No nation can achieve real greatness if its people are not both essentially moral and essentially manly; both sets of qualities are necessary. It is an admirable thing to possess refinement and cultivation, but the price is too dear if they must be paid for at the cost of the rugged fighting qualities which make a man able to do a man’s work in the world, and which make his heart beat with that kind of love of country which is shown not only in readiness to try to make her civic life better, but also to stand up manfully for her when her honor and influence are at stake in a dispute with a foreign power. A heavy responsibility rests on the educated man. It is a double discredit to him to go wrong, whether his shortcomings take the form of shirking his every-day civic duties, or of abandonment of the nation’s rights in a foreign quarrel. He must no more be misled by the sneers of those who always write “patriotism” between inverted commas than by the coarser, but equally dangerous, ridicule of the politicians who jeer at “reform.” It is as unmanly to be taunted by one set of critics into cowardice as it is to be taunted by the other set into dishonesty. There are many upright and honorable men who take the wrong side, that is, the anti-American side, of the Monroe Doctrine because they are too short-sighted or too unimaginative to realize the hurt to the nation that would be caused by the adoption of their views. There are other men who take the wrong view simply because they have not thought much of the matter, or are in unfortunate surroundings, by which they have been influenced to their own moral hurt. There are yet other men in whom the mainspring of the opposition to that branch of American policy known as the Monroe Doctrine is sheer timidity. This is sometimes the ordinary timidity of wealth. Sometimes, however, it is peculiarly developed among educated men whose education has tended to make them over-cultivated and over-sensitive to foreign opinion. They are generally men who undervalue the great fighting qualities, without which no nation can ever rise to the first rank. The timidity of wealth is proverbial, and it was well illustrated by the attitude taken by too many people of means at the time of the Venezuela trouble. Many of them, including bankers, merchants, and railway magnates, criticised the action of the President and the Senate, on the ground that it had caused business disturbance. Such a position is essentially ignoble. When a question of national honor or of national right or wrong, is at stake, no question of financial interest should be considered for a moment. Those wealthy men who wish the abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine because its assertion may damage their business, bring discredit to themselves, and, so far as they are able, discredit to the nation of which they are a part.