win in the great world. Your return must be in the way of adding to the school's good name, adding to the sum of reputation which will come, and can only come, from the part played by the graduates in the life of the nation after they have graduated.

You must be efficient. You must be able to hold your own in the world of politics, the world of business; able to keep your head above water, to make your work satisfactory, to make it pay. If you do not, you cannot do good to others. You must never forget for a moment that so far from the doctrine of efficiency being a base doctrine, it is a doctrine vital to good in this country. If the elders as well as the boys would keep that in mind, they would appreciate better what I regard as one of the cardinal political doctrines that should be preached ever in this country, the doctrine that we should never penalize efficiency; that the line we should draw in business is on conduct and not on size, and what we should discriminate against is misconduct in any phase, and not efficiency.

So with politics. One of the hardest things to do is make men understand that efficiency in politics does not atone for public morality, and that morality, good intentions, decent conduct, all together do not atone for inefficiency. You must have both traits. I am always tempted to illustrate what I mean, by referring, simply because it is so easy to understand and so clear, to army experiences. Take my own brief military experience merely an experience of four months; but it gave me in part an understanding of all the problems that come in connection with soldiery, with the problems that were confronted on a gigantic scale in the case of your fathers

in the days of the Civil War. I could gain nothing with any man in the regiment unless he had the right purpose in him. I did not want him unless he had the right purpose in him; but even if he had the right purpose, even if he was boiling with patriotic enthusiasm, he was not of the least use to me if he could not shoot and walk and ride. And I could not accept any amount of patriotic fervor as offsetting a slight tendency to run away. You will amount to nothing unless you have the ideals, and you will amount to nothing unless in good faith you strive to realize them.1

I

If there is one thing which I should like to eradicate from the character of every American, it is the dreadful practice of paying a certain mean admiration and homage to the man who, whether in business or politics, achieves success at the cost of sacrificing all those principles for the lack of which, in the eye of any righteous man, no possible achievement of success can in any way compensate. That applies just as much to the smart politician, who by bribery and chicanery and sharp practice, who by misuse of public office, by mendacity, by cleverness in hoodwinking the people, rises to high station, as it applies to the unscrupulous man of affairs who makes a fortune, not legitimately, but illegitimately in some form of gambling, which is not merely gambling, but gambling with loaded dice, and who can count upon having, from no inconsiderable section of our people, the same admiring homage that would be gained by

1 Address delivered at the Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania, June 10, 1913.

the most respected business man whose success has been even more beneficial to the community than to himself.1

IV

MR. PRESIDENT, and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure for me to be here to-day and to address you and to wear what the Secretary has called the gilded trappings which show that I am one of the youngest living graduates of Cambridge. Something in the nature of a tract was handed to me before I came up here. It was an issue of the Gownsman (holding up, amid laughter, a copy of an undergraduate publication) with a poem portraying the poet's natural anxiety lest I should preach at him. Allow me to interpose an anecdote taken from your own hunting field. A one-time Master of Foxhounds strongly objected to the presence of a rather nearsighted and very hard-riding friend who at times insisted on riding in the middle of the pack; and on one occasion he earnestly addressed him as follows: "Mr. So and So, would you mind looking at those two dogs, Ploughboy and Melody. They are very valuable, and I really wish you would not jump on them." To which his friend replied, with great courtesy: "My dear sir, I should be delighted to oblige you, but unfortunately I have left my glasses at home, and I am afraid they must take their chance." I will promise to preach as little as I can, but you must take your chance, for it is impossible to break the bad habit of a lifetime at the bidding of a comparative stranger. I was deeply touched by the allusion to the lion and the coat-of

1 Speech at the Independent Club, Buffalo, N.Y., May 15, 1899.

arms. Before I reached London I was given to understand that it was expected that when I walked through Trafalgar Square, I should look the other way as I passed the lions.

...

Now I am going to disregard your poet and preach to you for just one moment, but I will make it as little obnoxious as possible. The Secretary spoke of me as if I were an athlete. I am not, and never have been one, although I have always been very fond of outdoor amusement and exercise.... I have always led an outdoor life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually possesses.

There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do. That is genius. I am not discussing what form that genius takes; whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one else can write, The Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, or Helen, thy beauty is to me; or of a man who can do a hundred yards in nine and three-fifths seconds. Such a man does what no one else can do. Only a very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing genius. The average man who is successful the average statesman, the average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call great success genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.

is not a

Take such a thing as hunting or any form of vigorous

bodily exercise. Most men can ride hard if they choose. Almost any man can kill a lion if he will exercise a little resolution in training the qualities that will enable him to do it.

(Taking a tumbler from the table, Mr. Roosevelt held it up.)

Now it is a pretty easy thing to aim straight at an object about that size. Almost any one, if he practices with the rifle at all, can learn to hit that tumbler; and he can hit the lion all right if he learns to shoot as straight at its brain or heart as at the tumbler. He does not have to possess any extraordinary capacity, not a bit — all he has to do is to develop certain rather ordinary qualities, but develop them to such a degree that he will not get flustered, so that he will press the trigger steadily instead of jerking it - and then he will shoot at the lion as well as he will at that tumbler. It is a perfectly simple quality to develop. You don't need any remarkable skill; all you need is to possess ordinary qualities, but to develop them to a more than ordinary degree.

It is just the same with the soldier. What is needed is that the man as soldier should develop certain qualities that have been known for thousands of years, but develop them to such a point that in an emergency he does, as a matter of course, what a great multitude of men can do but what a very large proportion of them don't do. And in making the appeal to the soldier, if you want to get out of him the stuff that is in him, you will have to use phrases which the intellectual gentlemen who do not fight will say are platitudes.

It is just so in public life. /It is not genius, it is not extraordinary subtlety, or acuteness of intellect, that is im