Theodore Roosevelt

“ Other peoples have been as devoted to liberty, and yet, because of lack of hard-headed common-sense and of ability to show restraint and subordinate individual passions for the general good, have failed so signally in the struggle of life as to become a byword among the nations. Yet other peoples, again, have possessed all possible thrift and business capacity, but have been trampled under foot, or have played a sordid and ignoble part in the world, because their business capacity was unaccompanied by any of the lift toward nobler things which marks a great and generous nation. ”

“ Yet, on the other hand, a nation prepared for war is a menace to mankind unless the national purpose is to treat other nations with good faith and justice. In any community it is neither the conscientious man who is a craven at heart nor yet the bold and strong without the moral sense, who is of real use to the community, it is the man who to strength and courage adds a realizing sense of the moral obligations resting upon him, the man who has not only the desire but the power to do his full duty by his neighbor and by the State. ”

“ Deliberately and of their own free will they strove for an ideal, upward and onward across the stony slopes of greatness. They did the hardest work that was then to be done; they bore the heaviest burden that any generation of Americans ever had to bear; and because they did this they have won such proud joy as it has fallen to the lot of no other men to win, and have written their names forever more on the golden honor roll of the Nation. ”

“ His standard of living should be such that he will not, by pressure of competition, lower the standard of living of our own wage-workers; for it must ever be a prime object of our legislation to keep high their standard of living. If the man who seeks to come here is from the moral and social standpoint of such a character as to bid fair to add value to the community he should be heartily welcomed. We can not afford to pay heed to whether he is of one creed or another, of one nation or another. ”

“ Let us never forget our duty to help in uplifting the lowly, to shield from wrong the humble; and let us likewise act in a spirit of the broadest and frankest generosity toward all our brothers, all our fellow-countrymen; in a spirit proceeding not from weakness but from strength, a spirit which takes no more account of locality than it does of class or creed; a spirit which is resolutely bent on seeing that the Union which Washington founded and which Lincoln saved from destruction shall grow nobler and greater throughout the ages. ”

“ Boasting and blustering are as objectionable among nations as among individuals, and the public men of a great nation owe it to their sense of national self-respect to speak courteously of foreign powers just as a brave and self-respecting man treats all around him courteously. But though to boast is bad and causelessly to insult another, worse; yet worse than all is it to be guilty of boasting, even without insult, and when called to the proof to be unable to make such boasting good. ”

“ The man or woman who does work worth doing is the man or woman who lives, who breathes that work; with whom it is ever present in his or her soul; whose ambition it is to do it well and to feel rewarded by the thought of having done it well. That man, that woman, puts the whole country under an obligation. As a body all those connected with the education of our people are entitled to the heartiest praise from all lovers of their country, because as a body they are devoting heart and soul to the welfare of those under them. ”

“ Labor Unions
37 I believe emphatically in organized labor. I believe in organizations of wage-workers. Organization is one of the laws of our social and economic development at this time. But I feel that we must always keep before our minds the fact that there is nothing sacred in the name itself. To call an organization an organization does not make it a good one. The worth of an organization depends upon its being handled with the courage, the skill, the wisdom, the spirit of fair-dealing as between man and man. ”

“ Life can mean nothing worth meaning, unless its prime aim is the doing of duty, the achievement of results worth achieving. A recent writer has finely said: “After all the saddest thing that can happen to a man is to carry no burdens. To be bent under too great a load is bad; to be crushed by it is lamentable; but even in that there are possibilities that are glorious. But to carry no load at all—there is nothing in that. No one seems to arrive at any goal really worth reaching in this world who does not come to it heavy-laden.” ”

“ For instance, if the United States alone, or in company only with the other nations that on the whole tend to act justly, disarmed, we might sometimes avoid bloodshed, but we would cease to be of weight in securing the peace of justice—the real peace for which the most law-abiding and high-minded men must at times be willing to fight. As the world is now, only that nation is equipped for peace that knows how to fight and that will not shrink from fighting if ever the conditions become such that war is demanded in the name of the highest morality. ”

“ This inevitably brings about a tendency to treat each man not on his merits as an individual, but on his position as belonging to a certain class in the community. If such a spirit grows up in this Republic it will ultimately prove fatal to us, as in the past it has proved fatal to every community in which it has become dominant. Unless we continue to keep a quick and lively sense of the great fundamental truth that our concern is with the individual worth of the individual man, this Government can not permanently hold the place which it has achieved among the nations. ”

“ A man does not have to defend his rights with his own hand, because he can call upon the police, upon the sheriff’s posse, upon the militia, or in extreme cases upon the Army, to defend him. But there is no such sanction of force for international law. At present there could be no greater calamity than for the free peoples, the enlightened, independent, and peace-loving peoples, to disarm while yet leaving it open to any barbarism or despotism to remain armed. ”

“ Then there is the other kind of success—the success which comes as the reward of keen insight, of sagacity, of resolution, of address, combined with unflinching rectitude of behavior, public and private. The first kind of success may, in a sense,—and a poor sense at that—benefit the individual, but it is always and necessarily a curse to the community; whereas the man who wins the second kind, as an incident of its winning, becomes a beneficiary to the whole commonwealth. ”

“ Workingman
29 With the sole exception of the farming interest, no one matter is of such vital moment to our whole people as the welfare of the wage-workers. If the farmer and the wage-worker are well off, it is absolutely certain that all others will be well off too. It is therefore a matter for hearty congratulation that on the whole wages are higher to-day in the United States than ever before. The standard of living is also higher than ever before in our history, and far higher than in any other country. ”

“ And let us not flatter ourselves, we who live in countries where the people rule, that it is ultimately possible for the people to cast upon any but themselves the responsibilities for the shape the government and the social and political life of the community assume. I ask, then, that our people feel quickened within them indignation against wrong in every shape, and condemnation of that wrong, whether found in private or in public life. ”

“ The Navy offers us the only means of making our insistence upon the Monroe Doctrine anything but a subject of derision to whatever nation chooses to disregard it. We desire the peace which comes as of right to the just man armed; not the peace granted on terms of ignominy to the craven and the weakling. ”

“ Above all, we need to remember that any kind of class animosity in the political world is, if possible, even more destructive to national welfare, than sectional, race, or religious animosity. We can get good government only upon condition that we keep true to the principles upon which this Nation was founded, and judge each man not as a part of a class, but upon his individual merits.
¶All that we have a right to ask of any man, rich or poor, whatever his creed, his occupation, his birthplace, or his residence, is that he shall act well and honorably by his neighbor and by his country. ”

“ I ask you to take that not as a conventional statement from the university platform, but to test it by thinking of the men whom you admire in our past history and seeing what are the qualities which have made you admire them, what are the services they have rendered. For, as President Wheeler said to-day, it is true now as it ever has been true that the greatest good fortune, the greatest honor, that can befall any man is that he shall serve, that he shall serve the nation, serve his people, serve mankind ”

“ Somewhere in Ruskin there is a sentence to the effect that the man who does a piece of work for the fee, normally does it in a second-rate way, and that the only first-rate work is the work done by the man who does it for the sake of doing it well, who counts the deed as itself his reward. In no kind of work done for the public do you ever find the really best, except where you find the man who takes hold of it because he is irresistibly impelled to do it; because he wishes to do it for the sake of doing it well, not for the sake of any reward that comes afterward or in connection with it. ”

“ So in achieving good government the fundamental factor must be the character of the average citizen; that average citizen’s power of hatred for what is mean and base and unlovely; his fearless scorn of cowardice, and his determination to war unyieldingly against the dark and sordid forces of evil. ”

“ To win success in the business world, to become a first class mechanic, a successful farmer, an able lawyer or doctor, means that the man has devoted his best energy and power through long years to the achievement of his ends. So it is in the life of the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests. The man or woman who as breadwinner and home-maker, or as wife and mother, has done all that he or she can do, patiently and uncomplainingly, is to be honored ”

“ With the courage, with the hardihood, with the strength, must come the power of self-restraint, the power of self-mastery, the capacity to work for and with others as well as for one’s self, the power of giving to others the love which each of us must bear for his neighbor, if we are to make our civilization great.... ”

“ If a man is utterly selfish, if utterly disregardful of the rights of others, if he has no ideals, if he works simply for the sake of ministering to his own base passions, if he works simply to gratify himself, small is his good in the community. I think even then he is probably better off than if he is an idler, but he is of no real use unless together with the quality which enables him to work he has the quality which enables him to love his fellows, to work with them and for them for the common good of all. ”

“ The problems before us to-day are very complex, and are widely different from those which the men of Washington’s generation had to face; but we can overcome them surely if we approach them in the spirit which Washington and Washington’s great supporters brought to bear upon the problems of their day—the spirit of sanity and of courage, the spirit which combines hard common-sense with the loftiest idealism. ”

“ I believe that our people are too sane, too self-respecting, too fit for self-government, ever to adopt such an attitude. This government is not and never shall be government by a plutocracy. This government is not and never shall be government by a mob. It shall continue to be in the future what it has been in the past, a government based on the theory that each man, rich 44or poor, is to be treated simply and solely on his worth as a man, that all his personal and property rights are to be safeguarded, and that he is neither to wrong others nor to suffer wrong from others. ”