Kitabı oxu: «African and European Addresses»
Foreword
My original intention had been to return to the United States direct from Africa, by the same route I took when going out. I altered this intention because of receiving from the Chancellor of Oxford University, Lord Curzon, an invitation to deliver the Romanes Lecture at Oxford. The Romanes Foundation had always greatly interested me, and I had been much struck by the general character of the annual addresses, so that I was glad to accept. Immediately afterwards, I received and accepted invitations to speak at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at the University of Berlin. In Berlin and at Oxford, my addresses were of a scholastic character, designed especially for the learned bodies which I was addressing, and for men who shared their interests in scientific and historical matters. In Paris, after consultation with the French Ambassador, M. Jusserand, through whom the invitation was tendered, I decided to speak more generally, as the citizen of one republic addressing the citizens of another republic.
When, for these reasons, I had decided to stop in Europe on my way home, it of course became necessary that I should speak to the Nobel Prize Committee in Christiania, in acknowledgment of the Committee's award of the peace prize, after the Peace of Portsmouth had closed the war between Japan and Russia.
While in Africa, I became greatly interested in the work of the Government officials and soldiers who were there upholding the cause of civilization. These men appealed to me; in the first place, because they reminded me so much of our own officials and soldiers who have reflected such credit on the American name in the Philippines, in Panama, in Cuba, in Porto Rico; and, in the next place, because I was really touched by the way in which they turned to me, with the certainty that I understood and believed in their work, and with the eagerly expressed hope that when I got the chance I would tell the people at home what they were doing and would urge that they be supported in doing it.
In my Egyptian address, my endeavor was to hold up the hands of these men, and at the same time to champion the cause of the missionaries, of the native Christians, and of the advanced and enlightened Mohammedans in Egypt. To do this it was necessary emphatically to discourage the anti-foreign movement, led, as it is, by a band of reckless, foolish, and sometimes murderous agitators. In other words, I spoke with the purpose of doing good to Egypt, and with the hope of deserving well of the Egyptian people of the future, unwilling to pursue the easy line of moral culpability which is implied in saying pleasant things of that noisy portion of the Egyptian people of to-day, who, if they could have their way, would irretrievably and utterly ruin Egypt's future. In the Guildhall address, I carried out the same idea.
I made a number of other addresses, some of which—those, for instance, at Budapest, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and the University of Christiania,—I would like to present here; but unfortunately they were made without preparation, and were not taken down in shorthand, so that with the exception of the address made at the dinner in Christiania and the address at the Cambridge Union these can not be included.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.SAGAMORE HILL,July 15, 1910.
Introduction
Mr. Roosevelt as an Orator
In the tumult, on the one hand of admiration and praise and on the other of denunciation and criticism, which Mr. Roosevelt's tour in Africa and Europe excited throughout the civilized world, there was one—and I am inclined to think only one—note of common agreement. Friends and foes united in recognizing the surprising versatility of talents and of ability which the activities of his tour displayed. Hunters and explorers, archæologists and ethnologists, soldiers and sailors, scientists and university doctors, statesmen and politicians, monarchs and diplomats, essayists and historians, athletes and horsemen, orators and occasional speakers, met him on equal terms. The purpose of the present volume is to give to American readers, by collecting a group of his transatlantic addresses and by relating some incidents and effects of their delivery, some impression of one particular phase of Mr. Roosevelt's foreign journey,—an impression of the influence on public thought which he exerted as an orator.
No one would assert that Mr. Roosevelt possesses that persuasive grace of oratory which made Mr. Gladstone one of the greatest public speakers of modern times. For oratory as a fine art, he has no use whatever; he is neither a stylist nor an elocutionist; what he has to say he says with conviction and in the most direct and effective phraseology that he can find through which to bring his hearers to his way of thinking. Three passages from the Guildhall speech afford typical illustrations of the incisiveness of his English and of its effect on his audience.
Fortunately you have now in the Governor of East Africa, Sir Percy Girouard, a man admirably fitted to deal wisely and firmly with the many problems before him. He is on the ground and knows the needs of the country and is zealously devoted to its interests. All that is necessary is to follow his lead and to give him cordial support and backing. The principle upon which I think it is wise to act in dealing with far-away possessions is this: choose your man, change him if you become discontented with him, but while you keep him, back him up.
I have met people who had some doubt whether the Sudan would pay. Personally, I think it probably will. But I may add that, in my judgment, this does not alter the duty of England to stay there. It is not worth while belonging to a big nation unless the big nation is willing, when the necessity arises, to undertake a big task. I feel about you in the Sudan just as I felt about us in Panama. When we acquired the right to build the Panama Canal, and entered on the task, there were worthy people who came to me and said they wondered whether it would pay. I always answered that it was one of the great world-works that had to be done; that it was our business as a nation to do it, if we were ready to make good our claim to be treated as a great World Power; and that as we were unwilling to abandon the claim, no American worth his salt ought to hesitate about performing the task. I feel just the same way about you in the Sudan.
It was with this primary object of establishing order that you went into Egypt twenty-eight years ago; and the chief and ample justification for your presence in Egypt was this absolute necessity of order being established from without, coupled with your ability and willingness to establish it. Now, either you have the right to be in Egypt, or you have not; either it is, or it is not your duty to establish and keep order. If you feel that you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and keep order there, why then by all means get out of Egypt. If, as I hope, you feel that your duty to civilized mankind and your fealty to your own great traditions alike bid you to stay, then make the fact and the name agree, and show that you are ready to meet in very deed the responsibility which is yours.
There may be little Ciceronian grace about these passages, but there is unmistakable verbal power. So many words of one syllable and of Saxon derivation are used as to warrant the opinion that the speaker possesses a distinctive style. That it is an effective style was proved by the response of the audience, which greeted these particular passages (although they contain by implication frank criticisms of the British people) with cheers and cries of "Hear, hear!" It should be remembered, too, that the audience, a distinguished one, while neither hostile nor antipathetic, came in a distinctly critical frame of mind. Like the man from Missouri, they were determined "to be shown" the value of Mr. Roosevelt's personality and views before they accepted them. That they did accept them, that the British people accepted them, I shall endeavor to show a little later.
There are people who entertain the notion that it is characteristic of Mr. Roosevelt to speak on the spur of the moment, trusting to the occasion to furnish him with both his ideas and his inspiration. Nothing could be more contrary to the facts. It is true that in his European journey he developed a facility in extemporaneous after-dinner speaking or occasional addresses, that was a surprise even to his intimate friends. At such times, what he said was full of apt allusions, witty comment (sometimes at his own expense), and bubbling good humor. The address to the undergraduates at the Cambridge Union, and his remarks at the supper of the Institute of British Journalists in Stationers' Hall, are good examples of this kind of public speaking. But his important speeches are carefully and painstakingly prepared. It is his habit to dictate the first draft to a stenographer. He then takes the typewritten original and works over it, sometimes sleeps over it, and edits it with the greatest care. In doing this, he usually calls upon his friends, or upon experts in the subject he is dealing with, for advice and suggestion.
Of the addresses collected in this volume, three—the lectures at the Sorbonne, at the University of Berlin, and at Oxford—were written during the winter of 1909, before Mr. Roosevelt left the Presidency; a fourth, the Nobel Prize speech, was composed during the hunting trip in Africa, and the original copy, written with indelible pencil on sheets of varying size and texture, and covered with interlineations and corrections, bears all the marks of life in the wilderness. The Cairo and Guildhall addresses were written and rewritten with great care beforehand. The remaining three, "Peace and Justice in the Sudan," "The Colonial Policy of the United States," and the speech at the University of Cambridge were extemporaneous. The Cairo and Guildhall speeches are on the same subject, and sprang from the same sources, and although one was delivered at the beginning, and the other at the close of a three months' journey, they should, in order to be properly understood, be read as one would read two chapters of one work.
When Mr. Roosevelt reached Egypt, he found the country in one of those periods of political unrest and religious fanaticism which have during the last twenty-five years given all Europe many bad quarters of an hour. Technically a part of the Ottoman Empire and a province of the Sultan of Turkey, Egypt is practically an English protectorate. During the quarter of a century since the tragic death of General Gordon at Khartum, Egypt has made astonishing progress in prosperity, in the administration of justice, and in political stability. All Europe recognizes this progress to be the fruit of English control and administration. At the time of Mr. Roosevelt's visit, a faction, or party, of native Egyptians, calling themselves Nationalists, had come into somewhat unsavory prominence; they openly urged the expulsion of the English, giving feverish utterance to the cry "Egypt for the Egyptians!" In Egypt, this cry means more than a political antagonism; it means the revival of the ancient and bitter feud between Mohammedanism and Christianity. It is in effect a cry of "Egypt for the Moslem!" The Nationalist party had by no means succeeded in affecting the entire Moslem population, but it had succeeded in attracting to itself all the adventurers, and lovers of darkness and disorder who cultivate for their own personal gain such movements of national unrest. The non-Moslem population, European and native, whose ability and intelligence is indicated by the fact that, while they form less than ten per cent. of the inhabitants, they own more than fifty per cent. of the property, were staunch supporters of the English control which the Nationalists wished to overthrow. The Nationalists, however, appeared to be the only people who were not afraid to talk openly and to take definite steps. Just before Mr. Roosevelt's arrival, Boutros Pasha, the Prime Minister, a native Egyptian Christian, and one of the ablest administrative officers that Egypt has ever produced, had been brutally assassinated by a Nationalist. The murder was discussed everywhere with many shakings of the head, but in quiet corners, and low tones of voice. Military and civil officers complained in private that the home government was paying little heed to the assassination and to the spirit of disorder which brought it about. English residents, who are commonly courageous and outspoken in great crises, gave one the impression of speaking in whispers in the hope that if it were ignored, the agitation might die away instead of developing into riot and bloodshed.
Now this way of dealing with a law-breaker and political agitator is totally foreign to Mr. Roosevelt; even his critics admit that he both talks and fights in the open. In two speeches in Khartum, one at a dinner given in his honor by British military and civil officers, and one at a reception arranged by native Egyptian military men and officials, he pointed out in vigorous language the dangers of religious fanaticism and the kind of "Nationalism" that condones assassination. Newspaper organs of the Nationalists attacked him for these speeches when he arrived in Cairo. This made him all the more determined to say the same things in Cairo when the proper opportunity came, especially as officials, both military and civil, of high rank and responsibility, had persistently urged him to do what he properly could to arouse the attention of the British Government to the Egyptian situation. The opportunity came in an invitation to address the University of Cairo. His speech was carefully thought out and was written with equal care; some of his friends, both Egyptian, and English, whom he consulted, were in the uncertain frame of mind of hoping that he would mention the assassination of Boutros, but wondering whether he really ought to do so. Mr. Roosevelt spoke with all his characteristic effectiveness of enunciation and gesture. He was listened to with earnest attention and vigorous applause by a representative audience of Egyptians and Europeans, of Moslems and Christians. The address was delivered on the morning of March 28th; in the afternoon the comment everywhere was, "Why haven't these things been said in public before?" Of course the criticisms of the extreme Nationalists were very bitter. Their newspapers, printed in Arabic, devoted whole pages to denunciations of the speech. They protested to the university authorities against the presentation of the honorary degree which was conferred upon Mr. Roosevelt; they called him "a traitor to the principles of George Washington," and "an advocate of despotism"; an orator at a Nationalist mass meeting explained that Mr. Roosevelt's "opposition to political liberty" was due to his Dutch origin, "for the Dutch, as every one knows, have treated their colonies more cruelly than any other civilized nation"; one paper announced that the United States Senate had recorded its disapproval of the speech by taking away Mr. Roosevelt's pension of five thousand dollars, in amusing ignorance of the fact that Mr. Roosevelt never had any pension of any kind whatsoever. On the other hand, government officers of authority united with private citizens of distinction (including missionaries, native Christians, and many progressive Moslems) in expressing, personally and by letter, approval of the speech as one that would have a wide influence in Egypt in supporting the efforts of those who are working for the development of a stable, just, and enlightened form of government. In connection with the more widely-known Guildhall address on the same subject it unquestionably has such an influence.
Between the delivery of the Cairo speech and that of the next fixed address, the lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23d, there were a number of extemporaneous and occasional addresses of which no permanent record has been, or can be made. Some of these were responses to speeches of welcome made by municipal officials on railway platforms, or were replies to toasts at luncheons and dinners. In Rome, Mayor Nathan gave a dinner in his honor in the Campidoglio, or City Hall, which was attended by a group of about fifty men prominent in Italian official or private life. On this occasion the Mayor read an address of welcome in French, to which Mr. Roosevelt made a reply touching upon the history of Italy and some of the social problems with which the Italian people have to deal in common with the other civilized nations of the earth. He began his reply in French, but soon broke off, and continued in English, asking the Mayor to translate it, sentence by sentence, into Italian for the assembled guests, most of whom did not speak English. Both the speech itself and the personality of the speaker made a marked impression upon his hearers; and after his retirement from the hall in which the dinner was held, what he said furnished almost the sole subject of animated conversation, until the party separated. In Budapest, under the dome of the beautiful House of Parliament, Count Apponyi, one of the great political leaders of modern Hungary, on behalf of the Hungarian delegates to the Inter-Parliamentary Union presented to Mr. Roosevelt an illuminated address in which was recorded the latter's achievements in behalf of human rights, human liberty, and international justice. Mr. Roosevelt in his reply showed an intimate familiarity with the Hungarian history such as, Count Apponyi afterwards said, he had never met in any other public man outside of Hungary. Although entirely extemporaneous, this reply may be taken as a fair exemplification of the spirit of all his speeches during his foreign journey. Briefly, in referring to some allusions in Count Apponyi's speech to the great leaders of liberty in the United States and in Hungary, he asserted that the principles for which he had endeavored to struggle during his political career were principles older than those of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln; older, indeed, than the principles of Kossuth, the great Hungarian leader; they were the principles enunciated in the Decalogue and the Golden Rule. One of the significant things about these sermons by Mr. Roosevelt—I call them sermons because he frequently himself uses the phrase, "I preach"—is that nobody spoke, or apparently thought the word cant in connection with them. They were accepted as the genuine and spontaneous expression of a man who believes that the highest moral principles are quite compatible with all the best social joys of life, and with dealing knockout blows when it is necessary to fight in order to redress wrongs or to maintain justice.
The people of Paris are perhaps as quick to detect and to laugh at cant or moral platitudes as anybody of the modern world. And yet the Sorbonne lecture, delivered by invitation of the officials of the University of Paris, on April 23d, saturated as it was with moral ideas and moral exhortation, was a complete success. The occasion furnished an illustration of the power of moral ideas to interest and to inspire. The streets surrounding the hall were filled with an enormous crowd long before the hour announced for the opening of the doors; and even ticket-holders had great difficulty in gaining admission. The spacious amphitheatre of the Sorbonne was filled with a representative audience, numbering probably three thousand people. Around the hall, were statues of the great masters of French intellectual life—Pascal, Descartes, Lavoisier, and others. On the wall was one of the Puvis de Chavannes's most beautiful mural paintings. The group of university officials and academicians on the dais, from which Mr. Roosevelt spoke, lent to the occasion an appropriate university atmosphere. The simple but perfect arrangement of the French and American flags back of the speaker suggested its international character.
The speech was an appeal for moral rather than for intellectual or material greatness. It was received with marked interest and approval; the passage ending with a reference to "cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat," was delivered with real eloquence, and aroused a long-continued storm of applause. With characteristic courage, Mr. Roosevelt attacked race suicide when speaking to a race whose population is diminishing, and was loudly applauded. Occasionally with quizzical humor he interjected an extemporaneous sentence in French, to the great satisfaction of his audience. A passage of peculiar interest was the statement of his creed regarding the relation of property-rights to human rights; it was not in his original manuscript but was written on the morning of the lecture as the result of a discussion of the subject of vested interests with one or two distinguished French publicists. He first pronounced this passage in English, and then repeated it in French, enforced by gestures which so clearly indicated his desire to have his hearers unmistakably understand him in spite of defective pronunciation of a foreign tongue that the manifest approval of the audience was expressed in a curious mingling of sympathetic laughter and prolonged and serious applause.
A fortnight after the Sorbonne address, I received from a friend, an American military officer living in Paris who knows well its general habit of mind, a letter from which I venture to quote here, because it so strikingly portrays the influence that Mr. Roosevelt exerted as an orator during his European journey:
I find that Paris is still everywhere talking of Mr. Roosevelt. It was a thing almost without precedent that this blasé city kept up its interest in him without abatement for eight days; but that a week after his departure should still find him the main topic of conversation is a fact which has undoubtedly entered into Paris history. The Temps [one of the foremost daily newspapers of Paris] has had fifty-seven thousand copies of his Sorbonne address printed and distributed free to every schoolteacher in France and to many other persons. The Socialist or revolutionary groups and press had made preparations for a monster demonstration on May first. Walls were placarded with incendiary appeals and their press was full of calls to arms. Monsieur Briand [the Prime Minister] flatly refused to allow the demonstration, and gave orders accordingly to Monsieur Lépine [the Chief of Police]. For the first time since present influences have governed France, certainly in fifteen years, the police and the troops were authorized to use their arms in self-defence. The result of this firmness was that the leaders countermanded the demonstration, and there can be no doubt that many lives were saved and a new point gained in the possibility of governing Paris as a free city, yet one where order must be preserved, votes or no votes. Now this stiff attitude of M. Briand and the Conseil is freely attributed in intelligent quarters to Mr. Roosevelt. French people say it is a repercussion of his visit, of his Sorbonne lecture, and that going away he left in the minds of these people some of that intangible spirit of his—in other words, they felt what he would have felt in a similar emergency, and for the first time in their lives showed a disregard of voters when they were bent upon mischief. It is rather an extraordinary verdict, but it has seized the Parisian imagination, and I, for one, believe it is correct.
Some of the English newspapers, while generally approving of the Sorbonne address, expressed the feeling that it contained some platitudes. Of course it did; for the laws of social and moral health, like the laws of hygiene, are platitudes. It was interesting to have a French engineer and mathematician of distinguished achievements, who discussed with me the character and effect of the Sorbonne address, rather hotly denounce those who affected to regard Mr. Roosevelt's restatement of obvious, but too often forgotten truth, as platitudinous. "The finest and most beautiful things in life," said this scientist, "the most abstruse scientific discoveries, are based upon platitudes. It is a platitude to say that the whole is greater than a part, or that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and yet it is upon such platitudes that astronomy, by aid of which we have penetrated some of the far-off mysteries of the universe, is based. The greatest cathedrals are built of single blocks of stone, and a single block of stone is a platitude. Tear the architectural structure to pieces, and you have nothing left but the single, common, platitudinous brick; but for that reason do you say that your architectural structure is platitudinous? The effect of Mr. Roosevelt's career and personality, which rest upon the secure foundation of simple and obvious truths, is like that of a fine architectural structure, and if a man can see only the single bricks or stones of which it is composed, so much the worse for him."
Of the addresses included in this volume the next in chronological order was that on "International Peace," officially delivered before the Nobel Prize Committee, but actually a public oration spoken in the National Theatre of Christiania, before an audience of two or three thousand people. The Norwegians did everything to make the occasion a notable one. The streets were almost impassable from the crowds of people who assembled about the theatre, but who were unable to gain admission. An excellent orchestra played an overture, especially composed for the occasion by a distinguished Norwegian composer, in which themes from the Star-Spangled Banner and from Norwegian national airs and folk-songs were ingeniously intertwined. The day was observed as a holiday in Christiania, and the entire city was decorated with evergreens and flags. On the evening of the same day, the Nobel Prize Committee gave a dinner in honor of Mr. Roosevelt which was attended by two or three hundred guests,—both men and women. General Bratlie, at one time Norwegian Minister of War, made an address of welcome, reviewing with appreciation Mr. Roosevelt's qualities both as a man of war and as a man of peace. The address in this volume, entitled, "Colonial Policy of the United States" was Mr. Roosevelt's reply to General Bratlie's personal tribute. It was wholly extemporaneous, but was taken down stenographically; and it adds to its interest to note the fact that on the evening of its delivery it was the first public utterance on any question of American politics which Mr. Roosevelt had made since he left America a year previous. The Nobel Prize speech and this address taken together form a pretty complete exposition of what may perhaps be called, for want of a better term, Mr. Roosevelt's "peace with action" doctrine.
"The World Movement," the address at the University of Berlin, was the first of two distinctively academic, or scholastic utterances, the other, of course, being the Romanes lecture. The Sorbonne speech was almost purely sociological and ethical. There are, to be sure, social and moral applications made of the theories laid down at Berlin and at Oxford; but these two university addresses are distinctly for a university audience. My own judgment is that the Sorbonne and Guildhall addresses were more effective in their human interest and their immediate political influence. But at both Berlin and Oxford, Mr. Roosevelt showed that he could deal with scholarly subjects in a scholarly fashion. It may be that he desired on these two occasions to give some indication that, although universally regarded as a man of action, he is entitled also to be considered as a man of thought. The lecture at the University of Berlin was a brilliant and picturesque academic celebration in which doctors' gowns, military uniforms, and the somewhat bizarre dress of the representatives of the undergraduate student corps, mingled in kaleidoscopic effect. One interesting feature of the ceremony was the singing by a finely trained student chorus without instrumental accompaniment, of Hail Columbia and The Star-Spangled Banner, harmonized as only the Germans can harmonize choral music. The Emperor and the Empress, with several members of the Imperial family, attended the lecture. Those who sat near the Emperor could see that he followed the address with genuine interest, nodding his head, or smiling now and then with approval at some incisively expressed idea, or some phrase of interjected humor, or a characteristic gesture on the part of the speaker. In one respect the lecture was a tour de force. On account of a sharp attack of bronchitis, from which he was then recovering, it was not decided by the physicians in charge until the morning of the lecture that Mr. Roosevelt could use his voice for one hour in safety. Arrangements had been made to have some one else read the lecture if at the last moment it should be necessary; and the fact that Mr. Roosevelt was able to do it himself effectively under these circumstances indicates that he has some of the physical as well as the intellectual attributes of the practised orator.
Mr. Roosevelt's first public speech in England was made at the University of Cambridge on May 26th when he received the honorary degree of LL.D. His address on this occasion was not, like the Romanes lecture at Oxford, a part of the academic ceremony connected with the conferring of the honorary degree. It was spoken to an audience of undergraduates when, after the academic exercises in the Senate House, he was elected to honorary membership in the Union Society, the well-known Cambridge debating club which has trained some of the best public speakers of England. At Oxford the doctors and dignitaries cracked the jokes—in Latin—while the undergraduates were highly decorous. At Cambridge, on the other hand, the students indulged in the traditional pranks which often lend a color of gaiety to University ceremonies at both Oxford and Cambridge. Mr. Roosevelt entered heartily into the spirit of the undergraduates, and it was evident that they, quite as heartily, liked his understanding of the fact that the best university and college life consists in a judicious mixture of the grave and the gay. The honor which these undergraduates paid to their guest was seriously intended, was admirably planned, and its genuineness was all the more apparent because it had a note of pleasantry. Mr. Roosevelt spoke as a university student to university students and what he said, although brief, extemporaneous, and even unpremeditated, deserves to be included with his more important addresses, because it affords an excellent example of his characteristic habit of making an occasion of social gaiety also an occasion of expressing his belief in the fundamental moral principles of social and political life. The speech was frequently interrupted by the laughter and applause of the audience, and the theory which Mr. Roosevelt propounded, that any man in any walk of life may achieve genuine success simply by developing ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree, was widely quoted and discussed by the press of Great Britain.
Next in chronological order comes the Guildhall speech. In the picturesqueness of its setting, in the occasion which gave rise to it, in the extraordinary effect it had upon public opinion in Great Britain, the continent of Europe, and America, and in the courage which it evinced on the part of the speaker, it is in my judgment the most striking of all Mr. Roosevelt's foreign addresses.
The occasion was a brilliant and notable one. The ancient and splendid Guildhall—one of the most perfect Gothic interiors in England, which has historical associations of more than five centuries—was filled with a representative gathering of English men and women. On the dais, or stage, at one end of the hall, sat the Lord Mayor and the Lady Mayoress, and the special guests of the occasion were conducted by ushers, in robes and carrying maces, down a long aisle flanked with spectators on either side and up the steps of the dais, where they were presented. Their names were called out at the beginning of the aisle, and as the ushers and the guest moved along, the audience applauded, little or much, according to the popularity of the newcomer. Thus John Burns and Mr. Balfour were greeted with enthusiastic hand-clapping and cheers, although they belong, of course, to opposite parties. The Bishop of London, Lord Cromer, the maker of modern Egypt, Sargent, the painter, and Sir Edward Grey, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, were among those greeted in this way. In the front row on one side of the dais were seated the aldermen of the city in their red robes, and various officials in wigs and gowns lent to the scene a curiously antique aspect to the American eye. Happily, the City of London has carefully preserved the historical traditions connected with it and with the Guilds, or groups of merchants, which in the past had so much to do with the management of its affairs. Among the invited guests, for example, were the Master of the Mercers' Company, the Master of the Grocers' Company, the Master of the Drapers' Company, the Master of the Skinners' Company, the Master of the Haberdashers' Company, the Master of the Salters' Company, the Master of the Ironmongers' Company, the Master of the Vintners' Company, and the Master of the Clothworkers' Company. These various trades, of course, are no longer carried on by Guilds, but by private firms or corporations, and yet the Guild organization is still maintained as a sort of social or semi-social recognition of the days when the Guildhall was not merely a great assembly-room, but the place in which the Guilds actually managed the affairs of their city. It was in such a place and amid such surroundings that Mr. Roosevelt was formally nominated and elected a Freeman of the ancient City of London.
Mr. Roosevelt's speech was far from being extemporaneous; it had been carefully thought out beforehand, and was based upon his experiences during the previous March, in Egypt; it was really the desire of influential Englishmen in Africa to have him say something about Egyptian affairs that led him to make a speech at all. He had had ample time to think, and he had thought a good deal, yet it was plainly to be seen that the frankness of his utterance, his characteristic attitude and gestures, and the pungent quality of his oratory at first startled his audience, accustomed to more conventional methods of public speaking. But he soon captured and carried his hearers with him, as is indicated by the exclamations of approval on the part of the audience which were incorporated in the verbatim report of the speech in the London Times. It is no exaggeration to say that his speech became the talk of England—in clubs, in private homes, and in the newspapers. Of course there was some criticism, but, on the whole, it was received with commendation. The extreme wing of the Liberal party, whom we should call Anti-Imperialists, but who are in Great Britain colloquially spoken of as "Little Englanders," took exception to it, but even their disapproval, save in a few instances of bitter personal attack, was mild. The London Chronicle, which is perhaps the most influential of the morning newspapers representing the Anti-Imperialist view, was of the opinion that the speech was hardly necessary, because it asserted that the Government and the British nation have long been of Mr. Roosevelt's own opinion. The Westminster Gazette, the leading evening Liberal paper, also asserted that "none of the broad considerations advanced by Mr. Roosevelt have been absent from the minds of Ministers, and of Sir Edward Grey in particular. We regret that Mr. Roosevelt should have thought it necessary to speak out yesterday, not on the narrow ground of etiquette or precedent, but because we cannot bring ourselves to believe that his words are calculated to make it any easier to deal with an exceedingly difficult problem."
The views of these two newspapers fairly express the rather mild opposition excited by the speech among those who regard British control in Egypt as a question of partisan politics. On the other hand, the best and most influential public opinion, while recognizing the unconventionality of Mr. Roosevelt's course, heartily approved of both the matter and the manner of the speech. The London Times said: "Mr. Roosevelt has reminded us in the most friendly way of what we are at least in danger of forgetting, and no impatience of outside criticism ought to be allowed to divert us from considering the substantial truth of his words. His own conduct of great affairs and the salutary influence of his policy upon American public life … at least give him a right, which all international critics do not possess, to utter a useful, even if not wholly palatable, warning." The Daily Telegraph, after referring to Mr. Roosevelt as "a practical statesman who combines with all his serious force a famous sense of humor," expressed the opinion that his "candor is a tonic, which not only makes plain our immediate duty but helps us to do it. In Egypt, as in India, there is no doubt as to the alternative he has stated so vigorously: we must govern or go; and we have no intention of going." The Pall Mall Gazette's opinion was that Mr. Roosevelt "delivered a great and memorable speech—a speech that will be read and pondered over throughout the world."
The London Spectator, which is one of the ablest and most thoughtful journals published in the English language, and which reflects the most intelligent, broad-minded, and influential public opinion in the British Empire, devoted a large amount of space to a consideration of the speech. The Spectator's position in English journalism is such that I make no apology for a somewhat long quotation from its comment:
Perhaps the chief event of the week has been Mr. Roosevelt's speech at the Guildhall. Timid, fussy, and pedantic people have charged Mr. Roosevelt with all sorts of crimes because he had the courage to speak out, and have even accused him of unfriendliness to this country because of his criticisms. Happily the British people as a whole are not so foolish. Instinctively they have recognized and thoroughly appreciated the good feeling of Mr. Roosevelt's speech. Only true friends speak as he spoke.... The barrel-organs, of course, grind out the old tune about Mr. Roosevelt's tactlessness. In reality he is a very tactful as well as a very shrewd man. It is surely the height of tactfulness to recognize that the British people are sane enough and sincere enough to like being told the truth. His speech is one of the greatest compliments ever paid to a people by a statesman of another country.... Mr. Roosevelt has made exactly the kind of speech we expected him to make—a speech strong, clear, fearless. He has told us something useful and practical, and has not lost himself in abstractions and platitudes.... The business of a trustee is not to do what the subject of the trust likes or thinks he likes, but to do, however much he may grumble, what is in his truest and best interests. Unless a trustee is willing to do that, and does not trouble about abuse, ingratitude, and accusations of selfishness, he had better give up his trust altogether.... We thank Mr. Roosevelt once again for giving us so useful a reminder of our duty in this respect.
These notes of approval were repeated in a great number of letters which Mr. Roosevelt received from men and women in all walks of life, men in distinguished official position and "men in the street." There were some abusive letters, chiefly anonymous, but the general tone of this correspondence is fairly illustrated by the following:
Allow me, an old colonist in his eighty-fourth year, to thank you most heartily for your manly address at the Guildhall and for your life-work in the cause of humanity. If I ever come to the great Republic, I shall do myself the honor of seeking an audience of your Excellency. I may do so on my one hundredth birthday! With best wishes and profound respect.
The envelope of this letter was addressed to "His Excellency 'Govern-or-go' Roosevelt." That the Daily Telegraph and that the "man in the street" should independently seize upon this salient point of the address—the "govern-or-go" theory—is significant.
American readers are sufficiently familiar with Mr. Roosevelt's principles regarding protectorate or colonial government; any elaborate explanation or exposition of his views is unnecessary. But it may be well to repeat that he has over and over again said that all subject peoples, whether in colonies, protectorates, or insular possessions like the Philippines and Porto Rico, should be governed for their own benefit and development and should never be exploited for the mere profit of the controlling powers. It may be well, too, to add Mr. Roosevelt's own explanation of his criticism of sentimentality. "Weakness, timidity, and sentimentality," he said in the Guildhall address, "many cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of all broken reeds sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean." Referring to these phrases, a correspondent a day or two after the speech asked if the word "sentiment" might not be substituted for the word "sentimentality." Mr. Roosevelt wrote the following letter in reply:
DEAR SIR: I regard sentiment as the exact antithesis of sentimentality, and to substitute "sentiment" for "sentimentality" in my speech would directly invert its meaning. I abhor sentimentality, and, on the other hand, I think no man is worth his salt who is not profoundly influenced by sentiment, and who does not shape his life in accordance with a high ideal.
Faithfully yours,THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
The Romanes lecture at Oxford University was the last of Mr. Roosevelt's transatlantic speeches. I can think of no greater intellectual honor that an English-speaking man can receive than to have conferred upon him by the queen of all universities, the highest honorary degree in her power to give, and in addition, to be invited to address the dignitaries and dons and doctors of that university as a scholar speaking to scholars. There is no American university man who may not feel entirely satisfied with the way in which the American university graduate stood the Oxford test on that occasion. He took in good part the jokes and pleasantries pronounced in Latin by the Chancellor, Lord Curzon; but after the ceremonies of initiation were finished, after the beadles had, in response to the order of the Chancellor, conducted "Doctorem Honorabilem ad Pulpitum," and after the Chancellor had, this time in very direct and beautiful English, welcomed him to membership in the University, he delivered an address, the serious scholarship of which held the attention of those who heard it and arrested the attention of many thousands of others who received the lecture through the printed page.
The foregoing review of the chief public addresses which Mr. Roosevelt made during his foreign journey, I think justifies the assertion that, for variety of subject, variety of occasion, and variety of the fields of thought and action upon which his speeches had a direct and manifest influence, he is entitled to be regarded as a public orator of remarkable distinction and power.
By way of explanation it may perhaps be permissible to add that I met Mr. Roosevelt in Khartum on March 14, 1910, and travelled with him through the Sudan, Egypt, the continent of Europe and England, to New York; I heard all his important speeches, and most of the occasional addresses; much of the voluminous correspondence which the speeches gave rise to passed through my hands; and I talked with many men, both in public and private life, in the various countries through which the journey was taken about the addresses themselves and their effect upon world-politics. If there is a failure in these pages to give an intelligent or an adequate impression of the oratorial features of Mr. Roosevelt's African and European journey, it is not because there was any lack of opportunity to observe or learn the facts.
LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT.
Peace and Justice in the Sudan
An Address at the American Mission 1 in Khartum, March 16, 1910
I have long wished to visit the Sudan. I doubt whether in any other region of the earth there is to be seen a more striking instance of the progress, the genuine progress, made by the substitution of civilization for savagery than what we have seen in the Sudan for the past twelve years. I feel that you here owe a peculiar duty to the Government under which you live—a peculiar duty in the direction of doing your full worth to make the present conditions perpetual. It is incumbent on every decent citizen of the Sudan to uphold the present order of things; to see that there is no relapse; to see that the reign of peace and justice continues. But you here have that duty resting upon you to a peculiar degree, and your best efforts must be given in all honor, and as a matter, not merely of obligation, but as a matter of pride on your part, towards the perpetuation of the condition of things that has made this progress possible, of the Government as it now stands—as you represent it, Slatin Pasha.2
I am exceedingly pleased to see here officers of the army, and you have, of course, your oath. You are bound by every tie of loyalty, military and civil, to work to the end I have named. But, after all, you are not bound any more than are you, you civilians. And, another thing, do not think for a moment that when I say that you are bound to uphold the Government I mean that you are bound to try to get an office under it. On the contrary, I trust, Dr. Giffen, that the work done here by you, done by the different educational institutions with which you are connected or with which you are affiliated, will always be done, bearing in mind the fact that the most useful citizen to the Government may be a man who under no consideration would hold any position connected with the Government. I do not want to see any missionary college carry on its educational scheme primarily with a view of turning out Government officials. On the contrary, I want to see the average graduate prepared to do his work in some capacity in civil life, without any regard to any aid whatever received from or any salary drawn from the Government. If a man is a good engineer, a good mechanic, a good agriculturist, if he is trained so that he becomes a really good merchant, he is, in his place, the best type of citizen. It is a misfortune in any country, American, European, or African, to have the idea grow that the average educated man must find his career only in the Government service. I hope to see good and valuable servants of the Government in the military branch and in the civil branch turned out by this and similar educational institutions; but, if the conditions are healthy, those Government servants, civil or military, will never be more than a small fraction of the graduates, and the prime end and prime object of an educational institution should be to turn out men who will be able to shift for themselves, to help themselves, and to help others, fully independent of all matters connected with the Government. I feel very strongly on this subject, and I feel it just as strongly in America as I do here.
Another thing, gentlemen, and now I want to speak to you for a moment from the religious standpoint, to speak to you in connection with the work of this mission. I wish I could make every member of a Christian church feel that just in so far as he spends his time in quarrelling with other Christians of other churches he is helping to discredit Christianity in the eyes of the world. Avoid as you would the plague those who seek to embroil you in conflict, one Christian sect with another. Not only does what I am about to say apply to the behavior of Christians towards one another, but of all Christians towards their non-Christian brethren, towards their fellow-citizens of another creed. You can do most for the colleges from which you come, you can do most for the creed which you profess, by doing your work in the position to which you have been called in a way that brings the respect of your fellow-men to you, and therefore to those for whom you stand. Let it be a matter of pride with the Christian in the army that in the time of danger no man is nearer that danger than he is. Let it be a matter of pride to the officer whose duty it is to fight that no man, when the country calls on him to fight, fights better than he does. That is how you can do more for Christianity, for the name of Christians, you who are in the army. Let the man in a civil governmental position so bear himself that it shall be acceptable as axiomatic that when you have a Christian, a graduate of a missionary school, in a public office, the efficiency and honesty of that office are guaranteed. That is the kind of Christianity that counts in a public official, that counts in the military official—the Christianity that makes him do his duty in war, or makes him do his duty in peace. And you—who I hope will be the great majority—who are not in Government service, can conduct yourselves so that your neighbors shall have every respect for your courage, your honesty, your good faith, shall have implicit trust that you will deal religiously with your brother as man to man, whether it be in business or whether it be in connection with your relations to the community as a whole. The kind of graduate of a Christian school really worth calling a Christian is the man who shows his creed practically by the way he behaves towards his wife and towards his children, towards his neighbor, towards those with whom he deals in the business world, and towards the city and Government. In no way can he do as much for the institution that trains him, in no way can he do as much to bring respect and regard to the creed that he professes. And, remember, you need more than one quality. I have spoken of courage; it is, of course, the first virtue of the soldier, but every one of you who is worth his salt must have it in him too. Do not forget that the good man who is afraid is only a handicap to his fellows who are striving for what is best. I want to see each Christian cultivate the manly virtues; each to be able to hold his own in the country, but in a broil not thrusting himself forward. Avoid quarrelling wherever you can. Make it evident that the other man wants to avoid quarrelling with you too.
One closing word. Do not make the mistake, those of you who are young men, of thinking that when you get out of school or college your education stops. On the contrary, it is only about half begun. Now, I am fifty years old, and if I had stopped learning, if I felt now that I had stopped learning, had stopped trying to better myself, I feel that my usefulness to the community would be pretty nearly at an end. And I want each of you, as he leaves college, not to feel, "Now I have had my education, I can afford to vegetate." I want you to feel, "I have been given a great opportunity of laying deep the foundations for a ripe education, and while going on with my work I am going to keep training myself, educating myself, so that year by year, decade by decade, instead of standing still I shall go forward, and grow constantly fitter, and do good work and better work."
I visited, many years ago, the college at Beirut. I have known at first hand what excellent work was being done there. Unfortunately, owing to my very limited time, it is not going to be possible for me to stop at the college at Assiut, which has done such admirable work in Egypt and here in the Sudan, whose graduates I meet in all kinds of occupations wherever I stop. I am proud, as an American, Dr. Giffen, of what has been done by men like you, like Mr. Young, like the other Americans who have been here, and, I want to say still further, by the women who have come with them. I always thought that the American was a pretty good fellow. I think his wife is still better, and, great though my respect for the man from America has been, my respect for the woman has been greater.
I stopped a few days ago at the little mission at the Sobat. One of the things that struck me there was what was being accomplished by the medical side of that mission. From one hundred and twenty-five miles around there were patients who had come in to be attended to by the doctors in the mission. There were about thirty patients who were under the charge of the surgeon, the doctor, at that mission. I do not know a better type of missionary than the doctor who comes out here and does his work well and gives his whole heart to it. He is doing practical work of the most valuable type for civilization, and for bringing the people of the country up to a realization of the standards that you are trying to set. If you make it evident to a man that you are sincerely concerned in bettering his body, he will be much more ready to believe that you are trying to better his soul.
Now, gentlemen, it has been a great pleasure to see you. When I get back to the United States, this meeting is one of the things I shall have to tell to my people at home, so that I may give them an idea of what is being done in this country. I wish you well with all my heart, and I thank you for having received me to-day.
Law and Order in Egypt
An Address before the National University in Cairo, March 28, 1910
It is to me a peculiar pleasure to speak to-day under such distinguished auspices as yours, Prince Fouad,3 before this National University, and it is of good augury for the great cause of higher education in Egypt that it should have enlisted the special interest of so distinguished and eminent a man. The Arabic-speaking world produced the great University of Cordova, which flourished a thousand years ago, and was a source of light and learning when the rest of Europe was either in twilight or darkness; in the centuries following the creation of that Spanish Moslem university, Arabic men of science, travellers, and geographers—such as the noteworthy African traveller Ibn Batutu, a copy of whose book, by the way, I saw yesterday in the library of the Alhazar4—were teachers whose works are still to be eagerly studied; and I trust that here we shall see the revival, and more than the revival, of the conditions that made possible such contributions to the growth of civilization.
This scheme of a National University is fraught with literally untold possibilities for good to your country. You have many rocks ahead of which you must steer clear; and because I am your earnest friend and well-wisher, I desire to point out one or two of these which it is necessary especially to avoid. In the first place, there is one point upon which I always lay stress in my own country, in your country, in all countries—the need of entire honesty as the only foundation on which it is safe to build. It is a prime essential that all who are in any way responsible for the beginnings of the University shall make it evident to every one that the management of the University, financial and otherwise, will be conducted with absolute honesty. Very much money will have to be raised and expended for this University in order to make it what it can and ought to be made; for, if properly managed, I firmly believe that it will become one of the greatest influences, and perhaps the very greatest influence, for good in all that part of the world where Mohammedanism is the leading religion; that is, in all those regions of the Orient, including North Africa and Southwestern Asia, which stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the farther confines of India and to the hither provinces of China. This University should have a profound influence in all things educational, social, economic, industrial, throughout this whole region, because of the very fact of Egypt's immense strategic importance, so to speak, in the world of the Orient; an importance due partly to her geographical position, partly to other causes. Moreover, it is most fortunate that Egypt's present position is such that this University will enjoy a freedom hitherto unparalleled in the investigation and testing out of all problems vital to the future of the peoples of the Orient.
Nor will the importance of this University be confined to the Orient. Egypt must necessarily from now on always occupy a similar strategic position as regards the peoples of the Occident, for she sits on one of the highways of the commerce that will flow in ever-increasing volume from Europe to the East. Those responsible for the management of this University should set before themselves a very high ideal. Not merely should it stand for the uplifting of all Mohammedan peoples and of all Christians and peoples of other religions who live in Mohammedan lands, but it should also carry its teaching and practice to such perfection as in the end to make it a factor in instructing the Occident. When a scholar is sufficiently apt, sufficiently sincere and intelligent, he always has before him the opportunity of eventually himself giving aid to the teachers from whom he has received aid.
Now, to make a good beginning towards the definite achievement of these high ends, it is essential that you should command respect and should be absolutely trusted. Make it felt that you will not tolerate the least little particle of financial crookedness in the raising or expenditure of any money, so that those who wish to give money to this deserving cause may feel entire confidence that their piasters will be well and honestly applied.
In the next place, show the same good faith, wisdom, and sincerity in your educational plans that you do in the financial management of the institution. Avoid sham and hollow pretence just as you avoid religious, racial, or political bigotry. You have much to learn from the universities of Europe and of my own land, but there is also in them not a little which it is well to avoid. Copy what is good in them, but test in a critical spirit whatever you take, so as to be sure that you take only what is wisest and best for yourselves. More important even than avoiding any mere educational shortcoming is the avoidance of moral shortcoming. Students are already being sent to Europe to prepare themselves to return as professors. Such preparation is now essential, for it is of prime importance that the University should be familiar with what is being done in the best universities of Europe and America. But let the men who are sent be careful to bring back what is fine and good, what is essential to the highest kind of modern progress, and let them avoid what are the mere non-essentials of the present-day civilization, and, above all, the vices of modern civilized nations. Let these men keep open minds. It would be a capital blunder to refuse to copy, and thereafter to adapt to your own needs, what has raised the Occident in the scale of power and justice and clean living. But it would be a no less capital blunder to copy what is cheap or trivial or vicious, or even what is merely wrongheaded. Let the men who go to Europe feel that they have much to learn and much also to avoid and reject; let them bring back the good and leave behind the discarded evil.
Remember that character is far more important than intellect, and that a really great university should strive to develop the qualities that go to make up character even more than the qualities that go to make up a highly trained mind. No man can reach the front rank if he is not intelligent and if he is not trained with intelligence; but mere intelligence by itself is worse than useless unless it is guided by an upright heart, unless there are also strength and courage behind it. Morality, decency, clean living, courage, manliness, self-respect—these qualities are more important in the make-up of a people than any mental subtlety. Shape this University's course so that it shall help in the production of a constantly upward trend for all your people.
You should be always on your guard against one defect in Western education. There has been altogether too great a tendency in the higher schools of learning in the West to train men merely for literary, professional, and official positions; altogether too great a tendency to act as if a literary education were the only real education. I am exceedingly glad that you have already started industrial and agricultural schools in Egypt. A literary education is simply one of many different kinds of education, and it is not wise that more than a small percentage of the people of any country should have an exclusively literary education. The average man must either supplement it by another education, or else as soon as he has left an institution of learning, even though he has benefited by it, he must at once begin to train himself to do work along totally different lines. His Highness the Khedive, in the midst of his activities touching many phases of Egyptian life, has shown conspicuous wisdom, great foresight, and keen understanding of the needs of the country in the way in which he has devoted himself to its agricultural betterment, in the interest which he has taken in the improvement of cattle, crops, etc. You need in this country, as is the case in every other country, a certain number of men whose education shall fit them for the life of scholarship, or to become teachers or public officials. But it is a very unhealthy thing for any country for more than a small proportion of the strongest and best minds of the country to turn into such channels. It is essential also to develop industrialism, to train people so that they can be cultivators of the soil in the largest sense on as successful a scale as the most successful lawyer or public man, to train them so that they shall be engineers, merchants—in short, men able to take the lead in all the various functions indispensable in a great modern civilized state. An honest, courageous, and far-sighted politician is a good thing in any country. But his usefulness will depend chiefly upon his being able to express the wishes of a population wherein the politician forms but a fragment of the leadership, where the business man and the landowner, the engineer and the man of technical knowledge, the men of a hundred different pursuits, represent the average type of leadership. No people has ever permanently amounted to anything if its only public leaders were clerks, politicians, and lawyers. The base, the foundation, of healthy life in any country, in any society, is necessarily composed of the men who do the actual productive work of the country, whether in tilling the soil, in the handicrafts, or in business; and it matters little whether they work with hands or head, although more and more we are growing to realize that it is a good thing to have the same man work with both head and hands. These men, in many different careers, do the work which is most important to the community's life; although, of course, it must be supplemented by the work of the other men whose education and activities are literary and scholastic, of the men who work in politics or law, or in literary and clerical positions.
Never forget that in any country the most important activities are the activities of the man who works with head or hands in the ordinary life of the community, whether he be handicraftsman, farmer, or business man—no matter what his occupation, so long as it is useful and no matter what his position, from the guiding intelligence at the top down all the way through, just as long as his work is good. I preach this to you here by the banks of the Nile, and it is the identical doctrine I preach no less earnestly by the banks of the Hudson, the Mississippi, and the Columbia.
Remember always that the securing of a substantial education, whether by the individual or by a people, is attained only by a process, not by an act. You can no more make a man really educated by giving him a certain curriculum of studies than you can make a people fit for self-government by giving it a paper constitution. The training of an individual so as to fit him to do good work in the world is a matter of years; just as the training of a nation to fit it successfully to fulfil the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or two, but of generations. There are foolish empiricists who believe that the granting of a paper constitution, prefaced by some high-sounding declaration, of itself confers the power of self-government upon a people. This is never so. Nobody can "give" a people "self-government," any more than it is possible to "give" an individual "self-help." You know that the Arab proverb runs, "God helps those who help themselves." In the long run, the only permanent way by which an individual can be helped is to help him to help himself, and this is one of the things your University should inculcate. But it must be his own slow growth in character that is the final and determining factor in the problem. So it is with a people. In the two Americas we have seen certain commonwealths rise and prosper greatly. We have also seen other commonwealths start under identically the same conditions, with the same freedom and the same rights, the same guarantees, and yet have seen them fail miserably and lamentably, and sink into corruption and anarchy and tyranny, simply because the people for whom the constitution was made did not develop the qualities which alone would enable them to take advantage of it. With any people the essential quality to show is, not haste in grasping after a power which it is only too easy to misuse, but a slow, steady, resolute development of those substantial qualities, such as the love of justice, the love of fair play, the spirit of self-reliance, of moderation, which alone enable a people to govern themselves. In this long and even tedious but absolutely essential process, I believe your University will take an important part. When I was recently in the Sudan I heard a vernacular proverb, based on a text in the Koran, which is so apt that, although not an Arabic scholar, I shall attempt to repeat it in Arabic: "Allah ma el saberin, izza sabaru"—God is with the patient, if they know how to wait.5
One essential feature of this process must be a spirit which will condemn every form of lawless evil, every form of envy and hatred, and, above all, hatred based upon religion or race. All good men, all the men of every nation whose respect is worth having, have been inexpressibly shocked by the recent assassination of Boutros Pasha. It was an even greater calamity for Egypt than it was a wrong to the individual himself. The type of man which turns out an assassin is a type possessing all the qualities most alien to good citizenship; the type which produces poor soldiers in time of war and worse citizens in time of peace. Such a man stands on a pinnacle of evil infamy; and those who apologize for or condone his act, those who, by word or deed, directly or indirectly, encourage such an act in advance, or defend it afterwards, occupy the same bad eminence. It is of no consequence whether the assassin be a Moslem or a Christian or a man of no creed; whether the crime be committed in political strife or industrial warfare; whether it be an act hired by a rich man or performed by a poor man; whether it be committed under the pretence of preserving order or the pretence of obtaining liberty. It is equally abhorrent in the eyes of all decent men, and, in the long run, equally damaging to the very cause to which the assassin professes to be devoted.
Your University is a National University, and as such knows no creed. This is as it should be. When I speak of equality between Moslem and Christian, I speak as one who believes that where the Christian is more powerful he should be scrupulous in doing justice to the Moslem, exactly as under reverse conditions justice should be done by the Moslem to the Christian. In my own country we have in the Philippines Moslems as well as Christians. We do not tolerate for one moment any oppression by the one or by the other, any discrimination by the Government between them or failure to mete out the same justice to each, treating each man on his worth as a man, and behaving towards him as his conduct demands and deserves.
In short, gentlemen, I earnestly hope that all responsible for the beginnings of the University, which I trust will become one of the greatest and most powerful educational influences throughout the whole world, will feel it incumbent upon themselves to frown on every form of wrong-doing, whether in the shape of injustice or corruption or lawlessness, and to stand with firmness, with good sense, and with courage, for those immutable principles of justice and merciful dealing as between man and man, without which there can never be the slightest growth towards a really fine and high civilization.
Citizenship in a Republic
An Address Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, plowmen, woodchoppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our race. The primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest schools can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage man and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit. The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of the Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that, Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours—an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or of a very few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nation may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness.
But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for the heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their—your—chances of useful service are at an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief towards all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a soldier."
France has taught many lessons to other nations; surely one of the most important is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries at every court in Europe the "freemasons of fashion" have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvellous instrument of precision, French prose, has turned towards France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland's doom and the vengeance of Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish host were stricken at Roncesvalles.
Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character—the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common-sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him. I do not for one moment admit that political morality is different from private morality, that a promise made on the stump differs from a promise made in private life. I do not for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealings with other nations, any more than that he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.
In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account. We speak of international law; but international law is something wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience as regards the other. International law will, I believe, as the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of necessity obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital importance between it and its neighbors, and actions must of necessity, where this is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise statesmen, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep ever in mind that in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to resent wrong-doing from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals should be high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two Republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom or strength, which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing of a time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for it. You have had a great past. I believe that you will have a great future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
International Peace
An Address before the Nobel Prize Committee Delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910
It is with peculiar pleasure that I stand here to-day to express the deep appreciation I feel of the high honor conferred upon me by the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize.6 The gold medal which formed part of the prize I shall always keep, and I shall hand it on to my children as a precious heirloom. The sum of money provided as part of the prize by the wise generosity of the illustrious founder of this world-famous prize system I did not, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, feel at liberty to keep. I think it eminently just and proper that in most cases the recipient of the prize should keep for his own use the prize in its entirety. But in this case, while I did not act officially as President of the United States, it was nevertheless only because I was President that I was enabled to act at all; and I felt that the money must be considered as having been given me in trust for the United States. I therefore used it as a nucleus for a foundation to forward the cause of industrial peace, as being well within the general purpose of your Committee; for in our complex industrial civilization of to-day the peace of righteousness and justice, the only kind of peace worth having, is at least as necessary in the industrial world as it is among nations. There is at least as much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in international relationships.
We must ever bear in mind that the great end in view is righteousness, justice as between man and man, nation and nation, the chance to lead our lives on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of brotherly good-will one for another. Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life; but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.
Moreover, and above all, let us remember that words count only when they give expression to deeds or are to be translated into them. The leaders of the Red Terror prattled of peace while they steeped their hands in the blood of the innocent; and many a tyrant has called it peace when he has scourged honest protest into silence. Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.
Now, having freely admitted the limitations to our work, and the qualifications to be borne in mind, I feel that I have the right to have my words taken seriously when I point out where, in my judgment, great advance can be made in the cause of international peace. I speak as a practical man, and whatever I now advocate I actually tried to do when I was for the time being the head of a great nation, and keenly jealous of its honor and interest. I ask other nations to do only what I should be glad to see my own nation do.
The advance can be made along several lines. First of all, there can be treaties of arbitration. There are, of course, states so backward that a civilized community ought not to enter into an arbitration treaty with them, at least until we have gone much further than at present in securing some kind of international police action. But all really civilized communities should have effective arbitration treaties among themselves. I believe that these treaties can cover almost all questions liable to arise between such nations, if they are drawn with the explicit agreement that each contracting party will respect the other's territory and its absolute sovereignty within that territory, and the equally explicit agreement that (aside from the very rare cases where the nation's honor is vitally concerned) all other possible subjects of controversy will be submitted to arbitration. Such a treaty would insure peace unless one party deliberately violated it. Of course, as yet there is no adequate safeguard against such deliberate violation, but the establishment of a sufficient number of these treaties would go a long way towards creating a world opinion which would finally find expression in the provision of methods to forbid or punish any such violation.
Secondly, there is the further development of The Hague Tribunal, of the work of the conferences and courts at The Hague. It has been well said that the first Hague Conference framed a Magna Charta for the nations; it set before us an ideal which has already to some extent been realized, and towards the full realization of which we can all steadily strive. The second Conference made further progress; the third should do yet more. Meanwhile the American Government has more than once tentatively suggested methods for completing the Court of Arbitral Justice, constituted at the second Hague Conference, and for rendering it effective. It is earnestly to be hoped that the various Governments of Europe, working with those of America and of Asia, shall set themselves seriously to the task of devising some method which shall accomplish this result. If I may venture the suggestion, it would be well for the statesmen of the world in planning for the erection of this world court, to study what has been done in the United States by the Supreme Court. I cannot help thinking that the Constitution of the United States, notably in the establishment of the Supreme Court and in the methods adopted for securing peace and good relations among and between the different States, offers certain valuable analogies to what should be striven for in order to secure, through The Hague courts and conferences, a species of world federation for international peace and justice. There are, of course, fundamental differences between what the United States Constitution does and what we should even attempt at this time to secure at The Hague; but the methods adopted in the American Constitution to prevent hostilities between the States, and to secure the supremacy of the Federal Court in certain classes of cases, are well worth the study of those who seek at The Hague to obtain the same results on a world scale.
In the third place, something should be done as soon as possible to check the growth of armaments, especially naval armaments, by international agreement. No one Power could or should act by itself; for it is eminently undesirable, from the standpoint of the peace of righteousness, that a Power which really does believe in peace should place itself at the mercy of some rival which may at bottom have no such belief and no intention of acting on it. But, granted sincerity of purpose, the great Powers of the world should find no insurmountable difficulty in reaching an agreement which would put an end to the present costly and growing extravagance of expenditure on naval armaments. An agreement merely to limit the size of ships would have been very useful a few years ago, and would still be of use; but the agreement should go much further.
Finally, it would be a master stroke if those great Powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others. The supreme difficulty in connection with developing the peace work of The Hague arises from the lack of any executive power, of any police power, to enforce the decrees of the court. In any community of any size the authority of the courts rests upon actual or potential force; on the existence of a police, or on the knowledge that the able-bodied men of the country are both ready and willing to see that the decrees of judicial and legislative bodies are put into effect. In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down violence. So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace within certain definite limits and certain definite conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind.
The Colonial Policy of the United States
An Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, on the Evening of May 5, 1910
When I first heard that I was to speak again this evening, my heart failed me. But directly after hearing Mr. Bratlie7 I feel that it is a pleasure to say one or two things; and before saying them, let me express my profound acknowledgment for your words. You have been not only more than just but more than generous. Because I have been so kindly treated, I am going to trespass on your kindness still further, and say a word or two about my own actions while I was President. I do not speak of them, my friends, save to illustrate the thesis that I especially uphold, that the man who has the power to act is to be judged not by his words but by his acts—by his words in so far as they agree with his acts. All that I say about peace I wish to have judged and measured by what I actually did as President.
I was particularly pleased by what you said about our course, the course of the American people, in connection with the Philippines and Cuba. I believe that we have the Cuban Minister here with us to-night? [A voice: "Yes."] Well, then, we have a friend who can check off what I am going to say. At the close of the war of '98 we found our army in possession of Cuba, and man after man among the European diplomats of the old school said to me: "Oh, you will never go out of Cuba. You said you would, of course, but that is quite understood; nations don't expect promises like that to be kept." As soon as I became President, I said, "Now you will see that the promise will be kept." We appointed a day when we would leave Cuba. On that day Cuba began its existence as an independent republic. Later there came a disaster, there came a revolution, and we were obliged to land troops again, while I was President, and then the same gentlemen with whom I had conversed before said: "Now you are relieved from your promise; your promise has been kept, and now you will stay in Cuba." I answered: "No, we shall not. We will keep the promise not only in the letter but in the spirit. We will stay in Cuba to help it on its feet, and then we will leave the island in better shape to maintain its permanent independent existence." And before I left the Presidency Cuba resumed its career as a separate republic, holding its head erect as a sovereign state among the other nations of the earth. All that our people want is just exactly what the Cuban people themselves want—that is, a continuance of order within the island, and peace and prosperity, so that there shall be no shadow of an excuse for any outside intervention.
We acted along the same general lines in the case of San Domingo. We intervened only so far as to prevent the need of taking possession of the island. None of you will know of this, so I will just tell you briefly what it was that we did. The Republic of San Domingo, in the West Indies, had suffered from a good many revolutions. In one particular period when I had to deal with the island, while I was President, it was a little difficult to know what to do, because there were two separate governments in the island, and a revolution going on against each. A number of dictators, under the title of President, had seized power at different times, had borrowed money at exorbitant rates of interest from Europeans and Americans, and had pledged the custom-houses of the different towns to different countries; and the chief object of each revolutionary was to get hold of the custom-houses. Things got to such a pass that it became evident that certain European Powers would land and take possession of parts of the island. We then began negotiations with the Government of the island. We sent down ships to keep within limits various preposterous little manifestations of the revolutionary habit, and, after some negotiations, we concluded an agreement. It was agreed that we should put a man in as head of the custom-houses, that the collection of customs should be entirely under the management of that man, and that no one should be allowed to interfere with the custom-houses. Revolutions could go on outside them without interference from us; but the custom-houses were not to be touched. We agreed to turn over to the San Domingo Government forty-five per cent. of the revenue, keeping fifty-five per cent. as a fund to be applied to a settlement with the creditors. The creditors also acquiesced in what we had done, and we started the new arrangement. I found considerable difficulty in getting the United States Senate to ratify the treaty, but I went ahead anyhow and executed it until it was ratified. Finally it was ratified, for the opposition was a purely factious opposition, representing the smallest kind of politics with a leaven of even baser motive. Under the treaty we have turned over to the San Domingo Government forty-five per cent. of the revenues collected, and yet we have turned over nearly double as much as they ever got when they collected it all themselves. In addition, we have collected sufficient to make it certain that the creditors will receive every cent to which they are entitled. It is self-evident, therefore, that in this affair we gave a proof of our good faith. We might have taken possession of San Domingo. Instead of thus taking possession, we put into the custom-houses one head man and half a dozen assistants, to see that the revenues were honestly collected, and at the same time served notice that they should not be forcibly taken away; and the result has been an extraordinary growth of the tranquillity and prosperity of the islands, while at the same time the creditors are equally satisfied, and all danger of outside interference has ceased.
That incident illustrates two things: First, if a nation acts in good faith, it can often bring about peace without abridging the liberties of another nation. Second, our experience emphasizes the fact (which every Peace Association should remember) that the hysterical sentimentalist for peace is a mighty poor person to follow. I was actually assailed, right and left, by the more extreme members of the peace propaganda in the United States for what I did in San Domingo; most of the other professional peace advocates took no interest in the matter, or were tepidly hostile; however, I went straight ahead and did the job. The ultra-peace people attacked me on the ground that I had "declared war" against San Domingo, the "war" taking the shape of the one man put in charge of the custom-houses! This will seem to you incredible, but I am giving you an absolutely accurate account of what occurred. I disregarded those foolish people, as I shall always disregard sentimentalists of that type when they are guilty of folly. At the present we have comparative peace and prosperity in the island, in consequence of my action, and of my disregard of these self-styled advocates of peace.
The same reasoning applies in connection with what we did at the Isthmus of Panama, and what we are doing in the Philippines. Our colonial problems in the Philippines are not the same as the colonial problems of other Powers. We have in the Philippines a people mainly Asiatic in blood, but with a streak of European blood and with the traditions of European culture, so that their ideals are largely the ideals of Europe. At the moment when we entered the islands the people were hopelessly unable to stand alone. If we had abandoned the islands, we should have left them a prey to anarchy for some months, and then they would have been seized by some other Power ready to perform the task that we had not been able to perform. Now I hold that it is not worth while being a big nation if you cannot do a big task; I care not whether that task is digging the Panama Canal or handling the Philippines. In the Philippines I feel that the day will ultimately come when the Philippine people must settle for themselves whether they wish to be entirely independent, or in some shape to keep up a connection with us. The day has not yet come; it may not come for a generation or two. One of the greatest friends that liberty has ever had, the great British statesman Burke, said on one occasion that there must always be government, and that if there is not government from within, then it must be supplied from without. A child has to be governed from without, because it has not yet grown to a point when it can govern itself from within; and a people that shows itself totally unable to govern itself from within must expect to submit to more or less of government from without, because it cannot continue to exist on other terms—indeed, it cannot be permitted permanently to exist as a source of danger to other nations. Our aim in the Philippines is to train the people so that they may govern themselves from within. Until they have reached this point they cannot have self-government. I will never advocate self-government for a people so long as their self-government means crime, violence, and extortion, corruption within, lawlessness among themselves and towards others. If that is what self-government means to any people then they ought to be governed by others until they can do better.
What I have related represents a measure of practical achievement in the way of helping forward the cause of peace and justice, and of giving to different peoples freedom of action according to the capacities of each. It is not possible, as the world is now constituted, to treat every nation as one private individual can treat all other private individuals, because as yet there is no way of enforcing obedience to law among nations as there is among private individuals. If in the streets of this city a man walks about with the intent to kill somebody, if he manages his house so that it becomes a source of infection to the neighborhood, the community, with its law officers, deals with him forthwith. That is just what happened at Panama, and, as nobody else was able to deal with the matter, I dealt with it myself, on behalf of the United States Government, and now the Canal is being dug, and the people of Panama have their independence and a prosperity hitherto unknown in that country.
In the end, I firmly believe that some method will be devised by which the people of the world, as a whole, will be able to insure peace, as it cannot now be insured. How soon that end will come I do not know; it may be far distant; and until it does come I think that, while we should give all the support that we can to any possible feasible scheme for quickly bringing about such a state of affairs, yet we should meanwhile do the more practicable, though less sensational, things. Let us advance step by step; let us, for example, endeavor to increase the number of arbitration treaties and enlarge the methods for obtaining peaceful settlements. Above all, let us strive to awaken the public international conscience, so that it shall be expected, and expected efficiently, of the public men responsible for the management of any nation's affairs that those affairs shall be conducted with all proper regard for the interests and well-being of other Powers, great or small.
The World Movement
An Address Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910
I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making, to a country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West became in fact a German Empire. Throughout mediæval times the Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.
After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working for a new uplift of civilization in Western Europe was round the Karling House, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat of whose Empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion in Middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the Karling Empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen North, and new hordes of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the early Emperors of Germany proper who quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.
To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the great nations of Middle and Western Europe; which has inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers whose children's children have been and are being fused into the American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in every way closer than it has ever been before.
Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life of this University covers the period during which that movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent; while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.
When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight. Further ages passed, while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature, changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the development of life generally and what has gone on in the development of human society, and these I shall discuss elsewhere.8 But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.
Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization—for, properly speaking, there was no one movement—were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire—and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.
Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have developed our own; while it is also difficult to say exactly how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which Stonehenge is the type.
The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate present—and which is but a span's length from the present, even when compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.
Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness. The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual, was much faster than anything that had occurred during the æons of mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement was very slow indeed, and, moreover, in each case it was strongly localized; while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a "world movement" at all; for by far the greater part of the habitable globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.
With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man, when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically these three peoples—although, judged even by the history of which we have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.
The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus, until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.
The Græco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that affected a far larger share of the world's surface. For the first time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a "world movement" in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of the world's surface and that it represented what was incomparably the most important of all that was happening in world history at the time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas. Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later which fully avenged it.
This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace our descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far more thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both conquests were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest which in its ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.
With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned. During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted with qualifications. There is no hard and fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of architecture—especially cathedral architecture—and of serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.
During this period there were several very important extra-European movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose, and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any European influence.
Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction—Hun and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.
At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement towards a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures which culminated in the discovery of America; and after these two epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization. Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as varied as it is striking.
In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate and sub-tropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators, as in most of tropical Asia and Africa and in much of tropical America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan's growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.
There are of course many grades between these different types of influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is at present no large space of territory in which the general movement of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was felt over only a relatively small portion of the world's surface. Over much the larger part of the world the process of change and development was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in action and reaction, and in inter-action, among themselves, were grouped immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.
Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The student of sociology may live in Berlin or St. Petersburg, Rome or London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Aires; but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life insurance for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is accomplished in the laboratories of Tokyo, just as he must know the details of that practical application of science which has changed the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating or applying Socialism, there is no movement of note which can take place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before.
So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces, in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.
The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature. In both directions the advance has been very great during the past four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year 150 A.D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate than any which we had as late as 1850 A.D. More was known of physical science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern movement began. The case was the same as regards military science. At the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always been—sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this University was founded, the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were not materially improved. A graduate of your University to-day can go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one of the most formidable problems of modern life.
Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when our children's children, or their children's children, shall dwell in an ironless age—and, later on, in an age without coal—and will have to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century, more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine, the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of the human race.
The advances in the realm of pure intellect have been of equal note, and they have been both intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields of learning and wisdom have been discovered by the few, and at the same time knowledge has spread among the many to a degree never dreamed of before. Old men among us have seen in their own generation the rise of the first rational science of the evolution of life. The astronomer and the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, and all their brethren in many different fields of wide endeavor, work with a training and knowledge and method which are in effect instruments of precision, differentiating their labors from the labors of their predecessors as the rifle is differentiated from the bow.
The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the main-spring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Græco-Roman civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement, wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in applied science—all these mark our civilization as they marked the wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.
One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand, merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now I will not assert that in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly overcome; but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome them than was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously shown by the military history of the Græco-Roman period as compared with the history of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and among nations of European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military history the change was steadily from a citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the days of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when the Roman Republic conquered what world it knew, the armies were filled with citizen soldiers. But gradually the citizens refused to serve in the armies, or became unable to render good service. The Greek states described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, hired others to do their fighting for them. The Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any infantry, to the legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to an end, there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers. The change from the citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been completed.
Now, the exact reverse has been the case with us in modern times. A few centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the principal figure in most armies, and in great numbers of cases the mercenary soldier was an alien. In the wars of religion in France, in the Thirty Years' War in Germany, in the wars that immediately thereafter marked the beginning of the break-up of the great Polish Kingdom, the regiments and brigades of foreign soldiers formed a striking and leading feature in every army. Too often the men of the country in which the fighting took place played merely the ignoble part of victims, the burghers and peasants appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary armies by which they were plundered. Gradually this has all changed, until now practically every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary has almost disappeared, while the army exists on a vaster scale than ever before in history. This is so among the military monarchies of Europe. In our own Civil War of the United States the same thing occurred, peaceful people as we are. At that time more than two generations had passed since the War of Independence. During the whole of that period the people had been engaged in no life-and-death struggle; and yet, when the Civil War broke out, and after some costly and bitter lessons at the beginning, the fighting spirit of the people was shown to better advantage than ever before. The war was peculiarly a war for a principle, a war waged by each side for an ideal, and while faults and shortcomings were plentiful among the combatants, there was comparatively little sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant struggle, where across the warp of so many interests is shot the woof of so many purposes, dark strands and bright, strands sombre and brilliant, are always intertwined; inevitably there was corruption here and there in the Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides, and the great majority of the enormous masses of fighting men, wholly disregarded, and were wholly uninfluenced by, pecuniary considerations. There were of course foreigners who came over to serve as soldiers of fortune for money or for love of adventure; but the foreign-born citizens served in much the same proportion, and from the same motives, as the native-born. Taken as a whole, it was, even more than the Revolutionary War, a true citizens' fight, and the armies of Grant and Lee were as emphatically citizen armies as Athenian, Theban, or Spartan armies in the great age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the days of the Republic.
Another striking contrast in the course of modern civilization as compared with the later stages of the Græco-Roman or classic civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and politics. In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its zenith, politics became a recognized means of accumulating great wealth. Cæsar was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he spent an enormous fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which he made out of his political-military career. Augustus established Imperial Rome on firm foundations by the use he made of the huge fortune he had acquired by plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of Washington and Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their civilizations culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as one of the incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is in sharp contrast to what has happened within the last two or three centuries. During this time there has been a steady growth away from the theory that money-making is permissible in an honorable public career. In this respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and things which statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or two centuries ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career even a century ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still exercise a large, and sometimes an improper, influence in politics, but it is apt to be an indirect influence; and in the advanced states the mere suspicion that the wealth of public men is obtained or added to as an incident of their public careers will bar them from public life. Speaking generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern political life, but it is not acquired in political life. The colonial administrators, German or American, French or English, of this generation lead careers which, as compared with the careers of other men of like ability, show too little rather than too much regard for money-making; and literally a world scandal would be caused by conduct which a Roman proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and which would not have been especially uncommon even in the administration of England a century and a half ago. On the whole, the great statesmen of the last few generations have been either men of moderate means, or, if men of wealth, men whose wealth was diminished rather than increased by their public services.
I have dwelt on these points merely because it is well to emphasize in the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many respects there is a complete lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day and the only other civilization in any way comparable to it, that of the ancient Græco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many points in which the analogy is close, and in some of these points the resemblances are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of all is the fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of interest, and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization can be compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now literally a world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid and is ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at one point is certain to be felt with greater or less effect at almost every other point. Every path of activity open to the human intellect is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto dreamed of. We have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in consequence, a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and daring souls have before them a well-nigh limitless opening for endeavor of any kind.
Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been able to develop only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field of endeavor has been limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, of course, been great movements, but they were of practically only one form of activity; and although usually this set in motion other kinds of activities, such was not always the case. The great religious movements have been the pre-eminent examples of this type. But they are not the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the Phoenicians, at almost opposite poles of cultivation, have represented movements in which one element, military or commercial, so overshadowed all other elements that the movement died out chiefly because it was one-sided. The extraordinary outburst of activity among the Mongols of the thirteenth century was almost purely a military movement, without even any great administrative side; and it was therefore well-nigh purely a movement of destruction. The individual prowess and hardihood of the Mongols, and the perfection of their military organization, rendered their armies incomparably superior to those of any European, or any other Asiatic, power of that day. They conquered from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic; they seized the Imperial throne of China; they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they had no root of permanence; their work was mere evil while it lasted, and it did not last long; and when they vanished they left hardly a trace behind them. So the extraordinary Phoenician civilization was almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization, and though it left an impress on the life that came after, this impress was faint indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks with their many-sided development. Yet the Greek civilization itself fell, because this many-sided development became too exclusively one of intellect, at the expense of character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities which fit men to govern both themselves and others. When the Greek lost the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes? We cannot be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty.
Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true. We cannot afford to develop any one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phoenician, nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.
We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family life, the fundamental and essential qualities—the homely, every-day, all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy children, then the State will topple, will go down, no matter what may be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be that power of organization, that power of working in common for a common end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion during the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the hard intolerance and and intellectual barrenness of what was worst in the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern philosophy in its various branches, it would be worse than folly on our part to ignore our need of intellectual leadership. Your own great Frederick once said that if he wished to punish a province he would leave it to be governed by philosophers; the sneer had in it an element of justice; and yet no one better than the great Frederick knew the value of philosophers, the value of men of science, men of letters, men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed to accept Tolstoy as a guide in social and moral matters; but it would also be a bad thing not to have Tolstoy, not to profit by the lofty side of his teachings. There are plenty of scientific men whose hard arrogance, whose cynical materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put them on a level with the bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they denounce. Yet our debt to scientific men is incalculable, and our civilization of to-day would have reft from it all that which most highly distinguishes it if the work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of well-being than was ever attained by any preceding civilization. Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!
It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of sentimental attachment to the rights of man; in which a high material development in the things of the body shall be achieved without subordination of the things of the soul; in which there shall be a genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of those virile qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall avail any race; in which the fullest development of scientific research, the great distinguishing feature of our present civilization, shall yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever take the place of character—for, from the standpoint of the nation as of the individual, it is character that is the one vital possession.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's well-being. You, my hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the people of my own land.
The Conditions of Success
An Address at the Cambridge Union, May 26, 1910
Mr. President and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure for me to be here to-day and to address you and to wear what the Secretary9 has called the gilded trappings which show that I am one of the youngest living graduates of Cambridge. Something in the nature of a tract was handed to me before I came up here. It was an issue of the Gownsman [holding up, amid laughter, a copy of an undergraduate publication] with a poem portraying the poet's natural anxiety lest I should preach at him. Allow me to interpose an anecdote taken from your own hunting field. A one-time Master of Foxhounds strongly objected to the presence of a rather near-sighted and very hard-riding friend who at times insisted on riding in the middle of the pack; and on one occasion he earnestly addressed him as follows: "Mr. So and So, would you mind looking at those two dogs, Ploughboy and Melody. They are very valuable, and I really wish you would not jump on them." To which his friend replied, with great courtesy: "My dear sir, I should be delighted to oblige you, but unfortunately I have left my glasses at home, and I am afraid they must take their chance." I will promise to preach as little as I can, but you must take your chance, for it is impossible to break the bad habit of a lifetime at the bidding of a comparative stranger. I was deeply touched by the allusion to the lion and the coat-of-arms. Before I reached London I was given to understand that it was expected that when I walked through Trafalgar Square, I should look the other way as I passed the lions.
Now I thank you very much for having made me an honorary member. Harvard men feel peculiarly at home when they come to Cambridge. We feel we are in the domain of our spiritual forefathers, and I doubt if you yourselves can appreciate what it is to walk about the courts, to see your buildings, and your pictures and statues of the innumerable men whose names we know so well, and who have been brought closer to us by what we see here. That would apply not alone to men of the past. The Bishop of Ely to you is the Bishop of to-day; but I felt like asking him when I met him this morning, "Where is Hereward the Wake?" It gives an American university man a peculiar feeling to come here and see so much that tells of the ancient history of the University.
The tie between Harvard and Cambridge has always been kept up. I remember when you sent over Mr. Lehmann to teach us how to row. He found us rather refractory pupils, I am afraid. In the course of the struggle, the captain of the Harvard crew was eliminated. He afterwards came down to Cuba and was one of the very best captains in my regiment. At that time, however, he was still too close to his college days—he was separated from them only by about two weeks when he joined me—to appreciate what I endeavored to instil into him, that while winning a boat-race was all very well, to take part in a victorious fight, in a real battle, was a good deal better. Sport is a fine thing as a pastime, and indeed it is more than a mere pastime; but it is a very poor business if it is permitted to become the one serious occupation of life.
One of the things I wish we could learn from you is how to make the game of football a rather less homicidal pastime. (Laughter.) I do not wish to speak as a mere sentimentalist; but I do not think that killing should be a normal accompaniment of the game, and while we develop our football from Rugby, I wish we could go back and undevelop it, and get it nearer your game. I am not qualified to speak as an expert on the subject, but I wish we could make it more open and eliminate some features that certainly tend to add to the danger of the game as it is played in America now. On the Pacific slope we have been going back to your type of Rugby football. I would not have football abolished for anything, but I want to have it changed, just because I want to draw the teeth of the men who always clamor for the abolition of any manly game. I wish to deprive those whom I put in the mollycoddle class, of any argument against good sport. I thoroughly believe in sport, but I think it is a great mistake if it is made anything like a profession, or carried on in a way that gives just cause for fault-finding and complaint among people whose objection is not really to the defects, but to the sport itself.
Now I am going to disregard your poet and preach to you for just one moment, but I will make it as little obnoxious as possible. (Laughter.) The Secretary spoke of me as if I were an athlete. I am not, and never have been one, although I have always been very fond of outdoor amusement and exercise. There was, however, in my class at Harvard, one real athlete who is now in public life. I made him Secretary of State, or what you call Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he is now Ambassador in Paris. If I catch your terminology straight, he would correspond to your triple blue. He was captain of the football eleven, played on the base-ball team, and rowed in the crew, and in addition to that he was champion heavy-weight boxer and wrestler, and won the 220-yard dash. His son was captain of the Harvard University crew that came over here and was beaten by Oxford two years ago. [Voices: "Cambridge."] Well, I never took a great interest in defeats. (Loud laughter and applause.) Now, as I said before, I never was an athlete, although I have always led an outdoor life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually possesses.
There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do. That is genius. I am not discussing what form that genius takes; whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one else can write, The Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, or Helen, thy beauty is to me; or of a man who can do 100 yards in nine and three-fifths seconds. Such a man does what no one else can do. Only a very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing genius. The average man who is successful,—the average statesman, the average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call great success—is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.
Take such a thing as hunting or any form of vigorous bodily exercise. Most men can ride hard if they choose. Almost any man can kill a lion if he will exercise a little resolution in training the qualities that will enable him to do it. [Taking a tumbler from the table, Mr. Roosevelt held it up.] Now it is a pretty easy thing to aim straight at an object about that size. Almost any one, if he practises with the rifle at all, can learn to hit that tumbler; and he can hit the lion all right if he learns to shoot as straight at its brain or heart as at the tumbler. He does not have to possess any extraordinary capacity, not a bit,—all he has to do is to develop certain rather ordinary qualities, but develop them to such a degree that he will not get flustered, so that he will press the trigger steadily instead of jerking it—and then he will shoot at the lion as well as he will at that tumbler. It is a perfectly simple quality to develop. You don't need any remarkable skill; all you need is to possess ordinary qualities, but to develop them to a more than ordinary degree.
It is just the same with the soldier. What is needed is that the man as soldier should develop certain qualities that have been known for thousands of years, but develop them to such a point that in an emergency he does, as a matter of course, what a great multitude of men can do but what a very large proportion of them don't do. And in making the appeal to the soldier, if you want to get out of him the stuff that is in him, you will have to use phrases which the intellectual gentlemen who do not fight will say are platitudes. (Laughter and applause.)
It is just so in public life. It is not genius, it is not extraordinary subtlety, or acuteness of intellect, that is important. The things that are important are the rather commonplace, the rather humdrum, virtues that in their sum are designated as character. If you have in public life men of good ability, not geniuses, but men of good abilities, with character,—and, gentlemen, you must include as one of the most important elements of character commonsense—if you possess such men, the Government will go on very well.
I have spoken only of the great successes; but what I have said applies just as much to the success that is within the reach of almost every one of us. I think that any man who has had what is regarded in the world as a great success must realize that the element of chance has played a great part in it. Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities; but the opportunities have to come. If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion you don't get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace no one would have known his name now. The great crisis must come, or no man has the chance to develop great qualities.
There are exceptional cases, of course, where there is a man who can do just one thing, such as a man who can play a dozen games of chess or juggle with four rows of figures at once—and as a rule he can do nothing else. A man of this type can do nothing unless in the one crisis for which his powers fit him. But normally the man who makes the great success when the emergency arises is the man who would have made a fair success in any event. I believe that the man who is really happy in a great position—in what we call a career—is the man who would also be happy and regard his life as successful if he had never been thrown into that position. If a man lives a decent life and does his work fairly and squarely so that those dependent on him and attached to him are better for his having lived, then he is a success, and he deserves to feel that he has done his duty and he deserves to be treated by those who have had greater success as nevertheless having shown the fundamental qualities that entitle him to respect. We have in the United States an organization composed of the men who forty-five years ago fought to a finish the great Civil War. One thing that has always appealed to me in that organization is that all of the men admitted are on a perfect equality provided the records show that their duty was well done. Whether a man served as a lieutenant-general or an eighteen-year-old recruit, so long as he was able to serve for six months and did his duty in his appointed place, then he is called Comrade and stands on an exact equality with the other men. The same principle should shape our associations in ordinary civil life.
I am not speaking cant to you. I remember once sitting at a table with six or eight other public officials, and each was explaining how he regarded being in public life, how only the sternest sense of duty prevented him from resigning his office, and how the strain of working for a thankless constituency was telling upon him, and nothing but the fact that he felt he ought to sacrifice his comfort to the welfare of his country kept him in the arduous life of statesmanship. It went round the table until it came to my turn. This was during my first term of office as President of the United States. I said: "Now, gentlemen, I do not wish there to be any misunderstanding. I like my job, and I want to keep it for four years longer." (Loud laughter and applause.) I don't think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did. Moreover, I don't think any ex-President ever enjoyed himself more. I have enjoyed my life and my work because I thoroughly believe that success—the real success—does not depend upon the position you hold, but upon how you carry yourself in that position. There is no man here to-day who has not the chance so to shape his life after he leaves this university that he shall have the right to feel, when his life ends, that he has made a real success of it; and his making a real success of it does not in the least depend upon the prominence of the position he holds. Gentlemen, I thank you, and I am glad I have violated the poet's hope and have preached to you.
British Rule in Africa
Address Delivered at the Guildhall, London, May 31, 1910 10
It is a peculiar pleasure to me to be here. And yet I cannot but appreciate, as we all do, the sadness of the fact that I come here just after the death of the Sovereign whom you so mourn, and whose death caused such an outburst of sympathy for you throughout the civilized world. One of the things I shall never forget is the attitude of that great mass of people, assembled on the day of the funeral, who in silence, in perfect order, and with uncovered heads, saw the body of the dead King pass to its last resting-place. I had the high honor of being deputed to come to the funeral as the representative of America, and by my presence to express the deep and universal feeling of sympathy which moves the entire American people for the British people in their hour of sadness and trial.
I need hardly say how profoundly I feel the high honor that you confer upon me; an honor great in itself, and great because of the ancient historic associations connected with it, with the ceremonies incident to conferring it, and with the place in which it is conferred. I am very deeply appreciative of all that this ceremony means, all that this gift implies, and all the kind words which Sir Joseph Dimsdale has used in conferring it. I thank you heartily for myself. I thank you still more because I know that what you have done is to be taken primarily as a sign of the respect and friendly good-will which more and more, as time goes by, tends to knit together the English-speaking peoples.
I shall not try to make you any extended address of mere thanks, still less of mere eulogy. I prefer to speak, and I know you would prefer to have me speak, on matters of real concern to you, as to which I happen at this moment to possess some first-hand knowledge; for recently I traversed certain portions of the British Empire under conditions which made me intimately cognizant of their circumstances and needs. I have just spent nearly a year in Africa. While there I saw four British protectorates. I grew heartily to respect the men whom I there met, settlers and military and civil officials; and it seems to me that the best service I can render them and you is very briefly to tell you how I was impressed by some of the things that I saw. Your men in Africa are doing a great work for your Empire, and they are also doing a great work for civilization. This fact and my sympathy for and belief in them are my reasons for speaking. The people at home, whether in Europe or in America, who live softly, often fail fully to realize what is being done for them by the men who are actually engaged in the pioneer work of civilization abroad. Of course, in any mass of men there are sure to be some who are weak or unworthy, and even those who are good are sure to make occasional mistakes—that is as true of pioneers as of other men. Nevertheless, the great fact in world history during the last century has been the spread of civilization over the world's waste spaces. The work is still going on; and the soldiers, the settlers, and the civic officials who are actually doing it are, as a whole, entitled to the heartiest respect and the fullest support from their brothers who remain at home.
At the outset, there is one point upon which I wish to insist with all possible emphasis. The civilized nations who are conquering for civilization savage lands should work together in a spirit of hearty mutual good-will. I listened with special interest to what Sir Joseph Dimsdale said about the blessing of peace and good-will among nations. I agree with that in the abstract. Let us show by our actions and our words in specific cases that we agree with it also in the concrete. Ill-will between civilized nations is bad enough anywhere, but it is peculiarly harmful and contemptible when those actuated by it are engaged in the same task, a task of such far-reaching importance to the future of humanity, the task of subduing the savagery of wild man and wild nature, and of bringing abreast of our civilization those lands where there is an older civilization which has somehow gone crooked. Mankind as a whole has benefited by the noteworthy success that has attended the French occupation of Algiers and Tunis, just as mankind as a whole has benefited by what England has done in India; and each nation should be glad of the other nation's achievements. In the same way, it is of interest to all civilized men that a similar success shall attend alike the Englishman and the German as they work in East Africa; exactly as it has been a benefit to every one that America took possession of the Philippines. Those of you who know Lord Cromer's excellent book in which he compares modern and ancient imperialism need no words from me to prove that the dominion of modern civilized nations over the dark places of the earth has been fraught with widespread good for mankind; and my plea is that the civilized nations engaged in doing this work shall treat one another with respect and friendship, and shall hold it as discreditable to permit envy and jealousy, backbiting and antagonism among themselves. I visited four different British protectorates or possessions in Africa—namely, East Africa, Uganda, the Sudan, and Egypt. About the first three, I have nothing to say to you save what is pleasant, as well as true. About the last, I wish to say a few words because they are true, without regard to whether or not they are pleasant.
In the highlands of East Africa you have a land which can be made a true white man's country. While there I met many settlers on intimate terms, and I felt for them a peculiar sympathy, because they so strikingly reminded me of the men of our own western frontier of America, of the pioneer farmers and ranch-men who built up the States of the great plains and the Rocky Mountains. It is of high importance to encourage these settlers in every way, remembering—I say that here in the City—remembering that the prime need is not for capitalists to exploit the land, but for settlers who shall make their permanent homes therein. Capital is a good servant, but a mighty poor master. No alien race should be permitted to come into competition with the settlers. Fortunately you have now in the Governor of East Africa, Sir Percy Girouard, a man admirably fitted to deal wisely and firmly with the many problems before him. He is on the ground and knows the needs of the country, and is zealously devoted to its interests. All that is necessary is to follow his lead, and to give him cordial support and backing. The principle upon which I think it is wise to act in dealing with far-away possessions is this—choose your man, change him if you become discontented with him, but while you keep him back him up.
In Uganda the problem is totally different. Uganda cannot be made a white man's country, and the prime need is to administer the land in the interest of the native races, and to help forward their development. Uganda has been the scene of an extraordinary development of Christianity. Nowhere else of recent times has missionary effort met with such success; the inhabitants stand far above most of the races in the Dark Continent in their capacity for progress towards civilization. They have made great strides, and the English officials have shown equal judgment and disinterestedness in the work they have done; and they have been especially wise in trying to develop the natives along their own lines, instead of seeking to turn them into imitation or make-believe Englishmen. In Uganda all that is necessary is to go forward on the paths you have already marked out.
The Sudan is peculiarly interesting because it affords the best possible example of the wisdom—and when I say that I speak with historical accuracy—of disregarding the well-meaning but unwise sentimentalists who object to the spread of civilization at the expense of savagery. I remember a quarter of a century ago when you were engaged in the occupation of the Sudan that many of your people at home and some of ours in America said that what was demanded in the Sudan was the application of the principles of independence and self-government to the Sudanese, coupled with insistence upon complete religious toleration and the abolition of the slave trade. Unfortunately, the chief reason why the Mahdists wanted independence and self-government was that they could put down all religions but their own and carry on the slave trade. I do not believe that in the whole world there is to be found any nook of territory which has shown such astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being and prosperity as the Sudan has shown during the last twelve years while it has been under British rule. Up to that time it was independent, and it governed itself; and independence and self-government in the hands of the Sudanese proved to be much what independence and self-government would have been in a wolf pack. Great crimes were committed there, crimes so dark that their very hideousness protects them from exposure. During a decade and a half, while Mahdism controlled the country, there flourished a tyranny which for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even imagine. The keystones of the Mahdist party were religious intolerance and slavery, with murder and the most abominable cruelty as the method of obtaining each.
During those fifteen years at least two-thirds of the population, probably seven or eight millions of people, died by violence or by starvation. Then the English came in; put an end to the independence and self-government which had wrought this hideous evil; restored order, kept the peace, and gave to each individual a liberty which, during the evil days of their own self-government, not one human being possessed, save only the blood-stained tyrant who at the moment was ruler. I stopped at village after village in the Sudan, and in many of them I was struck by the fact that, while there were plenty of children, they were all under twelve years old; and inquiry always developed that these children were known as "Government children," because in the days of Mahdism it was the literal truth that in a very large proportion of the communities every child was either killed or died of starvation and hardship, whereas under the peace brought by English rule families are flourishing, men and women are no longer hunted to death, and the children are brought up under more favorable circumstances, for soul and body, than have ever previously obtained in the entire history of the Sudan. In administration, in education, in police work, the Sirdar11 and his lieutenants, great and small, have performed to perfection a task equally important and difficult. The Government officials, civil and military, who are responsible for this task, and the Egyptian and Sudanese who have worked with and under them, and as directed by them, have a claim upon all civilized mankind which should be heartily admitted. It would be a crime not to go on with the work, a work which the inhabitants themselves are helpless to perform, unless under firm and wise guidance from outside. I have met people who had some doubt as to whether the Sudan would pay. Personally, I think it probably will. But I may add that, in my judgment, this fact does not alter the duty of England to stay there. It is not worth while belonging to a big nation unless the big nation is willing when the necessity arises to undertake a big task. I feel about you in the Sudan just as I felt about us in Panama. When we acquired the right to build the Panama Canal, and entered on the task, there were worthy people who came to me and said they wondered whether it would pay. I always answered that it was one of the great world works which had to be done; that it was our business as a nation to do it, if we were ready to make good our claim to be treated as a great world Power; and that as we were unwilling to abandon the claim, no American worth his salt ought to hesitate about performing the task. I feel just the same way about you in the Sudan.
Now as to Egypt. It would not be worth my while to speak to you at all, nor would it be worth your while to listen, unless on condition that I say what I deeply feel ought to be said. I speak as an outsider, but in one way this is an advantage, for I speak without national prejudice. I would not talk to you about your own internal affairs here at home; but you are so very busy at home that I am not sure whether you realize just how things are, in some places at least, abroad. At any rate, it can do you no harm to hear the view of one who has actually been on the ground, and has information at first hand; of one, moreover, who, it is true, is a sincere well-wisher of the British Empire, but who is not English by blood, and who is impelled to speak mainly because of his deep concern in the welfare of mankind and in the future of civilization. Remember also that I who address you am not only an American, but a Radical, a real—not a mock—democrat, and that what I have to say is spoken chiefly because I am a democrat, a man who feels that his first thought is bound to be the welfare of the masses of mankind, and his first duty to war against violence and injustice and wrong-doing, wherever found; and I advise you only in accordance with the principles on which I have myself acted as American President in dealing with the Philippines.
In Egypt you are not only the guardians of your own interests; you are also the guardians of the interests of civilization; and the present condition of affairs in Egypt is a grave menace to both your Empire and the entire civilized world. You have given Egypt the best government it has had for at least two thousand years—probably a better government than it has ever had before; for never in history has the poor man in Egypt, the tiller of the soil, the ordinary laborer, been treated with as much justice and mercy, under a rule as free from corruption and brutality, as during the last twenty-eight years. Yet recent events, and especially what has happened in connection with and following on the assassination of Boutros Pasha three months ago, have shown that, in certain vital points, you have erred; and it is for you to make good your error. It has been an error proceeding from the effort to do too much and not too little in the interests of the Egyptians themselves; but unfortunately it is necessary for all of us who have to do with uncivilized peoples, and especially with fanatical peoples, to remember that in such a situation as yours in Egypt weakness, timidity, and sentimentality may cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of all broken reeds, sentimentality12 is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.
In Egypt you have been treating all religions with studied fairness and impartiality; and instead of gratefully acknowledging this, a noisy section of the native population takes advantage of what your good treatment has done to bring about an anti-foreign movement, a movement in which, as events have shown, murder on a large or a small scale is expected to play a leading part. Boutros Pasha13 was the best and most competent Egyptian official, a steadfast upholder of English rule, and an earnest worker for the welfare of his countrymen; and he was murdered simply and solely because of these facts, and because he did his duty wisely, fearlessly, and uprightly. The attitude of the so-called Egyptian Nationalist Party in connection with this murder has shown that they were neither desirous nor capable of guaranteeing even that primary justice the failure to supply which makes self-government not merely an empty but a noxious farce. Such are the conditions; and where the effort made by your officials to help the Egyptians towards self-government is taken advantage of by them, not to make things better, not to help their country, but to try to bring murderous chaos upon the land, then it becomes the primary duty of whoever is responsible for the government in Egypt to establish order, and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end.
It was with this primary object of establishing order that you went into Egypt twenty-eight years ago; and the chief and ample justification for your presence in Egypt was this absolute necessity of order being established from without, coupled with your ability and willingness to establish it. Now, either you have the right to be in Egypt or you have not; either it is or it is not your duty to establish and keep order. If you feel that you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and to keep order there, why, then, by all means get out of Egypt. If, as I hope, you feel that your duty to civilized mankind and your fealty to your own great traditions alike bid you to stay, then make the fact and the name agree and show that you are ready to meet in very deed the responsibility which is yours. It is the thing, not the form, which is vital; if the present forms of government in Egypt, established by you in the hope that they would help the Egyptians upward, merely serve to provoke and permit disorder, then it is for you to alter the forms; for if you stay in Egypt it is your first duty to keep order, and above all things also to punish murder and to bring to justice all who directly or indirectly incite others to commit murder or condone the crime when it is committed. When a people treats assassination as the corner-stone of self-government, it forfeits all right to be treated as worthy of self-government. You are in Egypt for several purposes, and among them one of the greatest is the benefit of the Egyptian people. You saved them from ruin by coming in, and at the present moment, if they are not governed from outside, they will again sink into a welter of chaos. Some nation must govern Egypt. I hope and believe that you will decide that it is your duty to be that nation.
Biological Analogies in History 14
Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910
An American who in response to such an invitation as I have received speaks in this University of ancient renown, cannot but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in the things of the body.
More than ever before in the world's history we of to-day seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in "cramp elf and saurian forms" the creative forces "swathed their too-much power," down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet; and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence. In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the science that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial conditions—for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary life during the last three generations have been greater than in all the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position the more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative worth and inter-relationship are just as necessary in historical study as in any other kind of study. The fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at once from the category of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book is directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great historians, the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need merely that the future writers of history, without losing the qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the new facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal. Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No "scientific" treatise about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that Joinville's place is in both history and literature; no minute study of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot—and Marbot is as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art of presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than the layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics which can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of realization, it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the future must essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great historians of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an honorable, but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian who produces books which are not literature must rest content with the honor, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to use.
Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in the scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He who would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology, of the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of that science of evolution which is inseparably connected with the great name of Darwin. Of course there is no exact parallelism between the birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, and the birth, growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there are homologies.
How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the interpretation of human history, we cannot at present say. The historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and, moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts of vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full significance, are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The research which enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge stands first; but second only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also requires us to say that with our present knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.
Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of man substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him, we also find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind, though widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day. Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation, by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that we have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the development of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts as to which we grope in the dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give no adequate explanation.
I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily for success even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer souls of small endeavor who know neither failure nor success. Let us hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children and children's children to endless generations shall arise to take our places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close, and we go out into the darkness, and others' hands grasp the torch, at least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.
Appendix
CONVOCATION
JUNE 7, 1910
FOLLOWED BY THE DELIVERY OF
THE ROMANES LECTURE
BY
THE HON'BLE THEODORE ROOSEVELT
HON. D.C.L
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
LORD CURZON OF KEDLESTON
CHANCELLOR
PRESIDING
Convocation and the Romanes Lecture,
June 7, 1910 15
THE CHANCELLOR.
Causa huius Convocationis est, Academici, ut, si vobis placuerit, in virum Honorabilem Theodorum Roosevelt, Civitatum Foederatarum Americae Borealis olim Praesidentem, Gradus Doctoris in Iure Civili conferatur honoris causa; ut Praelectio exspectatissima ab eodem, Doctore in Universitate facto novissimo, coram vobis pronuncietur; necnon ut alia peragantur, quae ad Venerabilem hanc Domum spectant.
Placetne igitur Venerabili huic Convocationi ut in virum Honorabilem Theodorum Roosevelt Gradus Doctoris in Iure Civili conferatur honoris causa?
Placetne vobis, Domini Doctores? Placetne vobis, Magistri?
To the Bedels.
Ite, Bedelli! Petite Virum Honorabilem!
The Chancellor to the Vice-Chancellor, as Mr. Roosevelt takes his place for presentation.
Hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis,
Cuius in adventum pavidi cessere cometae
Et septemgemini turbant trepida ostia Nili!
PRESENTATION SPEECH by DR. HENRY GOUDY,
Regius Professor of Civil Law, Fellow of All Souls College
Insignissime Cancellarie!
Vosque Egregii Procuratores!
Saepenumero mihi et antea contigit plurimos e Republica illa illustri oriundos, affines nostros, vobis praesentare gradum honorarium Doctoris in Iure Civili accepturos, inter quos vel nomina praestantissimorum hominum citare in promptu esset. Neque tamen quemquam vel suis ipsius meritis vel fama digniorem, qui hoc titulo donaretur, salutavi quam hunc virum quem ad vos duco.
Batavorum antiqua stirpe ortus, sicut et nomen ipsius inclitum indicat, Americanae patriae germanum civem sese praestitit; in qua nemo sane laudem maiorem Reipublicae suae suorum iudicio contulisse creditur.
Tardius quidem ad Britannos fama nominis inclaruit, imprimis tum quum certamine inter Hispanos atque suos orto alae Equitum praefectus rei militaris sese peritissimum ostentabat. Huic autem, omnia scire ardenti, nulla pars humanitatis supervacua aut negligenda videbatur. Manifesto quippe declaravit, ut cum poeta loquar:
"Non sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo,"
atque exinde annales non tantum patriae suae sed totius terrarum orbis exemplo virtutis implere.
Quippe bis Hercule! in locum amplissimum Praesulis Reipublicae suae electus egregio illo in statu ita se gerebat ut laudes et nomen magni illius antecessoris, Abraham Lincoln, vel aequipararet—quorum alter servitudinem, alter corruptionem vicit. Unde et spem licet concipere ut viro bis summum civitatis honorem adepto accedat et denuo idem ille honor terna vice, numero auspicatissimo, numerandus.
Fortem hospitis nostri animum et tenacem propositi novimus; felicitati et otio non modo suorum sed etiam gentium exterarum consuluit: bellator ipse atque idem pacis omnibus terrae gentibus firmandae auctor indefessus, sicut et exemplum illustre praebuit nuper foedere icto post bellum inter Iapones et Scytharum populos gestuni. Neque idem pacem veram esse iudicavit, nisi quae iustitiae et ipsa inniteretur; quippe civitates laude dignas negavit quibus nee in se ipsis constaret fides et animi magnitudo.
Venatoriam artem exercuit, historiae naturalis amator; post dimissum opus civicum requiem in Africae solitudinibus nuper quaesivit ubi in feras terrae non minore animo, successu haud minore, ferrum exacuit quam in malos saeculi mores saevire solitus est.
Iam tandem, laboribus functus, patriam suam repetiturus nobiscum paulum temporis commoratur Ulysses ille alter, viarum pariter expertus et consiliorum largitor.
Neque praetermittendum est hospitem nostrum, dum varias artes colit, Musarum opus non neglexisse, stilo non minus quam lingua facundus; quem nos, Academici, magnis de rebus loquentem hodie audituri sumus.
Hunc igitur praesento
Theodorum Roosevelt,
ut admittatur ad gradum Doctoris in Iure Civili honoris causa.
The Chancellor to Mr. Roosevelt in admitting him to the Degree.
Strenuissime, insignissime, civium toto orbe terrae hodie agentium, summum ingentis rei publicae magistratum bis incorrupte gestum, ter forsitan gesture, augustissimis regibus par, hominum domitor, beluarum ubique vastator, homo omnium humanissime, nihil a te alienum, ne nigerrimum quidem, putans, ego auctoritate Mea et totius Universitatis admitto te ad Gradum Doctoris in Iure Civili honoris causa.
The Chancellor to the Bedels.
Ite, Bedelli! Ducite Doctorem Honorabilem ad Pulpitum!
The Chancellor will then, in English, welcome Mr. Roosevelt to Oxford, and invite him to deliver his Lecture.
THE ROMANES LECTURE
At the close of the Lecture the Chancellor will direct the Vice-Chancellor to dissolve the Convocation as follows:
Iamque tempus enim est, Insignissime mi Vice-Cancellarie, dissolve, quaeso, Convocationem.
The Vice-Chancellor will dissolve the Convocation as follows:
Celsissime Domine Cancellarie, iussu tuo dissolvimus hanc Convocationem.
FINIS
Convocation and the Romanes Lecture
TRANSLATION OF THE LATIN
THE CHANCELLOR.
The object of this Convocation is, that, if it be your pleasure, Gentlemen of the University, the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Civil Law may be conferred on the Honorable Theodore Roosevelt, ex-President of the United States of North America, that the long-expected Romanes Lecture may be delivered by him, when he has been made the youngest Doctor in the University, and that any other business should be transacted which may belong to this Venerable House.
Is it the pleasure then of this Venerable House that the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Civil Law should be conferred upon the Honorable Theodore Roosevelt? Is it your pleasure, Reverend Doctors? Is it your pleasure, Masters of the University?
Go, Bedels, and bring in the Honorable gentleman!
The Chancellor to the Vice-Chancellor.
Behold, Vice-Chancellor, the promised wight,
Before whose coming comets turned to flight,
And all the startled mouths of sevenfold Nile took fright!
PRESENTATION SPEECH by DR. HENRY GOUDY
It has been my privilege to present in former years many distinguished citizens of the great American Republic for our honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, but none of them have surpassed in merit or obtained such world-wide celebrity as he whom I now present to you. Of ancient Dutch lineage, as his name indicates, but still a genuine American, he has long been an outstanding figure among his fellow citizens. He first became known to us in England during the Spanish-American War, when he commanded a regiment of cavalry and proved himself a most capable military leader. Omnivorous in his quest of knowledge, nothing in human affairs seemed to him superfluous or negligible. In the language of the poet, one might say of him—"Non sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo." Twice has he been elevated to the position of President of the Republic, and in performing the duties of that high office has acquired a title to be ranked with his great predecessor Abraham Lincoln—"Quorum alter servitudinem, alter corruptionem vicit." May we not presage that still a third time—most auspicious of numbers—he may be called upon to take the reins of government?
With unrivalled energy and tenacity of purpose he has combined lofty ideals with a sincere devotion to the practical needs not only of his fellow countrymen, but of humanity at large. A sincere friend of peace among nations—who does not know of his successful efforts to terminate the devastating war between Russia and Japan?—he has also firmly held that Peace is only a good thing when combined with justice and right. He has ever asserted that a nation can only hope to survive if it be self-respecting and makes itself respected by others.
A noted sportsman and lover of Natural History, he has recently, after his arduous labors as Head of the State, been seeking relaxation in distant Africa, where his onslaughts on the wild beasts of the desert have been not less fierce nor less successful than over the many-headed hydra of corruption in his own land.
Now, like another Ulysses, on his homeward way he has come to us for a brief interval, after visiting many cities and discoursing on many themes.
Nor must I omit to remind you that our guest, amid his engrossing duties of State, has not neglected the Muses. Not less facile with the pen than the tongue, he has written on many topics, and this afternoon it will be our privilege to listen to him discoursing on a lofty theme.
By the Chancellor.
Most strenuous of men, most distinguished of citizens to-day playing a part on the stage of the world, you who have twice administered with purity the first Magistracy of the Great Republic (and may perhaps administer it a third time), peer of the most august Kings, queller of men, destroyer of monsters wherever found, yet the most human of mankind, deeming nothing indifferent to you, not even the blackest of the black; I, by my authority and that of the whole University, admit you to the Degree of Doctor of Civil Law, honoris causa.
Go, Bedels, conduct the Honorable Doctor to the Lectern!
Here follows the Chancellor's welcome, and the Romanes Lecture
After the Lecture, the Chancellor to the Vice-Chancellor.
And now, my dear Vice-Chancellor—for it is time—be good enough to dissolve the Convocation!
The Vice-Chancellor.
Exalted Lord Chancellor, at your bidding we dissolve the Convocation.
