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In Union

Is
Strength

American

Spirit in
the

Country
Districts

In American citizenship, we can succeed permanently only upon the basis of standing shoulder to shoulder, working in association, by organization, each working for all, and yet remembering that we need each so to shape things that each man can develop to best advantage all the forces and powers at his command. In your organization you accomplish much by means of the Brotherhood, but you accomplish it because of the men who go to make up that Brotherhood.-Ibid.

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it remains true now, as it always has been, that in the last resort the country districts are those in which we are surest to find the old American spirit, the old American habits of thought and ways of living. 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 of 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

Spirit in

the

Country

Districts

boys leaders of men when they had come to American 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 the 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.

Ibid.

No one can dam the Mississippi. If the nation started to dam it, the nation would waste its time. It would not hurt the Mississippi, but it would not only throw away its own means, but would incidentally damage the population along the banks. You can't dam the current. You can build levees to keep the current within bounds and to shape its direction. I think that is exactly what we can do in connection with these great corporations knowns as trusts. We cannot reverse the industrial tendency of the age. If you succeed in doing it, then all cities. like Wheeling will have to go out of business. Remember that. You cannot put a stop to or reverse the industrial tendencies of the age, but you can control and regulate them and see that they do no harm.-Ibid.

The Current

Can't be Dammed

The Slipshod Worker a Poor Citizen

Your work is hard. Do you suppose I mention that because I pity you? No; not a bit. I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does n't work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being. The law of worthy work well done is the law of successful American life. I believe in play, too-play, and play hard while you play, but don't make the mistake of thinking that that is the main thing. The work is what counts, and if a man does his work well and it is worth doing, then it matters but little in which line that work it done; the man is a good American citizen. If he does his work in slipshod fashion, then no matter what kind of work it is, he is a poor American citizen.-Ibid.

No Such
Word as

Fail

We of America, we, the sons of a nation yet in the pride of its lusty youth, spurn the teachings of distrust, spurn the creed of failure and despair. We know that the future is ours if we have in us the manhood to grasp it, and we enter the new century girding our loins for the contest before us, rejoicing in the struggle, and resolute so to bear ourselves that the nation's future shall even surpass her glorious past.—Ibid.

The Stuff

of which Americans

It is pretty simple to go just one way and turn another way, and then go another way, if somebody tells you how, but if you have Are Made got to think for yourself, then you appreciate the fact that the man on your right hand is thinking too, and that he will "stay put." We won in the Civil War because we had the manhood to which to appeal. We are going to win as a nation in the great industrial contest of the present day, because the average American has in him the stuff out of which victors are made-victors in the industrial and victors in the military world.

Ibid.

The first requisite of good citizenship is that the man shall do the homely, every-day, humdrum duties well. A man is not a good citizen, I do not care how lofty his thoughts are about citizenship in the abstract, if in the concrete his actions do not bear them out; and it does not make much difference how high his aspirations for mankind at large may be, if he does not behave well in his own family those aspirations do not bear visible fruit. He must be a good breadwinner, he must take care of his wife and his children, he must be a neighbor whom his neighbors can trust, he must act squarely in his business

What Makes a

Good

Citizen

What
Makes a
Good
Citizen

relations, he must do all these every-day, ordinary duties first, or he is not a good citizen. But he must do more. In this country of ours the average citizen must devote a good deal of thought and time to the affairs of the State as a whole or those affairs will go backward; and he must devote that thought and that time steadily and intelligently. If there is any one quality that is not admirable, whether in a nation or in an individual, it is hysterics, either in religion or in anything else.-Ibid

Evolution

vs.

In every governmental process the aim that Revolution a people capable of self-government should steadfastly keep in mind is to proceed by evolution rather than revolution. On the other hand, every people fit for self-government must beware of that fossilization of mind which refuses to allow of any change as conditions change. Now in dealing with the whole problem of the change in our great industrial civilization-in dealing with the tendencies which have been accentuated in so extraordinary a degree by steam and electricity and by the tremendous upbuilding of industrial centres which steam and electricity have been the main factors in bringing about -I think we must set before ourselves the

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