 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
XXVIII
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY,
CALIFORNIA, MAY 14, 1903
President Wheeler, fellow-members of the University:
Last night, in speaking to one of my new friends in
California, he told me that he thought enough had been
said to me about the fruits and flowers; that enough had
been said to me about California being an Eden, and
that he wished I would pay some attention to Adam as
well. Much though I have been interested in the wonderful
physical beauty of this wonderful State, I have
been infinitely more interested in its citizenship, and
perhaps most in its citizenship, in the making.
When I come to the University of California and am
greeted by its President I am greeted by an old and
valued friend, a friend whom I have not merely known
socially but upon whom, while I was Governor of New
York, I leaned often for advice and assistance in the
problems with which I had to deal. When he accepted
your offer I grudged him to you. And it was not
until I came here, not until I have seen you, that I have
been fully reconciled to the loss. But now I am, for I
can conceive of no happier life for any man to lead to
whom life means what it should mean, than the life of the
President of this great university.
This same friend last night suggested to me a thought
that I intend to work out in speaking to you to-day.
We were talking over the University of California, and
our country. Facts tend to become commonplace, and
we tend to lose sight of their importance when once they
are ingrained into the life of the nation. Although we
talk a good deal about what the widespread education of
this country means, I question if many of us deeply consider
its meaning. From the lowest grade of the public
school to the highest form of university training, education
in this country is at the disposal of every man, every
woman, who chooses to work for and obtain it. The
State has done very much; witness this university.
Private benefaction has done much, very much; witness
also this university. And each one of us who has obtained
an education has obtained something for which he
or she has not personally paid. No matter what the
school, what the university, every American who has a
school training, a university training, has obtained something
given to him outright by the State, or given to him
by those dead or those living who were able to make provision
for that training because of the protection of the
State, because of existence within its borders. Each one
of us then who has an education, school or college, has
obtained something from the community at large for
which he or she has not paid, and no self-respecting man
or woman is content to rest permanently under such an
obligation. Where the State has bestowed education the
man who accepts it must be content to accept it merely
as a charity unless he returns it to the State in full, in
the shape of good citizenship. I do not ask of you,
men and women here to-day, good citizenship as a favor
to the State. I demand it of you as a right, and hold
you recreant to your duty if you fail to give it.
Here you are in this university, in this State with
its wonderful climate, which is permitting people of a
Northern stock for the first time in the history of that
Northern stock to gain education in physical surroundings,
Greeks. Here you have all those advantages, and you
are not to be excused if you do not show in tangible
fashion your appreciation of them and your power to
give practical effect to that appreciation. From all our
citizens we have a right to expect good citizenship; but
most of all from those who have received most; most of
all from those who have had the training of body, of
mind, of soul, which comes from association in and with
a great university. From those to whom much has been
given we have Biblical authority to expect and demand
much in return; and the most that can be given to
any man is education. I expect and demand in the
name of the nation much more from you who have had
training of the mind than from those of mere wealth.
To the man of means much has been given, too, and
much will be expected from him, and ought to be, but
not as much as from you, because your possession is
more valuable than his. If you envy him I think poorly
of you. Envy is merely the meanest form of admiration,
and a man who envies another admits thereby his own
inferiority. We have a right to expect from the college-bred
man, the college-bred woman, a proper sense of proportion,
a proper sense of perspective, which will enable
him or her to see things in their right relation one to another,
and when thus seen while wealth will have a proper
place, a just place, as an instrument for achieving happiness
and power, for conferring happiness and power, it
will not stand as high as much else in our national life.
I ask you to take that not as a conventional statement
from the university platform, but to test it by thinking
of the men whom you admire in our past history and
seeing what are the qualities which have made you admire
them, what are the services they have rendered. For,
as President Wheeler said to-day, it is true now as it ever
has been true that the greatest good-fortune, the greatest
that he shall serve the nation, serve his people, serve
mankind; and looking back in history the names that
come up before us, the names to which we turn, the
names of the men of our own people which stand as
shining honor marks in our annals, the names of those
men typifying qualities which rightly we should hold in
reverence, are the names of the statesmen, of the soldiers,
of the poets, and after them, not abreast of them,
the names of the architects' of our material prosperity
also.
Of recent years I have been thrown in contact with a
number of college graduates doing good service to the
country, and as I wish to make it perfectly evident what
I mean by the kind of service which I should hope to
have from you and which it seems to me worth while to
render, I want to say just a word about two college
graduates who have during the last five years rendered
and are now rendering such services: Governor Taft in
the Philippines, and Brigadier-General Leonard Wood,
lately Governor of Cuba. When we acquired the Philippines
and took possession for the time being of Cuba to
train its people in citizenship, we assumed heavy responsibilities;
so heavy that some very excellent persons
thought we ought to shirk them. I hold that a great
and masterful people forfeits its title to greatness if it
shirks any work because that work is difficult and responsible.
The difficulty and responsibility impose upon
us the high duty of doing the work well, but they in no
way excuse us for refusing to do it. We had to do the
work and the question came of the choice of instruments
in doing it. The most important and most difficult
task after the establishment of order by the army
in the Philippines was the establishment of civil government
therein; and second only in importance to
that came the administration of Cuba, during the
to turn its government over to its own people and start
it as a free republic. When tasks are all-important
the most important factor in doing them right is the
choice of the agents; and among the many debts of
gratitude which this nation owes to President McKinley,
no debt is greater than the debt we owe him for the
choice of his instruments, such a choice as that of Taft,
such a choice as that of Wood. We sent Taft to the
Philippines; we sent Wood to Cuba; both of them as
tested by the standard of our commercial life, poor men;
each man with little more than his salary to keep himself
and his family; each man to handle millions upon millions
of dollars, to have the power by mere conniving at
what was improper to acquire untold wealth,—and sent
them knowing that we did not ever have to consider
whether such opportunities would be temptations toward
them; sent them knowing that they had the ideals of the
true American and that, therefore, we did not have to
consider the chance of such a temptation appealing to
them.
Taft went to the Philippines to stay there; not only
forfeiting thereby the certainty of brilliant rise in his profession
on the bench or at the bar here if he had stayed,
but at imminent risk to his own health; because he felt
that his duty as an American made him go; that, as
President McKinley told me of him, he had been drafted
into the service of the country and he could not honorably
refuse. We have seen in consequence the Philippine
Islands administered by the American official who is at
the head of the Government and by his colleagues in the
interest primarily of their people, and seeking to obtain
for the United States, for the dominant race, that spent
its blood and its treasure in making firm and stable the
government of those islands, the reward that comes from
the consciousness of duty well done. Under Taft, by and
well-being come to those islands to a degree never before
known in their recorded history, and to a degree infinitely
greater than had ever been dreamed possible by
those who knew them best, but more than that, a greater
measure of self-government has been given to them than
is now given to any other Asiatic people under alien rule,
than to any other Asiatic people under their own rulers,
save Japan alone. That is an achievement of the past
five years which I hold to be absolutely unparalleled in
history; and when the debit and credit side of our
national life is finally made up a long stroke shall be put
to the credit side for what has been done in the Philippines
under Taft and his associates.
In the same way Leonard Wood worked in Cuba. Put
down there to do an absolutely new task, to take a
people of a different race, a different speech, a different
creed, a people just emerging from the hideous welter of
a war, cruel and sanguinary, beyond what we in this
fortunate country can readily conceive, to take a people
down in the depths of poverty and misery, just recovering
from suffering which makes one shudder to
think of, a people untrained utterly and absolutely in
self-government, and fit them for it; and he did it. For
three years he worked. He established a school system
as good as the best that we have in any of our States.
He cleaned cities which had never been cleaned in their
existence before. He secured absolute safety for life and
property. He did the kind of governmental work which
should be the undying honor of our people forever. And
he came home to what? He came home to be thanked
by a few, to be attacked by others—not to their credit,—
and to have as his real reward the sense that though his
work had been done at pecuniary sacrifice to him, that
though the demands upon him had been such as to eat
into his private means, yet he had worthily and well done
upon the uniform of the United States Army.
I have chosen Taft and Wood simply as instances of
what other men by the hundred have done, Americans
who have graduated from no college, Americans who
have graduated from all our different colleges, and especially
by practically all those Americans who have graduated
from the two great typical American institutions of
learning—West Point and Annapolis. Taft and Wood
and their fellows are spending or have spent the best
years of their prime in doing a work which means to
them pecuniary loss, at the best a bare livelihood while
they are doing it, and are doing it gladly because they realize
the truth that the highest privilege that can be given
to any American is the privilege of serving his country,
his fellow-Americans. As I am speaking to an audience
with proper ideals, when I say that Taft and Wood have
done all this service to their pecuniary loss I am holding
them up not for pity but for admiration. Every man,
every woman here, should feel it incumbent upon him or
her to welcome with joy the chance to render service
to the country, service to our people at large,
and to accept the rendering of the service as in itself
ample repayment therefor. Do not misunderstand me.
The average man, the average woman must earn his or
her living in one way or another, and I most emphatically
do not advise any one to decline to do the humdrum,
every-day duties because there may come a chance for the
display of heroism.
I ask of you the straightforward, earnest performance
of duty in all the little things that come up day by day in
business, in domestic life, in every way, and then when
the opportunity comes, if you have thus done your duty
in the lesser things, I know you will rise level to the
heroic needs.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |