Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
History
Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
Speeches, addresses, etc.
I have told you why I am glad, because of what we have done. Let me add
my final word as to why I am anxious about it. We have driven out the
Spaniards. This did not prove for this nation a very serious task. Now
we are approaching the really serious task. Now it behooves us to show
that we are capable of doing infinitely better the work which we blame
the Spaniards for doing so badly; and woe to us unless we do show not
merely a slight but a well-nigh immeasurable improvement! We have
assumed heavy burdens, heavy responsibilities. I have no sympathy with
the men who cry out against our assuming them. If this great nation, if
this nation with its wealth, with its continental vastness of domain,
with its glorious history, with its memory of Washington and Lincoln, of
its statesmen and soldiers and sailors, the builders and the wielders of
commonwealths, if this nation is to stand cowering back because it is
afraid to undertake tasks lest they prove too formidable, we may well
suppose that the decadence of our race has begun. No; the tasks are
difficult, and all the more for that reason let us gird up our loins and
go out to do them. But let us meet them, realizing their difficulty; not
in a spirit of levity, but in a spirit of sincere and earnest desire to
do our duty as it is given us to see our duty. Let us not do it in the
spirit of sentimentality, not saying we must at once give universal
suffrage to the people of the Philippines--they are unfit for it. Do not
let us mistake the shadow for the substance. We have got to show the
practical common sense which was combined with the fervent religion of
the Puritan; the combination which gave him the chance to establish here
that little group of commonwealths which more than any others have
shaped the spirit and destiny of this nation; we must show both
qualities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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