consideration in
their eyes--to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of
Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done your
share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you
neither preach nor practise such a doctrine. 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 tho 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 stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse
never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by
effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has
been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity
of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked
to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright and the
man still does actual work tho of a different kind, whether as a writer
or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of
exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if
he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a
period, not of preparation, but of more enjoyment, he shows that he is
simply a cumberer on the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself
to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again
arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life,
and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow
it for serious work in the world.

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.