THE STRENUOUS LIFE BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

[Footnote 2: Extract from speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago,
April 10, 1899. From the "Strenuous Life. Essays and Addresses" by
Theodore Roosevelt. The Century Co., 1900.]


In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the
State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently
and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American
character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the
doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor
and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to
the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink
from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these
wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from
lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as
little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what
every self-respecting American demands from himself and his sons shall
be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach
the boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in
their eyes--to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of
Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done your
share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you
neither preach nor practise such a doctrine. You work, yourselves, and
you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt
you will teach your sons that tho they may have leisure, it is not to be
spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who
possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their
livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of
non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in
historical research--work of the type we most need in this country, the
successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We
do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies
victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt
to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in
the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse
never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by
effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has
been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity
of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked
to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright and the
man still does actual work tho of a different kind, whether as a writer
or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of
exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if
he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a
period, not of preparation, but of more enjoyment, he shows that he is
simply a cumberer on the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself
to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again
arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life,
and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow
it for serious work in the world.

In the last analysis a healthy State can exist only when the men and
women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the
children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk
difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to
wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a man's
work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep
those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet
of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.
In one of Daudet's powerful and melancholy books he speaks of "the fear
of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present day."
When such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that nation is
rotten to the heart's core. When men fear work or fear righteous war,
when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well
it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit
subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong
and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base
untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice
happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to
dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even tho checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows
not victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had
believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the
worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have
saved hundreds of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of
dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then
lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the
dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those
months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only
to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking
from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we
were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations
of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the
men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the
armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves
equal to the mighty days, let us the children of the men who carried the
great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our
fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the
suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair were
unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the
slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American republic
placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations....

The Army and Navy are the sword and shield which this nation must carry
if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth--if she is not
to stand merely as the China of the western hemisphere. Our proper
conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is merely
the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course, we are bound
to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must see that there
is civic good sense in our home administration of city, State and
nation. We must strive for honesty in office, for honesty toward the
creditors of the nation and of the individual, for the widest freedom of
individual initiative where possible, and for the wisest control of
individual initiative where it is hostile to the welfare of the many.
But because we set our own household in order we are not thereby excused
from playing our part in the great affairs of the world. A man's first
duty is to his own home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his
duty to the State; for if he fails in this second duty, it is under the
penalty of ceasing to be a freeman. In the same way, while a nation's
first duty is within its own borders it is not thereby absolved from
facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so,
it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the peoples
that shape the destiny of mankind.


I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the
life of ease, but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth
century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand
idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if
we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their
lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and
stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the
domination of the world. Let us, therefore, boldly face the life of
strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold
righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave,
to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us
shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation,
provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only
through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall
ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.


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