University of Virginia Library

XXII
AT OMAHA, NEBRASKA, APRIL 27, 1903

Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow-citizens:

It is a great pleasure to come before you this evening.
Since Saturday I have been travelling through your great
and beautiful State. I know your people; I have been
with them; I have worked with them; and it is indeed a
joy to come here now and see from one end of your State
to the other the signs of your abounding prosperity. I
feel that the future of Nebraska is secure. There will be
temporary ups and downs, and of course if any of you
are guilty of folly, from your own folly nothing can save
you but yourselves. But if you act as I believe and trust
that you will act, this State has a future before it second
to that of no other State in this great Nation.

I address you to-night on the anniversary of the birth
of the great silent soldier—Ulysses Grant,—and I am glad
to have the chance of saying a few words to an audience
such as this in this great typical city of the West on the
occasion of the birthday of the great Western general,
the great American general. It is a good thing to pay
homage with our lips to the illustrious dead. It is a
good thing to keep in mind what we owe to the memories
of Washington and his fellows, who founded this mighty
Republic, to Abraham Lincoln and Grant and their fellows,
who saved it. It is a far better thing to pay the
homage that counts—the homage of our lives and our
deeds. Illustrious memories of the nation's past are but
curses if they serve the men of the nation at present as

excuses for shirking the problems of the day. They are
blessings if they serve to spur on the men of now to see
that they act as well in their time as the men of yesterday
did in theirs.

Each generation has its peculiar problems; each generation
has certain tasks allotted to it to do. Shame to it if
it treats the glorious deeds of a generation that went before
as an excuse for its own failure to do the peculiar
task it finds ready to hand. Upon the way in which we
solve our problems will depend whether our children and
our children's children shall look back or shall not look
back to us with the veneration which we feel for the men
of the mighty years of the Civil War. Our task is a
lighter one than theirs, but it is an important one, and do
it we must, if we wish to rise level to the standard set us
by our forefathers. You in Nebraska have passed through
periods of terrible privation, of misery and hardship.
They were evil times. And yet, there is no experience,
no evil, that out of it good cannot come, if only we look
at it right. Things are better now. Things can be kept
better, but only on condition that we face facts with coolness
and sanity, with clear-eyed vision that tells us what
is true and what is false. When things go wrong there
is another tendency in humanity to wish to blame some
of its fellows. It is a natural tendency, and by no means
always a wholesome tendency. There is always a tendency
to feel that somehow by legislation, by the enactment
of some law, by the trying of some patent scheme,
things can be made permanently better. Now, something
can be done by law. A good deal can be done by law.
Even more can be done by the honest administration of
the law; an administration which knows neither fear nor
favor, which treats each man exactly as that man's record
entitles him to be treated; the kind of enforcement of
the law which I think I may promise that you will have
while Mr. Knox remains Attorney-General. But more

than the law, far more than the administration of the
law, depends upon the individual quality of the average
citizen. The chief factor in winning success for your
State, for the people in the State, must be what the chief
factor in winning the success of a people has been from
the beginning of time—the character of the individual
man, of the individual woman.

I have spoken of the homage we should pay to the
memory of Grant. It is the homage we should pay to
the memory of Lincoln, the homage we should pay to
all of our fellow-countrymen who have at any time rendered
great service to the Republic, and it can be rendered
in most efficient form not by merely praising them for
having dealt with problems which now we do not have to
face, but by facing our problems in the same spirit in
which they faced theirs. Nothing was more noteworthy
in all of Lincoln's character than the way in which he
combined fealty to the loftiest ideal with a thoroughly
practical capacity to achieve that ideal by practical
methods. He did not war with phantoms; he did not
struggle among the clouds; he faced facts; he endeavored
to get the best results he could out of the warring forces
with which he had to deal. When he could not get the
best he was forced to content himself, and did content
himself, with the best possible. What he did in his day
we must do in ours. It is not possible to lay down any
rule of conduct so specific that it will enable us to meet
each particular issue as it arises. All that can be done is
to lay down certain general rules, and then to try, each
man for himself, to apply those general rules to the
specific cases that come up.

Our complex industrial civilization has not only been
productive of much benefit, but has also brought us face
to face with many puzzling problems; problems that are
puzzling, partly because there are men that are wicked,
partly because there are good men who are foolish or

short-sighted. There are many such to-day—the problems
of labor and capital, the problems which we group
together rather vaguely when we speak of the problems
of the trusts, the problems affecting the farmers on the
one hand, the railroads on the other. It would not be possible
in any one place to deal with the particular shapes
which these problems take at that time and in that place.
And yet, there are certain general rules which can be laid
down for dealing with them, and those rules are the immutable
rules of justice, of sanity, of courage, of common-sense.
Six months ago it fell to my lot to appoint
a commission to investigate into and conclude about
matters connected with the great and menacing strike in
the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. On that commission
I appointed representatives of the church, of the
bench, of the army, a representative of the capitalists of
the region, and a representative of organized labor. They
published a report which was not only of the. utmost moment
because of dealing with the great and vital problem
with which they were appointed to deal, but also because
in its conclusions it initiated certain general rules in so
clear and masterful a fashion that I wish most earnestly
it could receive the broadest circulation as a tract wherever
there exists or threatens to exist trouble in any way
akin to that with which those commissioners dealt.

If I might give a word of advice to Omaha, I should
like to see your daily press publish in full the concluding
portion of that report of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission,
signed by all the members thereof, by those in
a special sense the champion of the wage worker, and by
those in a special sense identified with capital, organized
or unorganized, because, men and women of Omaha,
those people did not speak first as capitalist or as laborer,
did not speak first as judge, as army man, as church man,
but all of them signed that report as American citizens
anxious to see right and justice prevail. No one quality

will get us out of any difficulty. We need more than
one; we need a good many. We need, as I said, the
power first of each man's honestly trying to look at
the problem from his fellow's standpoint. Capitalist and
wage worker alike, should honestly endeavor each to look
at any matter from the other's standpoint, with a freedom
on the one hand from the contemptible arrogance
which looks down upon the man of less means, and, on
the other, from the no less contemptible envy, jealousy,
and rancor, which hates another because he is better off.
Each quality is the supplement of the other, and in point
of baseness there is not the weight of a finger to choose
between them. Look at the report signed by those men;
look at it in the spirit in which they wrote it, and if you
can only make yourselves, make this community, approach
the problems of to-day in the spirit that those
men, your fellows, showed in approaching the problem
of yesterday, your problems will be solved.

Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate,
hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community,
though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class
he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty
that class's own worst enemy. In the long run, and as a
whole, we are going to go up or go down together. Of
course there will be individual exceptions, small, local exceptions,
exceptions in kind, exceptions in place; but as
a whole, if the commonwealth prospers, some measure of
prosperity comes to all of us. If it is not prosperous,
then the adversity, though it may fall unequally upon us,
will weigh more or less upon all. It lies with us ourselves
to determine our own fate. I cannot too often say
that the wisest law, the best administration of the law, can
do naught more than give us a fair field in which to work
out that fate aright. If as individuals, or as a community,
we mar our future by our own folly, let us remember
that it is upon ourselves that the responsibility must rest.