Promoting good citizenshipBryce, James Bryce, Viscount
Philosophy
Promoting good citizenship
Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount
Citizenship
We may also appeal to every citizen’s sense of dignity and
self-respect. We may bid him recollect that he is the heir of rights
and privileges which you and our ancestors fought for, and which
place him, whatever his birth or fortune, among the rulers of his
country. He is unworthy of himself, unmindful of what he owes to the
Constitution that has given him these functions, if he does not try to
discharge them worthily. These considerations are no doubt familiar to
us Englishmen and Americans, though we may not always feel their force
as deeply as we ought. To the new immigrants of whom I have already
spoken they are unfamiliar; yet to the best among these also they have
sometimes powerfully appealed. You had, in the last generation, no more
high-minded and patriotic citizen than the German exile of 1849, the
late Mr. Carl Schurz.
When every motive has been invoked, and every expedient applied that
can stimulate the sense of civic duty, one never can feel sure that
the desired result will follow. The moral reformer and the preacher
of religion have the same experience. The ebbs and flows of ethical
life are beyond the reach of scientific prediction. There are times
of awakening, “times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord,” as
your Puritan ancestors said, but we do not know when they will come nor
can we explain why they come just when they do. Every man can recall
moments in his own life when the sky seemed to open above him, and when
his vision was so quickened that all things stood transfigured in a
purer and brighter radiance, when duty, and even toil done for the sake
of duty, seemed beautiful and full of joy.
You remember Wordsworth’s lines--
“Hence, in a season of fair weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that celestial sea
That brought us hither.”
If we survey the wide field of European history, we shall find that
something like this happens with nations also. They, too, have moments
of exaltation, moments of depression. Their ideals rise and fall. They
are for a time filled with a spirit which seeks truth, which loves
honour, which is ready for self-sacrifice; and after a time the light
begins to fade from the hills and this spirit lingers only among the
best souls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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