GOOD CITIZENSHIP BY GROVER CLEVELAND [Illustration] PHILADELPHIA HENRY ALTEMUS COMPANY Copyright, 1908, by Howard E. Altemus Published June, 1908 CONTENTS Introduction 5 Good Citizenship 11 Patriotism and Holiday Observance 37 INTRODUCTION It is not of the author’s own motion that the following essays are given to the public in this form. With characteristic modesty, Mr. Cleveland was willing that these addresses should lie undiscovered and unread in the limbo of pigeonholes or of yellowing newspaper-file; and yet the thoughtful reader will be the first to proclaim that these utterances are neither insignificant nor ephemeral. Their very themes are age-old. Before Rome was, Patriotism and Good Citizenship were the purest and loftiest ideals of the ancient world; and, through the ages that have followed, those nations have been noblest, bravest and most enduring in which love of home and love of country have been most deep-seated. Mr. Cleveland’s address on Good Citizenship was delivered before the Commercial Club of Chicago in October, 1903; and that on Patriotism and Holiday Observance before the Union League Club, of the same city, on Washington’s Birthday, 1907. Now, with Mr. Cleveland’s sanction, they appear for the first time in book form. No one can scan these pages, however hastily, without saying to himself, “Here is a man who preaches what, for a lifetime, he has been practicing.” Not all patriotism finds expression in the heat and joy of the battlefield; nor does good citizenship begin and end on election day. Mr. Cleveland has, in himself, proved that an upright and fearless chief magistrate in the White House may be as true a patriot as the leader of a forlorn hope, as lofty a type of citizen as a Garrison or a Phillips. No public man of this generation has been more bitterly assailed than Grover Cleveland; none has met with more unswerving serenity the attacks, fair and foul, of those whose selfish interests have made them his sworn foes. That famous phrase, uttered years ago, “We love him for the enemies he has made,” is a true saying. THE PUBLISHERS. GOOD CITIZENSHIP [Illustration] GOOD CITIZENSHIP There is danger that my subject of American good citizenship is so familiar and so trite as to lack interest. This does not necessarily result from a want of appreciation of the importance of good citizenship, nor from a denial of the duty resting upon every American to be a good citizen. There is, however, abroad in our land a self-satisfied and perfunctory notion that we do all that is required of us in this direction when we make profession of our faith in the creed of good citizenship and abstain from the commission of palpably unpatriotic sins.