Art of Public Speaking

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happiness.
To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent. We are the
heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are exacted by the
dead hand of a bygone civilization. We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race;
and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away.
Under such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed, and the success which we have had in the past,
the success which we confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of vainglory, but
rather a deep and abiding realization of all that life has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the responsibility
which is ours; and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can thrive
best, alike as regard the things of the body and the things of the soul.
Much has been given to us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties
to ourselves--and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness
into relation to the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such
responsibilities.
Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship. We must
show not only in our words but in our deeds that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will by
acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights.
But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the
strong. While ever careful to refrain from wronging others, we must be no less insistent that we are not
wronged ourselves. We wish peace; but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it
because we think it is right, and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts rightly and justly should
ever have cause to fear, and no strong power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent
aggression.
Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; but still more important are our relations
among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and in power, as a nation has seen during a century
and a quarter of its national life, is inevitably accompanied by a like growth in the problems which are ever
before every nation that rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility and danger. Our
forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils the very existence of
which it was impossible that they should foresee.
Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial
development of the half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before have men
tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms
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The Art of Public Speaking
of a democratic republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have
developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, also have brought the care
and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers.
Upon the success of our experiment much depends--not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the
welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its
foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the
generations yet unborn.
There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it
seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us, nor fearing to approach these
problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.
Yet after all, tho the problems are new, tho the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers,
who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these
problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government
is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern
its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the free men who compose it.
But we have faith that we shall not prove false to memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their
work; they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we
shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children's children.
To do so, we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical
intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and, above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal,
which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington; which made great the men
who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.
ON AMERICAN MOTHERHOOD[38]
(1905)
In our modern industrial civilization there are many and grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the
triumphs. It is not a good thing to see cities grow at disproportionate speed relatively to the country; for the
small land owners, the men who own their little homes, and therefore to a very large extent the men who till
farms, the men of the soil, have hitherto made the foundation of lasting national life in every State; and, if the
foundation becomes either too weak or too narrow, the superstructure, no matter how attractive, is in
imminent danger of falling.
But far more important than the question of the occupation of our citizens is the question of how their family
life is conducted. No matter what that occupation may be, as long as there is a real home and as long as those
who make up that home do their duty to one another, to their neighbors and to the State, it is of minor
consequence whether the man's trade is plied in the country or in the city, whether it calls for the work of the
hands or for the work of the head.
No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of artistic development, will permanently
avail any people unless its home life is healthy, unless the average man possesses honesty, courage, common
sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at need to fight hard; and unless the average woman is
a good wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of womanhood, able and
willing to bear, and to bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound in body, mind, and
character, and numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease.
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The Art of Public Speaking
There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world endures, and which no amount of progress [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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