No nation as great as ours can expect to escape the penalty of greatness, for greatness does not come without trouble and labor. There are problems ahead of us at home and problems abroad, because such problems are incident to the working out of a great national career. We do not shrink from them. Scant is our patience with those who preach the gospel of craven weakness. No nation under the sun ever yet played a part worth playing if it feared its fate overmuch—if it did not have the courage to be great. We of America, we, the sons of a nation yet in the pride of its lusty youth, spurn the teachings of distrust, spurn the creed of failure and despair. We know that the future is ours if we have in us the manhood to grasp it, and we enter the new century girding our loins for the contest before us, rejoicing in the struggle, and resolute so to bear ourselves that the Nation’s future shall even surpass her glorious past.
AT THE BANQUET TO JUSTICE HARLAN, THE NEW WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 9, 1902
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen:
It is a peculiar privilege to be here to-night as one of those gathered to do homage to a career which has honored America. It is difficult to say certain of the truths which must need be said without being guilty of truisms in saying them. It is not an idle boast of this country when we speak of the court upon which Mr. Justice Harlan sits as the most illustrious and important court in all the civilized world. It is not merely our own people who say that—it is the verdict of other nations as well.
Mr. Justice Harlan has served for a quarter of a century on that court. During that time he has exercised an influence over the judicial statesmanship of the country of a kind such as is possible only under our own form of government. For the judges of the Supreme Court of the land must be not only great jurists, but they must be great constructive statesmen. And the truth of what I say is illustrated by every study of American statesmanship, for in not one serious study of American political life will it be possible to omit the immense part played by the Supreme Court in the creation, not merely the modification, of the great policies through and by means of which the country has moved on to its present position.
Thrice fortunate is the court when it has as one of its members a man who has played a great part in other spheres of our composite national life. Mr. Justice Harlan came from Kentucky, a State in which the patriotism of the people was put to so peculiarly a severe test in the Civil War. In the States of the further North it was easy for the man to make up his mind on which side he would unsheathe his sword. In the States of the further South it was equally easy. In Kentucky the task was a difficult one. I remember, Mr. Justice, being told by a Kentuckian, who was a stanch friend of yours and one of the greatest lawyers and most patriotic citizens whom this country had—John Mason Brown—that he came back from a trip from the West as a young man of twenty-one, just at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, just after Sumter had been fired upon, and his mother brought down to him the sword that his father had carried in the Mexican War, and said to him:
“My son, this is the sword your father carried. I hope you will draw it on the side that defends the flag for which your father fought, but, for one side or the other, draw it you must.”
In any audience in any State of the Union, take it as far north as you wish, I can appeal with confidence to the people I address when I say that next to the homage we pay to the men who proved the truth of their endeavor as they battled in the blue uniform is the homage we pay to the men who, with equal sincerity, with equal devotion to the right as it was given them to see the right, wore the gray. And none pay that tribute of regard so frankly as those who themselves wore the blue in battle.
And having said that, I am sure that none of my friends who fought in the Confederate service will misunderstand me or will grudge what I am about to say when I say that the greatest debt owed by this country to any set of men is owed by it to those men of the so-called border States—the men who in statesmanship followed Clay and the Crittendens and the Blairs; the men who as soldiers fought on the same side with Thomas and Farragut, the men who were for the Union, without regard to whether their immediate associates were for it or not. In New York, in Massachusetts, in Illinois, in Iowa, the men who stood for the Union went with the stream. In parts of Kentucky, of Virginia, of Missouri, they stemmed the torrent. And, gentlemen, I am half a Southerner myself. Two of my uncles fought in the Confederate Navy. One of them served under the father-in-law of Vice-Governor Luke Wright, of the Philippine Islands. And so I think I have the right to say that, knowing the Southern people as I do, I would heartily advocate fighting twice as hard as you fought from 1861 to 1865 for the privilege of staying in the same Union with them.
The man to be a great statesman on the bench of the Supreme Court must have many qualities, and fortunate are we that this evening we can point to Justice Harlan as embodying them. A good citizen must be a good citizen in peace and in war. He must have the decent and orderly virtues, and he must have the essential manliness for the lack of which no good intention can atone. It will be a bad thing for the nation if ever we grow as a nation to submit to the suppression of efficiency and morality, if we ever grow to accept the belief that we are to have two camps, in one of which will be grouped the men who mean well, but who don’t do things, and in the other the men who do things, but who do not mean well.