472 COLONEL ROOSEVELT'S PARIS SPEECH. 



" The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children 

 and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The 

 conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good 

 qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self- 

 centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its 

 own shortcomings. 



" To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard material- 

 ism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older 

 nations ; although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of 

 a complex and predominantly industrial civilization. 



" It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of the Gamaliel of the 

 Old ; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his turn 

 can become a teacher as well as a scholar. 



" To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the 

 one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my country- 

 men, because you and we are citizens of great democratic republics. A 

 democratic republic such as each of ours — an effort to realize in its full sense 

 government by, of, and for the people — represents the most gigantic of all 

 possible social experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for 

 good and for evil. 



" With you here and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or 

 failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average 

 woman, does his or her duty first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life and 

 next in those great occasional crises which call for the heroic virtues. 



GOOD CITIZENSHIP SUCCESS OF A REPUBLIC. 



" The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to suc- 

 ceed. The stream will not permanently rise higher tha.i the main source; 

 and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the 

 average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to 

 see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average 

 cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher. 



" It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any 

 democracy, are drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; 

 but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain 

 people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received 

 special advantages ; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental train- 

 ing; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for the 

 enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To 

 you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be ex- 

 pected. 



" Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that 

 queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as 

 the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and 

 evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. 



" It is not the critic who counts ; not the man who points out how the 

 strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. 



" The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face h 



