Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 1 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

I thank you for having given me the opportunity this afternoon to come before you and to lay the cornerstone of this building.

AT THE EXERCISES OF THE SOCIETY OF THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND, ATTENDING THE REBURIAL OF MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM STARK ROSECRANS, ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, WASHINGTON, D.⁠ C., MAY 17, 1902

Speaker Henderson; and you, the Comrades of the Great Chief whose reburial in the National Cemetery here at Arlington we have met together to commemorate:

Speaker Henderson in his address has well said that the builder rather than the destroyer is the man most entitled to honor among us; that the man who builds up is greater than he who tears down; and that our homage should be for the fighting man who not only fought worthily but fought in a worthy cause. Therefore for all time, not merely the people of this great reunited country but the nations of mankind who see the hope for ordered liberty in what this country has done, will hold you, the men of the great Civil War, and the leaders like him whose mortal remains are to be put to-day in their final resting place, in peculiar honor because you were soldiers who fought to build; you were upbuilders; you were the men to whose lot it fell to save, to perpetuate, to make stronger the great national fabric, the foundations of which had been laid by the men who fought under him whose home at Mount Vernon stands as an equally prized memorial of the past with Arlington. It is no chance that has made Mount Vernon and Arlington, here in the neighborhood of Washington, the two great memorials of the nation’s past. One commemorates the founding and the other the saving of the nation. If it were not for what Arlington symbolizes, Mount Vernon would mean little or nothing. If it were not for what was done by Rosecrans and his fellows, the work of Washington would have crumbled into bloody chaos and the deeds of the founders of this Republic be remembered only because they had begun another of the many failures to make practical the spirit of liberty in this world. Without the work that you did the work of the men who fought the Revolution to a successful close would have meant nothing. To you it was given to do the one great work which if left undone would have meant that all else done by our people would have counted for nothing. And you left us a reunited country, and therefore the right of brotherhood with and of pride in the gallantry and self-devotion of those who wore the gray, who were pitted against you in the great struggle. The very fact that we appreciate more and more as the years go on the all-importance to this country and to mankind of your victory, makes it more and more possible for us to recognize in the heartiest and frankest manner the sincerity, the self-devotion, the fealty to the right as it was given to them to see the right, of our fellow Americans against whom you fought—and now the reunion is so complete that it is useless to allude to the fact that it is complete. And you left us another lesson in brotherhood. To-day you come here, comrades of the Army of the Cumberland—the man who had a commission and the man who fought in the ranks—brothers, because each did what there was in him to do for the right. Each did what he could and all alike shared equally in the glory of the deed that was done. Officer and enlisted man stand at the bar of history to be judged not by the difference of rank, but by whether they did their duties in their respective ranks. And oh, of how little count, looking back, the difference of rank compared with the doing of the duty! What was true then is true now. Doing the duty well is what counts. In any audience of this kind one sees in the highest official and social position men who fought as enlisted men in the armies of the Union or in the armies of the Confederacy. All we ask is, did they do their duty? If they did, honor to them! Little we care what particular position they held, save insofar as the holding of exalted position gave the men a chance to do great and peculiar service.

I shall not try to eulogize the dead General in the presence of his comrades, in the presence of his countrymen who have come to honor the memory of the man against whom they were pitted in the past—who come here because they now, like us, are Americans and nothing else, devoted to the Union and to one flag. I shall not try to speak of his services in the presence of those who fought through the Civil War, who risked the loss of life, who endured the loss of limb, who fought as enlisted men or came out boys not yet ready to enter college but able to bear commissions in the army of the United States, as the result of three or four years of service with the colors. There are those of each class of whom I have spoken who have addressed or will address you to-day. They are entitled to speak as comrades of the great dead. But the younger among us are only entitled to pay to the great dead the homage of those to whom ordered liberty has been handed down as a heritage because of the blood, and of the sweat, and of the toil of the men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. Great were the lessons you taught us in war. Great have been the lessons you have taught us in peace since the war. Sincerely and humbly the men who came after you hasten to acknowledge the debt that is owing to you. You were the men of the mighty days who showed yourselves equal to the days. We have to-day lesser tasks; and shame to us if we flinch from doing or fail to do well these lesser tasks, when you carried to triumphant victory a task as difficult as that which was set you! Here in the presence of one of the illustrious dead whose names will remain forever on the honor roll of the greatest Republic upon which the sun has ever shone, it behooves all of us, young and old, solemnly and reverently to pledge ourselves to continue undimmed the traditions you have left us; to do the work, whatever that work may be, necessary to make good the work that you did; to acknowledge the inspiration of your careers in war and in peace; and to remind ourselves once for all that lip loyalty is not the loyalty that counts. The loyalty that counts is the loyalty which shows itself in deeds rather than in words; and therefore we pledge ourselves to make good by our lives what you risked your lives to gain and keep for the nation as a whole.

AT THE CENTENNIAL MEETING OF THE BOARD OF HOME MISSIONS OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., ON THE EVENING OF MAY 20, 1902

Mr. Chairman; and you, my friends—for if this meeting means anything, it means a commemoration of the embodied spirit of friendship and righteousness working through the Church through generations—

I am glad to have the chance of greeting you to-night. I belong to a closely allied Church—the Dutch Reformed. I want to tell you a curious incident which was mentioned to me by one of the two gentlemen who, on your behalf, met me this evening and brought me up here. Mr. Ogden mentioned to me that two hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, the first church of my denomination here in this city was put up under contract by his ancestors, who then dwelt in Connecticut. It is, I think, in a sense symbolical of how much the Church has counted in the life of our people that the descendants of those who worshiped in that church and of those who under contract put it up, should be meeting here this evening. I have another bond with you. There are not very many Dutch Reformed churches in this city; not quite as many as there should be; and during a considerable portion of my life I have had to go to a Presbyterian church, because there was not a Reformed church to attend. All of my early years I went to the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, which then had as its pastor Dr. Adams. Those of you who remember him will agree with me that he was one of the very few men concerning whom it was not inappropriate to use the adjective by which I shall describe him, for he was in very truth a saintly man.

It is a pleasure on behalf of the people of the United States to greet you and bid you welcome on this hundredth anniversary of the beginning of organized home missionary work by the Presbyterian Church. In one sense of course all earnest and fervent church work is a part of home missionary work. Every earnest and zealous believer, every man or woman who is a doer of the word and not a hearer only, is a lifelong missionary in his or her field of labor—a missionary by precept, and, by what counts a thousandfold more than precept, by practice. Every such believer exerts influence on those within reach, somewhat by word and infinitely more through the ceaseless, wellnigh unfelt pressure—all the stronger where its exercise is unconscious—the pressure of example, broad charity, and neighborly kindness.

But to-night we celebrate one hundred years of missionary work done not incidentally, but with set purpose; a hundred years of effort to spread abroad the Gospel and lay the moral foundation upon which all true national greatness must rest. The century that has closed has seen the conquest of this continent by our people. To conquer a continent is rough work. All really great work is rough in the doing, though it seems smooth enough to those who look back upon it, or to the contemporaries who overlook it from afar. We need display but scant patience with those who, sitting at ease in their own homes, delight to exercise a querulous and censorious spirit of judgment upon their brethren who, whatever their shortcomings, are doing strong men’s work as they bring the light of civilization into the world’s dark places. The criticism of those who live softly, remote from the strife, is of little value; but it would be difficult to overestimate the value of the missionary work of those who go out to share the hardship, and, while sharing it, not to talk, but to wage war against the myriad forms of brutality. It is such missionary work that prevents the pioneers from sinking perilously near the level of the savage race against which they war. Without it the conquest of this continent would have had little but an animal side. Without it the pioneers’ fierce and rude virtues and sombre faults would have remained unlit by the flame of pure and loving aspiration. Without it the life of this country would have been a life of inconceivably hard and barren materialism. Because of it, because of the spirit that lay under those missionaries’ work, deep beneath and through the national character runs that power of firm adherence to a lofty ideal upon which the safety of the nation will ultimately depend.