You want to face the fact and realize more than ever before that the honor or the shame of the country may depend upon the high average of character and capacity of the officers and enlisted men, and that a high average of character and capacity in the enlisted men can to a large degree be obtained only through you, the officers; that you must devote your time in peace to bringing up the standard of fighting efficiency of the men under you, not merely in doing your duty so that you can not be called to account for failure to perform it, but doing it in a way that will make any man under you abler to perform his.
I noticed throughout the time that we were in Cuba that the orders given and executed were of the simplest kind, and that there was very little manœuvring, practically none of the manœuvring of the parade-ground. Now, I want you to weigh what I say, for if you take only half of it, you will invert it. I found out very soon in my regiment that the best man was the man who had been in the Regular Army in actual service, out in the West, campaigning on the plains; if he had been a good man in the Regular Army in actual service on the plains he was the best man that I could get hold of. On the other hand, if he had merely served in time of peace a couple of years in an Eastern garrison, where he did practically nothing outside of parade grounds and barracks, or if he had been in an ordinary National Guard regiment, then one of two things was true; if he understood that he had only learned five per cent of war, he was five per cent better than any one who had learned none of it, and that was a big advance; but if he thought he had also learned the other ninety-five per cent he was worse than any one else. I recollect perfectly one man who had been a corporal in the Regular Army; this young fellow joined us sure that he knew everything, confident that war consisted in nice parade-ground manœuvres. It was almost impossible to turn his attention from trying the very difficult task of making my cowpunchers keep in a straight line, to the easier task of training them so that they could do the most efficient fighting when the occasion arose. He confused the essentials and the non-essentials. The non-essentials are so pretty and so easy that it is a great temptation to think that your duty lies in perfecting yourself and the men under you in them. You have got to do that, too; but if you only do that you will not be worth your salt when the day of trial comes.
Gentlemen, I do not intend to try here to preach to you upon the performance of your duties. It has been your special business to learn to do that. I do ask you to remember the difference there is in the military profession now from what it has been in past time; to remember that the final test of soldiership is not excellence in parade-ground formation, but efficiency in actual service in the field, and that the usefulness, the real and great usefulness in the parade-ground and barracks work comes from its being used not as an end, but as one of the means to an end. I ask you to remember that. I do not have to ask you to remember what you can not forget—the lessons of loyalty, of courage, of steadfast adherence to the highest standards of honor and uprightness which all men draw in when they breathe the atmosphere of this great institution.
AT THE HARVARD COMMENCEMENT DINNER, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., JUNE 25, 1902
Mr. President; President Eliot; and you, my Fellow Harvard Men:
I am speaking for all of you I am sure—I speak for all Americans to-day, when I say that we watch with the deepest concern the sick-bed of the English king, and that all Americans in tendering their hearty sympathy to the people of Great Britain remember keenly the outburst of genuine grief with which England last fall greeted the calamity that befell us in the death of President McKinley.
President Eliot spoke of the service due and performed by the college graduate to the State. It was my great good fortune five years ago to serve under your President, the then Secretary of the Navy, ex-Governor Long, and by a strange turn of the wheel of fate he served in my Cabinet as long as he would consent to serve, and then I had to replace him by another Harvard man!
I have been fortunate in being associated with Senator Hoar, and I should indeed think ill of myself if I had not learned something from association with a man who possesses that fine and noble belief in mankind, the lack of which forbids healthy effort to do good in a democracy like ours. I shall not speak of his associate, the junior senator, another Harvard man—Cabot Lodge—because it would be difficult for me to discuss in public one who is my closest, stanchest, and most loyal personal friend. I have another fellow Harvard man to speak of to-day, and it is necessary to paraphrase an old saying in order to state the bald truth, that it is indeed a liberal education in high-minded statesmanship to sit at the same council table with John Hay.
In addressing you this afternoon, I want to speak of three other college graduates, because of the service they have done the public. If a college education means anything, it means fitting a man to do better service than he could do without it; if it does not mean that it means nothing, and if a man does not get that out of it, he gets less than nothing out of it. No man has a right to arrogate to himself one particle of superiority or consideration because he has had a college education, but he is bound, if he is in truth a man, to feel that the fact of his having had a college education imposes upon him a heavier burden of responsibility, that it makes it doubly incumbent upon him to do well and nobly in his life, private and public. I wish to speak of three men, who, during the past three or four years have met these requirements—of a graduate of Hamilton College, Elihu Root, of a graduate of Yale, Governor Taft, and of a fellow Harvard man, Leonard Wood—men who did things; did not merely say how they ought to be done, but did them themselves; men who have met that greatest of our national needs, the need for service that can not be bought, the need for service that can only be rendered by the man willing to forego material advantages because it has to be given at the man’s own material cost.
When in England they get a man to do what Lord Cromer did in Egypt, when a man returns as Lord Kitchener will return from South Africa, they give him a peerage, and he receives large and tangible reward. But our Cromers, our men of that stamp, come back to this country, and if they are fortunate, they go back to private life with the privilege of taking up as best they can the strings left loose when they severed their old connections; and if fortune does not favor them they are accused of maladversion in office—not an accusation that hurts them, but an accusation that brands with infamy every man who makes it, and that reflects but ill on the country in which it is made.