A Square DealandThe ManWho Counts
When it comes to rendering service, that which counts chiefly with a college graduate, as with any other American citizen, is not intellect so much as what stands above mere power of body, or mere power of mind, but must in a sense include them, and that is, character. It is a good thing to have a sound body and a better thing to have a sound mind; and better still to have that aggregate of virile and decent qualities which we group together under the name of character. I said both decent and virile qualities—it is not enough to have one or the other alone. If a man is strong in mind and body and misuses his strength then he becomes simply a foe to the body politic, to be hunted down by all decent men; and if on the other hand he has thoroughly decent impulses but lacks strength he is a nice man but does not count. You can do but little with him.
¶In the unending strife for civic betterment, small is the use of those people who mean well, but who mean well feebly. The man who counts is the man who is decent and who makes himself felt as a force for decency, forcleanliness, for civic righteousness. He must have several qualities; first and foremost, of course, he must be honest, he must have the root of right thinking in him. That is not enough. In the next place he must have courage; the timid good man counts but little in the rough business of trying to do well the world’s work. And finally, in addition to being honest and brave he must have common-sense. If he does not have it, no matter what other qualities he may have, he will find himself at the mercy of those who, without possessing his desire to do right, know only too well how to make the wrong effective.
¶We can pardon the man who has had no chance in life if he does but little for the state, and we can count it greatly to his credit if he does much for the state. But upon you who have had so much rests a heavy burden to show that you are worthy of what you have received. A double responsibility is upon you to use aright, not merely the talents that have been given to you, but the chances you have to make much of these talents. We have a right to expect service to the state from you in many different lines: In the line of what, for lack of a better word, we will call philanthropy; in all lines of effort for public decency.
¶Remember always that the man who does a thing so that it is worth doing is always a man who does his work for the work’s sake. Somewhere in Ruskin there is a sentence to the effect that the man who does a piece of work for the fee, normally does it in a second-rate way, and that the only first-rate work is the work done by the man who does it for the sake of doing it well, who counts the deed as itself his reward. In no kind of work done for the public do you ever find the really best, except where you find the man who takes hold of it because he is irresistibly impelled to do it; because he wishes to do it for the sake of doing it well, not for the sake of any reward that comes afterward or in connection with it.
¶Of course, that is true of almost every other walk of life; just exactly as true as it is in politics. A clergyman is not worth his salt if he finds himself bound to be a clergyman for the material reward of that profession. Every doctor who has ever succeeded has been a man incapable of thinking of his fee when he did a noteworthy surgical operation. A scientific man, a writer, a historian, an artist, can only be a good man of science, a first class artist, a first class writer, if he does his work for the sake of doing it well; and this is exactly as true in political life, exactly as true in everyform of social effort, in every kind of work done for the public at large. The man who does work worth doing is the man who does it because he cannot refrain from doing it, the man who feels it borne in on him to try that particular job and see if he cannot do it well. And so it is with a general in the field. The man in the civil war who thought of any material reward for what he did was not among the men whose names you read now on the honor roll of American history.
¶So the work that our colleges can do is to fit their graduates, to do service; to fit the bulk of them, the men who cannot go in for the highest type of scholarship, to do the ordinary citizen’s service for the country; and they can fit them to do this service only by training them in character. To train them in character means to train them not only to possess, as they must possess, the softer and gentler virtues, but also the virile powers of a race of vigorous men, the virtues of courage, of honesty—not merely the honesty that refrains from doing wrong, but the honesty that wars aggressively for the right—the virtues of courage, honesty, and finally, hard common-sense.[20]