I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I believe that our people will in the end rise level to every need, will in the end triumph over every difficulty that rises before them. I could not have such confident faith in the destiny of this mighty people if I had it merely as regards one portion of that people. Throughout our land things on the whole have grown better and not worse, and this is as true of one part of the country as it is of another. I believe in the Southerner as I believe in the Northerner. I claim the right to feel pride in his great qualities and in his great deeds exactly as I feel pride in the great qualities and deeds of every other American. For weal or for woe we are knit together, and we shall go up or go down together; and I believe that we shall go up and not down, that we shall go forward instead of halting and falling back, because I have an abiding faith in the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the common-sense of all my countrymen.
The Southern States face difficult problems; and so do the Northern States. Some of the problems are the same for the entire country. Others exist in greater intensity in one section; and yet others exist in greater intensity in another section. But in the end they will all be solved; for fundamentally our people are the same throughout this land; the same in the qualities of heart and brain and hand which have made this Republic what it is in the great to-day; which will make it what it is to be in the infinitely greater to-morrow. I admire and respect and believe in and have faith in the men and women of the South as I admire and respect and believe in and have faith in the men and women of the North. All of us alike, Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, can best prove our fealty to the Nation’s past by the way in which we do the Nation’s work in the present; for only thus can we be sure that our children’s children shall inherit Abraham Lincoln’s single-hearted devotion to the great unchanging creed that “righteousness exalteth a nation.”
ADDRESS AT THE HUNGARIAN CLUB DINNER, NEW YORK CITY, FEB. 14, 1905
Mr. President, and you, my Fellow-Americans:
It is a peculiar pleasure to me to be with you this evening; and in greeting my hosts of the Hungarian Republican Club, I give utterance to the thought of my fellow-guest, Congressman Sulzer, when I say that whatever our differences before election, when once the election has taken place, all of us in public life or in private life, President, Congressmen, judges, legislators, alike are American citizens and nothing else.
It is nearly ten years ago that I first took dinner here in the immediate neighborhood of where I am dining now, and at that time, I remember perfectly, when I was first brought up here, it was by Mr. Jacob Riis and Mr. Jim Reynolds, and I was told that I would get a very good dinner and hear some very good music, and both prophecies proved true. It was about that time that I grew to be acquainted with so many of my hosts and fellow-guests of this evening. Others I had known before. With one of my fellow-guests, General Grant, I was then working, and at different times I spoke at meetings presided over or held in the clubhouses of various of the gentlemen here present, sometimes on political subjects, much more often on matters of good citizenship affecting us all as good citizens.
I grew in those years, gentlemen, to have a very close feeling of sympathy and affection and regard for the men and women of the great East Side of this city. I needed no urging when I was invited to come and be a guest at a club of the East Side this evening. President Braun has described how the preliminary invitation took place. It was six years ago that this club gave me a dinner after I had been elected Governor, and they then said that they “intended to elect me President and that I must then come and take dinner with them again.” I told them that if they would carry out their part of the contract I would carry out my part. I am not perfectly certain that they anticipated that their offer would be closed with so soon, but you see, gentlemen, I have closed with it.
To-night I wish to greet you most warmly and to say that I doubt if we could find a more typically American gathering than this, for Americanism is not a matter of birthplace, of ancestry, of creed, of occupation. Americanism is a matter of the spirit that is within, of a man’s soul. From the time when we first became an independent Nation to the present moment there has never been a generation in which some of our most distinguished and most useful men were not born on the other side of the Atlantic. It is peculiarly appropriate, and to me peculiarly pleasant that, in addressing this club of the men upon whose efforts so much of the future welfare of this city, of this State, of this Nation, depends, I should be addressing men who show by their actions that they know no difference between Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, native-born and foreign-born, provided only that the man, whatever his creed, whatever his birthplace, strives to live so as to do his full duty by his neighbor and by the community as a whole.
We can not keep too clearly before our minds the fact that for the success of our civilization what is needed is, not so much brilliant ability, not so much unusual genius, as the possession by the average man of the plain homely workaday virtues that make that man a good father, a good husband, a good friend and neighbor, a decent man with whom to deal in all relations of life. We need good laws. We need honest administration of the laws. And we can not afford to be contented with less. But more than all else we need that the average man shall have in him the root of righteous living; that the average man shall have in him the feeling that will make him ashamed to do wrong or to submit to wrong, and that will make him feel his bounden duty to help those that are weaker, to help those especially that are in any way dependent upon him, and while not in any way losing his power of individual initiative, to cultivate the further power of acting in combination with his fellows for the common end of social uplifting and good government.
I shall not keep you very long this evening. I have come here not to make you a set speech, but if you will allow me to say so to speak as an old friend among his old friends. I have seen a good deal of your lives. I know the effort, the toil, the sorrow, the happiness, and the success. I have endeavored when I have been brought in contact with the East Side in the course of any work in which I have been engaged so to handle myself that the East Side might be a little better for it. I do not know whether I succeeded or not, but I do know that I have always been better myself for contact with it.