Kitabı oku: «African and European Addresses», sayfa 7
In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Græco-Roman civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement, wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in applied science—all these mark our civilization as they marked the wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.
One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand, merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now I will not assert that in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly overcome; but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome them than was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously shown by the military history of the Græco-Roman period as compared with the history of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and among nations of European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military history the change was steadily from a citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the days of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when the Roman Republic conquered what world it knew, the armies were filled with citizen soldiers. But gradually the citizens refused to serve in the armies, or became unable to render good service. The Greek states described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, hired others to do their fighting for them. The Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any infantry, to the legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to an end, there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers. The change from the citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been completed.
Now, the exact reverse has been the case with us in modern times. A few centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the principal figure in most armies, and in great numbers of cases the mercenary soldier was an alien. In the wars of religion in France, in the Thirty Years' War in Germany, in the wars that immediately thereafter marked the beginning of the break-up of the great Polish Kingdom, the regiments and brigades of foreign soldiers formed a striking and leading feature in every army. Too often the men of the country in which the fighting took place played merely the ignoble part of victims, the burghers and peasants appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary armies by which they were plundered. Gradually this has all changed, until now practically every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary has almost disappeared, while the army exists on a vaster scale than ever before in history. This is so among the military monarchies of Europe. In our own Civil War of the United States the same thing occurred, peaceful people as we are. At that time more than two generations had passed since the War of Independence. During the whole of that period the people had been engaged in no life-and-death struggle; and yet, when the Civil War broke out, and after some costly and bitter lessons at the beginning, the fighting spirit of the people was shown to better advantage than ever before. The war was peculiarly a war for a principle, a war waged by each side for an ideal, and while faults and shortcomings were plentiful among the combatants, there was comparatively little sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant struggle, where across the warp of so many interests is shot the woof of so many purposes, dark strands and bright, strands sombre and brilliant, are always intertwined; inevitably there was corruption here and there in the Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides, and the great majority of the enormous masses of fighting men, wholly disregarded, and were wholly uninfluenced by, pecuniary considerations. There were of course foreigners who came over to serve as soldiers of fortune for money or for love of adventure; but the foreign-born citizens served in much the same proportion, and from the same motives, as the native-born. Taken as a whole, it was, even more than the Revolutionary War, a true citizens' fight, and the armies of Grant and Lee were as emphatically citizen armies as Athenian, Theban, or Spartan armies in the great age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the days of the Republic.
Another striking contrast in the course of modern civilization as compared with the later stages of the Græco-Roman or classic civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and politics. In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its zenith, politics became a recognized means of accumulating great wealth. Cæsar was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he spent an enormous fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which he made out of his political-military career. Augustus established Imperial Rome on firm foundations by the use he made of the huge fortune he had acquired by plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of Washington and Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their civilizations culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as one of the incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is in sharp contrast to what has happened within the last two or three centuries. During this time there has been a steady growth away from the theory that money-making is permissible in an honorable public career. In this respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and things which statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or two centuries ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career even a century ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still exercise a large, and sometimes an improper, influence in politics, but it is apt to be an indirect influence; and in the advanced states the mere suspicion that the wealth of public men is obtained or added to as an incident of their public careers will bar them from public life. Speaking generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern political life, but it is not acquired in political life. The colonial administrators, German or American, French or English, of this generation lead careers which, as compared with the careers of other men of like ability, show too little rather than too much regard for money-making; and literally a world scandal would be caused by conduct which a Roman proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and which would not have been especially uncommon even in the administration of England a century and a half ago. On the whole, the great statesmen of the last few generations have been either men of moderate means, or, if men of wealth, men whose wealth was diminished rather than increased by their public services.
I have dwelt on these points merely because it is well to emphasize in the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many respects there is a complete lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day and the only other civilization in any way comparable to it, that of the ancient Græco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many points in which the analogy is close, and in some of these points the resemblances are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of all is the fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of interest, and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization can be compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now literally a world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid and is ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at one point is certain to be felt with greater or less effect at almost every other point. Every path of activity open to the human intellect is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto dreamed of. We have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in consequence, a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and daring souls have before them a well-nigh limitless opening for endeavor of any kind.
Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been able to develop only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field of endeavor has been limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, of course, been great movements, but they were of practically only one form of activity; and although usually this set in motion other kinds of activities, such was not always the case. The great religious movements have been the pre-eminent examples of this type. But they are not the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the Phoenicians, at almost opposite poles of cultivation, have represented movements in which one element, military or commercial, so overshadowed all other elements that the movement died out chiefly because it was one-sided. The extraordinary outburst of activity among the Mongols of the thirteenth century was almost purely a military movement, without even any great administrative side; and it was therefore well-nigh purely a movement of destruction. The individual prowess and hardihood of the Mongols, and the perfection of their military organization, rendered their armies incomparably superior to those of any European, or any other Asiatic, power of that day. They conquered from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic; they seized the Imperial throne of China; they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they had no root of permanence; their work was mere evil while it lasted, and it did not last long; and when they vanished they left hardly a trace behind them. So the extraordinary Phoenician civilization was almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization, and though it left an impress on the life that came after, this impress was faint indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks with their many-sided development. Yet the Greek civilization itself fell, because this many-sided development became too exclusively one of intellect, at the expense of character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities which fit men to govern both themselves and others. When the Greek lost the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes? We cannot be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty.
Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true. We cannot afford to develop any one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phoenician, nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.
We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family life, the fundamental and essential qualities—the homely, every-day, all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy children, then the State will topple, will go down, no matter what may be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be that power of organization, that power of working in common for a common end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion during the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the hard intolerance and and intellectual barrenness of what was worst in the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern philosophy in its various branches, it would be worse than folly on our part to ignore our need of intellectual leadership. Your own great Frederick once said that if he wished to punish a province he would leave it to be governed by philosophers; the sneer had in it an element of justice; and yet no one better than the great Frederick knew the value of philosophers, the value of men of science, men of letters, men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed to accept Tolstoy as a guide in social and moral matters; but it would also be a bad thing not to have Tolstoy, not to profit by the lofty side of his teachings. There are plenty of scientific men whose hard arrogance, whose cynical materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put them on a level with the bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they denounce. Yet our debt to scientific men is incalculable, and our civilization of to-day would have reft from it all that which most highly distinguishes it if the work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of well-being than was ever attained by any preceding civilization. Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!
It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of sentimental attachment to the rights of man; in which a high material development in the things of the body shall be achieved without subordination of the things of the soul; in which there shall be a genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of those virile qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall avail any race; in which the fullest development of scientific research, the great distinguishing feature of our present civilization, shall yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever take the place of character—for, from the standpoint of the nation as of the individual, it is character that is the one vital possession.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's well-being. You, my hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the people of my own land.
The Conditions of Success
An Address at the Cambridge Union, May 26, 1910
Mr. President and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure for me to be here to-day and to address you and to wear what the Secretary9 has called the gilded trappings which show that I am one of the youngest living graduates of Cambridge. Something in the nature of a tract was handed to me before I came up here. It was an issue of the Gownsman [holding up, amid laughter, a copy of an undergraduate publication] with a poem portraying the poet's natural anxiety lest I should preach at him. Allow me to interpose an anecdote taken from your own hunting field. A one-time Master of Foxhounds strongly objected to the presence of a rather near-sighted and very hard-riding friend who at times insisted on riding in the middle of the pack; and on one occasion he earnestly addressed him as follows: "Mr. So and So, would you mind looking at those two dogs, Ploughboy and Melody. They are very valuable, and I really wish you would not jump on them." To which his friend replied, with great courtesy: "My dear sir, I should be delighted to oblige you, but unfortunately I have left my glasses at home, and I am afraid they must take their chance." I will promise to preach as little as I can, but you must take your chance, for it is impossible to break the bad habit of a lifetime at the bidding of a comparative stranger. I was deeply touched by the allusion to the lion and the coat-of-arms. Before I reached London I was given to understand that it was expected that when I walked through Trafalgar Square, I should look the other way as I passed the lions.
Now I thank you very much for having made me an honorary member. Harvard men feel peculiarly at home when they come to Cambridge. We feel we are in the domain of our spiritual forefathers, and I doubt if you yourselves can appreciate what it is to walk about the courts, to see your buildings, and your pictures and statues of the innumerable men whose names we know so well, and who have been brought closer to us by what we see here. That would apply not alone to men of the past. The Bishop of Ely to you is the Bishop of to-day; but I felt like asking him when I met him this morning, "Where is Hereward the Wake?" It gives an American university man a peculiar feeling to come here and see so much that tells of the ancient history of the University.
The tie between Harvard and Cambridge has always been kept up. I remember when you sent over Mr. Lehmann to teach us how to row. He found us rather refractory pupils, I am afraid. In the course of the struggle, the captain of the Harvard crew was eliminated. He afterwards came down to Cuba and was one of the very best captains in my regiment. At that time, however, he was still too close to his college days—he was separated from them only by about two weeks when he joined me—to appreciate what I endeavored to instil into him, that while winning a boat-race was all very well, to take part in a victorious fight, in a real battle, was a good deal better. Sport is a fine thing as a pastime, and indeed it is more than a mere pastime; but it is a very poor business if it is permitted to become the one serious occupation of life.
One of the things I wish we could learn from you is how to make the game of football a rather less homicidal pastime. (Laughter.) I do not wish to speak as a mere sentimentalist; but I do not think that killing should be a normal accompaniment of the game, and while we develop our football from Rugby, I wish we could go back and undevelop it, and get it nearer your game. I am not qualified to speak as an expert on the subject, but I wish we could make it more open and eliminate some features that certainly tend to add to the danger of the game as it is played in America now. On the Pacific slope we have been going back to your type of Rugby football. I would not have football abolished for anything, but I want to have it changed, just because I want to draw the teeth of the men who always clamor for the abolition of any manly game. I wish to deprive those whom I put in the mollycoddle class, of any argument against good sport. I thoroughly believe in sport, but I think it is a great mistake if it is made anything like a profession, or carried on in a way that gives just cause for fault-finding and complaint among people whose objection is not really to the defects, but to the sport itself.
Now I am going to disregard your poet and preach to you for just one moment, but I will make it as little obnoxious as possible. (Laughter.) The Secretary spoke of me as if I were an athlete. I am not, and never have been one, although I have always been very fond of outdoor amusement and exercise. There was, however, in my class at Harvard, one real athlete who is now in public life. I made him Secretary of State, or what you call Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he is now Ambassador in Paris. If I catch your terminology straight, he would correspond to your triple blue. He was captain of the football eleven, played on the base-ball team, and rowed in the crew, and in addition to that he was champion heavy-weight boxer and wrestler, and won the 220-yard dash. His son was captain of the Harvard University crew that came over here and was beaten by Oxford two years ago. [Voices: "Cambridge."] Well, I never took a great interest in defeats. (Loud laughter and applause.) Now, as I said before, I never was an athlete, although I have always led an outdoor life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually possesses.
There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do. That is genius. I am not discussing what form that genius takes; whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one else can write, The Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, or Helen, thy beauty is to me; or of a man who can do 100 yards in nine and three-fifths seconds. Such a man does what no one else can do. Only a very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing genius. The average man who is successful,—the average statesman, the average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call great success—is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.
Take such a thing as hunting or any form of vigorous bodily exercise. Most men can ride hard if they choose. Almost any man can kill a lion if he will exercise a little resolution in training the qualities that will enable him to do it. [Taking a tumbler from the table, Mr. Roosevelt held it up.] Now it is a pretty easy thing to aim straight at an object about that size. Almost any one, if he practises with the rifle at all, can learn to hit that tumbler; and he can hit the lion all right if he learns to shoot as straight at its brain or heart as at the tumbler. He does not have to possess any extraordinary capacity, not a bit,—all he has to do is to develop certain rather ordinary qualities, but develop them to such a degree that he will not get flustered, so that he will press the trigger steadily instead of jerking it—and then he will shoot at the lion as well as he will at that tumbler. It is a perfectly simple quality to develop. You don't need any remarkable skill; all you need is to possess ordinary qualities, but to develop them to a more than ordinary degree.
It is just the same with the soldier. What is needed is that the man as soldier should develop certain qualities that have been known for thousands of years, but develop them to such a point that in an emergency he does, as a matter of course, what a great multitude of men can do but what a very large proportion of them don't do. And in making the appeal to the soldier, if you want to get out of him the stuff that is in him, you will have to use phrases which the intellectual gentlemen who do not fight will say are platitudes. (Laughter and applause.)
It is just so in public life. It is not genius, it is not extraordinary subtlety, or acuteness of intellect, that is important. The things that are important are the rather commonplace, the rather humdrum, virtues that in their sum are designated as character. If you have in public life men of good ability, not geniuses, but men of good abilities, with character,—and, gentlemen, you must include as one of the most important elements of character commonsense—if you possess such men, the Government will go on very well.
I have spoken only of the great successes; but what I have said applies just as much to the success that is within the reach of almost every one of us. I think that any man who has had what is regarded in the world as a great success must realize that the element of chance has played a great part in it. Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities; but the opportunities have to come. If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion you don't get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace no one would have known his name now. The great crisis must come, or no man has the chance to develop great qualities.
There are exceptional cases, of course, where there is a man who can do just one thing, such as a man who can play a dozen games of chess or juggle with four rows of figures at once—and as a rule he can do nothing else. A man of this type can do nothing unless in the one crisis for which his powers fit him. But normally the man who makes the great success when the emergency arises is the man who would have made a fair success in any event. I believe that the man who is really happy in a great position—in what we call a career—is the man who would also be happy and regard his life as successful if he had never been thrown into that position. If a man lives a decent life and does his work fairly and squarely so that those dependent on him and attached to him are better for his having lived, then he is a success, and he deserves to feel that he has done his duty and he deserves to be treated by those who have had greater success as nevertheless having shown the fundamental qualities that entitle him to respect. We have in the United States an organization composed of the men who forty-five years ago fought to a finish the great Civil War. One thing that has always appealed to me in that organization is that all of the men admitted are on a perfect equality provided the records show that their duty was well done. Whether a man served as a lieutenant-general or an eighteen-year-old recruit, so long as he was able to serve for six months and did his duty in his appointed place, then he is called Comrade and stands on an exact equality with the other men. The same principle should shape our associations in ordinary civil life.
