Colonel McCook, Gentlemen, and Ladies:
It needed no urging to get me to accept your invitation. I hailed the chance of speaking a few words to you on this occasion, because it seems to me that the railroad branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association exemplifies in practice just exactly what I like to preach; that is, the combination of efficiency with decent living and high ideals.
In our present advanced civilization we have to pay certain penalties for what we have obtained. Among the penalties is the fact that in very many occupations there is so little demand upon nerve, hardihood, and endurance, that there is a tendency to unhealthy softening of fibre and relaxation of fibre; and such being the case I think it is a fortunate thing for our people as a whole that there should be certain occupations, prominent among them railroading, in which the man has to show the very qualities of courage, of hardihood, or willingness to face danger, the cultivation of the power of an instantaneous decision under difficulties, and the other qualities which go to make up the virile sideof a man’s character—the qualities, Colonel McCook, which you and those like you showed when as boys, as young men, they fought to a finish the great Civil War.
So much for the manliness, so much for the strength, so much for the courage developed by your profession, all of which you show, and have to show, or you could not succeed in doing the work you are doing as your life work. These qualities are all-important, but they are not all-sufficient. It is necessary absolutely to have them. No nation can rise to greatness without them; but by them alone no nation will ever become great. Reading through the pages of history you come upon nation after nation in which there has been a high average of individual strength, bravery, and hardihood, and yet in which there has been nothing approaching to national greatness, because those qualities were not supplemented by others just as necessary. With the courage, with the hardihood, with the strength, must come the power of self-restraint, the power of self-mastery, the capacity to work for and with others as well as for one’s self, the power of giving to others the love which each of us must bear for his neighbor, if we are to make our civilization really great. And these are the qualities which are fostered and developed, which are given full play, by institutions such as the Young Men’s Christian Association.
The other day in a little Lutheran church at Sioux Falls I listened to a most interesting and moststimulating sermon, which struck me particularly because of the translation of a word which, I am ashamed to say, I had myself always before mistranslated. It was on the old text of faith, hope, and charity. The sermon was delivered in German, and the word that the preacher used for charity was not charity, but love; preaching that the greatest of all the forces with which we deal for betterment is love. Looking it up I found, of course, what I ought to have known but did not, that the Greek word which we have translated into the word charity, should be more properly translated love. That is, we use the word charity at present in a sense which does not make it correspond entirely to the word used in the original Greek. This Lutheran preacher developed in a very striking but very happy fashion the absolute need of love in the broadest sense of the word, in order to make mankind even approximately perfect.
We need then the two qualities—the quality of which I first spoke to you which has many shapes, the quality which rests upon courage, upon bodily and mental strength, upon will, upon daring, upon resolution, the quality which makes a man work; and then we need the quality of which the preacher spoke when he spoke of love as being the great factor, the ultimate factor, in bringing about the kind of human fellowship which will even approximately enable us to come up toward the standard after which I think all of us with many shortcomings strive. Work, the quality which makes a manashamed not to be able to pull his own weight, not to be able to do for himself as well as for others without being beholden to any one for what he is doing. No man is happy if he does not work. Of all miserable creatures the idler, in whatever rank of society, is in the long run the most miserable. If a man does not work, if he has not in him not merely the capacity for work but the desire for work, then nothing can be done with him. He is out of place in our community. We have in our scheme of government no room for the man who does not wish to pay his way through life by what he does for himself and for the community. If he has leisure which makes it unnecessary for him to devote his time to earning his daily bread, then all the more he is bound to work just as hard in some way that will make the community the better off for his existence. If he fails in that, he fails to justify his existence. Work, the capacity for work, is absolutely necessary; and no man’s life is full, no man can be said to live in the true sense of the word, if he does not work. This is necessary, and yet it is not enough. If a man is utterly selfish, if utterly disregardful of the rights of others, if he has no ideals, if he works simply for the sake of ministering to his own base passions, if he works simply to gratify himself, small is his good in the community. I think even then he is probably better off than if he is an idler, but he is of no real use unless together with the quality which enables him to work he has the quality which enables him tolove his fellows, to work with them and for them for the common good of all.
It seems to me that these Young Men’s Christian Associations play a part of the greatest consequence, not merely because of the great good they do in themselves, but because of the lesson of brotherhood that they teach all of us. All of us here are knit together by bonds which we can not sever. For weal or for woe our fates are inextricably intermingled. All of us in our present civilization are dependent upon one another to a degree never before known in the history of mankind, and in the long run we are going to go up or go down together. For a moment some man may rise by trampling on his fellows; for a moment, and much more commonly, some men may think they will rise or gratify their envy and hatred by pulling down others. But any such movement upward is probably illusory, and is certainly short-lived. Any permanent movement upward must come in such a shape that all of us feel the lift a little, and if there is a tendency down ward all of us will feel that tendency, too. We must, if we are to raise ourselves, realize that each of us in the long run can with certainty be raised only if the conditions are such that all of us are somewhat raised. In order to bring about these conditions the first essential is that each shall have a genuine spirit of regard and friendship for the others, and that each of us shall try to look at the problems of life somewhat from his neighbor’s standpoint—that we shall have the capacity to understandone another’s position, one another’s needs, and also the desire each to help his brother as well as to help himself. To do that wisely, wisely to strive with that as the aim, is not very easy. Many qualities are needed in order that we can contribute our mite toward the upward movement of the world—among them the quality of self-abnegation, and yet combined with it the quality which will refuse to submit to injustice. I want to preach the two qualities going hand in hand. I do not want a man to fail to try to strive for his own betterment, I do not want him to be quick to yield to injustice; I want him to stand for his rights; but I want him to be very certain that he knows what his rights are, and that he does not make them the wrongs of some one else.
I have a great deal of faith in the average American citizen. I think he is a pretty good fellow, and I think he can generally get on with the other average American citizen if he will only know him. If he does not know him, but makes him a monster in his mind, then he will not get on with him. But if he will take the trouble to know him and realize that he is a being just like himself, with the same instincts, not all of them good, the same desire to overcome those that are not good, the same purposes, the same tendencies, the same shortcomings, the same desires for good, the same need of striving against evil; if he will realize all this, then if you can get the two together with an honest desire each to try not only to help himself but to help the other,most of our problems will be solved. And I can imagine no way more likely to hurry forward such a favorable solution than to encourage the building up of just such institutions as this.
Therefore, I congratulate you with all my heart upon this meeting to-day. Therefore I esteem myself most fortunate in having the chance of addressing you. It is a very good thing to attend to the material side of life. We must in the first instance attend to our material prosperity. Unless we have that as a foundation we can not build up any higher kind of life. But we shall lead a miserable and sordid life if we spend our whole time in doing nothing but attending to our material needs. If the building up of the railroads, of the farms, of the factories, of the industrial centres, means nothing whatever but an increase in the instruments of production and an increase in the fevered haste with which those instruments are used, progress amounts to but a little thing. If, however, the developing of our material prosperity is to serve as a foundation upon which we raise a higher, a purer, a fuller, a better life, then indeed things are well with the Republic. If as our wealth increases the wisdom of our use of the wealth increases in even greater proportion, then the wealth has justified its existence many times over. If with the industry, the skill, the hardihood, of those whom I am addressing and their fellows, nothing comes beyond a selfish desire each to grasp for himself whatever he can of material enjoyment, then the outlook for the futureis indeed grave, then the advantages of living in the twentieth century surrounded by all our modern improvements, our modern symbols of progress, is indeed small. But if we mean to make of each fresh development in the way of material betterment a step toward a fresh development in moral and spiritual betterment, then we are to be congratulated.
To me the future seems full of hope because, although there are many conflicting tendencies, and although some of these tendencies of our present life are for evil, yet, on the whole the tendencies for good are in the ascendency. And I greet this audience, this great body of delegates, with peculiar pleasure because they are men who embody, and embody by the very fact of their presence here, the two essential sets of qualities of which I have been speaking. They embody the capacity for self-help with the desire mutually to help one the other. You have several qualities I like. You have sound bodies. Your profession is not one that can be carried on, at least in some of its branches, without the sound body. You have sound minds, and that is better than sound bodies; and finally, the fact that you are here, the fact that you have done what you have done, shows that you have that which counts for more than body, for more than mind—character.
I congratulate you upon what you are doing for yourselves, and I congratulate you even more upon what you are doing for all men who hope to see the day brought nearer when the people of all nations,shall realize—not merely talk of, but realize—what the essence of brotherhood is. I congratulate you, as I say, not only because you are bettering yourselves, but because to you, for your good fortune, it is given to better others, to teach, in the way in which teaching is most effective, not merely by precept but by action. The railroad men of this country are a body entitled to the well wishes of their fellow-men in any event, but peculiarly is this true of the railroad men of the country who join in such work as that of the Young Men’s Christian Associations, because they are showing by their actions—and oh, how much louder actions speak than words!—that it is not only possible, but very, very possible and easy to combine the manliness which makes a man able to do his own share of the world’s work, with that fine and lofty love of one’s fellow-men which makes you able to come together with your fellows and work hand in hand with them for the common good of mankind in general.
Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, and you, my Fellow-Citizens:
Colorado has certain special interests which it shares with the group of States immediately around it. To my mind one of the best pieces of legislation put upon the statute books of the National Government of recent years was the irrigation act; an act under which we declare it to be the nationalpolicy that exactly as care is to be taken of the harbors and along the lower courses of the rivers, so in their upper courses care is to be taken by the Nation of the irrigation work to be done in connection with them.
Under that act a beginning has been made in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and the Territory of Arizona. There is bound to be disappointment here and there where people have built hopes without a quite sufficient warranty of fact behind. But good will surely come at once and wellnigh immeasurable good in the future from the policy which has thus been begun. In Colorado two-thirds of your products come from irrigated farms, and four years ago those products already surpassed fifteen million dollars. With the aid of the government far more can be done in the future even than has been done in the past. The object of the law is to provide small irrigated farms to actual settlers, to actual home-makers; the land is given away ultimately in small tracts under the terms of the homestead act, the settlers repaying the cost of bringing water to their lands in ten annual payments; and lands now in private ownership can be watered in small tracts by similar payments, but the law forbids the furnishing of water to large tracts, and the aim of the government is rigidly to prevent the acquisition of large rights for speculative purposes. The purpose of the law was, and that purpose is being absolutely carried out, to promote settlement and cultivation of smallfarms carefully tilled. Water made available under the terms of this law becomes appurtenant under the law to the land, and can not be disposed of without it, and thus monopoly and speculation in this vitally important commodity are prevented, or at least their evil effects minimized so far as the law or the administration of the law can bring that end about. This is the great factor in future success. The policy is a policy of encouragement to the home-maker, to the man who comes to establish his home, to bring up his children here as a citizen of the commonwealth, and his welfare is guarded by the union of the water and the land.
The government can not deal with large numbers individually. We have encouraged the formation of associations of water users, of cultivators of the soil in small tracts. The ultimate ownership and control of the irrigation works will pass away from the government into the hands of those users, those home-makers, who through their officers do the necessary business of their associations. The aim of the government is to give locally the ultimate control of water distributed and to leave neighborhood disputes to be settled locally; and that should be so as far as it is possible. The law protects vested rights; it prevents conflict with established laws or institutions; but of course it is important that the legislatures of the States should co-operate with the National Government. When the works are constructed to utilize the waters now wasted happy and prosperous homes will flourish where twenty yearsago it would have seemed impossible that a man could live. It is a great national measure of benefit, and while, as I say, it is primarily to benefit the people of the mountain States and of the great plains, yet it will ultimately benefit the whole community. For, my fellow-countrymen, you can never afford to forget for one moment that in the long run anything that is of benefit to one part of our Republic is of necessity of benefit to all the Republic. The creation of new homes upon desert lands means greater prosperity for Colorado and the Rocky Mountain States, and inevitably their greater prosperity means greater prosperity for Eastern manufacturers, for Southern cotton growers, for all our people throughout the Union.
Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is of course with a peculiar feeling of pleasure that I come here to New Mexico, from which Territory half (and if my memory serves me correctly a little over half) of the men of my regiment came. The man is but a poor man wherever he may be born to whom one part of this country is not exactly as dear as any other part. And I should count myself wholly unworthy of the position I hold if I did not strive to represent the people of the mountains and the plains exactly as much as those of the Mississippi Valley or of either coast, the Atlantic or the Pacific. I know your people, Mr.Governor, and I need not say how fond I am of them, for that you know yourself. How could I help being fond of people with whom I have worked, with whom I marched to battle? The only men here to whom I would doff my hat quicker than to the men of my own regiment are the men of the great war. You know well the claim that comradeship in war makes between man and man; and it has always seemed to me, Mr. Governor, that in a sense my regiment in its composition was a typical American regiment. Its people came from the West chiefly, but some from the East, from the South chiefly, but some from the North, so that every section was represented in it. They varied in birthplace as in creed; some were born on this side of the water, some on the other side; some of their ancestors had come to New Mexico, as did your ancestors, Mr. Governor, when this was already a city and at a time when not one English-speaking community existed on the Atlantic seaboard; some were men whose forefathers were among the early Puritans and Pilgrims; some were of those whose forefathers had settled by the banks of the James even before the Puritan and Pilgrim came to this country, but after your people came. There were men in that regiment who themselves were born, or whose parents were born, in England, Ireland, Germany, or Scandinavia, but there was not a man, no matter what his creed, what his birthplace, what his ancestry, who was not an American and nothing else. We had representatives of the real, original, native Americans, because we had noinconsiderable number who were in whole or in part of Indian blood. There was in the regiment but one kind of rivalry among those men, and but one would have been tolerated. That was the rivalry of each man to see if he could not do his duty a little better than any one else. Short would have been the shrift of any man who tried to introduce division along lines of section, or creed, or class. We had serving in the ranks men of inherited wealth and men who all their lives had earned each day’s bread by that day’s labor, and they stood on a footing of exact equality. It would not have been any more possible for a feeling of arrogance to exist on one side than for a feeling of rancor and envy to exist on the other.
I appreciate to the full all the difficulties under which you labor, and I think that your progress has been astonishing. I congratulate you upon all that has been done, and I am certain that the future will far more than make good the past. I believe that we have come upon an era of fuller development for New Mexico. That development must of course take place principally through the average of foresight, thrift, industry, energy and will of the citizens of New Mexico; but the government can and will help somewhat. This is a great grazing State. Because of the importance of the grazing industry I wish to bespeak your support for the preservation in proper shape of the forest reserves of the State. These forest reserves are created and are kept up in the interest of the home-maker. In many of them thereis much natural pasturage. Where that is the case the object is to have that pasturage used by the settlers, by the people of the Territory, not eaten out so that nobody will have the benefit after three years. I want the land preserved so that the pasturage will do, not merely for a man who wants to make a good thing out of it for two or three years, but for the man who wishes to see it preserved for the use of his children and his children’s children. That is the way to use the resources of the land. I build no small hope upon the aid that under the wise law of Congress will ultimately be extended to this as to other States and Territories in the way of governmental aid to irrigation. Irrigation is of course to be in the future wellnigh the most potent factor in the agricultural development of this Territory and one of the factors which will do most toward bringing it up to Statehood. Nothing will count more than development of that kind in bringing the Territory in as a State. That is the kind of development which I am most anxious to see here—the development that means permanent growth in the capacity of the land, not temporary, not the exploiting of the land for a year or two at the cost of its future impoverishment, but the building up of farm and ranch in such shape as to benefit the home-maker whose intention it is that this Territory of the present, this State of the future, shall be a great State in the American Union.
Bishop:
Permit me to thank you and to say how much I appreciate the courtesy you showed in putting yourself to such inconvenience to come here to greet me. I had hoped to meet you at Santa Fe in the cathedral, where I participated in the baptism of the son of one of the men of my regiment.
I greet the school children and the sisters. There can be no greater privilege than to meet a missionary who has done good work. Of all the work that is done or that can be done for our country, the greatest is that of educating the body, the mind, and above all the character, giving spiritual and moral training to those who in a few years are themselves to decide the destinies of the nation.
Mr. Superintendent:
I wish to express the peculiar pleasure it is to have seen the Indian schools to-day, and through you, Mr. Superintendent, I want to say to the Indians that are right behind you, what a fine thing it is to see the industry and thrift of their people. I was struck by their orchards, the irrigated fields, and by seeing them working in the fields and along the road. The Indian who will work and do his duty will stand on a par with any other Americancitizen. Of course I will do as every President must do, I will stand for his rights with the same jealous eagerness that I would for the rights of any white man. I am glad to see the Indian children being educated as these are educated so as to come more and more into the body of American citizenship, to fit themselves for work in the home, work in the fields, for leading decent, clean lives, for making themselves self-supporting, for being good providers and good housekeepers; in other words, for becoming American citizens just like other American citizens.
Mr. Governor, and you, my Fellow-Citizens:
I am glad to be in Arizona to-day. From Arizona many gallant men came into the regiment which I had the honor to command. Arizona sent men who won glory on fought fields, and men to whom came a glorious and an honorable death fighting for the flag of their country. As long as I live it will be to me an inspiration to have served with Bucky O’Neill. I have met so many comrades whom I prize, for whom I feel respect and admiration and affection, that I shall not particularize among them except to say that there is none for whom I feel all of respect and admiration and affection more than for your Governor.
I have never been in Arizona before. It is one of the regions from which I expect most development through the wise action of the National Congress inpassing the irrigation act. The first and biggest experiment now in view under that act is the one that we are trying in Arizona. I look forward to the effects of irrigation partly as applied by and through the government, still more as applied by individuals, and especially by associations of individuals, profiting by the example of the government, and possibly by help from it—I look forward to the effects of irrigation as being of greater consequence to all this region of country in the next fifty years than any other material movement whatsoever.
In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which, so far as I know, is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country—to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I was delighted to learn of the wisdom of the Santa Fe railroad people in deciding not to build their hotel on the brink of the canyon. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel, or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see. We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardonedif we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children’s children will get the benefit of it. If you deal with irrigation, apply it under circumstances that will make it of benefit, not to the speculator who hopes to get profit out of it for two or three years, but handle it so that it will be of use to the home-maker, to the man who comes to live here, and to have his children stay after him. Keep the forests in the same way. Preserve the forests by use; preserve them for the ranchman and the stockman, for the people of the Territory, for the people of the region round about. Preserve them for that use, but use them so that they will not be squandered, that they will not be wasted, so that they will be of benefit to the Arizona of 1953 as well as the Arizona of 1903.
To the Indians here I want to say a word of welcome. In my regiment I had a good many Indians. They were good enough to fight and to die, and they are good enough to have me treat them exactly as squarely as any white man. There are many problems in connection with them. We must save them from corruption and from brutality; and I regret to say that at times we must save them from unregulated Eastern philanthropy. All I ask is a square deal for every man. Give him a fair chance. Do not let him wrong any one, and do not let him be wronged.
I believe in you. I am glad to see you. I wish you well with all my heart, and I know that your future will justify all the hopes we have.
My Fellow-Citizens:
This is the first time I have ever been to California, and I can not say to you how much I have looked forward to making the trip. I can tell you now with absolute certainty that I will have enjoyed it to the full when I get through.
I have felt that the events of the last five or six years have been steadily hastening the day when the Pacific will loom in the world’s commerce as the Atlantic now looms, and I have wished greatly to see these marvelous communities growing up on the Pacific Slope. There are plenty of things that to you seem matters of course, that I have read about and know about from reading, and yet when I see them they strike me as very wonderful.
One thing that impresses me more than anything else as I go through the country—as I said I have never been on the Pacific Slope; the Rocky Mountain States and the States of the great plains I know quite as well as I know the Eastern seaboard; I have worked with the men, played with them, fought with them; I know them all through—the thing that impresses me most as I go through this country and meet the men and women of the country, is the essential unity of all Americans. Down at bottom weare the same people all through. That is not merely a unity of section, it is a unity of class. For my good fortune I have been thrown into intimate relationship, into intimate personal friendship, with many men of many different occupations, and my faith is firm that we shall come unscathed out of all our difficulties here in America, because I think that the average American is a decent fellow, and that the prime thing in getting him to get on well with the other average American is to have each remember that the other is a decent fellow, and try to look at the problems a little from the other’s standpoint.
I thank you for coming out here to greet me. I wish you well with all my heart for the future.
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Governor, and you, my Fellow-Citizens:
It is half a century since the early pioneers founded this place, and while time goes fast in America anywhere, it has gone fastest here on the Pacific Slope and in the regions of the Rocky Mountains directly to the eastward. If you live in the presence of miracles you gradually get accustomed to them. So it is difficult for any of us, and it is especially difficult for those who have themselves been doing the things, to realize the absolute wonder of the things that have been done. California and the region round about have in the past fifty or sixty years traversed the distance that separates the foundersof the civilization of Mesopotamia and Egypt from those who enjoy the civilization of to-day. They have gone further than that. They have seen this country change from a wilderness into one of the most highly civilized regions of the world’s surface. They have seen cities, farms, ranches, railroads grow up and transform the very face of nature. The changes have been so stupendous that in our eyes they have become commonplace. We fail to realize their immense, their tremendous importance. We fail entirely to realize what they mean. Only the older among you can remember the early pioneer days, and yet to-day I have spoken to man after man yet in his prime who, when he first came to this country warred against wild man and wild nature in the way in which that warfare was waged in the prehistoric days of the old world. We have spanned in a single lifetime—in less than the lifetime of any man who reaches the age limit prescribed by the psalmist—the whole space from savagery through barbarism, through semi-civilization, to the civilization that stands two thousand years ahead of that of Rome and Greece in the days of their prime.
The old pioneer days have gone, but if we are to prove ourselves worthy sons of our sires we can not afford to let the old pioneer virtues lapse. There is just the same need now that there was in ’49 for the qualities that mark a mighty and masterful people. East and west we now face substantially the same problems. No people can advanceas far and as fast as we have advanced, no people can make such progress as we have made, and expect to escape the penalties that go with such speed and progress. The growth and complexity of our civilization, the intensity of the movement of modern life, have meant that with the benefits have come certain disadvantages and certain perils. A great industrial civilization can not be built up without a certain dislocation, a certain disarrangement of the old conditions, and therefore the springing up of new problems. The problems are new, but the qualities needed to solve them are as old as history itself, and we shall solve them aright only on condition that we bring to the solution the same qualities of head and heart that have been brought to the solution of similar problems by every race that has ever conquered for itself a space in the annals of time.
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I want to thank you very much for your courtesy in receiving me, and to say how much I have enjoyed being here. This is the first glimpse I have ever had of the big trees, and I wish to pay the highest tribute I can to the State of California, to those private citizens and associations of citizens who have co-operated with the State in preserving these wonderful trees for the whole nation, in preservingthem in whatever part of the State they may be found. All of us ought to want to see nature preserved. Take a big tree whose architect has been the ages—anything that man does toward it may hurt it and can not help it. Above all, the rash creature who wishes to leave his name to mar the beauties of nature should be sternly discouraged. Those cards pinned up on that tree give an air of the ridiculous to this solemn and majestic grove. To pin those cards up there is as much out of place as if you tacked so many tin cans up there. I mean that literally. You should save the people whose names are there from the reprobation of every one by taking down the cards at the earliest possible moment; and do keep these trees, keep all the wonderful scenery of this wonderful State unmarred by the vandalism or the folly of man. Remember that we have to contend not merely with knavery, but with folly; and see to it that you by your actions create the kind of public opinion which will put a stop to any destruction of or any marring of the wonderful and beautiful gifts that you have received from nature, that you ought to hand on as a precious heritage to your children and your children’s children.
President Jordan, and you, my Fellow-Citizens, and especially you, my Fellow-college Men and Women:
I thank you for your greeting, and I know you will not grudge my saying, first of all, a special word of thanks to the men of the Grand Army. It is a fine thing to have before a body of students men who by their practice have rendered it unnecessary that they should preach; for what we have to teach by precept, you, the men of ’61 to ’65, have taught by deed, by action. I am proud as an American college man myself to have seen the tablet outside within the court which shows that this young university sent eighty-five of her sons to war when the country called for them. I come from a college which boasts as its proudest building that which stands to the memory of Harvard’s sons who responded to the call of Lincoln when the hour of the Nation’s danger was at hand. It will be a bad day for this country and a worse day for all educative institutions in this country if ever such a call is made, and the men of college training do not feel it peculiarly incumbent upon them to respond.
President Jordan has been kind enough to allude to me as an old friend. Mr. Jordan is too modest to say that he has long been not only a friend, but a man to whom I have turned for advice and help,before and since I became President. I am glad to have the chance of acknowledging my obligations to him, and I am also glad that when I ask you to strive toward productive scholarship, toward productive citizenship, I can use the president of the university as an example. Of course, in any of our American institutions of learning, even more important than the production of scholarship is the production of citizenship. That is the most important thing that any institution of learning can produce. There are a great number of students who can not and should not try, in after life, to lead a career of scholarship, but no university can take high rank if it does not aim at the production of, and succeed in producing, a certain number of deep and thorough scholars—not scholars whose scholarship is of the barren kind, but men of productive scholarship, men who do good work, I trust great work, in the fields of literature, of art, of science, in all their manifold activities. Here in California this Nation, composite in its race stocks, speaking an Old World tongue, and with an inherited Old World culture, has acquired an absolutely new domain. I do not mean new only in the sense of additional territory like that already possessed, I mean new in the sense of new surroundings, to use the scientific phrase, of a new environment. Being new, I think we have a right to look for a substantial achievement on the part of your people along new lines. I do not mean the self-conscious striving after newness, which isonly too apt to breed eccentricity, but I mean that those among you whose bent is toward scholarship as a career should keep in mind the fact that such scholarship should be productive, and should therefore aim at giving to the world some addition to the world’s stock of what is useful or beautiful; and if you work simply and naturally, taking advantage of your surroundings as you find them, then in my belief a new mark will be made in the history of intellectual achievement by our race. You of this institution are blessed in its extraordinary physical beauty and appropriateness of architecture and surroundings, with a suggestion of what I might call the Americanized Greek. Such is your institution, situated on the shores of this great ocean, built by a race which has come steadily westward, which has come to where the Occident looks west to the Orient, a race whose members here, fresh, vigorous, have the boundless possibilities of the future brought to their very doors in a sense that can not be possible for the members of the race situated further east. Surely there will be some great outcome in the way not merely of physical, but of moral and intellectual work worth doing. I do not want you to turn out prigs; I do not want you to turn out the self-conscious. I believe, with all my heart, in play. I want you to play hard without encroaching on your work. I do, nevertheless, think you ought to have at least the consciousness of the serious side of what all this means, and of the necessity of effort,thrust upon you, so that you may justify by your deeds in the future your training and the extraordinary advantages under which that training has been obtained.
America, the Republic of the United States, is of course in a peculiar sense typical of the present age. We represent the fullest development of the democratic spirit acting on the extraordinary and highly complex industrial growth of the last half century. It behooves us to justify by our acts the claims made for that political and economic progress. We will never justify the existence of the Republic by merely talking each Fourth of July about what the Republic has done. If our homage is lip loyalty merely, the great deeds of those who went before us, the great deeds of the times of Washington and of the times of Lincoln, the great deeds of the men who won the Revolution and founded the Nation, and of the men who preserved it, who made it a Union and a free Republic, will simply arise to shame us. We can honor our fathers and our fathers’ fathers only by ourselves striving to rise level to their standard. There are plenty of tendencies for evil in what we see round about us. Thank heaven, there are an even greater number of tendencies for good, and one of the things, Mr. Jordan, which it seems to me give this Nation cause for hope is the national standard of ambition which makes it possible to recognize with admiration and regard such work as the founding of a university of this character. It speaks well for ourNation that men and women should desire during their lives to devote the fortunes which they were able to acquire or to inherit because of our system of government, because of our social system, to objects so entirely worthy and so entirely admirable as the foundation of a great seat of learning such as this. All that we outsiders can do is to pay our tribute of respect to the dead and to the living who have done such good, and at least to make it evident that we appreciate to the full what has been done.
I have spoken of scholarship; I want to go back to the question of citizenship, a question affecting not merely the scholars among you, not merely those who are hereafter to lead lives devoted to science, to art, to productivity in literature. And when you take up science, art, and literature, remember that one first-class bit of work is better than one thousand fairly good bits of work; that as the years roll on the man or the woman who has been able to make a masterpiece with the pen, the brush, the pencil, in any way, has rendered a service to the country such as not all his or her compeers who merely do fairly good second-rate work can ever accomplish. Only a limited number of us can ever become scholars or work successfully along the lines I have spoken of, but we can all be good citizens. We can all lead a life of action, a life of endeavor, a life that is to be judged primarily by the effort, somewhat by the result, along the lines of helping the growth of what is right and decent and generousand lofty in our several communities, in the State, in the Nation.
You men and women who have had the advantages of a college training are not to be excused if you fail to do, not as well as, but more than the average man outside who has not had your advantages. Every now and then I meet (at least I meet him in the East, and I dare say he is to be found here) the man who, having gone through college, feels that somehow that confers upon him a special distinction which relieves him from the necessity of showing himself as good as his fellows. I see you recognize the type. That man is not only a curse to the community, and incidentally to himself, but he is a curse to the cause of academic education, the college and university training, because by his existence he serves as an excuse for those who like to denounce such education. Your education, your training, will not confer on you one privilege in the way of excusing you from effort or from work. All it can do and what it should do, is to make you a little better fitted for such effort, for such work; and I do not care whether that is in business, politics, in no matter what branch of endeavor, all it can do is by the training you have received, by the advantages you have received, to fit you to do a little better than the average man that you meet. It is incumbent upon you to show that the training has had that effect. It ought to enable you to do a little better for yourselves, and if you have in you souls capable of a thrill of generousemotion, souls capable of understanding what you owe to your training, to your alma mater, to the past and the present that have given you all that you have—if you have such souls, it ought to make you doubly bent upon disinterested work for the State and the Nation.
Such work can be done along many different lines. I want to-day, here in California, to make a special appeal to all of you, and to California as a whole, for work along a certain line—the line of preserving your great natural advantages alike from the standpoint of use and from the standpoint of beauty. If the students of this institution have not by the mere fact of their surroundings learned to appreciate beauty, then the fault is in you and not in the surroundings. Here in California you have some of the great wonders of the world. You have a singularly beautiful landscape, singularly beautiful and singularly majestic scenery, and it should certainly be your aim to try to preserve for those who are to come after you that beauty, to try to keep unmarred that majesty. Closely entwined with keeping unmarred the beauty of your scenery, of your great natural attractions, is the question of making use of, not for the moment merely, but for future time, of your great natural products. Yesterday I saw for the first time a grove of your great trees, a grove which it has taken the ages several thousands of years to build up; and I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptianconqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates, which it has taken so many thousands of years to build up, and which can be put to better use. That, you may say, is not looking at the matter from the practical standpoint. There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions in mankind. But, furthermore, I appeal to you from the standpoint of use. A few big trees, of unusual size and beauty, should be preserved for their own sake; but the forests as a whole should be used for business purposes, only they should be used in a way that will preserve them as permanent sources of national wealth. In many parts of California the whole future welfare of the State depends upon the way in which you are able to use your water supply; and the preservation of the forests and the preservation of the use of the water are inseparably connected. I believe we are past the stage of national existence when we could look on complacently at the individual who skinned the land and was content for the sake of three years’ profit for himself to leave a desert for the children of those who were to inherit the soil. I think we have passed that stage. We should handle, and I think we now do handle, all problems such as those of forestry and of the preservation and use of our waters from the standpoint of the permanent interests of the home-maker in any region—the man who comes in not to take what he can out of the soil and leave, having exploited the country, but who comes todwell therein, to bring up his children, and to leave them a heritage in the country not merely unimpaired, but if possible even improved. That is the sensible view of civic obligation, and the policy of the State and of the Nation should be shaped in that direction. It should be shaped in the interest of the home-maker, the actual resident, the man who is not only to be benefited himself, but whose children and children’s children are to be benefited by what he has done. California has for years, I am happy to say, taken a more sensible, a more intelligent interest in forest preservation than any other State. It early appointed a forest commission; later on some of the functions of that commission were replaced by the Sierra Club, a club which has done much on the Pacific Coast to perpetuate the spirit of the explorer and the pioneer. Then I am happy to say a great business interest showed an intelligent and far-sighted spirit which is of happy augury, for the Redwood Manufacturers of San Francisco were first among lumbermen’s associations to give assistance to the cause of practical forestry. The study of the redwood which the action of this association made possible was the pioneer study in the co-operative work which is now being carried out between lumbermen all over the United States and the Federal Bureau of Forestry. All of this kind of work is peculiarly the kind of work in which we have a right to expect not merely hearty co-operation from, but leadership in college men trained in the universities of this Pacific Coast State; for the forestsof this State stand alone in the world. There are none others like them anywhere. There are no other trees anywhere like the giant Sequoias; nowhere else is there a more beautiful forest than that which clothes the western slope of the Sierra. Very early your forests attracted lumbermen from other States, and by the course of timber land investments some of the best of the big tree groves were threatened with destruction. Destruction came upon some of them, but the women of California rose to the emergency through the California Club, and later the Sempervirens Club took vigorous action. But the Calaveras grove is not yet safe, and there should be no rest until that safety is secured, by the action of private individuals, by the action of the State, by the action of the Nation. The interest of California in forest protection was shown even more effectively by the purchase of the Big Basin Redwood Park, a superb forest property the possession of which should be a source of just pride to all citizens jealous of California’s good name.
I appeal to you, as I say, to protect these mighty trees, these wonderful monuments of beauty. I appeal to you to protect them for the sake of their beauty, but I also make the appeal just as strongly on economic grounds; as I am well aware that in dealing with such questions a far-sighted economic policy must be that to which alone in the long run one can safely appeal. The interests of California in forests depend directly of course upon the handling of her wood and water supplies and the supplyof material from the lumber woods and the production of agricultural products on irrigated farms. The great valleys which stretch through the State between the Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges must owe their future development as they owe their present prosperity to irrigation. Whatever tends to destroy the water supply of the Sacramento, the San Gabriel, and the other valleys strikes vitally at the welfare of California. The welfare of California depends in no small measure upon the preservation of water for the purposes of irrigation in those beautiful and fertile valleys which can not grow crops by rainfall alone. The forest cover upon the drainage basins of streams used for irrigation purposes is of prime importance to the interests of the entire State. Now keep in mind that the whole object of forest protection is, as I have said again and again, the making and maintaining of prosperous homes. I am not advocating forest protection from the æsthetic standpoint only. I do advocate the keeping of big trees, the great monarchs of the woods, for the sake of their beauty, but I advocate the preservation and wise use of the forests because I feel it essential to the interests of the actual settlers. I am asking that the forests be used wisely for the sake of the successors of the pioneers, for the sake of the settlers who dwell on the land and by doing so extend the borders of our civilization. I ask it for the sake of the man who makes his farm in the woods, or lower down along the sides of the streams which have their rise in the mountains.Every phase of the land policy of the United States is, as it by right ought to be, directed to the upbuilding of the home-maker. The one sure test of all public land legislation should be: does it help to make and to keep prosperous homes? If it does, the legislation is good. If it does not, the legislation is bad. Any legislation which has a tendency to give land in large tracts to people who will lease it out to tenants is undesirable. We do not want ever to let our land policy be shaped so as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to others. We want to make the smaller men who, under such conditions would rent, actual proprietors. We must shape our policy so that these men themselves shall be the land owners, the makers of homes, the keepers of homes.
Certain of our land laws, however beneficent their purposes, have been twisted into an improper use, so that there have grown up abuses under them by which they tend to create a class of men who, under one color and another, obtain large tracts of soil for speculative purposes, or to rent out to others; and there should be now a thorough scrutiny of our land laws with the object of so amending them as to do away with the possibility of such abuses. If it was not for the national irrigation act we would be about past the time when Uncle Sam could give every man a farm. Comparatively little of our land is left which is adapted to farming without irrigation. The home-maker on the public land must hereafter, in the great majority of cases, have water for irrigation,or the making of his home will fail. Let us keep that fact before our minds. Do not misunderstand me when I have spoken of the defects of our land laws. Our land laws have served a noble purpose in the past and have become the models for other governments. The homestead law has been a notable instrument for good. To establish a family permanently upon a quarter section of land, or of course upon a less quantity if it is irrigated land, is the best use to which it can be put. The first need of any nation is intelligent and honest citizens. Such can come only from honest and intelligent homes, and to get the good citizenship we must get the good homes. It is absolutely necessary that the remainder of our public land should be reserved for the home-maker, and it is necessary in my judgment that there should be a revision of the land laws and a cutting out of such provisions from them as in actual practice under present conditions tend to make possible the acquisition of large tracts for speculative purposes or for the purpose of leasing to others.
Citizenship is the prime test in the welfare of the Nation; but we need good laws; and above all we need good land laws throughout the West. We want to see the free farmer own his home. The best of the public lands are already in private hands, and yet the rate of their disposal is steadily increasing. More than six million acres were patented during the first three months of the present year. It is time for us to see that our remaining public lands are saved for the home-makerto the utmost limit of his possible use. I say this to you of this university because we have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific Slope, the Rocky Mountains and great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and right use of the forests, in securing the right use of the waters, and in seeing to it that our land policy is not twisted from its original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change when such change is necessary in the line of that purpose, the purpose being to turn the public domain into farms each to be the property of the man who actually tills it and makes his home on it.
Infinite are the possibilities for usefulness that lie before such a body as that I am addressing. Work? Of course you will have to work. I should be sorry for you if you did not have to work. Of course you will have to work, and I envy you the fact that before you, before the graduates of this university, lies the chance of lives to be spent in hard labor for great and glorious and useful causes, hard labor for the uplifting of your States of the Union, of all mankind.
Mr. Chairman, and you, Men and Women of San Francisco:
Before I came to the Pacific Slope I was an expansionist, and after having been here I fail to understand how any man, convinced of his country’sgreatness and glad that his country should challenge with proud confidence its mighty future, can be anything but an expansionist. In the century that is opening the commerce and the command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history.
The seat of power ever shifts from land to land, from sea to sea. The earliest civilizations, those seated beside the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, had little to do with sea traffic. But with the rise of those people who went down to the sea in ships, with the rise of the Phœnicians, the men of Tyre and Sidon, the Mediterranean became the central sea on whose borders lay the great wealthy and cultivated powers of antiquity. The war navies and the merchant marines of Carthage, Greece, and Rome strove thereon for military and industrial supremacy. Its control was the prerequisite to greatness, and the Roman became lord of the western world only when his fleet rode unchallenged from the Ægean to the Pillars of Hercules. Then Rome fell. But for centuries thereafter the wealth and the culture of Europe were centred on its southern shores, and the control of the Mediterranean was vital in favoring or checking their growth. It was at this time that Venice and Genoa flourished in their grandeur and their might.
But gradually the nations of the north grew beyond barbarism and developed fleets and commerce of their own. The North Sea, the Baltic, the Bay of Biscay, saw trading cities rise to become independentor else to become props of mighty civilized nations. The sea-faring merchants ventured with ever greater boldness into the Atlantic. The cities of the Netherlands, the ports of the Hansa, grew and flourished as once the Italian cities had grown. Holland and England, Spain, Portugal, and France sent forth mercantile adventurers to strive for fame and profit on the high seas. The Cape of Good Hope was doubled, America was discovered, and the Atlantic Ocean became to the greater modern world what the Mediterranean had been to the lesser world of antiquity.
Now, men and women of California, in our own day, the greatest of all the seas and the last to be used on a large scale by civilized man bids fair to become in its turn the first in point of importance. The empire that shifted from the Mediterranean will in the lifetime of those now children bid fair to shift once more westward to the Pacific. When the 19th century opened the lonely keels of a few whale ships, a few merchantmen, had begun to furrow the vast expanse of the Pacific; but as a whole its islands and its shores were not materially changed from what they had been in the long past ages when the Phœnician galleys traded in the purple of Tyre, the ivory of Libya, the gold of Cyprus. The junks of the Orient still crept between China and Japan and Farther India; and from the woody wilderness which shrouded the western shores of our own continent the red lords of the land looked forth upon a waste of waters which only their own canoes traversed.That was but a century ago; and now at the opening of the 20th century the change is so vast that it is wellnigh impossible for us to estimate its importance. In the South Seas the great commonwealth of Australia has sprung into being. Japan, shaking off the lethargy of centuries, has taken her rank among civilized, modern powers. European nations have seated themselves along the eastern coast of Asia, while China by her misfortunes has given us an object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting to exist as a nation at all if both rich and defenceless.
Meanwhile our own mighty Republic has stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and now in California, Oregon, and Washington, in Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines, holds an extent of coast line which makes it of necessity a power of the first class in the Pacific. The extension in the area of our domain has been immense, the extension in the area of our influence even greater. America’s geographical position on the Pacific is such as to ensure our peaceful domination of its waters in the future if only we grasp with sufficient resolution the advantages of that position. We are taking long strides in that direction; witness the cables we are laying down, the steamship lines we are starting—some of them already containing steamships larger than any freight carriers that have previously existed. We have taken the first steps toward digging an Isthmian canal, to be under our own control, a canal which will make our Atlantic and Pacific coast lines in effect continuous, which will be of incalculablebenefit to our mercantile navy, and above all to our military navy in the event of war.
The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be called Providential. Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have undertaken. I most earnestly hope that this work will ever be of a peaceful character. We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war. We should deal in a spirit of justice and fairness with weaker nations, and we should show to the strongest that we are able to maintain our rights. Such showing can not be made by bluster; for bluster merely invites contempt. Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready. If we do these things we can count on the peace that comes to the just man armed, to the just man who neither fears nor inflicts wrong. We must keep on building and maintaining a thoroughly efficient navy, with plenty of the best and most formidable ships, with an ample supply of officers and men, and with those officers and men trained in the most efficient fashion to perform their duties. Only thus can we assure our position in the world at large. It behooves all men of lofty soul fit and proud to belong to a mighty nation to see to it that we keep our position in the world; for our proper place is with the great expanding peoples, with the peoples thatdare to be great, that accept with confidence a place of leadership in the world. All our people should take that position, but especially of California, you of the Pacific Slope, for much of our expansion must go through the Golden Gate, and inevitably you who are seated by the Pacific must take the lead in and must profit by the growth of American influence along the coasts and among the islands of that mighty ocean, where east and west finally become one.
The citizen that counts, the man that counts in our life, is the man who endeavors not to shirk difficulties but to meet and overcome them, is the man who endeavors not to lead his life in the world’s soft places, not to walk easily and take his comfort, but the man who goes out to tread the rugged ways that lead to honor and success, the ways the treading of which means good work worthily done.
What father or what mother here, if capable of taking the right view, does not wish to see his or her children grow up trained, not to flinch but to overcome, trained not to avoid whatever is hard and rough and difficult, but to go down into the hurly-burly of actual life and win glory in the arena, heedless of the dust and the sweat and blood of the contest?
You men of the West, the older among you, came here and hewed out your own fates for yourselves. The younger among you are the heirs of the men who did this, and you can not, unless you are false to your blood, desire to see the Nation, which is butthe aggregate of the individuals, act otherwise than in the way which you esteem as honorable for the individual.
Our place as a Nation is and must be with the nations that have left indelibly their impress on the centuries. Men will tell you that the great expanding nations of antiquity have passed away. So they have; and so have all others. Those that did not expand passed away and left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded, the Roman passed away, but the Roman has left the print of his law, of his language, of his masterful ability in administration, deep in the world’s history, deeply imprinted in the character of the races that came after him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of its opportunities. I do not ask that it seek for the easiest path.
If our fathers had preferred ease to effort, if they had been content to say: “Go in peace; we would prefer that the Union were kept, but we are not willing to pay the price in blood and effort of keeping it”; if they had done that there is not a man or woman in this hall who would now walk with head erect, who would now have the right to feel, as we have the right to feel, that we challenge equality with the citizens of the proudest country that the world has yet seen. I ask that this generation and future generations strive in the spirit of those who strove to found the Republic, of those who strove to save and perpetuate it. I ask that this Nation shape its policy in a spirit of justice toward all, a spirit of resoluteendeavor to accept each duty as the duty comes, and to rest ill-content until that duty is done. I ask that we meet the many problems with which we are confronted from without and from within, not in the spirit that seeks to purchase present peace by the certainty of future disaster, but with a wise, a fearless, and a resolute desire to make of this Nation in the end, as the centuries go by, the example for all the nations of the earth, to make of it a nation in which we shall see the spirit of peace and of justice incarnate, but in which also we shall see incarnate the spirit of courage, of hardihood, the spirit which while refusing to wrong the weak is incapable of flinching from the strong.
Friends and Fellow-Americans:
It is a befitting thing that the first sod turned to prepare for the monument to commemorate President McKinley should be turned in the presence of his old comrades of the great war, and in the presence of the men who in a lesser war strove to show that they were not wholly unworthy of those who in the dark years of ’61 to ’65 proved their truth by their endeavor, and with their blood cemented the foundation of the American Republic. It is a solemn thing to speak in memory of a man whowhen young went to war for the honor and the life of the Nation, who for four years did his part in the camp, on the march, in battle, rising steadily upward from the ranks, and to whom it was given in after life to show himself exemplary in public and in private conduct, to become the ideal of the Nation in peace as he had been a typical representative of the Nation’s young sons in war.
It is not too much to say that no man since Lincoln was as widely and as universally beloved in this country as was President McKinley; for it was given to him not only to rise to the most exalted station but to typify in his character and conduct those virtues which any citizen worthy of the name likes to regard as typically American; to typify the virtues of cleanly and upright living in all relations private and public, in the most intimate family relations, in the relations of business, in relations with his neighbors, and finally in his conduct of the great affairs of state. And exactly as it was given to him to do his part in settling aright the greatest problem which it has ever befallen this Nation to settle since it became a Nation—the problem of the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery—exactly as it was his good fortune to do his part as a man should in his youth in settling that great problem, so it was his good fortune, when he became in fact and in name the Nation’s chief, to settle the problems springing out of the Spanish War; problems less important only than those which were dealt with by the men who under the lead ofWashington founded our government and the men who, upholding the statesmanship of Lincoln and following the sword of Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, saved and perpetuated the Republic.
When 1898 came and the war which President McKinley in all honesty and in all sincerity sought to avoid became inevitable and was pressed upon him he met it as he and you had met the crisis of 1861. He did his best to prevent the war coming; once it became evident that it had to come then he did his best to see that it was ended as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. It is a good lesson for nations and individuals to learn never to hit if it can be helped and then never to hit softly. I think it is getting to be fairly understood that that is our foreign policy. We do not want to threaten; certainly we do not desire to wrong any man; we are going to keep out of trouble if we possibly can keep out; and if it becomes necessary for our honor and our interest to assert a given position we shall assert it with every intention of making the assertion good.
The Spanish War came. As its aftermath came trouble in the Philippines, and it was natural that this State, within whose borders live and have lived so many of the men who fought in the great war, should find its sons eagerly volunteering for the chance to prove their truth in the war that came in their days; and it was to be expected that California’s sons should do well, as they did do well, in the Philippines in the new contest.
And now it is eminently fitting that the men of the great war and the men of the lesser war claiming not only to have been good soldiers but to be good citizens should come here to assist at laying the foundation of the monument to him who typified in his career the virtues of the soldier and exemplified in his high office our ideals of good citizenship. I am glad that such a monument should have been erected here in this wonderful State on the shores of the Pacific; in this city with a great past and with a future so great that the most sanguine among us can not properly estimate it; this city of the Occident which looks west to the Orient across the Pacific, westward to the west that is the hoary east; this city situated upon that giant ocean which will in a not distant future be commercially the most important body of water in the entire world.
I thank you for coming here and for giving me the privilege of joining with you to-day in these solemn ceremonies of commemoration, the ceremonies of laying the foundation of a monument which is to keep green in mind the memory of McKinley as a lesson in war and a lesson in peace, as a lesson to all Americans of what can be done by the American who in good faith strives to do his whole duty by the mighty Republic.