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

by Theodore Roosevelt

You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business, politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before they pass final judgment. And now, gentlemen and ladies, I must be pardoned for one personal allusion. We have here to-day one man whom I have found exactly to answer to that need, who stands as a strong pillar for decency because he has high ideals combined with practical common-sense; and that is Bishop Lawrence.

Well, I guess I have said about all I have to say. Success does not lie entirely in the hands of any one of us. From the day the tower of Siloam fell, misfortune has fallen sometimes upon the just as well as the unjust. We sometimes see the good man, the honest man, the strong man, broken down by forces over which he had no control. If the hand of the Lord is heavy upon us the strength and wisdom of man shall avail nothing. But as a rule in the long run each of us comes pretty near to getting what he deserves. Each of us can, as a rule—there are, of course, exceptions—finally achieve the success best worth having, the success of having played his part honestly and manfully; of having lived so as to feel at the end he has done his duty; of having been a good husband, a good father; of having tried to make the world a little better off rather than worse off because he has lived; of having been a doer of the word and not a hearer only—still less a mere critic of the doers. Every man has it in him, unless fate is indeed hard upon him, to win out that measure of success if he will honestly try.

There are two kinds of success to be won. In the first place, there is success in doing the thing that can only be done by the exceptional man. Therefore most of us can not achieve this kind of success. It comes only to the man who has very exceptional qualities. The other kind, a very, very high kind, is the ordinary kind of success, the success that comes to the man who does the things which most men could do, but which they do not do; which comes to the man who develops or possesses to a higher degree the qualities that all of us have to a greater or less extent. In the history of the world some of the men who stand high—who stand in all but the very highest places—are those who have not possessed any wonderful genius in statecraft, war, art, literature—in whatever calling; but who have developed within themselves, by long, patient effort, resolutely maintained in spite of repeated failure, the ordinary, everyday, humdrum qualities of courage, of resolution, of proper appreciation of the relative importance of things; of honesty, of truth, of good sense, of unyielding perseverance. We can each one of us develop to a very high degree these qualities; and if we do so develop them, each one of us is sure of a measure of success; and I greet you here on this twentieth anniversary of the founding of Groton School because I feel that Groton School is one of those institutions which pre-eminently stand for the development of precisely those qualities among the boys whom it sends forth to be American men, American citizens, to do honor to themselves and their school by honoring the commonwealth to which we all belong.

ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG, PA., MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 30, 1904

Governor, and You, my Fellow-Citizens:

It is indeed a pleasure to greet you to-day. In greeting all I, of course, greet above all others the men to whom we owe it that we are here to-day, or that we have a country of which to be proud—the men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. And, having greeted first those at one end of the line, I want to speak of the others and say I was exceedingly pleased to see the children. Also let me say a word of greeting in your behalf, my comrades of the Civil War, to the regulars who were here to-day as an escort—to the men who now wear the uniform of “Uncle Sam,” and wear it honorably to defend the flag as you defended it in your youth and early manhood. The memories of this field are inextricably entwined in our hearts with the great deeds of the leaders of the past, as one by one the men who here signalized themselves have passed away.

Governor Pennypacker alluded to the fact that to-day Pennsylvania mourns its senior Senator. The regiment which Senator Quay was instrumental in raising took part in the battle of Gettysburg—the battle in which Governor Pennypacker shared. Senator Quay was not with it here; he had gone with another regiment, and it is appropriate at this time to recall the fact that when the term of service of that regiment expired, just before the battle of Fredericksburg, Senator Quay declined to accept the discharge and continued as a volunteer with the army that fought at Fredericksburg and won the medal of honor on that bloody day.

The place where we now are has won a double distinction. Here was fought one of the great battles of all time, and here was spoken one of the few speeches which shall last through the ages. As long as this Republic endures or its history is known, so long shall the memory of the Battle of Gettysburg likewise endure and be known; and as long as the English tongue is understood, so long shall Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech thrill the hearts of mankind.

The Civil War was a great war for righteousness; a war waged for the noblest ideals, but waged also in thoroughgoing, practical fashion. That is why you won then—because you had the ideals, because you had the lift of soul in you, and because also you had the right stuff in you to make those ideals count in actual life. You had to have the ideals, but if you had not been able to march and shoot you could not have put them into practice. It was one of the few wars which mean, in their successful outcome, a lift toward better things for the nations of mankind. Some wars have meant the triumph of order over anarchy and licentiousness masquerading as liberty; some wars have meant the triumph of liberty over tyranny masquerading as order; but this victorious war of ours meant the triumph of both liberty and order, the triumph of orderly liberty, the bestowal of civil rights upon the freed slaves, and at the same time the stern insistence on the supremacy of the national law throughout the length and breadth of the land. Moreover, this was one of those rare contests in which it was to the immeasurable interest of the vanquished that they should lose, while at the same time the victors acquired the precious privilege of transmitting to those who came after them, as a heritage of honor forever, not only the memory of their own valiant deeds, but the memory of the deeds of those who, no less valiantly and with equal sincerity of purpose, fought against the stars in their courses. The war left to us all, as fellow-countrymen, as brothers, the right to rejoice that the Union has been restored in indestructible shape in a country where slavery no longer mocks the boast of freedom, and also the right to rejoice with exultant pride in the courage, the self-sacrifice, and the devotion, alike of the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray.

He is but a poor American who, looking at this field, does not feel within himself a deeper reverence for the Nation’s past and a higher purpose to make the Nation’s future rise level to her past. Here fought the chosen sons of the North and the South, the East and the West. The armies which on this field contended for the mastery were veteran armies, hardened by long campaigning and desperate fighting into such instruments of war as no other nation then possessed. The severity of the fighting is attested by the proportionate loss—a loss unrivaled in any battle of similar size since the close of the Napoleonic struggles; a loss which in certain regiments was from three-fourths to four-fifths of the men engaged. Every spot on this field has its own associations of soldierly duty nobly done, of supreme self-sacrifice freely rendered. The names of the chiefs who served in the two armies form a long honor roll; and the enlisted men were worthy, and even more than worthy, of those who led them. Every acre of this ground has its own associations. We see where the fight thundered through and around the village of Gettysburg; where the artillery formed on the ridges; where the cavalry fought; where the hills were attacked and defended; and where, finally, the great charge surged up the slope only to break on the summit in the bloody spray of gallant failure.