II

GOOD CITIZENSHIP THE BASIS OF

JUST GOVERNMENT

I. THE DUTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

I

MEN can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others. If from lawlessness or fickleness, from folly or self-indulgence, they refuse to govern themselves, then most assuredly in the end they will have to be governed from the outside. They can prevent the need of government from without only by showing that they possess the power of government from within. A sovereign cannot make excuses for his failures; a sovereign must accept the responsibility for the exercise of the power that inheres in him; and where, as is true in our Republic, the people are sovereign, then the people must show a sober understanding and a sane and steadfast purpose if they are to preserve that orderly liberty upon which as a foundation every republic must rest.1

II

THERE used to be in the army an old proverb that there were no bad regiments, but plenty of bad colonels. So in private life I have grown to believe that if you always

1 Speech at the Opening of the Jamestown Exposition, April 26, 1907.

find bad servants in a household you want to look out for the mistress. I wonder if you grasp just what I mean by that? If you always find bad public servants, look out for the public! We here you my hearers and I live in a government where we are the people and in consequence where we are not to be excused if the government goes wrong. There are many countries where the government can be very wrong indeed and where nevertheless it can be said that the people are fundamentally right, for they don't choose their public servants, they don't choose their government. On the contrary we do choose our government, not temporarily but permanently, and in the long run our public servants must necessarily be what we choose to have them. They represent us; they must represent our self-restraint and sense of decency and common sense, or else our folly, our wickedness, or at least our supine indifference in letting others do the work of government for us. Not only should we have the right type of public servants, but we should remember that the wrong type discredits not only the man himself but each of us whose servant he is. Sometimes I hear our countrymen inveigh against politicians; I hear our countrymen abroad saying, “Oh, you must n't judge us by our politicians." I always want to interrupt and answer, "You must judge us by our politicians." We pretend to be the masters - we, the people and if we permit ourselves to be ill served, to be served by corrupt and incompetent and inefficient men, then on our own heads must the blame rest.1

1 Permission to use this excerpt granted by The Harr Wagner Publishing Company, publishers of Theodore Roosevelt's Realizable Ideals.

III

IN a democracy like ours we cannot expect the stream to rise higher than its source. If the average man and the average woman are not of the right type, your public men will not be of the right type. The average man must be a decent man in his own home, he must pull his own weight, he must be a decent neighbor, and a man with whom you like to deal, or he cannot be a good citizen. That is good as a beginning; but it is not enough. He must show in his relations with his fellows and in his dealing with the State the essentials of good citizenship. Genius is not necessary. Genius is a fine thing; but fortunately character is not only more common, but better. What he needs to show is character, and there are three essential qualities going to make up character.

In the first place, there is honesty. The bolder a man is the worse he is, if he has n't honesty. Don't be misled by that unfortunate trait sometimes shown by our people the trait of deifying mere smartness, meaning thereby mental subtlety and ability unencumbered by any sense of responsibility.

But honesty is not enough. I don't care how honest a man is, if he is timid he is no good. I don't want to see a division of our citizenship into good men who are afraid and bad men who are not at all afraid. The honest man who is afraid is of just as little use in civic life as in

war.

: You need honesty and then you need courage; but both of them together are not enough. I don't care how honest a man is and how brave he is, if he is a naturalborn fool you can do nothing with him; and perhaps this

applies particularly to people in the profession of politics. Of course, the bolder a politician is, if he is dishonest, the worse he is; hunt him out of public life; and a feeble, well-meaning, timid politician, like the other good, timid people, is of no use; but the bold, incorruptible politician who stupidly goes wrong may be just as useless to a community in the long run as if he were hired by some dishonest man to do his work. So there is a third quality; that is, you must possess the saving grace of common sense.

When you get into your average citizen honesty militant, not merely passive, honesty-courage, and common sense, you will find that your representatives in public life will soon show the same traits; and when they do, we shall have gone a long way toward solving the questions which must be solved and must be solved aright, if this nation is to be, as it shall and will be, not merely the greatest republic upon which the sun has ever shone, but the nation which holds out the lamp of hope to all the other nations throughout the world.1

IV

As soon as I left college I wanted to take an interest in political life; I wanted to find out how the work of governing was really done. Quite a number of nice people in New York, along Fifth Avenue, solemnly advised me not to join any of the regular political organizations, because I would find that they were composed only of "muckers," not of "gentlemen." The answer was easy: "Then they are the ones that govern; if it is the muckers that govern, I want to see if I cannot hold my own with 1 Speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium, September 7, 1910.

them. I will join with them in governing you if you are too weak to govern yourself." I intended to be one of the class that governs, not one of the class that is governed. So I joined the political club in my district. I joined it just as I joined the National Guard. If there came a time of civic disturbance in the community, or if we were invaded or were at war with any country, I did not intend to have to hire somebody else to do my shooting for me. I intended to do it myself; and in the same way I intended to do the governing myself, to do my part of it.

I want to see you feel the same way. Education is of good chiefly according to the use you put it to. If it teaches you to be so puffed with pride as to make you misestimate the relative values of things, it becomes a harm and not a benefit. There are few things less desirable than the arid cultivation, the learning and refinement which lead merely to that intellectual conceit which makes a man in a democratic community like ours hold himself aloof from his fellows and pride himself upon the weakness which he mistakes for supercilious strength. Small is the use of those educated men who in after life meet no one but themselves, and gather in parlors to discuss wrong conditions which they do not understand and to advocate remedies which have the prime defect of being unworkable. I remember exSpeaker Reed speaking to me of how easy it was to get an absolutely perfect theory to meet any condition as long as you kept that theory in the study, and how difficult it was to get even moderately good results out of any theory when you tried to apply it to the hard facts of actual life. The judgment on practical affairs, polit