TO THE CONGREGATION ASSEMBLED AT THE BLUE SCHOOLHOUSE ON UPPER DIVIDE CREEK, COLO., SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 1905
Friends:
It is hard for me not to call you neighbors, for during a number of years my neighbors were just such men and women as those I now see before me, and they were as good friends as I ever had. I do not intend to say more than a few words to-day, but I do wish to tell you how thoroughly at home I feel with you, how much I have enjoyed my stay here, and how I have appreciated the kind and thoughtful hospitality with which I have been treated.
Here, as elsewhere in almost every gathering in the West, I see men wearing the button which shows that they served in the Grand Army of the Republic, and carrying the flag which they more than any other men in this Nation have the right to carry because it is owing to them that this Nation has a flag at all. The few words which I have to say are to be on success, and I wish to illustrate what I mean by taking these veterans of the Civil War as examples; and what I am about to say was suggested by a conversation I had with the Dominie here, when he was with me the other day on a bear hunt. The Grand Army in its organization is typically and fundamentally American, because in the Grand Army every man from lieutenant-general to drummer boy is judged not by his position, but by the way he discharges or discharged his duty while in that position. In other words, to the Grand Army man success, in the highest and truest acceptation of the word, means the full performance of duty in whatever position Providence has assigned the man to whom the duty comes. Success from the soldier’s standpoint, if an army is to rank as one of the great armies of all time, must mean that whether the man carries sword or musket, whether he looks after the mules or the commissary, he does his duty up to the handle. If the soldier feels that he has done that, then he has a right to feel that his career has been honorable and successful, and that his children’s children will be proud of him. Success had this meaning from 1861 to 1865.
So it is in civil life. Real success consists in doing one’s duty well in the path where one’s life is led. Of course, you must remember that to do your duty you must in the first place do it to yourself and to those that are nearest you. There is no use whatever in having lofty ambitions or great schemes for helping mankind if you are not able in the first place to keep yourself and your own family decently fed, clothed, and housed. You must pull your own weight first before you can do more than be a passenger in the boat. You must do what is right to your family and your neighbors before you can help the State. If, however, you have the ordinary humdrum qualities, the workaday qualities, you can win real success; for real success in civil life means that the man is able to make a living for himself and his family, to educate his children, to do his duty by his neighbors, and when the end of his life comes, to be able to feel that the world has been a little better and not a little worse off because he has lived.
When it comes to the great prizes of life there must always be more or less accident in winning. No man who has made what the world at large calls a great success can fail to recognize, if he is sincere with himself, that there has been much of chance, of fortune, in his triumph; and surely this should prevent arrogance on his part, and should also prevent any feeling of mean envy toward him on the part of others. Carry yourself so that if accident puts great opportunities in your way you will be able to take advantage of them, and so that, at any rate, even if the exceptional opportunities do not come, you can do the things that count most for real happiness in life, the things that in their sum mean the life that is successful, because they make up a happy and healthy home. No amount of skill, perseverance, energy, or genius can win either the great or the small prizes of life unless back of them lie character and the courage of moral convictions. With this character, whether the great opportunity comes or not, you can count upon so bearing yourselves that your children will bless you for having done all that was in your power to bring them up to an honored name.
So much for success in private life. Now for the success from the national standpoint. In this country of ours the Government can no more rise higher than those who make it than a stream can rise higher than its source. No one leader, no set of leaders, can make the Government. It will be made by the average citizen, and whether it stands high or low will and must depend upon the character of the average citizenship. Only this average citizen can make or unmake it. The right type of leader can guide and help him—in short, can lead him; but he must himself be trusted to see to it that his leadership is right, and if he has not the right stuff in him, then no leadership will avail him or any of us. In the Civil War, Grant and Sherman and Farragut rendered incalculable service; but in the last analysis it was the average man in the ranks who made the army. If that man had not had the right stuff in him not all the generalship of the greatest leaders would have availed to win victory. So it is now. The man who carries the hod or the axe or the coupling-pin; the man who holds the plow or the hammer; the average man who does the average work of the Nation, is the man upon whom our whole political and social fabric rests. If he continues to have the right stuff in him, then as a Nation we shall continue to go up. If he surrenders himself to idleness and ignorance, to mean envy and mean hate; if he is not thrifty, industrious, energetic and intelligent; above all, if his moral fibre weakens—then the Republic will be in a bad way. There is no secret about good citizenship. The qualities that make a good citizen are those that the humblest man or woman, girl or boy, can have; but they are the qualities upon which the foundations of the State rest. Dishonesty, especially if accompanied by that unpleasant type of ability without conscientiousness which some people deify under the name of “smartness,” is a curse and a disgrace to the individual and to the community. Honesty is the first quality for the individual and for the Nation; and it must be backed up by courage—the courage which does not wait before showing itself until the heroic days which may never come, but which unflinchingly does each day that day’s duty, be it easy or hard; and finally it must be backed up by the common-sense without which courage and honesty are of so little avail. The man who is a good husband; the woman who is a good wife and mother; the son who so carries himself that the family are glad to have him at home instead of earnestly wishing he were away; the daughter who as she grows up is a help to her mother instead of an added burden; the family in which tenderness and consideration are shown for one another, together with the strong, fearless qualities absolutely necessary both for man and for woman in this rough, workaday world of ours—such men and women, such families, have won the success that most counts, and in their aggregate make up the Nation that is really successful.
AT THE BANQUET OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND BOARD OF TRADE, DENVER, COLO., MAY 9, 1905
Mr. President; Mr. Toastmaster; and you, Men of Denver; Men of Colorado:
I hope I need not say how glad I am to be your guest to-night. Let me say just one word in reference to the work of this organization of which I am not only the guest, but to which I owe my most sincere thanks for having elected me to honorary membership. You have done a great work for the material prosperity of this city, of this State. I fully appreciate, as every sensible man must, the great, the vital importance of that work. We must have a basis of material prosperity before any community, whether State, municipality, or nation, can develop itself, can rise in any degree. There must in the community as in the individual be first as a basis the material prosperity; but woe to the community, woe to the individual, that accepts such material prosperity as the be-all and the end-all of its life. In the world at large, and especially in this Nation, we have been passing through an era of materialism. It has had its good side, and it has had its poor side; and we of this country will never rise level to the standard that should be set here until we not only understand but apply the truth that material prosperity is only the foundation, and that its worth depends entirely upon the kind of moral superstructure of good citizenship that we build upon it. No wealth, no material well-being, shall avail the Nation where class hatreds flourish, where man looks upon his brother with envy and hatred or with arrogance and contempt, according to his position, where the average man fails to understand that the supreme good for any man is the granting him the opportunity and training him to the power to do service to the community at large. I believe in material well-being, of course; I should be a fool if I did not. I believe in material well-being; I believe in those who have built it up; but I believe also that it is a curse if it is not accompanied by the lift toward higher things. We of this country; we who have enjoyed the marvelous prosperity that this country has possessed in a degree pre-eminent above all other nations of earth, must in the future show our understanding of this doctrine, or we shall fail to make of the Republic what it must and shall be made—an example for all the nations of mankind.