Man_in_the_Arena--Teddy_Roosevelt.txt

The Man in the Arena
by Teddy Roosevelt 1858 - 1919 the 26th President of the United States

Theodore Roosevelt delivered the speech entitled “Citizenship in a Republic” at 
the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910. The speech is popularly known as “The 
Man in the Arena.” His statements at the Sorbonne were part of a larger trip to 
Europe that also included visits to Vienna, Budapest, and Oslo. On May 5, 1910, 
he gave his Nobel Prize speech. This trip came in the midst of Roosevelt's 
frustration with the Taft administration and followed his African safari with
Kermit. After completing his tour of Europe, Roosevelt would make a triumphant 
return to the U.S.

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 war-like 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 thralldom of the Middle Ages.              

This was the most famous university of medieval 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, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisher folk 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 were once 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 the 
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 school 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 men 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 stockade 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 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-centered, 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 roundabout 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 to merely 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 one 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 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.

Today 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 great citizens of great democratic republics. A 
democratic republic such as 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 great responsibilities alike 
for good and 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 very few men, the quality of the 
leaders is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers 
is high enough, then the nations 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 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 cries which call for 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 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 a 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 
toward 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 criticize 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 to 
think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their 
part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of 
contempt for the achievement 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, who 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 neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of 
cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into 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 exactly 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 valiant soldier.”

France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the most 
important lessons 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 marvelous instrument of precision, French prose, has 
turned toward 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 
hosts 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 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 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.

In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave man; that 
is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve his country as a 
soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim 
against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their 
emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a 
crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not 
because it is a war. The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and 
this whether the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The 
question must not be merely, is there to be peace or war? The question must be, 
is it right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be 
fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile person must be “Yes,” 
whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, 
just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in 
private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no 
self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit 
to wrong.

Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than 
ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of blessings for any 
nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of 
blessings in Biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest 
of all curses is in the curse of sterility, and the severest of all 
condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first 
essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and 
mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. 
If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to 
increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and 
willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of 
ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in 
the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great 
republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from 
the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes 
upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle 
of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, 
no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no 
sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the 
loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues 
the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.

Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty he owes 
himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man’s foremost duty is owed to 
himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by 
providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has 
been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid 
material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in 
movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and 
only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public. It is 
not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt 
is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that 
he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity 
in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his 
children.

Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely 
acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of 
material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal 
emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the 
foundation, and the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon 
it is raised the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to 
recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of 
value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he 
has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real 
use—and such is often the case—why, then he does become an asset of real worth. 
But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of 
wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most 
other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places 
cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing 
that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer 
our admiration to the reward instead of the deed rewarded; and if what should 
be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration 
will only come from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a 
certain measure of tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the 
question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the 
other things that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise 
and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard 
than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself. The 
man who, for any cause for which he is himself accountable, has failed to 
support himself and those for whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he has 
fallen lamentably short in his prime duty. But the man, having far surpassed 
the limits of providing for the wants, both of body and mind, of himself and of 
those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or 
retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a 
whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is 
an unworthy citizen of the community; that he is to be neither admired nor 
envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of 
citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose 
level of purpose is even lower than his own.

My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In 
every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; 
ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property 
rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly 
appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the 
upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property. In fact, it is 
essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that there are certain 
qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire in and of themselves, 
which ought by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from the 
standpoint of the use made of them. Foremost among these I should include two 
very distinct gifts—the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. 
Money-making, the money touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in 
a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great 
degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and without 
such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the least attractive 
types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it is with the orator. It 
is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in democracy should be able to 
state his views clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of 
value to the community is enable the man thus to explain himself; if it enables 
the orator to put false values on things, it merely makes him a power for 
mischief. Some excellent public servants have not that gift at all, and must 
merely rely on their deeds to speak for them; and unless oratory does represent 
genuine conviction based on good common sense and able to be translated into 
efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the damage to 
the public it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in 
any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they 
tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which 
they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready 
talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, 
sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body 
politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To 
admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift 
is to do wrong to the republic.

Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force to the 
orator’s latter-day and more influential brother, the journalist. The power of 
the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration 
because of that power unless it is used aright. He can do, and often does, 
great good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, 
all writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of 
their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it. 
Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, 
are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community 
through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid 
triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and 
conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it 
and that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were 
advanced by purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.

In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that they ought to 
possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He 
must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and he also must have 
those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. 
He is useless if he is inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type 
of citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is 
dependent upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place 
in active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from 
robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from robuster virtues. The good 
citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good 
citizen unless he has the ability which will make him work hard and which at 
need will make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he 
is an efficient citizen.

But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then 
the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body 
politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a 
man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement, with 
brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if 
the community worships those qualities and treats their possessors as heroes 
regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no 
difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It 
makes no difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in 
a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular 
leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he 
should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a 
man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large 
habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked 
man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis 
free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such 
admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.

The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make 
the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a 
good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of 
character. But of course many others must be added thereto if a state is to be 
not only free but great. Good citizenship is not good citizenship if only 
exhibited in the home. There remain the duties of the individual in relation to 
the State, and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist 
where the effort is made to carry on the free government in a complex 
industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, 
and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in political 
life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closet philosopher, the 
refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be 
governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and 
the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob-leader, and the insincere man who 
to achieve power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not 
merely useless but noxious.

The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in 
practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they 
have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to 
realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor 
than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with 
stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give 
effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to 
the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the 
ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him 
as he does the work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry 
and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage he will 
do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the 
ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember also that the worth of the 
ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice 
be realized. We should abhor the so-called “practical” men whose practicality 
assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in 
disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and 
conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But only less 
desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of 
fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the 
possible good.

We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme 
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual 
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we 
should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we 
continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual 
initiative can, under changed conditions, be performed with better results by 
common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in 
theory a hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. 
This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will 
see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest 
phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little 
hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water-supply; 
but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems 
which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree but 
in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and water-supply have to be 
considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract 
dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested 
by practical experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and 
individualism is entirely pointless, because of the failure to agree on 
terminology. It is not good to be the slave of names. I am a strong 
individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere 
matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens 
acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to 
individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of 
physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of 
to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which 
triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of 
ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring 
about justice and the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and 
more into the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably 
borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and 
extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer 
destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, 
than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may not with great 
advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men 
who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to 
make a mark of weakness on our part.

But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. We 
should not say that men are equal when they are not equal, nor proceed upon the 
assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should 
strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of 
preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a 
man of the plain people, blood of their blood, and bone of their bone, who all 
his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, at the end died for them, 
who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for 
them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and 
sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local significance):

“I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all 
men, but that they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They 
did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral 
development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in 
what they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable 
rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they 
said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that 
all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to 
confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free 
society which should be familiar to all—constantly looked to, constantly 
labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly 
approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and 
augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.”

We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make us desist 
from the effort to do away with the inequality which means injustice; the 
inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor to 
strive to bring even nearer the day when, as far as is humanly possible, we 
shall be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have an equal 
opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he renders 
service. There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render 
service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and 
must be inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the 
artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather 
than whose fault is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the 
man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of 
privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is 
injustice, whatever form it takes.

To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have 
reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what 
is not true and cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of 
the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to 
his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies 
down, it is a waste of time to try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for 
every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk 
their work and those who do it.

Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life and not be misled into 
following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for recreating the golden 
age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded examination. On the other hand, 
it is foolish to reject a proposal merely because it is advanced by 
visionaries. If a given scheme is proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in 
considering it, disregard formulas. It does not matter in the least who 
proposes it, or why. If it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; 
otherwise reject it. There are plenty of good men calling themselves Socialists 
with whom, up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next 
step is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it, without 
any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may differ. But, on 
the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it has been worthwhile to 
take one step, this does not in the least mean that it may not be highly 
disadvantageous to take the next. It is just as foolish to refuse all progress 
because people demanding it desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as 
it would be to go to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures 
advocated by the extremists were wise. 

The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he 
will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims as his own. 
Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in 
which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete 
liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man 
to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not 
wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without 
reference to which side happens at the moment to be the persecutor and which 
the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to 
the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty 
to a nation, or substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a 
certain social category, for judgment awarded them according to their conduct. 
Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the 
arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to 
envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The 
overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and 
hateful malice directed against the wealth or power, are really at root merely 
different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same 
shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less 
fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who 
excites those who have not property to plunder those who have. The gravest 
wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who 
seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class 
from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less 
wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges 
each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, 
without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only 
true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a 
republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call 
antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor 
in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the line 
that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was 
successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of 
an oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class 
had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was 
at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the 
fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and 
bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of 
cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks 
us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his 
conduct in that position.

In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of 
conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences 
of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if 
conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room 
for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are 
signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether 
religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a 
manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the 
downfall of so many, many nations.

Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic should 
beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground 
that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for 
those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other 
citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class 
hatred or class interest, to religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who 
makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of 
furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and 
self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any 
public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen 
something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some 
emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess. Let me 
illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience. A number of years ago I 
was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western United 
States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each 
being determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the 
cows they followed. If on a round-up an animal was passed by, the following 
year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. 
By the custom of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the 
man on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a newly 
hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built 
a fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it in the fire; and then the cowboy 
started to put on the brand. I said to him, “It’s so-and-so’s brand,” naming 
the man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: “That’s all right, boss; 
I know my business.” In another moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting 
on my brand!” To which he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the 
boss’s brand.” I answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the 
ranch and get whatever is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.” He jumped 
up and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.” And I 
answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me then you will steal 
from me.”

Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in public 
life. If a public man tried to get your vote by saying that he will do 
something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it 
becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.

So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to his family, 
to his neighbor, to the State. There remain duties of citizenship which the 
State, the aggregation of all the individuals, owes in connection with other 
States, with other nations. Let me say at once that I am no advocate for a 
foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he 
can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. 
Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international 
feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country 
because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe 
of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any 
one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually an 
exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at 
the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may 
change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all other 
countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust 
him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate 
view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however 
intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love 
of his native land.

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 national honor as a gentleman of his own honor, will be 
careful to see that the nations neither inflect nor suffer 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 a man should act deceitfully as a public servant 
in his dealing with other nations, any more than 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 to 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 
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 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 so 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 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.