THE STRENUOUS LIFE
SPEECH BEFORE THE
IN speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the
West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who
preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American
character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine
of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to
preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires
mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship,
or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
As it is with the individual, so it is with the
nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no
history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it
is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor
suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor
defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the
end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted up
to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would
have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the
blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of
many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country
those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to
defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from
strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were
weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the
earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld
the wisdom of
We of this generation do not have to face a task such
as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to
perform them! We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to
rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what
goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher
life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the
wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow
of question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that
has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the
end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and
adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in
good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great
issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them
well or ill. In 1898 we could not help being brought face to face with the
problem of war with
The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his
country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful
virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of
feeling the mighty lift that thrills "stern men with empires in their
brains"—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its
new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our
needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world's work, by bringing
order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of
our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who
fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth
leading.
I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that
our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous
endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many
nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and
ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard
of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and
stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of
the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our
duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word;
resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use
practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical,
within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is
justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor,
that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.