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

by Theodore Roosevelt

I remember so well seven years ago when we were raising this regiment, riding in here one day to see the Alamo, and going away feeling that come what would I was going to try to handle myself so that there should no disgrace come to the memory of the Americans who died there. I want you to remember that ours was a volunteer regiment and a small war, and that we do not claim any credit for what we did more than falls to the lot of any number of other people. All we ask of you is to believe that we tried to show the spirit which would have made us do the kind of a job that you of the Civil War did, if the need had arisen.

I wish to express my acknowledgments for the greeting which I have received here in San Antonio and which I have received throughout the length and breadth of Texas. This is the third time I have visited this beautiful city—and it is such a beautiful city. I wonder if you yourselves, proud though you are of it, appreciate the charm it has to an outsider coming here. It is fifteen years ago that I first came here, simply passing through as any number of other travelers pass through, and saw it. Seven years ago when I came here I was here strictly on business. When we got back that year from Santiago I said to the officers of the regiment, “Now we have got to have a reunion of the regiment in San Antonio.” All kinds of things happened in between. I have led a middling busy life myself since; and now at last the chance has come to make good the promise and to have those of the regiment who are able to come together here in the city where the regiment was raised to greet one another and talk over the past. In a sense we can claim that that regiment was a typical American body. The men composing it were raised chiefly in the Southwest, but some from the North, some from the East, so that we had the Northerner and the Southerner, the Easterner and the Westerner in that regiment; we had men in it who worshiped their Creator some according to one creed, some according to another, for almost every religious body of any size in the United States was represented within our ranks. We had men who had been born abroad and men who were born here, whose ancestors came to what is now the United States at the time of the landing of the first colonists at the mouth of the James or at Plymouth. We had men of inherited wealth and men who all their lives long had earned each day’s bread by that day’s toil. We had men of every grade socially; men who worked with their heads; men who worked with their hands; men of all the types that our country produces; but each of them glad to get in on his worth as a man only, and content to be judged purely by what he could show himself to be.

It has always seemed to me that one of the greatest lessons taught by the Civil War was the lesson of brotherhood. You, my friends, who wore the blue; you, my friends, who wore the gray, what each of you when he went forward to battle was concerned with about the man on his right hand and the man on his left was not what that man’s ancestry was, not as to how he worshiped his Maker, not as to what his profession was, or his means; what you wanted to know was whether he would stay put. If he did you were for him, and if he did not you were against him.

The same thing that was true in the great war is true in time of peace. This Government is emphatically a government by the people, for the people, of the people. Now, besides applauding that sentiment, let us live up to it. It has two sides to it. In the first place, it applies in a dozen different directions. It applies, for instance, in reference to creed. We have a right to ask that our neighbor do his duty toward God and man; but we have no business to dictate to him how he shall worship his Maker, and no business to discriminate for or against him because of the way in which he does it. In the same way, if a man is a decent citizen, he is a decent citizen, whether rich or poor. To judge from some of the talk you occasionally hear, a man can not be a square man if he is rich. Remember always that you listen at your peril to any man who would seek to inflame you against your fellow-citizen because he is better off. Again, in the Civil War, come back to the consideration about your bunkie. You did not care whether he was a banker or bricklayer. If he was a banker he was all right if he was a good fellow, if he did his duty in camp, if he did not straggle on the march, if he did not drop his share of the joint provisions on the march, and then expect you to share yours with him at the end of the day. You wanted him to do his part, and if he did it you were for him. Now, apply that in civil life. If the rich man does not his duty, cinch him, and I will help you just as far as I can. But don’t cinch him because he is a rich man. If you do you are a mighty mean creature yourself; you are not a good American yourself. Give him a perfectly fair show. If he is a poor man and does his duty, help him, stand by him. If he whines about his poverty and says that he ought to be carried, you may just as well make up your mind to drop him then and there. Every man of us stumbles at times. Every man of us at times needs a helping hand stretched out to him; and shame to any man who will not stretch out that helping hand to his brother if that brother needs it. But if the brother lies down, you can do mighty little in carrying him. You can help him up; but once up he has got to walk himself. The only way in which you can ever really help any man is to help him to help himself.

That brings me to the second set of people here whom I have been most especially glad to see and to greet—the children. In the first place, I believe in them, as you know, and judging by the showing that San Antonio has made to-day, San Antonio is all right as regards both quality and quantity. As I like your stock I am glad that it does not seem likely to die out. In passing through Texas I have been more impressed than by anything else by the evident care you are giving to education, the evident care given to training your children, the school facilities, both for primary and higher education, and the way in which those facilities are being taken advantage of. Of course it is a mere truism to say that the care of the children is the most important task of any generation. You have a wonderful empire here in Texas. It is literally larger than most Old World empires. Your diversification of soil and climate, the marvelous fertility of your soil, your natural advantages, ensure you a phenomenal future agriculturally and industrially, ensure this State a wonderful growth in population and wealth. All that is essential. You must have the material basis upon which to build as a foundation, but I need not say to you to remember that it is only a foundation. The material counts for nothing if you do not build upon it the spiritual, if you do not build upon it the things of the soul, of the mind.

Let me again take an example from the war. We need arms and equipment, but the best rifle ever made does not make a soldier if it has not got the right man behind it. You may take the finest modern weapon, put it in the hands of a weakling or a coward, and a good man will beat him with a club. If the other man is a good man too, you want a mighty good weapon, or you will get beaten. But the weapon does not in any shape or way serve as a substitute for the spirit of the soldier. That is what counts in the last resort. Tactics change, weapons change, but the soul that drives a man forward to victory does not change as the ages go by. The men of the Civil War, alike the men who wore the gray and the men who wore the blue, made a record which remains forever a heritage of honor and of glory for all this people. They did that because they had in them the spirit which from time immemorial has made the soldiers of whom the world is proud, the spirit for the lack of which no other quality in man or in nation will atone. We of to-day, we who, if a war should come, will have to fight under new conditions, with new arms, will win (as assuredly I believe we shall win) only because our men still have in them the spirit that made their forefathers do well in battle. So you must train your children up so that in addition to having what counts for material prosperity in a State, you must have the things that tell most for greatness, the things that make for the soul of the Nation.

Here in San Antonio what is the building you are proudest of?—the Alamo. It is not exactly up to date. Other buildings are more useful. But you are proud of it because it commemorates forever the spirit of those who made its fame immortal. So in the State itself, important though it is to provide for the industrial welfare of the commonwealth, the thing that is most important is to take care of the really vital crop—the crop of citizens. The thing which the State most needs to care for is the welfare, not merely material, but moral and intellectual as well, of the children who are going to make up the State fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years hence; and that is why I am so glad to see the care which you of Texas are taking in the training of the generation that is now coming up.

A thing that is distressing to me to see is when sometimes the man and woman who have done well in life show a curious inability to train their own children in the way that has resulted successfully for themselves. I think that all of us know people who, because they have worked hard and triumphed, feel that somehow or other they will spare their children the acquisition of the very qualities which have made the parents triumph. Too often you see the man, and I am sorry to say the woman, who says, “I have had to work hard; my sons and my daughters shall have an easy time.” Such a man or woman is preparing ruin for the children about whom this is said. Of course, you want to give your children all the love possible; but it is not right to mistake folly for affection. When you spare the child that which alone will enable it to conquer in after life, you are not giving it a blessing; you are doing it the greatest wrong in your power. Bring up the boy and girl alike with the understanding that life is not generally soft, is not generally easy, that there will be plenty of rough times, and that what they have to show is not the spirit that avoids difficulties and flinches from them, but the spirit which overcomes them. Let each of the older among you look back upon your lives. You men of the Civil War; what are the times of which you are proudest? What are the memories you are most glad to hand down to your children and your children’s children? The times that were easy? No. You are proud to remember and have them remember the days of toil, of peril, of effort, the days when you had to risk life and endure every form of hardship and of labor, when you had in you the spirit that made you endure it, that made you rise level to the great need. Surely you must not rob your sons of the right to feel in their turn the same pride that you now feel in the power to overcome difficulty, the power to work, the power of wresting triumph out of danger.

There is only one of my fellow-citizens to whom I will touch my hat quicker than to the soldier; and that is the mother, because I think she has a little harder time of it. The mother who has brought up as they should be brought up a family of young children is entitled to such respect as no other person in the community is entitled to. When the end of her life comes she has endured any amount of hardship, the sitting up by beds of sick children, the endless taking care of them, for a mother is not allowed to know the difference between night and day as far as the ending of the day’s task is concerned; but, after all, when her life is done she can look back upon it with a prouder sense of satisfaction than any one else, if she has done her duty, for her children and her husband shall rise up and call her blessed. The worthy life for the Nation, for the individual, for the man, for the woman, is the life of effort for the things worth striving for; and our whole aim should be not to teach those who are to come after us to shirk difficulties, and to strive to have an easy time in life, but to strive to do their duty, whether that duty is hard or not, and to feel that no success is so great as the success of duty worth doing which is well done.

Of course, that is my conception of the life for the Nation as well as for the individual. I am not going to develop my theory about that; in the first place, because I want to keep clear of anything that you might think touched in the faintest degree upon politics, and in the next place because I believe you know pretty well how I feel anyway. I feel that this Nation, whether it wishes to or not, can not help being a great Nation. You of Texas by what your forefathers did and what you have done have helped in making this Nation so that it is impossible not to be great. We can not decide whether we will be great or not. The only thing we can decide is whether, being great, we will do well or do ill. We have got our duty in the world. We must do our duty to others, and we must do our duty to ourselves. We must so handle ourselves that no weak power which is behaving itself shall have cause to fear us; and no strong power of any kind shall be able to oppress or wrong us. We all believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I have a little difficulty in getting some of my friends to accept my interpretation of it; but they will in time, because that interpretation has come to stay. We are building the Panama Canal. While that will be a benefit to all the country, it will be of most benefit to the Gulf States. We have duties in connection with the great position we have taken. We can not shirk these duties. We can do them well or do them ill, but do them we must That is one reason why I want to see a good navy; and we have got a good navy. I am going to use a simile that I used a couple of nights ago at Dallas. In the old days in Texas I understand that there used to be a proverb that while you would not generally want a gun at all, if you did want it you wanted it quick and you wanted it awfully bad. That is just the way I feel about the navy. I feel that if we have it the chances are that we will not need it; but that if we do not have it, we might find that our need for it was vital.