Part 4
¶I do not in the least underestimate the need of having material prosperity as the basis of our civilization, but I most earnestly insist that if our civilization does not build a lofty super structure on this basis, we can never rank among the really great peoples.[28]
A Square Deal and The Nobility of Parenthood
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 home, 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, so long as there is a real home and so 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 the city, whether it calls for the work of the hands or for the work of the head.
¶But the Nation is in a bad way if there is no real home, if the family is not of the right kind, if the man is not a good husband and father, if he is brutal or cowardly or selfish; if the woman has lost her sense of duty, if she is sunk in vapid self-indulgence or has let her nature be twisted so that she prefers a sterile pseudo-intellectuality to that great and beautiful development of character which comes only to those whose lives know the fulness of duty done, of effort made, and self-sacrifice undergone.
¶In the last analysis the welfare of the State depends absolutely on whether or not the average family, the average man and woman, and their children, represent the kind of citizenship for the foundation of a great Nation, and if we fail to appreciate this we fail to appreciate the root morality upon which all healthy civilization is based.
¶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.
¶¶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 home-maker, the breadwinner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmeet, the housewife, the mother.
¶The woman should have ample educational advantages; but save in exceptional cases the man must be, and the woman need not be, and generally ought not to be, trained for a life long 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 honorable 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 are scant she must usually enjoy even her rare holidays taking her 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 among 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 honorable 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 honorable 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 more than this, who can lead and ought to lead great careers of outside usefulness in addition to—not as a substitute 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.
¶No mother has an easy time, and 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 wrong-doing is so abhorrent as wrong-doing 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’s keeping her self-respect just as I believe in the man’s 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 honor bound to think of the rights of the other as well as of his or her own.
¶But I think 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.
¶¶¶Into the woman’s keeping is committed the destiny of the generation to come after us. In bringing up children 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 sons and daughters in the softer and milder virtues mothers must seek to give them those stern and hardy qualities which in after life they will surely need.
¶Some children will go wrong in spite of the best training, and some will go right even where their surroundings are most unfortunate; nevertheless, an immense amount depends upon the family training.
¶If mothers, through weakness, bring up sons to be selfish and to think only of themselves, they will be responsible for much sadness among the women who are to be their wives in the future. If they let their daughters grow up idle, perhaps under the mistaken impression that as they have had to work hard, their daughters shall know only enjoyment, they 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 a curse, but a blessing. Seek to make them happy, to make them enjoy life, but seek also to make them face life with the steadfast resolution to wrest success from labor 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 a good many 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 the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the 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 any one 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 women 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 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 strength of character. Even apart from the 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 of the 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 pleasures of mere effortless ease, of self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the infinitely higher pleasures that come to those who know the toil and the weariness, but 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 labor. 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, and ordinarily of work more for others than for one’s self.
¶The man is but a poor creature whose effort is not rather for the betterment of his wife and children than for himself; and as for the mother, her very name stands for loving unselfishness and self-abnegation, and, in any society fit to exist, is fraught with associations which render it holy.
¶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 realize that her work lies at the foundation of all National happiness and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed.[33]
A Square Deal and Great Riches
In this world of ours it is practically impossible to get success of any kind on a large scale without paying something for it. The exceptions to the rule are too few to warrant our paying heed to them, and as a rule it may be said that something must be paid as an offset for everything we get and for everything we accomplish. This is notably true of our industrial life.
¶The problems which we of America have to face to-day are very serious, but we will do well to remember that after all they are only part of the price which we have to pay for the triumphs we have won, for the high position to which we have attained. If we were a backward and stationary country we would not have to face these problems at all, but I think that most of us are agreed that to be backward and stationary would be altogether too heavy a price to pay for the avoidance of the problems in question.
¶There are no labor troubles where there is no work to be done by labor. There are no troubles about corporations where the poverty of the community is such that it is not worth while to form corporations. There is no difficulty in regulating railroads where the resources of a region are so few that it does not pay to build railroads. There are many excellent people who shake their heads over the difficulties that as a Nation we now have to face; but their melancholy is not warranted save in a very partial degree, for most of the things of which they complain are the inevitable accompaniments of the growth and greatness of which we are proud.
¶There is every reason why we should be vigilant in searching out what is wrong and unflinchingly resolute in striving to remedy it. But at the same time we must not blind ourselves to what has been accomplished for good, and above all we must not lose our heads and become either hysterical or rancorous in grappling with what is bad.
¶Take such a question, for instance, as the question, or rather the group of questions, connected with the growth of corporations in this country. This growth has meant, of course, the growth of individual fortunes. Undoubtedly the growth of wealth in this country has had some very unfortunate accompaniments, but it seems to me that much the worse damage that people of wealth can do the rest of us is not any actual physical harm, but the awakening in our breasts of either the mean vice of worshipping mere wealth, and the man of mere wealth, for the wealth’s sake, or the equally mean vice of viewing with rancorous envy and hatred the men of wealth merely because they are men of wealth.
¶Envy is, of course, merely a kind of crooked admiration, and we often see the very man who in public is most intemperate in his denunciation of wealth in his private life most eager to obtain wealth, in no matter what fashion, and at no matter what moral cost.
¶It is impossible too strongly to insist upon what ought to be the patent fact that it is not only in the interest of the people of wealth themselves, but in our interest, in the interest of the public as a whole, that they should be treated fairly and justly; that if they show exceptional business ability they should be given exceptional reward for that ability.
¶The tissues of our industrial fabric are interwoven in such complex fashion that what strengthens or weakens part also strengthens or weakens the whole.
¶If we penalize industry we will ourselves in the end have to pay a considerable part of the penalty. If we make conditions such that the men of exceptional ability are able to secure marked benefits by the exercise of that ability, then we shall ourselves benefit somewhat. It is our interest no less than our duty to treat them fairly.
¶On the other hand, it is no less their interest to treat us fairly—by “us” I mean the great body of the people, the men of moderate or small fortunes, the farmers, the wage-workers, the smaller business men and professional men.
¶The man of great means who achieves fortune by crooked methods does wrong to the whole body politic. But he not merely does wrong to, he becomes a source of imminent danger to other men of great means; for his ill-won success tends to arouse a feeling of resentment, which if it becomes inflamed, fails to differentiate between the men of wealth who have done decently and the men of wealth who have not done decently.
¶The conscience of our people has been deeply shocked by the revelations made of recent years as to the way in which some of the great fortunes have been obtained and used, and there is, I think, in the minds of the people at large a strong feeling that a serious effort must be made to put a stop to the cynical dishonesty and contempt for right which have thus been revealed.
¶I believe that something, and I hope that a good deal, can be done by law to remedy the state of things complained of. But when all that can be has thus been done, there will yet remain much which the law cannot touch, and which must be reached by the force of public opinion.
¶There are men who do not divide actions merely into those that are honest and those that are not, but create a third subdivision—that of law honesty; of that kind of honesty which consists in keeping clear of the penitentiary. It is hard to reach astute men of this type save by making them feel the weight of an honest public indignation.
¶We can not afford in this country to draw the distinction as between rich man and poor man. The distinction upon which we must insist is the vital, deep-lying, unchangeable distinction between the honest man and the dishonest man, between the man who acts decently and fairly by his neighbor and with a quick sense of his obligations, and the man who acknowledges no internal law save that of his own will and appetite. Above all we should treat with a peculiarly contemptuous abhorrence the man who in a spirit of sheer cynicism debauches either our business life or our political life.
¶There are men who use the word “practical politics” as merely a euphemism for dirty politics, and it is such men who have brought the word “politician” into discredit. There are other men who use the noxious phrase “business is business” as an excuse and justification for every kind of mean and crooked work, and these men make honest Americans hang their heads because of some of the things they do.
¶It is the duty of every honest patriot to rebuke in emphatic fashion alike the politician who does not understand that the only kind of “practical politics” which a nation can with safety tolerate is that kind which we know as clean politics, and that we are as severe in our condemnation of the business trickery which succeeds as of the business trickery which fails. The scoundrel who fails can never by any possibility be as dangerous to the community as the scoundrel who succeeds, and of all the men in the country the worst citizens, those who should excite in our minds the most contemptuous abhorrence, are the men who have achieved great wealth, or any other form of success, in any save a clean and straightforward manner.[27]
A Square Deal and The Farmer
Conditions have changed in the country far less than they have changed in the cities, and in consequence there has been little breaking away from the methods of life which have produced the great majority of the leaders of the Republic in the past. Almost all our great Presidents have been brought up in the country, and most of them worked hard on the farms in their youth and got their early mental training in the healthy democracy of farm life.
¶The forces which made these farm bred boys leaders of men when they had come to their full manhood are still at work in our country districts. Self-help and individual initiative remain to a peculiar degree typical of life in the country, life on a farm, in a lumbering camp, on a ranch. Neither the farmers nor their hired hands can work through combinations as readily as the capitalists or wage-workers of cities can work.
¶It must not be understood from this that there has been no change in farming and farm life. The contrary is the case. There has been much change, much progress. The granges and similar organizations, the farmers’ institutes, and all the agencies which promote intelligent co-operation and give opportunity for social and intellectual intercourse among the farmers, have played a large part in raising the level of life and work in the country districts.