to mistake folly for affection. When you spare the child that which alone will enable it to conquer in after life, you are not giving it a blessing; you are doing it the greatest wrong in your power. Bring up the boy and girl alike with the understanding that life is not generally soft, is not generally easy, that there will be plenty of rough times, and that what they have to show is not the spirit that avoids difficulties and flinches from them, but the spirit which overcomes them. Let each of the older among you look back upon your lives. You men of the Civil War; what are the times of which you are proudest? What are the memories you are most glad to hand down to your children and your children’s children? The times that were easy? No. You are proud to remember and have them remember the days of toil, of peril, of effort, the days when you had to risk life and endure every form of hardship and of labor, when you had in you the spirit that made you endure it, that made you rise level to the great need. Surely you must not rob your sons of the right to feel in their turn the same pride that you now feel in the power to overcome difficulty, the power to work, the power of wresting triumph out of danger.

There is only one of my fellow-citizens to whom I will touch my hat quicker than to the soldier; and that is the mother, because I think she has a little harder time of it. The mother who has brought up as they should be brought up a family of young children is entitled to such respect as no other person in the community is entitled to. When the end of her life comes she has endured any amount of hardship, the sitting up by beds of sick children, the endless taking care of them, for a mother is not allowed to know the difference between night and day as far as the ending of the day’s task is concerned; but, after all, when her life is done she can look back upon it with a prouder sense of satisfaction than any one else, if she has done her duty, for her children and her husband shall rise up and call her blessed. The worthy life for the Nation, for the individual, for the man, for the woman, is the life of effort for the things worth striving for; and our whole aim should be not to teach those who are to come after us to shirk difficulties, and to strive to have an easy time in life, but to strive to do their duty, whether that duty is hard or not, and to feel that no success is so great as the success of duty worth doing which is well done.

Of course, that is my conception of the life for the Nation as well as for the individual. I am not going to develop my theory about that; in the first place, because I want to keep clear of anything that you might think touched in the faintest degree upon politics, and in the next place because I believe you know pretty well how I feel anyway. I feel that this Nation, whether it wishes to or not, can not help being a great Nation. You of Texas by what your forefathers did and what you have done have helped in making this Nation so that it is impossible not to be great. We can not decide whether we will be great or not. The only thing we can decide is whether, being great, we will do well or do ill. We have got our duty in the world. We must do our duty to others, and we must do our duty to ourselves. We must so handle ourselves that no weak power which is behaving itself shall have cause to fear us; and no strong power of any kind shall be able to oppress or wrong us. We all believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I have a little difficulty in getting some of my friends to accept my interpretation of it; but they will in time, because that interpretation has come to stay. We are building the Panama Canal. While that will be a benefit to all the country, it will be of most benefit to the Gulf States. We have duties in connection with the great position we have taken. We can not shirk these duties. We can do them well or do them ill, but do them we must That is one reason why I want to see a good navy; and we have got a good navy. I am going to use a simile that I used a couple of nights ago at Dallas. In the old days in Texas I understand that there used to be a proverb that while you would not generally want a gun at all, if you did want it you wanted it quick and you wanted it awfully bad. That is just the way I feel about the navy. I feel that if we have it the chances are that we will not need it; but that if we do not have it, we might find that our need for it was vital.

TO THE CONGREGATION ASSEMBLED AT THE BLUE SCHOOLHOUSE ON UPPER DIVIDE CREEK, COLO., SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 1905

_Friends_:

It is hard for me not to call you neighbors, for during a number of years my neighbors were just such men and women as those I now see before me, and they were as good friends as I ever had. I do not intend to say more than a few words to-day, but I do wish to tell you how thoroughly at home I feel with you, how much I have enjoyed my stay here, and how I have appreciated the kind and thoughtful hospitality with which I have been treated.

Here, as elsewhere in almost every gathering in the West, I see men wearing the button which shows that they served in the Grand Army of the Republic, and carrying the flag which they more than any other men in this Nation have the right to carry because it is owing to them that this Nation has a flag at all. The few words which I have to say are to be on success, and I wish to illustrate what I mean by taking these veterans of the Civil War as examples; and what I am about to say was suggested by a conversation I had with the Dominie here, when he was with me the other day on a bear hunt. The Grand Army in its organization is typically and fundamentally American, because in the Grand Army every man from lieutenant-general to drummer boy is judged not by his position, but by the way he discharges or discharged his duty while in that position. In other words, to the Grand Army man success, in the highest and truest acceptation of the word, means the full performance of duty in whatever position Providence has assigned the man to whom the duty comes. Success from the soldier’s standpoint, if an army is to rank as one of the great armies of all time, must mean that whether the man carries sword or musket, whether he looks after the mules or the commissary, he does his duty up to the handle. If the soldier feels that he has done that, then he has a right to feel that his career has been honorable and successful, and that his children’s children will be proud of him. Success had this meaning from 1861 to 1865.

So it is in civil life. Real success consists in doing one’s duty well in the path where one’s life is led. Of course, you must remember that to do your duty you must in the first place do it to yourself and to those that are nearest you. There is no use whatever in having lofty ambitions or great schemes for helping mankind if you are not able in the first place to keep yourself and your own family decently fed, clothed, and housed. You must pull your own weight first before you can do more than be a passenger in the boat. You must do what is right to your family and your neighbors before you can help the State. If, however, you have the ordinary humdrum qualities, the workaday qualities, you can win real success; for real success in civil life means that the man is able to make a living for himself and his family, to educate his children, to do his duty by his neighbors, and when the end of his life comes, to be able to feel that the world has been a little better and not a little worse off because he has lived.

When it comes to the great prizes of life there must always be more or less accident in winning. No man who has made what the world at large calls a great success can fail to recognize, if he is sincere with himself, that there has been much of chance, of fortune, in his triumph; and surely this should prevent arrogance on his part, and should also prevent any feeling of mean envy toward him on the part of others. Carry yourself so that if accident puts great opportunities in your way you will be able to take advantage of them, and so that, at any rate, even if the exceptional opportunities do not come, you can do the things that count most for real happiness in life, the things that in their sum mean the life that is successful, because they make up a happy and healthy home. No amount of skill, perseverance, energy, or genius can win either the great or the small prizes of life unless back of them lie character and the courage of moral convictions. With this character, whether the great opportunity comes or not, you can count upon so bearing yourselves that your children will bless you for having done all that was in your power to bring them up to an honored name.

So much for success in private life. Now for the success from the national standpoint. In this country of ours the Government can no more rise higher than those who make it than a stream can rise higher than its source. No one leader, no set of leaders, can make the Government. It will be made by the average citizen, and whether it stands high or low will and must depend upon the character of the average citizenship. Only this average citizen can make or unmake it. The right type of leader can guide and help him—in short, can lead him; but he must himself be trusted to see to it that his leadership is right, and if he has not the right stuff in him, then no leadership will avail him or any of us. In the Civil War, Grant and Sherman and Farragut rendered incalculable service; but in the last analysis it was the average man in the ranks who made the army. If that man had not had the right stuff in him not all the generalship of the greatest leaders would have availed to win victory. So it is now. The man who carries the hod or the axe or the coupling-pin; the man who holds the plow or the hammer; the average man who does the average work of the Nation, is the man upon whom our whole political and social fabric rests. If he continues to have the right stuff in him, then as a Nation we shall continue to go up. If he surrenders himself to idleness and ignorance, to mean envy and mean hate; if he is not thrifty, industrious, energetic and intelligent; above all, if his moral fibre weakens—then the Republic will be in a bad way. There is no secret about good citizenship. The qualities that make a good citizen are those that the humblest man or woman, girl or boy, can have; but they are the qualities upon which the foundations of the State rest. Dishonesty, especially if accompanied by that unpleasant type of ability without conscientiousness which some people deify under the name of “smartness,” is a curse and a disgrace to the individual and to the community. Honesty is the first quality for the individual and for the Nation; and it must be backed up by courage—the courage which does not wait before showing itself until the heroic days which may never come, but which unflinchingly does each day that day’s duty, be it easy or hard; and finally it must be backed up by the common-sense without which courage and honesty are of so little avail. The man who is a good husband; the woman who is a good wife and mother; the son who so carries himself that the family are glad to have him at home instead of earnestly wishing he were away; the daughter who as she grows up is a help to her mother instead of an added burden; the family in which tenderness and consideration are shown for one another, together with the strong, fearless qualities absolutely necessary both for man and for woman in this rough, workaday world of ours—such men and women, such families, have won the success that most counts, and in their aggregate make up the Nation that is really successful.

AT THE BANQUET OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND BOARD OF TRADE, DENVER, COLO., MAY 9, 1905

_Mr. President; Mr. Toastmaster; and you, Men of Denver; Men of Colorado_:

I hope I need not say how glad I am to be your guest to-night. Let me say just one word in reference to the work of this organization of which I am not only the guest, but to which I owe my most sincere thanks for having elected me to honorary membership. You have done a great work for the material prosperity of this city, of this State. I fully appreciate, as every sensible man must, the great, the vital importance of that work. We must have a basis of material prosperity before any community, whether State, municipality, or nation, can develop itself, can rise in any degree. There must in the community as in the individual be first as a basis the material prosperity; but woe to the community, woe to the individual, that accepts such material prosperity as the be-all and the end-all of its life. In the world at large, and especially in this Nation, we have been passing through an era of materialism. It has had its good side, and it has had its poor side; and we of this country will never rise level to the standard that should be set here until we not only understand but apply the truth that material prosperity is only the foundation, and that its worth depends entirely upon the kind of moral superstructure of good citizenship that we build upon it. No wealth, no material well-being, shall avail the Nation where class hatreds flourish, where man looks upon his brother with envy and hatred or with arrogance and contempt, according to his position, where the average man fails to understand that the supreme good for any man is the granting him the opportunity and training him to the power to do service to the community at large. I believe in material well-being, of course; I should be a fool if I did not. I believe in material well-being; I believe in those who have built it up; but I believe also that it is a curse if it is not accompanied by the lift toward higher things. We of this country; we who have enjoyed the marvelous prosperity that this country has possessed in a degree pre-eminent above all other nations of earth, must in the future show our understanding of this doctrine, or we shall fail to make of the Republic what it must and shall be made—an example for all the nations of mankind.

But do not think that I fail to understand the importance of our material well-being. I congratulate Denver with all my heart that it is the centre of the great mining and livestock industries. It is of enormous consequence to all our people that any section of this country should do well. Do not forget that. So far from its being a hurt to any one section to see another section prosper, we can on the contrary count it as certain that if a part of this country prospers much the rest of the country will as a whole feel some good effects from the result of the prosperity. As Senator Patterson was just saying to me, when three years ago we succeeded in getting through that law which I am so very proud should have been enacted during my administration, the law by which the Nation undertook to do its share in the great work of reclamation of the arid lands of the West; when we got through that law there were certain shortsighted people, representing as they believed the interests of the non-arid Eastern lands, who objected to its passage on the ground that it would help build up their rivals; whereas, they ought to have seen that whatever built up the inter-mountain States would add to the prosperity of all the United States. There is just one safe motto for Americans to act on; that is, the motto of all men up; not some men down.

In a very small way I am trying to build up an other industry for the benefit of the whole country, which we are starting here in Colorado. Through Secretary Wilson of the Department of Agriculture, in connection with your Agricultural College, we are starting the development of a breed of American horse which may be called the general utility horse. If I have any influence with this Administration I am going to have this work continued! Also, incidentally (if any of you have come from Vermont you will appreciate this), I think that for this end we should develop the old breed of Morgan horse, because we have in the Morgan horse a type which is not surpassed in any country for the purpose to be served by the breed of horse most important for us to develop. I do not think that the perpetuation of that fine old stock should be left to private breeders. I think the Government should take part in it. The reason we have started this horse breeding by the Government here in Colorado is that we find, for reasons that I am not wholly able to explain, that the stoutest forelegs in horses are developed here in Colorado; and so I hope the Senators from Colorado will help me to develop the Morgan horse in Colorado.

Gentlemen, I want to say a word as to a governmental policy in which I feel that this whole country ought to take a great interest and which is itself but part of a general policy into which I think our Government must go. I speak of the policy of extending the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, of giving them the power to fix rates and to have the rates that they fix go into effect practically at once. As I say, that represents in my mind part of what should be the general policy of this country, the policy of giving not to the State but to the National Government an increased supervisory and regulatory power over corporations. The first step and to my mind the most important step in this general policy is to give the Nation in effective form this power over the great transportation corporations of this country. In the days of the fathers of the older among you the highways of commerce for civilized nations were what they had always been—waterways and roads. Therefore they were open to all who chose to travel upon them. Within the last two generations we have seen a system grow up under which the old methods were completely revolutionized, and now the typical highway of commerce is the railroad. Compared to the railroad the ordinary road for wheeled vehicles, and the waterway, whether natural or artificial, have lost their importance. Here in Colorado, for instance, it is the railroads which, of course, are the only highways that you need take into account in dealing with the question of commerce in the State or outside of the State. Therefore, under this changed system, we see highways of commerce grow up each of which is controlled by a single corporation or individual; sometimes several of them being controlled in combination by corporations or a few individuals. When such is the case, in my judgment it is absolutely necessary that the Nation (for the separate States can not possibly do it) should assume a supervisory and regulatory function over the great corporations which practically control the highways of commerce.

Now fix clearly in your minds two facts at the outset. As with everything else mundane, when you get that supervisory and regulatory power on behalf of the Nation you will not have cured all the evils that existed and you will not equal the expectations of the amiable but ill-regulated enthusiast who thinks that you ought to have cured all those evils. A measure of good will come, some good will be done, some injustice will have been prevented; but we shall be a long way from the millennium. Get that fact clear in your mind or you will be laying up for your selves a store of incalculable disappointment in the future. That is the first thing.