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The Future
The life of a nation is much like
the life of a man. It begins with an infancy of weakness, of reliance
upon others, a seeking for guidance in the experience of those who
are older, in the conservation of all the forces available, and
the development to a strength which is not taken seriously by the
neighbor nations of the earth. Extension of territory and accumulation
of wealth follow, with increasing time for the arts and luxuries
which opportunity brings, and then the serene stages where full
growth is achieved, and when the hot passions of youth have faded
into the dignified serenity of established position. In this period
is the nation’s peril. Shakespeare [394][395]
has told us of the “Seven Ages of Man”; of the progress from infancy,
through strength, to the period of decay, when human senses all
have vanished, yet life still lurks in the slowly-pulsing heart;
and after that comes dissolution, and the gathering again of elements
in other formations; the disappearance of factors as they had been
known before, and their reassembling in newer combinings, that shall
begin again the strange experiment of life. Some flash into glorious
promise, and pass before that promise is fulfilled. Some linger
superfluous upon the stage, the glow of a splendid past behind them,
the certainty of extinction before.
So with the nations that have made
procession across the page of history. It is fair to gather from
the record of those that have vanished some rules that must apply
to those that still exist; for those departed have trod one way,
and all their exits have led through a single gate.
This nation we call the United States
has seen its time of infancy. It passed impetuous boyhood in 1812.
It proved adventurous in 1848. It came to quick blows in its full
maturity, and reveled in the exuberance of unmeasured strength from
1861 to 1865. Then came the time of judg- [395][396]
ment, of serene self-valuation, of conscious equality with any other,
and then utility arrived. Opportunity was seized—opportunity was
made. All the resources that lay in the land, that lurked in the
air, that thrilled in the brains and the hearts of men were developed,
until the nation in wealth, in power and in magnificence stood at
the very apex of existence. After that one thing of two must come.
In Rome, riches and culture crumbled the foundation stones of empire;
and she who from her seven hills had ruled the world passed through
the gate, and was buried in that cemetery of the nations beside
Greece, and Babylon, and distant Nineveh. There was a time in each
when its armies marched whithersoever they pleased, and when its
ships came from every port in the known world with gold in the ingot,
with silks in the bale. But a nation drunk with power or debauched
with vice is a nation diseased and hurrying on to death.
Perhaps no country in the whole lapse
of time has possessed the genius, the wealth or the power of the
United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. If the
leaders of the nation should abandon themselves to the gratification
of sense, if the corrosion of idleness should eat at the [396][397]
iron of vigor and the wine of indulgence dissolve the pearls of
purity, there could be but a single ending to the history so splendidly
begun, so magnificently maintained. It is providential that in an
era of great possibilities—for either good or evil—the happier fate
should be assured by the rise of this man; that whatever of moral
malaria might have fastened upon the civic health of the people
was corrected by the presence of a man of vigorous right, a prophet
of the strenuous life, a citizen who teaches the doctrine “Trust
in God, and help yourself.” It is providential that the right man
came to the nation at the juncture in its history when it needed
him. And it is a matter worthy of reflection that his whole life
seems to have been dedicated to a preparation for the work which
now engrosses him. Combined in his veins, as Mrs. Boylan has well
said in her splendid poem, runs the blood of master races. He comes
of a family which flourished on American soil long before the American
nation was dreamed of. His parentage, his youth, his training, his
education up to arrival at manhood, have all been steps in his preparation,
as clearly as was the anointing with oil which set apart the son
of Jesse for the throne of [397][398]
Israel. His political training, his experience in office, his hunting,
his conduct of business affairs, his virile, manly strength and
heroic soul—all are the attributes which the man of the hour needed—which
the man of the hour must have, or the opportunity of the hour will
have vanished forever. In an unusual degree the arrival of this
man, so equipped, and at the time, is of the very greatest value
to the nation. There can be no tendency to idleness or enervation
while the industry and energy of such a man provide an incentive
to worthy deeds for the youth of America.
Patrick Henry, in that wonderful speech
before the Virginia convention, said: “There is but one lamp by
which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.” The
citizen of the United States can know no better rule by which to
decide what shall be the mission and achievement of his country
than to study the tendency of the past, and the probable course
of the men in control at critical stages. America’s history is,
or should be, in the possession of the sons of the Republic. It
has been a steady progress toward a definite objective, from the
very beginning. In a way, that progress has been more a [398][399]
result of extraordinary conditions than of cohesive, concerted planning.
The critical time came with the close of the nineteenth century.
With power at the flood, with influence untried, with every faculty
up to maturity fully developed, there waited possibilities for immeasurable
good, for unlimited growth abroad, and consequent unlimited advancement
at home; or the probability of growth’s cessation—with the inevitable
beginning of deterioration, moral and physical, which has come to
every people who, content with achievement, has abandoned progress.
With that history and tendency known,
with the mighty forces understood, the manner of men at the head
of affairs in the crisis completes the data required in forming
judgment as to what the future of the nation shall be. Very fortunately,
Theodore Roosevelt has placed himself on record as to the course
he believes his country should follow, and a definite pledge as
to the direction in which his influence shall be exerted. At Minneapolis,
Minnesota, he delivered a speech September 2, before the blow at
his chief had fallen at Buffalo; and in those lines the lamp by
which the student may be guided is set aflame. [399][400]
From that speech the following illustrative passages are taken:
In his admirable series of studies
of twentieth-century problems, Dr. Lyman Abbott has pointed
out that we are a nation of pioneers; that the first colonists
to our shores were pioneers, and that pioneers selected out
from among the descendants of these early pioneers, mingled
with others selected afresh from the old world, pushed westward
into the wilderness and laid the foundations for new commonwealths.
They were men of hope and expectation,
of enterprise and energy; for the men of dull content or more
dull despair had no part in the great movement into and across
the new world.
Our country has been populated
by pioneers, and therefore it has in it more energy, more enterprise,
more expansive power than any other in the wide world.
You whom I am now addressing stand
for the most part but one generation removed from these pioneers.
You are typical Americans, for you have done the great, the
characteristic, the typical work of our American life. In making
homes and carving out careers for yourselves and your children,
you have built up this State. Throughout our history the success
of the homemaker has been but another name for the upbuilding
of the nation.
We have but little room among
our people for the timid, the irresolute, and the idle; and
it is no less true that there is scant room in the world at
large for the nation with mighty thews that dares not to be
great.
Sometimes we hear those who do
not work spoken of with envy. Surely the wilfully idle need
arouse in the breast of a healthy man no emotion stronger than
that of contempt—at the outside no emotion stronger than angry
contempt. The feeling of envy would have in it an admission
of inferiority on our part, to which the men who know not the
sterner joys of life are not entitled. [400][401]
Poverty is a bitter thing, but
it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and
physical, moral and intellectual flabbiness to which those doom
themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest
of all vain pursuits, the pursuit of mere pleasure, as a sufficient
end in itself.
The wilfully idle man, like the
wilfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy and vigorous
community. Moreover, the gross and hideous selfishness for which
each stands defeats even its own miserable aims. Exactly as
infinitely the happiest woman is she who has borne and brought
up many healthy children, so infinitely the happiest man is
he who has toiled hard and successfully in his life work.
The work may be done in a thousand
different ways; with the brain or the hands, in the study, the
field, or the workshop; if it is honest work, honestly done,
and well worth doing, that is all we have a right to ask.
Every father and mother here,
if they are wise, will bring up their children not to shirk
difficulties, but to meet and overcome them; not to strive after
a life of ignoble ease, but to strive to do their duty, first
to themselves and their families, and then to the whole State;
and this duty must inevitably take the shape of work in some
form or other.
It is not possible ever to insure
prosperity merely by law. Something for good can be done by
law, and bad laws can do an infinity of mischief; but, after
all, the best law can only prevent wrong and injustice and give
to the thrifty, the far-seeing and the hard-working a chance
to exercise to the best advantage their special and peculiar
abilities.
No hard and fast rule can be laid
down as to where our legislation shall stop in interfering between
man and man, between interest and interest.
All that can be said is that it
is highly undesirable on the one hand to weaken individual initiative,
and on the other hand that, in a constantly increasing number
of cases, we shall find [401][402]
it necessary in the future to shackle cunning as in the past
we have shackled force.
It is not only highly desirable,
but necessary, that there should be legislation which shall
carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall
discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing
the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous
competitors who have no conscience, and will do right only under
fear of punishment.
There is but the scantiest justification
for most of the outcry against the men of wealth as such, and
it ought to be unnecessary to state that any appeal which directly
or indirectly leads to suspicion and hatred among ourselves,
which tends to limit opportunity, and, therefore, to shut the
door of success against poor men of talent, and, finally, which
entails the possibility of lawlessness and violence, is an attack
upon the fundamental properties of American citizenship.
Our interests are at bottom common;
in the long run we go up or go down together.
Yet more and more it is evident
that the State, and, if necessary, the nation, has got to possess
the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations
which are its creatures; particularly as regards the great business
combinations which derive a portion of their importance from
the existence of some monopolistic tendency.
The right should be exercised
with caution and self-restraint, but it should exist, so that
it may be invoked if the need arises.
So much for our duties, each to
himself and each to his neighbor, within the limits of our own
country. But our country, as it strides forward with ever-increasing
rapidity to a foremost place among the world powers, must necessarily
find, more and more, that it has world duties also.
There are excellent people who
believe that we can shirk these duties and yet retain our self-respect;
but these good people are in error. Other good people seek to
deter us from [402][403] treading
the path of hard but lofty duty by bidding us remember that
all nations that have achieved greatness, that have expanded
and played their part as world powers, have in the end passed
away. So they have; so have all others. The weak and the stationary
have vanished as surely as, and more rapidly than, those whose
citizens felt within them the life that impels generous souls
to great and noble effort.
This is another way of stating
the universal law of death, which is itself part of the universal
law of life. The man who works, the man who does great deeds,
in the end dies as surely as the veriest idler who cumbers the
earth’s surface; but he leaves behind him the great fact that
he has done his work well. So it is with nations. While the
nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and
the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must
die, yet no less surely the nation that has played the part
of the weakling must also die; and, whereas the nation that
has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has
done a great work really continues, though in changed form,
forevermore. The Roman has passed away, exactly as all nations
of antiquity which did not expand when he expanded have passed
away; but their very memory has vanished, while he himself is
still a living force throughout the wide world in our entire
civilization of to-day, and will so continue through countless
generations, through untold ages
It is because we believe with
all our heart and soul in the greatness of this country, because
we feel the thrill of hardy life in our veins, and are confident
that to us is given the privilege of playing a leading part
in the century that has just opened, that we hail with eager
delight the opportunity to do whatever task Providence may allot
us.
We admit with all sincerity that
our first duty is within our own household; that we must not
merely talk, but act, in favor of cleanliness and decency and
righteousness in all political, social and civic matters. No
prosperity and no glory can save a nation that is rotten at
heart. We must ever keep the core [403][404]
of our national being sound, and see to it that not only our
citizens in private life, but above all, our statesmen in public
life, practice the old, common-place virtues which from time
immemorial have lain at the root of all true national well-being.
Yet while this is our first duty,
it is not our whole duty. Exactly as each man, while doing first
his duty to his wife and the children within his home, must
yet, if he hopes to amount to much, strive mightily in the world
outside his home, so our nation, while first of all seeing to
its own domestic well-being, must not shrink from playing its
part among the great nations without.
It is both foolish and undignified
to indulge in undue self-glorification, and above all in loose-tongued
denunciation of other peoples. Whenever on any point we come
in contact with a foreign power I hope that we shall always
strive to speak courteously and respectfully of that foreign
power.
Let us make it evident that we
intend to do justice. Then let us make it equally evident that
we will not tolerate injustice being done us in return.
Let us further make it evident
that we use no words which we are not prepared to back up with
deeds, and that, while our speech is always moderate, we are
ready and willing to make it good. Such an attitude will be
the surest possible guarantee of that self-respecting peace,
the attainment of which is and must ever be the prime aim of
a self-governing people.
This is the attitude we should
take as regards the Monroe doctrine. There is not the least
need of blustering about it. Still less should it be used as
a pretext for our own aggrandizement at the expense of any other
American State.
But most emphatically we must
make it evident that we intend on this point ever to maintain
the old American position. Indeed, it is hard to understand
how any man can take any other position now that we are all
looking forward to the building of the isthmian canal. [404][405]
Commercially, as far as this doctrine
is concerned, all we wish is a fair field and no favor; but
if we are wise we shall strenuously insist that under no pretext
whatsoever shall there be any territorial aggrandizement on
American soil by any European power, and this, no matter what
form the territorial aggrandizement may take.
We most earnestly hope and believe
that the chance of our having any hostile military complication
with any foreign power is small. But that there will come a
strain, a jar, here and there, from commercial and agricultural—that
is, from industrial—competition is almost inevitable.
Here, again, we have got to remember
that our first duty is to our own people, and yet that we can
get justice best by doing justice. We must continue the policy
that has been so brilliantly successful in the past, and so
shape our economic system as to give every advantage to the
skill, energy and intelligence of our farmers, merchants, manufacturers
and wage-workers; and yet we must also remember, in dealing
with other nations, that benefits must be given when benefits
are sought.
Throughout a large part of our
national career our history has been one of expansion, the expansion
being of different kinds at different times. This expansion
is not a matter of regret but of pride. It is vain to tell a
people as masterful as ours that the spirit of enterprise is
not safe. The true American has never feared to run risks when
the prize to be won was of sufficient value.
No nation capable of self-government
and of developing by its own efforts a sane and orderly civilization,
no matter how small it may be, has anything to fear from us.
Our dealings with Cuba illustrate this, and should be forever
a subject of just national pride.
We speak in no spirit of arrogance
when we state as a simple historic fact that never in recent
years has any great nation acted with such disinterestedness
as we have shown in Cuba. We freed the island from the Spanish
yoke. We then earnestly [405][406]
did our best to help the Cubans in the establishment of free
education, of law and order, of material prosperity, of the
cleanliness necessary to sanitary well-being in their great
cities.
We did all this at great expense
of treasure, at some expense of life; and now we are establishing
them in a free and independent commonwealth, and have asked
in return nothing whatever save that at no time shall their
independence be prostituted to the advantage of some foreign
rival of ours or so as to menace our well-being. To have failed
to ask this would have amounted to national stultification on
our part.
In the Philippines we have brought
peace, and we are at this moment giving them such freedom and
self-government as they could never under any conceivable conditions
have obtained had we turned them loose to sink into a welter
of blood and confusion, or to become the prey of some strong
tyranny without or within. We are not trying to subjugate a
people; we are trying to develop them and make them a law-abiding,
industrious and educated people, and we hope ultimately a self-governing
people. We have done our duty to ourselves, and we have done
the higher duty of promoting the civilization of mankind.
The first essential of civilization
is law. Anarchy is simply the hand-maiden and forerunner of
tyranny and despotism. Law and order enforced by justice and
by strength lie at the foundation of civilization. Law must
be based upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be
enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing
it means in the end that there is no justice and no law—nothing
but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength.
Without the habit of orderly obedience
to the law, without the stern enforcement of the laws at the
expense of those who defiantly resist them, there can be no
possible progress, moral or material, in civilization. There
can be no weakening of the law-abiding spirit at home if we
are permanently to succeed; and just as little can we afford
to show weakness abroad. [406][407]
Barbarism has and can have no
place in a civilized world. It is our duty toward the people
living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains,
and we can only free them by destroying barbarism itself. The
missionary, the merchant and the soldier may each have to play
a part in this destruction and in the consequent uplifting of
the people.
Exactly as it is the duty of a
civilized power scrupulously to respect the rights of all weaker
civilized powers and gladly to help those who are struggling
toward civilization, so it is its duty to put down savagery
and barbarism.
As in such a work human instruments
must be used, and as human instruments are imperfect, at times
there will be injustice; at times merchant, or soldier, or even
missionary may do wrong. Let us instantly condemn and rectify
such wrong when it occurs, and if possible punish the wrongdoer.
But, shame, thrice shame to us if we are so foolish as to make
such occasional wrongdoing an excuse for failing to perform
a great and righteous task.
So it must be in the future. We
gird up our loins as a nation with the stern purpose to play
our part manfully in winning the ultimate triumph, and therefore
we turn scornfully aside from the paths of mere ease and idleness
and with unfaltering steps tread the rough road of endeavor,
smiting down the wrong and battling for the right as Greatheart
smote and battled in Bunyan’s immortal story.
September 5, 1901, the day before
his assassination, President McKinley delivered a speech at the
Pan-American Exposition, in Buffalo, which fairly and clearly expressed
his view of the nation’s obligations and duties, and his estimate
of the Republic’s immeasurable possibilities. The address has become
prophetic. The views [407][408] must
be regarded as the crystallized sentiment of the nation, and the
policy as that which the American people will resolutely follow.
From that notable speech these words are chosen:
Expositions are the timekeepers
of progress. They record the world’s advancement. They stimulate
the energy, enterprise and intellect of the people and quicken
human genius. They go into the home. They broaden and brighten
the daily life of the people. They open mighty storehouses of
information to the student. To the commissioners of the Dominion
of Canada and the British colonies, the French colonies, the
republics of Mexico and of Central and South America, and the
commissioners of Cuba and Porto Rico, who share with us in this
undertaking, we give the hand of fellowship and felicitate with
them upon the triumphs of art, science, education and manufacture
which the old has bequeathed to the new century.
Isolation is no longer possible
or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different
languages, the same day in all Christendom. The telegraph keeps
us advised of what is occurring everywhere, and the press foreshadows,
with more or less accuracy, the plans and purposes of the nations.
Market prices of products and of securities are hourly known
in every commercial mart, and the investments of the people
extend beyond their own national boundaries into the remotest
parts of the earth.
At the beginning of the nineteenth
century there was not a mile of steam railroad on the globe.
Now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then
there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast
mileage traversing all lands and all seas. God and man have
linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent
to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with
each other the less occasion is there for misunderstanding and
the stronger [408][409] the disposition
when we have differences to adjust them in the court of arbitration,
which is the noblest forum for the settlement of international
disputes.
Our industrial enterprises, which
have grown to such great proportions, affect the homes and occupations
of the people and the welfare of the country. Our capacity to
produce has developed so enormously and our products have so
multiplied that the problem of more markets requires our urgent
and immediate attention. Only a broad and enlightened policy
will keep what we have. No other policy will get more. In these
times of marvelous business energy and gain we ought to be looking
to the future, strengthening the weak places in our industrial
and commercial systems that we may be ready for any storm or
strain.
By sensible trade arrangements
which will not interrupt our home production, we shall extend
the outlets for our increasing surplus. A system which provides
a mutual exchange of commodities is manifestly essential to
the continued healthful growth of our export trade. We must
not repose in fancied security that we can forever sell everything
and buy little or nothing. If such a thing were possible it
would not be best for us or for those with whom we deal. We
should take from our customers such of their products as we
can use without harm to our industries and labor.
Reciprocity is the natural outgrowth
of our wonderful industrial development under the domestic policy
now firmly established. What we produce beyond our domestic
consumption must have a vent abroad. The excess must be relieved
through a foreign outlet, and we should sell everywhere we can
and buy wherever the buying will enlarge our sales and productions,
and thereby make a greater demand for home labor.
The period of exclusiveness is
past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing
problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of good
will and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity
treaties are in har- [409][410]
mony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are
not.
If, perchance, some of our tariffs
are no longer needed for revenue or to encourage and protect
our industries at home, why should they not be employed to extend
and promote our markets abroad?
Then, too, we have inadequate
steamship service. New lines of steamers have already been put
in commission between the Pacific coast ports of the United
States and those on the western coast of Mexico and Central
and South America. These should be followed up with direct steamship
lines between the eastern coast of the United States and South
American ports.
One of the needs of the times
is direct commercial lines from our vast fields of production
to the fields of consumption that we have but barely touched.
Next in advantage to having the thing to sell is to have the
convenience to carry it to the buyer.
We must encourage our merchant
marine. We must have more ships. They must be under the American
flag, built and manned and owned by Americans. These will not
only be profitable in a commercial sense; they will be messengers
of peace and amity wherever they go.
We must build the isthmian canal,
which will unite the two oceans and give a straight line of
water communication with the western coast of Central and South
America and Mexico. The construction of a Pacific cable cannot
be longer postponed.
In the furtherance of these objects
of national interest and concern you are performing an important
part.
The good work will go on. It cannot
be stopped. These buildings will disappear; this creation of
art and beauty and industry will perish from sight, but their
influence will remain to
“Make it live beyond its too short living
With praises and thanksgiving.”
Our earnest prayer is that God
will graciously vouchsafe [410][411]
prosperity, happiness and peace to all our neighbors and like
blessings to all the peoples and powers of earth.
The day of President McKinley’s death,
the day Theodore Roosevelt assumed the duties and recorded the oath
which made him chief executive of the nation, he pledged himself
to carry out the policy of his predecessor, in every detail which
went to the peace and prosperity, the liberties and the laws of
his country. Here, then, is the “lamp” by which a forecast may be
fashioned. The United States will maintain, in its domestic economy,
the policies which had affected trade and commerce in the past.
There will be a readjustment of tariff duties, a removal of the
tax where it is no longer necessary, a reduction where that can
be done in accordance with public interest, and an extension and
encouragement of trade with the nations beyond our borders. There
will be a jealous preservation of the Monroe doctrine, yet a maintaining
of peace in the family of nations. And the canal across the Central
American isthmus will be built by Americans, financed with American
money, and kept within the control of Americans, whether peace or
war shall come.
We know the materials which constitute
the [411][412] nation. We know the
tendency of public men in this portentous era. And we know the temper
of the man whose influence, above that of other men, shall direct
the advance of the great Republic. Nothing more conclusively illustrating
President Roosevelt’s position in this juncture can be presented
than his recent remarks when the subject of his reëlection to his
high office was suggested to him, and was used as a means of inducing
him to appoint to office a man whom he had learned was unfit.
“I am going to select the best men
for public positions. Men appointed to high public places must be
high in morals and in many other respects. If the American people
care to show their approval of my course as President during the
three years and a half I have to serve, by placing me at the head
of the Republican ticket in 1904, I should feel deeply grateful.
It would be an honor it would be difficult for any man to decline.
But if I have to pander to any cliques, combinations, or movements
for their approval, I would not give a snap of my finger for it,
or a nomination for it under such circumstances. My endorsement
must come from the people of the country.” [412][413]
When an earlier triumph came to him,
Mr. Roosevelt was asked by a friend what had been his motto through
life, and he replied: “I have never had any motto, except this:
‘What thy hands find to do, do it with thy might.’”
This is the story of Theodore Roosevelt,
twenty-sixth President of the United States, in the hour when the
nation enters its golden era.
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