Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 3 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

We have a very large field for warring against evil here at home. When we have made things all as they should be in Nation, State, and municipality here at home, then we can talk about reforming the rest of mankind; but meanwhile let us begin at home.

ADDRESS AT THE PRIZE DAY EXERCISES AT GROTON SCHOOL, GROTON, MASS., MAY 24, 1904

Mr. Rector, and Boys, and Fellow-Parents:

All I shall have to say to you to-day will be simply in the line of illustrating what the Rector has said, for it seems to me that he has preached just about the right gospel of life as we ought to learn it; and let me at the beginning thank the Rector for what I shall hope was a personal allusion to me, because it is the only time in my life that I have been even indirectly compared to Apollo. When the comparison was made I saw the Bishop look self-conscious, so I wish to put in my claim first.

I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and lacks any one of those three traits.

I was struck, Mr. Peabody, by what you said as to the attitude these boys should have in college. The boys from a school like this—from Groton, from St. Mark’s, from St. Paul’s, from any of these schools—if they are worth their salt, if they have real loyalty and not merely lip-loyalty to their schools, ought to go to Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, with the firm intention of so carrying themselves that Groton, St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and the other schools shall not be sneered at because of anything they do. You are not entitled, either in college or in after life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been at Groton—not an ounce; but we are entitled to hold you to an exceptional accountability because you have been at Groton. Because much has been given to you, therefore we have a right to expect much from you; and we have a right to expect that you shall begin to give that much just as soon as you leave school and go to college, so that you shall count when you are there.

I read the other day in a very bright college book a sentence that grated on me because of a sneer it contained at the “shoals of freshmen from church schools,” which implied that they did not so conduct themselves as to add weight for what was best in college life. I do not think such sneers are justified; but you are peculiarly liable to such sneers, and therefore you should be peculiarly careful to walk so as not to be suspected of deserving them. We have a right to expect that you will, from the outset, and without showing yourselves varieties of that most obnoxious of creatures, the prig, handle yourselves decently, so as to be a force for what is decent and right in college.

Another thing: I was glad to hear the Rector, in describing one pitfall that you are to avoid, use just exactly the right word when he asked you to be careful not to turn out snobs. Now, there are in our civic and social life very much worse creatures than snobs, but none more contemptible. (By the way—this is not speaking to the boys, but to the parents—I have had the good luck to have my boys go to the public schools before they came here.) If you have any stuff in you at all, and try to amount to anything in after life, you will not remain snobs even if you start as such. It will be taken out of you very soon and very roughly if you go into any real work. Go into politics—go to your district convention, and try to carry it on the snob basis and see how far you will get. The thing that will strike you in just about a week is that there are a whole lot of able people sliding around this planet. The fact that the individual opposed to you does not wear a cravat, and does wear a saw-edge collar, does not imply that you are going to carry the convention against him! You will soon find that it is not his clothes but his political sense and energy that control. You will find that if you expect to do anything there will be mighty little temptation to try to treat the men with whom you are working on any basis save the fundamental democratic basis of what they amount to, and what you can show you amount to as compared to them. So that if you go into life to do anything, it is perfectly useless for me to tell you to get rid of snobbery, because you will have to. It is just as true in every other field as in politics. Every man who works in philanthropy—and he can do nothing in philanthropy unless he combines a very earnest desire to accomplish what is decent with the determination to accomplish it in practical fashion (I shall speak of that later)—if he goes into philanthropy and tries to do something in a college settlement, tries to do his part in working to disentangle the tangled knot of our social and civic life, he will find just as soon as he gets interested in his work he won’t care and won’t know who the people are who are with him except as he judges them by their fruits. The interest that you take in him is, can a given man accomplish something? If he can not, then let him give place to the man who can.

You see, all I am doing is to amplify here and there the Rector’s speech. Take what was said about scholarship. I came here intending to speak to you along that same line, although in a slightly different way, approaching it from a slightly different aspect. I believe with all my heart in athletics, in sport, and have always done as much thereof as my limited capacity and my numerous duties would permit; but I believe in bodily vigor chiefly because I believe in the spirit that lies back of it. If a boy can not go into athletics because he is not physically able to, that does not count in the least against him. He may be just as much of a man in after life as if he could, because it is not physical address but the moral quality behind it which really counts. But if he has the physical ability and keeps out because he is afraid, because he is lazy, because he is a mollycoddle, then I haven’t any use for him. If he has not the right spirit, the spirit which makes him scorn self-indulgence, timidity and mere ease, that is if he has not the spirit which normally stands at the base of physical hardihood, physical prowess, then that boy does not amount to much, and he is not ordinarily going to amount to much in after life. Of course, there are people with special abilities so great as to outweigh even defects like timidity and laziness, but the man who makes the Republic what it is, if he has not courage, the capacity to show prowess, the desire for hardihood; if he has not the scorn of mere ease, the scorn of pain, the scorn of discomfort (all of them qualities that go to make a man’s worth on an eleven or a nine or an eight); if he has not something of that sort in him then the lack is so great that it must be amply atoned for, more than amply atoned for, in other ways, or his usefulness to the community will be small. So I believe heartily in physical prowess, in the sports that go to make physical prowess. I believe in them not only because of the amusement and pleasure they bring, but because I think they are useful. Yet I think you had a great deal better never go into them than to go into them with the idea that they are the chief end even of school or college; still more of life. There was an article in one of the “Atlantic” monthlies last year which all parents (even those of the most limited intellectual home development, Mr. Peabody!) should read, by Lawrence Lowell, on the careers in after life of those who have distinguished themselves as scholars and as athletes in college; and the showing for the athletes was not as good, either, as I had hoped or as I had expected that it would have been. I believe that to have been in athletics is an advantage to a man only if he realizes that even when he is in college it is not his chief end, and if he realizes that once out of college it can not be his end at all. It is a mighty good thing to be a halfback on a varsity eleven; but it is a mighty poor thing, when a man reaches the age of forty, only to be able to say that he was once halfback on an eleven. Do not lose the sense of proportion. Remember that in life, and above all in the very active, practical, workaday life on this continent, the man who wins out must be the man who works. He can not play all the time. He can not have play as his principal occupation and win out. Let him play; let him have as good a time as he can have. I have a pity that is akin to contempt for the man who does not have as good a time as he can out of life. But let him work. Let him count in the world. When he comes to the end of his life let him feel he has pulled his weight and a little more. A sound body is good; a sound mind is better; but a strong and clean character is better than either. In college it is not necessary to get into Phi Beta Kappa, though that is desirable; but it is necessary to work hard at your studies. It is necessary to have the habit of application, the habit of subordinating mere pleasure to serious duty, if you are going to do really good work once you are out of school and out of college. And while I would be very sorry to see those who are in control here in Groton lose that personal touch with their students which has made them again and again keep a poor scholar and thereby make in the end a good citizen; while I should be very sorry to see that policy reversed, still I am glad—I do not know that the boys will share my joy on this point—I am glad that the standard of scholarship is to be raised.

Now, what I have to say to you yourselves, boys, as to what you will amount to when you are men, is in substance but a repetition of what I have already said. If you leave Groton, and the college to which you afterward go, if you go to any—if you leave simply with the feeling that you have had ten delightful years; that you have just barely got through your examinations; that you have graduated; that you are not positively disgraced; that you have met decent people, and that life has been easy and it won’t be your fault if it does not continue as easy—if that is the feeling with which you have left school and college, then you are poor creatures, and there is small good that will ever come out of you. Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that—and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality—comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment—or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for. Incidentally, of all the miserable people that I know I should put high in the top rank those who reach middle age having steadfastly striven only to amuse themselves as they went through life. If there ever was a pursuit which stultified itself by its very conditions, it is the pursuit of pleasure as the all-sufficing end of life. Happiness can not come to any man capable of enjoying true happiness unless it comes as the sequel to duty well and honestly done. To do that duty you need to have more than one trait. You will meet plenty of well-meaning people who speak to you as if one trait were enough. That is not so. You might just as well in any rough sport in any game, think that a man could win by mere strength if he was clumsy; or by mere agility and precision of movement without strength; or by strength and agility if he had no heart. You need a great many qualities to make a successful man on a nine or an eleven; and just so you need a great many different qualities to make a good citizen. In the first place, of course it is almost tautological to say that to make a good citizen the prime need is to be decent, clean in thought, clean in mind, clean in action; to have an ideal and not to keep that ideal purely for the study—to have an ideal which you will in good faith strive to live up to when you are out in life. If you have an ideal only good while you sit at home, an ideal that nobody can live up to in outside life, then I advise you strongly to take that ideal, examine it closely, and then cast it away. It is not a good one. The ideal that it is impossible for a man to strive after in practical life is not the type of ideal that you wish to hold up and follow. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground. Be truthful; a lie implies fear, vanity or malevolence; and be frank; furtiveness and insincerity are faults incompatible with true manliness. Be honest, and remember that honesty counts for nothing unless back of it lie courage and efficiency. If in this country we ever have to face a state of things in which on one side stand the men of high ideals who are honest, good, well-meaning, pleasant people, utterly unable to put those ideals into shape in the rough field of practical life, while on the other side are grouped the strong, powerful, efficient men with no ideals: then the end of the Republic will be near. The salvation of the Republic depends—the salvation of our whole social system depends—upon the production year by year of a sufficient number of citizens who possess high ideals combined with the practical power to realize them in actual life.