Part 22

We can keep all the forms of free government; and every Fourth of July we can talk possibly a little too boastfully of both the past and the present; and yet it shall not avail us if we do not have in our hearts the spirit that makes for decent citizenship, the spirit that alone counts in the formation of a true republic. And that spirit is essentially the same in public life as in private life. The manifestations of it differ, but the spirit is the same. A public man is as much bound to tell the truth on the stump as off the stump. On the other hand, his critics will do well to remember that truth-telling is a virtue for them to practice also. What we need in public life and in private life is not genius so much as the many-sided development of the qualities which in their sum make good citizenship. In a great crisis we shall need a genius; thrice and thrice over fortunate is the nation which then develops a Lincoln to lead it in peace; a Grant to lead it in war; a Washington to lead it in war and peace.

But what we need as a nation, as an individual, at the ordinary times which are so much larger in the aggregate than the extraordinary times, and upon our conduct in which really depends our conduct in extraordinary times, are the commonplace virtues which we all recognize, and which when we were young we wrote about in copybooks, and which, if we practice, will count for a thousand times more in the long run than any brilliance and genius of any kind or sort whatsoever.

I want to say just a word on the other side of the two great questions, the legislative and educational questions. Education must be twofold. Of course if we do not have education in the school, the academy, the college, the university, and have it developed in the highest and wisest manner, we shall make but a poor fist of American citizenship. One of the things that is most hopeful in our Republic is the way in which the State has taken charge of elementary education; and the way in which, in the East through private gift, here in the West through the wise liberality of the several States, the higher education has been taken care of, as in your own University of Minnesota. But such education can never be all. It can never be more than half, and sometimes not that. Nothing can take the place of the education of the home; and that education must be largely the unconscious influence of character upon character. There is no use in the father trying to instil wise saws and precepts into the son, if his own character gives the lie to his advice. And unfortunately it is just as true in the education of children as in everything else, that it is almost as harmful to be a virtuous fool as a knave. So often throughout our social structure from the wealthiest down to the poorest you see the queer fatuity of the man or the woman which makes them save their children temporary discomfort, temporary unpleasantness, at the cost of future destruction; you see a great many men, and I am sorry to say a great many women, who say, “I have had to work hard; my boy or my girl shall not do anything.” I have seen it in every rank. I have heard the millionaire say, “I have had to work all my life to make money, let my boy spend it.” It would be better for the boy never to have been born than to be brought up on that principle. On the other hand, I have seen the overworked drudge, the laborer’s wife, who said, “Well, I have had to work my heart out all my days; my daughters shall be ladies”; and her conception of her daughters being ladies was to have them sit around useless and incompetent, unable to do anything, brought up to be discontented cumberers of the earth’s surface. As Abraham Lincoln said: “There is a deal of human nature in mankind.” Fundamentally, virtues and faults are just the same in the millionaire and the day laborer. The man or the woman who seeks to bring up his or her children with the idea that their happiness is secured by teaching them to avoid difficulties is doing them a cruel wrong. To bring up the boy and girl so sheltered that they can not stand any rough knocks, that they shrink from toil, that when they meet an obstacle they feel they ought to go around or back instead of going on over it—the man or the woman who does that is wronging the children to a degree that no other human being can wrong them. If you are worth your salt and want your children to be worth their salt, teach them that the life that is not a life of work and effort is worthless, a curse to the man or woman leading it, a curse to those around him or her. Teach the boys that if they are ever to count in the world they will count not by flinching from difficulties, but by warring with and overcoming them. What utter scorn one feels for those who seek only the life of ease; the life passed in dexterous effort to avoid all angular corners, to avoid being put in the places where a strong man by blood and sweat and toil and risk wins triumph! What a wretched life is the life of the man passed in endeavoring to shirk his share of the burden laid upon him in this world! And it makes no difference whether that man is a man of inherited wealth or one who has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; it is equally ignoble in either case. What is true of the individual is true of the nation. The man who counts is not the man who dodges work, but he who goes out into life rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, girding himself for the effort, bound to win and wrest triumph from difficulty and disaster.

So it is with our Nation. No nation which has bound itself only to do easy things ever yet amounted to anything, ever yet came to anything throughout the ages. We have become a great people. At the threshold of this twentieth century we stand with the future looming large before us. We face great problems within and great problems without. We can not if we would refuse to face those problems. All we can decide is whether we will do them well or ill; for the refusal to face them would itself mean that we were doing them ill. We are in the arena into which great nations must come. We must play our part. It rests with us to decide that we shall not play it ignobly; that we shall not flinch from the great problems that there are to do, but that we shall take our place in the forefront of the great nations and face each problem of the day with confident and resolute hope.

IN THE CHAPEL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903

_Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen_:

I am glad to have the chance of greeting you this evening, but I regret that the engagements for me have been so numerous that it will be only a greeting. I wish I could be here to see your beautiful grounds and buildings by daylight, and to see a little of the life of the university.

There are plenty of tendencies for good, and, I am sorry to say, plenty of tendencies for evil in our modern life, and high among the former must be placed the rapid growth of the great institutions of learning in this country. There is a twofold side to the work done in any institution of this kind. In the first place the institution is to turn out scholars and men proficient in the different technical branches for which it trains them. It should be the aim of every university which seeks to develop the liberal side of education to turn out men and women who will add to the sum of productive achievement in scholarship; who will not merely be content to work in the fields that have already been harrowed a thousand times by other workers, but who will strike out for themselves and try to do new work that counts; so in each technical school if the institution is worthy of standing in the front rank, it will turn out those who in that particular specialty stand at the head. But in addition to this merely technical work, to the turning out of the scholar, the professional man, the man or woman trained on some special line, each university worthy the name must endeavor to turn out men and women in the fullest sense of the word, good citizens, men and women who will add by what they do to the sum of noble work in the whole community.

It is a good thing that so much attention should be given to physical development. I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal, and if he feels any sympathy for himself I do not like him. I believe thoroughly in the sound and vigorous body. I believe still more in the vigorous mind. And I believe most of all in what count for more than body, for more than mind, and that is character. That is the sum of the forces that make the man or the woman worth knowing, worth revering, worth holding to. Play hard while you play, but do not mistake it for work. If a young fellow is twenty it is a good thing that he should be a crack half-back; but when he is forty I am sorry if he has never been anything else except once at twenty a good half-back. Keep the sense of proportion. Play hard; it will do you good in your work. But work hard and remember that this is the main thing.

Finally, in closing, I think it is a safe thing to take a motto that I heard from the lips of an old football player once: “Don’t flinch, don’t foul, and hit the line hard.”

AT MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903

_My Fellow-Citizens_:

At the special session of the Senate held in March the Cuban reciprocity treaty was ratified. When this treaty goes into effect, it will confer substantial economic benefits alike upon Cuba, because of the widening of her market in the United States, and upon the United States, because of the equal widening and the progressive control it will give to our people in the Cuban market. This treaty is beneficial to both parties and justifies itself on several grounds. In the first place we offer to Cuba her natural market. We can confer upon her a benefit which no other nation can confer; and for the very reason that we have started her as an independent republic and that we are rich, prosperous, and powerful, it behooves us to stretch out a helping hand to our feebler younger sister. In the next place, it widens the market for our products, both the products of the farm and certain of our manufactures; and it is therefore in the interests of our farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and wage-workers. Finally, the treaty was not merely warranted but demanded, apart from all other considerations, by the enlightened consideration of our foreign policy. More and more in the future we must occupy a preponderant position in the waters and along the coasts in the region south of us; not a position of control over the republics of the south, but of control of the military situation so as to avoid any possible complications in the future. Under the Platt amendment Cuba agreed to give us certain naval stations on her coast. The Navy Department decided that we needed but two, and we have specified where these two are to be. President Palma has concluded an agreement giving them to us—an agreement which the Cuban legislative body will doubtless soon ratify. In other words, the Republic of Cuba has assumed a special relation to our international political system, under which she gives us outposts of defence, and we are morally bound to extend to her in a degree the benefit of our own economic system. From every standpoint of wise and enlightened home and foreign policy the ratification of the Cuban treaty marked a step of substantial progress in the growth of our nation toward greatness at home and abroad.

Equally important was the action on the tariff upon products of the Philippines. We gave them a reduction of twenty-five per cent, and would have given them a reduction of twenty-five per cent more had it not been for the opposition, in the hurried closing days of the last session, of certain gentlemen who, by the way, have been representing themselves both as peculiarly solicitous for the interests of the Philippine people and as special champions of the lowering of tariff duties. There is a distinctly humorous side to the fact that the reduction of duties which would benefit Cuba and the Philippines as well as ourselves was antagonized chiefly by those who in theory have been fond of proclaiming themselves the advanced guardians of the oppressed nationalities in the islands affected and the ardent advocates of the reduction of duties generally, but who instantly took violent ground against the practical steps to accomplish either purpose.

Moreover, a law was enacted putting anthracite on the free list and completely removing the duties on all other kinds of coal for one year.

We are now in a condition of prosperity unparalleled not merely in our own history but in the history of any other nation. This prosperity is deep rooted and stands on a firm basis because it is due to the fact that the average American has in him the stuff out of which victors are made in the great industrial contests of the present day, just as in the great military contests of the past; and because he is now able to use and develop his qualities to best advantage under our well-established economic system. We are winning headship among the nations of the world because our people are able to keep their high average of individual citizenship and to show their mastery in the hard, complex, pushing life of the age. There will be fluctuations from time to time in our prosperity, but it will continue to grow just so long as we keep up this high average of individual citizenship and permit it to work out its own salvation under proper economic legislation.

The present phenomenal prosperity has been won under a tariff which was made in accordance with certain fixed and definite principles, the most important of which is an avowed determination to protect the interests of the American producer, business man, wage-worker, and farmer alike. The general tariff policy, to which, without regard to changes in detail, I believe this country is irrevocably committed, is fundamentally based upon ample recognition of the difference between the cost of production—that is, the cost of labor—here and abroad, and of the need to see to it that our laws shall in no event afford advantage in our own market to foreign industries over American industries, to foreign capital over American capital, to foreign labor over our own labor. This country has and this country needs better-paid, better-educated, better-fed, and better-clothed workingmen, of a higher type, than are to be found in any foreign country. It has and it needs a higher, more vigorous, and more prosperous type of tillers of the soil than is possessed by any other country. The business men, the merchants and manufacturers, and the managers of the transportation interests show the same superiority when compared with men of their type abroad. The events of the last few years have shown how skilfully the leaders of American industry use in international business competition the mighty industrial weapons forged for them by the resources of our country, the wisdom of our laws, and the skill, the inventive genius, and the administrative capacity of our people.

It is, of course, a mere truism to say that we want to use everything in our power to foster the welfare of our entire body politic. In other words, we need to treat the tariff as a business proposition, from the standpoint of the interests of the country as a whole, and not with reference to the temporary needs of any political party. It is almost as necessary that our policy should be stable as that it should be wise. A nation like ours could not long stand the ruinous policy of readjusting its business to radical changes in the tariff at short intervals, especially when, as now, owing to the immense extent and variety of our products, the tariff schedules carry rates of duty on thousands of different articles. Sweeping and violent changes in such a tariff, touching so vitally the interests of all of us, embracing agriculture, labor, manufactures, and commerce, would be disastrous in any event, and they would be fatal to our present well-being if approached on the theory that the principle of the protective tariff was to be abandoned. The business world, that is, the entire American world, can not afford, if it has any regard for its own welfare, even to consider the advisability of abandoning the present system.

Yet, on the other hand, where the industrial conditions so frequently change, as with us must of necessity be the case, it is a matter of prime importance that we should be able from time to time to adapt our economic policy to the changed conditions. Our aim should be to preserve the policy of a protective tariff, in which the Nation as a whole has acquiesced, and yet wherever and whenever necessary to change the duties in particular paragraphs or schedules as matters of legislative detail, if such change is demanded by the interests of the Nation as a whole.

In making any readjustment there are certain important considerations which can not be disregarded. If a tariff law has on the whole worked well, and if business has prospered under it and is prospering, it may be better to endure some inconveniences and inequalities for a time than by making changes to risk causing disturbance and perhaps paralysis in the industries and business of the country. The fact that the change in a given rate of duty may be thought desirable does not settle the question whether it is advisable to make the change immediately. Every tariff deals with duties on thousands of articles arranged in hundreds of paragraphs and in many schedules. These duties affect a vast number of interests which are often conflicting. If necessary for our welfare, then of course Congress must consider the question of changing the law as a whole or changing any given rates of duty, but we must remember that whenever even a single schedule is considered some interests will appear to demand a change in almost every schedule in the law; and when it comes to upsetting the schedules generally the effect upon the business interests of the country would be ruinous.

One point we must steadily keep in mind. The question of tariff revision, speaking broadly, stands wholly apart from the question of dealing with the trusts. No change in tariff duties can have any substantial effect in solving the so-called trust problem. Certain great trusts or great corporations are wholly unaffected by the tariff. Practically all the others that are of any importance have as a matter of fact numbers of smaller American competitors; and of course a change in the tariff which would work injury to the large corporation would work not merely injury but destruction to its smaller competitors; and equally of course such a change would mean disaster to all the wage-workers connected with either the large or the small corporations. From the standpoint of those interested in the solution of the trust problem such a change would therefore merely mean that the trust was relieved of the competition of its weaker American competitors, and thrown only into competition with foreign competitors; and that the first effort to meet this new competition would be made by cutting down wages, and would therefore be primarily at the cost of labor. In the case of some of our greatest trusts such a change might confer upon them a positive benefit. Speaking broadly, it is evident that the changes in the tariff will affect the trusts for weal or for woe simply as they affect the whole country. The tariff affects trusts only as it affects all other interests. It makes all these interests, large or small, profitable; and its benefits can be taken from the large only under penalty of taking them from the small also.

To sum up, then, we must as a people approach a matter of such prime economic importance as the tariff from the standpoint of our business needs. We can not afford to become fossilized or to fail to recognize the fact that as the needs of the country change it may be necessary to meet these new needs by changing certain features of our tariff laws. Still less can we afford to fail to recognize the further fact that these changes must not be made until the need for them outweighs the disadvantages which may result; and when it becomes necessary to make them they should be made with full recognition of the need of stability in our economic system and of keeping unchanged the principle of that system which has now become a settled policy in our national life. We have prospered marvelously at home. As a nation we stand in the very forefront in the giant international industrial competition of the day. We can not afford by any freak or folly to forfeit the position to which we have thus triumphantly attained.

AT SIOUX FALLS, S. D., APRIL 6, 1903

_Fellow-Citizens_:

There are many, many lesser problems which go to make up in their entirety the huge and complex problems of our modern industrial life. Each of these problems is, moreover, connected with many of the others. Few indeed are simple or stand only by themselves. The most important are those connected with the relation of the farmers, the stock growers and soil tillers, to the community at large, and those affecting the relations between employer and employed. In a country like ours it is fundamentally true that the well-being of the tiller of the soil and the wage-worker is the well-being of the State. If they are well off, then we need concern ourselves but little as to how other classes stand, for they will inevitably be well off too; and, on the other hand, there can be no real general prosperity unless based on the foundation of the prosperity of the wage-worker and the tiller of the soil.