Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (75 page)

Again, if there are sound reasons or bases for the points you demand, then there is no need to use violence. On the other hand, when there is no sound reason that concessions should be made to you but mainly
your own desire, then reason cannot work and you have to rely on force. Thus, using force is not a sign of strength but rather a sign of weakness. Even in daily human contact, if we talk seriously, using reasons, there is no need to feel anger. We can argue the points. When we fail to prove with reason, then anger comes. When reason ends, then anger begins. Therefore, anger is a sign of weakness….

We are passing through a most difficult period. I am very encouraged by your warm expression and by the Nobel Peace Prize. I thank you from the depth of my heart.

Louis Pasteur, French chemist of the nineteenth century who founded the science of microbiology, made the most important discovery in medical history: contagious diseases are transmitted by germs. A champion of rigorous scientific inquiry, he was honored in 1888 with the opening in Paris of the Pasteur Institute.

As the first director of this institute named for him, Pasteur was asked to address his colleagues on November 14, 1888. He was, it is reported, “overcome by his feelings,” and his son delivered for him the prepared speech in praise of education, a talk that specifically expressed Pasteur’s pride in his country’s respect for educational progress (“From village schools to laboratories, everything has been founded or renovated”).

Pasteur’s speech celebrates the accomplishments of his countrymen while mourning the passage of time, with a series of subordinate “if” clauses to express regrets. The speech begins and ends in patriotic sentiment, marked by a study in contrast of “two contrary laws” (“The one seeks violent conquests; the other, the relief of humanity”). It also contains straightforward advice, always effective in a speech, especially by an acknowledged expert.

The portion of the speech that follows is from René Valery-Radot’s
The Life of Pasteur
, translated from the French by Mrs. R. L. Devonshire.

***

…WHEN THE DAY
came that, foreseeing the future which would be opened by the discovery of the attenuation of virus, I appealed to my country, so that we should be allowed, through the strength and impulse of private initiative, to build laboratories to be devoted, not only to the prophylactic treatment of hydrophobia, but also to the study of virulent and contagious diseases—on that day again, France gave in handfuls…. It is now finished, this great building, of which it might be said that there is
not a stone but what is the material sign of a generous thought. All the virtues have subscribed to build this dwelling place for work.

Alas! mine is the bitter grief that I enter it, a man “vanquished by time,” deprived of my masters, even of my companions in the struggle, Dumas, Bouley, Paul Bert, and lastly Vulpian, who, after having been with you, my dear Grancher, my counselor at the very first, became the most energetic, the most convinced champion of this method.

However, if I have the sorrow of thinking that they are no more, after having valiantly taken their part in discussions which I have never provoked but have had to endure; if they cannot hear me proclaim all that I owe to their counsels and support; if I feel their absence as deeply as on the morrow of their death, I have at least the consolation of believing that all that we struggled for together will not perish. The collaborators and pupils who are now here share our scientific faith…. Keep your early enthusiasm, dear collaborators, but let it ever be regulated by rigorous examinations and tests. Never advance anything which cannot be proved in a simple and decisive fashion.

Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself, it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but, without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word. What I am now asking you, and you will ask of your pupils later on, is what is most difficult to an inventor.

It is indeed a hard task, when you believe you have found an important scientific fact and are feverishly anxious to publish it, to constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, to fight with yourself, to try and ruin your own experiments and only to proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses.

But when, after so many efforts, you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest, which can be felt by a human soul, and the thought that you will have contributed to the honor of your country renders that joy still deeper.

If science has no country, the scientist should have one, and ascribe to it the influence which his works may have in this world…. Two contrary laws seem to be wrestling with each other nowadays; the one, a law of blood and of death, ever imagining new means of destruction and forcing nations to be constantly ready for the battlefield—the other, a law of peace, work and health, ever evolving new means of delivering man from the scourges which beset him.

The one seeks violent conquests; the other, the relief of humanity. The latter places one human life above any victory; while the former would sacrifice hundreds and thousands of lives to the ambition of one. The law of which we are the instruments seeks, even in the midst of carnage, to
cure the sanguinary ills of the law of war; the treatment inspired by our antiseptic methods may preserve thousands of soldiers. Which of those two laws will ultimately prevail, God alone knows. But we may assert that French science will have tried, by obeying the law of humanity, to extend the frontiers of life.

Asthmatic, nearsighted, tutored at home because he was too sickly a boy to attend school, Theodore Roosevelt in his teens threw himself into bodybuilding and the achievement of what would now be called his “personal best.” The word that expresses vigorous exertion is “strenuous”; he chose “The Strenuous Life” as the title of his best-known speech and the collection of his speeches.

This inspirational lecture was delivered on April 10, 1899, the year after he resigned as assistant secretary of the navy in the McKinley administration, gained national fame leading the “Rough Riders” up Kettle Hill in the battle for San Juan, Puerto Rico, and later led the Republicans of New York to victory in his race for governor.

The speech works well because it uses the example of the vigorous person—one who will “wrest triumph from toil and risk”—as a paradigm for a can-do populace in a triumphant nation. He leaves unsaid, but clearly implies, that he is the exemplar of that self-helping nation.

He takes Tennyson’s thought “‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” and transmutes it into politics as “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” In another form on another occasion, Teddy Roosevelt expressed the same idea, beginning, “It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

The publicist John R. (“Tex”) McCrary called this quotation to the attention of Dwight Eisenhower, who sent it to friends during the campaign of 1952; after Richard Nixon’s 1960 loss to John Kennedy, the defeated Nixon sent the same strenuous sentiments, suitable for framing, to many of his supporters as a credo of potential comeback.

***

…I WISH TO
preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes—to be the ultimate goal after which they strive?… You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working
for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stem strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed….

In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children. In one of Daudet’s powerful and melancholy books he speaks of “the fear of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present day.” When such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that nation is rotten to the heart’s core. When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and
that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let us, the children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American Republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations.

We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them!…

The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the overcivilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills “stern men with empires in their brains”—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth leading. They believe in that cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all and end-all of national life, instead of realizing that, though an indispensable element, it is, after all, but one of the many elements that go to make up true national greatness. No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All honor must be paid to the architects of our material prosperity, to the great captains of industry who have built our factories and our railroads, to the strong men who toil for wealth with brain or hand; for great is the debt of the nation to these and their kind. But our debt is yet greater to the men whose highest type is to be found in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like Grant. They showed by their lives that they recognized the law of work, the law of strife; they toiled to win a competence for themselves and
those dependent upon them; but they recognized that there were yet other and even loftier duties—duties to the nation and duties to the race.