The Art of Public Speaking - Section 39 | by Dale Carnegie & J. Berg Esenwein

Section 39 Appendix D. Speeches for Study and Practice. Theodore Roosevelt. Inaugural Address. 1905. My fellow citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the giver of good, who has blessed us with the conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of well-being and 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 civilisation. We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race, and yet our life has called for the vigour 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 vain glory, but rather a deep and abiding realisation of all that life has offered us, a full acknowledgement 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 it. 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 in relation to the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibility. 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 fibre 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 of a democratic republic. The conditions which have told for our marvellous 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 centres. 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 today, 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, though the problems are new, though 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 need such high traits of character as that people which seek 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 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, 1905. Footnote from his speech in Washington on March 13, 1905, before the National Congress of Mothers, printed from a copy furnished by the President for this collection in response to a request. 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 landowners, 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 neighbours 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 worth, no splendour 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. There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the homemaker, the breadwinner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmate, the housewife and mother. The woman should have ample educational advantages, but save in exceptional cases, the man must be, and she need not be, and generally ought not to be, trained for a lifelong career as the family breadwinner, and therefore, after a certain point, the training of the two must normally be different, because the duties of the two are normally different. This does not mean inequality of function, but it does mean that normally there must be dissimilarity of function. On the whole, I think the duty of the woman the more important, the more difficult, and the more honourable of the two. On the whole, I respect the woman who does her duty even more than I respect the man who does his. No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children, for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day, but often every hour of the night. She may have to get up night after night to take care of a sick child, and yet must, by day, continue to do all her household duties as well, and if the family means a scant, she must usually enjoy even her rare holidays taking a whole brood of children with her. The birth pangs make all men the debtors of all women. Above all, our sympathy and regard are due to the struggling wives, amongst those whom Abraham Lincoln called the plain people, and whom he so loved and trusted, for the lives of these women are often led on the lonely heights of quiet, self-sacrificing heroism. Just as the happiest and most honourable and most useful task that can be set any man is to earn enough for the support of his wife and family, for the bringing up and starting in life of his children, so the most important, the most honourable and desirable task which can be set any woman is to be a good and wise mother, in a home marked by self-respect and mutual forbearance, by willingness to perform duty, and by refusal to sink into self-indulgence or avoid that which entails effort and self-sacrifice. Of course there are exceptional men and exceptional women who can do and ought to do much more than this, who can lead and ought to lead great careers of outside usefulness in addition to, not as substitutes for, their home work. But I am not speaking of exceptions. I am speaking of the primary duties. I am speaking of the average citizens, the average men and women who make up the nation. Inasmuch as I am speaking to an assemblage of mothers, I shall have nothing whatsoever to say in praise of an easy life. Yours is the work which is never ended. No mother has an easy time. The most mothers have very hard times. And yet what true mother would barter her experience of joy and sorrow in exchange for a life of cold selfishness, which insists upon perpetual amusement and the avoidance of care, and which often finds its fit dwelling-place in some flat designed to furnish, with the least possible expenditure of effort, the maximum of comfort and of luxury, but in which there is literally no place for children? The woman who is a good wife, a good mother, is entitled to our respect as is no one else. But she is entitled to it only because, and so long as, she is worthy of it. Effort and self-sacrifice are the law of worthy life for the man as for the woman, though neither the effort nor the self-sacrifice may be the same for the one as for the other. I do not in the least believe in the patient Griselda type of woman, in the woman who submits to gross and long continued ill-treatment, any more than I believe in a man who tamely submits to wrongful aggression. No wrongdoing is so abhorrent as wrongdoing by a man toward the wife and the children who should arouse every tender feeling in his nature. Selfishness toward them, lack of tenderness toward them, lack of consideration for them, above all brutality in any form toward them, should arouse the heartiest scorn and indignation in every upright soul. I believe in the woman keeping her self-respect just as I believe in the man doing so. I believe in her rights just as much as I believe in the man's, and indeed a little more, and I regard marriage as a partnership in which each partner is in honour bound to think of the rights of the other as well as of his or her own. But I think that the duties are even more important than the rights, and in the long run I think that the reward is ampler and greater for duty well done than for the insistence upon individual rights, necessary though this too must often be. Your duty is hard, your responsibility great, but greatest of all is your reward. I do not pity you in the least. On the contrary, I feel respect and admiration for you. Into the woman's keeping is committed the destiny of the generations to come after us. In bringing up your children, you mothers must remember that while it is essential to be loving and tender, it is no less essential to be wise and firm. Foolishness and affection must not be treated as interchangeable terms, and besides training your sons and daughters in the softer and milder virtues, you must seek to give them those stern and hard equalities which in afterlife they will surely need. Some children will go wrong in spite of the best training, and some will go right even when their surroundings are most unfortunate. Nevertheless, an immense amount depends upon the family training. If you mothers through weakness bring up your sons to be selfish and to think only of themselves, you will be responsible for much sadness among the women who are to be their wives in the future. If you let your daughters grow up idle, perhaps under the mistaken impression that as you yourselves have had to work hard they should know only enjoyment, you are preparing them to be useless to others and burdens to themselves. Teach boys and girls alike that they are not to look forward to lives spent in avoiding difficulties, but to lives spent in overcoming difficulties. Teach them that work for themselves and also for others is not curse, but a blessing. Seek to make them happy, to make them enjoy life, but seek also to make them face life with a steadfast resolution to wrest success from labour and adversity, and to do their whole duty before God and to man. Surely she who can thus train her sons and her daughters is thrice fortunate among women. There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But a man or woman who deliberately forgoes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate a rightly difference between the all-important and the unimportant, why, such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who, though able-bodied, is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide. The existence of women of this type forms one of the most unpleasant and unwholesome features of modern life. If anyone is so dim of vision as to fail to see what a thoroughly unlovely creature such a woman is, I wish they would read Judge Robert Grant's novel Unleavened Bread, ponder seriously the character of Selma, and think of the fate that would surely overcome any nation which developed its average and typical woman along such lines. Unfortunately, it would be untrue to say that this type exists only in American novels. That it also exists in American life is made unpleasantly evident by the statistics as to the dwindling families in some localities. It is made evident in equally sinister fashion by the census statistics as to divorce, which are fairly appalling, for easy divorce is, now as it ever has been, a bane to any nation, a curse to society, a menace to the home, an incitement to married unhappiness, and to immorality, an evil thing for men and a still more hideous evil for women. These unpleasant tendencies in our American life are made evident by articles such as those which I actually read not long ago in a certain paper, where a clergyman was quoted, seemingly with approval, as expressing the general American attitude when he said that the ambition of any, save a very rich man, should be to rear two children only, so as to give his children an opportunity to taste a few of the good things of life. This man, whose profession and calling should have made him a moral teacher, actually set before others the ideal not of training children to do their duty, not of sending them forth with stout hearts and ready minds to win triumphs for themselves and their country, not of allowing them the opportunity and giving them the privilege of making their own place in the world, but, forsooth, of keeping the number of children so limited that they might taste a few good things. The way to give a child a fair chance in life is not to bring it up in luxury, but to see that it has the kind of training that will give it strength of character. Even apart from the vital question of national life, and regarding only the individual interest of the children themselves, happiness in the true sense is a hundredfold more apt to come to any given member of a healthy family of healthy-minded children, well-brought-up, well-educated, but taught that they must shift for themselves, must win their own way, and by their own exertions make their own positions of usefulness, than it is apt to come to those whose parents themselves have acted on and have trained their children to act on the selfish and sordid theory that the whole end of life is to taste a few good things. The intelligence of the remark is on a par with its morality, for the most rudimentary mental process would have shown the speaker that if the average family in which there are children contained but two children, the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with braver and more robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any way regrettable, for a race that practiced such doctrine, that is, a race that practiced race suicide, would thereby conclusively show that it was unfit to exist, and that it had better give place to people who had not forgotten the primary laws of their being. To sum up then, the whole matter is simple enough. If either a race or an individual prefers the pleasure of more effortless ease, of self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the infinitely higher pleasures that come to those who know the toil and the also the joy of hard duty well done, why, that race or that individual must inevitably in the end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid and ignoble. No man and no woman, really worthy of the name, can care for the life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and trouble and labour. Save in exceptional cases, the prizes worth having in life must be paid for, and the life worth living must be a life of work for a worthy end, an ordinarily of work more for others than for one's self. The woman's task is not easy, no task worth doing is easy, but in doing it, and when she has done it, there shall come to her the highest and holiest joy known to mankind, and having done it, she shall have the reward prophesied in Scripture, for her husband and her children, yes, and all people who realise that her work lies at the foundation of all national happiness and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed. you