What father or what mother here, if capable of taking the right view, does not wish to see his or her children grow up trained, not to flinch but to overcome, trained not to avoid whatever is hard and rough and difficult, but to go down into the hurly-burly of actual life and win glory in the arena, heedless of the dust and the sweat and blood of the contest?
You men of the West, the older among you, came here and hewed out your own fates for yourselves. The younger among you are the heirs of the men who did this, and you can not, unless you are false to your blood, desire to see the Nation, which is but the aggregate of the individuals, act otherwise than in the way which you esteem as honorable for the individual.
Our place as a Nation is and must be with the nations that have left indelibly their impress on the centuries. Men will tell you that the great expanding nations of antiquity have passed away. So they have; and so have all others. Those that did not expand passed away and left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded, the Roman passed away, but the Roman has left the print of his law, of his language, of his masterful ability in administration, deep in the world’s history, deeply imprinted in the character of the races that came after him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of its opportunities. I do not ask that it seek for the easiest path.
If our fathers had preferred ease to effort, if they had been content to say: “Go in peace; we would prefer that the Union were kept, but we are not willing to pay the price in blood and effort of keeping it”; if they had done that there is not a man or woman in this hall who would now walk with head erect, who would now have the right to feel, as we have the right to feel, that we challenge equality with the citizens of the proudest country that the world has yet seen. I ask that this generation and future generations strive in the spirit of those who strove to found the Republic, of those who strove to save and perpetuate it. I ask that this Nation shape its policy in a spirit of justice toward all, a spirit of resolute endeavor to accept each duty as the duty comes, and to rest ill-content until that duty is done. I ask that we meet the many problems with which we are confronted from without and from within, not in the spirit that seeks to purchase present peace by the certainty of future disaster, but with a wise, a fearless, and a resolute desire to make of this Nation in the end, as the centuries go by, the example for all the nations of the earth, to make of it a nation in which we shall see the spirit of peace and of justice incarnate, but in which also we shall see incarnate the spirit of courage, of hardihood, the spirit which while refusing to wrong the weak is incapable of flinching from the strong.
AT THE CEREMONIES INCIDENT TO THE BREAKING OF SOD FOR THE ERECTION OF A MONUMENT IN MEMORY OF THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 13, 1903
Friends and Fellow-Americans:
It is a befitting thing that the first sod turned to prepare for the monument to commemorate President McKinley should be turned in the presence of his old comrades of the great war, and in the presence of the men who in a lesser war strove to show that they were not wholly unworthy of those who in the dark years of ’61 to ’65 proved their truth by their endeavor, and with their blood cemented the foundation of the American Republic. It is a solemn thing to speak in memory of a man who when young went to war for the honor and the life of the Nation, who for four years did his part in the camp, on the march, in battle, rising steadily upward from the ranks, and to whom it was given in after life to show himself exemplary in public and in private conduct, to become the ideal of the Nation in peace as he had been a typical representative of the Nation’s young sons in war.
It is not too much to say that no man since Lincoln was as widely and as universally beloved in this country as was President McKinley; for it was given to him not only to rise to the most exalted station but to typify in his character and conduct those virtues which any citizen worthy of the name likes to regard as typically American; to typify the virtues of cleanly and upright living in all relations private and public, in the most intimate family relations, in the relations of business, in relations with his neighbors, and finally in his conduct of the great affairs of state. And exactly as it was given to him to do his part in settling aright the greatest problem which it has ever befallen this Nation to settle since it became a Nation—the problem of the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery—exactly as it was his good fortune to do his part as a man should in his youth in settling that great problem, so it was his good fortune, when he became in fact and in name the Nation’s chief, to settle the problems springing out of the Spanish War; problems less important only than those which were dealt with by the men who under the lead of Washington founded our government and the men who, upholding the statesmanship of Lincoln and following the sword of Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, saved and perpetuated the Republic.
When 1898 came and the war which President McKinley in all honesty and in all sincerity sought to avoid became inevitable and was pressed upon him he met it as he and you had met the crisis of 1861. He did his best to prevent the war coming; once it became evident that it had to come then he did his best to see that it was ended as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. It is a good lesson for nations and individuals to learn never to hit if it can be helped and then never to hit softly. I think it is getting to be fairly understood that that is our foreign policy. We do not want to threaten; certainly we do not desire to wrong any man; we are going to keep out of trouble if we possibly can keep out; and if it becomes necessary for our honor and our interest to assert a given position we shall assert it with every intention of making the assertion good.
The Spanish War came. As its aftermath came trouble in the Philippines, and it was natural that this State, within whose borders live and have lived so many of the men who fought in the great war, should find its sons eagerly volunteering for the chance to prove their truth in the war that came in their days; and it was to be expected that California’s sons should do well, as they did do well, in the Philippines in the new contest.