r anything, but I want to have it changed, just
because I want to draw the teeth of the men who always clamor for the
abolition of any manly game. I wish to deprive those whom I put in the
mollycoddle class, of any argument against good sport. I thoroughly
believe in sport, but I think it is a great mistake if it is made
anything like a profession, or carried on in a way that gives just
cause for fault-finding and complaint among people whose objection is
not really to the defects, but to the sport itself.

Now I am going to disregard your poet and preach to you for just one
moment, but I will make it as little obnoxious as possible.
(Laughter.) The Secretary spoke of me as if I were an athlete. I am
not, and never have been one, although I have always been very fond of
outdoor amusement and exercise. There was, however, in my class at
Harvard, one real athlete who is now in public life. I made him
Secretary of State, or what you call Minister of Foreign Affairs, and
he is now Ambassador in Paris. If I catch your terminology straight,
he would correspond to your triple blue. He was captain of the
football eleven, played on the base-ball team, and rowed in the crew,
and in addition to that he was champion heavy-weight boxer and
wrestler, and won the 220-yard dash. His son was captain of the
Harvard University crew that came over here and was beaten by Oxford
two years ago. [Voices: "Cambridge."] Well, I never took a great
interest in defeats. (Loud laughter and applause.) Now, as I said
before, I never was an athlete, although I have always led an outdoor
life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory
is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the
utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually
possesses.

There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes
to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to
do. That is genius. I am not discussing what form that genius takes;
whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one
else can write, _The Ode on a Grecian Urn_, for example, or _Helen,
thy beauty is to me_; or of a man who can do 100 yards in nine and
three-fifths seconds. Such a man does what no one else can do. Only a
very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing
genius. The average man who is successful,--the average statesman, the
average public servant, the average soldier,