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
The only way to avoid the growth of these evils is, so far as may
be, to help in the creation of conditions which will permit mutual
understanding and fellow-feeling between the members of different
classes. To do this it is absolutely necessary that there should be
natural association between the members for a common end or with a
common purpose. As long as men are separated by their caste lines,
each body having its own amusements, interests, and occupations, they
are certain to regard one another with that instinctive distrust which
they feel for foreigners. There are exceptions to the rule, but it is
a rule. The average man, when he has no means of being brought into
contact with another, or of gaining any insight into that other’s ideas
and aspirations, either ignores these ideas and aspirations completely,
or else feels toward them a more or less tepid dislike. The result
is a complete and perhaps fatal misunderstanding, due primarily to
the fact that the capacity for fellow-feeling is given no opportunity
to flourish. On the other hand, if the men can be mixed together in
some way that will loosen the class or caste bonds and put each on
his merits as an individual man, there is certain to be a regrouping
independent of caste lines. A tie may remain between the members of
a caste, based merely upon the similarity of their habits of life;
but this will be much less strong than the ties based on identity of
passion, of principle, or of ways of looking at life. Any man who has
ever, for his good fortune, been obliged to work with men in masses,
in some place or under some condition or in some association where
the dislocation of caste was complete, must recognize the truth of
this as apparent. Every mining-camp, every successful volunteer
regiment, proves it. In such cases there is always some object which
must be attained, and the men interested in its attainment have to
develop their own leaders and their own ties of association, while
the would-be leader can succeed only by selecting for assistants the
men whose peculiar capacities fit them to do the best work in the
various emergencies that arise. Under such circumstances the men who
work together for the achievement of a common result in which they are
intensely interested are very soon certain to disregard, and, indeed,
to forget, the creed or race origin or antecedent social standing or
class occupation of the man who is either their friend or their foe.
They get down to the naked bed-rock of character and capacity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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