I want to say just a word on the other side of the two great questions, the legislative and educational questions. Education must be twofold. Of course if we do not have education in the school, the academy, the college, the university, and have it developed in the highest and wisest manner, we shall make but a poor fist of American citizenship. One of the things that is most hopeful in our Republic is the way in which the State has taken charge of elementary education; and the way in which, in the East through private gift, here in the West through the wise liberality of the several States, the higher education has been taken care of, as in your own University of Minnesota. But such education can never be all. It can never be more than half, and sometimes not that. Nothing can take the place of the education of the home; and that education must be largely the unconscious influence of character upon character. There is no use in the father trying to instil wise saws and precepts into the son, if his own character gives the lie to his advice. And unfortunately it is just as true in the education of children as in everything else, that it is almost as harmful to be a virtuous fool as a knave. So often throughout our social structure from the wealthiest down to the poorest you see the queer fatuity of the man or the woman which makes them save their children temporary discomfort, temporary unpleasantness, at the cost of future destruction; you see a great many men, and I am sorry to say a great many women, who say, “I have had to work hard; my boy or my girl shall not do anything.” I have seen it in every rank. I have heard the millionaire say, “I have had to work all my life to make money, let my boy spend it.” It would be better for the boy never to have been born than to be brought up on that principle. On the other hand, I have seen the overworked drudge, the laborer’s wife, who said, “Well, I have had to work my heart out all my days; my daughters shall be ladies”; and her conception of her daughters being ladies was to have them sit around useless and incompetent, unable to do anything, brought up to be discontented cumberers of the earth’s surface. As Abraham Lincoln said: “There is a deal of human nature in mankind.” Fundamentally, virtues and faults are just the same in the millionaire and the day laborer. The man or the woman who seeks to bring up his or her children with the idea that their happiness is secured by teaching them to avoid difficulties is doing them a cruel wrong. To bring up the boy and girl so sheltered that they can not stand any rough knocks, that they shrink from toil, that when they meet an obstacle they feel they ought to go around or back instead of going on over it—the man or the woman who does that is wronging the children to a degree that no other human being can wrong them. If you are worth your salt and want your children to be worth their salt, teach them that the life that is not a life of work and effort is worthless, a curse to the man or woman leading it, a curse to those around him or her. Teach the boys that if they are ever to count in the world they will count not by flinching from difficulties, but by warring with and overcoming them. What utter scorn one feels for those who seek only the life of ease; the life passed in dexterous effort to avoid all angular corners, to avoid being put in the places where a strong man by blood and sweat and toil and risk wins triumph! What a wretched life is the life of the man passed in endeavoring to shirk his share of the burden laid upon him in this world! And it makes no difference whether that man is a man of inherited wealth or one who has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; it is equally ignoble in either case. What is true of the individual is true of the nation. The man who counts is not the man who dodges work, but he who goes out into life rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, girding himself for the effort, bound to win and wrest triumph from difficulty and disaster.
So it is with our Nation. No nation which has bound itself only to do easy things ever yet amounted to anything, ever yet came to anything throughout the ages. We have become a great people. At the threshold of this twentieth century we stand with the future looming large before us. We face great problems within and great problems without. We can not if we would refuse to face those problems. All we can decide is whether we will do them well or ill; for the refusal to face them would itself mean that we were doing them ill. We are in the arena into which great nations must come. We must play our part. It rests with us to decide that we shall not play it ignobly; that we shall not flinch from the great problems that there are to do, but that we shall take our place in the forefront of the great nations and face each problem of the day with confident and resolute hope.
IN THE CHAPEL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903
Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of greeting you this evening, but I regret that the engagements for me have been so numerous that it will be only a greeting. I wish I could be here to see your beautiful grounds and buildings by daylight, and to see a little of the life of the university.
There are plenty of tendencies for good, and, I am sorry to say, plenty of tendencies for evil in our modern life, and high among the former must be placed the rapid growth of the great institutions of learning in this country. There is a twofold side to the work done in any institution of this kind. In the first place the institution is to turn out scholars and men proficient in the different technical branches for which it trains them. It should be the aim of every university which seeks to develop the liberal side of education to turn out men and women who will add to the sum of productive achievement in scholarship; who will not merely be content to work in the fields that have already been harrowed a thousand times by other workers, but who will strike out for themselves and try to do new work that counts; so in each technical school if the institution is worthy of standing in the front rank, it will turn out those who in that particular specialty stand at the head. But in addition to this merely technical work, to the turning out of the scholar, the professional man, the man or woman trained on some special line, each university worthy the name must endeavor to turn out men and women in the fullest sense of the word, good citizens, men and women who will add by what they do to the sum of noble work in the whole community.
It is a good thing that so much attention should be given to physical development. I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal, and if he feels any sympathy for himself I do not like him. I believe thoroughly in the sound and vigorous body. I believe still more in the vigorous mind. And I believe most of all in what count for more than body, for more than mind, and that is character. That is the sum of the forces that make the man or the woman worth knowing, worth revering, worth holding to. Play hard while you play, but do not mistake it for work. If a young fellow is twenty it is a good thing that he should be a crack half-back; but when he is forty I am sorry if he has never been anything else except once at twenty a good half-back. Keep the sense of proportion. Play hard; it will do you good in your work. But work hard and remember that this is the main thing.
Finally, in closing, I think it is a safe thing to take a motto that I heard from the lips of an old football player once: “Don’t flinch, don’t foul, and hit the line hard.”
AT MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903
My Fellow-Citizens: