92 Presidential Addresses 



mally, the nation that achieves greatness, like the 

 individual who achieves greatness, can do so only at 

 the cost of anxiety and bewilderment and heart- 

 wearing effort. Timid people, people scant of faith 

 and hope, and good people who are not accustomed 

 to the roughness of the life of effort are almost 

 sure to be disheartened and dismayed by the work 

 and the worry, and overmuch cast down by the 

 shortcomings, actual or seeming, which in real life 

 always accompany the first stages even of what 

 eventually turn out to be the most brilliant victories. 

 All this is true of what has happened during the 

 last four years in the Philippine Islands. The Span 

 ish War itself was an easy task, but it left us certain 

 other tasks which were much more difficult. One 

 of these tasks was that of dealing with the Philip 

 pines. The easy thing to do the thing which ap 

 pealed not only to lazy and selfish men, but to very 

 many good men whose thought did not drive down 

 to the root of things was to leave the islands. Had 

 we done this, a period of wild chaos would have su 

 pervened, and then some stronger power would have 

 stepped in and seized the islands and have taken up 

 the task which we in such a case would have flinched 

 from performing. A less easy, but infinitely more 

 absurd course, would have been to leave the islands 

 ourselves, and at the same time to assert that we 

 would not permit any one else to interfere with 

 them. This particular course would have combined 

 all the possible disadvantages of every other course 

 which was advocated. It would have placed us in 



