Teddy Roosevelt

These are the goals toward which we strive; and let us at least earnestly endeavor to realize them here on this continent.

There are certain things so obvious as to seem commonplace, which, nevertheless, must be kept constantly before us if we are to preserve our just sense of proportion.

All about us there are innumerable tendencies that tell for good, and innumerable tendencies that tell for evil.

Certain duties have fallen to us as a legacy of the war with Spain, and we can not avoid performing them.

As a nation we shall have to choose our representatives in these islands as carefully as Grant chose the generals who were to serve at the vital points under him.

As I have already said, our first duty, our most important work, is setting our own house in order.

When these crises come, the nation will triumph or sink accordingly as it produces or fails to produce statesmen like Lincoln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as it does or does not back them in their efforts.

In short, the Roman had character as well as masterful genius, and when pitted against peoples either of less genius or of less character, these peoples went down.

Every man who does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as a private citizen is paying to Grant’s memory the kind of homage that is best worth paying.

It is the one quality which we can least afford to lose.

It is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially to refer when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective way, by praising him as a man.

In the Union armies there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but none with his iron determination.

Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of stubborn fixity of purpose.

I shall ask attention, not to Grant’s life, but to the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day should learn them.

The rough, strong poet of democracy has sung of Grant as “the man of mighty days, and equal to the days.” The days are less mighty now, and that is all the more reason why we should show ourselves equal to them.

If the Union, which so many men shed their blood to restore, were not now a union in fact, then the precious blood would have been wasted.

If the great silent soldier, the Hammer of the North, had struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many conquerors in civil strife before him had done, to rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then the war would have been fought in…

In the sweat of our brows do we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at times, yet it is far more bitter to eat the bread that is unearned, unwon, undeserved.

In the second and even greater struggle the deeds of Lincoln the statesman were made good by those of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the work that dropped from Lincoln’s tired hands when the assassin’s bullet went home…

Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and it was his good fortune to win the highest renown alike as soldier and statesman.

There are great men also in the second rank; for in any gallery of merely national heroes Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson, would surely have their place.

Each one of these men has had his own group of devoted followers, and some of them have at times swayed the nation with a power such as the foremost of all hardly wielded.

But fortunately the men of sturdy common sense and sound patriotism proved victors, and the new navy was begun.

But if the man chosen had been timid about taking risks, nothing that could be done for him would have availed.

Only thus can we do full justice to as splendid and gallant a body of men as any nation ever had the good luck to include among its armed defenders.