HISTORIC SPEECHES
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
The
Strenuous Life
April 1899
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 gold
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 .
A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs
merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive
after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as
of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting
American demands from himself and from his sons shall be
demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you
would teach your boys that case, that peace, is to be the
first Consideration in their eyes-to be the ultimate goal
after which they strive? You men of Chicago have made this
city great, you men of Illinois have done your share, and
more than your share, in making America great, because
you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work
yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you
are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons
that though they ma have leisure, it is not to be spent
in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that
those who possess it, being free from the necessity of
working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to
carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science,
in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research-work
of the type we most need in this country, the successful
carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation.
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the
man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs
his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has
those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife
of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never
to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save
by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means
that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man
can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact
that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose.
If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man
still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether
as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics
or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows
he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period
of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not
of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps
not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a
cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself
to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should
again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very
satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately
unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
In the last analysis
a healthy state can exist only when the men and women
who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when
the children are so trained that they shall endeavor,
not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not
to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil
and risk. The man must be glad to do a man's work, to
dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to
keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the
housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and
fearless mother of many healthy children. In one of Daudet's
powerful and melancholy books he speaks of "the
fear of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife
of the present day." When such words can be truthfully
written of a nation, that nation is rotten to the heart's
core. When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women
fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and
well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where
they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women
who are themselves strong and brave and highminded.
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 Lincoln, and bore sword or
rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the
men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let
us, the children of the men who carried the great Civil
War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers
that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that
the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair,
were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured;
for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored,
and the mighty American republic placed once more as a
helmeted queen among nations.
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
Spain. All we could decide was whether we should shrink
like cowards from the contest, or enter into it as beseemed
a brave and highspirited people; and, once in, whether
failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now.
We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in
Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can
decide is whether we shall meet them in a way that will
redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make
of our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful
page in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all
merely amounts to dealing with them badly. We have a given
problem to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is,
of course, always danger that we may not solve it aright;
but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders
it certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright. 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 l 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.
They believe in that cloistered life which saps the hardy
virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual;
or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and
greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all and
end-all of national life, instead of realizing that, though
an indispensable element, it is, after all, but one of
the many elements that go to make up true national greatness.
No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid
deep in the material prosperity which comes from thrift,
from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing
effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither
was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material
prosperity alone. All honor must lie paid to the architects
of our material prosperity, to the great captains of industry
who have built our factories and our railroads, to the
strong men who toil for wealth with brain or hand; for
great is the debt of the nation to these and their kind.
But our debt is yet greater to the melt whose highest type
is to be found in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like
Grant. They showed by their lives that they recognized
the law of work, the law of strife; they toiled to win
a competence for themselves and those dependent upon them;
but they recognized that there were yet other and even
loftier duties- duties to the nation and duties to the
race.
We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow
ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters
who care nothing for what happens beyond. Such a policy
would defeat even its own end; for as the nations grow
to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought
into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own
in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we
must build up our Dower without our own borders. We must
build the isthmian canal, and we must Rasp the points of
vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding
the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West.
So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint of
international honor the argument is even stronger. The
guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago left us echoes
of glory, but they also left us a legacy of duty. If we
drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage
anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all.
It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform,
and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered.
Such a course would be the course of infamy. It would be
followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands
themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to
step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves
weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the
labors that great and high-spirited nations are eager to
undertake.
The work must be done; we cannot escape our responsibility;
and if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance
to do the work-glad of the chance to show ourselves equal
to one of the great tasks set modern civilization. But
let us not deceive ourselves as to the importance of the
task. Let us not be misled by vainglory into underestimating
the strain it will put on our powers. Above all, let us,
as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities
with proper seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We
must demand the highest order of integrity and ability
in our public men who are to grapple with these new problems.
We must hold to a rigid accountability those public servants
who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the nation
or inability to rise to the high level of the new demands
upon our strength and our resources.
Of course we must remember
not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially
should we beware of attacking the men who are merely
the occasions and not the causes of disaster. Let me
illustrate what I mean by the army and the navy. If twenty
years ago we had gone to war, we should have found the
navy as absolutely unprepared as the army. At that time
our ships could not have encountered with success the
fleets of Spain any more than nowadays we can put untrained
soldiers, no matter how brave, who are armed with archaic
black-powder weapons, against well-- drilled regulars
armed with the highest type of modern repeating rifle.
But in the early eighties the attention of the nation
became directed to our naval needs. Congress most wisely
made a series of appropriations to build up a new navy,
and under a succession of able and patriotic secretaries,
of both political parties, the navy was gradually built
up, until its material became equal to its splendid personnel,
with the result that in the summer of 1898 it leaped
to its proper place as one of the most brilliant and
formidable fighting navies in the entire world. We rightly
pay all honor to the men controlling the navy at the
time it won these great deeds, honor to Secretary Long
and Admiral Dewey, to the captains who handled the ships
in action, to the daring lieutenants who braved death in
the smaller craft, and to the heads of bureaus at Washington
who saw that the ships were so commanded, so armed, so
equipped, so well engined, as to insure the best results.
But let us also keep ever in mind that all of this would
not have availed if it had not been for the wisdom of the
men who during the preceding fifteen years had built up
the navy. Keep in mind the secretaries of the navy during
those years; keep in mind the senators and congressmen
who by their votes gave the money necessary to build and
to armor the ships, to construct the great guns, and to
train the crews; remember also those who actually did build
the ships, the armor, and the guns; and remember the admirals
and captains who handled battle-ship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat
on the high seas, alone and in squadrons, developing the
seamanship, the gunnery, and the power of acting together,
which their successors utilized so gloriously at Manila
and off Santiago. And, gentlemen, remember the converse,
too. Remember that justice has two sides. Be just to those
who built up the navy, and, for the sake of the future
of the country, keep in mind those who opposed its building
up. Read the "Congressional Record." Find out
the senators and congressmen who opposed the grants for
building the new ships; who opposed the purchase of amour
without which the ships were worthless, who opposed any
adequate maintenance for the Navy Department, and strove
to cut down the number of men necessary to man our fleets.
The men who did these things were one and all working to
bring disaster on the country. They have no share in the
glory of Manila, in the honor of Santiago. They have no
cause to feel proud of the valor of our sea-captains, of
the renown of our flag. Their motives may or may not have
been good, but their acts were heavily fraught with evil.
whey did ill for the national honor, and we won in spite
of their sinister opposition.
Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day. Our army
has never been built up as it should be built up. I shall
not discuss with an audience like this the puerile suggestion
that a nation of seventy millions of freemen is in danger
of losing its liberties from the existence of an army of
one hundred thousand men, three fourths of whom will be
employed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast fortresses,
and on Indian reservations. No man of good sense and stout
heart can take such a proposition seriously. If we are
such weaklings as the proposition implies, then we are
unworthy of freedom in any event. To no body of men in
the United States is the country so much indebted as to
the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular army
and navy. There is no body from which the country has less
to fear, and none of which it should be prouder, none which
it should be more anxious to upbuild.
Our army needs complete reorganization,-not merely enlarging,-and
the reorganization can only come as the result of legislation.
A proper general staff should be established, and the positions
of ordnance, commissary, and quartermaster officers should
be filled by detail from the line. Above all, the army
must be given the chance to exercise in large bodies. Never
again should we see, as we saw in the Spanish war, major-generals
in command of divisions who had never before commanded
three companies together in the field. Yet, incredible
to relate, Congress has shown a queer inability to learn
some of the lessons of the war. There were large bodies
of men in both branches who opposed the declaration of
war, who opposed the ratification of peace, who opposed
the upbuilding of the army, and who even opposed the purchase
of amour at a reasonable price for the battle-ships and
cruisers, thereby putting an absolute stop to the building
of any new fighting-ships for the navy. If, during the
years to come, any disaster should befall our arms, afloat
or ashore, and thereby any shame come to the United States,
remember that the blame will lie upon the men whose names
appear upon the roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side
of these great questions. On them will lie the burden of
any loss of our soldiers and sailors, of any dishonor to
the flag; and upon you and the people of this country will
lie the blame if you do not repudiate, in no unmistakable
way, what these men have done. The blame will not rest
upon the untrained commander of untried troops, upon the
civil officers of a department the organization of which
has been left utterly inadequate, or upon the admiral with
an insufficient number of ships; but upon the public men
who have so lamentably failed in forethought as to refuse
to remedy these evils long in advance, and upon the nation
that stands behind those public men.
So, at the present hour, no small share of the responsibility
for the blood shed in the Philippines, the blood of our
brothers, and the blood of their wild and ignorant foes,
lies at the thresholds of those who so long delayed the
adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those who by their
worse than foolish words deliberately invited a savage
people to plunge into a war fraught with sure disaster
for them-a war, too, in which our own brave men who follow
the flag must pay with their blood for the silly, mock
humanitarianism of the prattlers who sit at home in peace.
The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which
this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the
nations of the earth-if she is not to stand merely as the
China of the western hemisphere. Our proper conduct toward
the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is merely
the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course
we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household
well. We must see that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness,
civic good sense in our home administration of city, State,
and nation. We must strive for honesty in office, for honesty
toward the creditors of the nation and of the individual;
for the widest freedom of individual initiative where possible,
and for the wisest control of individual initiative where
it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we
set our own household in order we are not thereby excused
from playing our part in the great affairs of the world.
A man's first duty is to his own home, but he is not thereby
excused from doing his duty to the State; for if he fails
in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing
to be a freeman. In the same way, while a nations first
duty is within its own borders, it is not thereby absolved
from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if
it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle
for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of
mankind.
In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are confronted
by most difficult problems. It is cowardly to shrink from
solving them in the proper way; for solved they must be,
if not by us, then by some stronger and more manful race.
If we are too weak, too selfish, or too foolish to solve
them, some bolder and abler people must undertake the solution.
Personally, I am far too firm a believer in the greatness
of my country and the power of my countrymen to admit for
one moment that we shall ever be driven to the ignoble
alternative.
The problems are different
for the different islands. Porto Rico is not large enough
to stand alone. We must govern it wisely and well, primarily
in the interest of its own people. Cuba is, in my judgment,
entitled ultimately to settle for itself whether it shall
be an independent state or an integral portion of the
mightiest of republics. But until order and stable liberty
are secured, we must remain in the island to insure them,
and infinite tact, judgment, moderation, and courage
must be shown by our military and civil representatives
in keeping the island pacified, in relentlessly stamping
out brigandage, in protecting all alike, and yet in showing
proper recognition to the men who have fought for Cuban
liberty. The Philippines offer a yet graver problem.
their population includes halfcaste and native Christians,
warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people
are utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs
of becoming fit. Others may in time become fit but at
present can only take part in self- government under
a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent. We have
driven Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let
it be replaced by savage anarchy, our work has been for
harm and not for good. I have scant patience with those
who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines,
and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it,
or that they shrink from it because of the expense and
trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who
make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their
timidity and who cant about "liberty" and the "consent
of the governed," in order to excuse themselves for
their unwillingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines,
if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave
the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation,
and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation.
Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever
having settled in these United States.
England's rule in India and Egypt has been of great benefit
to England, for it has trained up generations of men accustomed
to look at the larger and loftier side of public life.
It has been of even greater benefit to India and Egypt.
And finally, and most of all, it has advanced the cause
of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in the Philippines,
we will add to that national renown which is the highest
and finest part of national life, will greatly benefit
the people of the Philippine Islands, and, above all, we
will play our part well in the great work of uplifting
mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in mind that we
must show in a very high degree the qualities of courage,
of honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance must be stamped
out. The first and all-important work to be done is to
establish the supremacy of our flag. We must put down armed
resistance before we call accomplish anything else, and
there should be no parleying, no faltering, in dealing
with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage
the foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them;
but it must be remembered that their utterances are not
saved from being treasonable merely by the fact that they
are despicable.
When once we have put down armed resistance, when once
our rule is acknowledged, then an even more difficult task
will begin, for then we must see to it that the islands
are administered with absolute honesty and with good judgment.
If we let the public service of the islands be turned into
the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have begun
to tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction.
We must send out there only good and able men, chosen for
their fitness, and not because of their partisan service,
and those men must not only administer impartial justice
to the natives and serve their own government with honesty
and fidelity, but must show the utmost tact and firmness,
remembering that, with such people as those with whom we
are to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that
next to weakness comes lack of consideration for their
principles and prejudices.
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.
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