Chapter I: Part 1

REALIZABLE
IDEALS

Earl Lectures of Pacific Theological Seminary
delivered at Berkeley, California,
in 1911.

BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

SAN FRANCISCO
WHITAKER & RAY-WIGGIN CO.
1912

COPYRIGHT
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1911

INTRODUCTION

The addresses printed in this volume were delivered under the auspices of Pacific Theological Seminary by the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, as Earl Lecturer, in the Spring of 1911. The Seminary is fortunate in possessing a Lectureship founded by Mr. Edwin T. Earl in 1901, whose purpose, as stated in the articles of foundation, is “to aid in securing at the University of California the presentation of Christian truth by bringing to Berkeley year by year eminent Christian scholars and thinkers to speak upon themes calculated to illustrate and disseminate Christian thought and minister to Christian life.” The uncommon public interest which this series of lectures aroused, and the attendance of many thousands who daily crowded the Greek Theatre to hear them, emphasized to the Lectureship Committee the desirability of yielding to a wide-spread demand for their publication. Since Mr. Roosevelt did not have a manuscript, arrangements were made for an accurate stenographic report, which was afterwards submitted to him for revision. So much should be said in explanation of the forensic form of these lectures. Their fine ethical purpose justifies the hope that they may continue to stimulate good citizenship in wider circles than those which came within reach of the speaker’s voice.

WILLIAM FREDERIC BADÈ.

September, 1911.
Pacific Theological Seminary,
Berkeley, California.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Realizable Ideals 1

The Home and the Child 34

The Bible and the Life of the People 67

The Public Servant and the Eighth
Commandment 91

The Shaping of Public Opinion and the
Ninth Commandment 124

REALIZABLE IDEALS

When I was first asked to deliver this course of lectures I refused just because what I wanted to preach was action. I did not feel sure that I could preach action in five lectures. I finally accepted, because it seemed to me so admirable a thing for the Seminary to have started this kind of a lecture course and so admirable a thing for the founder of the course to have provided for it that I did not feel quite at liberty to refuse.

All our extraordinary material development, our wonderful industrial growth will go for nothing unless with that growth goes hand in hand the moral, the spiritual growth that will enable us to use aright the other as an instrument. I hesitated some time as to exactly what title to give to the lectures I was to deliver because I wanted to use the two titles of Applied Ethics and Realizable Ideals. I chose these titles because they seemed to me to put into words the only spirit which I think counts for anything in preaching, whether by a professional or by an amateur; the spirit which regards preaching as worthless unless transmuted into action. If we treat the study of ethics as a mere intellectual diversion then we probably do ourselves little harm and certainly do ourselves no good. If we consciously or carelessly preach ideals which cannot be realized and which we do not intend to have realized, then so far from accomplishing a worthy purpose we actually tend to weaken the morality we ostensibly preach. Now, anything I have to say to you during these lectures will derive its whole value from the spirit in me as I say it and the spirit in you as you listen to it. If I preach to you anything which I do not strive, with whatever haltings and shortcomings, myself to realize then I am unworthy for you to listen to; and if, on the other hand, you come to listen to me from mere curiosity, or to get a little temporary enjoyment, then you would better have stayed at home.

I chose as the opening lecture this address on realizable ideals, because the longer I have lived the more strongly I have felt the harm done by the practice among so many men of keeping their consciences in separate compartments; sometimes a Sunday conscience and a weekday conscience; sometimes a conscience as to what they say or what they like other people to say, and another conscience as to what they do and like other people to do; sometimes a conscience for their private affairs and a totally different conscience for their business relations. Or again, there may be one compartment in which the man keeps his conscience not only for his domestic affairs but for his business affairs and a totally different compartment in which he keeps his conscience when he deals with public men and public measures.

It has always irritated me when, in whatever capacity, I have attended Sunday School celebrations, to listen to some of the speeches made, and especially when I knew some of the men making them. I have always felt most strongly that it was mischievous and wrong for a man to get up before a number of boys and girls and preach to them to “take no thought of things of the body,” not “to regard their own interests in any way,” to think of “nothing whatever but others,” when they knew that he did not follow any such course of action himself, and when they knew that they themselves could not act and were not expected to act, literally on his words. That kind of a speech does harm, because harm is always done by preaching an ideal which the preacher and the hearer know cannot be followed, which they know it is not intended to have followed; for then the hearer confounds all ideals with the false ideal to which he is listening; and because he finds that he is not expected to live up to the doctrine to which he has listened he concludes that it is needless to live up to any doctrine at all.

Now I do not mean for a moment that the ideal preached should be a low one; I do not mean for a moment that it is ever possible entirely to realize even for the very best man or woman the loftiest ideal; but I do mean that the ideal should not be preached except with sincerity, and that it should be preached in such a fashion as to make it possible measurably to approach it.

Take the Sunday School address of the type to which I object and of which I have just spoken: If you tell a number of boys who are about to become men and go out to earn their own living--if you tell them to despise the things of the body, to care nothing for material success, you are telling them what you would not want your own boys actually to do; you are telling them what they cannot do unless they are willing to become public charges, and what it is not desirable that they should try to do. To tell them such things in the name of morality is to invite them to despise morality. What is necessary is to tell them that their first duty is to earn their own livelihood, to support themselves and those dependent upon them; but that when that first duty has been performed there yet remains a very large additional duty, in the way of service to their neighbor, of service to the rest of mankind.

Again, I have heard men, whose lives have been passed chiefly in amassing money, preach to boys that money was of no real consequence, that they ought to disregard it, that it was really entirely unimportant. Well, those men did not in practice believe what they preached. Curiously enough some of them had for so many years schooled themselves to utter that kind of a sentence when they got on a platform, and to act in such diametrically opposite fashion when they were in their business offices, that they had ceased to become conscious of any incongruity; when they got up to speak they naturally fell into the very vice that represented the negation of the other vice into which they equally naturally fell as soon as they sat down before their counting-desk. Now, it is a false statement, and therefore it is a disservice to the cause of morality, to tell any man that money does not count. If he has not got it he will find that it does count tremendously. If he is worth his salt and is desirous of caring for mother and sisters, wife and children, he will not only find that it counts but he will realize that he has acted with infamy and with baseness if he has not appreciated the fact that it does count. And of course, when I speak of money I mean what money stands for. It counts tremendously. No man has any right to the respect of his fellows if through any fault of his own he has failed to keep those dependent upon him in reasonable comfort. It is his duty not to despise money. It is his duty to regard money, up to the point where his wife and children and any other people dependent upon him have food, clothing, shelter, decent surroundings, the chance for the children to get a decent education, the chance for the children to train themselves to do their life work aright, a chance for wife and children to get reasonable relaxation. Now practically, as regards his or her own family, I doubt if there is anyone here who would deny that proposition. It is so obvious that it seems needless to put it before you; and yet how often do we listen to a man on a platform like this, saying, because it is the conventional thing to say, “pay no heed to money.” Now, of course, when such a preacher says “pay no heed to money” his hearers at once accept what he is about to say further as insincere; and, whether they pay heed to money or not, they pay no further heed to what he says about it.

It is not a realizable ideal, to “pay no heed to money.” You must pay heed up to the point I have indicated. But it is a realizable ideal, after you have once reached that point, to understand that money is merely a means to an end, and that if you make it the end instead of a means you do little good to yourself and are a curse to everybody else. It is a realizable ideal, to make people understand that while it is their first duty to pull their own weight in the world, yet that after they have achieved a certain amount of prosperity both their capacity for usefulness toward others and their capacity for enjoyment depends infinitely more on other things than upon possessing additional money.

Now, the very fact that I grant in the fullest degree the need of having enough money, which means the need of sufficient material achievement to enable you and those dependent upon you to lead your lives healthily and under decent conditions--the very fact that I grant this as the essential first need to meet, entitles me to have you accept what I say at its face value when I add that this represents only the beginning, and that after you have reached this point your worth as a unit in the commonwealth, your worth to others and your worth to yourself, depends infinitely less upon having additional money than it depends upon your possessing certain other things, things of the soul and the spirit.

I could not overstate the grinding misery, the heart-breaking misery, I have seen come to a family where the man is unable quite to do what he ought to for those dependent upon him. But after the man and the woman have reached the point where they have a home in which the elemental needs are met and where in addition they have accumulated a comparatively small amount of money necessary to meet the primal needs of the spirit and of the intellect--after this point is reached it is my deliberate judgment that money, instead of being the prime factor, is one of the minor factors, both in usefulness and in happiness. Always keep in mind my first proviso--I am not going to repeat it to you--as to the necessity of having enough money. But go beyond that; for beyond that, the difference between the multi-millionaire and the man of very moderate fortune is in the vast majority of cases really a difference of appearance and not of reality as regards both usefulness and happiness. The chief harm that the multi-millionaire does in my mind comes not in his joining with others to make a trust--although when he does that I will try to regulate him--and it is not in the fact that in him as in other men there is, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “a deal of human nature,” so that he is sometimes very good and sometimes not good at all; it is that he is apt to give to the rest of us a thoroughly false ideal. The worst ill that can befall us is to have our own souls corrupted, and it is a debasing thing for a nation to choose as its heroes the men of mere wealth.

I remember a number of years ago seeing a pleasant and very happy little community very nearly ruined--and as regards many of the families completely ruined--because an entirely amiable multi-millionaire moved into the neighborhood. I really think that his amiability and his perfectly sincere desire to be pleasant with everyone was one of the causes of the mischief. I know, for instance, a very nice woman there, with a charming little house, who, having been asked to dinner at the very gorgeous mansion of this worthy soul of many millions, naturally wished to entertain him and his wife in return. But, alas, she was perfectly wretched when it actually came to entertaining them in her house; she was not willing to have the hired girl wait on the table; she had to have a butler, and then she had to live up to the butler. And the funny thing was instead of giving the multi-millionaire a perfectly pleasant time in her own fashion, which she could have done, she merely gave him a dreary tenth-rate imitation of his own feasts. Instead of putting herself in a totally different class, so that there could be no competition between them at all, she insisted on competing in a class where she was certain to get the worst of it. After two or three years of the millionaire’s residence in the neighborhood there were not a few families who had suffered either some permanent damage or grave temporary discomfort, not from any fault of the millionaire, but because they themselves had been foolish. Now, I don’t want to preach against the millionaire; but I do want to preach against us if we let him make us spoil ourselves--that’s all.

I wish us to understand better than we now do what are the real things and what are the artificial things of life. I wish us to get a better perspective. Take even the average educational institution; if a very wealthy man visits it altogether too many of the boys look at him with eager interest, as a man that has had just the career that they intend to emulate; and altogether too many of the girls think that they would like to marry into his class! Now, in that case, I don’t blame him at all; I think it merely adds to our sin, to our iniquity, if we blame him instead of ourselves for the feelings, not that he has about us, but that we have about him. But I do blame ourselves; I blame us if we do not have a proper sense of perspective, if we fail to pay honor to the people who are entitled to it. I do not wonder that a great many men make of money-getting their one ideal when so many of their fellow countrymen treat success in making money as the chief kind of success.

When America’s history is written, when the history of the last century in America is written a hundred years hence, the name of no multi-millionaire, who is nothing but a multi-millionaire, will appear in that history, unless it appears in some foot-note to illustrate some queer vagary or extravagance. The men who will loom large in our history are the men of real achievement of the kind that counts. You can go over them--statesmen, soldiers, wise philanthropists--I wish to underscore the word “wise,” for the philanthropist who is really worth calling such is the man who tries to make such use of his philanthropy as to provide against the need of philanthropy in the future, just as the real worker in charity is the worker who does his best to bring about conditions in which charity shall not be necessary. The statesman, the writer, the man of science, of letters, of art, these are the men who will leave their mark on history.

When you look back and think of the Civil War, what lives of those who then lived would you, if you had a chance, like yourselves to have lived? Not the lives of the sordid souls who stayed at home and made money out of the Civil War; not even the lives of those men who were not sordid, who acted honorably in their private business at home, but who did not have the opportunity and privilege of going to the front. The lives that you respect, the lives that you wish your fathers or forefathers to have led, are those of the men who in the time of the Nation’s trial each endeavored to render all the service that could possibly be rendered to the nation. Those are the men of the past to whose memory we look up, of whose fame we as Americans are jealous, whose good deeds we would like to emulate. Now, that is our attitude toward the past; I ask that we make it also our attitude in the present.

I wish it distinctly to be understood that I have not the smallest prejudice against multi-millionaires. I like them. But I always feel this way when I meet one of them: You have made millions--good; that shows you must have something in you, I wish you would show it.

I do regard it as a realizable ideal for our people as a whole to demand, not of the millionaire--not at all--but of their own children and of themselves, that they shall get the millionaire in his proper perspective, and when they once do that ninety-five per cent of what is undesirable in the power of the millionaire will disappear. I shall speak of the other five per cent in a minute or two; but I am speaking now of much the larger part of what makes him undesirable; and much of that larger part is not in him at all, it is in us; it is in the emotions we permit the sight of him to produce in us.

Now, a word to my fellow reformers. If they permit themselves to adopt an attitude of hate and envy toward the millionaire they are just about as badly off as if they adopt an attitude of mean subservience to him. It is just as much a confession of inferiority to feel mean hatred and defiance of a man as it is to feel a mean desire to please him overmuch. In each case it means that the man having the emotion is not confident in himself, that he lacks self-confidence, self-reliance, that he does not stand on his own feet; and, therefore, in each case it is an admission that the man is not as good as the man whom he hates and envies, or before whom he truckles.

So that I shall preach as an ideal neither to truckle to nor to hate the man of mere wealth, because if you do either you admit your inferiority in reference to him; and if you admit that you are inferior as compared to him you are no good American, you have no place in this Republic. So that from our standpoint toward the millionaire ninety-five per cent of the damage he can do us is subjective and not objective; that is to say, it rests with us and not with him.

There remains the five per cent of harm that he can do us for which we are not responsible. Up to this point I have been preaching to us about him. Now I want to say a word or two to him, to the man of great wealth. The mere acquisition of wealth in and by itself, beyond a certain point, speaks very little indeed for the man compared with success in most other lines of endeavor. I want you to weigh the words that I have used--the mere acquisition of wealth in itself. I know that there are many men who have made great fortunes where the making of the great fortune has been an incident to the doing of a great task, where the man has really been at least as much interested in the task as in the fortune. It is a great epic feat to drive a railroad across a continent; it is a great epic feat to build up a business worth building. For the man who performs that feat I have a genuine regard. For the man who makes a great fortune as an incident to rendering a great service I have nothing but admiration--although unfortunately the men who are entitled to our regard, and a little more--to our admiration--for the feats that they have thus done, have too often forfeited all right to that regard and admiration and more than forfeited it by the course that they have afterwards, or coincidently, pursued in regard to money making or in other matters. Furthermore the wealthy men who make money which does not represent service are public enemies; we are bound to make war against every form of special privilege.

We have now definitely accepted as axiomatic the fact that in this country we have to control the use of enormous aggregations of wealth in business. But no great industrial chief should be content to do only so much as is necessary to keep within the law. He may be “law honest,” and yet be a sinister enemy of the commonwealth.

One great realizable ideal for our people is to discourage mere law honesty. It is necessary to have good laws and to have them well enforced. But the best laws and the most rigid enforcement will not by themselves produce a really healthy type of morals in the community. In addition to the law and its enforcement we must have the public opinion which frowns on the man who violates the spirit of the law even although he keeps just within the letter. I cannot tell you any one way in which that feeling can be made to carry weight. I think it must find expression in a dozen different ways. Later in one of these lectures I shall discuss the organs of public opinion and public expression--the press and the magazines. When they more measurably reach the ideal they ought to, we shall be able to grapple more effectually with the man of wealth who fails in his duty than we do at present. But without waiting for that day, we should strive to create in the community the sense of proportion which will make us respect the decent man who does well, and condemn the man who does not act decently and who does wrong.

The other day a sentence was uttered in the Senate by a certain Senator which I thought was fraught--quite unconsciously fraught--with a lesson for all of us. The Senator in question had been engaged in an impassioned speech on behalf of Mr. Lorimer, and in speaking of some of the unsavory creatures who had testified in the case he said in answer to a question, “Yes, they were fools as well as knaves,” and that in his experience all knaves were fools.

That is not so. This Senator was giving expression to a very unhealthy attitude of the public mind, the tendency to treat as a knave only the foolish knave, and to pardon the wise knave who managed to succeed in his villainy. We shall never come near realizing the very realizable ideal of honesty in business and public life until we make it evident that the scoundrel whom we hate most is not the scoundrel who fails but the scoundrel who succeeds. The scoundrel who fails is condemned by everyone and is laughed at by his fellow-knaves. It is the scoundrel who wins out that is the menace to this Republic, the menace to this great commonwealth of ours. Let us so shape our laws as to make it difficult for the scoundrel to succeed, and to give us at least a reasonable chance of punishing him after he succeeds. In addition to this, let us also, each of us individually and all of us collectively, strive to create the kind of public opinion which will make the success of such a scoundrel hardly worth having. The dullest man, the man with the thickest skin, does not enjoy very much a success which brings on him the scorn of his fellows. The old Greek proverb was that “contempt would pierce the shell of a tortoise,” and whatever our people really scorn, really despise, really condemn, is something that the knaves among us rarely care to have. When we can create the public opinion which will mean that the average honest man turns away from the successful knave one of the prime incentives for being a successful knave will have vanished.

To that end, friends, I again wish to say that we must hold up an ideal that can be realized. If we use language which would go to show that we regard success and failure in the business world as of indifference, then we shall merely convince every man in that world that we are speaking insincerely. You do not regard success and failure with indifference. You do not regard the man who fails and the man who succeeds as standing on the same plane; and as long as you do not so regard it, tell the truth about it. No man ever permanently helped a reform by lying on behalf of the reform. Tell the truth about it; and then you can expect to be believed when you tell further truths; the truth that business success, though an admirable thing, up to a certain point an absolutely necessary thing, is beyond that point not as admirable as some other things; and the truth that business success obtained, not by serving your fellows but by swindling your fellows, is an infamy and is to be so regarded by all honest men.

Realizable ideals; we must have them in private and in public life both. I have already told you of one type of sermon to which I strongly object. There is another type to which I object almost as strongly, and that is the sermon which in its condemnation of innocent pleasure tends to make men confound vice and pleasure. I heartily abhor the man who practices vice because he regards it as the only kind of enjoyment. I do not abhor quite as much, but I at least as much despise, the clergyman who makes ready the path for such a man by condemning indiscriminately innocent enjoyment and vice. It is not only harmless, but it is eminently desirable, that young people should have a good time.

What we wish for ourselves, and have a right to wish for ourselves I want to see us preach towards others. If you persuade the average boy that it is wicked to have a good time, it may have either one of two results: if he is a very sensitive boy it may prevent him from ever having a good time, in which case I will guarantee that he makes all those intimately associated with him have a very bad time; or else, you may persuade him that inasmuch as he thoroughly intends to have a good time, and as a good time is wicked--why, in for a lamb, in for a sheep, and he will be wicked to some purpose. I ask here again that not only every clergyman but every teacher of morals--and that ought to include every father who is worth being called father--endeavor to help the boy in getting a good time; and then hold him to a rigid accountability if he turns that good time into a bad time.

This illustrates just what I mean by a realizable ideal. Don’t preach the impossible. Don’t preach what makes your hearers think you are insincere. But have ideals and insist on their realization. If this nation has not the right kind of ideal in every walk of life, if we have not in our souls the capacity for idealism, the power to strive after ideals, then we are gone. No nation ever amounted to anything if it did not have within its soul the power of fealty to a lofty ideal. For that very reason it is our duty to avoid preaching false ideals, and with almost equal scrupulousness to avoid preaching, as desirable, ideals which cannot be measurably attained.

I am to deliver four more lectures, and I wish in these lectures to speak of applied ethics, of realizable ideals; in the first place in the family, because that is the foundation of everything; in the next place in public life--which means in the collective life of all of us, in the life lived on behalf of all of us; and finally as regards the expression of public opinion, as regards the instruments that should do most to shape public opinion--the press, the magazines. In each of those four lectures I shall endeavor to show you why I believe we should change certain of the ideals we now have, and why I believe we should in every way, and, above all, by the force of public opinion, insist that the realizable ideal be actually realized in practice.

THE HOME AND THE CHILD

If this were the first of these lectures I would feel like apologizing for having brought you here under false pretenses; but you came here with your eyes open now and I haven’t any sympathy for you!

I spoke yesterday of applied ethics, of realizable ideals. Before I begin my regular theme of today I want to say a word as to my utterances yesterday. I intend to try to avoid the position in which a former fellow-townsman of mine, a Mr. Richard Grant White, who was a great Shakespearean scholar got himself. It was once announced that he was to deliver twelve lectures on Shakespeare; in his first lecture he outlined what he intended to say in the other eleven; and then he spent the other eleven in answering the attacks on the first. I intend to try to avoid getting into a similar predicament, but I must make one explanation.

Two or three remarks that were made to me after the close of the lecture yesterday suggested to me that I ought perhaps to have laid emphasis on a point which seemed to me so obvious that I did not emphasize it. Two or three gentlemen spoke to me in a way that indicated that they thought that in advocating realizable ideals I had somehow seemed to advocate low ideals. I do not believe that to most of you I conveyed any such impression, but if I did I of course wish to correct it. I should be ashamed of myself unless I believed in high ideals. I do not think that an ideal is really a high ideal unless it is one that is at least partially realizable. My preaching is not against high ideals but against wrong ideals. I remember in a little story by Miss Mary E. Wilkins when she makes one of her characters say anent the leading village worthy who claimed to be much better than anyone else, “I think there are some people who aren’t so far ahead of us as they are to one side of us; sometimes it is latitude and sometimes it is longitude that separates reformers.” I would be sorry indeed to have any word of mine understood as implying any willingness to lower our ideals. All I want is to have the people that preach them sure that they are really high ideals. No ideal can be right for this world if it is not fitted to be used in this world. It cannot be right to preach to men and women a standard of conduct up to which you do not expect them to live. My plea is only that those who preach shall strive to preach a doctrine up to which it is possible to live, and that those who listen shall not listen merely to gratify their esthetic sensibilities, but shall listen with the serious purpose of applying and of acting upon the principles laid down to them. Perhaps in what I had to say yesterday I ought to have guarded myself against the possibility of anyone’s misconstruing my language. I hope I have so guarded myself in what I have said today.

The first place where I desire to see any man or woman realize his or her ideals is in connection with those most intimately thrown with him or her. The very first place in which it is necessary that ideals should be realized is in the man’s own home. It is so elementary that it seems hardly necessary to say that everything else in our civilization rests upon the home; that all public achievement rests upon private character; that the state cannot go on onward and upward, that the nation cannot make progress, unless the average individual is of the right type, unless the average American is a pretty decent fellow and unless his wife is a still better fellow. It will not be possible otherwise for the nation permanently to rise.

The first essential toward the achievement of good citizenship is, of course, the building up the kind of character which will make the man a good husband, a good father, a good son; which will make the woman a good daughter when she is young, a good wife and mother as she grows older. Absolutely nothing is gained by filling a man with vague aspirations for the betterment of his kind if you have not filled him first of all with the desire to do decently by those members of mankind with whom he passes most of his life.

We all of us know the type of man, frequently found at cross-road groceries, who in his abundant leisure is able to explain precisely how humanity should be benefited and the nation run, meanwhile he himself exists at all only because his wife takes in washing. We also know the man who in public life is filled with the loftiest aspirations; but whose family unite in breathing a sigh of relief whenever he is absent from the house.

Of course there is now and then a man who in some given crisis plays the hero although on other occasions he plays the brute--there are such cases; but it is a mighty unsafe thing to proceed upon the assumption that because a man is ordinarily a brute he will therefore be a hero in a crisis. Disregarding the exceptions, and speaking normally, no man can be of any service to the state, no man can amount to anything from the standpoint of usefulness to the community at large, unless first and foremost he is a decent man in the close relations of life. No community can afford to think for one moment that great public service, that great material achievement, that ability shown in no matter how many different directions, will atone for the lack of a sound family life.

Multiplication of divorces means that there is something rotten in the community, that there is some principle of evil at work which must be counteracted and overcome or widespread disaster will follow. In the same way, if the man preaches and practices a different code of morality for himself than that which he demands that his wife shall practice, then no profession on his part of devotion to civic ideals will in the least avail to alter the fact that he is fundamentally a bad citizen. I do not believe in weakness; I believe in a man’s being a man; and for that very reason I abhor the creature who uses the expression that “a man must be a man” in order to excuse his being a vile and vicious man.

I recollect saying to a young friend who was about to enter college, “My friend, I know that you feel that you ought to be a good man; now, be willing to fight for your principles whenever it is necessary; if you’re willing enough to fight nobody will complain about your being too virtuous.”

If you accept only the weak man who cannot hold his own as the type of virtuous man, you will inevitably create an atmosphere among ordinary, vigorous young men in which they will translate their contempt of weakness into contempt of virtue. My plea is that the virtuous man, the decent man, shall be a strong man, able to hold his own in any way, just because I wish him to be an agent in eradicating the misconception that being decent somehow means being weak; I want this to apply to every form of decency, public as well as private.

The worst development that we could see in civic life in this country would be a division of citizens into two camps, one camp containing nice, well-behaved, well-meaning little men, with receding chins and small feet, men who mean well and who if they are insulted feel shocked and want to go home; and the other camp containing robust and efficient creatures who do not mean well at all. I wish to see our side--the side of decency--include men who have not the slightest fear of the people on the other side. I wish to see the decent man in any relation of life, including politics, when hustled by the man who is not decent, able so to hold his own that the other gentleman shall feel no desire to hustle him again. My plea is for the virtue that shall be strong and that shall also have a good time. You recollect that Wesley said he wasn’t going to leave all the good times to the Devil. In the same way we must not leave strength and efficiency to the Devil’s agents. The decent man must realize that it is his duty to be strong just as much as to be decent. There are a good many types of men for whom I do not care; and among those types I would put in prominent place the timid good man--the good man who means well but is afraid. I wish to see it inculcated from the pulpit by every ethical teacher, and in the home, that just to be decent is not enough; that in addition to being a decent man it is the duty of the man to be a strong man. And also this; to let the fact that he is a decent man dawn on his neighbors by itself, and without his announcing it or emphasizing it.

With both men and women the prime necessity to remember is that the simple duties are the most important. I believe that they also mark the way by which, and by which alone, it is possible to realize the truest and highest happiness. I have known a good many miserable people in my life, and infinitely the most miserable among them have been those who have deliberately and with set purpose devoted their lives to the pursuit of what they call pleasure. A young girl, a young man, can be happy for a few years and to a certain degree, in following a life from which every vestige of serious effort and of attempt to fulfill duty has been removed; but they can thus be happy only at the cost of laying up for themselves an infinite store of misery in the future. In this audience there are many who fought in the great Civil War. The memories that those men prize are not the memories of the days of ease, of the days when life was pleasant for them; the memories that they prize, and that they wish to hand down as heritages of honor to their children, are the memories of the days of toil and effort, of the days of the march and the battle, the weary months in camp, the time when in the full flush of their vigorous young manhood they gladly risked everything--life itself--for the great prize of death in battle for the right.

It is not given to every generation--fortunately it is given to only an occasional generation--to spend itself for so great a goal; but we can all render, not as distinguished, but as essential, a service in ordinary life, if only we will face the ordinary humdrum every-day duties in the spirit in which the soldiers of the Civil War faced their great and exceptional task. But this we can only do if we put duty before pleasure, and make of it our highest happiness.

As I said to you yesterday, I do not intend to preach anything that I do not think can be practiced. I call your attention to the fact that I have not said that you shall put duty in the place of pleasure; I have merely asked you to put it before pleasure. Pleasure has its place. I wish you to have a good time, I wish you to enjoy yourselves. But I wish you to remember that merely having a good time will turn to bitter dust in your mouth, to Dead Sea fruit in your mouth, if you devote your whole attention only to the pursuit of pleasure, and especially to the pursuit of vapid pleasure. Pleasure interspersed as an occasional needed relief in doing your life work as duty demands that you do it--such pleasure is worth having. But pleasure pursued as a serious business represents about as melancholy an occupation as any that I know of anywhere. Of course, if you have the pure Bridge Club type of mind I can’t expect to appeal to you. If unlimited Bridge, continued through that section of eternity that you enjoy on this earth, represents your ideal, then nothing that I can say will in any way shake or alter it--which will be, not my fault, but yours. If, however, you have in you the desire for higher things, then I believe that it is possible to make you realize that in the long run your greatest enjoyment will come from the performance of duty. It is very important that we should consider our rights; but it is all-important that we should consider our duties.

A little while ago I was handed a letter from the Equal Suffrage Association asking me to speak on behalf of Woman Suffrage. I have always told my friends that it seemed to me that no man was worth his salt who did not think very deeply of woman’s rights; and that no woman was worth her salt who did not think more of her duties than of her rights. Now, personally I am rather tepidly in favor of woman’s suffrage. When the opportunity came I have always supported it. But I have studied the condition of women in those states where they have the suffrage and in the adjacent states where they do not have it; and, after such study I have never been able to take as great interest in the question as in many other questions because it has always seemed to me so infinitely less important than so many other questions affecting women. I do not think that the harm that its opponents fear will come from it, but I do not think that more than a fraction of the good that its advocates anticipate will come from it. In consequence, while I favor it yet, as I said, I favor it tepidly, because I am infinitely more interested in other things. I do not believe that the question of woman’s voting is a thousandth or a millionth part as important as the question of keeping, and where necessary reviving, among the women of this country, the realization that their great work must be done in the home, that the ideal woman of the future, just like the ideal woman of the past, must be the good wife, the good mother, the mother who is able to bear, and to rear, a number of healthy children. Now, I notice that a good many men applauded that statement. I wish to say to those men in their turn that there is no human being with whom I have less sympathy than the man who is always loudly in favor of woman doing her duty while he falls short in the performance of his own. He in his turn is not fit to exercise the suffrage if he is not a good man in his own home. If he does not make it the first duty of his life to be an efficient home-maker, a good and loving husband, a wise and loving father, he is a mighty poor citizen. And let him be exceedingly careful that he occupies the proper relation towards his family, and does his duty to the state; before he tries to talk to the woman about keeping her proper position. Let him do his duty first before troubling himself as to how she does hers.

I wish to speak especially about the relation of the home and the child. There is a natural--and I cannot help thinking a regrettable--tendency to treat with a certain levity what ought to be the great fundamental truth underlying every system of morals taught in this country. I do not wish to see this country a country of selfish prosperity, where those who enjoy the material prosperity think only of the selfish gratification of their own desires, and are content to import from abroad not only their art, not only their literature, but even their babies. Look at the census returns published in 1910, and you will see that this country is beginning to travel the path that France has long been traveling. Two-thirds of our increase now comes from the immigrants and not from the babies born here, not from young Americans who are to perpetuate the blood and traditions of the old stock. It surely ought to be so obvious as to be unnecessary to point out that all thought of the next generation, all thought of its vocational, artistic or ethical training is wasted thought if there is not to be a next generation to train. The first duty of any nation that is worth considering at all is to perpetuate its own life, its own blood. That duty will not be performed unless we have not merely a high but a sober ideal of duty and devotion in family life, unless our men and women realize what true happiness is, realize and act on the belief that no other form of pleasure, no other form of enjoyment, in any way takes the place of that highest of all pleasures which comes only in the home, which comes from the love of the one man and the one woman for each other, and for their children. Nothing else takes the place or can take the place of family life, and family life cannot be really happy unless it is based on duty, based on recognition of the great underlying laws of religion and morality, of the great underlying laws of civilization, the laws which if broken mean the dissolution of civilization. Unless the average man and woman are married and have healthy children then my coming before this audience is a waste of time and it is a waste of time for you in your turn to come here and listen to me. If you do not believe in your own stock enough to wish to see the stock kept up then you are not good Americans, you are not patriots; and if you do not believe in this, then I for one shall not mourn your extinction, and in such event I shall welcome the advent of a new race that will take your place, because you will have shown that you are not fit to cumber the ground.

This is the most essential and the least pleasant truth that I have to tell you. I can’t expect you to applaud it. But I want you to think over it; and I don’t care a rap what you think of me for telling it to you, if only you will think seriously of the truth itself. In the long run no man or woman can really be happy unless he or she is doing service. Happiness springing exclusively from some other cause crumbles in your hands, amounts to nothing; and in no other way can service as good be rendered as by the right type of mother and father--and I have put them in their order of precedence, the mother first, the father next.

Speaking here in a great educational institution I wish to extend my profound sympathy to the teachers and instructors who are continually brought into contact with what I may call the cuckoo style of parent--the parent who believes that when he can once turn his child into school he shifts all responsibility from his own shoulders for the child’s education, the parent who believes that he can buy for a certain sum--which he usually denounces as excessive--a deputy parent to do his work for him. There is no profession in this country quite as important as the profession of teacher, ranging from the College President right down to the lowest paid teacher in any one of our smallest country public schools. There is no other profession so important. But not the best teacher can wholly supply the want of what ought to be done in the home by the father and the mother. And you men here, I wish you to remember that I put the father in with the mother. I know perfectly well that he cannot fulfill quite as useful a function in the home; but he has his place! He has no right to try to shift the burden wholly upon the woman’s shoulders and then wonder why the children are not better brought up. We continually speak--and it is perfectly proper that we should--of the enormous importance of the woman’s work in the home. It is more important than the man’s. She does play a greater part. But the man is not to be excused if he fails to recognize that his work in the home, in helping bring up, as well as provide for, the children, is also one of his primary functions.