Part 2

¶¶The first requisite of good citizenship is that the man shall do the homely, every-day, hum-drum duties well. A man is not a good citizen, I do not care how lofty his thoughts are about citizenship in the abstract, if in the concrete his actions do not bear them out; and it does not make much difference how high his aspirations for mankind at large may be, if he does not behave well in his own family those aspirations do not bear visible fruit. He must be a good breadwinner, he must take care of his wife and his children, he must be a neighbor whom his neighbors can trust, he must act squarely in his business relations,—he must do all these every-day, ordinary duties first, or he is not a good citizen. But he must do more.

¶In this country of ours the average citizen must devote a good deal of thought and time to the affairs of the State as a whole or those affairs will go backward; and he must devote that thought and time steadily and intelligently. If there is any one quality that is not desirable, whether in a nation or in an individual, it is hysterics, either in religion or anything else. The man or woman who makes up for ten days’ indifference to duty by an eleventh-day morbid repentance about that duty is of scant use in the world. Now in the same way it is of no possible use to decline to go through all ordinary duties of citizenship for a long space of time and then suddenly to get up and feel very angry about something or somebody, not clearly defined, and demand reform, as if it was a concrete substance to be handed out forthwith.

¶We cannot keep too clearly before our minds the facts that for the success of our civilization what is needed is not so much brilliant ability, not so much unusual genius, as the possession by the average man of the plain, homely, work-a-day virtues that make that man a good father, a good husband, and a good friend and neighbor—a decent man with whom to deal in all relations of life.

¶We need good laws, we need honest administration of the laws, and we cannot afford to be contented with less, but more than aught else we need that the average man shall have in him the root of righteous living; that the average man shall have in him the feeling that will make him ashamed to do wrong or to submit to wrong, and that will make him feel his bounden duty to help those that are weaker, to help those especially that are in a way dependent upon him, and while not in any way losing his power of individual initiative, to cultivate without ceasing the further power of acting in combination with his fellows for a common end of social uplifting and of good government.

¶One word upon success in life, upon the success that each of us should strive for. It is a great mistake—oh, such a great mistake—to measure success merely by that which glitters from without, or to speak of it in terms which will mislead those about us, and especially the younger people about us, as to what success really is.

¶There must of course be for success, a certain material basis, I should think ill of any man who did not wish to leave his children a little better and not a little worse off materially than he was, and I should not feel that he was doing his duty by them; and if he cannot do his duty by his own children he is not going to do his duty by any one else.

¶But after that certain amount of material prosperity has been gained then the things that really count most are the things of the soul rather than the things of money, and I am sure that each of you if he will really think of what it is that made him most happy, of what it is that made him most respect his neighbors will agree with me.

¶¶Look back in your own lives, see what the things are that you are proudest of as you look back, and you will in almost every case and on every occasion find that those memories of pride are associated, not with days of ease, but with days of effort, the day when you had to do all that was in you for some worthy end, and the worthiest of all worthy ends is to make those that are closest and nearest to you—your wife and your children, and those near you—happy and not sorry that you are alive.

¶And after that has been done, to be able so to handle yourself that you can feel when the end comes that on the whole your community, your fellow men, are a little better off and not a little worse off because you have lived.

¶This kind of success is open to every one of us. The great prizes come more or less by accident, and no human being knows that better than any man who has won one of them. The great prizes come more or less by accident, but to each man there comes normally the chance so to lead his life that at the end of his days his children, his wife, those that are dear to him shall rise up and call him blessed, and so that his neighbors and those who have been brought into intimate association with him, may feel that he has done his part as a man in a world which sadly needs that each man should play his part well.

¶¶Treat each man according to his worth as a man. Don’t hold for or against him that he is either rich or poor. But if he is rich and crooked, hold it against him; if not rich but crooked, then hold it against him. But if he is a square man, stand by him. Distrust all who would have any one class placed before any other. Other republics have fallen because of the unscrupulous rich or the unscrupulous poor who gained ascendancy, who substituted loyalty to class for loyalty to the people as a whole.

¶Abolish the insolence and arrogance of the rich who look down upon the poor; if they lost their wealth they would be ready to plunder the rich. The unscrupulous man who becomes rich would oppress the poor. The man who is true to you is ultimately righteous, and the man who will steal for you will steal from you. The man who will seek to persuade you that he will benefit you by wronging any one else will wrong you when it will benefit him.

¶What we must do as a Nation is to stand for the immutable principles of decency and virtue, regarding vice with abhorrence. If we make any artificial divisions we have done irreparable injury to the people.

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

¶I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I believe that our people will in the end rise level to every need, will in the end triumph over every difficulty that rises before them. I could not have such confident faith in the destiny of this mighty people if I had it merely as regards one portion of that people. Throughout our land things on the whole have grown better and not worse, and this is as true of one part of the country as it is of another.

¶For weal or woe we are knit together and we shall go up or go down together; and I believe that we shall go up and not down, that we shall go forward instead of halting and falling back, because I have an abiding faith in the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the common-sense of all my countrymen.

¶Fundamentally our people are the same throughout this land; the same in qualities of heart and brain and hand which have made this Republic what it is in the great to-day; which will make it what it is to be in the infinitely greater to-morrow. All of us alike, Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, can best prove our fealty to the Nation’s past by the way in which we do the Nation’s work in the present; for only thus can we be sure that our children’s children shall inherit Abe Lincoln’s single-hearted devotion to the great unchanging creed that “righteousness exalteth a nation.”

A Square Deal and The Dignity of Labor

The law of worthy work well done is the law of successful American life. I believe in play too—play, and play hard while you play; but don’t make the mistake of thinking that that is the main thing. The work is what counts, and if a man does his work well and it is worth doing, then it matters but little in which line that work is done; the man is a good American citizen. If he does his work in slipshod fashion, then no matter what kind of work it is, he is a poor American citizen.

¶Among ourselves we differ in many qualities, of body, head, and heart; we are unequally developed, mentally as well as physically. But each of us has the right to ask that he shall be protected from wrong-doing as he does his work and carries his burden through life. No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing; and this is a prize open to every man, for there can be no work better worth doing than that done to keep in health and comfort and with reasonable advantages those immediately dependent upon the husband, the father, or the son.

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

¶Surely from our own experience each one of us knows that this is true. From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life’s burdens. The men whom we most delight to honor in all this land are those who, in the iron years from ’61 to ’65, bore on their shoulders the burden of saving the Union. They did not choose the easy task. They did not shirk the difficult duty. Deliberately and of their own free will they strove for an ideal, upward and onward across the stony slopes of greatness. They did the hardest work that was then to be done; they bore the heaviest burden that any generation of Americans ever had to bear; and because they did this they have won such proud joy as it has fallen to the lot of no other men to win, and have written their names forever more on the golden honor roll of the Nation.

¶As it is with the soldier, so it is with the civilian. To win success in the business world, to become a first class mechanic, a successful farmer, an able lawyer or doctor, means that the man has devoted his best energy and power through long years to the achievement of his ends. So it is in the life of the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests. The man or woman who as breadwinner and home-maker, or as wife and mother, has done all that he or she can do, patiently and uncomplainingly, is to be honored; and is to be envied by all those who have never had the good fortune to feel the need and duty of doing such work.

¶The woman who has borne, and who has reared as they should be reared, a family of children, has in the most emphatic manner deserved well of the Republic. Her burden has been heavy, and she has been able to bear it worthily only by the possession of resolution, of good sense, of conscience, and of unselfishness.

¶¶But if she has borne it well, then to her shall come the supreme blessing, for in the words of the oldest and greatest of books, “Her children shall rise up and call her blessed,” and among the benefactors of the land her place must be with those who have done the best and the hardest work whether as lawgivers or as soldiers, whether in public or in private life.

¶This is not a soft and easy creed to preach. It is a creed willingly learned only by men and women who, together with their softer virtues, possess also the stronger; who can do, and dare, and die at need, but who while life lasts will never flinch from their allotted task.... It is not enough to be well-meaning and kindly, but weak; neither is it enough to be strong, unless morality and decency go hand in hand with strength. We must possess the qualities which make us do our duty in our homes and among our neighbors, and in addition we must possess the qualities which are indispensable to the makeup of every great and masterful nation—the qualities of courage and hardihood, of individual initiative and yet of power to combine for a common end, and, above all, the resolute determination to permit no man and no set of men to sunder us one from the other by lines of caste or creed or section.

¶We must act upon the motto of all for each and each for all.

¶There must be ever present in our minds the fundamental truth that in a Republic such as ours the only safety is to stand neither for nor against any man because he is rich or because he is poor, because he is engaged in one occupation or another, because he works with his brains or because he works with his hands. We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less. Finally we must ever keep in mind that a Republic such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly liberty which comes through the equal domination of the law over all men alike, and through its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it.