AT BANQUET OF THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 14, 1903
Mr. Toastmaster, and you, my Fellow-Members of the Union League Club:
No one can too strongly insist upon the elementary fact that you can not build the superstructure of public virtue save on private virtue. The sum of the parts is the whole, and if we wish to make that whole, the State, the representative and exponent and symbol of decency, it must be so made through the decency, public and private, of the average citizen.
It is absolutely essential if we are to have the proper standard of public life that promise shall be square with performance. A lie is no more to be excused in politics than out of politics. A promise is as binding on the stump as off the stump; and there are two facets to that crystal. In the first place, the man who makes a promise which he does not intend to keep and does not try to keep should rightly be adjudged to have forfeited in some degree what should be every man’s most precious possession—his honor. On the other hand, the public that exacts a promise which ought not to be kept, or which can not be kept, is by just so much forfeiting its right to self-government. There is no surer way of destroying the capacity for self-government in a people than to accustom that people to demanding the impossible or the improper from its public men. No man fit to be a public man will promise either the impossible or the improper; and if the demand is made that he shall do so it means putting a premium upon the unfit in public life. There is the same sound reason for distrusting the man who promises too much in public that there is for distrusting the man who promises too much in private business.
The one indispensable thing for us to keep is a high standard of character for the average American citizen.