ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS
Mr. Chairman, Commander-in-Chief, and you, my Comrades:
I can say that there is nothing else of which I am quite so proud as having won, in a sense, the right to claim comradeship with you. And, gentlemen, I recollect speaking with a friend at the time of the Spanish War as to why we went, and it was agreed that it was simply because we could not stay away. We had taken to heart the great object-lesson that you gave. I am very glad to have the chance of seeing you this evening and of being with you. I would be but a poor American if I did not appreciate to the full the debt under which America rests to you, not alone for the lesson in war that you have given, but for what that lesson teaches as to peace. I meet you here and I see the general and the man from the ranks honor one another by the highest title either knows—comrade. I see you applying the great lesson of brotherhood—the lesson that must be applied in civil life no less than in military life if we are to work out, as we shall work out, aright the problems that facethe Republic. The war in which I was engaged was a small affair; but it gave us an understanding of what you had done and of what you had been through. I know pretty well what kind of memories you have. I know what you did, what you risked, what you sacrificed. I know what it meant to you, and I know why you did it. There are two or three lessons that you taught that I hope this country will not only never forget, but will never cease applying. In the first place the motive—the tissue of motives that spurred you on—the love for liberty, love for union, and the love for the stable and ordered freedom of a great people. You braved nights in the freezing mud of the trenches in winter, and the marches under scorching midsummer suns; fever cots, wounds, insufficient food, exhausting fatigue of a type that those that have not tried it can not even understand. You did it without one thought of the trivial monetary reward at the moment; you did it because your souls spurred you on. And that is the reason why to this day, when any man speaks to a body of veterans he speaks to a body of men who are instant to respond to any call for adherence to a lofty ideal. In other words, you practiced, and by practicing preached, in the strongest manner, the ideal of doing your duty, of doing duty when duty calls, without thought of what the reward might be. In the days when the sad, kindly, patient Lincoln—mighty Lincoln—stood in the White House like a high priest of the people, between the horns of the altar, and poured out theblood of the bravest and best, it was because only by that sacrifice could the flag that had been rent in sunder once again be made without a seam. You taught the ideal of duty—duty, a word that stands above glory, or any other word. Glory is a good word, too, but duty is a better one.
You taught, in addition to that, brotherhood. In the ranks, as you stood there shoulder to shoulder, little any one of you cared what the man next to you was as regarded wealth, trade, or education, if he was in very truth a man. And, friends, short would have been our shrift if in our army as a whole there had been any failure to exercise just that type of judgment—to exercise the judgment on the man as a man; short would have been our shrift if we had failed to do justice to the bricklayer on the one hand, or to the banker on the other; if we had shown either contempt of the one, or the no less mean emotion of envy for the other. If we are to go on, as we shall and must go on in our national career, we must apply in the civic life of our nation exactly the principles which obtained in the Grand Army of the Republic. There are plenty of foes to fight and we can not afford to have honest men betrayed into hostility toward one another; betrayed into acting toward one another in a way that will permanently deteriorate the standard of our national character. We can afford to disagree on questions of proper political difference. There are plenty such. But we can not afford, if we are to remain true to the ideals of the past, to differabout those ideals. We can not afford to do less than justice to any man. We can not afford to shrink from seeing that the right obtains; nor, on the other hand, to rebuke any effort to stir up those dark and evil forces which lurk in each man’s breast, and which need to be kept down, not excited.
The Commander-in-Chief spoke of the great and good President—of President McKinley—who died for the people exactly as Abraham Lincoln died. You who wore the blue in the early sixties warred against that spirit of disunion which, if successful, would have meant widespread governmental anarchy throughout this land. You warred for orderly liberty. So now it behooves each of us so to conduct his civil life, so to do his duty as a citizen, that we shall in the most effective way war against the spirit of anarchy in all its forms. You did mighty deeds, and you leave us more than mighty deeds, for you leave us the memory of how you did them. You leave us not only the victory, but the spirit that lay behind it and shone through it. You leave us not only the triumph, but the memory of the patient resolution, of the suffering, of the dogged endurance and heroic daring through which that triumph came to pass. You in your youth and early manhood took up the greatest task which fell to the lot of any generation of our people to perform. You did it well. We have lesser tasks, and yet tasks of great and vital importance. Woe to us if we do not show ourselves worthy to be your successors, by doing our lesser tasks with the samefirm determination for right that you displayed when you fought to a finish the great Civil War, when you upheld the arms of Abraham Lincoln, and followed to victory the flag of Ulysses S. Grant.
Mr. President, Mr. Mayor, and you, the Men and Women of the Palmetto State, Men and Women of the South; my Fellow-citizens of the Union:
It is indeed to me a peculiar pleasure to have the chance of coming here to this Exposition held in your old, your beautiful, your historic city.
My mother’s people were from Georgia; but before they came to Georgia, before the Revolution, in the days of Colonial rule, they dwelt for nearly a century in South Carolina; and therefore I can claim your State as mine by inheritance no less than by the stronger and nobler right which makes each foot of American soil in a sense the property of all Americans.
Charleston is not only a typical Southern city; it is also a city whose history teems with events which link themselves to American history as a whole. In the early Colonial days Charleston was the outpost of our people against the Spaniard in the South. In the days of the Revolution there occurred here some of the events which vitally affected the outcome of the struggle for Independence, and which impressed themselves most deeply upon thepopular mind. It was here that the tremendous, terrible drama of the Civil War opened.
With delicate and thoughtful courtesy you originally asked me to come to this Exposition on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. The invitation not only showed a fine generosity and manliness in you, my hosts, but it also emphasized as hardly anything else could have emphasized how completely we are now a united people. The wounds left by the great Civil War, incomparably the greatest war of modern times, have healed; and its memories are now priceless heritages of honor alike to the North and to the South. The devotion, the self-sacrifice, the steadfast resolution and lofty daring, the high devotion to the right as each man saw it, whether Northerner or Southerner—all these qualities of the men and women of the early sixties now shine luminous and brilliant before our eyes, while the mists of anger and hatred that once dimmed them have passed away forever.
All of us, North and South, can glory alike in the valor of the men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray. Those were iron times, and only iron men could fight to its terrible finish the giant struggle between the hosts of Grant and Lee, the struggle that came to an end thirty-seven years ago this very day. To us of the present day, and to our children and children’s children, the valiant deeds, the high endeavor, and abnegation of self shown in that struggle by those who took part therein will remain for evermore to mark thelevel to which we in our turn must rise whenever the hour of the Nation’s need may come.
When four years ago this Nation was compelled to face a foreign foe, the completeness of the reunion became instantly and strikingly evident. The war was not one which called for the exercise of more than an insignificant fraction of our strength, and the strain put upon us was slight indeed compared with the results. But it was a satisfactory thing to see the way in which the sons of the soldier of the Union and the soldier of the Confederacy leaped eagerly forward, emulous to show in brotherly rivalry the qualities which had won renown for their fathers, the men of the great war. It was my good fortune to serve under an ex-Confederate general, gallant old Joe Wheeler, who commanded the cavalry division at Santiago.
In my regiment there were certainly as many men whose fathers had served in the Southern, as there were men whose fathers had served in the Northern, army. Among the captains there was opportunity to promote but one to field rank. The man who was singled out for this promotion because of conspicuous gallantry in the field was the son of a Confederate general and was himself a citizen of this, the Palmetto State; and no American officer could wish to march to battle beside a more loyal, gallant, and absolutely fearless comrade than my former captain and major, your fellow-citizen, Micah Jenkins.
A few months ago, owing to the enforced absenceof the Governor of the Philippines, it became necessary to nominate a Vice-Governor to take his place—one of the most important places in our Government at this time. I nominated as Vice-Governor an ex-Confederate, General Luke Wright, of Tennessee. It is therefore an ex-Confederate who now stands as the exponent of this Government and this people in that great group of islands in the eastern seas over which the American flag floats. General Wright has taken a leading part in the work of steadily bringing order and peace out of the bloody chaos in which we found the islands. He is now taking a leading part not merely in upholding the honor of the flag by making it respected as the symbol of our power, but still more in upholding its honor by unwearied labor for the establishment of ordered liberty—of law-creating, law-abiding civil government—under its folds.
The progress which has been made under General Wright and those like him has been indeed marvelous. In fact, a letter of the General’s the other day seemed to show that he considered there was far more warfare about the Philippines in this country than there was warfare in the Philippines themselves! It is an added proof of the completeness of the reunion of our country that one of the foremost men who have been instrumental in driving forward the great work for civilization and humanity in the Philippines has been a man who in the Civil War fought with distinction in a uniform of Confederate gray.
If ever the need comes in the future the past has made abundantly evident the fact that from this time on Northerner and Southerner will in war know only the generous desire to strive how each can do the more effective service for the flag of our common country. The same thing is true in the endless work of peace, the never-ending work of building and keeping the marvelous fabric of our industrial prosperity. The upbuilding of any part of our country is a benefit to the whole, and every such effort as this to stimulate the resources and industry of a particular section is entitled to the heartiest support from every quarter of the Union. Thoroughly good national work can be done only if each of us works hard for himself, and at the same time keeps constantly in mind that he must work in conjunction with others.
You have made a particular effort in your Exhibition to get into touch with the West Indies. This is wise. The events of the last four years have shown us that the West Indies and the Isthmus must in the future occupy a far larger place in our national policy than in the past. This is proved by the negotiations for the purchase of the Danish Islands, the acquisition of Porto Rico, the preparation for building an Isthmian canal, and, finally, by the changed relations which these years have produced between us and Cuba. As a Nation we have especial right to take honest pride in what we have done for Cuba. Our critics abroad and at home have insisted that we never intended to leavethe island. But on the 20th of next month Cuba becomes a free republic, and we turn over to the islanders the control of their own government. It would be very difficult to find a parallel in the conduct of any other great State that has occupied such a position as ours. We have kept our word and done our duty, just as an honest individual in private life keeps his word and does his duty.
Be it remembered, moreover, that after our four years’ occupation of the island we turn it over to the Cubans in a better condition than it ever has been in all the centuries of Spanish rule. This has a direct bearing upon our own welfare. Cuba is so near to us that we can never be indifferent to misgovernment and disaster within its limits. The mere fact that our administration in the island has minimized the danger from the dreadful scourge of yellow fever, alike to Cuba and to ourselves, is sufficient to emphasize the community of interest between us. But there are other interests which bind us together. Cuba’s position makes it necessary that her political relations with us should differ from her political relations with other powers. This fact has been formulated by us and accepted by the Cubans in the Platt amendments. It follows as a corollary that where the Cubans have thus assumed a position of peculiar relationship to our political system they must similarly stand in a peculiar relationship to our economic system.
We have rightfully insisted upon Cuba adopting toward us an attitude differing politically from thatshe adopts toward any other power; and in return, as a matter of right, we must give to Cuba a different—that is, a better—position economically in her relations with us than we give to other powers. This is the course dictated by sound policy, by a wise and far-sighted view of our own interest, and by the position we have taken during the past four years. We are a wealthy and powerful country, dealing with a much weaker one; and the contrast in wealth and strength makes it all the more our duty to deal with Cuba, as we have already dealt with her, in a spirit of large generosity.
This Exposition is rendered possible because of the period of industrial prosperity through which we are passing. While material well-being is never all-sufficient to the life of a nation, yet it is the merest truism to say that its absence means ruin. We need to build a higher life upon it as a foundation; but we can build little indeed unless this foundation of prosperity is deep and broad. The well-being which we are now enjoying can be secured only through general business prosperity, and such prosperity is conditioned upon the energy and hard work, the sanity and the mutual respect, of all classes of capitalists, large and small, of wage-workers of every degree. As is inevitable in a time of business prosperity, some men succeed more than others, and it is unfortunately also inevitable that when this is the case some unwise people are sure to try to appeal to the envy and jealousy of those who succeed least. It is a good thing when these appeals are made toremember that while it is difficult to increase prosperity by law, it is easy enough to ruin it, and that there is small satisfaction to the less prosperous if they succeed in overthrowing both the more prosperous and themselves in the crash of a common disaster.
Every industrial exposition of this type necessarily calls up the thought of the complex social and economic questions which are involved in our present industrial system. Our astounding material prosperity, the sweep and rush rather than the mere march of our progressive material development, have brought grave troubles in their train. We can not afford to blink these troubles, any more than because of them we can afford to accept as true the gloomy forebodings of the prophets of evil. There are great problems before us. They are not insoluble, but they can be solved only if we approach them in a spirit of resolute fearlessness, of common-sense, and of honest intention to do fair and equal justice to all men alike. We are certain to fail if we adopt the policy of the demagogue who raves against the wealth which is simply the form of embodied thrift, foresight, and intelligence; who would shut the door of opportunity against those whose energy we should especially foster, by penalizing the qualities which tell for success. Just as little can we afford to follow those who fear to recognize injustice and to endeavor to cut it out because the task is difficult or even—if performed by unskilful hands—dangerous.
This is an era of great combinations both of labor and of capital. In many ways these combinations have worked for good; but they must work under the law, and the laws concerning them must be just and wise, or they will inevitably do evil; and this applies as much to the richest corporation as to the most powerful labor union. Our laws must be wise, sane, healthy, conceived in the spirit of those who scorn the mere agitator, the mere inciter of class or sectional hatred; who wish justice for all men; who recognize the need of adhering so far as possible to the old American doctrine of giving the widest possible scope for the free exercise of individual initiative, and yet who recognize also that after combinations have reached a certain stage it is indispensable to the general welfare that the Nation should exercise over them, cautiously and with self-restraint, but firmly, the power of supervision and regulation.
Above all, the administration of the government, the enforcement of the laws, must be fair and honest. The laws are not to be administered either in the interest of the poor man or the interest of the rich man. They are simply to be administered justly; in the interest of justice to each man be he rich or be he poor—giving immunity to no violator, whatever form the violation may assume. Such is the obligation which every public servant takes, and to it he must be true under penalty of forfeiting the respect both of himself and of his fellows.
And now, my fellow-countrymen, in closing I amgoing to paraphrase something said by Governor Aycock last night. I have dwelt to-day upon the fact that we are indeed a reunited people; that we are indeed and forever one people. The time was when one could not have made that statement with truth; now it can be truthfully said. There was a time when it was necessary to keep saying it, because it was already true, and because the assertion made it more true; but the time is at hand, I think the time has come, when it is not necessary to say it again. Proud of the South? Of course we are proud of the South; not only Southerners, but Northerners are proud of the South. Proud of your great deeds? Of course I am proud of your great deeds, for you are my people. I thank you from my heart for the welcome you have given me, and I assure you that few experiences in my life have been more pleasant than the experiences of these two days that I have spent among you.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my hosts, and my Fellow-Guests:
What I am going to say to-night will be based upon the altogether admirable address made this afternoon by my old and valued friend, the new president of your great university, in the courseof which he spoke of what the university can contribute to the state as being scholarship and service. There are only a limited number of men of any university who can add to what has been so well called by Professor Munsterberg “productive scholarship.” Of course each university should bend its energies toward developing the few men who are thus able to add to the sum of the nation’s work in scholarly achievement. To those men the all-important doctrine to preach is that one piece of first-rate work is worth a thousand pieces of second-rate work; and that after a generation has passed each university will be remembered by what its sons have produced, not in the line of a mass of pretty good work, but in the way of the few masterpieces. I do not intend, however, to dwell upon this side of the university’s work, the work of scholarship, the work of the intellect trained to its highest point of productiveness. I want to speak of the other side, the side that produces service to the public, service to the nation. Not one in a hundred of us is fit to be in the highest sense a productive scholar, but all of us are entirely fit to do decent service if we care to take the pains. If we think we can render it without taking the pains, if we think we can render it by feeling how nice it would be to render it—why, the value of that service will be but little.
Fortunately to-day those who addressed you had a right to appeal not merely to what they had spoken, but to what they had done. When we are inclined to be pessimistic over affairs, and especially publicaffairs here in the United States, it is a pleasant thing to be able to look back to the last twenty years of the life of Columbia’s late President, Mayor Low. And now, for a moment, look at things in their pure historic perspective. Think what it means in the way of an object-lesson to have a man who, after serving two terms as Mayor of what is now one of the great boroughs of this great city, then became for twelve years the President of one of the foremost institutions of learning in the entire land, and then again became the chief officer of the city. That was not merely creditable to Mr. Low; it was creditable to us. It spoke well for the city. It is a big mark on the credit side. We have plenty of marks on the debit side; but we feel that this goes a long way toward making the balance even.
As for the Dean—why, I sat at the feet of that Gamaliel when I first went into politics. He and I took part in the affairs of the old Twenty-first Assembly District in the days when I was just out of college. My very first experiences in practical politics were gained in connection with the Dean. And, gentlemen, as I gradually passed out of the sphere of the Dean, I passed into the sphere of your present President, and he has been my close friend, my valued adviser, ever since.
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 these 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, for cleanliness, 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.
To you, the men of Columbia here, the men ofthis great city, and the men who, when they graduate, go to other parts of the country, we have the right to look in an especial degree for service to the public. To you much has been given, and woe and shame to you if we can not rightfully expect much from you in return.
We can pardon the man who has 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 wishesto 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, gentlemen, 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 every form 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 can not refrain from doing it, the man who feels it borne in on him to try that particular job and see if he can not 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 can not 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. Totrain 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.
Gentlemen of the Graduating Class:
In receiving these diplomas you become men who above almost any others of the entire Union are to carry henceforth ever-present with you the sense of responsibility which must come if you are worthy of wearing the uniform; which must come with the knowledge that on some tremendous day it may depend upon your courage, your preparedness, your skill in your profession, whether or not the nation is again to write her name on the world’s roll of honor or is to know the black shame of defeat. We all of us earnestly hope that the occasion for war may not arise, but if it has to come then this nation must win; and as Dr. Winston has pointed out, in winning the prime factor must of necessity be the United States Navy. If the navy fails us then we are doomed to defeat. It should therefore be an object of prime importance for every patriotic American to see that the navy is built up; and that it iskept to the highest point of efficiency both in personnel and material. Above all, it can not be too often repeated to those representatives of the nation in whose hands the practical application of the principle lies, that in modern naval war the chief factor in achieving triumph is what has been done in the way of thorough preparation and training before the beginning of the war. It is what has been done before the outbreak of war that counts most. After the outbreak, all that can be done is to use to best advantage the great war engines, and the seamanship, marksmanship, and general practical efficiency which have already been provided by the forethought of the national legislature and by the administrative ability, through a course of years, of the Navy Department. A battleship can not be improvised. It takes years to build. And we must learn that it is exactly as true that the skill of the officers and men in handling a battleship aright can likewise never be improvised; that it must spring from use and actual sea service, and from the most careful, zealous, and systematic training. You to whom I am about to give these diplomas now join the ranks of the officers of the United States Navy. You enter a glorious service, proud of its memories of renown. You must keep ever in your minds the thought of the supreme hour which may come when what you do will forever add to or detract from that renown. Some of you will have to do your part in helping construct the ships and the guns which you use. You need to bend every energy toward making theseships and guns in all their details the most perfect of their kind throughout the world. The ship must be seaworthy, the armament fitted for best protection to the guns and men, the guns in all their mechanism fit to do the greatest possible execution in the shortest possible time. Every detail, whether of protection to the gun-crews, of rapidity and sureness in handling the ammunition and working the elevating and revolving gear, or of quickness and accuracy in sighting, must be thought out far in advance, and the thought carefully executed in the actual work. But after that has been done it remains true that the best ships and guns, the most costly mechanism, are utterly valueless if the men have not been trained to use them to the best possible advantage. From now on throughout your lives there can be no slackness in the performance of duty on your part. Much has been given you, and much will be expected from you. Your duty must be ever present with you, waking and sleeping. You must train yourselves, and you must train those under you, in the actual work of seamanship, in the actual work of gunnery. If the day for battle comes you will need all that you possess of boldness, skill, determination, ability to bear punishment, and instant readiness in an emergency. Without these qualities you can do nothing, yet even with them you can do but little if you have not had the forethought and set purpose to train yourselves and the enlisted men under you aright. Officers and men alike must have the sea habit; officers and men alike must realizethat in battle the only shots that count are the shots that hit, and that normally the victory will lie with the side whose shots hit oftenest. Of course you must have the ability to stand up to the hammering; the courage, the daring, the resolution to endure; but I take it for granted you will have those qualities. It is less to be thought to your credit to have them than it would be eternally to your discredit to lack them. I take it for granted you will have the courage we have a right to expect to go with American seamanship; that you will have the daring and the resolution. And I ask that you make it from now on your object to see that if ever the day should arise, your courage, your readiness, your eager desire to win fresh renown for the flag be made good by the training you have given yourselves and those under you in the practical work of your profession in seamanship and gunnery.
Mr. Toastmaster; Mr. President; Compatriots; and Fellow-Americans:
It is a pleasure to take part in greeting you this evening. Societies that cultivate patriotism in the present by keeping alive the memory of what we owe to the patriotism of the past, fill an indispensable function in this Republic. You come here to-night from every quarter—from every State of the Republicand from the islands of the Eastern Seas. The Republic has put up its flag in those islands, and the flag will stay there.
I am glad to meet you here to-night—you, the descendants of the statesmen and soldiers who fought to establish this country in 1776, some of the older among whom, and the fathers of the others, fought with no less valor wearing the blue or the gray in the Civil War. May we now show our fealty to the great men who did the great deeds of the past, not alone by word but by deed! May we prove ourselves true to them, not merely by paying homage to their memory, but by so shaping the policy of this great Republic as to make it evident that we are not unworthy of our sires. They did justice, and we will do justice. They did justice as strong men, not as weaklings; and we will show ourselves strong men and not weaklings.
Before me I see men who lived in iron times, men who did great deeds. I see here a delegate from Kentucky who served under Farragut in the great days of the Civil War. I see a descendant of a man from Connecticut who was called Brother Jonathan. All around these tables are gathered men the names of whose ancestors stand not only for righteousness but also for strength—for both qualities, gentlemen. Righteousness finds weakness but a poor yoke-fellow. With righteousness must go strength to make that righteousness of avail. And in the names of the mighty men of the past I ask each man here to do his part in seeing that this nationremains true in deed as well as in word to the ideals of the past; to remember that we can no more afford to show weakness than we can afford to do wrong. Where wrong has been done by any one the wrongdoer shall be punished; but we shall not halt in our great work because some man has happened to do wrong. Honor to the statesmen of the past, and may the statesmen of the present strive to live up to the example they set! Honor to the army and navy of the past! And honor to those gallant Americans wearing the uniform of the American Republic who in the army and the navy of the present day uphold gloriously the most glorious traditions of the past!
Another thing, compatriots of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution: We are Americans, and that means that we treat Americanism primarily as a matter of spirit and purpose, and in the broadest sense we regard every man as a good American, whatever his creed, whatever his birthplace, if he is true to the ideals of this Republic.
To-day I have been down to Annapolis to see the graduating class of the Naval Academy; and it would have done your hearts good to have seen those fine, manly, upstanding young fellows who looked every man straight in the face without flinching. We may be sure that the honor of the Republic is safe in their hands.
I was glad to meet those young fellows to-day. I am glad to meet representatives of the navy likeyou, Admiral Watson, and of the army like you, General Breckenridge. I am glad that we as Americans have cause to be proud of the army and the navy of the United States—of the men who in the past have upheld the honor of the flag, and of their successors, the soldiers and sailors of the present day, who during the last three years have done such splendid work in the inconceivably dangerous and harassing warfare of the eastern tropics.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am to say but one word. Nothing more need be said than has been said already by those who have addressed you this afternoon—the statesmen who worked with McKinley and the pastor under whose ministrations he sat.
It is indeed appropriate that the Methodists of America—the men belonging to that religious organization which furnished the pioneers in carving out of the West what is now the heart of the great American Republic—should found this great university in the city of Washington and should build the college that is to teach the science of government in the name of the great exponent of good and strong government who died last fall, who died as truly for this country as Abraham Lincoln himself.
I thank you for having given me the opportunity this afternoon to come before you and to lay the cornerstone of this building.
Speaker Henderson; and you, the Comrades of the Great Chief whose reburial in the National Cemetery here at Arlington we have met together to commemorate:
Speaker Henderson in his address has well said that the builder rather than the destroyer is the man most entitled to honor among us; that the man who builds up is greater than he who tears down; and that our homage should be for the fighting man who not only fought worthily but fought in a worthy cause. Therefore for all time, not merely the people of this great reunited country but the nations of mankind who see the hope for ordered liberty in what this country has done, will hold you, the men of the great Civil War, and the leaders like him whose mortal remains are to be put to-day in their final resting place, in peculiar honor because you were soldiers who fought to build; you were upbuilders; you were the men to whose lot it fell to save, to perpetuate, to make stronger the great national fabric, the foundations of which had been laid by the menwho fought under him whose home at Mount Vernon stands as an equally prized memorial of the past with Arlington. It is no chance that has made Mount Vernon and Arlington, here in the neighborhood of Washington, the two great memorials of the nation’s past. One commemorates the founding and the other the saving of the nation. If it were not for what Arlington symbolizes, Mount Vernon would mean little or nothing. If it were not for what was done by Rosecrans and his fellows, the work of Washington would have crumbled into bloody chaos and the deeds of the founders of this Republic be remembered only because they had begun another of the many failures to make practical the spirit of liberty in this world. Without the work that you did the work of the men who fought the Revolution to a successful close would have meant nothing. To you it was given to do the one great work which if left undone would have meant that all else done by our people would have counted for nothing. And you left us a reunited country, and therefore the right of brotherhood with and of pride in the gallantry and self-devotion of those who wore the gray, who were pitted against you in the great struggle. The very fact that we appreciate more and more as the years go on the all-importance to this country and to mankind of your victory, makes it more and more possible for us to recognize in the heartiest and frankest manner the sincerity, the self-devotion, the fealty to the right as it was given to them to see the right, of our fellow Americansagainst whom you fought—and now the reunion is so complete that it is useless to allude to the fact that it is complete. And you left us another lesson in brotherhood. To-day you come here, comrades of the Army of the Cumberland—the man who had a commission and the man who fought in the ranks—brothers, because each did what there was in him to do for the right. Each did what he could and all alike shared equally in the glory of the deed that was done. Officer and enlisted man stand at the bar of history to be judged not by the difference of rank, but by whether they did their duties in their respective ranks. And oh, of how little count, looking back, the difference of rank compared with the doing of the duty! What was true then is true now. Doing the duty well is what counts. In any audience of this kind one sees in the highest official and social position men who fought as enlisted men in the armies of the Union or in the armies of the Confederacy. All we ask is, did they do their duty? If they did, honor to them! Little we care what particular position they held, save insofar as the holding of exalted position gave the men a chance to do great and peculiar service.
I shall not try to eulogize the dead General in the presence of his comrades, in the presence of his countrymen who have come to honor the memory of the man against whom they were pitted in the past—who come here because they now, like us, are Americans and nothing else, devoted to the Union and to one flag. I shall not try to speak of his servicesin the presence of those who fought through the Civil War, who risked the loss of life, who endured the loss of limb, who fought as enlisted men or came out boys not yet ready to enter college but able to bear commissions in the army of the United States, as the result of three or four years of service with the colors. There are those of each class of whom I have spoken who have addressed or will address you to-day. They are entitled to speak as comrades of the great dead. But the younger among us are only entitled to pay to the great dead the homage of those to whom ordered liberty has been handed down as a heritage because of the blood, and of the sweat, and of the toil of the men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. Great were the lessons you taught us in war. Great have been the lessons you have taught us in peace since the war. Sincerely and humbly the men who came after you hasten to acknowledge the debt that is owing to you. You were the men of the mighty days who showed yourselves equal to the days. We have to-day lesser tasks; and shame to us if we flinch from doing or fail to do well these lesser tasks, when you carried to triumphant victory a task as difficult as that which was set you! Here in the presence of one of the illustrious dead whose names will remain forever on the honor roll of the greatest Republic upon which the sun has ever shone, it behooves all of us, young and old, solemnly and reverently to pledge ourselves to continue undimmed the traditions you have left us; to do the work,whatever that work may be, necessary to make good the work that you did; to acknowledge the inspiration of your careers in war and in peace; and to remind ourselves once for all that lip loyalty is not the loyalty that counts. The loyalty that counts is the loyalty which shows itself in deeds rather than in words; and therefore we pledge ourselves to make good by our lives what you risked your lives to gain and keep for the nation as a whole.
Mr. Chairman; and you, my friends—for if this meeting means anything, it means a commemoration of the embodied spirit of friendship and righteousness working through the Church through generations—
I am glad to have the chance of greeting you to-night. I belong to a closely allied Church—the Dutch Reformed. I want to tell you a curious incident which was mentioned to me by one of the two gentlemen who, on your behalf, met me this evening and brought me up here. Mr. Ogden mentioned to me that two hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, the first church of my denomination here in this city was put up under contract by his ancestors, who then dwelt in Connecticut. It is, I think, in a sense symbolical of how much the Church hascounted in the life of our people that the descendants of those who worshiped in that church and of those who under contract put it up, should be meeting here this evening. I have another bond with you. There are not very many Dutch Reformed churches in this city; not quite as many as there should be; and during a considerable portion of my life I have had to go to a Presbyterian church, because there was not a Reformed church to attend. All of my early years I went to the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, which then had as its pastor Dr. Adams. Those of you who remember him will agree with me that he was one of the very few men concerning whom it was not inappropriate to use the adjective by which I shall describe him, for he was in very truth a saintly man.
It is a pleasure on behalf of the people of the United States to greet you and bid you welcome on this hundredth anniversary of the beginning of organized home missionary work by the Presbyterian Church. In one sense of course all earnest and fervent church work is a part of home missionary work. Every earnest and zealous believer, every man or woman who is a doer of the word and not a hearer only, is a lifelong missionary in his or her field of labor—a missionary by precept, and, by what counts a thousandfold more than precept, by practice. Every such believer exerts influence on those within reach, somewhat by word and infinitely more through the ceaseless, wellnigh unfelt pressure—all the stronger where its exercise is unconscious—thepressure of example, broad charity, and neighborly kindness.
But to-night we celebrate one hundred years of missionary work done not incidentally, but with set purpose; a hundred years of effort to spread abroad the Gospel and lay the moral foundation upon which all true national greatness must rest. The century that has closed has seen the conquest of this continent by our people. To conquer a continent is rough work. All really great work is rough in the doing, though it seems smooth enough to those who look back upon it, or to the contemporaries who overlook it from afar. We need display but scant patience with those who, sitting at ease in their own homes, delight to exercise a querulous and censorious spirit of judgment upon their brethren who, whatever their shortcomings, are doing strong men’s work as they bring the light of civilization into the world’s dark places. The criticism of those who live softly, remote from the strife, is of little value; but it would be difficult to overestimate the value of the missionary work of those who go out to share the hardship, and, while sharing it, not to talk, but to wage war against the myriad forms of brutality. It is such missionary work that prevents the pioneers from sinking perilously near the level of the savage race against which they war. Without it the conquest of this continent would have had little but an animal side. Without it the pioneers’ fierce and rude virtues and sombre faults would have remained unlit by the flame of pure and lovingaspiration. Without it the life of this country would have been a life of inconceivably hard and barren materialism. Because of it, because of the spirit that lay under those missionaries’ work, deep beneath and through the national character runs that power of firm adherence to a lofty ideal upon which the safety of the nation will ultimately depend.
Honor, thrice honor to those who for three generations, during the period of this people’s great expansion, have seen that the force of the living truth expanded as the nation expanded! They bore the burden and heat of the day, they toiled obscurely and died unknown, that we might come into a glorious heritage. Let us prove the sincerity of our homage to their faith and their works by the way in which we manfully carry toward completion the work they so well began.
Friends, I made up my mind coming up here that I would speak to you of something that has taken place to-day and of something else that has taken place within the last ten days. First of the action of this nation which has culminated on this Tuesday, the twentieth of May, nineteen hundred and two, in starting a free Republic on its course. That represented four years’ work. There were blunders and shortcomings in the work, of course; and there were men of little faith who could only see the blunders and shortcomings. But it represents work triumphantly done. And I think that we as citizens of this Republic have a right to feel proud that wekept our pledge to the letter, and that we have established a new international precedent. I do not remember (and I have thought a good deal about it, ladies and gentlemen) another case in modern times where, as a result of such a war, the victorious nation has contented itself with setting a new nation free and fitting it as well as could be done to start well in the difficult path of self-government. Mere anarchy and ruin would have fallen upon the island if we had contented ourselves with simple victory in the war and then had turned the island loose to shift for itself. For over three years the harder work of peace has supplemented the hard work of war; for over three years our representatives in the island (representatives largely of the army, remember—I sometimes hear the army attacked; gentlemen, I have even heard missionaries attacked. But it is well for us that when there comes a great work in peace or in war we have the army as an instrument for it), our representatives in Cuba have steadily worked to build up a school system, to see to sanitation, to preserve order and secure the chance for the starting of industries; to do everything in our power so that the new government might begin with the chances in its favor. And now as a nation we bid it Godspeed. We intend to see that it has all the aid we can give it, and I trust and believe that our people will, through their national legislature, see to it very shortly that Cuba has the advantage of entering into peculiarly close relations with us in our economic system.
That is the deed that was consummated to-day; now for the other.
Ten days or a fortnight ago an appalling calamity befell another portion of the West Indies; befell islands not in any way under our flag—islands owning allegiance to two European powers. But their need was great and our people met that need as speedily as possible. Congress at once appropriated a large sum of money and through private gifts great additions were made to that appropriation; and I found, as usual, the army and navy the instruments through which the work could be done. I wanted to get men whom I could call on instantly to drop whatever their work was and go down, with the certainty that neither pestilence nor the danger from volcanoes or anything else would make them swerve a half inch—men upon whose absolute integrity and capacity I could count, as well as on their courage. When I wanted these men and wanted them at once I turned to the army and the navy. I am sure that we all feel proud that ships bearing the American flag should have been the first to carry relief to those who had been stricken down by so appalling a disaster.
It seems to me that while there is much evil against which we need to war with all the strength there is in us, and while there are many tendencies in the complex forces about us which are fraught with peril to the future welfare of the Republic and of mankind, yet it is a fine thing to see at the opening of this century such omens of internationalbrotherhood, of a future when the sense of duty to one’s neighbor will extend beyond national lines. They are good omens for the future, these actions: that action which culminated to-day in establishing the free Republic of Cuba; that action which made our country the first to reach out a generous and helping hand to those upon whom calamity had fallen, without regard to what the flag was to which they paid allegiance.
Mr. Chairman; Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you this evening, and I know you will pardon me if it is but a word, for I did not anticipate that there would be another meeting at which to speak.
Of course, the very first thing that any nation has to do is to keep in order the affairs of its own household; to do that which is best for its own life. And as has been so well and truthfully said, Dr. Van Dyke, by you this evening, the vital thing to a nation is the spiritual, not the material. Napoleon said that in war the moral was to the material as ten to one; and it is just exactly as true in civil and social life. I do not mean for one moment to undervalue the material. We must have thrift, business energy, business enterprise and all that spring from them,as the foundation upon which we are to build the great national superstructure. But it is a pretty poor building if you have nothing but the basement. It is an admirable thing to have material development, great material riches, if we do not misestimate the position that that material well-being should occupy in the nation. It is an admirable thing to have wealth if we use it aright and understand its relative value compared to the things of the spirit. Now that sounds like preaching. But it is only an expression of a political truism if you look at it in the right way. We have spread during the last century over this whole continent. One hundred years ago the home missionary work was begun. Do you realize that at that time any one who went west of the Mississippi went into a foreign land? He did; and as late as 1846 any one who went, in this latitude, to the Pacific Coast, went into a foreign land. But as we expanded nationally, so it was our good fortune that there should go hand in hand with such expansion the expansion of the church work, and of all that goes with church work. I do not think we can realize the all-importance of the way in which the vital need was met by the men who went out as missionaries, and pastors, and workers in the little raw, struggling communities whose people were laying deep the foundations of the great States that to-day fill the valley of the Mississippi and stud the Pacific Coast. The men who went out have by their efforts given to what would otherwise have been the merely material development of our people the spirituallift that was vital to it—the spiritual lift that made in the end a great nation instead of merely a nation of well-to-do people. We want well-to-do people, but if they areonlywell-to-do people, they have come far short of what we have a right to demand. A giant work looms up before the churches in this country, and it is work which the churches must do. Our civilization has progressed in many ways for the right; in some ways it has gone wrong. The tremendous sweep of our industrial development has already brought us face to face on this continent with many a problem which has puzzled for generations the wisest people of the old world. With that growth in the complexity of our civilization, of our industrialism, has grown an increase in the effective power alike of the forces that tell for good and of the forces that tell for evil. The forces for evil, as our great cities grow, become more concentrated, more menacing to the community, and if the community is to go forward and not back they must be met and overcome by forces for good that have grown in corresponding degree. More and more in the future our churches must realize that we have a right to expect that they shall take the lead in shaping those forces for good.
I am not going to verge on the domain of theology, and still less of dogma. I do not think that at the present time there will be any dissent from the proposition that after all in this work-a-day world we must largely judge men by their fruits; that we can not accept a long succession of thistlecrops as indicating fig trees; and that we have a right to look to the churches for setting the highest possible standard of conduct and of service, public and private, for the whole land; that the church must make itself felt by finding its expression through the life work of its members; not merely on Sunday, but on week days; not merely within these walls, but at home and in business. We have a right to expect that you will show your faith by your works; that the people who have the inestimable advantages of the church-life and the home-life should be made to remember that as much has been given them, much will be expected of them; that they must lead upright lives themselves and be living forces in the war for decency among their surroundings; that we have a right to expect of you and those like you that you shall not merely speak for righteousness, but do righteousness in your own homes and in the world at large.
Mrs. President, and members of the Society, and you, my comrades, and, finally, officers and men of the Regular Army, whom we took as our models in the war four years ago:
It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon to accept in the name of the nation the monument putup by your society to the memory of those who fell in the war with Spain; a short war; a war that called for the exertion of only the merest fraction of the giant strength of this nation; but a war, the effects of which will be felt through the centuries to come, because of the changes it wrought. It is eminently appropriate that the monument should be unveiled to-day, the day succeeding that on which the free republic of Cuba took its place among the nations of the world as a sequel to what was done by those men who fell and by their comrades in ’98.
And here, where we meet to honor the memory of those who drew the great prize of death in battle, a word in reference to the survivors: I think that one lesson every one who was capable of learning anything learned from his experience in that war was the old, old lesson that we need to apply in peace quite as much—the lesson that the man who does not care to do any act until the time for heroic action comes, does not do the heroic act when the time does come. You all of you remember, comrades, some man—it is barely possible some of you remember being the man—who, when you enlisted, had a theory that there was nothing but splendor and fighting and bloodshed in the war, and then had the experience of learning that the first thing you had to do was to perform commonplace duties, and perform them well. The work of any man in the campaign depended upon the resolution and effective intelligence with which he started about doing each duty as it arose; not waiting until hecould choose the duty that he thought sufficiently spectacular to do, but doing the duty that came to hand. That is exactly the lesson that all of us need to learn in times of peace. It is not merely a great thing, but an indispensable thing that the nation’s citizens should be ready and willing to die for it in time of need; and the presence of no other quality could atone for the lack of such readiness to lay down life if the nation calls. But in addition to dying for the nation you must be willing and anxious to live for the nation, or the nation will be badly off. If you want to do your duty only when the time comes for you to die, the nation will be deprived of valuable services during your lives.
I never see a gathering of this kind; I never see a gathering under the auspices of any of the societies which are organized to commemorate the valor and patriotism of the founders of this nation; I never see a gathering composed of the men who fought in the great Civil War or in any of the lesser contests in which this country has been engaged, without feeling the anxiety to make such a gathering feel, each in his or her heart, the all-importance of doing the ordinary, humdrum, commonplace duties of each day as those duties arise. A large part of the success on the day of battle is always due to the aggregate of the individual performance of duty during the long months that have preceded the day of battle. The way in which a nation arises to a great crisis is largely conditioned upon the way in which its citizens have habituatedthemselves to act in the ordinary affairs of the national life. You can not expect that much will be done in the supreme hour of peril by soldiers who have not fitted themselves to meet the need when the need comes, and you can not expect the highest type of citizenship in the periods when it is needed if that citizenship has not been trained by the faithful performance of ordinary duty. What we need most in this Republic is not special genius, not unusual brilliancy, but the honest and upright adherence on the part of the mass of the citizens and of their representatives to the fundamental laws of private and public morality—which are now what they have been during recorded history. We shall succeed or fail in making this Republic what it should be made—I will go a little further than that—what it shall and must be made, accordingly as we do or do not seriously and resolutely set ourselves to do the tasks of citizenship—and good citizenship consists in doing the many small duties, private and public, which in the aggregate make it up.
Mr. Commander; Comrades; and you, the men and women of the United States who owe your being here to what was done by the men of the great Civil War:
I greet you, and thank you for the honor done me in asking me to be present this day. It is a good custom for our country to have certainsolemn holidays in commemoration of our greatest men and of the greatest crises in our history. There should be but few such holidays. To increase their number is to cheapen them. Washington and Lincoln—the man who did most to found the Union, and the man who did most to preserve it—stand head and shoulders above all our other public men, and have by common consent won the right to this preëminence. Among the holidays which commemorate the turning points in American history, Thanksgiving has a significance peculiarly its own. On July 4 we celebrate the birth of the nation; on this day, the 30th of May, we call to mind the deaths of those who died that the nation might live, who wagered all that life holds dear for the great prize of death in battle, who poured out their blood like water in order that the mighty national structure raised by the far-seeing genius of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Hamilton, and the other great leaders of the Revolution, great framers of the Constitution, should not crumble into meaningless ruins.
You whom I address to-day and your comrades who wore the blue beside you in the perilous years during which strong, sad, patient Lincoln bore the crushing load of national leadership, performed the one feat the failure to perform which would have meant destruction to everything which makes the name America a symbol of hope among the nations of mankind. You did the greatest and most necessary task which has ever fallen to the lot of anymen on this Western Hemisphere. Nearly three centuries have passed since the waters of our coasts were first furrowed by the keels of those whose children’s children were to inherit this fair land. Over a century and a half of colonial growth followed the settlement; and now for over a century and a quarter we have been a nation.
During our four generations of national life we have had to do many tasks, and some of them of far-reaching importance; but the only really vital task was the one you did, the task of saving the Union. There were other crises in which to have gone wrong would have meant disaster; but this was the one crisis in which to have gone wrong would have meant not merely disaster but annihilation. For failure at any other point atonement could have been made; but had you failed in the iron days the loss would have been irreparable, the defeat irretrievable. Upon your success depended all the future of the people on this continent, and much of the future of mankind as a whole.
You left us a reunited country. You left us the right of brotherhood with the men in gray, who with such courage, and such devotion for what they deemed the right, fought against you. But you left us much more even than your achievement, for you left us the memory of how it was achieved. You, who made good by your valor and patriotism the statesmanship of Lincoln and the soldiership of Grant, have set as the standards for our efforts in the future both the way you did your work in warand the way in which, when the war was over, you turned again to the work of peace. In war and in peace alike your example will stand as the wisest of lessons to us and our children and our children’s children.
Just at this moment the Army of the United States, led by men who served among you in the great war, is carrying to completion a small but peculiarly trying and difficult war in which is involved not only the honor of the flag but the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism. The task has not been as difficult or as important as yours, but, oh, my comrades, the men in the uniform of the United States, who have for the last three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Philippine Islands, are your younger brothers, your sons. They have shown themselves not unworthy of you, and they are entitled to the support of all men who are proud of what you did.
These younger comrades of yours have fought under terrible difficulties and have received terrible provocation from a very cruel and very treacherous enemy. Under the strain of these provocations I deeply deplore to say that some among them have so far forgotten themselves as to counsel and commit, in retaliation, acts of cruelty. The fact that for every guilty act committed by one of our troops a hundred acts of far greater atrocity have been committed by the hostile natives upon our troops, orupon the peaceable and law-abiding natives who are friendly to us, can not be held to excuse any wrongdoers on our side. Determined and unswerving effort must be made, and has been and is being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.
Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From time to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman cruelty and barbarity—cruelty infinitely worse than any that has ever been committed by our troops in the Philippines; worse to the victims, and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it. The men who fail to condemn these lynchings, and yet clamor about what has been done in the Philippines, are indeed guilty of neglecting the beam in their own eye while taunting their brother about the mote in his. Understand me. These lynchings afford us no excuse for failure to stop cruelty in the Philippines. But keep in mind that these cruelties in the Philippines have been wholly exceptional, and have been shamelessly exaggerated. We deeply and bitterly regret that they should have been committed, no matter how rarely, no matter under what provocation, by American troops. But they afford far less ground fora general condemnation of our army than these lynchings afford for the condemnation of the communities in which they occur. In each case it is well to condemn the deed, and it is well also to refrain from including both guilty and innocent in the same sweeping condemnation.
In every community there are people who commit acts of wellnigh inconceivable horror and baseness. If we fix our eyes only upon these individuals and upon their acts, and if we forget the far more numerous citizens of upright and honest life and blind ourselves to their countless deeds of wisdom and justice and philanthropy, it is easy enough to condemn the community. There is not a city in this land which we could not thus condemn if we fixed our eyes solely upon its police record and refused to look at what it had accomplished for decency and justice and charity. Yet this is exactly the attitude which has been taken by too many men with reference to our army in the Philippines; and it is an attitude iniquitous in its absurdity and its injustice.
The rules of warfare which have been promulgated by the War Department and accepted as the basis of conduct by our troops in the field are the rules laid down by Abraham Lincoln when you, my hearers, were fighting for the Union. These rules provide, of course, for the just severity necessary in war. The most destructive of all forms of cruelty would be to show weakness where sternness is demanded by iron need. But all cruelty is forbidden,and all harshness beyond what is called for by need. Our enemies in the Philippines have not merely violated every rule of war, but have made of these violations their only method of carrying on the war. Think over that! It is not a rhetorical statement—it is a bald statement of contemporary history. They have been able to prolong the war at all only by recourse to acts each one of which put them beyond the pale of civilized warfare. We would have been justified by Abraham Lincoln’s rules of war in infinitely greater severity than has been shown.
The fact really is that our warfare in the Philippines has been carried on with singular humanity. For every act of cruelty by our men there have been innumerable acts of forbearance, magnanimity, and generous kindness. These are the qualities which have characterized the war as a whole. The cruelties on our part have been wholly exceptional.
The guilty are to be punished; but in punishing them, let those who sit at ease at home, who walk delicately and live in the soft places of the earth, remember also to do them common justice. Let not the effortless and the untempted rail overmuch at strong men who with blood and sweat face years of toil and days of agony, and at need lay down their lives in remote tropic jungles to bring the light of civilization into the world’s dark places. The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potentfactors in the progress of humanity. Yet from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.
It behooves us to keep a vigilant watch to prevent these abuses and to punish those who commit them; but if because of them we flinch from finishing the task on which we have entered, we show ourselves cravens and weaklings, unworthy of the sires from whose loins we sprang. Oh, my comrades, how the men of the present tend to forget not merely what was done but what was spoken in the past! There were abuses and to spare in the Civil War; and slander enough, too, by each side against the other. Your false friends then called Grant a “butcher” and spoke of you who are listening to me as mercenaries, as “Lincoln’s hirelings.” Your open foes—as in the resolution passed by the Confederate Congress in October, 1862—accused you, at great length, and with much particularity, of “contemptuous disregard of the usages of civilized war;” of subjecting women and children to “banishment, imprisonment, and death;” of “murder,” of “rapine,” of “outrages on women,” of “lawless cruelty,” of “perpetrating atrocities which would be disgraceful in savages;” and Abraham Lincoln was singled out for especial attack because of his “spirit of barbarous ferocity.” Verily, these men who thus foully slandered you have their heirs to-day in those who traduce our armies in the Philippines, who fix their eyes on individual deeds of wrong so keenly that at last they become blind tothe great work of peace and freedom that has already been accomplished.