¶¶The first requisite of good citizenship is that the man shall do the homely, every-day, hum-drum 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 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 time steadily and intelligently. If there is any one quality that is not desirable, whether in a nation or in an individual, it is hysterics, either in religion or anything else. The man or woman who makes up for ten days’ indifference to duty by an eleventh-day morbid repentance about that duty is of scant use in the world. Now in the same way it is of no possible use to decline to go through all ordinary duties of citizenship for a long space of time and then suddenly to get up and feel very angry about something or somebody, not clearly defined, and demand reform, as if it was a concrete substance to be handed out forthwith.[4] ¶We cannot keep too clearly before our minds the facts that for the success of our civilization what is needed is not so much brilliant ability, not so much unusual genius, as the possession by the average man of the plain, homely, work-a-day virtues that make that man a good father, a good husband, and a good friend and neighbor—a decent man with whom to deal in all relations of life. ¶We need good laws, we need honest administration of the laws, and we cannot afford to be contented with less, but more than aught else we need that the average man shall have in him the root of righteous living; that the average man shall have in him the feeling that will make him ashamed to do wrong or to submit to wrong, and that will make him feel his bounden duty to help those that are weaker, to help those especially that are in a way dependent upon him, and while not in any way losing his power of individual initiative, to cultivate without ceasing the further power of acting in combination with his fellows for a common end of social uplifting and of good government. ¶One word upon success in life, upon the success that each of us should strive for. It is a great mistake—oh, such a great mistake—to measure success merely by that which glitters from without, or to speak of it in terms which will mislead those about us, and especially the younger people about us, as to what success really is.