ADMIRAL DEWEYPUBLISHED IN “McCLURE’S MAGAZINE,” OCTOBER, 1899Admiral Dewey has done more than add a glorious page to our history; more even than do a deed the memory of which will always be an inspiration to his countrymen, and especially his countrymen of his own profession. He has also taught us a lesson which should have profound practical effects, if only we are willing to learn it aright.In the first place, he partly grasped and partly made his opportunity. Of course, in a certain sense, no man can absolutely make an opportunity. There were a number of admirals who, during the dozen years preceding the Spanish War, were retired without the opportunity of ever coming where it was possible to distinguish themselves; and it may be that some of these lacked nothing but the chance. Nevertheless, when the chance does come, only the great man can see it instantly and use it aright. In the second place, it must always be remembered that the power of using the chance aright comes only to the man who has faithfully and for long years made ready himself and his weapons for the possibleneed. Finally, and most important of all, it should ever be kept in mind that the man who does a great work must almost invariably owe the possibility of doing it to the faithful work of other men, either at the time or long before. Without his brilliancy their labor might be wasted, but without their labor his brilliancy would be of no avail.It has been said that it was a mere accident that Dewey happened to be in command of the Asiatic Squadron when the war with Spain broke out. This is not the fact. He was sent to command it in the fall of 1897, because, to use the very language employed at the time, it was deemed wise to have there a man “who could go into Manila if necessary.” He owed the appointment to the high professional reputation he enjoyed, and to the character he had established for willingness to accept responsibility, for sound judgment, and for entire fearlessness.Probably the best way (although no way is infallible) to tell the worth of a naval commander as yet untried in war is to get at the estimate in which he is held by the best fighting men who would have to serve under him. In the summer of 1897 there were in Washington captains and commanders who later won honor for themselves and their country in the war with Spain, and who were already known for the dash and skill with which they handled theirships, the excellence of their gun practice, the good discipline of their crews, and their eager desire to win honorable renown. All these men were a unit in their faith in the then Commodore Dewey, in their desire to serve under him, should the chance arise, and in their unquestioning belief that he was the man to meet an emergency in a way that would do credit to the flag.An excellent test is afforded by the readiness which the man has shown to take responsibility in any emergency in the past. One factor in Admiral Dewey’s appointment—of which he is very possibly ignorant—was the way in which he had taken responsibility in purchasing coal for the squadron that was to have been used against Chile, if war with Chile had broken out, at the time General Harrison was President. A service will do well or ill at the outbreak of war very much in proportion to the way it has been prepared to meet the outbreak during the preceding months. Now, it is often impossible to say whether the symptoms that seem to forbode war will or will not be followed by war. At one time, under President Harrison, we seemed as near war with Chile as ever we seemed to war with Spain under President McKinley. Therefore, when war threatens, preparations must be made in any event; for the evil of what proves to be the needless expenditure of money in one instance is not to beweighed for a moment against the failure to prepare in the other. But only a limited number of men have the moral courage to make these preparations, because there is always risk to the individual making them. Laws and regulations must be stretched when an emergency arises, and yet there is always some danger to the person who stretches them; and, moreover, in time of sudden need, some indispensable article can very possibly only be obtained at an altogether exorbitant price. If war comes, and the article, whether it be a cargo of coal, or a collier, or an auxiliary naval vessel, proves its usefulness, no complaint is ever made. But if the war does not come, then some small demagogue, some cheap economist, or some undersized superior who is afraid of taking the responsibility himself, may blame the man who bought the article and say that he exceeded his authority; that he showed more zeal than discretion in not waiting for a few days, etc. These are the risks which must be taken, and the men who take them should be singled out for reward and for duty. Admiral Dewey’s whole action in connection with the question of coal-supply for our fleet during the Chilean scare marked him as one of these men.No one who has not some knowledge of the army and navy will appreciate how much this means. It is necessary to have a complete system of checks uponthe actions, and especially upon the expenditures, of the army and navy; but the present system is at times altogether too complete, especially in war. The efficiency of the quartermasters and commissary officers of the army in the war with Spain was very seriously marred by their perfectly justifiable fear that the slightest departure from the requirements of the red-tape regulations of peace would result in the docking of their own pay by men more concerned in enforcing the letter of the law than in seeing the army clothed and fed. In the navy, before the passage of the Personnel Bill, a positive premium was put on a man’s doing nothing but keep out of trouble; for if only he could avoid a court-martial, his promotions would take care of themselves, so that from the selfish standpoint no possible good could come to him from taking risks, while they might cause him very great harm. The best officers in the service recognized the menace that this state of affairs meant to the service, and strove to counterbalance it in every way. No small part of the good done by the admirable War College, under Captains Mahan, Taylor, and Goodrich, lay in their insistence upon the need of the naval officer’s instantly accepting responsibility in any crisis, and doing what was best for the flag, even though it was probable the action might be disavowed by his immediate superiors, and though itmight result in his own personal inconvenience and detriment. This was taught not merely as an abstract theory, but with direct reference to concrete cases; for instance, with reference to taking possession of Hawaii, if a revolution should by chance break out there during the presence of an American warship, or if the warship of a foreign power attempted to interfere with the affairs of the island.For the work which Dewey had to do willingness to accept responsibility was a prime requisite. A man afraid to vary in times of emergency from the regulations laid down in time of peace would never even have got the coal with which to steam to Manila from Hong Kong the instant the crisis came. We were peculiarly fortunate in our Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Long; but the best Secretary that ever held the navy portfolio could not successfully direct operations on the other side of the world. All that he could do was to choose a good man, give him the largest possible liberty of action, and back him up in every way; and this Secretary Long did. But if the man chosen had been timid about taking risks, nothing that could be done for him would have availed. Such a man would not have disobeyed orders. The danger would have been of precisely the contrary character. He would scrupulously have done just whatever he was told to do, and then would have sat down and waited for further instructions,so as to protect himself if something happened to go wrong. An infinity of excuses can always be found for non-action.Admiral Dewey was sent to command the fleet on the Asiatic station primarily because he had such a record in the past that the best officers in the navy believed him to be peculiarly a man of the fighting temperament and fit to meet emergencies, and because he had shown his willingness to assume heavy responsibilities. How amply he justified his choice it is not necessary to say. On our roll of naval heroes his name will stand second to that of Farragut alone, and no man since the Civil War, whether soldier or civilian, has added so much to the honorable renown of the nation or has deserved so well of it. For our own sakes, and in particular for the sake of any naval officer who in the future may be called upon to do such a piece of work as Dewey did, let us keep in mind the further fact that he could not have accomplished his feat if he had not had first-class vessels and excellently trained men; if his warships had not been so good, and his captains and crews such thorough masters of their art. A man of less daring courage than Dewey would never have done what he did; but the courage itself was not enough. The Spaniards, too, had courage. What they lacked was energy, training, forethought. They fought their vessels until they burned or sank;but their gunnery was so poor that they did not kill a man in the American fleet. Even Dewey’s splendid capacity would not have enabled him to win the battle of Manila Bay had it not been for the traditional energy and seamanship of our naval service, so well illustrated in his captains, and the excellent gun-practice of the crews, the result of years of steady training. Furthermore, even this excellence in the personnel would not have availed if under a succession of Secretaries of the Navy, and through the wisdom of a succession of Congresses, the material of the navy had not been built up as it actually was.If war with Spain had broken out fifteen years before it did,—that is, in the year 1883, before our new navy was built,—it would have been physically impossible to get the results we actually did get. At that time our navy consisted of a collection of rusty monitors and antiquated wooden ships left over from the Civil War, which could not possibly have been matched against even the navy of Spain. Every proposal to increase the navy was then violently opposed with exactly the same arguments used nowadays by the men who oppose building up our army. The Congressmen who rallied to the support of Senator Gorman in his refusal to furnish an adequate army to take care of the Philippines and meet the new national needs, or who defeated theproposition to buy armor-plate for the new ships, assumed precisely the ground that was taken by the men who, prior to 1883, had succeeded in preventing the rebuilding of the navy. Both alike did all they could to prevent the upholding of the national honor in times of emergency. There were the usual arguments: that we were a great peaceful people, and would never have to go to war; that if we had a navy or army we should be tempted to use it and therefore embark in a career of military conquest; that there was no need of regulars anyhow, because we could always raise volunteers to do anything; that war was a barbarous method of settling disputes, and too expensive to undertake even to avoid national disgrace, and so on.But fortunately the men of sturdy common sense and sound patriotism proved victors, and the new navy was begun. Its upbuilding was not a party matter. The first ships were laid down under Secretary Chandler; Secretary Whitney continued the work; Secretary Tracy carried it still further; so did Secretary Herbert, and then Secretary Long. Congress after Congress voted the necessary money. We have never had as many ships as a nation of such size and such vast interests really needs; but still by degrees we have acquired a small fleet of battleships, cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo-boats, all excellent of their class. The squadron withwhich Dewey entered Manila Bay included ships laid down or launched under Secretaries Chandler, Whitney, Tracy, and Herbert; and all four of these Secretaries, their naval architects, the chiefs of bureaus, the young engineers and constructors, the outside contractors, the shipyard men like Roach, Cramp, and Scott, and, finally and emphatically, the Congressmen who during these fifteen years voted the supplies, are entitled to take a just pride in their share of the glory of the achievement. Every man in Congress whose vote made possible the building of theOlympia, theBaltimore, theRaleigh, or the putting aboard them and their sister ships the modern eight-inch or rapid-fire five-inch guns, or the giving them the best engines and the means where with to practice their crews at the targets—every such man has the right to tell his children that he did his part in securing Dewey’s victory, and that, save for the action of him and his fellows, it could not have been won. This is no less true of the man who planned the ships and of the other men, whether in the government service or in private employment, who built them, from the head of the great business concern which put up an armor-plate factory down to the iron-worker who conscientiously and skilfully did his part on gun-shield or gun.So much for the men who furnished the material and the means for assembling and practicing thepersonnel. The same praise must be given the men who actually drilled the personnel, part of which Dewey used. If our ships had merely been built and then laid up, if officers and crews had not been exercised season after season in all weathers on the high seas in handling their ships both separately and in squadron, and in practicing with the guns, all the excellent material would have availed us little. Exactly as it is of no use to give an army the best arms and equipment if it is not also given the chance to practice with its arms and equipment, so the finest ships and the best natural sailors and fighters are useless to a navy if the most ample opportunity for training is not allowed. Only incessant practice will make a good gunner; though, inasmuch as there are natural marksmen as well as men who never can become good marksmen, there should always be the widest intelligence displayed in the choice of gunners. Not only is it impossible for a man to learn how to handle a ship or do his duty aboard her save by long cruises at sea, but it is also impossible for a good single-ship captain to be an efficient unit in a fleet unless he is accustomed to manœuvre as part of a fleet.It is particularly true of the naval service that the excellence of any portion of it in a given crisis will depend mainly upon the excellence of the whole body, and so the triumph of any part is legitimatelyfelt to reflect honor upon the whole and to have been participated in by every one. Dewey’s captains could not have followed him with the precision they displayed, could not have shown the excellent gun practice they did show—in short, the victory would not have been possible had it not been for the unwearied training and practice given the navy during the dozen years previous by the admirals, the captains, and the crews who incessantly and in all weathers kept their vessels exercised, singly and in squadron, until the men on the bridge, the men in the gun-turrets, and the men in the engine-rooms knew how to do their work perfectly, alone or together. Every officer and man, from the highest to the lowest, who did his full duty in raising the navy to the standard of efficiency it had reached on May 1, 1898, is entitled to feel some personal share in the glory won by Dewey and Dewey’s men. It would have been absolutely impossible not merely to improvise either the material or the personnel with which Dewey fought, but to have produced them in any limited number of years. A thoroughly good navy takes a long time to build up, and the best officer embodies always the traditions of a first-class service. Ships take years to build, crews take years before they become thoroughly expert, while the officers not only have to pass their early youth in a course of special training, but can not possibly riseto supreme excellence in their profession unless they make it their life-work.We should therefore keep in mind that the hero can not win save for the forethought, energy, courage, and capacity of countless other men. Yet we must keep in mind also that all this forethought, energy, courage, and capacity will be wasted unless at the supreme moment some man of the heroic type arises capable of using to the best advantage the powers lying ready to hand. Whether it is Nelson, the greatest of all admirals, at Aboukir, Copenhagen, or Trafalgar; or Farragut, second only to Nelson, at New Orleans or Mobile; or Dewey at Manila—the great occasion must meet with the great man, or the result will be at worst a failure, at best an indecisive success. The nation must make ready the tools and train the men to use them, but at the crisis a great triumph can be achieved only should some heroic man appear. Therefore it is right and seemly to pay homage of deep respect and admiration to the man when he does appear.Admiral Dewey performed one of the great feats of all time. At the very outset of the Spanish War he struck one of the two decisive blows which brought the war to a conclusion, and as his was the first fight, his success exercised an incalculable effect upon the whole conflict. He set the note of the war. He had carefully prepared for action duringthe months he was on the Asiatic coast. He had his plans thoroughly matured, and he struck the instant that war was declared. There was no delay, no hesitation. As soon as news came that he was to move, his war-steamers turned their bows toward Manila Bay. There was nothing to show whether or not Spanish mines and forts would be efficient; but Dewey, cautious as he was at the right time, had not a particle of fear of taking risks when the need arose. In the tropic night he steamed past the forts, and then on over the mines to where the Spanish vessels lay. What material inferiority there was on the Spanish side was nearly made up by the forts and mines. The overwhelming difference was moral, not material. It was the difference in the two commanders, in the officers and crews of the two fleets, and in the naval service, afloat and ashore, of the two nations. On the one side there had been thorough preparation; on the other, none that was adequate. It would be idle to recapitulate the results. Steaming in with cool steadiness, Dewey’s fleet cut the Spaniards to pieces, while the Americans were practically unhurt. Then Dewey drew off to breakfast, satisfied himself that he had enough ammunition, and returned to stamp out what embers of resistance were still feebly smouldering.The victory ensured the fall of the Philippines, for Manila surrendered as soon as our land forcesarrived and were in position to press their attack home. The work, however, was by no means done, and Dewey’s diplomacy and firmness were given full scope for the year he remained in Manila waters, not only in dealing with Spaniards and insurgents, but in making it evident that we would tolerate no interference from any hostile European power. It is not yet the time to show how much he did in this last respect. Suffice it to say that by his firmness he effectually frustrated any attempt to interfere with our rights, while by his tact he avoided giving needless offence, and he acted in hearty accord with our cordial well-wishers, the English naval and diplomatic representatives in the islands.Admiral Dewey comes back to his native land having won the right to a greeting such as has been given to no other man since the Civil War.
PUBLISHED IN “McCLURE’S MAGAZINE,” OCTOBER, 1899
Admiral Dewey has done more than add a glorious page to our history; more even than do a deed the memory of which will always be an inspiration to his countrymen, and especially his countrymen of his own profession. He has also taught us a lesson which should have profound practical effects, if only we are willing to learn it aright.
In the first place, he partly grasped and partly made his opportunity. Of course, in a certain sense, no man can absolutely make an opportunity. There were a number of admirals who, during the dozen years preceding the Spanish War, were retired without the opportunity of ever coming where it was possible to distinguish themselves; and it may be that some of these lacked nothing but the chance. Nevertheless, when the chance does come, only the great man can see it instantly and use it aright. In the second place, it must always be remembered that the power of using the chance aright comes only to the man who has faithfully and for long years made ready himself and his weapons for the possibleneed. Finally, and most important of all, it should ever be kept in mind that the man who does a great work must almost invariably owe the possibility of doing it to the faithful work of other men, either at the time or long before. Without his brilliancy their labor might be wasted, but without their labor his brilliancy would be of no avail.
It has been said that it was a mere accident that Dewey happened to be in command of the Asiatic Squadron when the war with Spain broke out. This is not the fact. He was sent to command it in the fall of 1897, because, to use the very language employed at the time, it was deemed wise to have there a man “who could go into Manila if necessary.” He owed the appointment to the high professional reputation he enjoyed, and to the character he had established for willingness to accept responsibility, for sound judgment, and for entire fearlessness.
Probably the best way (although no way is infallible) to tell the worth of a naval commander as yet untried in war is to get at the estimate in which he is held by the best fighting men who would have to serve under him. In the summer of 1897 there were in Washington captains and commanders who later won honor for themselves and their country in the war with Spain, and who were already known for the dash and skill with which they handled theirships, the excellence of their gun practice, the good discipline of their crews, and their eager desire to win honorable renown. All these men were a unit in their faith in the then Commodore Dewey, in their desire to serve under him, should the chance arise, and in their unquestioning belief that he was the man to meet an emergency in a way that would do credit to the flag.
An excellent test is afforded by the readiness which the man has shown to take responsibility in any emergency in the past. One factor in Admiral Dewey’s appointment—of which he is very possibly ignorant—was the way in which he had taken responsibility in purchasing coal for the squadron that was to have been used against Chile, if war with Chile had broken out, at the time General Harrison was President. A service will do well or ill at the outbreak of war very much in proportion to the way it has been prepared to meet the outbreak during the preceding months. Now, it is often impossible to say whether the symptoms that seem to forbode war will or will not be followed by war. At one time, under President Harrison, we seemed as near war with Chile as ever we seemed to war with Spain under President McKinley. Therefore, when war threatens, preparations must be made in any event; for the evil of what proves to be the needless expenditure of money in one instance is not to beweighed for a moment against the failure to prepare in the other. But only a limited number of men have the moral courage to make these preparations, because there is always risk to the individual making them. Laws and regulations must be stretched when an emergency arises, and yet there is always some danger to the person who stretches them; and, moreover, in time of sudden need, some indispensable article can very possibly only be obtained at an altogether exorbitant price. If war comes, and the article, whether it be a cargo of coal, or a collier, or an auxiliary naval vessel, proves its usefulness, no complaint is ever made. But if the war does not come, then some small demagogue, some cheap economist, or some undersized superior who is afraid of taking the responsibility himself, may blame the man who bought the article and say that he exceeded his authority; that he showed more zeal than discretion in not waiting for a few days, etc. These are the risks which must be taken, and the men who take them should be singled out for reward and for duty. Admiral Dewey’s whole action in connection with the question of coal-supply for our fleet during the Chilean scare marked him as one of these men.
No one who has not some knowledge of the army and navy will appreciate how much this means. It is necessary to have a complete system of checks uponthe actions, and especially upon the expenditures, of the army and navy; but the present system is at times altogether too complete, especially in war. The efficiency of the quartermasters and commissary officers of the army in the war with Spain was very seriously marred by their perfectly justifiable fear that the slightest departure from the requirements of the red-tape regulations of peace would result in the docking of their own pay by men more concerned in enforcing the letter of the law than in seeing the army clothed and fed. In the navy, before the passage of the Personnel Bill, a positive premium was put on a man’s doing nothing but keep out of trouble; for if only he could avoid a court-martial, his promotions would take care of themselves, so that from the selfish standpoint no possible good could come to him from taking risks, while they might cause him very great harm. The best officers in the service recognized the menace that this state of affairs meant to the service, and strove to counterbalance it in every way. No small part of the good done by the admirable War College, under Captains Mahan, Taylor, and Goodrich, lay in their insistence upon the need of the naval officer’s instantly accepting responsibility in any crisis, and doing what was best for the flag, even though it was probable the action might be disavowed by his immediate superiors, and though itmight result in his own personal inconvenience and detriment. This was taught not merely as an abstract theory, but with direct reference to concrete cases; for instance, with reference to taking possession of Hawaii, if a revolution should by chance break out there during the presence of an American warship, or if the warship of a foreign power attempted to interfere with the affairs of the island.
For the work which Dewey had to do willingness to accept responsibility was a prime requisite. A man afraid to vary in times of emergency from the regulations laid down in time of peace would never even have got the coal with which to steam to Manila from Hong Kong the instant the crisis came. We were peculiarly fortunate in our Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Long; but the best Secretary that ever held the navy portfolio could not successfully direct operations on the other side of the world. All that he could do was to choose a good man, give him the largest possible liberty of action, and back him up in every way; and this Secretary Long did. But if the man chosen had been timid about taking risks, nothing that could be done for him would have availed. Such a man would not have disobeyed orders. The danger would have been of precisely the contrary character. He would scrupulously have done just whatever he was told to do, and then would have sat down and waited for further instructions,so as to protect himself if something happened to go wrong. An infinity of excuses can always be found for non-action.
Admiral Dewey was sent to command the fleet on the Asiatic station primarily because he had such a record in the past that the best officers in the navy believed him to be peculiarly a man of the fighting temperament and fit to meet emergencies, and because he had shown his willingness to assume heavy responsibilities. How amply he justified his choice it is not necessary to say. On our roll of naval heroes his name will stand second to that of Farragut alone, and no man since the Civil War, whether soldier or civilian, has added so much to the honorable renown of the nation or has deserved so well of it. For our own sakes, and in particular for the sake of any naval officer who in the future may be called upon to do such a piece of work as Dewey did, let us keep in mind the further fact that he could not have accomplished his feat if he had not had first-class vessels and excellently trained men; if his warships had not been so good, and his captains and crews such thorough masters of their art. A man of less daring courage than Dewey would never have done what he did; but the courage itself was not enough. The Spaniards, too, had courage. What they lacked was energy, training, forethought. They fought their vessels until they burned or sank;but their gunnery was so poor that they did not kill a man in the American fleet. Even Dewey’s splendid capacity would not have enabled him to win the battle of Manila Bay had it not been for the traditional energy and seamanship of our naval service, so well illustrated in his captains, and the excellent gun-practice of the crews, the result of years of steady training. Furthermore, even this excellence in the personnel would not have availed if under a succession of Secretaries of the Navy, and through the wisdom of a succession of Congresses, the material of the navy had not been built up as it actually was.
If war with Spain had broken out fifteen years before it did,—that is, in the year 1883, before our new navy was built,—it would have been physically impossible to get the results we actually did get. At that time our navy consisted of a collection of rusty monitors and antiquated wooden ships left over from the Civil War, which could not possibly have been matched against even the navy of Spain. Every proposal to increase the navy was then violently opposed with exactly the same arguments used nowadays by the men who oppose building up our army. The Congressmen who rallied to the support of Senator Gorman in his refusal to furnish an adequate army to take care of the Philippines and meet the new national needs, or who defeated theproposition to buy armor-plate for the new ships, assumed precisely the ground that was taken by the men who, prior to 1883, had succeeded in preventing the rebuilding of the navy. Both alike did all they could to prevent the upholding of the national honor in times of emergency. There were the usual arguments: that we were a great peaceful people, and would never have to go to war; that if we had a navy or army we should be tempted to use it and therefore embark in a career of military conquest; that there was no need of regulars anyhow, because we could always raise volunteers to do anything; that war was a barbarous method of settling disputes, and too expensive to undertake even to avoid national disgrace, and so on.
But fortunately the men of sturdy common sense and sound patriotism proved victors, and the new navy was begun. Its upbuilding was not a party matter. The first ships were laid down under Secretary Chandler; Secretary Whitney continued the work; Secretary Tracy carried it still further; so did Secretary Herbert, and then Secretary Long. Congress after Congress voted the necessary money. We have never had as many ships as a nation of such size and such vast interests really needs; but still by degrees we have acquired a small fleet of battleships, cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo-boats, all excellent of their class. The squadron withwhich Dewey entered Manila Bay included ships laid down or launched under Secretaries Chandler, Whitney, Tracy, and Herbert; and all four of these Secretaries, their naval architects, the chiefs of bureaus, the young engineers and constructors, the outside contractors, the shipyard men like Roach, Cramp, and Scott, and, finally and emphatically, the Congressmen who during these fifteen years voted the supplies, are entitled to take a just pride in their share of the glory of the achievement. Every man in Congress whose vote made possible the building of theOlympia, theBaltimore, theRaleigh, or the putting aboard them and their sister ships the modern eight-inch or rapid-fire five-inch guns, or the giving them the best engines and the means where with to practice their crews at the targets—every such man has the right to tell his children that he did his part in securing Dewey’s victory, and that, save for the action of him and his fellows, it could not have been won. This is no less true of the man who planned the ships and of the other men, whether in the government service or in private employment, who built them, from the head of the great business concern which put up an armor-plate factory down to the iron-worker who conscientiously and skilfully did his part on gun-shield or gun.
So much for the men who furnished the material and the means for assembling and practicing thepersonnel. The same praise must be given the men who actually drilled the personnel, part of which Dewey used. If our ships had merely been built and then laid up, if officers and crews had not been exercised season after season in all weathers on the high seas in handling their ships both separately and in squadron, and in practicing with the guns, all the excellent material would have availed us little. Exactly as it is of no use to give an army the best arms and equipment if it is not also given the chance to practice with its arms and equipment, so the finest ships and the best natural sailors and fighters are useless to a navy if the most ample opportunity for training is not allowed. Only incessant practice will make a good gunner; though, inasmuch as there are natural marksmen as well as men who never can become good marksmen, there should always be the widest intelligence displayed in the choice of gunners. Not only is it impossible for a man to learn how to handle a ship or do his duty aboard her save by long cruises at sea, but it is also impossible for a good single-ship captain to be an efficient unit in a fleet unless he is accustomed to manœuvre as part of a fleet.
It is particularly true of the naval service that the excellence of any portion of it in a given crisis will depend mainly upon the excellence of the whole body, and so the triumph of any part is legitimatelyfelt to reflect honor upon the whole and to have been participated in by every one. Dewey’s captains could not have followed him with the precision they displayed, could not have shown the excellent gun practice they did show—in short, the victory would not have been possible had it not been for the unwearied training and practice given the navy during the dozen years previous by the admirals, the captains, and the crews who incessantly and in all weathers kept their vessels exercised, singly and in squadron, until the men on the bridge, the men in the gun-turrets, and the men in the engine-rooms knew how to do their work perfectly, alone or together. Every officer and man, from the highest to the lowest, who did his full duty in raising the navy to the standard of efficiency it had reached on May 1, 1898, is entitled to feel some personal share in the glory won by Dewey and Dewey’s men. It would have been absolutely impossible not merely to improvise either the material or the personnel with which Dewey fought, but to have produced them in any limited number of years. A thoroughly good navy takes a long time to build up, and the best officer embodies always the traditions of a first-class service. Ships take years to build, crews take years before they become thoroughly expert, while the officers not only have to pass their early youth in a course of special training, but can not possibly riseto supreme excellence in their profession unless they make it their life-work.
We should therefore keep in mind that the hero can not win save for the forethought, energy, courage, and capacity of countless other men. Yet we must keep in mind also that all this forethought, energy, courage, and capacity will be wasted unless at the supreme moment some man of the heroic type arises capable of using to the best advantage the powers lying ready to hand. Whether it is Nelson, the greatest of all admirals, at Aboukir, Copenhagen, or Trafalgar; or Farragut, second only to Nelson, at New Orleans or Mobile; or Dewey at Manila—the great occasion must meet with the great man, or the result will be at worst a failure, at best an indecisive success. The nation must make ready the tools and train the men to use them, but at the crisis a great triumph can be achieved only should some heroic man appear. Therefore it is right and seemly to pay homage of deep respect and admiration to the man when he does appear.
Admiral Dewey performed one of the great feats of all time. At the very outset of the Spanish War he struck one of the two decisive blows which brought the war to a conclusion, and as his was the first fight, his success exercised an incalculable effect upon the whole conflict. He set the note of the war. He had carefully prepared for action duringthe months he was on the Asiatic coast. He had his plans thoroughly matured, and he struck the instant that war was declared. There was no delay, no hesitation. As soon as news came that he was to move, his war-steamers turned their bows toward Manila Bay. There was nothing to show whether or not Spanish mines and forts would be efficient; but Dewey, cautious as he was at the right time, had not a particle of fear of taking risks when the need arose. In the tropic night he steamed past the forts, and then on over the mines to where the Spanish vessels lay. What material inferiority there was on the Spanish side was nearly made up by the forts and mines. The overwhelming difference was moral, not material. It was the difference in the two commanders, in the officers and crews of the two fleets, and in the naval service, afloat and ashore, of the two nations. On the one side there had been thorough preparation; on the other, none that was adequate. It would be idle to recapitulate the results. Steaming in with cool steadiness, Dewey’s fleet cut the Spaniards to pieces, while the Americans were practically unhurt. Then Dewey drew off to breakfast, satisfied himself that he had enough ammunition, and returned to stamp out what embers of resistance were still feebly smouldering.
The victory ensured the fall of the Philippines, for Manila surrendered as soon as our land forcesarrived and were in position to press their attack home. The work, however, was by no means done, and Dewey’s diplomacy and firmness were given full scope for the year he remained in Manila waters, not only in dealing with Spaniards and insurgents, but in making it evident that we would tolerate no interference from any hostile European power. It is not yet the time to show how much he did in this last respect. Suffice it to say that by his firmness he effectually frustrated any attempt to interfere with our rights, while by his tact he avoided giving needless offence, and he acted in hearty accord with our cordial well-wishers, the English naval and diplomatic representatives in the islands.
Admiral Dewey comes back to his native land having won the right to a greeting such as has been given to no other man since the Civil War.
GRANTSPEECH DELIVERED AT GALENA, ILLINOIS, APRIL 27, 1900In the long run every great nation instinctively recognizes the men who peculiarly and pre-eminently represent its own type of greatness. Here in our country we have had many public men of high rank—soldiers, orators, constructive statesmen, and popular leaders. We have even had great philosophers who were also leaders of popular thought. Each one of these men has had his own group of devoted followers, and some of them have at times swayed the nation with a power such as the foremost of all hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip away, as the dust of conflict settles, and as through the clearing air we look back with keener wisdom into the nation’s past, mightiest among the mighty dead loom the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. There are great men also in the second rank; for in any gallery of merely national heroes Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson, would surely have their place. But these three greatest men have taken their place among the great men of all nations, the great menof all time. They stood supreme in the two great crises of our history, on the two great occasions when we stood in the van of all humanity and struck the most effective blows that have ever been struck for the cause of human freedom under the law, for that spirit of orderly liberty which must stand at the base of every wise movement to secure to each man his rights, and to guard each from being wronged by his fellows.Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and it was his good fortune to win the highest renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the second and even greater struggle the deeds of Lincoln the statesman were made good by those of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the work that dropped from Lincoln’s tired hands when the assassin’s bullet went home, and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were closed forever.It was no mere accident that made our three mightiest men, two of them soldiers, and one the great war President. It is only through work and strife that either nation or individual moves on to greatness. The great man is always the man of mighty effort, and usually the man whom grinding need has trained to mighty effort. Rest and peace are good things, are great blessings, but only if they come honorably; and it is those who fearlessly turn away from them, when they have not been earned,who in the long run deserve best of their country. In the sweat of our brows do we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at times, yet it is far more bitter to eat the bread that is unearned, unwon, undeserved. America must nerve herself for labor and peril. The men who have made our national greatness are those who faced danger and overcame it, who met difficulties and surmounted them, not those whose lines were cast in such pleasant places that toil and dread were ever far from them.Neither was it an accident that our three leaders were men who, while they did not shrink from war, were nevertheless heartily men of peace. The man who will not fight to avert or undo wrong is but a poor creature; but, after all, he is less dangerous than the man who fights on the side of wrong. Again and again in a nation’s history the time may, and indeed sometimes must, come when the nation’s highest duty is war. But peace must be the normal condition, or the nation will come to a bloody doom. Twice in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and twice in lesser crises, in 1812 and 1898, the nation was called to arms in the name of all that makes the words “honor,” “freedom,” and “justice” other than empty sounds. On each occasion the net result of the war was greatly for the benefit of mankind. But on each occasion this net result was of benefit only because after the war came peace, came justice andorder and liberty. If the Revolution had been followed by bloody anarchy, if the Declaration of Independence had not been supplemented by the adoption of the Constitution, if the freedom won by the sword of Washington had not been supplemented by the stable and orderly government which Washington was instrumental in founding, then we should have but added to the chaos of the world, and our victories would have told against and not for the betterment of mankind. So it was with the Civil War. If the four iron years had not been followed by peace, they would not have been justified. If the great silent soldier, the Hammer of the North, had struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many conquerors in civil strife before him had done, to rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then the war would have been fought in vain, and worse than in vain. If the Union, which so many men shed their blood to restore, were not now a union in fact, then the precious blood would have been wasted. But it was not wasted; for the work of peace has made good the work of war, and North and South, East and West, we are now one people in fact as well as in name; one in purpose, in fellow-feeling, and in high resolve, as we stand to greet the new century, and, high of heart, to face the mighty tasks which the coming years will surely bring.Grant and his fellow-soldiers who fought through the war, and his fellow-statesmen who completed the work partly done by the soldiers, not only left us the heritage of a reunited country and of a land from which slavery had been banished, but left us what was quite as important, the great memory of their great deeds, to serve forever as an example and an inspiration, to spur us on so that we may not fall below the level reached by our fathers. The rough, strong poet of democracy has sung of Grant as “the man of mighty days, and equal to the days.” The days are less mighty now, and that is all the more reason why we should show ourselves equal to them. We meet here to pay glad homage to the memory of our illustrious dead; but let us keep ever clear before our minds the fact that mere lip-loyalty is no loyalty at all, and that the only homage that counts is the homage of deeds, not of words. It is but an idle waste of time to celebrate the memory of the dead unless we, the living, in our lives strive to show ourselves not unworthy of them. If the careers of Washington and Grant are not vital and full of meaning to us, if they are merely part of the storied past, and stir us to no eager emulation in the ceaseless, endless war for right against wrong, then the root of right thinking is not in us; and where we do not think right we can not act right.It is not my purpose in this address to sketch, ineven the briefest manner, the life and deeds of Grant. It is not even my purpose to touch on the points where his influence has told so tremendously in the making of our history. It is part of the man’s greatness that now we can use his career purely for illustration. We can take for granted the fact that each American who knows the history of the country must know the history of this man, at least in its broad outline; and that we no more need to explain Vicksburg and Appomattox than we need to explain Yorktown. I shall ask attention, not to Grant’s life, but to the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day should learn them.Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of stubborn fixity of purpose. In the Union armies there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but none with his iron determination. This quality he showed as President no less than as general. He was no more to be influenced by a hostile majority in Congress into abandoning his attitude in favor of a sound and stable currency than he was to be influenced by check or repulse into releasing his grip on beleaguered Richmond. It is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially to refer when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective way, by praising him as a man. It is the one quality which we can least afford to lose. It is the only quality the lack of which is as unpardonable in the nation as inthe man. It is the antithesis of levity, fickleness, volatility, of undue exaltation, of undue depression, of hysteria and neuroticism in all their myriad forms. The lesson of unyielding, unflinching, unfaltering perseverance in the course upon which the nation has entered is one very necessary for a generation whose preachers sometimes dwell overmuch on the policies of the moment. There are not a few public men, not a few men who try to mold opinion within Congress and without, on the stump and in the daily press, who seem to aim at instability, who pander to and thereby increase the thirst for overstatement of each situation as it arises, whose effort is, accordingly, to make the people move in zigzags instead of in a straight line. We all saw this in the Spanish War, when the very men who at one time branded as traitors everybody who said there was anything wrong in the army at another time branded as traitors everybody who said there was anything right. Of course such an attitude is as unhealthy on one side as on the other, and it is equally destructive of any effort to do away with abuse.Hysterics of this kind may have all the results of extreme timidity. A nation that has not the power of endurance, the power of dogged insistence on a determined policy, come weal or woe, has lost one chief element of greatness. The people who wish to abandon the Philippines because we have had heavyskirmishing out there, or who think that our rule is a failure whenever they discover some sporadic upgrowth of evil, would do well to remember the two long years of disaster this nation suffered before the July morning when the news was flashed to the waiting millions that Vicksburg had fallen in the West and that in the East the splendid soldiery of Lee had recoiled at last from the low hills of Gettysburg. Even after this nearly two years more were to pass before the end came at Appomattox. Throughout this time the cry of prophets of disaster never ceased. The peace-at-any-price men never wearied of declaiming against the war, of describing the evils of conquest and subjugation as worse than any possible benefits that could result therefrom. The hysterical minority, passed alternately from unreasoning confidence to unreasoning despair; and at times they even infected for the moment many of their sober, steady countrymen. Eighteen months after the war began the State and Congressional elections went heavily against the war party, and two years later the opposition party actually waged the Presidential campaign on the issue that the war was a failure. Meanwhile there was plenty of blundering at the front, plenty of mistakes at Washington. The country was saved by the fact that our people, as a whole, were steadfast and unshaken. Both at Washington and at the front the leaders were men of undaunted resolution,who would not abandon the policy to which the nation was definitely committed, who regarded disaster as merely a spur to fresh effort, who saw in each blunder merely something to be retrieved, and not a reason for abandoning the long-determined course. Above all, the great mass of the people possessed a tough and stubborn fibre of character.There was then, as always, ample room for criticism, and there was every reason why the mistakes should be corrected. But in the long run our gratitude was due primarily, not to the critics, not to the fault-finders, but to the men who actually did the work; not to the men of negative policy, but to those who struggled toward the given goal. Merciful oblivion has swallowed up the names of those who railed at the men who were saving the Union, while it has given us the memory of these same men as a heritage of honor forever; and brightest among their names flame those of Lincoln and Grant, the steadfast, the unswerving, the enduring, the finally triumphant.Grant’s supreme virtue as a soldier was his doggedness, the quality which found expression in his famous phrases of “unconditional surrender” and “fighting it out on this line if it takes all summer.” He was a master of strategy and tactics, but he was also a master of hard hitting, of that “continuous hammering” which finally broke through even Lee’sguard. While an armed foe was in the field, it never occurred to Grant that any question could be so important as his overthrow. He felt nothing but impatient contempt for the weak souls who wished to hold parley with the enemy while that enemy was still capable of resistance.There is a fine lesson in this to the people who have been asking us to invite the certain destruction of our power in the Philippines, and therefore the certain destruction of the islands themselves, by putting any concession on our part ahead of the duty of reducing the islands to quiet at all costs and of stamping out the last embers of armed resistance. At the time of the Civil War the only way to secure peace was to fight for it, and it would have been a crime against humanity to have stopped fighting before peace was conquered. So in the far less important, but still very important, crisis which confronts us to-day, it would be a crime against humanity if, whether from weakness or from mistaken sentimentalism, we failed to perceive that in the Philippines the all-important duty is to restore order; because peace, and the gradually increasing measure of self-government for the islands which will follow peace, can only come when armed resistance has completely vanished.Grant was no brawler, no lover of fighting for fighting’s sake. He was a plain, quiet man, notseeking for glory; but a man who, when aroused, was always in deadly earnest, and who never shrank from duty. He was slow to strike, but he never struck softly. He was not in the least of the type which gets up mass-meetings, makes inflammatory speeches or passes inflammatory resolutions, and then permits over-forcible talk to be followed by over-feeble action. His promise squared with his performance. His deeds made good his words. He did not denounce an evil in strained and hyperbolic language; but when he did denounce it, he strove to make his denunciation effective by his action. He did not plunge lightly into war, but once in, he saw the war through, and when it was over, it was over entirely. Unsparing in battle, he was very merciful in victory. There was no let-up in his grim attack, his grim pursuit, until the last body of armed foes surrendered. But that feat once accomplished, his first thought was for the valiant defeated; to let them take back their horses to their little homes because they would need them to work on their farms. Grant, the champion whose sword was sharpest in the great fight for liberty, was no less sternly insistent upon the need of order and of obedience to law. No stouter foe of anarchy in every form ever lived within our borders. The man who more than any other, save Lincoln, had changed us into a nation whose citizens were all freemen, realized entirelythat these freemen would remain free only while they kept mastery over their own evil passions. He saw that lawlessness in all its forms was the handmaiden of tyranny. No nation ever yet retained its freedom for any length of time after losing its respect for the law, after losing the law-abiding spirit, the spirit that really makes orderly liberty.Grant, in short, stood for the great elementary virtues, for justice, for freedom, for order, for unyielding resolution, for manliness in its broadest and highest sense. His greatness was not so much greatness of intellect as greatness of character, including in the word “character” all the strong, virile virtues. It is character that counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good thing to have a keen, fine intellectual development in a nation, to produce orators, artists, successful business men; but it is an infinitely greater thing to have those solid qualities which we group together under the name of character—sobriety, steadfastness, the sense of obligation toward one’s neighbor and one’s God, hard common-sense, and, combined with it, the lift of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is right. These are the qualities which go to make up true national greatness, and these were the qualities which Grant possessed in an eminent degree.We have come here, then, to realize what themighty dead did for the nation, what the dead did for us who are now living. Let us in return try to shape our deeds so that the America of the future shall justify by her career the lives of the great men of her past. Every man who does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as a private citizen is paying to Grant’s memory the kind of homage that is best worth paying. We have difficulties and dangers enough in the present, and it is the way we face them which it to determine whether or not we are fit descendants of the men of the mighty past. We must not flinch from our duties abroad merely because we have even more important duties at home. That these home duties are the most important of all every thinking man will freely acknowledge. We must do our duty to ourselves and our brethren in the complex social life of the time. We must possess the spirit of broad humanity, deep charity, and loving-kindness for our fellowmen, and must remember, at the same time, that this spirit is really the absolute antithesis of mere sentimentalism, of soup-kitchen, pauperizing philanthropy, and of legislation which is inspired either by foolish mock benevolence or by class greed or class hate. We need to be possessed of the spirit of justice and of the spirit which recognizes in work and not ease the proper end of effort.Of course the all-important thing to keep in mindis that if we have not both strength and virtue we shall fail. Indeed, in the old acceptation of the word, virtue included strength and courage, for the clear-sighted men at the dawn of our era knew that the passive virtues could not by themselves avail, that wisdom without courage would sink into mere cunning, and courage without morality into ruthless, lawless, self-destructive ferocity. The iron Roman made himself lord of the world because to the courage of the barbarian he opposed a courage as fierce and an infinitely keener mind; while his civilized rivals, the keen-witted Greek and Carthaginian, though of even finer intellect, had let corruption eat into their brilliant civilizations until their strength had been corroded as if by acid. In short, the Roman had character as well as masterful genius, and when pitted against peoples either of less genius or of less character, these peoples went down.As the ages roll by, the eternal problem forever fronting each man and each race forever shifts its outward shape, and yet at the bottom it is always the same. There are dangers of peace and dangers of war; dangers of excess in militarism and of excess by the avoidance of duty that implies militarism; dangers of slow dry-rot, and dangers which become acute only in great crises. When these crises come, the nation will triumph or sink accordingly as it produces or fails to produce statesmen likeLincoln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as it does or does not back them in their efforts. We do not need men of unsteady brilliancy or erratic power—unbalanced men. The men we need are the men of strong, earnest, solid character—the men who possess the homely virtues, and who to these virtues add rugged courage, rugged honesty, and high resolve. Grant, with his self-poise, his self-command, his self-mastery; Grant, who loved peace and did not fear war, who would not draw the sword if he could honorably keep it sheathed, but who, when once he had drawn it, would not return it to the sheath until the weary years had brought the blood-won victory; Grant, who had no thought after the fight was won save of leading the life led by other Americans, and who aspired to the Presidency only as Zachary Taylor or Andrew Jackson had aspired to it—Grant was of a type upon which the men of to-day can well afford to model themselves. As I have already said, our first duty, our most important work, is setting our own house in order. We must be true to ourselves, or else, in the long run, we shall be false to all others. The Republic can not stand if honesty and decency do not prevail alike in public and private life; if we do not set ourselves seriously at work to solve the tremendous social problems forced upon us by the far-sweeping industrial changes of the last two generations.But in considering the life of Grant it is peculiarly appropriate to remember that, besides the regeneration in political and social life within our own borders, we must also face what has come upon us from without. No friendliness with other nations, no good will for them or by them, can take the place of national self-reliance. No alliance, no inoffensive conduct on our part, would supply, in time of need, the failure in ability to hold our own with the strong hand. We must work out our own destiny by our own strength. A vigorous young nation like ours does not always stand still. Now and then there comes a time when it is sure either to shrink or to expand. Grant saw to it that we did not shrink, and therefore we had to expand when the inevitable moment came.Great duties face us in the islands where the Stars and Stripes now float in place of the arrogant flag of Spain. As we perform those duties well or ill, so will we, in large part, determine our right to a place among the great nations of the earth. We have got to meet them in the very spirit of Grant. If we are frightened at the task, above all, if we are cowed or disheartened by any check, or by the clamor of the sensation-monger, we shall show ourselves weaklings unfit to invoke the memories of the stalwart men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. If we do not rule wisely, and if our rule is not in theinterest of the peoples who have come under our guardianship, then we had best never to have begun the effort at all. As a nation we shall have to choose our representatives in these islands as carefully as Grant chose the generals who were to serve at the vital points under him. Fortunately, so far the choice has been most wise. No nation has ever sent a better man than we sent to Cuba when President McKinley appointed as governor-general of that island Leonard Wood; and now, in sending Judge Taft at the head of the Commission to the Philippines, the President has again chosen the very best man to be found in all the United States for the purpose in view.Part of Grant’s great strength lay in the fact that he faced facts as they were, and not as he wished they might be. He was not originally an abolitionist, and he probably could not originally have defined his views as to State sovereignty; but when the Civil War was on, he saw that the only thing to do was to fight it to a finish and establish by force of arms the Constitutional right to put down rebellion. It is just the same thing nowadays with expansion. It has come, and it has come to stay, whether we wish it or not. Certain duties have fallen to us as a legacy of the war with Spain, and we can not avoid performing them. All we can decide is whether we will perform them well or ill. We can not leavethe Philippines. We have got to stay there, establish order, and then give the inhabitants as much self-government as they show they can use to advantage. We can not run away if we would. We have got to see the work through, because we are not a nation of weaklings. We are strong men, and we intend to do our duty.To do our duty—that is the sum and substance of the whole matter. We are not trying to win glory. We are not trying to do anything especially brilliant or unusual. We are setting ourselves vigorously at each task as the task arises, and we are trying to face each difficulty as Grant faced innumerable and infinitely greater difficulties. The sure way to succeed is to set about our work in the spirit that marked the great soldier whose life we this day celebrate: the spirit of devotion to duty, of determination to deal fairly, justly, and fearlessly with all men, and of iron resolution never to abandon any task once begun until it has been brought to a successful and triumphant conclusion.
SPEECH DELIVERED AT GALENA, ILLINOIS, APRIL 27, 1900
In the long run every great nation instinctively recognizes the men who peculiarly and pre-eminently represent its own type of greatness. Here in our country we have had many public men of high rank—soldiers, orators, constructive statesmen, and popular leaders. We have even had great philosophers who were also leaders of popular thought. Each one of these men has had his own group of devoted followers, and some of them have at times swayed the nation with a power such as the foremost of all hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip away, as the dust of conflict settles, and as through the clearing air we look back with keener wisdom into the nation’s past, mightiest among the mighty dead loom the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. There are great men also in the second rank; for in any gallery of merely national heroes Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson, would surely have their place. But these three greatest men have taken their place among the great men of all nations, the great menof all time. They stood supreme in the two great crises of our history, on the two great occasions when we stood in the van of all humanity and struck the most effective blows that have ever been struck for the cause of human freedom under the law, for that spirit of orderly liberty which must stand at the base of every wise movement to secure to each man his rights, and to guard each from being wronged by his fellows.
Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and it was his good fortune to win the highest renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the second and even greater struggle the deeds of Lincoln the statesman were made good by those of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the work that dropped from Lincoln’s tired hands when the assassin’s bullet went home, and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were closed forever.
It was no mere accident that made our three mightiest men, two of them soldiers, and one the great war President. It is only through work and strife that either nation or individual moves on to greatness. The great man is always the man of mighty effort, and usually the man whom grinding need has trained to mighty effort. Rest and peace are good things, are great blessings, but only if they come honorably; and it is those who fearlessly turn away from them, when they have not been earned,who in the long run deserve best of their country. In the sweat of our brows do we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at times, yet it is far more bitter to eat the bread that is unearned, unwon, undeserved. America must nerve herself for labor and peril. The men who have made our national greatness are those who faced danger and overcame it, who met difficulties and surmounted them, not those whose lines were cast in such pleasant places that toil and dread were ever far from them.
Neither was it an accident that our three leaders were men who, while they did not shrink from war, were nevertheless heartily men of peace. The man who will not fight to avert or undo wrong is but a poor creature; but, after all, he is less dangerous than the man who fights on the side of wrong. Again and again in a nation’s history the time may, and indeed sometimes must, come when the nation’s highest duty is war. But peace must be the normal condition, or the nation will come to a bloody doom. Twice in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and twice in lesser crises, in 1812 and 1898, the nation was called to arms in the name of all that makes the words “honor,” “freedom,” and “justice” other than empty sounds. On each occasion the net result of the war was greatly for the benefit of mankind. But on each occasion this net result was of benefit only because after the war came peace, came justice andorder and liberty. If the Revolution had been followed by bloody anarchy, if the Declaration of Independence had not been supplemented by the adoption of the Constitution, if the freedom won by the sword of Washington had not been supplemented by the stable and orderly government which Washington was instrumental in founding, then we should have but added to the chaos of the world, and our victories would have told against and not for the betterment of mankind. So it was with the Civil War. If the four iron years had not been followed by peace, they would not have been justified. If the great silent soldier, the Hammer of the North, had struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many conquerors in civil strife before him had done, to rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then the war would have been fought in vain, and worse than in vain. If the Union, which so many men shed their blood to restore, were not now a union in fact, then the precious blood would have been wasted. But it was not wasted; for the work of peace has made good the work of war, and North and South, East and West, we are now one people in fact as well as in name; one in purpose, in fellow-feeling, and in high resolve, as we stand to greet the new century, and, high of heart, to face the mighty tasks which the coming years will surely bring.
Grant and his fellow-soldiers who fought through the war, and his fellow-statesmen who completed the work partly done by the soldiers, not only left us the heritage of a reunited country and of a land from which slavery had been banished, but left us what was quite as important, the great memory of their great deeds, to serve forever as an example and an inspiration, to spur us on so that we may not fall below the level reached by our fathers. The rough, strong poet of democracy has sung of Grant as “the man of mighty days, and equal to the days.” The days are less mighty now, and that is all the more reason why we should show ourselves equal to them. We meet here to pay glad homage to the memory of our illustrious dead; but let us keep ever clear before our minds the fact that mere lip-loyalty is no loyalty at all, and that the only homage that counts is the homage of deeds, not of words. It is but an idle waste of time to celebrate the memory of the dead unless we, the living, in our lives strive to show ourselves not unworthy of them. If the careers of Washington and Grant are not vital and full of meaning to us, if they are merely part of the storied past, and stir us to no eager emulation in the ceaseless, endless war for right against wrong, then the root of right thinking is not in us; and where we do not think right we can not act right.
It is not my purpose in this address to sketch, ineven the briefest manner, the life and deeds of Grant. It is not even my purpose to touch on the points where his influence has told so tremendously in the making of our history. It is part of the man’s greatness that now we can use his career purely for illustration. We can take for granted the fact that each American who knows the history of the country must know the history of this man, at least in its broad outline; and that we no more need to explain Vicksburg and Appomattox than we need to explain Yorktown. I shall ask attention, not to Grant’s life, but to the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day should learn them.
Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of stubborn fixity of purpose. In the Union armies there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but none with his iron determination. This quality he showed as President no less than as general. He was no more to be influenced by a hostile majority in Congress into abandoning his attitude in favor of a sound and stable currency than he was to be influenced by check or repulse into releasing his grip on beleaguered Richmond. It is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially to refer when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective way, by praising him as a man. It is the one quality which we can least afford to lose. It is the only quality the lack of which is as unpardonable in the nation as inthe man. It is the antithesis of levity, fickleness, volatility, of undue exaltation, of undue depression, of hysteria and neuroticism in all their myriad forms. The lesson of unyielding, unflinching, unfaltering perseverance in the course upon which the nation has entered is one very necessary for a generation whose preachers sometimes dwell overmuch on the policies of the moment. There are not a few public men, not a few men who try to mold opinion within Congress and without, on the stump and in the daily press, who seem to aim at instability, who pander to and thereby increase the thirst for overstatement of each situation as it arises, whose effort is, accordingly, to make the people move in zigzags instead of in a straight line. We all saw this in the Spanish War, when the very men who at one time branded as traitors everybody who said there was anything wrong in the army at another time branded as traitors everybody who said there was anything right. Of course such an attitude is as unhealthy on one side as on the other, and it is equally destructive of any effort to do away with abuse.
Hysterics of this kind may have all the results of extreme timidity. A nation that has not the power of endurance, the power of dogged insistence on a determined policy, come weal or woe, has lost one chief element of greatness. The people who wish to abandon the Philippines because we have had heavyskirmishing out there, or who think that our rule is a failure whenever they discover some sporadic upgrowth of evil, would do well to remember the two long years of disaster this nation suffered before the July morning when the news was flashed to the waiting millions that Vicksburg had fallen in the West and that in the East the splendid soldiery of Lee had recoiled at last from the low hills of Gettysburg. Even after this nearly two years more were to pass before the end came at Appomattox. Throughout this time the cry of prophets of disaster never ceased. The peace-at-any-price men never wearied of declaiming against the war, of describing the evils of conquest and subjugation as worse than any possible benefits that could result therefrom. The hysterical minority, passed alternately from unreasoning confidence to unreasoning despair; and at times they even infected for the moment many of their sober, steady countrymen. Eighteen months after the war began the State and Congressional elections went heavily against the war party, and two years later the opposition party actually waged the Presidential campaign on the issue that the war was a failure. Meanwhile there was plenty of blundering at the front, plenty of mistakes at Washington. The country was saved by the fact that our people, as a whole, were steadfast and unshaken. Both at Washington and at the front the leaders were men of undaunted resolution,who would not abandon the policy to which the nation was definitely committed, who regarded disaster as merely a spur to fresh effort, who saw in each blunder merely something to be retrieved, and not a reason for abandoning the long-determined course. Above all, the great mass of the people possessed a tough and stubborn fibre of character.
There was then, as always, ample room for criticism, and there was every reason why the mistakes should be corrected. But in the long run our gratitude was due primarily, not to the critics, not to the fault-finders, but to the men who actually did the work; not to the men of negative policy, but to those who struggled toward the given goal. Merciful oblivion has swallowed up the names of those who railed at the men who were saving the Union, while it has given us the memory of these same men as a heritage of honor forever; and brightest among their names flame those of Lincoln and Grant, the steadfast, the unswerving, the enduring, the finally triumphant.
Grant’s supreme virtue as a soldier was his doggedness, the quality which found expression in his famous phrases of “unconditional surrender” and “fighting it out on this line if it takes all summer.” He was a master of strategy and tactics, but he was also a master of hard hitting, of that “continuous hammering” which finally broke through even Lee’sguard. While an armed foe was in the field, it never occurred to Grant that any question could be so important as his overthrow. He felt nothing but impatient contempt for the weak souls who wished to hold parley with the enemy while that enemy was still capable of resistance.
There is a fine lesson in this to the people who have been asking us to invite the certain destruction of our power in the Philippines, and therefore the certain destruction of the islands themselves, by putting any concession on our part ahead of the duty of reducing the islands to quiet at all costs and of stamping out the last embers of armed resistance. At the time of the Civil War the only way to secure peace was to fight for it, and it would have been a crime against humanity to have stopped fighting before peace was conquered. So in the far less important, but still very important, crisis which confronts us to-day, it would be a crime against humanity if, whether from weakness or from mistaken sentimentalism, we failed to perceive that in the Philippines the all-important duty is to restore order; because peace, and the gradually increasing measure of self-government for the islands which will follow peace, can only come when armed resistance has completely vanished.
Grant was no brawler, no lover of fighting for fighting’s sake. He was a plain, quiet man, notseeking for glory; but a man who, when aroused, was always in deadly earnest, and who never shrank from duty. He was slow to strike, but he never struck softly. He was not in the least of the type which gets up mass-meetings, makes inflammatory speeches or passes inflammatory resolutions, and then permits over-forcible talk to be followed by over-feeble action. His promise squared with his performance. His deeds made good his words. He did not denounce an evil in strained and hyperbolic language; but when he did denounce it, he strove to make his denunciation effective by his action. He did not plunge lightly into war, but once in, he saw the war through, and when it was over, it was over entirely. Unsparing in battle, he was very merciful in victory. There was no let-up in his grim attack, his grim pursuit, until the last body of armed foes surrendered. But that feat once accomplished, his first thought was for the valiant defeated; to let them take back their horses to their little homes because they would need them to work on their farms. Grant, the champion whose sword was sharpest in the great fight for liberty, was no less sternly insistent upon the need of order and of obedience to law. No stouter foe of anarchy in every form ever lived within our borders. The man who more than any other, save Lincoln, had changed us into a nation whose citizens were all freemen, realized entirelythat these freemen would remain free only while they kept mastery over their own evil passions. He saw that lawlessness in all its forms was the handmaiden of tyranny. No nation ever yet retained its freedom for any length of time after losing its respect for the law, after losing the law-abiding spirit, the spirit that really makes orderly liberty.
Grant, in short, stood for the great elementary virtues, for justice, for freedom, for order, for unyielding resolution, for manliness in its broadest and highest sense. His greatness was not so much greatness of intellect as greatness of character, including in the word “character” all the strong, virile virtues. It is character that counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good thing to have a keen, fine intellectual development in a nation, to produce orators, artists, successful business men; but it is an infinitely greater thing to have those solid qualities which we group together under the name of character—sobriety, steadfastness, the sense of obligation toward one’s neighbor and one’s God, hard common-sense, and, combined with it, the lift of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is right. These are the qualities which go to make up true national greatness, and these were the qualities which Grant possessed in an eminent degree.
We have come here, then, to realize what themighty dead did for the nation, what the dead did for us who are now living. Let us in return try to shape our deeds so that the America of the future shall justify by her career the lives of the great men of her past. Every man who does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as a private citizen is paying to Grant’s memory the kind of homage that is best worth paying. We have difficulties and dangers enough in the present, and it is the way we face them which it to determine whether or not we are fit descendants of the men of the mighty past. We must not flinch from our duties abroad merely because we have even more important duties at home. That these home duties are the most important of all every thinking man will freely acknowledge. We must do our duty to ourselves and our brethren in the complex social life of the time. We must possess the spirit of broad humanity, deep charity, and loving-kindness for our fellowmen, and must remember, at the same time, that this spirit is really the absolute antithesis of mere sentimentalism, of soup-kitchen, pauperizing philanthropy, and of legislation which is inspired either by foolish mock benevolence or by class greed or class hate. We need to be possessed of the spirit of justice and of the spirit which recognizes in work and not ease the proper end of effort.
Of course the all-important thing to keep in mindis that if we have not both strength and virtue we shall fail. Indeed, in the old acceptation of the word, virtue included strength and courage, for the clear-sighted men at the dawn of our era knew that the passive virtues could not by themselves avail, that wisdom without courage would sink into mere cunning, and courage without morality into ruthless, lawless, self-destructive ferocity. The iron Roman made himself lord of the world because to the courage of the barbarian he opposed a courage as fierce and an infinitely keener mind; while his civilized rivals, the keen-witted Greek and Carthaginian, though of even finer intellect, had let corruption eat into their brilliant civilizations until their strength had been corroded as if by acid. In short, the Roman had character as well as masterful genius, and when pitted against peoples either of less genius or of less character, these peoples went down.
As the ages roll by, the eternal problem forever fronting each man and each race forever shifts its outward shape, and yet at the bottom it is always the same. There are dangers of peace and dangers of war; dangers of excess in militarism and of excess by the avoidance of duty that implies militarism; dangers of slow dry-rot, and dangers which become acute only in great crises. When these crises come, the nation will triumph or sink accordingly as it produces or fails to produce statesmen likeLincoln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as it does or does not back them in their efforts. We do not need men of unsteady brilliancy or erratic power—unbalanced men. The men we need are the men of strong, earnest, solid character—the men who possess the homely virtues, and who to these virtues add rugged courage, rugged honesty, and high resolve. Grant, with his self-poise, his self-command, his self-mastery; Grant, who loved peace and did not fear war, who would not draw the sword if he could honorably keep it sheathed, but who, when once he had drawn it, would not return it to the sheath until the weary years had brought the blood-won victory; Grant, who had no thought after the fight was won save of leading the life led by other Americans, and who aspired to the Presidency only as Zachary Taylor or Andrew Jackson had aspired to it—Grant was of a type upon which the men of to-day can well afford to model themselves. As I have already said, our first duty, our most important work, is setting our own house in order. We must be true to ourselves, or else, in the long run, we shall be false to all others. The Republic can not stand if honesty and decency do not prevail alike in public and private life; if we do not set ourselves seriously at work to solve the tremendous social problems forced upon us by the far-sweeping industrial changes of the last two generations.
But in considering the life of Grant it is peculiarly appropriate to remember that, besides the regeneration in political and social life within our own borders, we must also face what has come upon us from without. No friendliness with other nations, no good will for them or by them, can take the place of national self-reliance. No alliance, no inoffensive conduct on our part, would supply, in time of need, the failure in ability to hold our own with the strong hand. We must work out our own destiny by our own strength. A vigorous young nation like ours does not always stand still. Now and then there comes a time when it is sure either to shrink or to expand. Grant saw to it that we did not shrink, and therefore we had to expand when the inevitable moment came.
Great duties face us in the islands where the Stars and Stripes now float in place of the arrogant flag of Spain. As we perform those duties well or ill, so will we, in large part, determine our right to a place among the great nations of the earth. We have got to meet them in the very spirit of Grant. If we are frightened at the task, above all, if we are cowed or disheartened by any check, or by the clamor of the sensation-monger, we shall show ourselves weaklings unfit to invoke the memories of the stalwart men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. If we do not rule wisely, and if our rule is not in theinterest of the peoples who have come under our guardianship, then we had best never to have begun the effort at all. As a nation we shall have to choose our representatives in these islands as carefully as Grant chose the generals who were to serve at the vital points under him. Fortunately, so far the choice has been most wise. No nation has ever sent a better man than we sent to Cuba when President McKinley appointed as governor-general of that island Leonard Wood; and now, in sending Judge Taft at the head of the Commission to the Philippines, the President has again chosen the very best man to be found in all the United States for the purpose in view.
Part of Grant’s great strength lay in the fact that he faced facts as they were, and not as he wished they might be. He was not originally an abolitionist, and he probably could not originally have defined his views as to State sovereignty; but when the Civil War was on, he saw that the only thing to do was to fight it to a finish and establish by force of arms the Constitutional right to put down rebellion. It is just the same thing nowadays with expansion. It has come, and it has come to stay, whether we wish it or not. Certain duties have fallen to us as a legacy of the war with Spain, and we can not avoid performing them. All we can decide is whether we will perform them well or ill. We can not leavethe Philippines. We have got to stay there, establish order, and then give the inhabitants as much self-government as they show they can use to advantage. We can not run away if we would. We have got to see the work through, because we are not a nation of weaklings. We are strong men, and we intend to do our duty.
To do our duty—that is the sum and substance of the whole matter. We are not trying to win glory. We are not trying to do anything especially brilliant or unusual. We are setting ourselves vigorously at each task as the task arises, and we are trying to face each difficulty as Grant faced innumerable and infinitely greater difficulties. The sure way to succeed is to set about our work in the spirit that marked the great soldier whose life we this day celebrate: the spirit of devotion to duty, of determination to deal fairly, justly, and fearlessly with all men, and of iron resolution never to abandon any task once begun until it has been brought to a successful and triumphant conclusion.
THE TWO AMERICASSPEECH AT THE FORMAL OPENING OF THE PAN-AMERICAN EXPOSITION, BUFFALO, MAY 20, 1901To-day we formally open this great exposition by the shores of the mighty inland seas of the North, where all the peoples of the Western Hemisphere have joined to show what they have done in art, science, and industrial invention, what they have been able to accomplish with their manifold resources and their infinitely varied individual and national qualities. Such an exposition, held at the opening of this new century, inevitably suggests two trains of thought. It should make us think seriously and solemnly of our several duties to one another as citizens of the different nations of this Western Hemisphere, and also of our duties each to the nation to which he personally belongs.The century upon which we have just entered must inevitably be one of tremendous triumph or of tremendous failure for the whole human race, because, to an infinitely greater extent than ever before, humanity is knit together in all its parts, for weal or woe. All about us there are innumerable tendencies that tell for good, and innumerable tendenciesthat tell for evil. It is, of course, a mere truism to say that our own acts must determine which set of tendencies shall overcome the other. In order to act wisely we must first see clearly. There is no place among us for the mere pessimist; no man who looks at life with a vision that sees all things black or gray can do aught healthful in molding the destiny of a mighty and vigorous people. But there is just as little use for the foolish optimist who refuses to face the many and real evils that exist, and who fails to see that the only way to ensure the triumph of righteousness in the future is to war against all that is base, weak, and unlovely in the present.There are certain things so obvious as to seem commonplace, which, nevertheless, must be kept constantly before us if we are to preserve our just sense of proportion. This twentieth century is big with the fate of the nations of mankind, because the fate of each is now interwoven with the fate of all to a degree never even approached in any previous stage of history. No better proof could be given than by this very exposition. A century ago no such exposition could have even been thought of. The larger part of the territory represented here to-day by so many free nations was not even mapped, and very much of it was unknown to the hardiest explorer. The influence of America upon Old World affairswas imponderable. World politics still meant European politics.All that is now changed, not merely by what has happened here in America, but by what has happened elsewhere. It is not necessary for us here to consider the giant changes which have come elsewhere in the globe; to treat of the rise in the South Seas of the great free commonwealths of Australia and New Zealand; of the way in which Japan has been rejuvenated and has advanced by leaps and bounds to a position among the leading civilized powers; of the problems, affecting the major portion of mankind, which call imperiously for solution in parts of the Old World which, a century ago, were barely known to Europe, even by rumor. Our present concern is not with the Old World, but with our own Western Hemisphere, America. We meet to-day, representing the people of this continent, from the Dominion of Canada in the north, to Chile and the Argentine in the south; representing peoples who have traveled far and fast in the last century, because in them has been practically shown that it is the spirit of adventure which is the maker of commonwealths; peoples who are learning and striving to put in practice the vital truth that freedom is the necessary first step, but only the first step, in successful free government.During the last century we have on the wholemade long strides in the right direction, but we have very much yet to learn. We all look forward to the day when there shall be a nearer approximation than there has ever yet been to the brotherhood of man and the peace of the world. More and more we are learning that to love one’s country above all others is in no way incompatible with respecting and wishing well to all others, and that, as between man and man, so between nation and nation, there should live the great law of right. These are the goals toward which we strive; and let us at least earnestly endeavor to realize them here on this continent. From Hudson Bay to the Straits of Magellan, we, the men of the two Americas, have been conquering the wilderness, carving it into state and province, and seeking to build up in state and province governments which shall combine industrial prosperity and moral well-being. Let us ever most vividly remember the falsity of the belief that any one of us is to be permanently benefited by the hurt of another. Let us strive to have our public men treat as axiomatic the truth that it is for the interest of every commonwealth in the Western Hemisphere to see every other commonwealth grow in riches and in happiness, in material wealth and in the sober, strong, self-respecting manliness, without which material wealth avails so little.To-day on behalf of the United States I welcomeyou here—you, our brothers of the North and you, our brothers of the South; we wish you well; we wish you all prosperity; and we say to you that we earnestly hope for your well-being, not only for your own sakes, but also for our own, for it is a benefit to each of us to have the others do well. The relations between us now are those of cordial friendship, and it is to the interest of all alike that this friendship should ever remain unbroken. Nor is there the least chance of its being broken, provided only that all of us alike act with full recognition of the vital need that each should realize that his own interests can best be served by serving the interests of others.You, men of Canada, are doing substantially the same work that we of this Republic are doing, and face substantially the same problems that we also face. Yours is the world of the merchant, the manufacturer and mechanic, the farmer, the ranchman, and the miner; you are subduing the prairie and the forest, tilling farm-land, building cities, striving to raise ever higher the standard of right, to bring ever nearer the day when true justice shall obtain between man and man; and we wish Godspeed to you and yours, and may the kindliest ties of good will always exist between us.To you of the republics south of us, I wish to say a special word. I believe with all my heart in the Monroe Doctrine. This doctrine is not to be invokedfor the aggrandizement of any one of us here on this continent at the expense of any one else on this continent. It should be regarded simply as a great international Pan-American policy, vital to the interests of all of us. The United States has, and ought to have, and must ever have, only the desire to see her sister commonwealths in the Western Hemisphere continue to flourish, and the determination that no Old World power shall acquire new territory here on this Western Continent. We of the two Americas must be left to work out our own salvation along our own lines; and if we are wise we will make it understood as a cardinal feature of our joint foreign policy that, on the one hand, we will not submit to territorial aggrandizement on this continent by any Old World power, and that, on the other hand, among ourselves each nation must scrupulously regard the rights and interests of the others, so that, instead of any one of us committing the criminal folly of trying to rise at the expense of our neighbors, we shall all strive upward in honest and manly brotherhood, shoulder to shoulder.A word now especially to my own fellow-countrymen. I think that we have all of us reason to be satisfied with the showing made in this Exposition, as in the great expositions of the past, of the results of the enterprise, the shrewd daring, the business energy and capacity, and the artistic and, above all, thewonderful mechanical skill and inventiveness of our people. In all of this we have legitimate cause to feel a noble pride, and a still nobler pride in the showing made of what we have done in such matters as our system of widespread popular education and in the field of philanthropy, especially in that best kind of philanthropy which teaches each man to help lift both himself and his neighbor by joining with that neighbor hand in hand in a common effort for the common good.But we should err greatly, we should err in the most fatal of ways, by wilful blindness to whatever is not pleasant, if, while justly proud of our achievements, we failed to realize that we had plenty of shortcomings to remedy, that there are terrible problems before us, which we must work out right, under the gravest national penalties if we fail. It can not be too often repeated that there is no patent device for securing good government; that after all is said and done, after we have given full credit to every scheme for increasing our material prosperity, to every effort of the lawmaker to provide a system under which each man shall be best secured in his own rights, it yet remains true that the great factor in working out the success of this giant Republic of the Western Continent must be the possession of those qualities of essential virtue and essential manliness which have built up every great and mighty peopleof the past, and the lack of which always has brought, and always will bring, the proudest of nations crashing down to ruin. Here in this Exposition, on the Stadium and on the pylons of the bridge, you have written certain sentences to which we all must subscribe, and to which we must live up if we are in any way or measure to do our duty: “Who shuns the dust and sweat of the contest, on his brow falls not the cool shade of the olive,” and “A free State exists only in the virtue of the citizen.” We all accept these statements in theory; but if we do not live up to them in practice, then there is no health in us. Take the two together always. In our eager, restless life of effort but little can be done by that cloistered virtue of which Milton spoke with such fine contempt. We need the rough, strong qualities that make a man fit to play his part well among men. Yet we need to remember even more that no ability, no strength and force, no power of intellect or power of wealth, shall avail us, if we have not the root of right living in us, if we do not pay more than a mere lip-loyalty to the old, old commonplace virtues, which stand at the foundation of all social and political well-being.It is easy to say what we ought to do, but it is hard to do it; and yet no scheme can be devised which will save us from the need of doing just this hard work. Not merely must each of us strive to dohis duty; in addition it is imperatively necessary also to establish a strong and intelligent public opinion which will require each to do his duty. If any man here falls short he should not only feel ashamed of himself, but in some way he ought also to be made conscious of the condemnation of his fellows, and this no matter what form his shortcoming takes. Doing our duty is, of course, incumbent on every one of us alike; yet the heaviest blame for dereliction should fall on the man who sins against the light, the man to whom much has been given, and from whom, therefore, we have a right to expect much in return. We should hold to a peculiarly rigid accountability those men who in public life, or as editors of great papers, or as owners of vast fortunes, or as leaders and molders of opinion in the pulpit, or on the platform, or at the bar, are guilty of wrongdoing, no matter what form that wrongdoing may take.In addition, however, to the problems which, under protean shapes, are yet fundamentally the same for all nations and for all times, there are others which especially need our attention, because they are the especial productions of our present industrial civilization. The tremendous industrial development of the nineteenth century has not only conferred great benefits upon us of the twentieth, but it has also exposed us to grave dangers. This highly complex movement has had many sides, some good and some bad,and has produced an absolutely novel set of phenomena. To secure from them the best results will tax to the utmost the resources of the statesman, the economist, and the social reformer. There has been an immense relative growth of urban population, and, in consequence, an immense growth of the body of wages-workers, together with an accumulation of enormous fortunes which more and more tend to express their power through great corporations that are themselves guided by some master mind of the business world. As a result, we are confronted by a formidable series of perplexing problems, with which it is absolutely necessary to deal, and yet with which it is not merely useless, but in the highest degree unwise and dangerous to deal, save with wisdom, insight, and self-restraint.There are certain truths which are so commonplace as to be axiomatic, and yet so important that we can not keep them too vividly before our minds. The true welfare of the nation is indissolubly bound up with the welfare of the farmer and the wage-worker—of the man who tills the soil, and of the mechanic, the handicraftsman, the laborer. If we can ensure the prosperity of these two classes we need not trouble ourselves about the prosperity of the rest, for that will follow as a matter of course.On the other hand, it is equally true that the prosperity of any of us can best be attained by measuresthat will promote the prosperity of all. The poorest motto upon which an American can act is the motto of “Some men down,” and the safest to follow is that of “All men up.” A good deal can and ought to be done by law. For instance, the State and, if necessary, the nation should by law assume ample power of supervising and regulating the acts of any corporation (which can be but its creature), and generally of those immense business enterprises which exist only because of the safety and protection to property guaranteed by our system of government. Yet it is equally true that, while this power should exist, it should be used sparingly and with self-restraint. Modern industrial competition is very keen between nation and nation, and now that our country is striding forward with the pace of a giant to take the leading position in the international industrial world, we should beware how we fetter our limbs, how we cramp our Titan strength. While striving to prevent industrial injustice at home, we must not bring upon ourselves industrial weakness abroad. This is a task for which we need the finest abilities of the statesman, the student, the patriot, and the far-seeing lover of mankind. It is a task in which we shall fail with absolute certainty if we approach it after having surrendered ourselves to the guidance of the demagogue, or to the doctrinaire, of the well-meaning man who thinks feebly, or of the cunning self-seekerwho endeavors to rise by committing that worst of crimes against our people—the crime of inflaming brother against brother, one American against his fellow-Americans.My fellow-countrymen, bad laws are evil things, good laws are necessary; and a clean, fearless, common-sense administration of the laws is even more necessary; but what we need most of all is to look to our own selves to see that our consciences as individuals, that our collective national conscience, may respond instantly to every appeal for high action, for lofty and generous endeavor. There must and shall be no falling off in the national traits of hardihood and manliness; and we must keep ever bright the love of justice, the spirit of strong brotherly friendship for one’s fellows, which we hope and believe will hereafter stand as typical of the men who make up this, the mightiest Republic upon which the sun has ever shone.
SPEECH AT THE FORMAL OPENING OF THE PAN-AMERICAN EXPOSITION, BUFFALO, MAY 20, 1901
To-day we formally open this great exposition by the shores of the mighty inland seas of the North, where all the peoples of the Western Hemisphere have joined to show what they have done in art, science, and industrial invention, what they have been able to accomplish with their manifold resources and their infinitely varied individual and national qualities. Such an exposition, held at the opening of this new century, inevitably suggests two trains of thought. It should make us think seriously and solemnly of our several duties to one another as citizens of the different nations of this Western Hemisphere, and also of our duties each to the nation to which he personally belongs.
The century upon which we have just entered must inevitably be one of tremendous triumph or of tremendous failure for the whole human race, because, to an infinitely greater extent than ever before, humanity is knit together in all its parts, for weal or woe. All about us there are innumerable tendencies that tell for good, and innumerable tendenciesthat tell for evil. It is, of course, a mere truism to say that our own acts must determine which set of tendencies shall overcome the other. In order to act wisely we must first see clearly. There is no place among us for the mere pessimist; no man who looks at life with a vision that sees all things black or gray can do aught healthful in molding the destiny of a mighty and vigorous people. But there is just as little use for the foolish optimist who refuses to face the many and real evils that exist, and who fails to see that the only way to ensure the triumph of righteousness in the future is to war against all that is base, weak, and unlovely in the present.
There are certain things so obvious as to seem commonplace, which, nevertheless, must be kept constantly before us if we are to preserve our just sense of proportion. This twentieth century is big with the fate of the nations of mankind, because the fate of each is now interwoven with the fate of all to a degree never even approached in any previous stage of history. No better proof could be given than by this very exposition. A century ago no such exposition could have even been thought of. The larger part of the territory represented here to-day by so many free nations was not even mapped, and very much of it was unknown to the hardiest explorer. The influence of America upon Old World affairswas imponderable. World politics still meant European politics.
All that is now changed, not merely by what has happened here in America, but by what has happened elsewhere. It is not necessary for us here to consider the giant changes which have come elsewhere in the globe; to treat of the rise in the South Seas of the great free commonwealths of Australia and New Zealand; of the way in which Japan has been rejuvenated and has advanced by leaps and bounds to a position among the leading civilized powers; of the problems, affecting the major portion of mankind, which call imperiously for solution in parts of the Old World which, a century ago, were barely known to Europe, even by rumor. Our present concern is not with the Old World, but with our own Western Hemisphere, America. We meet to-day, representing the people of this continent, from the Dominion of Canada in the north, to Chile and the Argentine in the south; representing peoples who have traveled far and fast in the last century, because in them has been practically shown that it is the spirit of adventure which is the maker of commonwealths; peoples who are learning and striving to put in practice the vital truth that freedom is the necessary first step, but only the first step, in successful free government.
During the last century we have on the wholemade long strides in the right direction, but we have very much yet to learn. We all look forward to the day when there shall be a nearer approximation than there has ever yet been to the brotherhood of man and the peace of the world. More and more we are learning that to love one’s country above all others is in no way incompatible with respecting and wishing well to all others, and that, as between man and man, so between nation and nation, there should live the great law of right. These are the goals toward which we strive; and let us at least earnestly endeavor to realize them here on this continent. From Hudson Bay to the Straits of Magellan, we, the men of the two Americas, have been conquering the wilderness, carving it into state and province, and seeking to build up in state and province governments which shall combine industrial prosperity and moral well-being. Let us ever most vividly remember the falsity of the belief that any one of us is to be permanently benefited by the hurt of another. Let us strive to have our public men treat as axiomatic the truth that it is for the interest of every commonwealth in the Western Hemisphere to see every other commonwealth grow in riches and in happiness, in material wealth and in the sober, strong, self-respecting manliness, without which material wealth avails so little.
To-day on behalf of the United States I welcomeyou here—you, our brothers of the North and you, our brothers of the South; we wish you well; we wish you all prosperity; and we say to you that we earnestly hope for your well-being, not only for your own sakes, but also for our own, for it is a benefit to each of us to have the others do well. The relations between us now are those of cordial friendship, and it is to the interest of all alike that this friendship should ever remain unbroken. Nor is there the least chance of its being broken, provided only that all of us alike act with full recognition of the vital need that each should realize that his own interests can best be served by serving the interests of others.
You, men of Canada, are doing substantially the same work that we of this Republic are doing, and face substantially the same problems that we also face. Yours is the world of the merchant, the manufacturer and mechanic, the farmer, the ranchman, and the miner; you are subduing the prairie and the forest, tilling farm-land, building cities, striving to raise ever higher the standard of right, to bring ever nearer the day when true justice shall obtain between man and man; and we wish Godspeed to you and yours, and may the kindliest ties of good will always exist between us.
To you of the republics south of us, I wish to say a special word. I believe with all my heart in the Monroe Doctrine. This doctrine is not to be invokedfor the aggrandizement of any one of us here on this continent at the expense of any one else on this continent. It should be regarded simply as a great international Pan-American policy, vital to the interests of all of us. The United States has, and ought to have, and must ever have, only the desire to see her sister commonwealths in the Western Hemisphere continue to flourish, and the determination that no Old World power shall acquire new territory here on this Western Continent. We of the two Americas must be left to work out our own salvation along our own lines; and if we are wise we will make it understood as a cardinal feature of our joint foreign policy that, on the one hand, we will not submit to territorial aggrandizement on this continent by any Old World power, and that, on the other hand, among ourselves each nation must scrupulously regard the rights and interests of the others, so that, instead of any one of us committing the criminal folly of trying to rise at the expense of our neighbors, we shall all strive upward in honest and manly brotherhood, shoulder to shoulder.
A word now especially to my own fellow-countrymen. I think that we have all of us reason to be satisfied with the showing made in this Exposition, as in the great expositions of the past, of the results of the enterprise, the shrewd daring, the business energy and capacity, and the artistic and, above all, thewonderful mechanical skill and inventiveness of our people. In all of this we have legitimate cause to feel a noble pride, and a still nobler pride in the showing made of what we have done in such matters as our system of widespread popular education and in the field of philanthropy, especially in that best kind of philanthropy which teaches each man to help lift both himself and his neighbor by joining with that neighbor hand in hand in a common effort for the common good.
But we should err greatly, we should err in the most fatal of ways, by wilful blindness to whatever is not pleasant, if, while justly proud of our achievements, we failed to realize that we had plenty of shortcomings to remedy, that there are terrible problems before us, which we must work out right, under the gravest national penalties if we fail. It can not be too often repeated that there is no patent device for securing good government; that after all is said and done, after we have given full credit to every scheme for increasing our material prosperity, to every effort of the lawmaker to provide a system under which each man shall be best secured in his own rights, it yet remains true that the great factor in working out the success of this giant Republic of the Western Continent must be the possession of those qualities of essential virtue and essential manliness which have built up every great and mighty peopleof the past, and the lack of which always has brought, and always will bring, the proudest of nations crashing down to ruin. Here in this Exposition, on the Stadium and on the pylons of the bridge, you have written certain sentences to which we all must subscribe, and to which we must live up if we are in any way or measure to do our duty: “Who shuns the dust and sweat of the contest, on his brow falls not the cool shade of the olive,” and “A free State exists only in the virtue of the citizen.” We all accept these statements in theory; but if we do not live up to them in practice, then there is no health in us. Take the two together always. In our eager, restless life of effort but little can be done by that cloistered virtue of which Milton spoke with such fine contempt. We need the rough, strong qualities that make a man fit to play his part well among men. Yet we need to remember even more that no ability, no strength and force, no power of intellect or power of wealth, shall avail us, if we have not the root of right living in us, if we do not pay more than a mere lip-loyalty to the old, old commonplace virtues, which stand at the foundation of all social and political well-being.
It is easy to say what we ought to do, but it is hard to do it; and yet no scheme can be devised which will save us from the need of doing just this hard work. Not merely must each of us strive to dohis duty; in addition it is imperatively necessary also to establish a strong and intelligent public opinion which will require each to do his duty. If any man here falls short he should not only feel ashamed of himself, but in some way he ought also to be made conscious of the condemnation of his fellows, and this no matter what form his shortcoming takes. Doing our duty is, of course, incumbent on every one of us alike; yet the heaviest blame for dereliction should fall on the man who sins against the light, the man to whom much has been given, and from whom, therefore, we have a right to expect much in return. We should hold to a peculiarly rigid accountability those men who in public life, or as editors of great papers, or as owners of vast fortunes, or as leaders and molders of opinion in the pulpit, or on the platform, or at the bar, are guilty of wrongdoing, no matter what form that wrongdoing may take.
In addition, however, to the problems which, under protean shapes, are yet fundamentally the same for all nations and for all times, there are others which especially need our attention, because they are the especial productions of our present industrial civilization. The tremendous industrial development of the nineteenth century has not only conferred great benefits upon us of the twentieth, but it has also exposed us to grave dangers. This highly complex movement has had many sides, some good and some bad,and has produced an absolutely novel set of phenomena. To secure from them the best results will tax to the utmost the resources of the statesman, the economist, and the social reformer. There has been an immense relative growth of urban population, and, in consequence, an immense growth of the body of wages-workers, together with an accumulation of enormous fortunes which more and more tend to express their power through great corporations that are themselves guided by some master mind of the business world. As a result, we are confronted by a formidable series of perplexing problems, with which it is absolutely necessary to deal, and yet with which it is not merely useless, but in the highest degree unwise and dangerous to deal, save with wisdom, insight, and self-restraint.
There are certain truths which are so commonplace as to be axiomatic, and yet so important that we can not keep them too vividly before our minds. The true welfare of the nation is indissolubly bound up with the welfare of the farmer and the wage-worker—of the man who tills the soil, and of the mechanic, the handicraftsman, the laborer. If we can ensure the prosperity of these two classes we need not trouble ourselves about the prosperity of the rest, for that will follow as a matter of course.
On the other hand, it is equally true that the prosperity of any of us can best be attained by measuresthat will promote the prosperity of all. The poorest motto upon which an American can act is the motto of “Some men down,” and the safest to follow is that of “All men up.” A good deal can and ought to be done by law. For instance, the State and, if necessary, the nation should by law assume ample power of supervising and regulating the acts of any corporation (which can be but its creature), and generally of those immense business enterprises which exist only because of the safety and protection to property guaranteed by our system of government. Yet it is equally true that, while this power should exist, it should be used sparingly and with self-restraint. Modern industrial competition is very keen between nation and nation, and now that our country is striding forward with the pace of a giant to take the leading position in the international industrial world, we should beware how we fetter our limbs, how we cramp our Titan strength. While striving to prevent industrial injustice at home, we must not bring upon ourselves industrial weakness abroad. This is a task for which we need the finest abilities of the statesman, the student, the patriot, and the far-seeing lover of mankind. It is a task in which we shall fail with absolute certainty if we approach it after having surrendered ourselves to the guidance of the demagogue, or to the doctrinaire, of the well-meaning man who thinks feebly, or of the cunning self-seekerwho endeavors to rise by committing that worst of crimes against our people—the crime of inflaming brother against brother, one American against his fellow-Americans.
My fellow-countrymen, bad laws are evil things, good laws are necessary; and a clean, fearless, common-sense administration of the laws is even more necessary; but what we need most of all is to look to our own selves to see that our consciences as individuals, that our collective national conscience, may respond instantly to every appeal for high action, for lofty and generous endeavor. There must and shall be no falling off in the national traits of hardihood and manliness; and we must keep ever bright the love of justice, the spirit of strong brotherly friendship for one’s fellows, which we hope and believe will hereafter stand as typical of the men who make up this, the mightiest Republic upon which the sun has ever shone.