SPEECH AT THE DINNER OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS, AT THE ARLINGTON HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 11, 1905
Mr. President, Your Eminence, Gentlemen:
It is a great pleasure to have the chance of coming here this evening and saying a word of greeting to a body of men who are engaged in doing work for this Republic which is to count, not merely in the present generation, but during the lifetimes of many generations to come. We hear a great deal said about true Americanism. Now the real American, the American whom it is worth while to call such, is the man whose belief in and work for America are not merely for the America of to-day, but for the America of the future.
It is a comparatively easy thing to do work when the reward is to come in the present; but every great nation that has ever existed on this globe has been great because its sons had in them the capacity to work for the well-being of generations yet unborn. Such a spirit is peculiarly necessary when the work that we desire to have done is essentially work of a non-remunerative type, non-remunerative in more than one way; non-remunerative in money, and it may be in fame. We do not know the names of the architects and builders of the great cathedrals whose magnificent beauty is an heirloom to civilization. We do not know the names of the builders of the great majority of the works to which every man with an aspiration after beauty naturally turns when he thinks of the past. We owe that beauty, we owe the elevation of thought, of mind and soul, that come with association and belief in it, to the fact that there were a sufficient number of men who worked in the spirit that Ruskin prayed for—the spirit of doing work not for the sake of the fee, but for the sake of the work itself.
There are things in a nation’s life more important than beauty; but beauty is very important. And in this Nation of ours, while there is very much in which we have succeeded marvelously, I do not think that if we look dispassionately at what we have done we will say that beauty has been exactly the strong point of the Nation. It rests largely with gatherings such as this, with the note that is set by men such as those I am addressing to-night, to determine whether or not this shall be true of the future. A very large percentage of the durable work, the work which is lasting, and therefore the beauty of which, if it exists, is also lasting, must be done by the Government. Many great buildings and beautiful buildings will be created by private effort; but many of the greatest buildings must necessarily be erected by the Government, national, State, or municipal. Those in control of any branch of that Government necessarily have but an ephemeral lease of power. Administration succeeds administration; Congress succeeds Congress; Legislature succeeds Legislature; and even if all of the administrations, all of the Congresses, are actuated (a not necessarily probable supposition) by an artistic spirit, it would still remain true that there could not be coherence in their work if they had to rely on themselves alone. The best thing that any administration, that any executive department of the Government, can do—and if I may venture to make any suggestion to the co-ordinate branch, Senator Cockrell, I would say that the best thing that any elective legislative body could do—is in these matters to surrender itself, within reasonable limits, to the guidance of those who really do know what they are talking about. The only way in which we can hope to have worthy artistic work done for the Nation or for a State or for a municipality, is by having such a growth of popular sentiment as will render it incumbent upon successive administrations, successive legislative bodies, to carry out steadily a plan chosen for them, worked out for them by such a body of men as that gathered here this evening. What I have said does not mean that we shall here in Washington, for instance, go into immediate and extravagant expenditures on public buildings. All that it means is that, whenever hereafter a public building is provided for and erected, it should be erected in accordance with a carefully thought out plan adopted long before; and that it should be not only beautiful in itself, but fitting in its relations to the whole scheme of the public buildings, the parks, the drives of the District.
Working through municipal commissions, very great progress has already been made in rendering more beautiful our cities, from New York to San Francisco. An incredible amount remains to be done. But a beginning has been made, and now I most earnestly hope that in the National Capital a better beginning will be made than anywhere else, and that can be made only by utilizing to the fullest degree the thought and the disinterested effort of the architects, the artists, the men of art, who stand foremost in their professions here in the United States, and who ask no other reward than the reward of feeling that they have done their full part to make as beautiful as it should be the capital city of the great Republic.
ADDRESS AT LUTHER PLACE MEMORIAL CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 29, 1905
Dr. Butler:
It is a great pleasure to meet with you this morning and say a word of greeting on the occasion of the rededication of this church, coming as it does almost simultaneously with the entry of your pastor into his eightieth year.
From the standpoint from which I am obliged so continually to look at matters, there is a peculiar function to be played by the great Lutheran Church in the United States of America. This is a Church which had its rise to power in, and, until it emigrated to this side of the water, had always had its fullest development in the two great races of Northern and Northern Middle Europe—the German and the Scandinavian. The Lutheran Church came to the territory which is now the United States very shortly after the first permanent settlements were made within our limits; for when the earliest settlers came to dwell around the mouth of the Delaware they brought the Lutheran worship with them, and so with the earliest German settlers who came to Pennsylvania and afterward to New York and the mountainous region in the western part of Virginia and the States south of it. From that day to this the history of the growth in population of this Nation has consisted largely, in some respects mainly, of the arrival of successive waves of newcomers to our shores; and the prime duty of those already in the land is to see that their own progress and development are shared by these newcomers. It is a serious and dangerous thing for any man to tear loose from the soil, from the religion in which he and his forbears have taken root, and to be transplanted into a new land. He should receive all possible aid in the new land; and the aid can be tendered him most effectively by those who can appeal to him on the ground of spiritual kinship. Therefore the Lutheran Church can do most in helping upward and onward so many of the newcomers to our shores; and it seems to me that it should be, I am tempted to say, wellnigh the prime duty of this Church to see that the immigrant, especially the immigrant of Lutheran faith from the Old World, whether he comes from Scandinavia or Germany, or whether he belonged to one of the Lutheran countries of Finland, or Hungary, or Austria, may be not suffered to drift off with no friendly hand extended to him out of all the church communion, away from all the influences that tend toward safeguarding and uplifting him, and that he find ready at hand in this country those eager to bring him into fellowship with the existing bodies. The Lutheran Church in this country is of very great power now numerically, and through the intelligence and thrift of its members, but it will grow steadily to even greater power. It is destined to be one of the two or three greatest and most important national churches in the United States; one of the two or three churches most distinctively American, most distinctively among the forces that are to tell for making this great country even greater in the future. Therefore a peculiar load of responsibility rests upon the members of this Church. It is an important thing for the people of this Nation to remember their rights, but it is an even more important thing for them to remember their duties. In the last analysis the work of statesmen and soldiers, the work of the public men, shall go for nothing if it is not based upon the spirit of Christianity working in the millions of homes throughout this country, so that there may be that social, that spiritual, that moral foundation without which no country can ever rise to permanent greatness. For material well-being, material prosperity, success in arts, in letters, great industrial triumphs, all of them and all of the structures raised thereon will be as evanescent as a dream if they do not rest on “the righteousness that exalteth a nation.”