Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/381

Rh to instill, both by your lives and by your teachings, these ideals into the minds of those who in the next generation will, as the men and women of that generation, determine the position which this nation is to hold in the history of mankind.

And now, in closing, I want to speak to you of certain things that have occurred during the last week and of how those things emphasize what I have just said to you as to the importance of this country having within its limits men who put the realization of high ideals above any form of money making. During this week our country has lost a great statesman who was also a great man of letters, a man who occupied a peculiar and unique position in our community, a man of whose existence we could each of us be proud because his life reflected upon each of us; for the United States as a whole was better because John Hay lived. John Hay entered the public service as a young man just come of age, as the secretary of President Lincoln. He served in the war, he was a member of the Loyal Legion. He was trusted by and was intimate with Lincoln as hardly any other man was. He then went on rendering service after service, and of his merits this was one of them: He had the great advantage and great merit of always being able at any moment to go back to private life unless he could continue in public life on his own terms. He went on rendering service after service to the country until as the climax of his career he served for some six years as secretary of state in two successive administrations, and by what he did and by what he was contributed in no small degree to achieve for this republic the respect of the nations of mankind. Such service as that could not have been rendered save by a man who had before him ideals as far above as the poles from those ideals which have in them any taint of what is base or sordid.

I wished to get for John Hay's successor the man whom I regarded as of all the men in the country that one best fitted to be such successor. In asking him to accept the position of secretary of state I was asking him to submit to a very great pecuniary sacrifice, and I never even thought of that aspect of the question, for I knew he wouldn't, either. I knew that whatever other consideration he had to waive for and against taking the position, the consideration of how it would affect his personal fortune would not be taken into account by Elihu Root. And he has accepted.

And now I am not speaking of Hay and Root as solitary exceptions. On the contrary, I am speaking of them as typical of a large class of men in public life, and when we hear so much criticism of certain aspects of our public life and of certain of our public servants, criticism which I regret to state is in many cases deserved, it is well for us to remember also the other side of the picture, to remember that here in America we now have and always have had at the command of the