EDWIN E. SLOSSON 155 Americanism is one of the fine arts, the finest of all the fine arts, the art of getting along peaceably with all sorts and conditions of men. We Americans have had more experience in the practice of this art than other nations, and it is not undue boasting to say that we have acquired a certain proficiency in it. A steel mill may contain twenty different nationalities and they do not quarrel any more than so many Irishmen or Poles in their native land. A city block is a map of Europe in miniature. The immigrants try to keep up their traditional antipathies, but there are few Old World feuds that, if let alone, can resist the solvent atmosphere of America. Their children when they go to school call each other names and stretch their little necks trying to look down on one another. And when they grow up they go into partnership or intermarry. So scrapping and bargaining, quarreling and flirting, studying together and working together, they learn to know each other and become good Americans together. No nation was ever before put to such a strain as ours in the Great War, for none ever contained so many representatives of the belligerent nationalities, yet none proved more stable and strong. Our national motto was not true when it was adopted, but it is now. At last the American people, regardless of racial diversity, can say with sincerity: United we stand. QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. Explain the allusion to "Topsy". 2. Why can an American citizen say, "I am the state"? 3. Why does the author say that our national motto (e pluribus unum) was not true when it was adopted? THE ABILITY TO REASON, A NECESSARY QUALITY FOR CITIZENSHIP ARTHUR T. HADLEY We are getting ready to be intelligent citizens-men who can judge public affairs, do independent thinking on national problems, and lead the nation into right lines of policy. Democracy needs this sort of leaders even more than it needs doctors or engineers; and it finds them very scarce. It is a good thing for a nation to have skilled medical advisers and skillful engineering experts. But it is an even better thing to have the energies of the nation as a whole wisely directed. The health of the body politic is more important than the health of one man or a hundred men. The waste due to misguided legislation is ten times greater than the waste due to miscalculated force. It is more fundamentally essential to preserve the country from political dangers at home or abroad than from the physical dangers which beset individuals. The source of these dangers to the body politic lies in the fact that most people in their political and social relations are guided by emotion rather than thinking, intuition rather than judgment. They alternate between unreasoning selfishness on the one hand and unreasoned benevolence on the other. The history of Greece and Rome and the cities of medieval Europe show how this difficulty over and over again has wrecked democratic government and brought nations which were once free under foreign rule or domestic tyranny. First, we must know how to find out facts; where to look for them, how to test them, how to judge the evidence for one statement or another in the face of our prepossessions. This is often a difficult task. We are always tempted to accept the statement which is easiest ARTHUR T. HADLEY 157 to understand, instead of the one that is most scrupulously near the truth; to take our knowledge from the highly colored phrases of the novel or the newspaper, rather than from laborious investigation of our own. Our eye is so caught by the label, the headline, or the advertisement, that we feel no impulse to test the underlying reality. The bane of American work as a whole, both public and private, is the unwillingness of our people to take trouble to get things right. But we must do something more. It is not enough for us or for the country to face facts truthfully. We must know the relative importance of different kinds of facts. The man who has facts at command, knows their relative values, and understands the art of stating them in proper order, is the guide whom the people crave. Men sometimes talk of the selfishness of the masses or of their lack of intellectual curiosity. The trouble is not so much selfishness as restricted vision; not lack of curiosity, but desire to gratify that curiosity too easily. The man whose study of language has taught him to avoid unnecessary words, and whose study of mathematics or of law has taught him to take his thoughts to pieces and put them together again until he has arranged them in the form of proof, goes out into the world equipped as a leader of men. His it is to lift them above their prejudices. His it is to help them to wisdom which the citizens must possess in order that a free commonwealth may remain free. His it is to develop the rational patriotism and rational religion on which permanent freedom must rest. QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. What is meant by "the ability to reason"? 2. What are the chief political dangers in any democracy? AMERICANISM* THEODORE ROOSEVELT There are two or three things that Americanism means. In the first place it means that we shall give to our fellowcitizens, the same wide latitude as to his individual beliefs that we demand for ourselves; that, so long as a man does his work as a man should, we shall not inquire, we shall not hold for or against him in civic life, his method of paying homage to his Maker. Now for another side of Americanism, the side of the work. Our democracy means that we have no privileged class, no class that is exempt from the duties or deprived of the privileges that are implied in the words "American citizenship." Now that principle has two sides to it, itself, for all of us would be likely to dwell continually upon one side, that all have equal rights. It is more important that we should dwell on the other side; that is, that we will have our duties and that the rights can not be kept unless the duties are performed. The law of American life must be the law of work; not the law of idleness; not the law of self-indulgence or pleasure, merely the law of work. That may seem like a trite saying. Most true sayings are trite. It is a disgrace for any American not to do his duty, but it is a double, a triple disgrace for a man of means or a man of education not to do his duty. The only work worth doing is done by those men, those women, who learn not to shrink from difficulties, but to face them and overcome them. So that Americanism means work, means effort, means the constant unending strife with our conditions, which is not only the law of nature if the race is *Extract from an address delivered at the Jewish Chautauqua, July 23, 1900. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 159 to progress, but which is really the law of the highest happiness for us ourselves. You have got to have the same interest in public affairs as in private affairs or you cannot keep this country what this country should be. You have got to have more than that-you have got to have courage. I don't care how good a man is, if he is timid, his value is limited. The timid will not amount to very much in the world. I want to see a good man ready to smite with the sword. I want to see him able to hold his own in active life against the force of evil. I want to see him. war effectively for righteousness. Of all the things we don't want to see is the tendency to divide into camps, on the one side all the nice, pleasant, refined people of high instincts, but no capacity to do work, and, on the other hand, men who have not got nice instincts at all, but who are not afraid. When you get that condition, you are preparing immeasurable disaster for the nation. You have got to combine decency and honesty with courage. But even that is not enough, for I don't care how brave, how honest a man is, if he is a natural-born fool he cannot be a sucHe has got to have the saving grace of common sense. He has got to have the right kind of heart, he has got to be upright and decent, he has got to be brave, and he has got to have common sense. He has got to have intelligence, and if he has those, then he has in him the making of a first-class American citizen. cess. QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. What are the "public affairs" in which we should take an interest? 2. What are some of the other ideals of Americanism? Is the construction, "You have got to have," in good form? |