Of course, in one sense, the first
essential for a man’s being a good
citizen is his
possession of the home virtues of which we think when we call a man by the
emphatic adjective of manly. No man can be a good
citizen who is not a good
husband and a good father, who is not
honest in his dealings with other men and women,
faithful to his friends and
fearless in the
presence of his foes, who has not got a
sound heart, a
sound mind, and a
sound body; exactly as no amount of
attention to
civil duties will save a
nation if the
domestic life is undermined, or there is
lack of the
rude military virtues which alone can
assure a country’s position in the world. In a free
republic, the
ideal citizen must be one willing and
able to take arms for the
defense of the
flag, exactly as the
ideal citizen must be the father of many
healthy children. A race must be strong and
vigorous; it must be a race of good fighters and good breeders, else its
wisdom will come to
naught and its
virtue be
ineffective; and no sweetness and
delicacy, no love for and
appreciation of beauty in art or
literature, no
capacity for building up
material prosperity can possibly
atone for the
lack of the great
virile virtues.
But this is
aside from my
subject, for what I wish to talk of is the
attitude of the American
citizen in
civic life. It ought to be
axiomatic in this country that every man must
devote a
reasonable share of his time to doing his
duty in the Political life of the . No man has a
right to
shirk his
political duties under whatever
plea of pleasure or business; and while such shirking may be pardoned in those of small cleans it is entirely unpardonable in those among whom it is most
common–in the people whose circumstances give them
freedom in the
struggle for life. In so far as the grows to think rightly, it will likewise grow to regard the young man of means who shirks his
duty to the State in time of peace as being only one
degree worse than the man who
thus shirks it in time of war. A great many of our men in business, or of our young men who are
bent on enjoying life (as they have a
perfect right to do if only they do not
sacrifice other things to enjoyment), rather
plume themselves upon being good citizens if they even
vote; yet voting is the very least of their duties, Nothing worth gaining is ever gained without
effort. You can no more have
freedom without striving and
suffering for it than you can win
success as a banker or a
lawyer without
labor and
effort, without self-denial in youth and the
display of a ready and
alert intelligence in middle age. The people who say that they have not the time to
attend to
politics are simply saying that they are
unfit to live in a free .