Address, Honorable Woodrow Wilson
Mr. Chairman and Fellow-Citizens: It is with genuine pleasure that I find myself in this place, facing a company of men and women who are devoting themselves to so disinterested a cause as that to which this Congress is consecrated.
Your chairman has stated in exactly the terms of my own thought, the errand upon which I have come. It would seem presumption upon my part to instruct this Congress, or to attempt to instruct it in the means of Conservation. I have come here, as he has said, to share in the inspiration of the occasion, to gather into my own thought an impression of the men and women who are working for these great objects in the United States. When I was on my way out here, and was thinking of this occasion, I prepared my talk on the conservation of our natural resources. When I arrived at the station, I was told to change the subject, that was not what the Congress was, this year, devoting its particular attention to, but to the conservation of the vital energy of the people of the United States. I had thought that I would have to apologize to you for wandering off before I had finished my address, into that very topic, because it seems to me that the more broadly we view the field of obligation, the more clearly it will appear to us that our duty is only done in respect to the laying of the foundation, when we have conserved the natural resources of America, for those natural resources are of no consequence unless there is a free and virile people to use them.
We are in the midst of a political campaign, and most of the audiences that I have faced have been political audiences. I want to say very frankly to you, that it is a comfort to me to face another kind, because, in a campaign, we take politics, as it were, to the people, but on this occasion the people of the United States are bringing to us the great forces of their thought.
A congress like this means something more vital, in some aspects, than any of the ordered efforts of political parties; for here are represented the men and women from every quarter of the Union, come together to speak that great volunteer voice of America, which is the atmosphere of politics, which creates the environment of the public man, which is the independent conscience of a great people asserting itself and instructing those who serve it, what their lines of best service are.
All voluntary effort distinguishes a free people from a people that is not free. An effort, an organization, that comes about whether the politician wants it or not, is the kind of effort and organization which shows that the people are ready to govern themselves and to assert their own opinions, whether the men in the public eye now consent to be their servants or not. (Applause.)
I have often made this boast about America, that, truly as we love our own institutions, proud as we are of the political history of America, if you could imagine yourself absolutely forgetting the documents upon which our constitutional history rests, over night, in the morning, we could make a new Constitution; we would not lose our self-possession, we would not lose our long training in self-control; we would not lose our instinct and genius for self-government. Strip us of one government, and we would make a new America in which we would shine as much as we did in the old. (Applause.) If that be not true, then it is not America, for America consists in the independent and originative power of the thought of the people. And so, when men and women from every part of the country gather in a great congress like this, to speak, not of matters of interest so much as of matters of duty, you realize in a gathering like this the vitality of the heart as well as of the mind of America, and men of every sort must give heed to the utterances of gatherings of this kind.
I know that there are some persons who come to these gatherings representing only themselves. I know that a gathering of men interested in a special cause is a great magnet to the crank. I know that all sorts of people, with special notions of their own, come sometimes to exploit them; but, after all, we ought to be very tolerant even of them, because some of the finest notions in the world have lived for a little while very lonely in the brain of a single man, or a single woman, and it is only by the tolerance of preaching that they get their currency, and finally get their imperial triumph by conquering the minds of the world, so that it is these voluntary contributions of thought, these irresistible currents of national life that are the most vital part of every people’s history. That is the reason I say it is a comfort to face an audience that I am not trying to persuade in regard to anything, but with which I am trying to get in sympathy, in order to share the great force which they represent.
It would be almost like assuring you that I was a thoughtful and rational being to say that I am in profound sympathy with the whole work of this great Congress, and that I am in particular sympathy, in keenest sympathy with that part which affects the conservation of the vital energy of the people of the United States. (Great applause.)
We have prided ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, upon our inventive genius; we have prided ourselves upon the ability to devise machines that can almost dispense with the intelligence of man. We have become a great manufacturing people because of this genius, because of our ability to draw together not only the tangible machinery of great enterprises but also the intellectual machinery of great enterprises, and we have been so proud of the mere multiplication of the resources of the Nation, so proud of its wealth, so proud of the ingenious methods by which we have increased its wealth, that we have been sometimes almost in danger of forgetting what the real root of the whole matter is.
I say, without intending to indict anybody, that it has too often happened that men have felt themselves obliged to dismiss superintendents who overtaxed a delicate piece of machinery, who have not gone further and felt obliged to dismiss a superintendent who overtaxed that most delicate of all pieces of machinery, the human body and the human brain. (Applause.)
If you drive your men and women too hard, your machinery will presently have to go on the scrap heap. If you sap the vital energy of your people, then there will be no energy in any part of the life you live, or in any enterprise that you may undertake. The energy of your people is not merely a physical energy. I am glad to say that the great State of New Jersey, which I have the honor to represent, has been very forward among her sister States in attempting to safeguard the lives and the health of those who work in her factories, and in all the undertakings which are in danger of impairing the health. I am glad to say that our Legislature has been to a very considerable extent, though not so far as it ought to be, thoughtful of the health of the children, thoughtful of the strength of women, thoughtful of the men and women together who have to breathe noxious gases, who are exposed to certain kinds of dust bred in certain manufactories, which dust carries congestion and danger to the lungs and to the whole system—we have been thoughtful of these things, but after all, we stand in exactly the same relation to our bodies that the nation stands to her forests and her rivers and her mines.
I have no use for my body unless I have a free and happy soul to be a tenant of it. We have no happy use for this continent unless we have a free and hopeful and energetic people to use it. I know that I have sometimes spoken of how foreigners laugh at Americans because they boast of the size of America, as if they had made it, and we are twitted with a pride in something that we did not create. We did not stretch all this great body of earth and pile it into beautiful mountains and variegate it with forests from ocean to ocean, and they say, “Why should you be so proud of what God created? You were not partners in the creation?”
But it seems to me that it is perfectly open for us to reply, “Any nation is as big as the thing that it accomplishes, and we have reason to be proud of the size of America, because we have occupied and dominated it.” (Applause.)
But we have come to a point where occupation and domination will not suffice to win us credit with the nations of the earth or our own respect. It was fine to have the cohesive and orderly power to plant commonwealths from one side of this great continent to another. It was pretty fine, and it strikes the imagination to remember the time when the ring of the ax in the forest and the crack of the rifle meant not merely the falling of a tree or the death of some living thing, but it meant the voice of the vanguard of civilization, making spaces for homes, destroying the wild life that would endanger human life, or destroying the life which it was necessary to destroy in order to sustain human life; and that the mere muscle, the mere quickness of eye, the mere indomitable physical courage of those pioneers that crossed this continent ahead of us, was evidence of the virility of the race, and was evidence also of its capacity to rule, to rule and to make conquest of the things that it needed to use. But now we have come to a point where everything has to be justified by its spiritual consequences, and the difficult part of the task is that which is immediately ahead of us.
Until the census of 1890, every census bureau could prepare maps for us, on which the frontiers of settlement in America were drawn, and until that time there had always been an interspace between the frontier of the movement westward and the little strip of coast upon the Pacific, which had been occupied, as it were, prematurely and out of order.
But, in 1890, it was impossible to draw a frontier in the United States, it was impossible to show any places where the spaces had not, at any rate, been sparsely filled, sparsely occupied by the populations that lived under the flag of the Union. It was about that time, by the way, or eight years later, that we were so eager for a frontier that we established a new frontier in the Philippines, in order, as Mr. Kipling would say, “to satisfy the feet of our young men.”
But the United States, ever since 1890, has been through with the business of beginning and now has the enormously more difficult task before it of finishing.
It is very easy, I am told, though I have never tried it, roughly to sketch in a picture, that all the students in art schools can make the rough sketch reasonably well, but they almost all, except those who have passed a certain point, spoil the picture in the finishing. All the difficulties, all the niceties of art, you have in the last touches, not in the first, and all the difficulties and niceties of civilization lie in the last touches, not in the first.
Anybody with courage and fortitude and resourcefulness can set up a frontier, but we have discovered, to our cost, that not many of us can set up a successful city government. (Applause.) Almost all the best governed cities in the world are on the other side of the water; almost all of the worst governed cities in the civilized world are in America. And the thing that is most taxing our political genius is making a decent finish, where we made such a distinguished beginning. We show it. You can feel it under you as you traverse a city; you can feel it in the pavements. They are provisional, most of them, or have not been laid at all and in jolting in the streets that are not the main thoroughfares of an American city, you feel the jolt of unfinished America. We have not had time, or we have let the contract to the wrong man. (Great applause.)
But, whatever be the cause, we have not completed the job in a way that ought to be satisfactory to our pride. You know that we are waiting for the development of an American literature, so I am told. Now, literature can not be done with the flat hand; you can not write an immortal sentence by taking a handful of words out of the dictionary and scattering them over the page. They have to be wrought together with the vital blood of the imagination, in order to speak to any other reader except those of the day itself. And, as in all forms of art, whether literary, or musical, or sculptural, there is this final test: can you finish what you begin? I believe, therefore, that the problem of this Congress is just this problem of putting the last touches on the human enterprise which we undertook in America.
We did not undertake anything new in America in respect of our industry. You will not find anything in the way of industry in America which can not be matched elsewhere in the world. If the happiness of our people and the welfare of our people does not exceed the happiness and welfare of other people, then, as Americans, we have failed; because we promised the world, not a new abundance of wealth, not an unprecedented scale of physical development, but a free and happy people. (Applause.)
That is the final pledge which we shall have to redeem, and if we do not redeem it, then we must admit an invalidity to the title deeds of America.
America was set up and opened her doors, in order that all mankind might come and find what it was to release their energies in a way that would bring them comfort and happiness and peace of mind. And we have to see to it that they get happiness and comfort and peace of mind; and we have to lend the effort, not only of great volunteer associations like this, but the efforts of our State governments and national government, to this highest of all enterprises, to see that the people are taken care of, not taken care of in the sense that those are taken care of who can not take care of themselves, because the best way to teach a boy to swim is to throw him into the water, and too much inflated apparatus around him will only prevent his learning to swim, because the great thing is not to go to the bottom and many of the devices by which we now learn to swim make it unnecessary to swim, because you can stay on top just the same, and I, for my part, do not believe that human vitality is assisted by making it unnecessary for it to assert itself. On the contrary, I believe that it is quickened only when it is put under such stimulation as to feel the whip, whether of interest or of necessity, to quicken it. But the last crux of the whole matter comes here: I am not interested in exerting myself unless the exertion, when it is over, brings me satisfaction.
If I have to work in such conditions that, every night, I fall into my bed absolutely exhausted, and with the lamp of hope almost at its last dying flicker, then I don’t care whether I get up in the morning or not; and when I get up in the morning, I do not go blithely to my work. I do not go to my work like a man who relishes the tasks of life. I go there because I must go, or starve, and there is always the goad at my stomach, the goad at my heart, because those dependent on me will suffer if I do not go to my work and the only way I can go to my work with satisfaction is to feel that, wherever I turn, I am dealing with my fellow-men, with fellow-human beings. So that we must take the heartlessness out of industry before we can put the heart into the men who are engaged in the industry. (Applause.)
The employer has got to feel that he is dealing with flesh and blood like his own and with his fellow-man, or else his employes will not be in sympathy with him and will not be in sympathy with the work, and a man who is not in sympathy with his work will not produce the things that are worth using.
All the stories we tell to our children about work are told of such men as Stradivarius, who lingered in the making of a violin as a lover would linger with his lady; who hated to take his fingers from the beloved wood which was yielding its music to his magic touch. In all poetry and song since, Stradivarius has been to us the type of the human genius and heart that is put into the work that is done without attention and zest.
We point to some of the exquisitely completed work of the stone carvers of the Middle Ages, the little hidden pieces tucked away unseen in the great cathedrals, where the work is just as loving in its detail and completeness as it is upon the altar itself, and we say this is the efflorescence of the human spirit expressed in work. The man knew that nobody, except perhaps an occasional adventurer coming to repair that cathedral, would ever see that work, but he wrought it for the sake of his own heart and in the sight of God. And that, we instinctively accept as the type of the spiritual side of work.
Now, imagine, ladies and gentlemen, imagine as merchants and manufacturers and bankers, what would happen to the industrial supremacy of the United States if all her workmen worked in that spirit. Would there be goods anywhere in the world that could for one moment match the goods made in America? Would not the American label be the label of spiritual distinction? And how are you going to bring that about? You are going to bring it about by such work as this Congress is interested in and the work which will ensue, because the things which you are discussing now are merely the passageways to things that are better.
Just so soon as you make it a matter of conscience with your legislatures to see to it that human life is conserved wherever modern processes touch it, just as soon as you make it the duty of society to release the human spirit occasionally on playgrounds, to surround it with beauty, to give it, even in the cities, a touch of nature, and the freedom of the open sky, just as soon as you realize and have all of society realize that play—enjoyment—is part of the building up of the human spirit, and that the load must sometimes be lifted, or else it will be a breaking load, just as soon as you realize that every time you touch the imagination of your people and quicken their thought and encourage their hope and spread abroad among them the sense of human fellowship and of mutual helpfulness, you are elevating all the levels of the national life, and then you will begin to see that your factories are doing better work, because, sooner or later, this atmospheric influence is going to get into every office in the United States, and men are going to see that the best possible instruments that they can have are men whom they regard as partners and fellow-beings. (Applause.)
I look upon a Congress like this as one of the indispensable instruments of the public life. Law, ladies and gentlemen, does not run before the thought of society and draw that thought after it. Law is nothing else but the embodiment of the thought of society, and when I see great bodies of men and women like this, running ahead of the law, and beckoning it on to fair enterprises of every sort, I know that I see the rising tide which is going to bring these things in inevitably. I know that I see law in the making; I know that I see the future forming its lines before my eyes, and that, presently, when we come to an agreement, and wherever we come to substantial agreement, we shall have the things that we desire. So that, for a man in public life, an assemblage like this is the food of his thought, if he lend his thought to what his fellow-countrymen are desiring and planning; and all the zest of politics lies, not in holding things where they are, but in carrying them forward along the lines of promise, to the place where they ought to be. (Applause.)
You are our consciences, you are our mentors, you are our schoolmasters. The men in public life have only twenty-four hours in their day and they generally spend eight of the twenty-four in sleeping—I must admit generally to spending nine—and in what remains they cannot comprehend the interests of a great nation. No man that I ever met, no group of men that I ever met, could sum up in their own thought the interests of a varied nation. Therefore, they are absolutely dependent upon suggestions coming from every fertile quarter, into their consciousness. They are subject, or they ought to be subject, daily, to instruction. A gentleman was quoting to me today a very fine remark of Prince Bismarck’s. He was taxed with inconsistency, with holding an opinion today that he had not held yesterday. He said he would be ashamed of himself if he did not hold himself at liberty, whenever he learned a new fact, to readjust his opinions. Why, that is what learning is for. Ought any man to be ashamed of having accepted the Darwinian theory, because he did not hold it before Darwin demonstrated it? Ought any man to be ashamed of having given up the Copernican idea of the universe? Ought any man to be obliged to apologize for having yielded to the facts? If he does not he will sooner or later be very sorry, because the facts are our masters, and if we do not yield to them, we will presently be their slaves. I suppose if I chose to assert the full consistency of my independence I would say that I was at liberty to jump from the top of this building, but just as soon as I reached the ground nature would have said to me, “You fool, didn’t you ever hear of the law of gravitation? Didn’t you hear of any of the things that would happen to you if you jumped off a building of this height? Suppose you spend a considerable period in a hospital thinking it over,” and it would be very impressively borne in upon me what the penalties of ignorance of the law of gravitation are. Now, it is going to be very impressively borne in upon the public men of this country if they ignore them what the laws of human life are. As Dr. Holmes used to say, “The truth is no invalid. You need not be afraid; no matter how roughly you treat her, she will survive, and if you treat her too roughly there will be a certain reaction in your own situation which will be the severest penalty you could carry.”
I come, therefore, to Indianapolis today to put my mind at your service, merely to express an attitude, merely to confess a faith, merely to declare the deep interest which must underlie all human effort, for, when the last thing is said about human effort, ladies and gentlemen, it lies in human sympathy. Unless the hearts of men are bound together the policies of men will fail, because the only thing that makes classes in a great nation is that they do not understand that their interests are identical. (Applause.)
The only thing that embarrasses public action is that certain men seek advantages which they can gain only at the expense of the rest of the country, and when they have gained them those very advantages prove the heaviest weight they have to carry, because they are then responsible for all that happens to those upon whom they have imposed and to those from whom they have subtracted what was their right.
So that the deepest task of all politics is to understand one another; the deepest task of all politics is to understand everybody, and I do not see how everybody is going to be understood unless everybody speaks up, and the more independent spokesmen there are the more vocal the Nation is, the more certain we shall be to work out in peace and finally in pride the great tasks which lie ahead of us. (Great and prolonged applause.)
[NINTH SESSION.]
The Congress reconvened at 8 o’clock p. m., in the Palm Room of the Claypool Hotel, and was called to order by President White.
President White—This is the evening session of the National Conservation Congress. I foresaw what was coming a long time ago when we began to prepare a program. I knew there would be a large number of ladies here, because they were getting very enthusiastic. I knew they would want section meetings for themselves to talk over matters of vital interest and plan how they were going to work for Conservation in all its departments, vital, social and political.
I felt that I was not capable and I did not know of any man who was capable of presiding over a large number of women, who sweetly and persistently know what they want and are bound to get it. (Laughter and applause.)
I was invited by the lady who is going to take charge of this meeting to attend the convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs at San Francisco, and right there I decided that Mrs. Moore should preside at this Congress at some one of its meetings, and I politely told her so at that time. I did it in justification of her rare ability displayed upon that occasion, and, selfishly, because I knew I was too timid to rule on points of order where there were so many women. (Laughter.)
I take pleasure in introducing Mrs. Philip N. Moore, of St. Louis, former President of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and a member of the Executive Committee of this Congress. She needs no introduction, as you all have met her many times. I now turn the meeting over to her good graces and good will.