Biological analogies in historyRoosevelt, Theodore
Philosophy
Biological analogies in history
Roosevelt, Theodore
History -- Philosophy
all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family,
with wealth in private use and business use, with labour, with poverty,
the one prime necessity is to remember that though hardness of heart is
a great evil it is no greater an evil than softness of head.
But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important of
all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern nations
somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded, that are
now in complicated relations with one another and with alien races,
have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong to
a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has
ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying on a scale hitherto
unexampled to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the
people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great
power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve,
and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the
man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and
the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with
utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our
own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism
which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that arise are of
wellnigh inconceivable difficulty. They cannot be solved by the foolish
sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little patent recipes, and
those cut-and-dried theories of the political nursery which have such
limited applicability amid the crash of elemental forces. Neither can
they be solved by the raw brutality of the men who, whether at home
or on the rough frontier of civilization, adopt might as the only
standard of right in dealing with other men, and treat alien races only
as subjects for exploitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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