Masterpieces of Eloquence: Famous Orations of Great World Leaders ..., Volume 25
edited by Mayo Williamson Hazeltine
could avoid plunging this country back into financial chaos. Until our opponents have explicitly and absolutely repudiated the principles which in 1896 they professed and the leaders who embody these principles, their success means the undoing of the country. Nor have they any longer even the excuse of being honest in their folly. They have raved, they have foamed at the mouth, in denunciation of trusts, and now, in my own State, their foremost party leaders, including the man before whom the others bow with bared head and trembling knee, have been discovered in a trust which really is of infamous and perhaps of criminal character; a trust in which these apostles of Democracy, these prophets of the new dispensation, have sought to wring fortunes from the dire need of their poorer brethren.
I rise to second the nomination of William McKinley because with him as leader this country has trod the path of national greatness and prosperity with the strides of a giant, and because, under him, we can and will once more and finally overthrow those whose success would mean for the nation material disaster and moral disgrace. Exactly as we have remedied the evils which in the past we undertook to remedy, so now, when we say that a wrong shall be righted it most assuredly will be righted.
We have nearly succeeded in bringing peace and order to the Philippines. We have sent thither and to the other islands toward whose inhabitants we now stand as trustees in the cause of good government men like Wood, Taft, and Allen, whose very names are synonyms of integrity and guarantees of efficiency. Appointees like these, chosen on grounds of merit and fitness alone, are evidence of the spirit and methods in and by which this nation must approach its new and serious duties. Contrast this with what would be
the fate of the islands under the spoils system so brazenly advocated by our opponents in their last national platform.
The war still goes on because the allies in this country of the bloody insurrectionary oligarchy have taught their foolish dupes abroad to believe that if the rebellion is kept alive until next November Democratic success at the polls here will be followed by the abandonment of the islandsthat means their abandonment to savages who would scramble for what we desert until some powerful civilized nation stepped in to do what we would have shown ourselves unfit to perform. Our success in November means peace in the islands. The success of our political opponents means an indefinite prolongation of misery and bloodshed.
We of this Convention now renominate the man whose name is a guarantee against such disaster. When we place William McKinley as our candidate before the people we place the Republican party on record as standing for the performance which squares with promise, as standing for the redemption in administration and legislation of the pledges made in the platform and on the stump, as standing for the upbuilding of the national honor and interest abroad and the continuance at home of the prosperity which it has already brought to the farm and the workshop.
We stand on the threshold of a new century, a century big with the fate of the great nations of the earth. It rests with us now to decide whether in the opening years of that century we shall march forward to fresh triumphs, or whether at the outset we shall deliberately cripple ourselves for the con
test.
Is America a weakling, to shrink from the world work that must be done by the world Powers?
No. The young giant of the West stands on a continent,
and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with fearless and eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race. We do not stand in craven mood, asking to be spared the task, cringing as we gaze on the contest.
No, we challenge the proud privilege of doing the work that Providence allots us, and we face the coming years high of heart and resolute of faith that to our people is given the right to win such honor and renown as has never yet been granted to the peoples of mankind.
A NATION OF PIONEERS
LAST ADDRESS DELIVERED IN HIS CAPACITY AS VICE-PRESIDENT, AT STATE FAIR AT MINNEAPOLIS, SEPTEMBER 2, 1901
N his admirable series of studies of twentieth century problems Dr. Lyman Abbott has pointed out that we are a nation of pioneers; that the first colonists to our shores were pioneers, and that pioneers selected out from among the descendants of these early pioneers, mingled with others selected afresh from the old world, pushed westward into the wilderness and laid the foundations for new commonwealths. They were men of hope and expectation, of enterprise and energy; for the men of dull content or more dull despair had no part in the great movement into and across the new world. Our country has been populated by pioneers; and, therefore, it has in it more energy, more enterprise, more expansive power than any other in the wide world.
You whom I am now addressing stand for the most part but one generation removed from these pioneers. You are
typical Americans, for you have done the great, the char acteristic, the typical work of our American life. In making homes and carving out careers for yourselves and your children, you have built up this state; throughout our history the success of the homemaker has been but another name for the upbuilding of the nation. The men who, with axe in the forest and pick in the mountains and plow on the prairies, pushed to completion the dominion of our people over the American wilderness have given the definite shape to our nation. They have shown the qualities of daring, endurance and far-sightedness, of eager desire for victory and stubborn refusal to accept defeat, which go to make up the essential manliness of the American character. Above all they have recognized in practical form the fundamental law of success in American life — the law of worthy work, the law of high, resolute endeavor.
We have but little room among our people for the timid, the irresolute and the idle; and it is no less true that there is scant room in the world at large for the nation with mighty thews that dares not to be great.
Surely in speaking to the sons of men who actually did the rough and hard, and infinitely glorious work of making the great northwest what it now is, I need hardly insist upon the righteousness of this doctrine. In your own vigorous lives you show by every act how scant is your patience with those who do not see in the life of effort the life supremely worth living. Sometimes we hear those who do not work spoken of with envy. Surely the willfully idle need arouse in the breast of a healthy man no emotion stronger that that of contempt at the outside no emotion stronger than angry contempt. The feeling of envy would have in it an admission of inferiority on our part, to which
the men who know not the sterner joys of life are not entitled.
Poverty is a bitter thing, but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral and intellectual flabbiness to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all pursuits, the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.
The willfully idle man, like the willfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy and vigorous community. Moreover, the gross and hideous selfishness for which it stands defeats even its own miserable aims.
Exactly as infinitely the happiest woman is she who has borne and brought up many healthy children, so infinitely the happiest man is he who has toiled hard and successfully in his life work. The work may be done in a thousand different ways; with the brain or the hands, in the study, the field or the workshop; if it is honest work, honestly done and well worth doing, that is all we have a right to ask. Every father and mother here, if they are wise, will bring up their children not to shirk difficulties, but to meet and overcome them; not to strive after a life of ignoble ease, but to strive to do their duty, first to themselves and their families, and then to the whole state; and this duty must inevitably take the shape of work in some form or other. You, the sons of pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs. They sought for true success, and, therefore, they did not seek ease. They knew that success comes only to those who lead the life of endeavor.
It seems to me that the simple acceptance of this fundamental fact of American life, this acknowledgment that the law of work is the fundamental law of our being, will help