The Strenuous Life: The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume 12 (of 14)Roosevelt, Theodore
General
The Strenuous Life: The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume 12 (of 14)
Roosevelt, Theodore
United States -- Colonial question; United States -- Politics and government
say that the nation rests upon the individual, upon the family—upon
individual manliness and womanliness, using the words in their widest
and fullest meaning.
To be a good husband or good wife, a good neighbor and friend, to be
hard-working and upright in business and social relations, to bring
up many healthy children—to be and to do all this is to lay the
foundations of good citizenship as they must be laid. But we can not
stop even with this. Each of us has not only his duty to himself,
his family, and his neighbors, but his duty to the State and to the
nation. We are in honor bound each to strive according to his or her
strength to bring ever nearer the day when justice and wisdom shall
obtain in public life as in private life. We can not retain the
full measure of our self-respect if we can not retain pride in our
citizenship. For the sake not only of ourselves but of our children
and our children’s children we must see that this nation stands for
strength and honesty both at home and abroad. In our internal policy we
can not afford to rest satisfied until all that the government can do
has been done to secure fair dealing and equal justice as between man
and man. In the great part which hereafter, whether we will or not, we
must play in the world at large, let us see to it that we neither do
wrong nor shrink from doing right because the right is difficult; that
on the one hand we inflict no injury, and that on the other we have a
due regard for the honor and the interest of our mighty nation; and
that we keep unsullied the renown of the flag which beyond all others
of the present time or of the ages of the past stands for confident
faith in the future welfare and greatness of mankind.
BROTHERHOOD AND THE HEROIC VIRTUES
ADDRESS AT VETERANS’ REUNION, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, SEPTEMBER 5, 1901
I speak to you to-night less as men of Vermont than as members of
the Grand Army which saved the Union. But at the outset I must pay a
special tribute to your State. Vermont was not a rich State, compared
with many States, and she had sent out so many tens of thousands of
her sons to the West that it is not improbable that as many men of
Vermont birth served in the regiments of other States as in those of
her own State. Yet, notwithstanding this drain, your gallant State
was surpassed by no other State of the North, either in the number
of men according to her population which she sent into the army, or
in the relative extent of her financial support of the war. Too much
can not be said of the high quality of the Vermont soldiers; and one
contributing factor in securing this high quality was the good sense
which continually sent recruits into the already existing regiments
instead of forming new ones.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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