Part 2

Give to our people something that will concentrate their common affection and solicitous care, and let them be their country’s good; give them a purpose that stimulates them to unite in lofty endeavor, and let that purpose be a demonstration of the sufficiency and beneficence of our popular rule, and we shall find that in their political thought there will be no place for the suggestions of sordidness and pelf.

Who will say that this is now our happy condition? Is not our public life saturated with the indecent demands of selfishness? More than this, can any of us doubt the existence of still more odious and detestable evils which, with steady, cankering growth, are more directly than all others threatening our safety and national life? I speak of the corruption of our suffrage, open and notorious, of the buying and selling of political places for money, the purchase of political favors and privileges, and the traffic in official duty for personal gain. These things are confessedly common. Every intelligent man knows that they have grown from small beginnings until they have reached frightful proportions of malevolence; and yet respectable citizens by the thousands have looked on with perfect calmness, and with hypocritical cant have declared they are not politicians, or with silly pretensions of faith in our strength and luck have languidly claimed that the country was prosperous, equal to any emergency and proof against all dangers.

Resulting from these conditions in a manner not difficult to trace, wholesome national sentiment is threatened with utter perversion. All sorts of misconceptions pervade the public thought, and jealousies, rapidly taking on the complexion of class hatred, are found in every corner of the land. A new meaning has been given to national prosperity. With a hardihood that savors of insolence, an old pretext, which has preceded the doom of ancient experiments in popular vote, is daily and hourly dinned in our ears. We are told that the national splendor we have built upon the showy ventures of speculative wealth is a badge of our success. Unsharing contentment is enjoined upon the masses of our people, and they are invited, in the bare subsistence of their scanty homes, to patriotically rejoice in their country’s prosperity.

This is too unsubstantial an enjoyment of benefits to satisfy those who have been taught American equality, and thus has arisen, by a perfectly natural process, a dissatisfied insistence upon a better distribution of the results of our vaunted prosperity. We now see its worst manifestation in the apparently incorrigible dislocation of the proper relations between labor and capital. This of itself is sufficiently distressing; but thoughtful men are not without dread of sadder developments yet to come.

There has also grown up among our people a disregard for the restraints of law and a disposition to evade its limitations, while querulous strictures concerning the actions of our courts tend to undermine popular faith in the course of justice, and, last but by no means least, complaints of imaginary or exaggerated shortcomings in our financial policies furnish an excuse for the flippant exploitation of all sorts of monetary nostrums.

I hasten to give assurance that I have not spoken in a spirit of gloomy pessimism. I have faith that the awakening is forthcoming, and on this faith I build a cheerful hope for the healing of all the wounds inflicted in slumber and neglect.

It is true that there should be an end of self-satisfied gratification, or pretense of virtue, in the phrase, “I am not a politician,” and it is time to forbid the prostitution of the word to a sinister use. Every citizen should be politician enough to bring himself within the true meaning of the term, as one who concerns himself with “the regulation or government of a nation or State for the preservation of its safety, peace and prosperity.” This is politics in its best sense, and this is good citizenship.

If good men are to interfere to make political action what it should be, they must not suppose they will come upon an open field unoccupied by an opposing force. On the ground they neglected they will find a host of those who engage in politics for personal ends and selfish purposes, and =this= ground cannot be taken without a hand-to-hand conflict. The attack must be made under the banner of disinterested good citizenship, by soldiers drilled in lessons of patriotism. They must be enlisted for life and constantly on duty.

Their creed should bind together in generous coöperation all who are willing to fight to make our government what the fathers intended it to be--a depository of benefits which, in equal current and volume, should flow out to all the people. This creed should teach the wickedness of attempting to make free opportunity the occasion for seizing especial advantages, and should warn against the danger of ruthless rapacity. It should deprecate ostentation and extravagance in the life of our people, and demand in the management of public affairs simplicity and strict economy. It should teach toleration in all things save dishonesty and infidelity to public trusts.

It should insist that our finance and currency concern not alone the large traders, merchants and bankers of our land, but that they are intimately and every day related to the well-being of our people in all conditions of life, and that, therefore, if any adjustments are necessary they should be made in such manner as shall certainly maintain the soundness of our people’s earnings and the security of their savings. It should enjoin respect for the law as the quality that cements the fabric of organized society and makes possible a government by the people. And in every sentence and every line of this creed of good citizenship the lesson should be taught that our country is a beautiful and productive field to be cultivated by loyal Americans, who, with weapons near at hand, whether they sow and reap or whether they rest, will always be prepared to resist those who attempt to despoil by day and pilfer in the night.

In the day when all shadows shall have passed away and when good citizenship shall have made sure the safety, permanence and happiness of our nation, how small will appear the strifes of selfishness in our civic life, and how petty will seem the machinations of degraded politics.

There shall be set over against them in that time a reverent sense of coöperation in Heaven’s plans for our people’s greatness, and the joyous pride of standing among those who, in the comradeship of American good citizenship, have so protected and defended our heritage of self-government that our treasures are safe in the citadel of patriotism, “where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

PATRIOTISM AND HOLIDAY OBSERVANCE

PATRIOTISM AND HOLIDAY OBSERVANCE

The American people are but little given to the observance of public holidays. This statement cannot be disposed of by the allegation that our national history is too brief to allow the accumulation of days deserving civic commemoration. Though it is true that our life as a people, according to the standard measuring the existence of nations, has been a short one, it has been filled with glorious achievements; and, though it must be conceded that it is not given to us to see in the magnifying mirage of antiquity the exaggerated forms of American heroes, yet in the bright and normal light shed upon our beginning and growth are seen grand and heroic men who have won imperishable honor and deserve our everlasting remembrance. We cannot, therefore, excuse a lack of commemorative inclination and a languid interest in recalling the notable incidents of our country’s past under the plea of a lack of commemorative material; nor can we in this way explain our neglect adequately to observe days which have actually been set apart for the especial manifestation of our loving appreciation of the lives and the deeds of Americans who, in crises of our birth and development, have sublimely wrought and nobly endured.

If we are inclined to look for other excuses, one may occur to us which, though by no means satisfying, may appear to gain a somewhat fanciful plausibility by reason of its reference to the law of heredity. It rests upon the theory that those who secured for American nationality its first foothold, and watched over its weak infancy were so engrossed with the persistent and unescapable labors that pressed upon them, and that their hopes and aspirations led them so constantly to thoughts of the future, that retrospection nearly became with them an extinct faculty, and that thus it may have happened that exclusive absorption in things pertaining to the present and future became so embedded in their natures as to constitute a trait of character descendible to their posterity, even to the present generation. The toleration of this theory leads to the suggestion that an inheritance of disposition has made it difficult for the generation of to-day to resist the temptation inordinately to strive for immediate material advantages, to the exclusion of the wholesome sentiment that recalls the high achievements and noble lives which have illumined our national career. Some support is given to this suggestion by the concession, which we cannot escape, that there is abroad in our land an inclination to use to the point of abuse the opportunities of personal betterment, given under a scheme of rule which permits the greatest individual liberty, and interposes the least hindrance to individual acquisition; and that in the pursuit of this we are apt to carry in our minds, if not upon our lips, the legend:

“Things done are won; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

But the question is whether all this accounts for our indifference to the proper observance of public holidays which deserve observance.

There is another reason which might be advanced in mitigation of our lack of commemorative enthusiasm, which is so related to our pride of Americanism that, if we could be certain of its sufficiency, we would gladly accept it as conclusive. It has to do with the underlying qualities and motives of our free institutions. Those institutions had their birth and nurture in unselfish patriotism and unreserved consecration; and, by a decree of fate beyond recall or change, their perpetuity and beneficence are conditioned on the constant devotion and single-hearted loyalty of those to whom their blessings are vouchsafed. It would be a joy if we could know that all the bright incidents in our history were so much in the expected order of events, and that patriotism and loving service are so familiar in our present surroundings, and so clear in their manifestation, as to dull the edge of their especial commendation. If the utmost of patriotism and unselfish devotion in the promotion of our national interests have always been and still remain universal, there would hardly be need of their commemoration.

But, after all, why should we attempt to delude ourselves? I am confident that I voice your convictions when I say that no play of ingenuity and no amount of special pleading can frame an absolutely creditable excuse for our remissness in appropriate holiday observance.

You will notice that I use the words “holiday observance.” I have not in mind merely the selection or appointment of days which have been thought worthy of celebration. Such an appointment or selection is easy, and very frequently it is the outcome of a perfunctory concession to apparent propriety, or of a transient movement of affectionate sentiment. But I speak of the observance of holidays, and such holidays as not only have a substantial right to exist, but which ought to have a lasting hold upon the sentiment of our people--days which, as often as they recur, should stimulate in the hearts of our countrymen a grateful recognition of what God has done for mankind, and especially for the American nation; days which stir our consciences and sensibilities with promptings to unselfish and unadulterated love of country; days which warm and invigorate our devotion to the supreme ideals which gave life to our institutions and their only protection against death and decay. I speak of holidays which demand observance by our people in spirit and in truth.

The commemoration of the day on which American independence was born has been allowed to lose much of its significance as a reminder of Providential favor and of the inflexible patriotism of the fathers of the republic, and has nearly degenerated into a revel of senseless noise and aimless explosion, leaving in its train far more of mishap and accident than lessons of good citizenship or pride of country. The observance of Thanksgiving Day is kept alive through its annual designation by Federal and State authority. But it is worth our while to inquire whether its original meaning, as a day of united praise and gratitude to God for the blessings bestowed upon us as a people and as individuals, is not smothered in feasting and social indulgence. We, in common with Christian nations everywhere, celebrate Christmas, but how much less as a day commemorating the birth of the Redeemer of mankind than as a day of hilarity and the interchange of gifts.

I will not, without decided protest, be accused of antagonizing or deprecating light-hearted mirth and jollity. On the contrary, I am an earnest advocate of every kind of sane, decent, social enjoyment, and all sorts of recreation. But, nevertheless, I feel that the allowance of an incongruous possession by them of our commemorative days is evidence of a certain condition, and is symptomatic of a popular tendency, which are by no means reassuring.

On the days these words are written, a prominent and widely read newspaper contains a communication in regard to the observance of the birthday of the late President McKinley. Its tone plainly indicates that the patriotic society which has for its primary purpose the promotion of this particular commemoration recognizes the need of a revival of interest in the observance of all other memorial days, and it announces that “its broader object is to instil into the hearts and minds of the people a desire for real, patriotic observance of all of our national days.”

Beyond all doubt, the commemorations of the birth of American heroes and statesmen who have rendered redemptive service to their country in emergencies of peace and war should be rescued from entire neglect and from fitful and dislocated remembrance. And, while it would be more gratifying to be assured that throughout our country there was such a spontaneous appreciation of this need, that in no part of our domain would there be a necessity of urging such commemorations by self-constituted organizations, yet it is comforting to know that, in the midst of prevailing apathy, there are those among us who have determined that the memory of the events and lives we should commemorate shall not be smothered in the dust and =smoke= of sordidness, nor crushed out by ruthless materialism.

On this day the Union League Club of Chicago should especially rejoice in the consciousness of patriotic accomplishment; and on this day, of all others, every one of its members should regard his membership as a badge of honor. Whatever else the organization may have done, it has justified its existence, and earned the applause of those whose love of country is still unclouded, by the work it has done for the deliverance of Washington’s birthday from neglect or indolent remembrance. I deem it a great privilege to be allowed to participate with the League in a commemoration so exactly designed, not only to remind those of mature years of the duty exacted by their heirship in American free institutions, but to teach children the inestimable value of those institutions, to inspire them to emulation of the virtues in which our nation had its birth, and to lead them to know the nobility of patriotic citizenship. The palpable and immediate good growing out of the commemorations which for twenty years have occurred under the auspices of the League are less impressive than the assurance that, in generations yet to come, the seed thus sown in the hearts of children and youth will bear the fruit of disinterested love of country and saving steadfastness to our national mission.

In furtherance of the high endeavor of your organization, it would have been impossible to select for observance any other civic holiday having as broad and fitting a significance as this. It memorizes the birth of one whose glorious deeds are transcendently above all others recorded in our national annals; and, in memorizing the birth of Washington, it commemorates the incarnation of all the virtues and all the ideals that made our nationality possible, and gave it promise of growth and strength. It is a holiday that belongs exclusively to the American people. All that Washington did was bound up in our national life, and became interwoven with the warp of our national destiny. The battles he fought were fought for American liberty, and the victories he won gave us national independence. His example of unselfish consecration and lofty patriotism made manifest, as in an open book, that those virtues were conditions not more vital to our nation’s beginning than to its development and durability. His faith in God, and the fortitude of his faith, taught those for whom he wrought that the surest strength of nations comes from the support of God’s almighty arm. His universal and unaffected sympathy with those in every sphere of American life, his thorough knowledge of existing American conditions, and his wonderful foresight of conditions yet to be, coupled with his powerful influence in the councils of those who were to make or mar the fate of an infant nation, made him a tremendous factor in the construction and adoption of the constitutional chart by which the course of the newly launched republic could be safely sailed. And it was he who first took the helm, and demonstrated, for the guidance of all who might succeed him, how and in what spirit and intent the responsibilities of our chief magistracy should be discharged.

If your observance of this day were intended to make more secure the immortal fame of Washington, or to add to the strength and beauty of his imperishable monument built upon a nation’s affectionate remembrance, =your= purpose would be useless. Washington has no need of you. But in every moment, from the time he drew his sword in the cause of American independence to this hour, living or dead, the American people have needed him. It is not important now, nor will it be in all the coming years, to remind our countrymen that Washington has lived, and that his achievements in his country’s service are above all praise. But it is important--and more important now than ever before--that they should clearly apprehend and adequately value the virtues and ideals of which he was the embodiment, and that they should realize how essential to our safety and perpetuity are the consecration and patriotism which he exemplified. The American people need to-day the example and teachings of Washington no less than those who fashioned our =nation= needed his labors and guidance; and only so far as we commemorate his birth with a sincere recognition of this need can our commemoration be useful to the present generation.